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

The writings of Dee and Kelley include a small collection of texts. Linguist Donald Laycock, an Australian skeptic, studied these writings and argued that they do not show unusual features. The untranslated parts of the Liber Loagaeth manuscript resemble speaking in unknown languages rather than true language. Dee did not separate the Liber Loagaeth material from the translated parts of the Calls, which are more like an artificial language. Dee called this language "Angelical," and later writers named it "Enochian." The sounds and grammar of the language are similar to English, but the translations are not enough to understand its regular structure. 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, it was used by Adam in Paradise to name all things. 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

According to Tobias Churton in his book The Golden Builders, the idea of an Angelic or ancient language was widely believed during the time of John Dee. People thought that if someone could speak this language, they could communicate directly with angels.

In 1581, Dee wrote in his personal journals that God had sent "good angels" to speak directly with prophets. In 1582, Dee worked with the seer Edward Kelley, though he had previously used other seers as well. With Kelley’s help as a scryer, Dee tried to create lasting contact with angels. Their efforts led to the creation of a language called Angelical, now more commonly known as Enochian.

This process began on March 26, 1583, when Kelley described seeing a 21-lettered alphabet in a crystal. A few days later, Kelley began 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 square 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 texts in this book.

About a year later, at the court of King Stephen Báthory in Kraków, where both men stayed for a time, Kelley reportedly received another set of texts. These texts include 48 poetic verses with English translations, which Dee called Claves Angelicae ("Angelic Keys"). Dee intended to use these keys to open the "Gates of Understanding" represented by the magic squares in Liber Loagaeth:

"I am therefore to instruct and inform you, according to your Doctrine delivered, which is contained in 49 Tables. In 49 voices, or callings: which are the Natural Keys to open those, not 49 but 48 (for one is not to be opened) Gates of Understanding, whereby you shall have knowledge to move every Gate…

But you shall understand that these 19 Calls are the Calls, or entrances into the knowledge of the mystical Tables. Every Table containing one whole leaf, whereunto you need no other circumstances."

Phonology and writing system

The sound patterns of Enochian are very similar to English, except for some hard-to-read parts like "bdrios," "excolphabmartbh," "longamphlg," and "lapch."

The language was mostly written using the Latin alphabet. However, some words were occasionally written in the Enochian script, which appears now and then in old writings. 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 letters, called the "Adamical alphabet," to 22 letters of the English alphabet. He treated the letters "U" and "V" as different forms of the same letter, as was common during his time. He did not use the letters "J," "K," or "W." In Dee’s writings, the Enochian script is written from right to left. Different documents show slightly different versions of the script. The Enochian script also looks similar to another script, also linked to the prophet Enoch, found in a book called Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam, which Dee owned.

The spelling rules of Enochian follow those of Early Modern English. For example, it uses soft and hard sounds for the letters "c" and "g," and it uses two-letter combinations like "ch," "ph," "sh," and "th" to represent sounds like /tʃ ~ k/, /f/, /ʃ/, and /θ/. Laycock compared Enochian spelling to its sounds and said, "the way it is pronounced makes it sound more like English than it looks at first." However, some words have long strings of consonants and vowels, like "ooaona," "paombd," "smnad," and "noncf." These patterns look random, as if letters were chosen from a text and put together without a clear rule. Laycock explained, "You can test this by picking every tenth letter on a page and grouping them into words. The result often looks like Enochian."

The Enochian letters, along with their names, English equivalents, and pronunciation as reconstructed by Laycock, are listed below. Modern pronunciation can vary depending on the traditions of the person using the language.

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

Grammar

The grammar mostly does not use articles or prepositions. Adjectives are very uncommon. Aaron Leitch found several affixes in Enochian, such as -o (meaning "of") and -ax (similar to -ing in English). Leitch notes that Enochian seems 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."

Compounds 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." Combining nouns with adjectives or other verbs is less common. Compounds may have different spellings for the words joined together.

Changes in verb forms can cause spelling variations that seem random. Because of this, Aaron Leitch has questioned whether Enochian truly has conjugations. The limited evidence of verb conjugation in Enochian resembles English, including the verb "to be," which is irregular in English.

Laycock reports that the most recorded forms are 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 patterns 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 rare and used in ways that can be hard to understand. Relative possessive pronouns exist but are used very infrequently.

Personal pronouns recorded in Dee's material include:

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

Word order 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 appear only once. A few of these words sound and mean something similar to words in the Bible, mostly names of people or places. For example, the word "luciftias," which means "brightness," sounds similar to "Lucifer," which means "the light-bearer." Another example is "babalond," meaning "wicked, harlot," which sounds like "Babylon." Leitch identifies several root words in Enochian. He lists "Doh," "I," "Ia," "Iad," and others as possible root words. Most of the known Enochian words are found in the Angelic Keys, but many more words are also recorded in Dee's journals.

The Liber Loagaeth contains thousands of words that have not yet been clearly 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 the Loagaeth. Laycock writes:

The texts in the Loagaeth show patterns often found in language without clear meaning, such as glossolalia, which is sometimes produced during trance-like states. In other words, Kelley may have been "speaking in tongues." […] there is no evidence that these early invocations are any form of "language" at all.

Several collections of Enochian words have been made to create Enochian dictionaries. A serious 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 texts is difficult to understand. It appears possible to recognize the numerals from 0 to 10:

However, larger numbers in Enochian texts are written using letters from the alphabet, and there is no clear pattern or method for interpreting them:

As Laycock stated, "the way to know if a future spiritual revelation of the Enochian language is correct will be by explaining 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 articles and prepositions. Limited evidence of Enochian verb conjugation also resembles English more than Semitic languages like Hebrew, which Dee claimed were less pure versions of the Enochian language.