How to Sequence the Perimeter Letters on John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Holy Table

For Vincent Bridges

By Terry Burns and J. Alan Moore

(Originally published in the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition Vol. 3 No. 27, September

20, 2014. Minor edits have been made to the original.)

Trying to make magical implements for an Enochian Temple by directly following the

instructions in John Dee’s angelic conversations is a losing battle unless one has years of time

and a fondness for deciphering poor handwriting and cryptic information. Because of this, most

people who try to make the Holy Table or Table of Practice as described in the appendix to

Dee’s Quinti Libri Mysteriorum do so by copying one of the many versions one can find in print

or on-line and trusting the explanation that particular writer gives about why his or her version is

correct.

That’s not surprising: Dee’s drawing of the Holy Table does not seem to match his explanation

of how to create it, and when those two explanations are reconciled it then doesn’t seem to match

the only illustration we have of Dee’s actual table.

As the reader may know, the outer letters on the Holy Table are derived from the names of the

Heptarchic Kings and Princes. They’re used in turn to create another 12 x 7 grid; that grid is

used to create the central 3 x 4 grid on the Holy Table, then a second permutation of that 12 x 7

grid is used to create a lamen. The transpositions one goes through to create each of these things

would be complicated even if Dee’s explanation (or the angelic explanation, or the explanation

scryed by Kelley and written by Dee, take your pick) were straightforward, but it isn’t.

(If you’d like to skip our discussion of how different writers on Enochian have lettered the table

and just go straight to how we think the table should be lettered, jump ahead to The Instructions

in the Spirit Diaries.)

Fortunately, the Holy Table was one of the few physical implements of Dee and Kelley’s

partnership that survived for at least a couple generations after his death: long enough for Elias

Ashmole to see it in John Cotton’s library and make meticulous notes.1 In 1658-59

2, when

Meric Casaubon published A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between

Dr: John Dee... and Some Spirits, he was able to include an illustration of the Holy Table based

on Dee’s physical original. This is TFR’s illustration, as redone for Aleister Crowley’s Equinox:

Figure 1: John Dee’s Holy Table, from the version in TFR as redone for the Equinox.

Notably, Meric Casaubon did not have all of Dee’s writing. TFR begins in Leiden on May 28,

1583, well past the date-- 26 April 1583, in Cracow—when Dee writes down instructions on how

to make the table. But Casaubon (or his artist or engraver) had access to John Dee’s real Holy

Table, and went by that.

Aleister Crowley’s Liber Chanokh reproduced the letters on the Holy Table using the same order

as Casaubon. So did works by Donald Tyson and most others who wrote on Enochian until the

turn of this century.

Since then, it has become “received wisdom” from the most well-known writers on Enochian

that Casaubon’s rendering of Dee’s actual Holy Table doesn’t match Dee’s writing because it

suffers from a printer’s or engraver’s error. For instance, in Enochian Vision Magic, Lon Milo

Duquette says:

Casaubon’s impressively printed image of the Holy Table is perhaps the greatest

flaw in his liberally flawed and ill-titled A True & Faithful Relation. One look

at the description and drawing in Dee’s Quinti Libri Mysteriorum: An Appendix

reveals the eighty-four letters that form the border of the Holy Table and the

twelve printed letters that fill the 3 x 4 center square of Casaubon’s image are

printed in backwards order.3

Similarly, an excellent on-line annotation of Aleister Crowley’s Liber Chanokh by “T.S.” says

that while Crowley used Casaubon’s ordering, Crowley was wrong, as were most of the printed

versions through the time that annotation was written: “most [as of the late 1990s] printed

versions reverse the order left to right from the design in Dee’s diaries, following the printed

version of TFR.4”

Is this true? Are most of the renderings of the Holy Table until the past ten or fifteen years

wrong?

You can likely guess our answer by looking at the cover art one of us created for the Journal of

the Western Mystery Tradition in 2011: sequenced like Casaubon’s with colors added based on

seventeenth century notes from Elias Ashmole. But don’t trust us. Work through this on your

own, and see what you think.

Figure 2: Our Table of Practice, crafted by J. Alan Moore in 2011

When we started this process, the only writer on Enochian we knew who was still using

Casaubon’s ordering was Vincent Bridges. In chapter six of his book The Ophanic Revelation,

Vincent takes a reader—perhaps too fast and perhaps with too little explanation—through the

way he derived the master 7 x 12 grid from the letters at the periphery of the Holy Table, and the

3 x 4 inner grid and the lamen from the 7 x 12 grid and one of its permutations. (The explanation

he gives in that chapter was originally written as a handbook for a specific lengthy working in

Sedona back in 1996, so he focuses more on what the thinks each component does rather than

why he’s come to such conclusions.)

