The Tablet of Union

The tablet is a grid of four rows of five letters, read as EXARP, HCOMA, NANTA and BITOM. It was received during the scrying sessions John Dee conducted with Edward Kelley in the mid 1580s, in the same period as the great tables and the calls, and it survives in Dee's own manuscript record of those sessions, now among the Sloane manuscripts in the British Library. Whatever anyone concludes about where the material came from, the document itself is a sixteenth century artefact and its text is not in doubt.

Its stated function is structural rather than independent. The system Dee recorded is built around four great tables, one for each element, each divided into quarters and populated with names extracted from the letters by prescribed rules. The Tablet of Union is what holds those four together: each of its rows is assigned to one of the elements, and its letters supply the names governing the whole arrangement, so that four separate tables become one system.

In some of Dee's arrangements it sits at the centre of a cross formed by the four tables, which is where the alternative name black cross comes from, though the term is used inconsistently in the sources and in the later literature that depends on them.

Almost everyone who works with Enochian material today received it through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn rather than from Dee, and the order did not simply pass it on. Its teaching papers on the subject placed the Tablet of Union at the centre of the scheme, assigned it to spirit or aether as a fifth element above the four, arranged the four great tables on the walls of its ritual chamber with the tablet between them, and attached the whole to the order's own system of correspondences, its grades, its tattva symbols and its colour scales. Aleister Crowley inherited that arrangement and carried it into his own work, from which most twentieth century practice descends.

The order also worked from a rearranged version of Dee's great table, revised on the authority of a vision rather than of the manuscripts. When the Dee manuscripts became widely available in the later twentieth century, practitioners could compare the two for the first time, and the difference between what Dee recorded and what the Golden Dawn taught became a live argument within the field, with some working from the manuscripts and others holding that a century of practice with the revised arrangement counts for something.

The atlas holds the document and its reception apart. The manuscript exists; what is made of it is a separate question with its own history.