The Call of the Thirty Aethyrs

The nineteenth Enochian Call is a single text recited with the name of whichever of the thirty Aethyrs is worked, which is why the corpus is traditionally counted as forty eight keys rather than nineteen: eighteen fixed calls, received through Edward Kelley in 1584 and published in Meric Casaubon's 1659 edition of Dee's spiritual diaries, and this one call standing for the thirty, recited once for each Aethyr in turn.

That structure sets the nineteenth call apart from every other call in the corpus. The first eighteen are fixed texts, two general openers and sixteen calls for the four Elemental Watchtowers; the nineteenth is a single template with one variable, the Aethyr's name, substituted in turn across all thirty. Dee's own angelic informant, Illemese, frames the whole set of nineteen as entrances into knowledge of the mystical tables, and the nineteenth call is the entrance into the thirty Aethyrs specifically, the aethyric ranks that sit outside the four Watchtowers' elemental structure altogether.

Casaubon's 1659 printing is again the manuscript basis for the call's text, alongside Dee's own diary record of the sessions in which Kelley scried it. No version of the call exists independent of that transmission, and every later working of the thirty Aethyrs, whether Dee and Kelley's own or a modern practitioner's, recites the same nineteenth call with only the Aethyr's name changing.

The nineteenth call's practical afterlife is dominated by a single later working: Aleister Crowley's 1911 Vision and the Voice, in which Crowley recited the call thirty times, once for each Aethyr in descending order, and recorded the visionary material each recitation produced. That record, published as Liber CCCCXVIII, is the reason the nineteenth call and the thirty Aethyr system are, for most twentieth and twenty first century readers, the most familiar part of Dee's entire angelic corpus, better known than the two general openers or the sixteen elemental calls that precede it in the Claves Angelicae.

Crowley's working was itself downstream of the Golden Dawn's earlier study of the Enochian material, documented in Israel Regardie's published editions of the order's papers, which had already brought the Calls back into ceremonial use more than two centuries after Casaubon's printing. The thirty Aethyrs themselves, and the ninety one Governors distributed across them, are catalogued separately in this atlas; the nineteenth call is the fixed text that later magicians used to approach each one, not a description of the Aethyrs' own content.

As with the rest of the Claves Angelicae, the call's only textual basis is Casaubon's 1659 edition of Dee's diaries. Vision and the Voice records what Crowley's own working produced, not an independent manuscript witness to the call's wording, and it is read here as documented modern reception rather than as evidence about Dee and Kelley's sixteenth century sessions.