PAZ

PAZ is the fourth of the thirty Aethyrs, or Airs, of the Enochian system, the thirty spiritual regions delivered to the mathematician John Dee and the scryer Edward Kelley in 1584, and named in the record Dee compiled from those sessions. Its three-letter name, PAZ, was received letter by letter through Kelley's scrying.

Place in the system

Each Aethyr is said to contain three Governors among whom the ninety-one Parts of the Earth are divided.

The thirty Aethyrs are the raw gift of the Dee-Kelley sessions; the elaborate visionary content attached to them in modern practice belongs to a later layer, above all Aleister Crowley's The Vision and the Voice, his record of scrying all thirty Aethyrs in 1900 and 1909. The Aethyr is described here as an element of that documented historical tradition, studied as such, its entities not reified.

The three Governors

PAZ holds three of the ninety-one Parts of the Earth recorded in Dee's Liber Scientiae. Thotanp governs Thebaidi, the Thebaid of Upper Egypt, under the Zodiacal King Lavavot of the tribe of Gad. Axziarg governs Parsadal, a name unmatched to any known region, under the same King. Pothnir governs Kushan, among the Central Asian lands east of Persia, under King Arfaolg of the tribe of Ephraim, who is given more Parts across the ninety-one than any other King, an imbalance the received material never explains. The twelve Kings and their tribes come from the angelic material itself; the zodiacal signs now attached to them are a later reconstruction, and more than one such scheme is in circulation.

Any statement about the fourth 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 PAZ, its place as the fourth 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.