POP

POP is the nineteenth 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, POP, 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

POP's three Parts are Torzoxi, ruling a Part called Parstavia with no secure identification, under King Arfaolg of the tribe of Ephraim; Abriond, ruling Celtica, the Celtic portion of Gaul, under King Cadaamp of the tribe of Benjamin; and Omagrap, ruling a Part called Vinsan that cannot be matched to any known region, under King Zinggen of the tribe of Zebulun. Gaul is represented twice in the ninety-one, here as Celtica and earlier as Gallia, using two different classical conventions for the same country, and the angels described the whole tabulation's purpose to Dee as the magical government of nations, a purpose that fit his own long-held ambitions for England exactly.

Any statement about the nineteenth Aethyr belongs to one of three layers of the record, and they are roughly three centuries apart. Saying which layer a claim comes from is most of what can honestly be said about an individual Aethyr.

The diaries, 1580s

The name POP, its place as the nineteenth of the thirty, and the governors assigned to it all come from the scrying sessions of John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s. In that material the thirty Aethyrs divide the earth between ninety-one governors: twenty-nine Aethyrs hold three each and the thirtieth holds four. This atlas carries all ninety-one, and the arithmetic can be checked against them.

The Golden Dawn, late nineteenth century

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn took Dee's material into its own curriculum and reorganised it, but its Enochian teaching concentrated on the four Watchtower tablets and the Tablet of Union. The thirty Aethyrs were comparatively little developed there. A claim about an Aethyr is therefore rarely a Golden Dawn claim, which is worth knowing because the order is often named as the source for Enochian material generally.

Crowley, 1900 and 1909

Almost everything said about the character of an individual Aethyr in modern circulation comes from Aleister Crowley. By his own account he began the series in Mexico in 1900 and completed it with Victor Neuburg in the Algerian desert in late 1909, and the record was published as The Vision and the Voice. Those descriptions are Crowley's visionary record of 1909, not Dee's, and they are not in the sixteenth-century diaries at all.