The Enochian Language Fictional Magic

Reverend Tom Erik Raspotnik Leader of Theistic Satanism

 

 

In the late 1500′s two “snake oil salesmen” Dee’s and Kelly were performing magical operations for Queen Elizabeth, these two through invocations and incantations were supposedly able to manifest several angels to commune with, and so started their “traveling circus” widely accepted at that time by the rich and famous of a burgeoning upper class.

However only their accounts exist and while they were attended by the Queens Guards no logs were noted of ritual times or times they performed rituals only hearsay and loans of gold are noted to the operations by Queen Elizabeth I scribes.

However there are questions that must be brought forward and questioned.

1. While depictions of angels were prevalent in Europe they did not embody the cylinders of Mesopotamia and more and likely were derivative of the imagination of Catholicism.

While not implying that Catholicism invented angels, they defined the perfection of artist rendering of religious figures and iconography.

The question I then propose is how do you know its an angel if you have never seen an angel, and then again during the Dark Ages people were resilient but not without fear of the supernatural.

Calling summoned entities and labeling them angels is by design not, even today such manifestations are mislabeled by peoples sub conscious.

As an established adept myself I can say I have manifested numerous entities and was not able to label any of these summoned entities, let along identify them with any correctness.

1.  

   1. Acceptance of these stories of angels of Enoch bring more questions to the table for the Theistic Satanist.

If one were to believe in the Enochian language that would have the magician or adept acknowledge Judaic Literature.

While the Book of Enoch is an important piece to a intricate puzzle in Satan’s past remember the Judaic version of our deity is questionable at best, I prefer to look to Sumerian Lore for answers than the confusing and often misleading Lore of the Hebrews and Canaanites.

 

But back to the inventors, much of this language was created during the days of study in England but really comes several years later while visiting the King of Poland, looking to glean some gold coins off from him.

For instance, the first call starts with “Ol sonf vors g, gohó Iad Balt, lanish calz vonpho” and is rendered in English “I reign over you, says the God of Justice, in power exalted above the firmaments of wrath.”

This is changed often in numerous printings to reflect the style of the magician, changing it completely from its originality even L a Vey attempted to change the originality of these texts in his “Ghost Written” Satanic Bible.

To take but one example, a recent editor of John Dee material, Gerald Suster, writes that skeptics are left with the “genuine and interesting intellectual problem” that:

 

a) Enochian bears little relation to any known language.

b) Yet philologists agree that it is impossible for a man to invent a new language.

(Suster 2003: 139).

This whole argument rests on the assumption that Enochian in fact shows linguistic criteria associated with a real natural language. However, this might very well be an erroneous assumption, and indeed all these claims need a closer, critical assessment.

But more can be said for this language and further assessment of the ideologies behind it make even a stronger case.

A competent linguist who to my knowledge has worked closer with the Enochian language – and published material on it – is the Australian linguist, anthropologist and sceptic Donald Laycock.

In his conclusion to the preface of The Complete Enochian Dictionary, Laycock is less than convinced of the supernatural origin of the language.

He even disputes the claim that it can be considered a proper language.

First of all he points to the fact that there are significant differences between the two bulks of Enochian texts, those first received on 29 March 1583, and those received a year later in Krakow.

The first texts were, as we have seen, simply spoken out by Kelley, staring into the “shewstone”, and transcribed by Dee. The texts are not given any definite English translation, except for some isolated words.

Laycock notes that the phonetic patterning of this material looks suspect for a natural language: there is a tendency of alternating between one- and two-syllable words only, and of words being arranged as simple variations over phonetically similar vowels (mostly varieties of the a-sound) (Laycock 1994: 33).

“Statistical studies in linguistics show that patterning of this nature is rare in normal language – though it is found in poetry and magical charms.” (ibid)

He goes on to state a more intriguing fact about this type of phonetic patterning: It is a common trait of glossolalia.

The nonsensical “speaking in tongues” is a phenomenon characteristically tied to trance-like behavior, and there are indeed passages from the records of the “Angelic conferences” that suggests Edward Kelley had a tendency of exhibiting such behavior at the times these verses were received.

John Dee frequently notes before the receptions that “fire starts to spring from Kelley’s eyes”, and he “disappears into the stone” (ibid: 34; Peterson 2003: 303, 309, 322 etc). There are also references to him losing his memory of what had happened (Peterson 2003: 322), and the idea that “trance” is a separate state of consciousness often resulting in such memory loss has a long history (e.g. Ludwig 1972: 18; Spanos 1996).

But there are many strange turn and twists that come together such as the invocations and incantations used to produce them.

