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Enochian Magic

The system of angelic language, calls, and aethyrs recorded by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s, and revived by the Golden Dawn three centuries later.

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Enochian magic is the system of angelic communication recorded by the English mathematician John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley between 1582 and 1589, built around a received language, a graded set of recited invocations, and a map of thirty spirit-worlds called the aethyrs. Dee was no fringe figure. He was an adviser to Elizabeth I, owner of one of the largest libraries in England — by his own surviving catalogue some two thousand printed books and several hundred manuscripts — learned in navigation and mathematics, and convinced that the deepest knowledge could be had only from beings above the human. Human learning, he had concluded by his fifties, could carry a man no further than the surface of nature; what he wanted lay on the far side of a conversation no living scholar could supply. From the spring of 1582 he and Kelley held hundreds of sessions — Dee called them “actions” — in which Kelley reported seeing and hearing angels in a polished crystal, while Dee, who saw nothing in the stone himself, sat beside him and wrote down every letter.

The architecture that emerged over those seven years was not borrowed whole from any earlier book. Its components were assembled session by session: the Sigillum Dei Aemeth and the furniture of the Holy Table; the heptarchic kings and their ministers; the alphabet and the great letter-grids of the Liber Loagaeth; and, last, the Angelical language proper, the forty-eight Keys, the four Watchtowers of the Great Table, and the thirty aethyrs. Taken together these form a working instrument of ascent — a structure for moving the mind upward through ordered ranks of created spirit toward the source. The architecture is set out below; the operative procedure for performing it Dee guarded, and the diaries record it only in fragments.

The framing and the furniture

Before any angel spoke a word of the new tongue, the actions had to be furnished. The first phase of the work, recorded in the diary Dee titled Mysteriorum Libri Quinque — the Five Books of Mystery, kept from late 1581 into 1583 and surviving as British Library Sloane MS 3188 — describes the apparatus the angels themselves dictated. Central to it is the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the “Seal of God’s Truth”: a disk of pure wax inscribed with a dense lattice of two circles, two heptagons, a heptagram, and a pentagram, carrying the names of God and of seven governing angels — the suffix aemeth is the Hebrew word for truth. Dee made one large seal for the showstone to rest upon and four smaller ones for the legs of the Holy Table, a consecrated table marked with Angelical characters around its border. The crystal — the “shewstone” — sat at the center on the great seal, flanked by a gold ring and a lamen, the whole arrangement converting an ordinary room at Mortlake into a precinct in which a vision could be lawfully received. The sigil is not decoration. It is a diagram of the divine name’s authority over the angelic hierarchy, the seal under which the spirits are bound to speak truly and not to deceive.

The earliest substantive revelation, developed through 1582 and early 1583, was the Heptarchia Mystica — a sevenfold government of “kings” and “princes,” one king and one prince to each of the seven planetary days, each with a name, a character, a seal, and a host of subject ministers. This phase is the most conventional part of the whole edifice; its rings, lamens, consecrated furniture, and table of planetary spirits sit close to the medieval Solomonic tradition and to the angelic cosmology Dee already knew from Cornelius Agrippa and from the cryptographic angel-magic of Johannes Trithemius. Had the actions stopped there, they would have produced a competent but unremarkable piece of Renaissance ritual. What followed had almost no precedent.

The language and the Book of the Speech of God

On 26 March 1583 Kelley reported in the stone a sight of twenty-one strange letters, and over the following months the angels delivered an entire script and language — not as a finished grammar handed down, but letter by letter, often read backward off grids of squares, so that nothing of it would be left to the two men’s own invention. The angels gave it as the speech of Adam in Eden, the tongue by which the first man named the creatures and read the book of nature true, lost to humankind at the Fall. Dee called it “Angelical” and, after the patriarch who in the apocryphal Book of Enoch had walked with the angels and learned the secrets of heaven, the name Enochian later attached to the whole system. The script runs to twenty-one characters, one of which may carry a diacritic dot; the surviving corpus contains roughly two hundred and fifty distinct words, more than half of them appearing only once — a body of text small enough to memorize and yet, in its irregular grammar and untranslatable terms, resistant to reduction.

