Taoagla

The number ninety-one is odd in the literal sense, and it is odd in the structural sense too.

Thirty Aethyrs holding three Parts apiece would give ninety. The thirtieth Aethyr, TEX, holds four. That extra Part is the whole of the discrepancy, and it is the reason every account of this material has to say ninety-one rather than the tidier ninety.

The received material offers no reason. Nalvage's introduction speaks of ninety-one Princes and Spiritual Governors from the outset, so the number was not arrived at by accident partway through, and Dee compiled the table himself and evidently saw nothing to query. Later writers have proposed explanations, generally numerological: ninety-one is the sum of the integers from one to thirteen, and it is the product of seven and thirteen, both numbers with weight in this system. It is also the numerical value of the Hebrew phrase joining the divine name with Adonai, a correspondence that carries genuine significance in Kabbalah. These are real properties of the number. Whether any of them is the reason is entirely unestablished, and none of them is proposed in the manuscripts.

The anomaly interacts with another feature of the list. TEX is the innermost and lowest of the Aethyrs, nearest to the earth, and it is also the most crowded. A reader inclined to find a system in this can say the material world is the densest; a reader disinclined can observe that this is exactly the kind of pattern that is easy to find after the fact.

What can be said without argument is that the anomaly is original, deliberate as far as the record shows, and unexplained.

This is the most important provenance point in the whole set of ninety-one, and it is routinely missed.

Dee's table assigns each Part to one of twelve Zodiacal Kings: Alpudus, Hononol, Zarzilg, Gebabal, Olpaged, Cadaamp, Zarnaah, Arfaolg, Lavavot, Zurchol, Ziracah and Zinggen. Each King is associated in the received material with one of the twelve tribes of Israel. That much is Dee's, and it is in the manuscript.

The zodiac signs are not. The angels did not give Dee a list of zodiacal attributions for the Kings. They told him to derive the attributions from the associated tribe, which was a standard sort of exercise for a Renaissance scholar, since the arrangement of the tribes around the tabernacle in the second chapter of Numbers had long been read astrologically. So far as the record shows, Dee never did it.

Every zodiacal attribution now in circulation is therefore a reconstruction, made by someone else, at some later date, from the tribes. The reconstructions do not agree. The scheme Agrippa used, which Dee knew, differs from the Golden Dawn's, and both differ from the one Benjamin Rowe adopted in the 1990s after weighing the alternatives and settling the choice by divination. Rowe himself noted that the entities he encountered appeared to disregard the attributions freely.

The practical consequence is that when a source states that a given Part belongs to Scorpio or to Cancer, the honest form of that statement is: under the reconstruction this source is using, the Part's King is assigned to that sign. The King and the tribe are sixteenth-century. The sign is not, and the confidence with which it is usually asserted is not warranted by anything in Dee.