Liber Scientiae, Auxilii et Victoriae Terrestris

What makes the Liber Scientiae unusual among angelic books is that it is a geography. The ninety one Parts of the Earth are matched to named regions, and the regions are those of a late sixteenth century European world picture: the provinces of the classical geographers, the kingdoms of Europe, the parts of Africa and Asia that reached Elizabethan London as names. There is nothing timeless about the list. It reflects what was on the maps John Dee owned, and Dee owned one of the largest libraries in England. That gives the book a double character. Read as angelic doctrine it assigns each region its governors and its Aethyr. Read as a document it records what a learned Englishman of the 1580s believed the divisions of the world to be, which is why historians of geography have found it interesting quite apart from its magical content.

The material was received in sessions where Edward Kelley reported what he saw in the stone and Dee wrote it down. Dee's role as recorder is why anything survives at all: he kept the working books, dated the sessions and preserved corrections, so the corpus can be studied as a sequence rather than as a finished revelation. The nature of Kelley's part in it, whether vision, invention or something between, was disputed in Dee's own lifetime and remains so.

The Enochian material did not reach the public through its authors. A portion of Dee's angelic diaries was printed in 1659 by Meric Casaubon under a title promising a true and faithful relation, and the edition was hostile: Casaubon published it to demonstrate that a learned man had been deceived by spirits, and his preface argues the case at length. The effect was the opposite of the intention. Printing put the system in circulation, and the later manuscripts that stayed in the Sloane collection supplied what Casaubon had left out.

The revival came through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which reorganised the material into a teaching system with elemental attributions the Dee papers do not contain, and then through Aleister Crowley, who treated the thirty Aethyrs as a sequence to be scried in order and published the record as The Vision and the Voice. In that reading the Aethyrs became stages of an inner ascent, and the Parts of the Earth that the Liber Scientiae tabulates fell out of view. The atlas keeps the table because it is the hinge of the system. Without it the Aethyrs have no ground, the ninety one governors have no jurisdiction, and the geography that the sixteenth century material actually asserts disappears behind a twentieth century reading of it.