ENOCHIAN 101
Illustration by Michael Arndt - (c) 1997 e.v.AN INTRODUCTION TO ENOCHIAN MAGICKby Christeos Pir(Text of a seminar given at Ecumenicon/Sacred Space VIII, an occult/pagan-oriented ecumenical conference that took place July 13 - 16, 1995 e.v. in Herndon VA.)
"I’m Christeos Pir, and I’m a student of Enochian Magick. I say that not out of formality or false
modesty, but because I have a pretty good idea (I hope) of my level of expertise with the Enochian
system. Those of you who have some experience with Enochian are invited to chime in with comments
or corrections when needed, though if something is a statement of opinion it’d be good to clearly label it
as such. Likewise, those new to Enochian are encouraged to speak up with any questions, which I’ll do
my best to answer as best I can. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll be glad to make something up on the
spot.
I have often read in thy books and records, how Enoch injoyed thy favour and conversation; with
Moses thou was familiar; And also that to Abraham, Isaack and Jacob, Joshua, Gideon, Esdras, Daniel,
Tobias and sundry others thy good angels were sent by thy disposition, to Instruct them, informe them,
helpe them, yea in worldly and domestick affaires, yea and sometymes to satisfie their desires, doubtes,
and questions of thy Secrete . . .
I have always had a great regard and care to beware of the filthy abuse of such as willingly or
wittingly invoke or consult with spiritual creatures of the damned sort: angels of darkness, forgers,
patrons of lies and untruths. Instead I have flown unto God through hearty prayer, full oft and in
sundry manners.
Having reached a point in 1581 where he could honestly say that he could progress no further in his
learning by studying the works of other mortal men, he set out to establish contact with God himself,
or from his angels, the knowledge which could be had no other way. Accordingly, he began a series of
visionary –in the literal sense– operations. As he had no knack for this scrying, or astral vision work,
he hired a somewhat disreputable alchemist and con-man named Edward Talbot, alias Edward Kelley, who had
a gift for it. Thus was begun one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of magick, and one
of the most far-reaching in its effect, ranking perhaps with the Egyptians in influence.
Beginning with instructions from the angels on the design of various pieces of paraphernalia to be employed, from a specially engraved cedar table to a ring to be worn when contacting them (many of these items are preserved in the British Museum, by the way), they soon progressed to extended visions of various angels and their insignia - the type of magical work familiar to readers of medieval grimoires:
King Bobogel. He appeared in a black velvet coat; and his hose was close round hose with velvet
upperstocks, overlayed with gold lace. On his head was a velvet cap with a black feather in it. A cape
was hanging on one of his shoulders, and his purse was hanging about his neck. Hung upon his girdle was
a rapier. His beard was long, and he had bloomers and slippers. And he said, I wear these robes not in
respect of myself, but of my Government.
Prince Bornogo. He appeared in a red robe with a gold circlet on his head; he shewed his seal and said:
This it is.
Soon, however, they began to become involved in the work for which they are best remembered: the 19
Angelic Calls. This was a series of verses in an unknown language, which Dee called Angelic, or
Enochian, after the prophet Enoch who was said to have walked in conversation with God. These Calls,
which have been demonstrated to be in a language possessing a real grammar and syntax, not to mention a
poetic flair, were said to be the proper conjurations to be used to directly contact and influence the
angels having control over the affairs of our world. In conjunction with a series of tables of letters
representing those various angelic forces working through the elements of Air, Water, Earth and Fire,
these Calls would enable the magician to do everything from effect cures for diseases to learning the
natures of various metals. In fact, according to the angels, the effect of learning all that they had to
teach would be to bring about the overthrow of governments around the world, the "alteration of most
states and kingdomes in the World," and usher in the apocalypse.
