ZID

ZID is the eighth 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, ZID, 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

ZID's three Parts are Zamfres, ruling Mantiana, most plausibly the Matiane of the classical geographers around Lake Urmia, under King Gebabal of the tribe of Asher; Todnaon, ruling a Part called Soxia that answers to no known place, under King Olpaged of the tribe of Dan; and Pristac, ruling Gallia, under King Zarzilg of the tribe of Naphtali. The angel Nalvage, introducing this portion of the work to Dee, said that the remaining thirty Calls belonged to ninety-one Princes and Spiritual Governors to whom the earth had been delivered as a portion, the closest thing the record gives to a stated definition of the whole scheme.

Any statement about the eighth 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 ZID, its place as the eighth 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.

Counting the thirty

The Aethyrs are numbered with LIL as the first and TEX as the thirtieth, and the convention is that the first is the most remote and the thirtieth the nearest. Crowley accordingly worked them in reverse, beginning at the thirtieth and ascending, which is why the numbering in his record runs down the page as the sequence goes up. A reader meeting a list that starts at TEX is looking at working order, not at a different numbering.

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.