ARN

John Dee, the mathematician, astrologer and royal adviser who conducted the sessions that produced the Aethyrs, was one of the most learned men in Elizabethan England, amassing one of the largest private libraries in the country at his house in Mortlake and advising Elizabeth I on matters ranging from navigation to the calendar. His scryer, Edward Kelley, brought a considerably less respectable background to their partnership: before the two men met in 1582, Kelley had reportedly been convicted of forgery or coining and, by some later accounts, had lost his ears as the punishment for it, a detail Dee's own diaries never mention directly but that shaped Kelley's later reputation among historians who doubt his honesty.

That doubt runs through modern assessment of every Aethyr, ARN included, since the entire content beyond the bare three-letter name and its Governors rests on Kelley's word alone, spoken aloud while Dee wrote it down, with no independent witness to confirm what Kelley actually saw or claimed to see in the scrying stone. Frances Yates, the historian of Renaissance esotericism, called Kelley an outright fraud; other scholars are more cautious, noting that Dee's diaries are excellent evidence of what Dee sincerely believed was happening but poor evidence of what, if anything, was objectively true, a gap that the Second Aethyr's own extremely thin original record, a name and a list of Governors and nothing more, does nothing to close.

Any statement about the second Aethyr belongs to one of three layers of the record, and they are roughly three centuries apart. Saying which layer a claim comes from is most of what can honestly be said about an individual Aethyr.

The diaries, 1580s

The name ARN, its place as the second of the thirty, and the governors assigned to it all come from the scrying sessions of John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s. In that material the thirty Aethyrs divide the earth between ninety-one governors: twenty-nine Aethyrs hold three each and the thirtieth holds four. This atlas carries all ninety-one, and the arithmetic can be checked against them.

Counting the thirty

The Aethyrs are numbered with LIL as the first and TEX as the thirtieth, and the convention is that the first is the most remote and the thirtieth the nearest. Crowley accordingly worked them in reverse, beginning at the thirtieth and ascending, which is why the numbering in his record runs down the page as the sequence goes up. A reader meeting a list that starts at TEX is looking at working order, not at a different numbering.

Crowley, 1900 and 1909

Almost everything said about the character of an individual Aethyr in modern circulation comes from Aleister Crowley. By his own account he began the series in Mexico in 1900 and completed it with Victor Neuburg in the Algerian desert in late 1909, and the record was published as The Vision and the Voice. Those descriptions are Crowley's visionary record of 1909, not Dee's, and they are not in the sixteenth-century diaries at all.