Enochian magic


Enochian magic is a system of ceremonial magic based on the evocation and commanding of various spirits. It is based on the 16th-century writings of John Dee and Edward Kelley, who claimed that their information, including the revealed Enochian language, was delivered to them directly by various angels. Dee's journals contained the Enochian script, and the tables of correspondences that accompany it. Dee and Kelley believed their visions gave them access to secrets contained within the Book of Enoch.

History

Origins and manuscript sources

The Enochian system of magic is primarily the work of two men: John Dee and Edward Kelley. The research of Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, Thomas Rudd, Elias Ashmole, William Wynn Westcott and Israel Regardie made additional contributions.
The raw material for the Enochian magical system was "dictated" through a series of Angelic communications which lasted from 1582-1589. Dee and Kelley claimed they received these instructions from angels. While Kelley conducted the psychic operation known as scrying, Dee kept meticulous written records. Kelley looked into a crystal "shewstone" and described aloud what he saw.
This account of the Angelic communications is taken at face value by most Enochian occultists. However, some of them have pointed out remarkable similarities to earlier grimoiric texts such as the Heptameron known to Dee. Such magical texts as The Book of Soyga and others including the magical works of Agrippa and Reuchlin probably also had an influence on Dee and Kelley. The system claims to relate to secrets contained within the apocryphal Book of Enoch.

Liber Logaeth – The Sixth and Sacred Book of the Mysteries

The Liber Logaeth ; is preserved in the British Museum as Sloane ms 3189. The correct spelling is Loagaeth but it has been so frequently printed as Logaeth that this spelling is in common use. Written up by Edward Kelley, it is composed of 65 folios containing 101 exceedingly complex magical grids of letters, 96 of which are 49×49 grids, plus 5 grids of 36 x 72 cells. It is from Liber Logaeth that Dee and Kelley derived the 48 Calls or Keys, and in which are concealed the keys to the Mystical Heptarchy, a related magical work by Dee. Liber Logaeth has never been published in book form but is available online at: . Dee himself left little information on his Sixth Holy Book apart from saying that it contained 'The Mysterie of our Creation, The Age of many years, and the conclusion of the World' and that the first page in the book signified Chaos. Note that the title The Book of Enoch attributed to the text of Liber Logaeth is not to be confused with the aprocryphal Biblical The Book of Enoch. Nor should it be confused with Crowley's rescension Liber Chanokh although all these texts are related.

The Five Books of Mystery

Another manuscript, Sloan ms. 3188 is an account of the 'actions' or workings undertaken in the Liber Logaeth, titled the Mysteriorum Libri Quinque. The Mysteriorum Libri Quinque is the diary for 22 December 1581 – 23 May 1583. It includes the first five Books of the Mysteries, ending where Casaubon's A True and Faithful Relation begins. It describes the furniture of the temple; the Seal of God ; the Tables of Light; the Great Circle and corresponding Collected Table of 49 Good Angels; the Mystic Heptarchy and the Tables of Creation; the Angelic Alphabet and the beginning of Loagaeth. There are two transcripts of this manuscript available today: Joseph Peterson and C. L. Whitby. Versions of the first three of the five Books of Mystical Exercises can be found online at : http://john-dee

Other Enochian manuscripts

Yet another central manuscript is Sloane 3191 which comprises: 48 Angelic Keys; The Book of Earthly Science, Aid and Victory; On the Mystic Heptarchy; and Invocations of the Good Angels.
Two further Manuscripts from Dee and Kelley's workings are important to Enochian magic:
Meric Casaubon's 1659 edition of part of these diaries, entitled A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers between John Dee and Some Spirits'' contains notorious transcription errors which in some cases were transmitted through many subsequent republications of the Dee/Kelly material; Casaubon's edition was intended to discredit Dee and Kelly by accusing them of dealing with the Christian Devil. An expanded facsimile edition of Casaubon was published by Magickal Childe in 1992
Dee and Kelley's surviving manuscripts later came into the possession of Elias Ashmole, who preserved them, and made fair copies of some, along with annotations.

