TAN is the seventeenth 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, TAN, 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
TAN's three Parts are Sigmorf, ruling Colchica, Colchis, at the eastern end of the Black Sea, under King Ziracah of the tribe of Reuben; Avdropt, ruling Cireniaca, Cyrenaica, on the coast of eastern Libya, under King Olpaged of the tribe of Dan; and Tocarzi, ruling Nasamoma, evidently the country of the Nasamones known from Herodotus, under King Zarzilg of the tribe of Naphtali. The Aethyr names themselves were given at the close of the 1584 sessions, on 13 July, together with the final portion of the Call of the Aethyrs, after which the angelic conversations largely ceased and Dee and Kelley's attention turned to alchemy and to the patronage of the imperial court at Prague.