Our own work on Dee and Kelley grew out of years of working with Vincent. Back in 2010,

when we still thought we’d have all the time in the world to work through Dee’s manuscripts, the

main problem we had in making our Holy Table was that we could not easily connect Vincent’s

explanation of how he ordered the outer letters of the Holy Table with the explanation in Dee’s

writing, and Vincent acknowledged it had been years—the 1980s and early 1990s—since he’d

gone through the original manuscripts. When he had gone over the original materials, it was

back in the day when such research required extended trips to the British Library, and Vincent

had spent quite a while there… but that was many years ago, and by the time we knew each other

he was much more interested in working his own system than poring over texts that were rapidly

being transcribed into more readable formats by a new generation of writers. Vincent was sure

the way he’d constructed the Holy Table was right. Had he made a mistake, we wondered? The

Holy Table, the way he configured it, worked, and our practice matched his experience. On a

personal level, we saw no need to “fix” anything.

But since we’ve heard again and again that we’re using a “reversed” Holy Table, we decided to

work through the system yet again. The exercise hasn’t changed the design of our Table, but we

can better explain why we think ours is in fact not reversed at all.

In this article, we’ve worked through how to create the Holy Table by (1) noting the huge

problems with the “printer’s error” as a cause of “reversed letters” argument, (2) reminding our

readers of a few axioms concerning the intersection of spywork and spirit communication in

Dee’s work, (3) returning to Dee’s original manuscripts to work through the spirit

communications that explained how to set up the Holy Table, and (4) trying to see if one could

actually use a Holy Table if it were set up the way Dee seems to suggest.

The Problem with the “Printer’s Error” Argument

Few argue that TFR is anything but a sloppy and unsympathetic transcription of Dee and

Kelley’s angelic conversations. We’ve talked at length other places about how the transcription

errors that run throughout TFR have caused misunderstandings. In fact, as we’ll get to in our

final section, there is indeed a transcription error in Casaubon’s illustration of John Dee’s Holy

Table. One of the letters, in our opinion, is wrong. But only one.

That’s a far different matter than the engraver’s error posited by many current writers. That

“error,” if it is that, seems to affect 84 of the 88 letters on the perimeter of the Table and reverses

the grid inside. That would show more than simple incompetence. It would be a stunning series

of repeated mistakes followed by another series of unrelated repeated mistakes, at least in terms

of how engravers in Casaubon’s day set up their plates.

Both of the writers quoted above say that Casaubon’s version reverses the order left to right from

the design in Dee’s diaries. When we look at Dee’s manuscripts in the next section, we’ll be

able to see why they drew that conclusion. The letters do look reversed, at least on the top and

bottom of the Table. But they aren’t reversed in a way that’s easily explained by viewing them

as a printer or engraver’s error.

Engraving an illustration like the one in TFR would have involved preparing a mirror or reversed

image on a copper plate. That meant that the engraver needed to not only mirror images, but

mirror the entire document, so that what is on the left side of the original is the right side of the

etching and again becomes the left side of the print.

For an engraver to make the kind of error that many writers now posit happened in TFR, the

engraver would have had to get complicated etchings correct yet out of order in a way that

presents each letter correctly. In other words, he would have had to make the mirrored shapes of

the letters correctly (including making the ones on the top of the table upside-down, the ones on

the left rotated 90 degrees clockwise, and the ones on the right rotated 90 degrees counter-

clockwise).

And that still doesn’t account for the sides! As Whitby said in his lengthy 1982 thesis, if one

compares Dee’s manuscript drawing to the engraving of the table in TFR , “the letters in the top

and bottom borders are written from right to left and the letters in the side borders are not only

written from right to left but have exchanged sides as well.”5 Now our hypothetical mistaken

engraver has switched the sides of the table while still keeping individual letters on each side

oriented correctly in terms of the center of the Table, too. If you work your way through the

lettering using Dee’s instructions, you’ll find that the letters in the left and right columns (whose

places are exchanged, as Whitby says) are also reversed, in a way (they’re lettered in reverse

order if you are reading by oriented your view from the center of the table and starting with the

“o” in the upper right) but since that “reverse order” is in this case reflected in vertical columns

where the letters are still correctly oriented with the top of the letter pointed towards the center

of the table, even though the sequence of individual letters seem wrong--there’s no way that a

simple printer’s error could account for it. The engraver would have had to have made a series

of errors with individual letters that still preserved the correct spatial orientation of the letters in

relation to the center of the Table while reversing the order of the top and bottom and switching

the left and right sides as well as the order of the letters in those sides.

