The Enochian Elemental Tablets: Great Table and Watchtowers

The Enochian elemental tablets are the four quarters of the "Great Table", a large grid of letters revealed to John Dee and Edward Kelley in Kraków in June 1584. Each quarter, later called a Watchtower, yields the names of God, kings, seniors and lesser angels who govern one region of the world. Dee recorded the table and its explanation; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn assigned the four tablets to the elements and made them the centre of a complex system of elemental magic.

The Revelation of the Great Table in 1584§

By 1584 Dee and Kelley had already received an alphabet, the great book Liber Loagaeth and a set of angelic invocations, the Calls, in the angelic tongue described in our article on the Enochian language. Working in Kraków, where they had travelled with the Polish nobleman Albert Łaski, they now received what became the most practically developed part of the corpus. Kelley reported a vision of four castles or watch-towers standing at the corners of the world, each with trumpets sounding and companies of angels issuing from their gates. The angels then dictated a great square of letters, divided into four parts, with a cross of letters between them.

Over the next sessions an angel named Ave explained how to read the table. Dee's account, preserved in the manuscripts now in the British Library and partly printed in Meric Casaubon's A True and Faithful Relation (1659; see our reading room text), shows Dee asking question after question about which letters formed which names and what each class of angels could do. The broader story of the partnership is told in our main article on Enochian magic.

Dee later compiled a fair copy of prayers for calling the angels of the table, which survives as the Tabula bonorum angelorum invocationes, "the invocations of the good angels" (see the catalogue entry on Dee's book of supplications). It is one of the few pieces of evidence that Dee intended the table to be used, not merely recorded.

Structure of the Four Watchtowers§

Each of the four quarters of the Great Table is a grid of twelve rows and thirteen columns. Within each grid a central cross, sometimes called the Great Cross, divides the quarter into four smaller squares, and each of these is crossed again by a smaller cross, often called a Calvary cross. The four quarters are separated by the central "Black Cross" of the whole table. The names are drawn from these crosses and squares according to rules Ave gave.

The names of God and the kings§

From the horizontal line of each Great Cross come three holy names of God, of three, four and five letters, which in the Golden Dawn versions read, for the eastern quarter, ORO IBAH AOZPI. From the centre of each Great Cross, read in a whirling pattern, comes the name of a king who rules the quarter. The Golden Dawn knew these kings by names such as Bataivah for the east and Iczhhcal for the north.

The seniors and the lesser angels§

From the arms of the Great Cross come the names of six seniors for each quarter, twenty-four in all; later writers connected them with the twenty-four elders who surround the throne in the Book of Revelation. Each of the sixteen smaller squares yields further names: the letters of its Calvary cross give a pair of divine names used to call and command the angels below, and the remaining letters furnish the names of the lesser angels, grouped in fours. According to Ave's explanation, these hosts have charge of matters such as medicine, the knowledge of metals, transformation, the secrets of the elemental creatures and movement from place to place.

Ave also tied the table to the evil or "cacodemonic" names formed by joining letters from neighbouring columns, which Dee was warned to avoid. Later writers treated these mainly as a theoretical feature of the system.

The Watchtowers and the Thirty Aethyrs§

The relationship between the Great Table and the other parts of the Enochian material is not fully explained in Dee's records. The Calls include invocations that later tradition assigned to the quarters and sub-quarters of the table. Separately, the angels described thirty Aethyrs or "airs", concentric heavens each governed by named governors, and ninety-one "parts of the earth" whose names and sigils Dee recorded in his Liber scientiae auxilii et victoriae terrestris. Dee was told that the letters of the governors' names were scattered through the four Watchtowers, so that the table functioned as a kind of master key for the whole system.

Because the connections were left incomplete, every later system is in part a reconstruction. This is the main reason Enochian magic has generated so many competing schemes. Readers interested in the Aethyrs should turn to The Vision and the Voice, Aleister Crowley's record of his journeys through them in 1909.

The Golden Dawn's Elemental Tablets§

When the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn studied Dee's manuscripts in the British Museum in the late 1880s, the Great Table became the core of their Enochian teaching. They made several decisive changes.