If the communications of spring 1583 seems quite easy to account for, the picture is a bit more complicated when it comes to the reception of the Enochian language proper in Krakow in April 1584 – at least on the surface of it.

As noted earlier, the reception process here seems much more complicated, and glossolalia does not altogether seem like a plausible solution. The Enochian “keys” or “calls” that were here received were processed letter by letter and word by word, backwards from the last word of each call.

This brings more examination and skepticism to the reader, sometimes things are not as they seem and as I always have told my students in the past examination of magicians texts are subject to magical comparative and what I mean by that is if it doesn’t fit into a standardized system used by the operator or does it integrate it probably is something of a mystical journey created to popularize a certain magician in his day.

But more questions come into play, as we examine further the Enochian language.

The method in which this was done is not all that clear, mainly due to the obscure notes one finds in Dee’s manuscript transcripts of the sessions.

In them each letter is mentioned, accompanied with numbers, some of them apparently signifying the position of the letters in the letter squares which they are taken from (Casaubon [ed.] 1659: 78-80).

Apparently, the source of the letters is the texts mentioned above, which after being received (through glossolalia) were put into letter squares of 49×49 letters, and named Liber Logaeth. The rather amazing way in which these texts seem to have been received is often brought forward as a proof of the supernatural origin of the language, in that it could not have been constructed by Kelley himself.

As noted author Suster writes:

Kelley would report, for instance: “He points to column 5, rank 23”, apparently not mentioning the letter, which Dee found and wrote down … This implies that Kelley had absolutely no idea which words would be formed.

To execute that feat, the man commonly denounced as a confidence trickster would have to know the exact positions of the 2,401 letters in each of the tablets. There must be an easier way of getting a living. (Suster 2003: 139)

This is easily accomplished as I studied the system and was able to alter it to my liking and change certain words and phrases to reflect what I need to place on the table, but the skeptic in me continued to examine further the turns and twists that made me question this system.

There of course easier ways to earn a living, and Kelley knew that quite well.

Once again Suster seems to be jumping to conclusions. Interestingly enough, the volume he himself has edited and selected contains the following account from the angelic sessions in Krakow, April 13 1584:

A (Two thousand and fourteen, in the sixth Table, is) D. 86. 7003. In the thirteenth Table is I. A In the 21st Table. 11406 downward. I In the last Table, one less then Number. A word, Jaida you shall understand, what that word is before the Sun go down. (Dee cited in Suster [ed.] 2003: 71)

 

In Dee’s recording, all this seems to be taken from the mouth of the angel Nalvage speaking through Kelley, including the letters. Note the discrepancy between this and the account given by Suster himself.

Admittedly, this would render the numbers given more mysterious. However, as Laycock observes, they cannot at any rate refer to letters in the letter squares, since all the squares in the supposed source were 49×49, adding up only to 2,401 (Laycock 1994: 40).

Some of the numbers given are much higher.

It seems to me more likely that the numbers are conceived as having mystical, numerological importance.

After receiving the word “Naoov”, for instance, Dee is asked to “add the numbers” of each letter.

When he has done this the angel makes him square it, which leaves him with the number 22,306,729. This is according to the angel the number of the “Philosopher’s work” (Casaubon [ed.] 1659: 80).

 

 

Be the importance of the numbers as it may, the passage above indicates that the angel Kelley actually mentioned each letter by name, and even spelled out the words they make up. The reception of each letter string ends with passages, in the angel Nalvage’s words, like “call it Hoath”, “call it Mad”, “call it Noco”, “call it Zirdo” and so forth (ibid: 79).

All interesting but probably created by the two as explanations of the operations they were creating for the various Kings and Queens of Europe.

In the actions, we should imagine Kelley having visions of letters in the “shewstone” which the angel pointed to. He would then spell them out to Dee himself. The method thus seems far more explicit and straight forward than what Suster and many with him seems ready to admit (I should perhaps note in passing that Suster’s paragraph has a wording suspiciously close to Aleister Crowley’s in his Confessions. See Crowley 1989: 612).

 

 

One should also mention that it is not even clear that this method was actually deployed all the way through. The exact procedure is only given for the very first text received. As Laycock notes, there are hints in the recordings that both Edward Kelley and the “spirits” themselves wanted to speed up the process after a while, being hold back only by Dee’s insistence on the letter-by-letter transcription (ibid: 41).

 

 

At any rate, the reception of this material is far more technical and less automatic than the former. Laycock notes however that the impracticality of the method also shows itself in the phonetic structure of the language here received, which differs significantly from the structure of the earlier material.

 

 

The most noticeable difference is that the new material is less pronounceable than the earlier, including sudden clusters of both vowels and consonants, like the words ooaona, paombd, smnad and noncf.