It has been alleged that Dee was simply the gullible dupe of Kelley’s willingness to come up with any plausible-sounding material in order to stay on Dee’s payroll. The facts seem to rule this out rather conclusively. In the first place, there is the matter of Kelley’s ability to produce the material in the manner, amount, and style he did without supernatural help. Kelley was an uninspired writer at best, but the poetry of the Calls is remarkable: Can the wings of the winds understand your voices of wonder? O you, second of the First, Whom the burning flames have framed with the depths of my jaws, whom I have prepared as cups for a wedding or as the flowers in their beauty for the Chamber of Righteousness; stronger are your feet than the barren stone, and mightier are your voices than the manifold winds. for you are become a building such as is not, but in the mind of the all-powerful. Arise, sayeth the First, move therefore unto his servants; show yourselves in power; and make me a strong seething; for I am of him that liveth forever. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that Kelley actually wanted to end the relationship and get away from Dee: some of the messages received were repugnant to Kelley, like this one, strangely prescient of some modern "channeled" work:
They would have persuaded him [Kelley]:
Lastly, there is the way in which the Calls were received. The first five were dictated, one letter at a
time, backwards, by indicating the position of the letter on a large table or chart. The angel would
point to a letter, and Kelley would give Dee the position, leaving Dee to look up which letter it was.
Much of the work was done in just a few days, and the translations were not received until sometime
later, yet the grammar and syntax of the language is intact. Kelley would have had to have been a genius
unlike any the world has seen, to make it all up as he went. Indeed, there’s even a session in which Dee
is warned in Greek, through Kelley, who spoke no Greek, not to trust him. I think we can rule out
deception on Kelley’s part, at least in regard to the Enochian work. His alchemical practices, which
later ended with his death while escaping from a foreign prison, may perhaps be another matter, but
outside the scope of our work today.
Interestingly, there is no evidence that Dee ever actually used any of
the instructions of the angels for magical purposes. He seems to have been solely interested in knowledge and exploration for it’s own sake. He died in 1608, lonely and destitute. After Dee’s death, the manuscripts of his Enochian work had a strange history. During his life, he had at one time tried to burn them, only to find that much of the material mysteriously survived. I espied . . . a sheet of faire white paper lying tossed to and fro in the wind . . . I found three of my Books lying, which were so diligently burnt the tenth day of April last. Towards the end of his life, Dee hid a number of the most important manuscripts in the false bottom of a
cedar chest, where they laid for years after his death. One day, a certain Mr. Jones, who had bought the
chest for his wife, discovered them. About half of them were burnt when the maid lined some pieplates
with them (let’s hope the pies were worth the loss!), and some time later when Mrs. Jones was forced to
flee the great fire of London the chest was lost, yet she somehow discovered the remaining papers among
the effects she had saved. They ended up in the possession of Elias Ashmole, scholar and mystic, who had
already discovered a number of Dee’s diaries elsewhere. Meanwhile, Meric Causabon, another 17th century
scholar, published some additional Dee diaries in his book, A True and Faithful Relation of What
passed for many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee (A Mathematician of Great Fame in Q. Eliz. and King James
their Reignes) and Some Spirits: Tending (had it Succeeded) To a General Alteration of most States and
Kingdomes in the World.
Ashmole and Causabon recognized the importance of Dee’s work in their
preservation and presentation of his writing. Contemporary writings reveal that other occult
experimenters were familiar with some of the material, and their influence on modern occultists is
unprecedented. Enochian turns up in Rosicrucian and Masonic texts and rituals from the 18th Century on.
The next major chapter in the story is the occult explosion of the late
19th Century, a period when occult groups of various kinds proliferated like Spring flowers. One of the
most influential was the celebrated order known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden
Dawn has an interesting and colorful history of its own, which I won’t go into at this time; save to
mention that some of its brightest lights, Dr. Wynn Westcott, the poet W. B. Yeats and Samuel Liddell
Mathers, discovered some of the Dee manuscripts in their research in the British Museum and incorporated
the Enochian system in their occult teaching and rituals. Another member of the Golden Dawn, the famous
magician, poet, mountainclimber and gnostic Aleister
Crowley, studied the Enochian system as presented by the Golden Dawn and used it to great effect in
a series of visionary works published as The Vision and The Voice.
Crowley’s sometime secretary and Golden Dawn reconstructor Francis "Israel" Regardie included much of
the Enochian papers of Westcott, Yeats and Mathers in his revived Golden Dawn material. Circus showman
turned self-proclaimed head of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, incorporates the Calls in his
Satanic Bible, typically, he turns all references to God (literally "The Highest" in Enochian)
to the name "Satan."
