The Third Call

The Third Call is one of sixteen calls in John Dee's Claves Angelicae used to work the angels of the four Elemental Watchtowers, earth, water, air and fire, received through the scryer Edward Kelley in 1584 and published in Meric Casaubon's 1659 edition of Dee's spiritual diaries. Dee's own angelic informant, named Illemese in the sessions, describes the nineteen calls together as entrances into the knowledge of the mystical tables. It opens the sequence of sixteen, immediately after the two general calls in the fixed sequence, the manuscript's own ordering rather than an editorial choice.

The four Watchtowers are the Great Tables of Dee's system, one for each classical element, each populated with its own hierarchy of angelic names read off a grid Dee recorded from the angels letter by letter. The sixteen calls of this middle group are the corpus's working tools for that hierarchy as a whole; Casaubon's 1659 edition prints them consecutively, in the same parallel format of angelic text and English gloss used for the rest of the forty eight keys, without further subdividing them by individual tablet in the base text itself.

Because this is a single closely grouped set drawn from one manuscript tradition, the sixteen calls share the bulk of their documented history: the same 1584 reception date, the same scryer, and the same first printing. What distinguishes The Third Call from its neighbors is chiefly its position in that fixed sequence, third in the group of sixteen, rather than any separately attested content of its own.

Meric Casaubon's 1659 A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits is the source through which The Third Call, like the rest of the Claves Angelicae, reached readers outside Dee's own household. Casaubon printed the angelic text beside Dee's English gloss, and it is that parallel printing, not a surviving independent manuscript, that has carried the sixteen elemental calls into every later edition.

The Golden Dawn's Enochian curriculum, documented in Israel Regardie's published editions of the order's teaching, drew on this middle group of sixteen calls for working the four Watchtowers ceremonially, a use several centuries removed from Dee's own sixteenth century sessions with Kelley. Later ceremonial interest in the Claves Angelicae has concentrated more heavily on the nineteenth call, the single text recited thirty times with the name of each Aethyr, popularized above all by Aleister Crowley's 1911 Vision and the Voice; The Third Call and its fifteen companion calls remain comparatively less written about in that later literature, tied instead to the elemental structure of the four Watchtowers rather than to the thirty Aethyrs.

No independent manuscript tradition exists to check Casaubon's transcription of The Third Call against, which is why every modern discussion of the call, this one included, ultimately rests on the same seventeenth century printing.