This feature is not found in natural languages (Laycock 1994: 40).

 

 

However, Laycock notes that it is exactly the feature you would expect when producing sentences by joining letters from a text in a natural language together according to a random pattern.

As he says somewhat mockingly: “The reader can test this by taking, for example, every tenth letter on this page, and dividing the string of letters into words. The ‘text’ created will tend to look rather like Enochian.” (ibid: 40-41).

 

 

When one considers the linguistic properties of the language of these later receptions it becomes clear that it exhibits traits that are suspiciously Old English.

Something that Angelic Beings would have to have learned, I question who taught then, and why are most of the entities that are currently brought forward during invocation.

 

 

Especially when one considers the claim of the language being the perennial “Adamic” language, spoken before the Fall, one would rather expect some proto-Semitic features to appear. The only feature slightly reminiscent of Semitic however, is the fact that when written with the Enochian characters, the language is written right to left.

 

 

The phonology, syntax and grammar all seem to be almost identical to English: Enochian seems to have both soft and hard values for consonants like c and g, and combines s andh to make the sh sound (ibid). According to Laycock, it does not seem to have a case system (ibid: 42), and the syntax is, judging from the translations given, purely English.

 

 

This is also quite remarkable, since not even with other European languages are such similarities (or rather, identity) of syntax extant (ibid: 43).

 

 

In addition, the verbal system is highly incomplete, with conjugations only traceable for two verbs, of which one, “to be”, is (unsurprisingly) highly irregular. Also the numeral system seems obscure and quite randomized, consisting mostly of single letters in a way reminiscent of the Hebrew and Aramaic system, but distinct since it shows no recognizable pattern.

 

 

Put briefly, the grammatical features of Enochian seem either purely English or totally randomized.

Another interesting feature can be noted considering the semantics of Enochian.

 

 

There are certain Enochian words that are suspiciously reminiscent of words well known to Dee and Kelley, many taken from biblical contexts, with semantic meanings in a way cognate to them (ibid:42). For instance there is babalond, meaning “wicked, harlot”, with possible reference to “the whore of Babylon” of Revelations. Christeos, “let there be” seems related to Christ, or the Logos of the Gospel of John, and luciftias, meaning “brightness” may have a connection the Pagan Lucifer, the light bringer.

 

 

Taken from another context important to Dee is londoh, translated as “kingdom”, which makes perfect sense taking into account Dee’s imperial ambitions for the Queen in London. The list could go on, but these examples suffice to make the point.

 

 

The semantics of Enochian seems heavily influenced by notions in Dee and Kelley’s contemporary times.

 

 

We find ourselves examining such as Christian, and as a Theistic Satanist with prior knowledge of Sumeria we can easily find ourselves questioning the overall notions of this “so-called” language of angels.

I would ask if angels were really speaking to the two inventors, why were they selected, and would the language be more ancient than Old English such as Syrian or Babylonian or even Sumerian.

But even the alphabet is questionable.

 

 

One should perhaps also consider briefly the Enochian alphabet, which was received by Kelley on 26 March 1583.

The 21 letters which make up the alphabet are reminiscent of the type of “magical script” so common in occult treatises of the time. For instance, the standard occult reference work of the time, Cornelius Agrippa’s De occuluta philosophia contained a nice selection (Agrippa 2003:311, 406-7).

 

 

However, to this day one has not been able to discern a definite source from which Dee and Kelley could have taken their particular alphabet.

 

 

It has been noted that Dee had in his possession an alchemical treatise, Voarchadumia contra alchimiam, written by Giovanni Pantheus in 1530, where we find a table containing what is called an “Enochian alphabet of the ancients”. This has been suggested as a source for Dee, since the manuscript he possessed, which still exists, contains his abundant marginal notes, and even an attempt to write his own name in Pantheus’ alphabet (see facsimile in Laycock 1994:30-31).

 

 

This argument seems to be a bit thin, since a) the alphabet in this treatise does not bear any significant similarity to the angelic script of Dee and Kelley, and b) the word “Enochian”, which on the surface seems to be the only link between the two, was actually not used by Dee and Kelley themselves to refer to “their” language.

 

 

Instead they used “angelic” and “Adamic”, “Enochian being a later convention. I would therefore argue that the Voarchadumia-manuscript is of little importance in this matter.

However, the idea of a perennial Adamic language that could still be recovered was a rather common speculation in esoteric circles of John Dee’s days (Harkness 1999:158-161).

 

 

There were even elaborate discussions among the bright heads of Europe about which of the historical languages was closest to the perennial language spoken in Eden, which would have been more likened to Sumerian or some form of Mesopotamian derived language.