Rediscovery by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

Dee and Kelly never referred to their magic as 'Enochian' but rather called it 'Angelic'. However, in modern occultism it is commonly known as Enochian. It is not quite clear how much of Enochian magic was put to use by Dee and Kelley. Indeed, whether Dee and Kelly ever practiced Enochian is still up for debate. The angels allegedly told them not to work Enochian magic, and there are no diary records of works being done except for one healing talisman that they were instructed by the angels to make. Dee and Kelley's journals are essentially notebooks which record the elements of the system, rather than records of workings they performed using the system.
Some writers assert that Thomas Rudd was the centre of a group of angel magicians who may have used Dee and Kelly's material. The Angelical material of Dee and Kelley also had a considerable influence on the magic of Rosicrucianism. However, little else became of Dee's work until late in the nineteenth century, when it was incorporated by a mysterious brother-hood of adepts in England. The rediscovery of Dee and Kelley’s material by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s led to Mathers developing the material into a comprehensive and workable system of ceremonial Magick.
They invoked the Enochian deities whose names were written on the tablets. They also traveled in what they called their Body of Light into these subtle regions and recorded their psychic experiences in a scientific manner. The two major branches of the system were then grafted on to the Adeptus Minor curriculum of the Golden Dawn.
Enochian as an operative system is difficult to reconstruct based upon original manuscripts, but contemporary occult organizations have attempted to make it usable. The Golden Dawn was the first, but their knowledge was based upon only one of Dee's diaries and their planetary, elemental, or zodiacal attributions have no foundation in the original sources.
According to Chris Zalewski's 1994 book, the Golden Dawn also invented the “game” of Enochian chess, in which aspects of the Enochian Tablets were used for divination. They used four chessboards without symbols on them, just sets of colored squares, and each board is associated with one of the four elements of magic.
Florence Farr founded the Sphere Group which also experimented with Enochian magic, as published in Kuntz.

Criticism of Enochian Magic

, a 20th-century occultist who began his magical career with the Alpha et Omega, was critical of the Enochian system. According to Case, the system of Dee and Kelley was incomplete, lacked sufficient protection methods, and was in fact just the basis of an older, more complete Qabalistic system. Case believed he had witnessed the physical breakdown of a number of practitioners of Enochian magic, due to the lack of protective methods. In a letter to occultist Dion Fortune, Case wrote:
When Case founded his own magical order, the Builders of the Adytum, he removed the Enochian system and substituted elemental tablets based on Qabalistic formulae communicated to him by Master R..

The system

The two pillars of modern Enochian Magick, as outlined in Liber Chanokh are the Elemental Watchtowers and the "World" of the 30 Aethyrs. The Aethyrs are the "heavens" or Aires of the system. Starting with the 30th Aethyr and working to the first, the magician explores only as far as his level of initiation will permit.

The Calls or 'Keys' and the "World" of the 30 Aethyrs

The essence of the Enochian system depends on the utilisation of Eighteen Calls or Keys in the Enochian language, and a Nineteenth key known as the Call or Key of the 30 Aethyrs. The calls are used to enter the various Aethyrs, in visionary states. The Aethyrs are conceived of as forming a map of the entire universe in the form of concentric rings which expand outward from the innermost to the outermost Aethyr.
The Enochian 'map' of the universe is depicted by Dee as a square, surrounded by 30 concentric circles. The 30 Aethyrs are numbered from 30 to 1. In a similar way to the methods used by magicians to scry upon the Qabalistic Tree of Life, which involves travelling astrally to each pathway and Sephira, magicians working the Enochian system record their impressions and visions within each of the successive Enochian Aethyrs. The systems are comparable but not equivalent; while Enochian has 30 Aethyrs, there are a total of 32 Sephira and paths upon the Tree of Life. Just as a magician may talk about exploring the Tree of Life from Malkuth to Kether, the Enochian magician would talk about exploring the Enochian Aethyrs from TEX to LIL.
Each of the 30 Aethyrs is populated by "Governors". Each of the governors has a sigil which can be traced onto the Great Tablet of Earth.
In practical Enochian workings, the Nineteenth Call/Key of the 30 Aethyrs is the only call necessary for working with the Aethyrs. It is only necessary to vary appropriately the name of the Aethyr itself near the beginning of the call. Once the Call is recited, the names of the Governors are vibrated one at a time and a record of the visions is kept. The use of Calls 1-18 is rather complex and their usage should be made clear via one of the Enochian textbooks cited below.