That’s a pretty complicated series of errors for an engraver to make. The other engravings in

TFR, such as those of Dee and Kelley themselves, are competently done. While a printer or

engraver’s error is possible, it is so improbable that if that if there were no other likely

explanation for why Casaubon’s engraving of John Dee’s Holy Table differed from Dee’s

instructions on how to make such a Table, we’d be more inclined to wonder if there had been

more information in the parts of the spirit conversations which are now missing than we would

be to write off the lettering of the Holy Table as shown in the illustration in TFR as totally wrong

due to printer or engraver’s error.

After all, several people had seen the physical item. No one raised any concern about

Casaubon’s illustration until late in the 20th

century. No less a magician than Aleister Crowley

used the Holy Table with the Enochian letters ordered the same way as Casaubon.

But still, the letters in Casaubon’s drawing seem to not follow Dee’s pattern, even if it took

around 400 years for anyone to notice that.

Compare this to a similar situation with another of Dee’s physical magical items, the Seal of

Aemeth. Over 400 years after Dee recorded instructions about how to make the Seal, Clay

Holden noticed that Dee’s written instructions did not match Dee’s own drawing of the Seal.6 In

this case, the physical item still exists, so there was no debating whether the discrepancy really

was there or not: it was. Holden’s explanation of that particular blind is one of the most elegant

moments in magical scholarship.7 Could something similar be at play with the apparent

contradiction between Dee’s written instructions about the Holy Table, his lettering of it, and the

different sequence of letters which appear in Casaubon’s illustration of the actual item?

Some Background on the Intersection of Spywork and Spirit Communication

If one wants to take the pages and pages of John Dee’s spiritual communications as

straightforward (a dangerous assumption, in our opinion) then there is no good explanation for

why the table appears one way in some places and differently in others, nor why Casaubon

would make such a huge mistake (or not notice if an engraver made such a huge mistake.)

Throughout the hundreds of pages of his recorded spirit communications, Dee claims to be

talking to entities who are teaching him the language of the Angels, an Adamic language last

revealed to the prophet Enoch… although these same entities repeatedly seem to lie, change their

minds, and throughout have a pretty poor track record of predicting anything that was not already

predictable. Yet Dee has access to the highest levels of Renaissance government—audiences

with Queen Elizabeth I, Polish King Stephen Bathory, Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf I.

Some of the “shadier” characters that appear in Dee’s diaries have curious connections: take

Vincent De Seve, the brother-in-law of Polish Count Albrecht Laski’s infamous third wife

Sabine. This seems to be the same Vincent de Seve who published a bunch of “lost” predictions

of Nostradamus in the late 1500s. The most mysterious person of all in Dee’s circle of unusual

friends seems to be the most talented: Edward Kelley, about whom we know almost nothing

until he begins scrying amazing spirit visions for John Dee.

Sir Edward Dyer, who later became the Chancellor of the Order of the Garter, went to Prague to

study alchemy with Kelley in 1590, after Dee and Kelley had parted ways. By that time, Dee’s

scryer had risen from a nobody to Sir Edward Kelley, Golden Knight of the Holy Roman

Empire. Yet amazing as his work reportedly was, few would characterize Kelley as honest and

straightforward. Most would label him a talented and opportunistic spy.

If one wants to acknowledge, as most all historians now do8, that Dee and Kelley were

intelligencers, then one must also acknowledge that the pages of grids and numbers and

instructions on how to transpose letter and numbers from one table into another look like nothing

so much as cryptography grids. It’s almost inconceivable that they weren’t partly used for that.

The Enochian letters themselves have rather fascinating alphanumeric properties that would be

ideal for ciphering. Rather than referring chapter and verse, so to speak, to Dee’s angelic

communications as if they were holy writ, it makes more sense to us to look at them as a

combination of intelligence work and spirit communication where it is difficult to know where

one part of the work ends and another begins. Are the blinds protection for Dee and Kelley, to

make heretical spirit communication look like spywork, or are the spirit communications

themselves spywork? Is Kelley (since he was the one doing the scrying) in part giving theatrical

performances to men like King Stephen Bathory and claiming it came from the angels?

We really have no way of knowing, so the safest approach it to assume that both could be true.

That makes the Enochian material, which appeared to “arrive” unexpectedly and whose grids

appear cryptographic but have in only one instance been shown to be so, even more enigmatic.

If axiom #1 is to not take Dee’s writing at face value, axiom #2 is to remember these dual

reasons why that is so: we never know when the magic is a cover for spywork and when the

magic is partially hidden because of spywork. As an intelligencer on the European continent,

some of what Dee writes may be for the eyes of others. (Consider: even before they leave

England, Kelley is scrying information for Polish Count Laski that purports to establish Laski’s

claim to two different thrones, and Dee is writing this down, an act which could get both of them

quickly strung up if the wrong person reported them. That scrying session reads very differently

when one realizes Dee was likely reporting information to Sir Francis Walsingham and Kelley to

Sir William Cecil, and both Cecil and Walsingham had many reasons to want to know what

Laski’s intentions were.)