Today, Enochian magic is found in such diverse places as the teachings of several of the Golden Dawn offshoots, the Order of the Aurum Solis, Crowley’s Ordo A.'. A.'. , the abovementioned Church of Satan, the pop-occult writings of Gerald and Betty Scheuler, several decks of tarot cards based in part or whole on Enochian material, and the researches of a great many independent occultists and magicians. One of the latter who deserves particular mention is Benjamin Rowe (known to some as Josh Norton, the name he uses in some newsgroups), who has carried his research beyond most of his predecessors into fascinating new fields, as described in a number of his books, particularly his Enochian Temples.
He also received a pseudo-biblical Book of Enoch outlining the history of the knowledge being imparted to him, from God’s conversations with Enoch to His dispatching of the angels to instruct Dee, and outlining the nature of the use of the knowledge: These are the holy and mystical Calls delivered, which followeth in practice for the moving of the Tables that control the Kings and Ministers of government. Their utterance is of force, and moveth them to visible apparition. ... They will open the mysteries of their creation, as far as shall be necessary: and give you understanding of many thousand secrets, wherein you are yet but children. For every Table hath his key, every key openeth his gate, and every gate being opened, giveth knowledge of himself, of the entrance, and of the mysteries of those things whereof his is an enclosure. Within these Palaces you shall find things that are of power. For every Palace is above his City and every City above his entrance. In these keys which we deliver, are the mysteries and secret beings and effects of all things moving, and moved within the world. And... The Call of the Thirty Aires summons the 91 Princes and spiritual Governors unto whom the earth is delivered as a portion. They bring in and depose kings and all governments upon the earth, and they vary the natures of things with the variation of every moment. Unto them, the providence of the aeternal judgement is already opened. And...
The Great Table of the Quarters containeth the following:
There were other revelations as well: a chart relating the 12 Tribes of Israel to 12 gates, related
somehow to the Tables, as mentioned above, and another relating the 4 triple names of God, extracted
from the elemental tablets, to the four cardinal directions.
Now, lastly, we come the what many consider the very heart of the
Enochian system, the Elemental tablets and the Thirty Aires or Aethyrs, and the 19 Calls or Keys to
access them.
The angels transmitted to Dee and Kelley a number of Calls or
invocations in a previously unknown language (barring any myths about the prophet Enoch) which Dee
dubbed "Angelic, or Enochian." Of these Calls, which sound more like prose poems than what we usually
think of as invocations, the first eighteen are the Keys to the Elemental Tablets, enabling the user -so
Dee was told- to command the angels in charge of various fields of our life, from medicine to metallurgy
to discovering other men’s secrets. The nineteenth Call gives the user access to the thirty "Aires,
or Aethyrs." These are seen as a series of concentric spheres surrounding the material universe, of
increasing spirituality from TEX, the closest to our world, to LIL,
that closest to the surface of this hypothetical cosmic onion. Each also contains a number of "Governors"
of the parts of the physical world, which is seen as being divided by God into 91 geographical areas.
The vast majority of those who have experimented with Dee’s body of work have concentrated on the Keys, Tablets and Aethyrs. The magicians who introduced Enochian magick into the Golden Dawn’s rituals focussed mainly upon the elemental tablets, especially the divine names of the four quarters; though some experimented with scrying or visiting with the astral sight either the Aethyrs or areas of the elemental tablets. Aleister Crowley crossed the Sahara Desert on foot, successively visiting each of the thirty Aethyrs. Gerald and Betty Scheuler commissioned priestess and artist Sallie Ann Glassman to illustrate an Enochian tarot deck based on Crowley’s descriptions of his visions as published in his book, The Vision and The Voice. The Order of the Aurum Solis includes the Keys, Tablets and Aethyrs in their curriculum. Benjamin Rowe, a contemporary magician and author, started out by systematically visiting the sections of the Earth Square of the Elemental Tablet, and has gone on to outline whole new vistas of Enochian magick, previously unknown, but fitting in perfectly with the work of his predecessors. One of these revelations consists of a system of visualizing the tablet squares as building blocks of a four-dimensional temple which one erects in the astral and to which one can then return when needed. And it seems that almost every day we can pick up a journal or newsletter of some magick-oriented group and read a record of someone’s scrying session to the 17th Aethyr, or of their conversation with the angel Idoigo. Enochian even turns up in recordings - check out Israel Regardie reading the First Call on Ministry’s "Golden Dawn" from the Land of Rape and Honey CD - and in books, like this quote from John Crowley (author of Little, Big and no relation to Uncle Al) in Aegypt:
"See!" said one of the two men. "Listen!"
