Liber Loagaeth (The Book of Speech from God)

Liber Loagaeth, whose title the angels glossed as ‘speech from God’, is the holy book dictated to Edward Kelley during sessions with John Dee in the spring of 1583. It consists largely of great tables of letters, most of them grids of forty-nine by forty-nine cells, together with some passages of continuous ‘angelic’ words. Kelley saw the leaves of the book in the shew-stone and read out the letters, which Dee recorded; the fair copy that survives, British Library Sloane MS 3189, is in Kelley’s handwriting. The angels told Dee that the book contained the language in which God created the world and in which Adam had named the creatures, and that its full meaning would be opened at a future time connected with the end of the age. They also stated that the first leaf received was in fact the last. Unlike the later Enochian ‘Calls’ of 1584, almost none of Loagaeth was translated, so it remains largely undeciphered. The book is closely linked with the Book of Soyga, a Latin magical work Dee owned, whose letter tables he asked the angels about; the cryptographer Jim Reeds later showed how the Soyga tables were generated, a finding that has encouraged comparison with Loagaeth’s grids. For modern Enochian practitioners the text is the mysterious root of the angelic language; for historians it is a key document of Dee’s quest for a perfect, primordial tongue.

What it contains

• Forty-eight leaves (front and back) of letter tables
• Tables mostly of 49 × 49 cells, with some passages of angelic words
• Titles and headings in the angelic language
• Notes on the order of the leaves and their reception
• Associated index of angelic words compiled by Peterson