Over and over again, especially when Kelley is not scrying Enochian material but scrying

supposedly angelic answers to geopolitical questions, Dee writes down answers that we know to

be wrong… but answers which would have been politically useful tools if one wanted to

manipulate someone towards a particular end. If we move from what Kelley scries in English to

the tables he begins to generate in Enochian, we see materials being produced in tables and

transformed into other tables using patterns that look, again, like those in different cipher codes

or transformations like the Cardan grille which could be used in espionage.

As we’ve worked our way through John Dee and Edward Kelley’s writing, we’ve seen again and

again that it’s a poor idea to assume that things are exactly as they seem. Dee’s writing is filled

with blinds, and whether one wants to call them “magical blinds” or “espionage disinformation”

or self-protection might well depend on the context. Those who write strictly on Enochian magic

forget that there might be things Dee could assume any magician might know that a person using

the same grid for spycraft might well not know. For instance: we’ll see that Dee’s instructions

for lettering the Holy Table seem to have someone moving counter-clockwise. The Table is

supposed to be an altar of communion connecting heaven and earth. Usually, if one is raising

energy or connecting to “skyward” energies, one moves clockwise, not counter-clockwise.

Wouldn’t that strike most magicians as odd?

While writing about the Holy Table, Dee will use the word “transposition” over and over, and

the angel Il will mention Dee’s conversation with Kelley about how to transpose letters. Is that a

hint? Or are Dee, Kelley, and the angel all just randomly speaking about this subject?

Finally, we’ll run into a comment which Dee writes upside-down in Latin next to a hand pointing

to a particular letter. That seems to shout, “read me! read me!” Yet when one translates the

Latin, it seems to say nothing that wasn’t already obvious. What gives?

We worked our way through a series of such “magical blinds” disguised as apparent mistakes

and letter cross-outs in one of our previous articles1 on Dee and Kelley’s Great Table of Earth.

Rather than running through our own writing, though, let’s turn to the simpler and more elegant

case of the blind on Dee’s Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the Seal of Aemeth.

Unlike other parts of Dee’s Enochian system, the tables and correspondences used in the

Sigillum Dei Aemeth were already well-known and part of a mnemonic system used by actors,

spies, cryptographers and magicians alike. But none of those correspondences explained the odd

letters and numbers around the perimeter, numbers which didn’t match Dee’s own directions on

how to make the Seal. As Clay Holden pointed out, "at the bottom of the Sigillum Dei Aemeth,

both in Dee's original illustration at the end of Mysteriorum Liber Secundus and in virtually

every version published since, one finds the character ‘y' with a ‘14' under it. The text however

clearly gives this number as ‘15.'9" Dee’s instructions and his illustration (and the actual Seals

he made, now property of the British Museum) did not match.

Holden speculated why that might be, and his answer, not surprisingly, required that one know a

little about a basic “occult” and ciphering subject: how to derive gematric values from the

numbers and letters and what meaning one might impute to those values. At the most basic

level, to solve a blind one must understand something about why the blind is there; that

understanding leads to other understandings about how to use the item. By the time one gets to

the Great Table of Earth, the last-received and most complex item in Dee’s spirit diaries, one has

to know how different components work with other components to solve the blind. (In that case,

one has to realize that Angelic Governors “govern” the entire Table of Earth, not individual

letters, or one can’t work out of the blind.) Once one sees a basic necessary principle, the

“blind” seems to have been hidden in plain sight. Why would the Holy Table be any different?

In our opinion, it’s not.

Magic and spycraft worked hand-in-hand in the Renaissance. Someone who works through

Dee’s original material should expect, rather than be surprised, when a table or series of tables is

not quite what it appears.

The Instructions in the Spirit Diaries

Dee’s spirit diaries are hard to read throughout, and the main section concerning the Holy Table

is no different. In March of 1582, the angel Uriel tells Dee and Edward Talbot (who may or may

not have been Edward Kelley) that they needed to make a Table upon which to put the “Sigillum

1 Available: http://www.jwmt.org/v2n19/john.html

Dei,” they’re later told the plan is false. By April 28 of 1583, in the material frequently recorded

as the appendix to Quinti libri Mysteriorum (or as Sloane MS 3188 folio 94b), Edward Kelley

and John Dee are, for reasons unknown, talking about Dee’s rules for how to transpose letters.10

We’re only a few days past the date when he’s been told how to pronounce the names of the

different Angelic or Enochian letters, names which curiously have no phonetic relationship at all

to their Roman equivalent, so the character written with the Roman “b” is pronounced “pa;” “c”

or “k” is pronounced “veh,” and so on. These short entries, all from the same day, will be the

one and only place where we get a system showing how to sequence the letters on the perimeter

of the Holy Table: first using Roman equivalents, then spelled out the way the letter is

pronounced, but in no case using the Enochian letters themselves (although we know from both

Ashmole’s description and Casaubon’s illustration of Dee’s Holy Table that the Table Dee

finally made did use the Enochian

letters.)

