ZAX

ZAX is the tenth 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, ZAX, 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 tenth Aethyr, ZAX, is the one later associated in Thelemic practice with the Abyss and its dweller Choronzon, from Aleister Crowley's account of scrying it in 1909.

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.

Any statement about the tenth 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 tenth Aethyr and the working at Bou Saada

ZAX is the Aethyr around which the best known and most discussed Enochian working turns. Crowley and Victor Neuburg conducted it in the Algerian desert near Bou Saada in December 1909, and Crowley's account of what was encountered there, under the name Choronzon, is the passage of The Vision and the Voice most often quoted and most often reproduced without its date.

That account is Crowley's, from 1909. Choronzon appears in the earlier Dee and Kelley material as a name; the character, the role and the whole narrative attached to it in modern usage belong to Crowley's record and to the writers who followed him.

The diaries, 1580s

The name ZAX, its place as the tenth 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.

Why the layers are kept apart here

The three are separated in this atlas because they make different kinds of claim. The diaries supply the names and the structure, the order supplies a ritual context, and Crowley supplies the descriptions. Attributing any of the three to another is the commonest error made about this material.