DES is the twenty-sixth of the thirty Aethyrs, or Airs, of the Enochian system, the thirty spiritual regions delivered to the mathematician John Dee and the scryer Edward Kelley in 1584, and named in the record Dee compiled from those sessions. Its three-letter name, DES, was received letter by letter through Kelley's scrying.
Place in the system
Each Aethyr is said to contain three Governors among whom the ninety-one Parts of the Earth are divided.
The thirty Aethyrs are the raw gift of the Dee-Kelley sessions; the elaborate visionary content attached to them in modern practice belongs to a later layer, above all Aleister Crowley's The Vision and the Voice, his record of scrying all thirty Aethyrs in 1900 and 1909. The Aethyr is described here as an element of that documented historical tradition, studied as such, its entities not reified.
The three Governors
DES's three Parts are Pophand, ruling a Part called Gorsin with no known referent, under King Arfaolg of the tribe of Ephraim; Nigrana, ruling Hispania, Spain, under King Cadaamp of the tribe of Benjamin; and Bazchim, ruling Pamphilia, on the southern coast of Anatolia, under King Arfaolg again. Dee's own diaries record the sessions behind this material in detail, including his questions, his hesitations, and the occasions on which he pressed the angels for clarification or disputed what he was told, which is what makes the diaries, whatever one concludes about the source of the material, unusually good evidence about Dee himself.