If you can’t switch easily between

alphabets, you may find the table to

the left helpful!

<- Figure 3: Enochian Alphabet

Correspondences

Dee records that he and Kelley had

“diuerse talks and discourses of

Transposition of letters: and I had

declared him my rule for to know

certainly how many ways, any number

of letter (propownded,) might be

transposed or altered in place or

order.”

At first glance, it would seem Dee and

Kelley are talking about how to

transpose letters between the

Angelic/Enochian and Roman

alphabets, because neither are very

skillful yet at transposing a Roman

letter into an Enochian one. But Dee

is also telling Kelley that he has a rule

for shifting the place or order of

letters.

Dee writes next that,

Behold, suddenly appeared, the Spirituall Creatre, Il, and sayd,

Il: Here is a goodly disputation of transposition of letters. Chuse, whether you

will dispute with me, of Transposition, or I shall lerne you.

∆ [Dee]: I had rather lerne than dispute. And first I think, that those letters in our

Adamicall Alphabet haue a due peculier unchangeable proportion of their

formes,--and likewise that their order is also Mysticall.

Il: These letters represent the Creation of man: and therefore they must be in

proportion.

…

Let me see the forme of your Table.

∆: --I shewed him the Characters and words which were to be paynted round

abowt in the border of the Table.

Il: How do you like those letters:

∆: I know not well what I may say. For, perhaps, that which I shuld like, were not

so to liked: and contrarywise I shold think well of, might be nothing worth.

Il: Thou sayest well.

Il’s exhortations as written by Dee and scryed by Kelley continue on to the next page, where we

see Dee’s drawing of the Holy Table. Take a look at this page as a whole before we zoom in on

part of it:

Figure 4: The sketch of the Holy Table from John Dee’s Spirit Diary, 4-28-1593

Dee’s writing is sloppy, but the Holy Table has been drawn out neatly on a grid. Some notes are

crammed in at the top; a hand points to one letter; comments above the grid in the center have

been crossed out and three of the letters in that grid have also been crossed out and replaced by

others. It seems likely that Dee is continuing his spirit diary on to a page already written on, the

page he is showing Il when Il commands him to “Let me see the forme of your Table” in the

passage just quoted.

At the top of this page, Il’s exhortations continue. She tells him how to make the inner square.

She says that every side must have 21 characters, and every corner should have a great “B.” But

apparently something else is going on and/or there are other instructions not written, because, if

you look closely, you can see the note Dee has written upside down in Latin in smaller letters,

next to the hand pointing at the “o,” or the Roman letter corresponding to “Med.” Let’s zoom

in on it and take a look:

Figure 5a: Close-ups of Dee’s Note Pointing to o/Med

Figure 5b: The same part of the page, with the Latin right-side-up

The upside-down Latin starts next to the ∆. Joseph Peterson transcribed and translated it as

follows:

∆ vide post foliam, et etiam Tabula cordis carnis et cutis, nam in lineis

defendentibus, ibedem habes hane hanc tabula hic incipiendo sed in primo

mittendo l et accipiendo o.

That roughly means, “See on the next sheet, and also in the table of the heart, flesh and skin, for

in the surrounding lines, you have this table here commencing the same, but omitting ‘l’ at the

start and gaining ‘o.’11

” Then the hand points to the “o” or med, in the Table beneath.

It sounds like there might be a pun here— “l” punning on El, a name of God, and “o” meaning

not the letter, but “zero.” The meaning of such wordplay—leave out God and you gain zero—

doesn’t seem help much, at least not yet.

What does Dee want us to see on the next sheet? Well, here it is:

Figure 6: The next page of Dee’s Spirit Diary, 4-28-1583

The most literal interpretation of Dee’s upside-down Latin, since “o” is the Enochian letter

“med” and Dee has just been told the tables on both pages start the same except that the previous

one has gained an “o,” or med, at the start, is that the Holy Table should start with “o” or “med.”

