Enochian is a secret language created for magical purposes. Its creators claimed it was given to them by angels. This language was recorded in the private writings of John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley in late 16th-century England. Kelley used a crystal ball to help Dee with his magical studies. Enochian is important in the practice of Enochian magic.

The writings of Dee and Kelley contain only a small amount of text. Linguist Donald Laycock, a skeptic from Australia, studied these writings and said they do not show any special features. The untranslated parts of the Liber Loagaeth manuscript look like speaking in unknown languages, not real language. Dee did not separate the Liber Loagaeth material from the translated parts called "Calls," which resemble an artificial language. Dee called this language "Angelical," and later it was named "Enochian" by others. The sounds and grammar of Enochian are similar to English, but there is not enough translation to understand its rules clearly. 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 his angels, Adam used it in Paradise to name everything. The term "Enochian" comes from Dee's belief that Enoch, a biblical figure, was the last person before Dee and Kelley to know the language.

History

According to Tobias Churton in his book The Golden Builders, people during John Dee’s time often believed in the existence of an Angelic or ancient language. It was thought that speaking this language could allow humans to communicate directly with angels.

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

On March 26, 1583, Kelley saw a vision of a 21-letter alphabet in a crystal. A few days later, Kelley began receiving a book called Liber Loagaeth, or "Book of Speech from God." The book contains 98 large letter tables, each made of a 49-by-49 grid of letters, written on both sides of 49 pages. Dee counted these as 49 tables. Dee and Kelley claimed the angels never translated the text in this book.

About a year later, while staying at the court of King Stephen Báthory in Kraków, Kelley reportedly received another set of writings. These writings include 48 poetic verses with English translations. Dee called these texts Claves Angelicae, or "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

Enochian has sounds similar to English, except for some hard-to-say groups of letters like "bdrios," "excolphabmartbh," "longamphlg," and "lapch." Most Enochian texts use the Latin alphabet. However, some words are written in the Enochian script, which appears occasionally in the manuscripts. The Enochian script has 21 letters. One of these letters can be written with or without a small dot above it. John Dee matched these 21 letters to 22 English letters, treating U and V as different forms of the same letter, and leaving out J, K, and W. In John Dee's diary, Enochian script is written from right to left. Different documents show slightly different versions of the script. The Enochian alphabet also looks similar to a script attributed to the prophet Enoch, which appeared in a book called Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam, a copy of which Dee owned.

Enochian spelling follows Early Modern English rules, such as using "c" and "g" for different sounds and combining letters like "ch," "ph," "sh," and "th" for certain sounds. Laycock compared Enochian spelling to its sounds and noted that it sounds more like English than it appears. However, some words have long strings of consonants and vowels, like "ooaona," "paombd," "smnad," and "noncf." These patterns resemble letters taken from a text and randomly grouped together. Laycock suggested that if you take every tenth letter from a page and make words from them, the result often looks similar to Enochian.

Dee listed the Enochian letters with their English equivalents, and Laycock provided their pronunciations. Today, pronunciation can differ based on the group or tradition of the person using Enochian. Several fonts for Enochian script exist. These fonts use ASCII codes, matching Enochian letters to their English counterparts.

Grammar

The grammar mostly does not use articles or prepositions. Adjectives are not used very often. Aaron Leitch found several affixes in Enochian, such as -o (meaning "of") and -ax (which works like -ing in English). Leitch notes that Enochian has a vocative case, which is different from English, 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 compound words can include demonstrative pronouns, conjunctions, and different forms of the verb "to be." Combining nouns with adjectives or other verbs is less common. Compound words may have different spellings of the combined words.

Changing verb forms can cause spelling changes that seem random or unpredictable. Because of this, Aaron Leitch questions if Enochian truly has verb conjugations. The limited evidence of Enochian verb conjugation looks similar to English, like the irregular verb "to be."

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 is not part of a conjugation.

To negate verbs, two forms are used: 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 not used often and can be hard to understand. Relative possessive pronouns exist but are used very little.

Personal pronouns found in Dee's materials include: Demonstrative pronouns: "oi" meaning "this," "unal" meaning "these, those," and "priaz(i)" meaning "those."

Word order is similar to English, except there are few articles and prepositions. Adjectives, though not common, usually come before the noun, like in English.

Vocabulary and corpus

Laycock says there are about 250 different words in the Enochian texts, and more than half of these words appear only once. A few of these words are similar to words in the Bible, mostly names, in how they sound and what they mean. For example, "luciftias" means "brightness" and sounds like "Lucifer," which means "the light-bearer." Similarly, "babalond" means "wicked, harlot" and sounds like "Babylon." Leitch identifies several root 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 are also found in Dee's journals.

Thousands of other words that are not clearly defined are found in the Liber Loagaeth. Laycock says the material in Liber Loagaeth is different from the language used in the "Calls" in the Angelic Keys. These "Calls" seem to have been created using tables and squares from Loagaeth. According to Laycock, several collections of Enochian words have been made to create Enochian dictionaries. A detailed 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 is difficult to explain. 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 include larger numbers written in alphabetical form, and there is no clear pattern to 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 believed that Enochian was the Adamic language spoken by everyone before the confusion of languages occurred. However, modern studies show that Enochian is a constructed language similar to English. The word order in Enochian follows English patterns, but it has fewer words like "the" or "in." Limited evidence of how verbs change in Enochian also resembles English more than Semitic languages like Hebrew, which Dee claimed were less pure versions of the Enochian language.