The matrix from which the language was drawn is the Liber Loagaeth, the “Book of the Speech of God,” also called the Book of Enoch — dictated to Kelley and written in his hand, surviving as British Library Sloane MS 3189. It is a forbidding object: forty-nine leaves carrying ninety-eight tables, each a grid of forty-nine squares by forty-nine, every cell holding a single letter. Dee counted the tables as forty-nine, one for each “gate” or call. The grids are not a transcription of any sentence in ordinary order; the angels insisted that the true reading ran through them along paths the men were not given in full, so that the Loagaeth functions less as a book to be read than as a sealed reservoir of the divine speech, from which the operative texts were extracted under angelic direction. This is the point of the whole exercise: a language that creates rather than merely describes, in which to pronounce a name correctly is to act upon the thing named.

The Keys, the Watchtowers, and the aethyrs

From this material Dee and Kelley derived, in 1584, the operative invocations the manuscripts call the Claves Angelicae — the Angelic Keys or Calls. Dee’s record gives forty-eight of them, each delivered first in Angelical and then in an English rendering supplied by the angels, in a high prophetic register of storms, thrones, fiery waters, and the numbering of the elect. The Keys are not all of one kind. The first two address the godhead and the highest spirits; a long series addresses the elemental quarters and their subdivisions; and the last, in Dee’s scheme, is the call that opens the aethyrs. Later practice, following the nineteenth-century reconstruction, commonly counts nineteen Calls — the first eighteen distinct, and the nineteenth treated as a single template repeated thirty times, with one name changed at each repetition, to open each of the thirty aethyrs in turn. The difference is one of bookkeeping rather than substance: the forty-eight of the manuscript and the nineteen of later practice describe the same body of text counted by two different conventions.

The Keys act upon the Great Table, the master diagram of the elemental world. It is a grid of letters divided into four quarters — the four Watchtowers, one each for earth, air, water, and fire — joined at the center by a small cross-shaped table, the Tablet of Union, that binds the elements together through spirit. From the rows and columns of each Watchtower the system reads out a hierarchy of angelic names: the great divine names spelled across the central cross of each tablet, the Kings, the Seniors, and the subordinate angels ruling the sub-elements. The Great Table existed in more than one form, for the men found their first transcription riddled with inconsistencies; a later corrected version, the reformed table, became the standard from which subsequent practice worked. The discrepancy between the earlier table and the reformed one is one of the genuine textual problems the system carries forward unresolved.

Above and beyond the elemental world stand the thirty aethyrs (or aires), named regions of ascent — from TEX, the lowest and nearest the earth, up to LIL, the highest and nearest the throne. They are not places in space but graded conditions of spirit, ranked stages of an ascent away from matter toward the divine. The aethyrs are subdivided into ninety-one “Parts of the Earth,” each with its own governing angel — three to each aethyr, four to TEX — mapping the thirty regions onto a scheme of the terrestrial world; to sound the appropriate call is, in the logic of the system, to open the gate of that aethyr and stand within it. This vertical ladder — earth and its Watchtowers below, the thirty graded aethyrs above — is the system’s distinctive contribution: a complete topography of created spirit, with a spoken key for every level.

What Dee thought he was doing

Dee never understood any of this as “magic” in the demonic sense, and to read it as conjuring is to misread it from the start. As Deborah Harkness has shown, the angel conversations were the culmination of his natural philosophy, not a flight from it. He believed the book of nature had grown corrupt and unreadable since the Fall, that human languages were the broken shards of the one true tongue, and that the world was visibly aging toward its end; the actions were a divinely aided program to recover the pure Adamic speech, to read creation truly once more, and to take part in a universal religious reform before the end came. The Hungarian scholar György Szönyi places the whole project under the older Renaissance ideal of exaltatio — the magical-mystical glorification of man, his ascent through the ranks of being toward deification — and argues that it was the desire for exaltatio that tied Dee’s mathematics, his cosmological glyph the Monas Hieroglyphica, and his angelic actions into one coherent quest. The aethyrs are the architecture of that ascent given a script.

Two things qualify the record. The first is mediation: every word of the angelic corpus reached Dee through Kelley, who alone saw and heard in the stone, and whether Kelley was a deliberate impostor exploiting a credulous older scholar or an unstable genuine visionary remains unresolved in the scholarship — the relationship was intimate and prolonged, Kelley repeatedly tried to abandon the scrying, and the records do not read like a simple confidence trick. The second is the editor: the bulk of the angelic diaries first reached print through a deliberately hostile hand, framed expressly to present Dee as a pious man cozened by demons. The system, in other words, is known only through a mediated and contested record — which is exactly why historians prize it, for Dee’s compulsive note-taking makes it one of the best-documented episodes of early modern learned magic. The documents cannot establish whether anything spoke through Kelley; they do establish two men working in deadly earnest and a structure too internally consistent to be casual invention.

