Enochian is a secret language created by John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley in late 16th-century England. Kelley, who practiced a type of magical divination, worked with Dee to study this language. Enochian is important in a form of magic called Enochian magic.

The writings in Dee's and Kelley's journals contain only a small number of texts. Linguist Donald Laycock, who studied the Enochian records, believed the language did not have special or unusual features. Some parts of the Liber Loagaeth manuscript, which were not translated, resemble the speech patterns of glossolalia, which is speaking in unknown languages, rather than a real language. Dee did not treat the Liber Loagaeth material as different from the translated parts of the language, which are more like a made-up language. Dee called this language "Angelical," and later it became known as "Enochian." The way the language sounds and its structure are similar to English, but the translations are not enough to fully understand its rules. Some Enochian words look like words or names in the Bible, but most have no clear origin.

Dee also called the language "Celestial Speech," "First Language of God-Christ," "Holy Language," or "Language of Angels." He named it "Adamical" because, according to Dee's angels, Adam used it in Paradise to name everything. The term "Enochian" comes from Dee's belief that the biblical figure Enoch was the last person before Dee and Kelley to know the language.

History

Tobias Churton wrote in his book The Golden Builders that people during John Dee's time believed in the existence of an Angelic or ancient language. It was thought that speaking this language would allow direct communication with angels.

In 1581, Dee wrote in his personal journal that God had sent "good angels" to speak directly with prophets. In 1582, Dee worked with Edward Kelley, a seer who used a crystal to see visions. Kelley helped Dee try to build lasting contact with angels. Their efforts led to the creation of a language called Angelical, now known as Enochian.

This process began on March 26, 1583, when Kelley saw a 21-letter alphabet in the crystal. A few days later, Kelley started receiving a book called Liber Loagaeth ("Book of Speech from God"). The book contains 98 large letter tables, each made of a 49-by-49 grid of letters, printed on both sides of 49 pages. Dee counted these as 49 tables. Dee and Kelley stated that the angels did not translate the book's text.

About a year later, while staying at the court of King Stephen Báthory in Kraków, Kelley reportedly received another set of texts. These included 48 poetic verses with English translations, which Dee called Claves Angelicae ("Angelic Keys"). Dee intended to use these keys to unlock the "Gates of Understanding" represented by the magic squares in Liber Loagaeth.

Phonology and writing system

The way Enochian sounds is very similar to English, except for some difficult letter combinations, such as "bdrios," "excolphabmartbh," "longamphlg," and "lapch."

The language was mostly written using the Latin alphabet. However, some words were occasionally written in the Enochian script found in ancient manuscripts. This script has 21 letters, and one of these letters may have a small dot above it. John Dee matched these letters, called the "Adamical alphabet," to 22 letters of the English alphabet. At the time, he treated the letters "U" and "V" as different forms of the same letter and did not use "J," "K," or "W." In Dee’s writings, the Enochian script is written from right to left. Some documents show slightly different versions of the script. The Enochian alphabet also looks similar to another script, also believed to belong to the prophet Enoch, found in a book called Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam, which Dee owned.

Enochian spelling follows rules similar to Early Modern English spelling. For example, it uses soft and hard sounds for the letters "c" and "g" and uses two-letter combinations like "ch," "ph," "sh," and "th" to represent sounds like /tʃ ~ k/, /f/, /ʃ/, and /θ/. Laycock studied how Enochian letters relate to their sounds and noted that the pronunciation sounds more like English than its spelling suggests. However, some words have long strings of consonants and vowels, such as "ooaona," "paombd," "smnad," and "noncf." These patterns resemble letters taken randomly from a text and grouped together. Laycock explained that readers can test this by selecting every tenth letter from a page and grouping them into words, which often looks similar to Enochian.

John Dee listed the Enochian letters, their names, and their English equivalents. Laycock also provided reconstructed pronunciations. Today, how Enochian is pronounced can vary depending on the traditions of the people who use it.