This group on the next page does. Also, you can see that it’s next to an “l” or “ur” in the

adjoining column

Above that group, the words say:

∆: After our prayers made, EK had sight (in the stone) of innumerable

letters and after a little while, they were browght into a lesser square and

fewer letters. First appeared in the border opposite to our standing place,

(which I haue used to call, the fronte Tabulae) these letters following,

beginning at the right hand, and proceeding towards the left.

Presumably, these are the letters that start at the right hand and proceed towards the left. He’s

labeled column 1 “in fronte Tabulae” or “in front of the Table;” 2 “A sinistris” or “to the left;” 3

“Juxta pectus” or “next to the chest;” and 4 “a dextris” or “to the right.” The line running from

the bottom of column one to the top of column 2 (and from the bottom of 2 to the top of 3, and

the bottom of 3 to the top of 4) suggests that this is how the letters are falling in line as they

sequence themselves around the table beginning “at the right hand” and proceeding left.

To make it easier to compare with the preceding page, we reproduced this table and added in the

Roman letter which transposes into the phonetically-spelled Enochian letter. Not surprisingly,

this list in column one starts with “o,” or med:

1 2 3 4

med o drux n drux n gon i

fam s un a ur l med o

med o tal m ur l un a

drux n fam s don r graph e

fam s don r ur l fam s

fam s ur l drux n mals p

ur l graph e un a tal m

ged g don r med o ur l

graph e or f graph e pa b

drux n gisg t graph e pa b

med o gon i med o drux n

graph e med o med o un a

graph e un a graph e un a

tal* m ged g ceph z van u

med o med o ged g un a

or f graph e ged g med o

med o van u ur l un a

gal d ur l mals p gon ‘ y

ged g don r mals p drux n

ged g don r fam f drux n

drux n un a un a ur l

*Dee has crossed it out and written “perhaps med”

Figure 7: Columns from the preceding figure

Compare this order of letters to that on the preceding page, and it appears the same. Written

upside-down across the top of the Table, we read:

o s o n s s l g e n o e e o o f o d g g n

You can compare the others yourself. You’ll see that these characters, if assembled around the

perimeter of the table from right to left starting with the “o” in the upper right, reverse the order

we see on Causabon’s illustration, which (if transposed back to Roman characters from

Enochian) would be:

n g g d o f o o e e o n e g l s s n o s o

Work your way around the table, and you’ll see why many – most – contemporary writers on

Enochian, from Aaron Leitch to Lon Milo Duquette to the “T.S.” who annotated Liber Chanokh,

think that Casaubon’s engraving has the letters reversed due to a printer or engraver’s error.

If we take it a step further and derive a 7 x 12 grid from this (as Dee is told to do later) and take

the middle 3 x 4 grid there to fill the middle of the Holy Table, you’ll get this in the center:

Gisg (g) Gon (y) Med (o)

Van (u,v) Ur (l) Don (r)

Ur (l) Don (r) Ur (l)

Graph (e) Med (o) Med (o)

That’s different from Casaubon, and exactly reversed.

Of course, that’s because if you reverse the top letters and go around clockwise instead of

counter-clockwise, you create a 7 x 12 grid that produces a 3 x 4 grid that is exactly reversed…

that ordering happens to result in a 3 x 4 table that is reversed on one axis from the table you get

if the letters start with “o” and run counter-clockwise. In other words, the perimeter in

Casaubon’s drawing yields the center table in the same drawing; they just seem to not match the

instructions Kelley has scried… instructions which now do seem to match Dee’s sketch on the

previous page.

Case closed? Have we inadvertently wound up proving how the etching of Dee’s actual Holy

Table was just so messed up by Casaubon or the printer or engraver or whomever that its little

more than a curious relic?

Look closer. There’s a little problem. If you try to imagine how you would actually use the

Holy Table in practice, you may see what that problem is before our explanation of it finishes.

According to his spirit diary, later that same evening of April 28, 1583, Dee wrote that he had

first doubted that the heads of the letters on the perimeter of the table should be oriented the way

they were:

I first dowted of the heds of the letters in the border, to be written,

which way they owght to be turned, to the center ward of the Table or from

the Center ward.

Il: The heds of the letters must be next or toward the center of the

square Table or Figure.

Why would Dee doubt that the tops of the letters should be pointing to the center of the Holy

Table? After all, that’s how he drew them on his own sketch on the previous page. That sketch

seemed to match the vision of the order of the letter that Kelley scried later that same afternoon

and which Dee recorded in four columns we saw above.

Next, Il gives a long and fiery speech about how to set up the 7 x 12 grid and how its

mathematical properties open up all sorts of “ternary” and “quaternary” powers to man, and then

said: “I have no more to say, but God transpose your myndes, according to his own will and

pleasure. You talked of Transposition.” Dee writes himself a note that Il has “alluded” to the

conversation he and Kelley had earlier that day about transposition.

