Occodon

The material behind the ninety-one Parts of the Earth comes from a specific, well-dated series of sessions. Between 1583 and 1587 the mathematician and royal adviser John Dee worked with the scryer Edward Kelley in a sustained attempt to obtain instruction from angels. Kelley looked into a crystal and reported what he saw and heard; Dee sat with pen and paper and wrote it down, asked questions, and occasionally argued.

The portion relevant here belongs to the work of 1584, much of it conducted in Cracow and Prague under the patronage of the Polish nobleman Albert Laski and later at the imperial court. The angel named Nalvage introduced it by telling Dee that thirty Calls remained to be delivered, and that those thirty were the Calls of ninety-one Princes and Spiritual Governors, to whom the earth was delivered as a portion. The stated purpose was practical and political: these were the powers that bring in and dispose kings and governments, and the Calls were the means of reaching them.

The delivery of this body of material was completed on 13 July 1584, with the final portion of the Call of the Aethyrs and the names of the thirty Aethyrs themselves. Dee then compiled the results into a book, Liber Scientiae Auxilii et Victoriae Terrestris, the Book of Knowledge, Help and Earthly Victory, which he dated 2 May 1585. That book is a table. For each of the ninety-one Parts it gives the name, the Aethyr the Part belongs to, the Zodiacal King that governs it, and a count of the ministers said to dwell there.

Everything else attached to the Parts in modern practice was added later, and in most cases much later. The tabulation itself is short, dry and administrative, and reads far more like a register than like a revelation.

Every word of this material reached the page through one man's mouth. Kelley scried; Dee recorded. That arrangement makes the honesty of Edward Kelley a question that cannot be set aside, and it is a genuinely unresolved one rather than a polite gesture toward balance.

The case against him is substantial. Kelley had a criminal record, is generally reported to have lost his ears as a judicial punishment, and habitually wore a close cap. He was a known forger. He was paid well and steadily by Dee, which gave him an obvious motive to keep the sessions productive. He later persuaded Dee, on angelic authority, that the two men should share their wives, an episode that damaged the partnership and that reads badly under any interpretation.

The case is not conclusive. The volume and internal consistency of the material are considerable; the Enochian Calls have a stable vocabulary across separate sessions weeks apart, which is difficult though not impossible to fake under questioning by a scholar as exacting as Dee. Kelley also frequently reported material that displeased him and that he argued against, which is not the behaviour of a straightforward confidence man.

Scholarship has moved. Frances Yates wrote flatly that Kelley was a fraud who deluded his pious master, and Peter French added the possibility of mental illness. More recent historians of Dee, among them Deborah Harkness, Nicholas Clulee, Gyorgy Szonyi and Hakan Hakansson, have largely declined to rule on it, treating the diaries as excellent evidence of what Dee believed and experienced and poor evidence of what was happening in the crystal. Egil Asprem has noted that this leaves a real gap rather than closing one.

The honest position is that the question is open, that it matters, and that the material can be described without settling it.

Sources The Queen's Conjuror: The Science and Magic of Dr. John DeeBenjamin Woolley with John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of NatureDeborah E. Harkness, John Dee's Natural Philosophy: Between Science and ReligionNicholas H. Clulee

A reader coming to the Parts of the Earth from modern occult literature will find a great deal attributed to them: elemental natures, tarot correspondences, sephirotic placements, ranks of authority, detailed characters and specific magical offices. Almost none of that is in Dee.

Dee's table gives four things per Part. The name. The Aethyr it falls under. The Zodiacal King that governs it. The number of ministers dwelling in it. It also relates each Part to a region of the earth. That is the whole of the primary record.

The additions came in two main waves. The first was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which from the 1880s absorbed Dee's Enochian material into a much larger synthesis and supplied it with the correspondences the order used everywhere else: elements, tarot trumps, Hebrew letters, positions on the Tree of Life. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers took the basics of Dee's system and fitted them into a ritual structure Dee would not have recognised. The second wave was Aleister Crowley, who learned Enochian in the Golden Dawn and carried its assumptions into his own work, adding a Thelemic layer on top.

There is also a reading dispute at the root of the thing. Nalvage's words describe ninety-one Princes and Spiritual Governors, which supports treating each name as a being to be addressed. But some careful readers of Dee's own tables, notably Benjamin Rowe, have argued that the name in that column is the name of the Part in the angelic language rather than of any resident spirit, and that the word Governor properly belongs to the twelve Zodiacal Kings listed in a separate column. Both readings can be defended from the manuscript. Practice has overwhelmingly followed the first, largely because the Golden Dawn did.