Several fonts for writing Enochian are available. These fonts use the same letter codes as their English equivalents in the ASCII system.

Grammar

The grammar of Enochian mostly lacks articles or prepositions. Adjectives are very uncommon. Aaron Leitch identified several affixes in Enochian, such as -o (meaning "of") and -ax (similar to -ing in English). Leitch notes that Enochian appears to have a vocative case, as shown by Dee's note in the margin of the First Table of Loagaeth: "Befes the vocative case of Befafes."

Compound words are common in Enochian texts. Modifiers and indicators are often combined with the nouns and verbs they modify or indicate. These compounds can appear with demonstrative pronouns, conjunctions, and different forms of the verb "to be." Compounding nouns with adjectives or other verbs is less frequent. Compound words may have different spellings for the words they combine.

Changes in spelling can occur during conjugation, sometimes appearing random. Because of this, Aaron Leitch has questioned whether Enochian truly has conjugations. The limited evidence of Enochian verb conjugation seems similar to English, including the verb "to be," which is highly irregular.

Laycock reports that the most forms are recorded for "be" and "goh-" (meaning "say"):

Note that "christeos" (meaning "let there be") might come from "Christ," and if so, it is not part of a conjugation.

For negating verbs, two forms are recorded: for example, "chis ge" (meaning "are not," where "chis" means "they are") and "ip uran" (meaning "not see," where "uran" means "see").

Enochian has personal pronouns, but they are rarely used and can be confusing. Relative possessive pronouns exist but are used infrequently.

Recorded personal pronouns (from Dee's writings only):

Demonstrative pronouns: "oi" (meaning "this"), "unal" (meaning "these, those"), "priaz(i)" (meaning "those").

Word order in Enochian is similar to English, except for the lack of articles and prepositions. Adjectives, though rare, usually come before the noun, as in English.

Vocabulary and corpus

Laycock states that there are about 250 different words in the collection of Enochian texts. More than half of these words are used only once. A few of these words sound and mean something similar to words in the Bible, mostly names. For example, "luciftias" means "brightness" and sounds like "Lucifer," which means "the light-bearer." Similarly, "babalond" means "wicked, harlot" and sounds like "Babylon." Leitch identified several basic words in Enochian, including "Doh," "I," "Ia," "Iad," and others. Most of the known Enochian words are found in the Angelic Keys, but many more words appear in Dee's journals.

The Liber Loagaeth contains thousands of additional words that are not yet defined. Laycock explains that the material in Liber Loagaeth seems different from the language used in the "Calls" found in the Angelic Keys. These "Calls" appear to have been created from the tables and squares in Loagaeth. According to Laycock, several collections of Enochian words have been made to create Enochian dictionaries. One important study is Donald Laycock's The Complete Enochian Dictionary. Another helpful resource is Vinci's Gmicalzoma: An Enochian Dictionary.

Representation of numbers

The number system in Enochian is hard to understand. It is possible to recognize the numerals from 0 to 10 using these symbols:

• 0 – T
• 1 – L, EL, L-O, ELO, LA, LI, LIL
• 2 – V, VI-I-V, VI-VI
• 3 – D, R
• 4 – S, ES
• 5 – O
• 6 – N, NORZ
• 7 – Q
• 8 – P
• 9 – M, EM
• 10 – X

However, Enochian texts use larger numbers written in alphabetical form, and there is no clear pattern for these numbers. As Laycock stated, "the test of any future spirit-revelation of the Enochian language will be the explanation of this numerical system."

Relation to other languages

Dee thought Enochian was the Adamic language spoken by everyone before the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel. However, modern studies show that Enochian is a constructed language similar to English. Its word order is mostly like English, but it has fewer words such as "the" or "in." There is very little evidence of how verbs change form in Enochian, and this is more like English than like Semitic languages such as Hebrew. Dee believed Hebrew and other Semitic languages were less pure versions of Enochian.