John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Great Table

Dr. John Dee’s spirit diaries, and the “Enochian” language and magickal system derived from them, present one of the great enigmas of the western mystery tradition. In contemporary magickal practice, the most commonly encountered parts of the Enochian system beyond the language itself are the so-called “Enochian Tablets,” also known as the “elemental” tablets or Watchtowers. Originally received as parts of a singular grid or map called the Great Table, the Four Watchtowers were joined by a Black Cross; from this cross are derived the names of the more commonly used “Tablet of Union.” This Great Table was the last component of a system and language delivered to Dee and Kelley over many years, and clearly dependent upon the components that had come before it. Yet today the Enochian Tablets and Tablet of Union are often used without any of the other components Dee was told were necessary.

One of the most documented uses has been in the materials of the Golden Dawn. Israel Regardie himself advised Golden Dawn students to be very careful with how they used Enochian : “It is a very powerful system, and if used carelessly and indiscriminately will bring about disaster and spiritual disintegration.”[1] Why does he think this will happen? From observation and experience, likely, though in terms of actual mechanics we can infer he did not know the mechanism.

That of course leaves the unanswered questions of why the Great Table has been turned into four Enochian Tablets and a Tablet of Union, and why they are used in Golden Dawn rituals anyway. (The reason often given is because they were in the cipher manuscript from which Mathers derived the initiations, but that really is a dodge rather than an answer.) Aleister Crowley’s Vision and the Voice recounted experiments scrying the aethyrs with Victor Neuberg and left more readers shocked than instructed; his more analytic Liber Chanokh is often ignored because of lack of sensationalism. Some later ceremonialists simply took the Enochian Tablets out of the initiatory process: Paul Foster Case’s B.O.T.A., for instance, uses materials very similar to the Golden Dawn but deletes the Enochian....read more>>...