Enochian

This article is about the mystical languages recorded in the journals of John Dee. For Dee's system of angel magic, see Enochian magic. For other examples of divine or angelic languages, see Divine language.

Enochian
Created by	John Dee Edward Kelley
Date	1583–1584
Setting and usage	Occult journals
Purpose	Divine language Enochian
Writing system	Enochian script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	None
IETF	i-enochian (deprecated)

Enochian (/ɪˈnoʊkiən/ ə-NOH-kee-ən) is an occult language or languages — said by its originators to have been received from angels — recorded in the private journals of John Dee and his colleague Edward Kelley in late 16th-century England. Kelley was a scryer who worked with Dee in his magical investigations. The language is integral to the practice of Enochian magic.

The languages found in Dee's and Kelley's journals encompasses a limited textual corpus. Linguist Donald Laycock studied the Enochian journals, and argues against any extraordinary features. The untranslated 'language' of the Liber Loagaeth manuscript recalls the patterns of glossolalia. The language of the Calls, which is translated, may be more like an artificial language. The phonology and grammar of the latter resemble English, though the translations are not sufficient to work out any regular morphology. Some Enochian words resemble words and proper names in the Bible, but most have no apparent etymology.

Dee's journals refer to the language as "Angelical", the "Celestial Speech", the "Language of Angels", the "First Language of God-Christ", the "Holy Language" or "Adamical" because, according to Dee's angels, it was used by Adam in Paradise to name all things. The term "Enochian" comes from Dee's assertion that the Biblical patriarch Enoch had been the last human (before Dee and Kelley) to know the language.

History

According to Tobias Churton in his text The Golden Builders, the concept of an Angelic or antediluvian language was common during Dee's time. If one could speak the language of Angels, it was believed one could directly interact with them.

In 1581, Dee mentioned in his personal journals that God had sent "good angels" to communicate directly with prophets. In 1582, Dee teamed up with the seer Edward Kelley, although Dee had used several other seers previously. With Kelley's help as a scryer, Dee set out to establish lasting contact with the angels. Their work resulted, among other things, in the reception of the Enochian or Angelical language.

The reception of Enochian started on March 26, 1583, when Kelley reported visions in the crystal of the twenty-one lettered alphabet characteristic of the language. A few days later, Kelley started receiving what became the first corpus of texts in the purported Angelic language. This resulted in the book Liber Loagaeth ("Book [of] Speech from God"). The book consists of 49 great letter tables, or squares made of 49 by 49 letters (however each table has a front and a back side, making 98 tables of 49×49 letters altogether). Dee and Kelley said the angels never translated the texts in this book.

The other set of Enochian texts was received through Kelley about a year later, in Kraków, where both alchemists stayed for some time at the court of King Stefan Batory. These come with English translations, thus providing the basis for the Enochian vocabulary. The texts comprise 48 poetic verses, which in Dee's manuscripts are called "Claves Angelicae", or "Angelic Keys". The Keys are assigned certain functions within the magical system. Dee was apparently intending to use these Keys to "open the 49 Gates of Wisdom/Understanding" represented by the 49 magic squares in Liber Loagaeth:

I am therefore to instruct and inform you, according to your Doctrine delivered, which is contained in 49 Tables. In 49 voices, or callings: which are the Natural Keys to open those, not 49 but 48 (for one is not to be opened) Gates of Understanding, whereby you shall have knowledge to move every Gate...

— The angel Nalvage

But you shall understand that these 19 Calls are the Calls, or entrances into the knowledge of the mystical Tables. Every Table containing one whole leaf, whereunto you need no other circumstances.

— The angel Illemese

While these texts contain most of the vocabulary, dozens of further words are found throughout Dee's journals. Thousands of undefined words are contained in the Liber Loagaeth.

Linguistic evaluation

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The Australian linguist Donald Laycock notes that the 'angelic' language of the Liber Loagaeth is very different from the 'Enochian' language of the Calls.

According to Laycock, the texts in the Loagaeth show patterning "characteristically found in certain types of meaningless language (such as glossolalia), which is often produced under conditions similar to trance. In other words, Kelley may have been 'speaking in tongues'. ... there is no evidence that these early invocations are any form of 'language' ... at all."

The language of the Enochian calls is very different, though it appears to be generated from the tables and squares of the Loagaeth. The grammar suggests English without articles or prepositions "and a few irregularities thrown in," word order follows English.

The very scant evidence of Enochian verb conjugation seems quite reminiscent of English, more so than with Semitic languages as Hebrew or Arabic, which Dee claimed were debased versions of the original Angelic language. The verb "to be" is highly irregular.

There are about 250 different words in the Enochian texts, more than half of which occur only once. A few resemble words in the Bible – mostly proper names – in both sound and meaning. For example, luciftias "brightness" resembles Lucifer "the light-bearer"; babalond "wicked, harlot" resembles Babylon.

Script

There are 21 letters in the script used in the Calls; one letter appears with or without a diacritic dot. They were mapped by Dee onto 22 of the letters of the English alphabet, omitting the English letters J, K, V, and W. The Enochian script is written from right to left in John Dee's diary. Different documents have slightly different forms of the script.