"I see nothing," said the other, the elder of them, who had often spent
fruitless hours alone before this very showstone, fruitless though he prepared himself with long prayer
and intense concentration: "I see nothing. I hear nothing."
"Annael. And Annochor. And Anilos. And Agobel, said the younger man. God
keep us and protect us from every harm."
The stone they looked into was a globe of moleskin-colored quartz the size of a fist, and the skryer who
looked into it came so close to it that his nose nearly touched it, and his eyes crossed; he lifted his
hands up to it, enclosing it as a man might enclose a fluttering candle-flame, to keep it steady.
They had been at work not a quarter of an hour before the stone when the
first creature appeared: their soft prayers and invocations had ceased, and for a time the only sound
was the rattle of the mullions is a hard March wind that filled up the night. When the younger of them,
Mr. Talbot, who knelt before the stone, began to tremble as though with cold, the other hugged his
shoulder to still him; and when the shivering had not ceased, he had risen to stir the fire, and it was
just then that the skryer said: "Look, Here is one. Here is another."
Doctor Dee - the older man, whose stone it was - turned back from the
fire. He felt a quick shiver, the hair rose on his neck, and a warmth started in his breastbone. He
stood still, looking to where the candle flame glittered doubly, on the surface of the glass and in its
depths. He felt the breaths in the room of the wind that blew outside, and heard its soft hoot in the
chimney.
But he saw nothing, no one, in his gray glass.
"Do you tell me," he said softly, "and I will write what you say."
He put down the poker, and snatched up an old pen and dipped it. At the top of a paper he scribbled the date: March 8th, 1582.
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Dr. John Dee was born, according to the horoscope he himself drew up, on July 13, 1527. By the time of
his experiments with Edward Kelley in the 1580's, he had earned a reputation as a scientist, astronomer,
cartographer, cryptologist, secret agent (he signed his secret messages to the Queen "007"),
astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, and sorcerer. He had been imprisoned by Bloody Mary, exalted by
Elizabeth, attacked as a black magician, conned by sleazy mediums and singled out by Angels to receive
knowledge lost since the time of the prophet Enoch. Despite the whispers of the ignorant, Dee was solely
concerned with obtaining knowledge from God or his delegates, and constantly took measures designed to
avoid being deceived by demonic forces: 
In the beginning, the angelic sessions pretty much fit the standard pattern of medieval magical ideas,
with a mage in consecrated robes and a ring of power commanding planetary spirits to obedience. In fact,
the table they commanded him to make had magick squares inscribed with spirits’ names some of whom we
see listed in such works as the Key of Solomon. This is perhaps not unexpected - it is apparent that
each person’s visions are couched in terms appropriate to their particular worldview and personal
psychological makeup. Thus the Christian sees Jesus or the God of the Bible, the Buddhist might converse
with Amitabha, the Wiccan with Herne and the Lady, and the Elizabethan magician conjure to visible
appearance Buer and Asmodeus. These early sessions included many revelations of magic squares filled
with intersecting angelic names -don’t forget Dee was a cryptographer- and complex instructions for
extracting them. We’ll run into this concept again when we come to the so-called Governors of the
Aethyrs in a bit. There were engraved cedar tables standing upon glass "insulators" that held wax
images of the Sigil Dei Aemeth [NOTE: This sigil, and a number of the images mentioned below,
There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line
like an alderman at the Lord Mayor’s show. None was dressed in white; some wore fillets or wreaths of
flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; all their eyes were strangely gay. They kept pressing in
by one and two, always room for more, they linked arms or clasped their hands behind them, they looked
out smiling at the two mortals who looked in at them. All their names began with A.