What needs to change places or transpose? It seems Dee has understood something but not

stated it. No more angelic instructions on the Holy Table perimeter appear; in the next

conversation suddenly new grid after transposed new grid come in through Kelly’s scrying. We

can’t think of any other place in the spirit conversation except the early sessions deriving the

Seal of Aemeth where Dee is told how to create so many items in reasonably clear terms. The

only problem is that each of the tables which follow must be created from a Holy Table

perimeter lettered correctly, or every single one of them will be wrong.

Does Dee realize something, and underscore the word “Transposition,” so we don’t miss it? It

does seem odd to emphasize this word when he isn’t transposing Roman letters into Enochian

and hasn’t switched the place or order of any letters.

There is one very large problem with the Holy Table as Dee has lettered it. Perhaps that was

why Dee was puzzling over the whether the tops of the letters should be oriented towards the

center of the Holy Table or away from it.

What’s wrong with Dee’s picture of the Holy Table?

Simply put: you can’t read it, at least not very well. Not unless you change your frame of

reference and transpose some of the letters. If you do, you can follow the directions Dee gives,

but then the Holy Table you set up won’t look like the one he drew on the preceding page. Can

you look at Dee’s drawing above and see why that is?

Dee’s question about how the heads of the letters are oriented is a key to realizing how the

perspective of the Operator (and how that Operator is oriented in relation to the Holy Table)

affects how and if that Operator needs to transpose any of the letters. You can’t easily interact

with the Holy Table and follow his instructions if you letter the perimeter the way that Dee has

drawn it. If you have any inclination to (for instance) charge individual letters, you will have a

rather difficult time unless you read some of them upside-down and backwards.

Think of where you as the Operator would stand in relation to this Table and you should be able

to see what we mean. As a thought experiment, imagine you’re standing right in the center of

the Holy Table, and the heads of the letters are oriented with their tops away from the center of

the Holy Table rather than towards it. You the Operator, from your perspective in the center of

the Table, could follow all of the directions and go around the table. You’d begin by facing the

“front” side, starting with the letter o/Med on the far right, and continuing right to left as you

read or vibrate or invoke or charge each letter. As you come to the end of that row, you’d turn

90 degrees and continue with the next side, moving counter-clockwise around the square and

always reading the letters right to left. Every letter would be oriented so you could easily see it.

Every letter would occur in the order given in those four columns.

Perhaps it would feel odd (given that the Holy Table is supposed to be a table of communion

linking the Operator and Earth to more celestial energies) that you’re moving counter-clockwise.

That seems akin to trying to raise energy by grounding it, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. But

at least you could interact with the Table from that perspective and the way you would place or

encounter the letters would match the order in Dee’s spirit diaries. It doesn’t make the best sense

in terms of magical energy, but you would be able to correctly follow the instructions on how the

perimeter letters should be ordered.

However, Il insisted that the tops of the letters are supposed to be oriented towards the Holy

Table’s center, which makes the letters themselves readable from points outside of the Table

rather than the inside.

If the Operator tries to read them from the center of the Table, then every single letter is upside-

down. But of course you don’t usually stand in the middle of the table; that was just a thought

experiment. Usually the Operator stands before the altar, and indeed Dee described the “front”

of the table as being across from his standing place. Let’s try that. The Holy Table is an altar,

after all.

If you imagine that the Holy Table is situated in front of you and you stand across from the

upside down letters on the “front,” you’ll have the place where you’re supposed to start (o/med

in the first column) across from you to the far right. But now you’re again looking at a line of

letters that is upside down. Whether in Enochian or Roman characters, you can’t easily read

them (or if you can, it begs the question of why you’re being asked to read up-side down letters

when they could have easily been placed right-side-up.)

Alphabets aren’t meant to be read upside down. Perhaps the upside-down Latin was a hint after

all. (Remember, that upside-down Latin told us to start with “o,” and Dee drew a hand that

pointed to the “o” in the upper right.)

The only way one can easily read the perimeter of the Table or interact with the letters is if you

go around to the other side of the altar and face the “front” from there. Try doing that, and then

place the letters from column 1 into place, reading them right to left. Start with the “o” the hand

points to.

You can’t. You’re already at the far left of that row. You either must place letters so that (from

your perspective facing them) you’re reading them left to right (when the directions state right-

to-left), or transform the order so they’ll all fit on the line and you can read them from right to

left. Since the former means you’d again be going around counter-clockwise, we’ll pick the

latter as making more magical sense, and transpose the letters.

