Thoughts on the "Restored Heptarchia"

Back in the late 1990's I was active on the alt.magick usenet newsgroup and was involved in a number of discussions related to Enochian magick. One that I specifically recall concerned what I then considered a brilliant idea with respect to the Angelic Keys. At the time I was trying to figure out how to relate the Keys to the quadrants of the Great Table, as I found the Golden Dawn's version problematic. I still do, and have been working with the Keys as laid out in Mastering the Great Table for many years now.

I first noticed the problem when trying to perform Enochian operations according to John Dee's original schema for the angels of the Great Table. I found that when going around the Holy Table and conjuring from each of the four directions, the Golden Dawn Key arrangement was a disaster. Many of the Keys refer to directions, but these never matched the direction from which the angels were being called. Clearly something was amiss.

Reading through the Keys in order a fairly simple solution presented itself. I related the First and Second Keys to the Conjurer and Scryer, or evocation and invocation, and divided the remaining sixteen Keys into four groups of four. Keys 3-6 are obviously one group, and Keys 15-18 are obviously another. Making groups out of 7-10 and 11-14 completed the set. However, there was one problem with this otherwise nice arrangement - Key 13.


With the other three groups, going around the Holy Table in order fit perfectly. But where Key 13 should have read "west" according to my schema, it read "south." But then I looked over the pattern again and noticed that Key 8, the "south" Key from the second group, did not mention a direction. I had read through the section of True and Faithful Relation in which Dee and Kelly are given the numbering for each Key, and noted that those sessions were disjointed and somewhat confusing.

So I figured that perhaps Dee had made a subtle mistake in the numbering. Maybe Key 8 and Key 13 should be switched! I announced this idea to the alt.magick newsgroup and was taken to task by none other than Benjamin Rowe, who commented that while he appreciated that I was willing to experiment with the system, I should make sure to thoroughly test out my idea before concluding that Dee, one of the most intelligent men of his age, got it wrong. I wound up working with the transposed key for a year or so, but found that it didn't really work as I expected.

So I changed the order back. As I present in Mastering the Great Table, what I found worked better was substituting the word "west" for "south" in Key 13 - and, in fact, just reading it as "south" even though you're facing west works pretty well too and the improvement from substituting the one word is incremental. What I learned from this is that even though a pattern may look pretty, it's real, solid experimentation that shows whether or not the magick actually works.

I thought of that story when reading over Aaron Leitch's recent post on Restoring the Enochian Heptarchia. What he apparently has done in his new book on Enochian magick is to "restore" the powers of the Heptarchial Kings and Princes into a format that makes more logical sense. He does this by swapping the powers of Princes Butmono and Blisdon, and those of Bralges and Bagenol. The new pattern is prettier, but I have yet to see any evidence that it works better.

In Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy I go with the original arrangement of the Princes. In order to fill out the powers of the Venus Prince and the Lunar King, I go with Carmara = Blumaza = Baligon and Hagonel = Bagenol. Carmara = Baligon is explicitly stated in the diaries, and Bagenol is Baligon's Prince, therefore Hagonel. Equating Carmara to Blumaza is a bit more of a stretch, though in the final version of the Heptarchia Dee does group Carmara with Monday. Also, there is a further note with respect to Blumaza, that he had not yet appeared "by that name" - implying that he had appeared, but by another.

As my version matches the original text more closely, I think that Leitch should be clearer about what his arrangement is. It's not a "restoration," it's an innovation. It's not that his arguments for it are illogical, or that the pattern he comes up with is inelegant. But when you take source material and change it around, you're not "uncovering" something original, you're modifying the material. Especially with the Heptarchia, Dee had several chances to swap the powers around and never did. "Revised" or "reordered" would be a more accurate term.

Now don't get me wrong, I love innovations. I think they're wonderful. The real test, though, is not how nice the pattern looks. It's how well it works, in objective, practical terms. I may very well go ahead and experiment with Leitch's ideas and put them to the probability test against the original arrangement. And if they do work better, I'll be the first to congratulate him on coming up with a working modification to the system. But doing so has proven elusive over the years.

As an example, one of the early innovations I initially liked was Donald Tyson's rearrangement of the Great Table, first published in Tetragrammaton. I personally think Tyson's idea of a physical apocalypse brought on by working Enochian magick is ridiculous, but he's generally a good researcher and his argument for his rearrangement was solid. However, I worked with it for a little over a year, testing it against different arrangements, and found that using it undermined the effects of my rituals dramatically.

As a quick aside, for those who don't know what I mean by probability testing, here's what I'm talking about. Practical magick influences the physical world through the manipulation of probability. What you need to do in order to test out a new magical technique is to identify an event of a known probability in the exterior world, and cast for it using each technique you're comparing in turn. Then you check to see how close you got to your goal, the closer the better. When you've done this enough times to build up a reasonable sample size, you compare your results and the technique with the biggest probability shift wins.

It's unfortunate that a scale like this can't really be developed at this point for works of illumination or really anything of an internal, mystical bent. Neuroscientists are working on the problem doing experiments with meditators, but so far there's nothing conclusive that can serve as a reliable marker. There have been a few studies with brainwaves that look promising, but as you need to look at both the firing frequency and the localization of the signals there's still a lot more work to be done before anything objective can be determined.

And objectivity is the key. That's why I insist on real-world tests. Everybody goes into circle thinking their new pattern is the best and will surely work - because if they didn't, they wouldn't be trying it out at all. So doing a ritual and having it "feel effective" is not reliable. When you work out a pattern that you think is clever, employing it in ritual usually will feel good and seem to confirm your expectations. So that's part of the function of practical magick - it's where the rubber hits the road, so to speak.

So at any rate, what I'm trying to say here in a roundabout fashion is that reading over Leitch's article I imagine that I feel much the way Benjamin Rowe must have reading my speculations on swapping around the Angelic Keys. It's great that Leitch is willing to do some experimental work with the system, but I want to see some real data before I'm going to be convinced that his new arrangement is better. In fact, I would encourage anyone interested in the Heptarchia to try both his and the original out and see what happens.

And as always, if you're willing to share your results, that's all the better.