The Great Table of Earth: The Elemental Watchtowers and their subdivisions

The angels of the four quarters are symbolized by the Elemental "Watchtowers" — four large magickal word-square Tables. Most of the well-known Enochian angels are drawn from the Watchtowers of the Great Table.
Each of the four Watchtowers, is collectively "governed" by a hierarchy of spiritual entities which runs as the Three Holy Names, the Great Elemental King, the Six Seniors , the Two Divine Names of the Calvary Cross, the Kerubim, and the Sixteen Lesser Angels. Each Watchtower is further divided into four sub-quadrants where we find the names of various Archangels and Angels who govern the quarters of the world. In this way, the entire universe, visible and invisible, is depicted as teeming with living intelligences. Each of the Elemental tablets is also divided into four sections by a figure known as the Great Central Cross. The Great Central cross consists of the two central vertical columns of the Elemental Tablet and the central horizontal line.
In addition to the four Elemental Watchtowers, a twenty-square cell known as the Tablet of Union completes the representation of the five traditional elemental attributes used in magic - Earth, Air, Water, Fire and Spirit. The Tablet of Union is derived from within the Great Central Cross of the Great Table.
The squares of the Elemental Watchtowers and those of the Tablet of Union are not simply squares, but in fact truncated pyramids, or pyramids with flat tops - thus, pyramids which have four sides and top, for a total of five 'sides'. Again, these represent the traditional five magical elements though in varying combinations. There are 20 Pyramids in the Tablet of Union and 156 in each of the four Elemental Tablets. Each pyramid houses an 'angel' with a one-letter name. The angel's attributes are 'read off' according to its position within the Tablet and proportions of the different Elements represented on its sides. When two Pyramids are combined they form an 'angel' with a two-letter name whose attributes are somewhat more complex. This gives rise to ever-more complex 'angels' depending on the number of pyramids under examination. The attribution of various Elements to the various pyramids is best depicted on a labelled and coloured version of the various Tablets; an Enochian texbook is most useful for this purpose.

Enochian temple furniture

Temple "furniture" required for the performance of Enochian magick includes:
Compared to other theories of magic, Enochian magic is often considered strikingly complex and difficult to grasp in its entirety. One of the difficulties is that many of the source documents are missing, and those that exist are sometimes fragmentary, due to the history of dispersal of Dee's library and manuscripts. Parts of the surviving manuscripts written by Dee have been lost. Paul Foster Case in fact postulated that Dee and Kelley's system was partial from the start, an incomplete system derived from an earlier and complete Qabalistic system. This has allowed numerous interpretations to arise, some of which have solidified into schools of thought with individual bodies of interpretative literature.
Another reason for the system's difficulty is the many and various ways in which the system can be interpreted, and the complex possibilities of the mathematical permutations of various combinations of the letters, tables, and diagrams fundamental to the system. Some employ all the varieties in the original manuscripts with advice of modern practitioners on interpreting this mythology which both represented and tried to produce experience of the biblical temple mythology.
A third difficulty is the use of the Enochian language for the invocations. Magicians see the correct pronunciation of the Enochian letters, words, and calls to be integral to magical success in utilizing the Enochian system - the letters must be memorized and their pronunciations learned. Fortunately, there have been several compilations of Enochian words made to form Enochian dictionaries which can act as a handy reference. A scholarly study is Laycock. Also useful is Vinci Authentic pronunciations according to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn usage are given by Israel Regardie in a set of Golden Dawn instructional CD's. Regardie's Enochian dictionary is also reprinted in Crowley, Duquette, and Hyatt, Enochian World of Aleister Crowley.
Enochian magic forms the backbone of both the Crowley and Golden Dawn systems of magic. Latest theories include that John Dee knew of the Slavonic Book of the Secrets of Enoch, as well as the Ethiopic Book of Enoch. Many individual magicians or very small groups prefer Enochian magic to other forms as the ceremonial scale required is smaller than that needed for Masonic-style ritual work. On the other hand, elaborate equipment is required to perform Enochian magic properly, including correct copies of the various Tablets and diagrams and other apparatuses.
From 1974 until his death, Texas composer Jerry Hunt used the "great table" of Dee and Kelley's Enochian system to compose his highly idiosyncratic, experimental, and multi-media music, which has been described as "shamanic." Hunt's music, scores, and even the language he used to describe his methods are shrouded in complex esotericism. Hunt's musical application of Enochian magic can be heard in his works "Ground: Five Mechanical Convention Streams," "Birome : cube," and "Cantegral Segment 18," among others.
Since Dee is known to have been a spy for Elizabeth I's court, there are interpretations of his Angelic manuscripts as cryptographic documents - most likely polyalphabetic ciphers - designed to disguise political messages. This aspect of the manuscripts is not of major concern to Enochian magicians, but there is no doubt that Dee's knowledge of mathematics and sophisticated ciphers contributed to his magical system.

Caveats

's book The Satanic Bible includes a section of "Enochian Keys" within a document called The Book of Leviathan, which purported to have been part of the lost manuscripts of Dee's. LaVey adapted Dee's Calls to include Satanic references which were not in the originals.
Since horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, in his short work "The History of the Necronomicon", made John Dee the translator of one of the versions of his mythical book of forbidden lore The Necronomicon, much has been written connecting Dee and Enochian magic with The Necronomicon. The fanciful connection between Dee and The Necronomicon was suggested by Lovecraft's friend Frank Belknap Long. Modern writings taking the connection seriously are considered fabrications.
In the 2013 fiction comedy horror film Knights of Badassdom there are references to "the mystic John Dee and a book which summons demons from hell".

In popular culture

A diagram of the Sigillum Dei Aemeth appears in the Season 9 Smallville episode, "Warrior."