If you stand where you can read the top, or “front,” of the table with letters right-side up and you

start with the “o” as Dee’s diary instructed, you can read the letters from right to left if you

transpose the order, by shifting the “o” to what is now, from your perspective, the far right of the

side Dee labeled “front.” [Of course, from the perspective of someone looking at it from across

the table (to whom the letters are upside down), you’ve moved the “o” to the far left. But it isn’t

that perspective that we’re interested in.]

Now, you can sequence the letters in the order Kelley scried and Dee wrote into columns, and

place them right to left. You’ll read and place them in this order – o then s then o then n s s l g e

n o e e o o f o d g g n, starting at the far right and moving left – but to someone on the other side

of the Holy Table, reading them upside down, they appear to be in the opposite order, n g g d o f

o o e e o n e g l s s n o s o. (And if you try to read them left to right like we do English letters,

which you shouldn’t be doing, that’s how they’ll look to you, too.)

From your perspective facing the letters, you finish the first column and then continue to the side

Dee has labeled “A dentris” and now place (or read or encounter or charge) the letters starting

from the top of column 2… the column labeled “A sinistris.” As before, place them from right to

left.

Notice that you are now moving clockwise around the perimeter of the Table, which seems much

more appropriate, but you’ve flipped the sides of the Table as it was viewed from the original

perspective. (Also, if your altar is oriented towards the East as most are, you’ve started by

moving from the west of the altar facing East to moving to the East of the altar facing west, and

are moving clockwise so that for the letters in column 2 you’ve wound up on the south of the

altar looking north.) As you continue clockwise around to the next side, and sequence the letters

from column 3 right to left, you’ve again reversed the letters from Dee’s sketch although you’ve

transposed the sequence perfectly. Continue clockwise to the next side, labeled “A sinistris,”

and place the letters left to right from column 4, which like column 2 seems to have swapped

sides. But “right” and “left” are only a matter of perspective. From your perspective, that of the

Operator who needs to read the letters, you are placing letters right to left.

You’ll finish with the letter “l,” and now maybe the pun on “El” makes more sense, since you’ve

moved around the Holy Table clockwise and wound up back at the beginning. You’re placing

the letters counter-clockwise but because you are in effect “orbiting” the table, and making it the

center rather than yourself, you’ve circumambulated around it clock-wise and wound up back in

the East.

That’s the process by which we set up our Holy Table and then we derived the grids that follow

it exactly as Dee instructs in the diary pages which follow: but the letters come out differently, of

course. The 3 x 4 grid in the middle is reversed. When we charged the individual letters, we

went through the same process.

Our Holy Table’s letters match the illustration given by Meric Casaubon, the one based on the

actual Holy Table of John Dee. Amazing? Not really.

We don’t think there was any printer or engraver’s error that messed up the illustration of the

Holy Table in TFR.

Oh, but there is a transcription error! Take a look at look at the letters you would have around

the perimeter using the method above, then look again at Casaubon. One of his letters is wrong.

The rest are in the same order we have, and the center grid is the one you’d derive if you placed

letters in the way we’ve described above. We’re pretty sure that the transcription error wasn’t

the engraver’s fault, or a magical blind: just Meric Casaubon miscopying one letter, and the

engraver reproducing his error, perfectly.

1 Christopher L. Whitby (1982). John Dee's actions with spirits: 22 December 1581 to 23 May 1583 (Doctoral

dissertation, University of Birmingham), pp. 149-150. 2 TFR is listed as being published in 1659, though other evidence suggests it may have come out the year before.

3 Lon Milo DuQuette, (2008). Enochian Vision Magick: An Introduction and Practical Guide to the Magick of Mr.

John Dee and Edward Kelley. Weiser Books. P. 50. 4 “T.S.,” ed., in Aleister Crowley, Liber Chanokh or “A Brief Abstract of the Symbolic Representation of the

Universe derived by Doctor John Dee through the scrying of Sir Edward Kelly” transcribed and annotated from the

Equinox vol. I nos. 7-8. P. 37.Available: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/crowley/liber/libers/liber084.pdf 5 Whitby, op. cit. p. 150.

6 cite Holden’s blind

7 Clay Holden, "Forward," in Lon Milo Duquette's Enochian Vision Magick (San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser,

2008), xx. 8 Try this one for starters: Glynn Parry, (2012). The Arch Conjuror of England: John Dee. Yale University Press.

9 Holden, op. cit., xviii

10 Unless noted otherwise, our quotes in this section all come from Dee’s spiritual diary entry for Sunday, April 28,

1583. We’ve compared digital copies of the original manuscripts to the transcriptions in Whitby, op. cit., and

Joseph Peterson, (2002), John Dee's Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic. Weiser

Books. 11

Peterson, Ibid, p. 375.