The First Call

The First Call is one of the two general or opening keys of John Dee's Claves Angelicae, the forty eight Enochian Calls received through the scryer Edward Kelley in 1584 and published in Meric Casaubon's 1659 edition of Dee's spiritual diaries, A True and Faithful Relation. Dee's own angelic informant, named Illemese in the sessions, describes the nineteen calls together as entrances into the knowledge of the mystical tables, the four Elemental Watchtowers that the sixteen calls following the two openers are used to work.

The First Call precedes that elemental work rather than addressing any single element or tablet, standing alongside the Second Call as one of a pair that opens the whole sequence before the sixteen calls of the Watchtowers and the nineteenth call, which is recited with the name of whichever of the thirty Aethyrs is being worked. Because the two opening calls address the system as a whole rather than any one part of it, they carry a different structural role from every call that follows: general rather than elemental, and spoken first regardless of which Watchtower or Aethyr the working turns to afterward.

The manuscript record for The First Call, like the rest of the Claves Angelicae, survives through Casaubon's seventeenth century printing rather than only in Dee's own hand, which is part of why the Calls circulated far more widely among later ceremonial magicians than the unpublished De Heptarchia Mystica, Dee's earlier and separate treatise on the day ruling Kings and Princes of Sloane MS 3191.

Casaubon's 1659 printing preserves The First Call in the angelic language Dee and Kelley called the language of Enoch, set beside Dee's own English gloss line by line, the same format Casaubon used for the whole corpus of forty eight keys. That parallel text is the entire textual basis for everything known about the call: no independent manuscript tradition confirms or corrects it beyond Dee's own diary pages.

The language itself has drawn sustained argument since Casaubon's day over whether it is a wholly invented tongue, an elaborated cipher built on English and Latin grammar, or something closer to a constructed language with its own internal consistency. That argument belongs to the corpus as a whole rather than to The First Call specifically, and it is why modern editions still print the angelic text and Dee's gloss side by side rather than treating either as sufficient on its own.

Twentieth century ceremonial orders revived the Calls for practical use largely through the Golden Dawn's Enochian curriculum and, later, through Aleister Crowley's own scrying of the thirty Aethyrs using the nineteenth call, recorded in his 1911 Vision and the Voice. The First Call, as one of the two general keys, has a smaller footprint in that later literature than the nineteenth call itself, since it opens a working rather than addressing any one of the thirty Aethyrs those later magicians focused on.