Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Enochian Governors

Pacasna

pah-KAS-nah

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Origin 1584

Pacasna is the second Part of ARN, the second Aethyr. Its territory is Tuscia, the older name for Etruria and the region of modern Tuscany, and its presence here is a reminder that Dee's geography is that of a sixteenth-century Englishman working from classical authorities rather than from any map of the whole world. Its Zodiacal King is Ziracah, associated with the tribe of Reuben. The sign of Aquarius attached to that King is a later derivation and is not found in the diaries. Dee's library at Mortlake was among the largest in England and contained the classical geographers in quantity, which is the most economical explanation for how names of this kind reached the table.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1584 1Tradition: John Dee and Edward Kelley's angelic sessions
Origin Period
1888 to 1900 2Tradition: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
Origin Period
1900 to 1909 3Tradition: Thelema
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
Compiled into Liber Scientiae, dated 2 May 1585 4Tradition: Dee and Kelley's Enochian records
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
Sessions ran from 1583, completed 13 July 1584 4Tradition: Dee and Kelley's Enochian records
Place of Origin
Cracow and Prague, under Albert Laski's patronage and the imperial court 5
Place of Origin
Dee's house at Mortlake for the earlier sessions 5
Attributed Author / Compiler
Edward Kelley scried and spoke the answers Dee wrote down 5
Attributed Author / Compiler
John Dee, mathematician and royal adviser, asked the questions 5
Attributed Author / Compiler
No independent witness to the sessions exists 5
Origin of the NameSourced to the subject's own account
No etymology, not derived from any known language 6
Origin of the NameSourced to the subject's own account
One of the ninety-one names received through Kelley's scrying in 1584 6
Origin of the NameSourced to the subject's own account
Tabulated in Dee's register 6
LanguageSourced to the subject's own account
Enochian (Angelical) 6
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own account
Dee's register gives only name, Aethyr, King and minister count 4Tradition: Dee and Kelley's Enochian records
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own account
No character, office, element, tarot, rank or Tree of Life place 4Tradition: Dee and Kelley's Enochian records
Meaning in the Attesting SourceSourced to the subject's own account
That layer of attribution is the Golden Dawn's, from 1888 on 4Tradition: Dee and Kelley's Enochian records
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
A modern system making claims scholarship never entertained; it never held scholarly standing 5
Whether Kelley reported or invented what he saw is an open question
Learn More
Pacasna in the Enochian System

Pacasna is one of the ninety-one Governors, the Parts of the Earth, set down in John Dee's Liber Scientiae Auxilii et Victoriae Terrestris, the register he compiled from the angelic sessions worked with Edward Kelley in 1584 and dated 2 May 1585.

Aethyr and King

In that tabulation Pacasna is placed within the second Aethyr, ARN, counting from LIL; each Aethyr holds three Governors. Pacasna is assigned to the Zodiacal King who rules Aquarius, one of the twelve Kings among whom the ninety-one Parts are shared, and in Dee's manuscript it is joined besides to a count of ministers and a region of the earth.

Beyond these attributions, a name, an Aethyr, a governing King, a number of ministers and a place on the map, the early sources say little of Pacasna as an individual. The elaborate character given to the Governors in modern practice belongs to the Golden Dawn's Enochian system (from 1888) and its Thelemic development, layers added three centuries after Dee, and is treated here as tradition, studied historically, its entities not reified.

In the Register

Pacasna stands second among the three Parts allotted to ARN. Its name runs to seven letters, the length all but two of the ninety-one names share. Like every Governor's, the name is also a figure: Dee's papers trace each of the ninety-one names letter by letter across the lettered squares of the Great Table, so that every Part of the Earth has a sigil as well as a name. The register attaches besides a count of ministering angels to each entry, a number that differs Part by Part, and it is by these tallies, not by any narrative, that the original material distinguishes one Governor from the next.

The Company of ARN

Liber Scientiae distributes the ninety-one Parts of the Earth across the thirty Aethyrs three at a time, until the last Aethyr, which takes four. ARN, the second in the order that runs from LIL, the most remote, down to TEX, nearest the earth, holds Pacasna in the second place together with Doagnis and Dialioa. The three were received and tabulated together, and later practice treats them together, as the company through which their Aethyr is approached.

Dee's table also sets each Part under one of twelve Zodiacal Kings, and ties each King to a tribe of Israel. The zodiac sign recorded for Pacasna in this atlas, Aquarius, rests on a further step Dee himself never took: the manuscripts direct that signs be derived from the tribes and record no derivation, so every sign now in circulation is a later reconstruction, and the competing reconstructions disagree.

The Aethyrs, unlike the Governors, acquired a modern literature. The Golden Dawn folded Dee's material into its curriculum from 1888, and Aleister Crowley scried all thirty Aethyrs, two in Mexico in 1900 and the remaining twenty-eight in the Algerian desert in 1909, publishing the record as The Vision and the Voice. In that record it is each Aethyr itself that fills the vision; the Governors of ARN play no speaking part, and the characters later occultists give them are tradition built on top of a bare table, not anything received in the sessions.

Modern entry into an Aethyr follows Crowley's method: the nineteenth Enochian Call, one fixed text with only the Aethyr's name changed, serves all thirty, so a practitioner working ARN recites the Call with that name and customarily greets its Governors, Pacasna among them, on the way in. What any of them is beyond a name in a register, the sources do not say.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Contained In

This governor's name is one of the ninety one Parts of the Earth traced from the Great Table's grid.

Disciplines That Use This

Under Patronage Of

Liber Scientiae places this Part of the Earth under the Zodiacal King who rules the tribe of Reuben.

Source Liber Scientiae, Auxilii et Victoriae TerrestrisJohn Dee and Edward Kelley
Sources
1. A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits
John Dee, edited by Meric Casaubon, T. Garthwait, 1659View the Source
2. The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order 1887-1923
Ellic Howe, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972on the order's foundation in 1888 and the composition of its knowledge lecturesView the Source
3. The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Oxford University Press, 2008the chapter on Crowley and Thelema, and on what the Golden Dawn passed to himView the Source
4. Liber Scientiae, Auxilii et Victoriae Terrestris
John Dee and Edward Kelley, 1585Liber Scientiae, Auxilii et Victoriae Terrestris; governor of the ARN Aethyr, listed in the tables of the ninety-one governors.
5. John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature
Deborah E. Harkness, Cambridge University Press, 1999the chapters on the continental journey of 1583 to 1589View the Source
6. Mysteriorum Libri Quinque and Liber Loagaeth (British Library Sloane MSS 3188 and 3189)
John Dee and Edward Kelley, 1583Dee's manuscript record of the sessions and of the received namesView the Source
Benjamin Rowe's edition of Dee's Enochian Governors material
Benjamin RoweGovernor of the ARN Aethyr in Rowe's tabulation of the ninety-one Enochian governors.
The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th edition
Israel Regardie, Llewellyn, 1989View the Source

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