For instance, the great German philologer and proponent of the North European renaissance Johann Reuchlin (1455 – 1522) considered the three biblical languages (Hebrew, Greek and Latin) the most likely candidates, while the French renaissance thinker Guillaume Postel (1510 – 1581) sided with Hebrew exclusively.

A perhaps more daring but doubtlessly intriguing proposal was made by the Swedish natural philosopher Andreas Kempe (1622 – 1689), who argued that God spoke Swedish, that Adam named the animals in Danish, and that the Serpent tempted Eve in French (ibid: 160).

Kempe’s proposal must no doubt have been tempting considering the Swedish imperial ambitions at the time. At any rate, the extant discourses about the primordial Adamic language in Dee’s time should be account enough for his thoughts on the issue.

However strange to us today, the idea was not that idiosyncratic after all.

The failure to propagate the Sumerian or Mesopotamian language at this time was the inability to drill down to the origns, this due in part to the Rosetta Stone not being found or deciphered during the 1500′s.

 

 

Although I myself am quite satisfied at this point, I will consider another possible influence on Dee and Kelley which Laycock mentions: Going from the thesis that a genuine Adamic language should be expected to have some proto-Semitic features, Laycock compares the Enochian typescript with different kinds of Semitic alphabets.

 

 

He finds, however, that it does not resemble any of the proto-Semitic scripts, like Sumerian or Egyptian hieroglyphic.

 

 

Rather it might have some similarities to much later Semitic languages, as Samarian and especially Ethiopian (Laycock 1994:28). Although this relation already seems to run counter to the claim of a primordial authenticity of the language, Laycock follows up on the lead hoping to find a more historically grounded source for the alphabet of Dee and Kelley. Laycock speculates that, given Dee’s persistent interest in the Apochrypha, and especially in the Enochian and Prophetic traditions present in Europe at the time, it might have been the case that Dee had seen an edition of the presumed lost Ethiopian Book of Enoch, possibly from Guilliam Postel, whom he met.

 

 

According to this argument, he would have seen a text which fascinated him immensely, but would not be able to read it. He would, however, recognize the alphabet, and might have used a similar version of it in the later workings (ibid).

While this possibility cannot be totally denied, it seems at the same time to be a claim quite unsupported of evidence. Such a discovery in Europe at the time would no doubt have sparked greater publicity. For these reasons and due to the lack of evidence I find the claim at best highly unlikely. It seems more likely that the 21-letter alphabet was a genuine product of Kelley’s medium-like creativity – inspired by the countless magical ciphers that he no doubt knew, but still original in its outlook. New magical alphabets seemed to surface almost every day in the early modern period.

My opinion as those who provided much of this evidence is that this language is not something one would probably use unless they were confused, not because I said so but because of what they read before in their magical studies, so as the teacher I am I provide this information which to some is painful as people frequently like to admit to mistakes.

But examination needs further investigation explanations of certain relevant linguistic milestones can help the reader move ahead from the notion this Enochian Language which was popularized by the Church of Satan and Aliester Crowley is relevant to magic, in observations I can say this that any form even babble can be used to propagate magic, every “squirrel can get a nut.”

There is an argument that flares of who has power or who is the best magician, or who has the best system I can tell you than the best system is designed by yourself personalized for your lifestyle, something I cannot teach students of magic.

Ignorance as of late has been the ways of most, those of us who have studied magic and created magical systems are nothing short of precision magicians, the few who have developed and created systems that are sound are to still be feared, those who have entered in systems of inferiority as left short with ill designed spells and weakened actions.

Bibliography.

• Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henry Cornelius [Donald Tyson ed.] 2003: Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Completely Annotated with Modern Commentary. St.Paul: Llewellyn Publications.

• Casaubon, Meric. [ed.] 1659: A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for many Yeers between Dr. John Dee and some Spirits: Tending (had it Succeeded) to a General Alteration of most States and Kingdoms in the World. London

• Crowley, Aleister 1989: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. London: Arcana Penguin Books.

• Harkness, Deborah 1999: John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy and the End of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Laycock, Donald C. 1994: The Complete Enochian Dictionary. A Dictionary of the Angelic Language Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. Boston: Weiser Books

• Ludwig, Arnold 1972: “Altered States of Consciousness”, in: Charles T. Tart [ed.]:Altered States of Consciousness. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday

• Peterson, Joseph H. [ed.] 2003: John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery. Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic. York Beach: Red Wheel/Weiser

• Spanos, Nicholas P. 1996: Multiple Identities and False Memories. Washington: American Psychological Association

• Suster, Gerald 2004: John Dee. Essential Readings. Western Esoteric Masters Series. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

 

 

Thanks!