The Enochian Language: Alphabet, Calls and the Angelic Tongue

The Enochian language is the "angelical" tongue recorded by the Elizabethan scholar John Dee from the visions of his scryer Edward Kelley between 1583 and 1584. It has its own alphabet of twenty-one letters, a vocabulary known mainly from nineteen invocations called the Calls or Keys, and a loose but recognisable grammar. Dee believed it was the language of Adam; modern linguists regard it as a constructed language strongly shaped by English, though how it was produced remains disputed.

Origins of the Enochian Language in Dee's Diaries§

From 1582 John Dee and Edward Kelley held hundreds of sessions in which Kelley gazed into a crystal and reported what angels showed and said, while Dee wrote everything down. The background to these "actions" is told in our main article on Enochian magic. The language emerged gradually. In the spring of 1583 the angels began dictating Liber Loagaeth, "the Book of the Speech from God", a collection of great letter-tables with passages of unknown words; around the same time Kelley was shown the characters of a new alphabet, which Dee carefully copied.

Dee did not invent the label "Enochian". He spoke of the angelical tongue, the holy language, or the first language of God-Christ and of Adam. The angels told him that this speech had been known to Adam in Paradise and that after the Fall only fragments survived; it had been restored to the patriarch Enoch and then lost again. The legend connects Dee's project with the ancient literature of the Book of Enoch, which describes Enoch's ascent to heaven and his reception of hidden knowledge, though Dee knew that book only by reputation. Later occultists took the name from this story, and "Enochian" became standard by the nineteenth century.

Dee and the search for a perfect language§

The idea of an original, perfect language was a serious question in Renaissance Europe: scholars debated whether Hebrew was the speech of Eden and whether the names Adam gave to things expressed their true natures. Dee's own Monas Hieroglyphica (1564), discussed in our article on the Monas symbol, sought a single sign expressing the structure of the cosmos. The angelic language promised words bound to things by divine institution.

The Enochian Alphabet and Its Letter Names§

The Enochian script has twenty-one letters. Like Hebrew, it is written from right to left, and each letter carries a name. The names as Dee recorded them are usually given as Un, Pa, Veh, Gal, Graph, Or, Ged, Na, Gon, Ur, Tal, Drux, Med, Mals, Ger, Don, Fam, Gisg, Van, Pal and Ceph, corresponding roughly to the English letters A, B, C or K, D, E, F, G, H, I or Y, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U or V, X and Z. There is no separate letter for J or W, and several letters cover more than one sound, much as in the English spelling of Dee's day.

Dee drew the characters with care, in a calligraphic form of hooked and angular strokes. They resemble no known historical script, though some writers have noted vague similarities to the cipher alphabets of Renaissance cryptography, such as those of Johannes Trithemius, whose works Dee admired (see the Steganographia). No direct borrowing has been demonstrated.

The alphabet also appears on the elaborate seals and tables Dee commissioned, including the holy table on which the shew-stone was placed. Those objects are described in the catalogue entry on Dee's holy table and lamen.

The Calls: The Key to the Vocabulary§

Most passages of Liber Loagaeth came without any translation, and they remain unreadable. The breakthrough came in April 1584 in Kraków, when the angels began to deliver a series of invocations together with their English meaning. These are the Calls or Keys. Eighteen are distinct texts; a nineteenth, the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs, is repeated with a change of name for each of the thirty "airs", which brings the total to forty-eight. The structure of these regions and their link to the Great Table is explained in our article on the Enochian elemental tablets.

The procedure recorded in the diaries is unusual. Kelley reported the letters of each Call one at a time, and in several cases the words were delivered backwards, from the last letter to the first; the angels explained that the words were too powerful to be spoken forward in the ordinary course of dictation. Dee then received the English rendering, sometimes word by word, sometimes in phrases, and wrote it between the lines. This interlinear text is the foundation of every Enochian dictionary.

The first Call opens with the words Ol sonf vorsg, goho Iad Balt, which Dee translated "I reign over you, saith the God of Justice." Words for fire, water, thrones, governors, wrath and mercy recur throughout, and the English versions read like the prophetic books of the Bible. A few words became famous in later occultism. Babalond, rendered as "harlot" or "wicked one", was taken up by Aleister Crowley as Babalon, a central goddess-figure of Thelema.

Grammar, Sound and Structure§

Is Enochian a language in the linguist's sense? The fullest answer comes from Donald Laycock, an Australian linguist who compiled The Complete Enochian Dictionary (1978) from Dee's manuscripts. Laycock found that Enochian has a stable core: certain roots recur with consistent meanings, some words take recognisable endings, and the sentences of the Calls can be matched to their English versions with reasonable accuracy.

