Comanan

The Parts of the Earth do not stand alone. They are one division of a larger object, the Great Table, which is the central artefact of Dee's Enochian system.

The Great Table is a grid of letters, twenty-five squares wide and twenty-seven high, delivered to Dee across several sessions in 1584. Its first division is by a cross of single-width arms, the Cross of Union or Black Cross, which separates it into four rectangular tablets, each twelve squares wide and thirteen high. These four are the Watchtowers, and they are assigned to the four traditional elements.

Each Watchtower is then divided internally by a Great Cross into four Lesser Angles, so that the elements are subdivided by element in the usual way of this kind of system. Names of God and of angels are read out of the tablets by prescribed routes through the letters: down a column here, across a row there, sometimes with a letter borrowed from the Cross of Union. The angels so derived were later given the labels Kerubic and Servient by the Golden Dawn, which is why those terms are ubiquitous in modern books and absent from Dee.

The ninety-one Parts come from a different method of division applied to the same table, one which cuts it into ninety-one dissimilar regions and yields the sigils recorded in Liber Scientiae. So the Parts, the Watchtower angels and the Tablet of Union names are all readings of one underlying grid, taken in different ways.

That structural economy is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to encounter the Aethyrs, the Watchtowers and the Parts as three separate systems. In Dee they are three views of a single object.

There is not one Great Table. There are two, and the difference has divided practitioners for over a century.

The first was produced during the work of 1584, with Dee present and recording in his usual manner. Three years later, in 1587, Edward Kelley working alone produced a revised version, now generally called the Tabula Recensa or Reformed Table. The revision changes the positions of the four Watchtowers within the table and alters a number of letters. Dee accepted it.

The consequences are not cosmetic. Because the angelic names are read out of the letters, a changed letter changes a name, and a rearranged tablet changes which element a given name belongs to. Two practitioners working conscientiously from the two tables will address different entities in different quarters.

The circumstance of the revision is uncomfortable for anyone hoping to settle the Kelley question. The one substantial alteration to the system's central artefact was made by Kelley at a point when Dee was not observing, and it arrived after the relationship between the two men had begun to deteriorate. That is a fact about the record, not an accusation; it can be read as evidence of fabrication or as evidence of nothing much, and the literature contains both readings.

The Golden Dawn used the Reformed Table, and most twentieth-century practice follows it for that reason rather than on any independent judgement. A visible minority of modern workers, associated with the movement to return to the manuscripts that gathered pace in the 1980s and 1990s, prefer the 1584 table on the grounds that Dee witnessed its reception. There is no way to adjudicate between them from the evidence, and both camps know it.