The original actions did not end over the system itself. In 1587 Kelley relayed an angelic command that the two men hold all things in common, including their wives — the so-called cross-matching, which Dee, troubled, recorded as fulfilled with the words pactum factum, “the pact is made.” The partnership survived even that, breaking apart only in 1589 over Kelley’s claim that the angels now directed him to keep his alchemical secrets to himself. Dee returned to England late that year to find his Mortlake library plundered, and the great instrument fell silent.

The afterlives: Golden Dawn and Crowley

The diaries lay largely unread for three centuries. Then in 1659 the scholar Meric Casaubon printed a large portion of them as A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee … and Some Spirits (London, 1659) — not to honor Dee but to warn against him and against the enthusiastic sectaries of the Interregnum, presenting the diaries as the cautionary record of a learned man deluded by spirits. The hostile frame did not prevent the book from becoming the channel through which the material survived.

It was seized upon at the end of the nineteenth century by the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who had partial access to Dee’s manuscripts and to Casaubon’s printed text and who rebuilt from them a working “Enochian” magic — fitting the aethyrs, the four Watchtowers, and the Tablet of Union into a wider scheme of ceremonial magic alongside the tarot and the Christian Kabbalah. The Golden Dawn’s recasting was substantial: it imposed a systematic elemental reading on the Watchtowers, assigned a color scheme to the tablets, supplied pronunciation conventions Dee had never recorded, and consolidated the forty-eight Keys into the nineteen of common practice. Much of what later magicians made of the material would have been foreign to Dee, who sought not power but instruction and believed he was receiving it from heaven.

Aleister Crowley, once a member of the Order, took the calls furthest. In 1900 and again in 1909 he used the nineteenth Key as a method of visionary ascent, sounding it thirty times to pass upward through the thirty aethyrs and recording what he saw at each, publishing the results in 1911 as The Vision and the Voice (Liber 418). Crowley’s central move — reading the thirty aethyrs as ascending initiatic grades, stages of his own spiritual progress — is, as the historian Egil Asprem has shown, an idiosyncratic visionary appropriation rather than a purist reconstruction of Dee’s intent; it is Crowley’s distinctive contribution to the Enochian tradition, and it departs sharply from the apocalyptic, nature-restoring purpose of the original actions. Through the Golden Dawn and through Crowley, Enochian passed into the broad stream of twentieth-century Western occultism — and later still into corners of it Dee could never have imagined, when Anton LaVey lifted the Enochian Keys into the Satanic Bible.

The system that bears the name today is therefore layered: a Tudor scholar’s record of a divinely intended language, read through a Victorian order’s elemental framework, and extended by its most famous defector into a ladder of personal initiation. Each stratum reshaped the one beneath it. The result remains one of the most demanding systems a practitioner of Western magic can take up, and one of the most thoroughly documented — a complete grammar of ascent assembled, word by word, from grids of squares, by two men who were certain they were taking dictation from heaven.

Scholarship and primary sources

The angelic record survives chiefly in three manuscripts in the British Library: Sloane MS 3188, Dee’s Mysteriorum Libri Quinque (the Five Books of Mystery, 1581–83); Sloane MS 3189, the Liber Loagaeth in Kelley’s hand; and Sloane MS 3191, the later angelic books including the heptarchic and Watchtower material. The text printed in the seventeenth century derived from a separate manuscript, Cotton Appendix XLVI. The diaries are studied alongside Dee’s own catalogue of his library and the cosmological glyph of his Monas Hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564), the work that links his mathematical and his angelic concerns.

→ Related: Divination · Lurianic Kabbalah · Paracelsianism · John Dee · Book Of Enoch · Adam · Cornelius Agrippa · Golden Dawn Lineage · Aleister Crowley · Ceremonial Magic · Christian Kabbalah · Rudolfine Prague

Sources

  • Harkness 1999
  • Asprem 2012
  • Szönyi 2004
  • Casaubon (ed.) 1659
  • Peterson 2003