He also found features that point to its origin. The sound system is close to English, with the same range of consonants and similar combinations. The word order of the Calls follows the English translation almost word for word, so that the "angelic" sentences mirror early modern English syntax. Inflection is irregular: the same word may appear in several forms without any clear rule, and some words occur only once. There is no systematic relationship to Hebrew, Greek or Latin, though a handful of words echo familiar ones, such as Babalond beside Babylon.

Laycock concluded that Enochian is most likely an invented language, produced fluently rather than designed systematically, and compared it to glossolalia, the "speaking in tongues" of some religious movements, while granting that it is more consistent than most glossolalia. Others, such as the practitioner-scholar Aaron Leitch, have argued that its grammar is more regular than Laycock allowed.

How Enochian was pronounced§

Dee's manuscripts include occasional notes on stress and syllables, but no full guide. The Golden Dawn sounded the letters as if they were Hebrew and inserted vowels between consonants; Z, for example, is commonly voiced as "zod". Some contemporary practitioners prefer a reconstruction based on Dee's notes and Elizabethan English, which can produce strikingly different sounds for the same word.

Who Made the Enochian Language?§

The question of authorship has no settled answer. Three broad positions recur.

• Kelley as author. Many historians assume that Kelley, consciously or not, composed the language. He was literate and capable of sustained invention, and the English-like structure fits an English speaker. The backward dictation, on this view, was a feat of memory or a sign of written drafts.
• A joint or unconscious creation. Others see the language as the product of the two men's relationship: Dee's expectations and reading shaped what Kelley "saw", while Kelley's visionary capacity gave it form. Deborah Harkness's study of the angel conversations emphasises how Dee's natural philosophy and apocalyptic hopes framed the whole enterprise.
• A revealed language. Practitioners within the Enochian tradition often accept, in some form, Dee's own belief that the language came from angelic sources. For them its English-like features reflect the medium through which it was received rather than its ultimate origin.

The historian of esotericism Egil Asprem has shown that each age has read the language in its own terms: as demonic deception in Meric Casaubon's 1659 edition, A True and Faithful Relation (readable in our reading room), as a ritual tongue in the Golden Dawn, as a channel for visions in Crowley's The Vision and the Voice, and as a puzzle for linguists and psychologists in the twentieth century.

The Enochian Language in Modern Magic§

For Dee the angelic language was a gift of knowledge, a step toward recovering the wisdom lost since Eden; he left little evidence of using the Calls in regular ritual. Enochian became a working magical language three centuries later, when the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn studied Dee's manuscripts in the British Museum and wove the Calls into its Second Order rituals for invoking the elemental powers of the Watchtowers.

Crowley's recitation of the nineteenth Call in the Algerian desert in 1909, with Victor Neuburg recording his visions, made the language central to Thelemic practice. Since the 1970s, editions of Dee's diaries by Geoffrey James, Joseph Peterson and others have made the primary sources widely accessible, and some practitioners now work with the language as Dee recorded it rather than in its Golden Dawn form. In popular culture Enochian usually stands for mysterious or forbidden speech, which says more about its reputation than about the devotional character of Dee's records.

Frequently asked questions§

Is Enochian a real language?§

It is a real recorded language with an alphabet, a vocabulary and some consistent grammar, but it has no native speakers and no history outside Dee's manuscripts and later occult use. Linguists such as Donald Laycock regard it as a constructed language heavily modelled on English. Whether it had a supernatural source is a question of belief, not linguistics.

How many letters are in the Enochian alphabet?§

There are twenty-one letters, written from right to left. Each has a name, such as Un for A and Pa for B, and several letters stand for more than one English sound.

Why is it called Enochian?§

Dee's angels said the language had been revealed to the patriarch Enoch before being lost. Dee himself called it the angelical or Adamic tongue; the name "Enochian" was adopted by later occultists and became standard in the nineteenth century.

Can Enochian be translated?§

Only partly. The Calls came with Dee's English translations and form the basis of all dictionaries, but most of the text of Liber Loagaeth has no translation and remains unintelligible.

Sources and further reading§

• A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits — Meric Casaubon (ed.), 1659
• The Complete Enochian Dictionary — Donald C. Laycock, 1978
• John Dee's Five Books of Mystery — Joseph H. Peterson (ed.), 2003
• John Dee's Conversations with Angels — Deborah E. Harkness, 1999
• Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture — Egil Asprem, 2012
• The Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee — Geoffrey James, 1984
• The Search for the Perfect Language — Umberto Eco, 1995