• Elemental attribution. Each quarter was assigned to an element and a direction: Air to the east, Water to the west, Earth to the north and Fire to the south, matching the arrangement of the order's pentagram ritual. The quarters thus became the four "elemental tablets".
• The Tablet of Union. The letters of the central Black Cross were rearranged into a small table of four lines, EXARP, HCOMA, NANTA and BITOM, representing Spirit in its union with Air, Water, Earth and Fire.
• Truncated pyramids. Each square of each tablet was imagined as the top of a truncated pyramid, with its four sides coloured and attributed to elements, signs of the zodiac, planets, Hebrew letters and tarot cards. Over each square stood an Egyptian god-form and a sphinx combining the elemental powers of the square.
• Ritual use. Adepts of the Second Order recited the Calls to open the Watchtowers before working with elemental forces, and painted their own coloured versions of the tablets as personal ritual equipment.

Enochian chess§

The Golden Dawn also developed a four-handed board game, often called Enochian or Rosicrucian chess, played on boards derived from the elemental tablets with pieces representing Egyptian deities. Usually credited to William Wynn Westcott and developed with S. L. MacGregor Mathers, it was used for divination as well as for meditation on the tablets. Its rules survive in the order's papers published by Israel Regardie.

The Opening by Watchtower§

Regardie's edition of the Golden Dawn papers also includes a ceremony known as the Opening by Watchtower, in which the officiant addresses the four quarters in turn with the names drawn from the tablets. It became a common opening rite in modern ceremonial magic, though it is a product of the order or its successors rather than of Dee.

Versions, Errors and Modern Debates§

The Great Table exists in more than one form. Dee recorded the original of 1584, and in 1587 at Třeboň the angels delivered a revised arrangement, attributed to the angel Raphael, that rearranges the quarters and alters letters. The manuscripts also contain copying variants, and the Golden Dawn's tablets reproduce one tradition of the table with further differences of their own.

These variations matter to practitioners because the names of the angels depend on the exact letters. Since the 1970s, editions and studies by Geoffrey James, Stephen Skinner and David Rankine, Donald Tyson and others have returned to Dee's manuscripts and argued over which version should be used. Skinner and Rankine, for instance, reconstructed a practice based on Dee's own invocations rather than on the Golden Dawn's attributions, while Tyson read the tablets in an apocalyptic framework drawn from Dee's angels' warnings about the end of the world.

The historian Egil Asprem has shown how these debates turned on questions of authenticity: whether the Golden Dawn system represents a legitimate development or a distortion, and what it means to "restore" a revelation that was never complete in the first place. The tablets have also been read psychologically, as a mandala-like map of the elements of the self, a view popular in the later twentieth century. None of these approaches can be checked against Dee's own practice, which remains largely unknown.

Frequently asked questions§

What are the Enochian Watchtowers?§

They are the four quarters of the Great Table of letters revealed to John Dee and Edward Kelley in 1584. Dee's angels described them as watch-towers at the four corners of the world, each governed by angelic hierarchies whose names are drawn from the letters. The Golden Dawn assigned them to the four elements.

What is the Tablet of Union?§

The Tablet of Union is the Golden Dawn's name for the letters of the central cross of the Great Table, rearranged into four short lines: EXARP, HCOMA, NANTA and BITOM. It represents Spirit uniting the four elemental tablets. The arrangement is the order's creation rather than Dee's.

Did John Dee use the elemental tablets in ritual?§

Dee compiled prayers for invoking the good angels of the table, which suggests he intended to use it, but the records show little of how or whether he did. The elaborate elemental practice associated with the tablets was developed by the Golden Dawn in the 1890s.

Why do different books give different versions of the tablets?§

Dee's manuscripts contain the 1584 table, a revised version given in 1587 and various copying differences, and the Golden Dawn introduced further changes. Practitioners therefore choose different versions according to whether they follow Dee's records or the Golden Dawn tradition.

Sources and further reading§

• A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits — Meric Casaubon (ed.), 1659
• The Enochian Magick of Dr. John Dee — Geoffrey James, 1994
• The Practical Angel Magic of Dr John Dee's Enochian Tables — Stephen Skinner & David Rankine, 2004
• Enochian Magic for Beginners — Donald Tyson, 1997
• Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture — Egil Asprem, 2012
• The Golden Dawn — Israel Regardie, 1937
• John Dee's Conversations with Angels — Deborah E. Harkness, 1999