Invocations of the Good Angels (Dee’s Book of Supplications)

This short manuscript is one of four practical books in Dee’s hand bound together in British Library Sloane MS 3191. It has no original title; the descriptive name Tabula bonorum angelorum invocationes was given by Elias Ashmole. Unlike the diaries, it is arranged as a working grimoire: a set of Latin prayers for calling the angels of the ‘Great Table’, the fourfold grid of letters revealed to Dee and Kelley in Kraków in 1584, from which the names of angels ruling the four quarters of the world are extracted. After a fundamental supplication to God, the book invokes the twenty-four seniors or elders, six for each quarter, and then successive groups of angels with particular competences: those skilled in medicine and curing disease, in metals and precious stones, in transformations, in the living creatures of each element, in the mixing of natures, in transporting people and things from place to place, in the mechanical arts, and in revealing human secrets. Each group is paired with the corresponding cacodemons, the evil spirits whose names are derived from the same tables. Together with the tables themselves, this text formed the basis of the ‘Watchtower’ system adopted and transformed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s and 1890s, and it remains central to modern Enochian practice. Historically it shows how Dee turned visionary material into an organised liturgy for practical ends.

What it contains

• Fundamental supplication to God for the aid of good angels
• Invocations of the twenty-four seniors of the four quarters
• Angels of medicine and their opposing cacodemons
• Angels of metals and precious stones
• Angels of transformation and of the creatures of the elements
• Angels of transport, the mechanical arts and secrets