The very name of these evocations should have been clue enough. Surely if the Watchtowers stand guard at the four corners of our dimension of reality, keeping back the hordes of Coronzon from descending like "stooping dragons," as the Eighth Key puts it, and if the evocations known as the Keys are designed to open the gates of these watchtowers, we might suspect that it would be a bad idea to unlock the gates.

Perhaps Dee believed, as the angels deceitfully encouraged him to believe, that the gates could be opened a crack for specific human purposes and then slammed shut before anything too horrible slipped through to our dimension of awareness. Dee would have assumed that the harrowing of the goddess Earth and her children by the demons of Coronzon would not occur until the preordained time of the apocalypse, an event initiated by God and presumably beyond Dee’s control.

What he failed to understand is that the date of the initiation of the apocalypse is (in the intention of the angels) the same date as the successful completion of the full ritual working of the 48 Keys. This date is not predetermined, but will be determined by the free will and actions of a single human being who in the Revelation of St. John is called the Antichrist.