The Third Aethyr, ZOM

The Aethyrs occupy an unusual place within the wider Enochian system Dee and Kelley produced: unlike the elaborate tables, calls and angelic hierarchies recorded elsewhere in Dee's manuscripts, the thirty Aethyrs as Dee first received them are little more than a bare list of names and governing angels, compiled into the treatise later known as Liber Scientiae and dated in Dee's own record to 2 May 1585, a full year after the main run of scrying sessions had concluded in July 1584. That gap between the original sessions and the treatise's compilation is itself a reminder that the Enochian corpus was assembled and organised over time rather than delivered as a single finished system.

It was this thin skeleton, a name, ZOM, and its governing Parts of the Earth, that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn took up from 1888 and began to furnish with the elaborate visionary and initiatory content later systems associate with the Aethyrs, work carried much further by Aleister Crowley's own scrying of all thirty Aethyrs in 1900 and 1909 and published as The Vision and the Voice. Everything beyond Dee's original bare record, the vivid landscapes, guardian figures and initiatory ordeals popularly associated with an Aethyr like ZOM today, belongs to that later three-century remove from Dee's own sixteenth-century sessions rather than to the Elizabethan record itself.