The Enochian alphabet closely follows the English alphabet, for example in having soft and hard ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩, and in the digraphs ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sh⟩ and ⟨th⟩ for the /tʃ ~ k, ʃ, θ/ sounds. The alphabet also shares many graphical similarities to a script—also attributed to the prophet Enoch—that appeared in the Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam of Johannes Pantheus, a copy of which Dee is known to have owned.

Laycock has mapped Enochian orthography to its sound system, and says "the resulting pronunciation makes it sound much more like English than it looks at first sight." Modern attempts at pronunciation vary, depending on the practitioner.

The Enochian letters, with their letter names and English equivalents as given by Dee, and pronunciations as reconstructed by Laycock, are as follows:

Letter	Letter name	English equivalent	Dee & Kelley's pronunciation	Golden Dawn pron.α,
	Un	A	[ɑ] (stressed), [a] (unstressed)	[ɑ]
	Pa	B	[b]; silent after m when before another consonant or final	[be]
	Veh	C	[k] before a, o, u; [s] before e, i and in consonant clusters, with many exceptions; ⟨ch⟩ as [k] in most positions but [tʃ] finally.
	Gal	D	[d]	[de]
	Graph	E	[e] (stressed), [ɛ] (unstressed)	[e]
	Or	F	[f]	[ɛf]
	Ged	G	[ɡ] before a, o, u; [dʒ] before e, i, finally, after d, and in consonant clusters.
	Na	H	[h] except in ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨th⟩; silent after a vowel (though vowel "lengthened")	[he]
	Gon	I	[j] word-initially before a vowel; as a vowel: [i] (stressed), [ɪ] (unstressed), plus diphthongs ai [aɪ], ei [eɪ], oi [oɪ]	[i]
		Y	[j]
	Ur	L	[l]
	Tal	M	[m]	[ɛm]
	Drux	N	[n]	[ɛn], [nu]
	Med	O	[o] (stressed), [ɒ] (unstressed)	[o]
	Mals	P	[p] but for ⟨ph⟩, which is [f]	[pe]
	Ger	Q	[kw]; the word q is [kwɑ]
	Don	R	[r]	[ɛr], [rɑ]
	Fam	S	[s] or [z] as would be natural in English, but for ⟨sh⟩, which is [ʃ]	[ɛs]
	Gisg	T	[t] but for ⟨th⟩, which is [θ]	[te]
	Van	U	[u] or [ʊ]; [ju] in intial position; [v] or [w] before another vowel and word-finally
	Pal	X	[ks]	[ɛks]
	Ceph	Z	[z], rarely [zɒd]	[zɒd]

^α According to Wynn Wescott, each letter may be pronounced separately as its name in English or sometimes as the first consonant and vowel of its Hebrew name, e.g. N may be [ɛn] or [nu] (from nun). However, consonants-vowel sequences may be optionally run together into single syllables. E.g. ta may be pronounced as [te ɑ] or [tɑ], co as [ko], ar as [ɑr].

A number of fonts for the Enochian script are available. They use the ASCII range, with the letters assigned to the codepoints of their English equivalents.

See also

• List of magical terms and traditions

References

Works cited

• Churton, Tobias (2002). The Golden Builders. Signal Publishing. ISBN 0-9543309-0-0.
• Dee, John (1582). "Sloane MS 3188". British Library.
• Dee, John (1992). Casaubon, Meric (ed.). A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between John Dee and Some Spirits. New York: Magickal Childe Publishing.
• Magickal Review staff, ed. (2005). "The Angelic or Enochian Alphabet". The Magickal Review. Archived from the original on 2011-07-12.
• DuQuette, Lon Milo (2019). Enochian Vision Magick: A Practical Guide to the Magick of Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Red Wheel/Weiser. ISBN 978-1578636846.
• Harkness, Deborah (1999). John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521622288.
• Laycock, Donald (2001). The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language As Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Boston: Weiser. ISBN 1578632544.
• Pantheus, Johannes (1550). Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam. p. 15v-16r. Archived from the original on 2016-03-08 – via Scribd.com.

Further reading

• Asprem, Egil (December 13, 2006). ""Enochian" language: A proof of the existence of angels?". Skepsis. Retrieved 2022-01-17.
• DeSalvo, John (2010). The Lost Art of Enochian Magic: Angels, Invocations, and the Secrets Revealed to Dr. John Dee. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. ISBN 978-1594773440.
• DeSalvo, John (2011). Decoding the Enochian Secrets: God's Most Holy Book to Mankind as Received by Dr. John Dee from Angelic Messengers. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. ISBN 978-1594773648.
• Eco, Umberto (1997). The Search for the Perfect Language. London: Fontana Press. ISBN 0006863787.
• Leitch, Aaron (2010a). The Angelical Language, Volume I: The Complete History and Mythos of the Tongue of Angels. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications. ISBN 978-0738714905.
• Leitch, Aaron (2010b). The Angelical Language, Volume II: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the Tongue of Angels. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications. ISBN 978-0738714912.
• Peterson, Joseph H., ed. (2003). John Dee's Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic: From the Collected Works Known as Mysteriorum Libri Quinque. Boston: Weiser Books. ISBN 1578631785.
• Tyson, Donald (1997). Enochian Magic for Beginners: The Original System of Angel Magic. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications. ISBN 1567187471.
• Yates, Frances (1979). The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415254094.