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 person who used magical practices to see visions and worked with Dee in his magical studies. This language is important to the practice of Enochian magic.

The writings of Dee and Kelley contain a small collection of texts. Linguist Donald Laycock, an Australian skeptic, studied the Enochian writings and argued that they do not have special or unusual features. The untranslated parts of the Liber Loagaeth manuscript look more like speaking in unknown languages than a real language. Dee did not separate the Liber Loagaeth material from the translated parts called the "Calls," which resemble 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 full structure. Some Enochian words look like words or names in the Bible, but most have no clear origin.

Dee's writings also called this language "Celestial Speech," "First Language of God-Christ," "Holy Language," or "Language of Angels." He also called it "Adamical," as his angels said 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

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

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 used other seers before. With Kelley’s help as a scryer, Dee tried to create a lasting connection with the angels. Their efforts led to the creation of a language called Angelical, now known as Enochian.

The process began on March 26, 1583, when Kelley saw visions of a 21-lettered alphabet in a 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 table is a square made of 49 letters on both the front and back of 49 leaves. Dee counted these as 49 tables. Dee and Kelley stated that the angels never translated the texts in this book.

About a year later, at the court of King Stephen Báthory in Kraków, where both Dee and Kelley lived for a time, Kelley reportedly received another set of texts. These texts include 48 poetic verses with English translations. In Dee’s writings, these are called 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

The sounds of Enochian are very similar to English, except for some hard-to-say combinations like "bdrios," "excolphabmartbh," "longamphlg," and "lapch."

The language was mostly written using the Latin alphabet. However, some words in Enochian script appear occasionally in the manuscripts. The script has 21 letters, and one of these letters may have a small dot above it or not. 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 in that time, and did not use J, K, or W. In John Dee’s diary, the Enochian script is written from right to left. Different documents show slightly different versions of the script. The alphabet also looks similar to another script, also linked to the prophet Enoch, found in a book called Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam, which Dee owned.

Enochian spelling follows the rules of Early Modern English spelling, such as using soft and hard ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩, and using letter pairs 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 spoken sounds more like English than it appears." However, the unusual groups of consonants and vowels in words like "ooaona," "paombd," "smnad," and "noncf" are similar to patterns made by randomly combining letters from a text. Laycock noted, "You can test this by taking, for example, every tenth letter on this page and splitting the letters into words. The 'text' you create will look similar to Enochian."

The Enochian letters, with their names and English equivalents as listed by Dee, and their reconstructed pronunciations by Laycock, are as follows. Today, pronunciation rules vary based on the traditions of the person using the language.

Several fonts for the Enochian script are available. These fonts use the same letter codes as the English alphabet.

Grammar

The grammar mostly does not use articles or prepositions. Adjectives are very uncommon. Aaron Leitch identified several affixes in Enochian, including -o (meaning "of") and -ax (which functions like -ing in English). Leitch noted that, unlike English, 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 and conjunctions, as well as with different forms of the verb "to be." Combining nouns with adjectives or other verbs is less frequent. Compounds may show different spellings of the words joined together.

Conjugation can cause spelling changes that may seem random. Because of this, Aaron Leitch has questioned whether Enochian actually has conjugations. The limited evidence of Enochian verb conjugation appears similar to English, including the verb "to be," which is highly irregular.

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

Note that christeos "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 "are not" (chis "they are") and ip uran "not see" (uran "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 little.

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

Demonstrative pronouns: oi "this," unal "these, those," priaz(i) "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 are similar to words in the Bible, especially names, both in how they sound and their meanings. For example, the word "luciftias," meaning "brightness," sounds like "Lucifer," which means "the light-bearer." Similarly, "babalond," meaning "wicked, harlot," sounds like "Babylon." Leitch identifies several root words in Enochian, including "Doh," "I," "Ia," "Iad," and others. Most of the known Enochian vocabulary is found in the Angelic Keys, but many more words are recorded 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" may have been created from the tables and squares in the Loagaeth. According to Laycock, several collections of Enochian words have been made to create Enochian dictionaries. One important example is Donald Laycock's The Complete Enochian Dictionary. Another helpful resource is Vinci's Gmicalzoma: An Enochian Dictionary.

Representation of numbers

The Enochian number system is difficult 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 order, and there is no clear pattern or system 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 believed that Enochian was the Adamic language spoken by everyone before the confusion of languages. However, modern studies show that Enochian is an artificial language similar to English. The word order in Enochian is much like English, except there are very few articles and prepositions. Limited evidence of how verbs are formed in Enochian is also similar to English, more than with Semitic languages like Hebrew. Dee believed that Hebrew and other Semitic languages were less pure versions of the Enochian language.