Enochian Magic and Language: Dee, Kelley and the Angelic Keys

Quick answer: Enochian is the name given to the angelic language and system of magic that the Elizabethan scholar John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley recorded between 1582 and 1589. Dee believed angels were dictating a lost celestial tongue, a twenty-one letter alphabet, forty-eight invocations called Keys or Calls, and a set of lettered tables known as the Watchtowers. The material sat in manuscripts for centuries before the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley turned it into a working occult system.

Related guides: John Dee, the Elizabethan magus, what the occult actually means, famous grimoires and how to read them, Hermeticism and Renaissance magic, the 72 angels of the Shem HaMephorash, sigils, seals and magical signatures.

What Is Enochian? The Angelic Language of Dee and Kelley

Enochian is the modern name for a language, an alphabet and a body of magical material that John Dee (1527–1608 or 1609) recorded in his private diaries from 1582 onward. Dee was a mathematician, court astrologer to Elizabeth I and one of the most learned men in England. Frustrated by the limits of books, he turned to scrying, the practice of seeing visions in a polished stone or mirror. Dee could not see anything himself, so he employed a series of scryers, the most important of whom was Edward Kelley (1555–1597), a man of doubtful reputation who joined him in March 1582.

Over the next seven years Kelley reported visions of angels, and Dee wrote down everything they said. The angels, according to these records, taught a language they called the speech of God or the primal tongue, spoken by Adam and known to the patriarch Enoch before being lost. Dee referred to it as the angelic or Adamic language. The word “Enochian” was applied later, by nineteenth-century occultists, and has stuck.

The core of the system is a twenty-one letter alphabet, a vocabulary of several hundred words, and forty-eight long invocations known as the Keys or Calls. Around these sit tables of letters from which the names of angels are extracted, a scheme of seven planetary kings called the Heptarchia, and a cosmology of thirty regions called Aethyrs. The full story of the man behind the records is told in our profile of John Dee.

How the Enochian Material Was Received, 1582–1589

The sessions, which Dee called “actions,” began at his house in Mortlake near London in 1582. The first results were the Sigillum Dei Aemeth, a wax disc engraved with names and numbers to be placed beneath the shew-stone, and the Heptarchia Mystica, a system of forty-nine angelic kings and princes assigned to the days of the week. In 1583 the angels dictated Liber Loagaeth, forty-nine folios of dense letter squares, which Dee regarded as the book of a new revelation.

In September 1583 Dee, Kelley and their families left England with the Polish nobleman Albert Łaski and traveled through the Netherlands and Germany to Kraków. There, between April and July 1584, the angels delivered the forty-eight Keys. The method was slow: Kelley saw letters pointed out on a table in the stone, one at a time, often dictated backward because the angels said the words were too powerful to be spoken forward. Dee then produced English translations supplied by the angels themselves.

Later in 1584 in Kraków the Great Table or Watchtowers were received, four square tablets of letters attributed to the four elements. The party moved to Prague, then to Třeboň in Bohemia under the patronage of Vilém of Rožmberk. In 1587 the angels delivered a revised Great Table and, notoriously, an instruction that Dee and Kelley should share wives, which strained the partnership. Kelley left in 1589; Dee returned to England the same year and the angelic actions effectively ended.

The Enochian Alphabet and Language

The Enochian alphabet has twenty-one letters, each with a name such as Pa, Veh, Ged and Gal, and each corresponding to one or more English letters. The script runs right to left in Dee’s manuscripts, though modern users often write it left to right. The letterforms are angular and unlike any known script, though some scholars see resemblances to earlier magical alphabets printed in Agrippa and in the Theban script of Trithemius.

The language itself has attracted serious attention from linguists. Donald Laycock, an Australian linguist, analyzed the corpus in the 1970s and concluded that Enochian has a real vocabulary with some internal consistency but that its grammar closely follows English word order, with few inflections and a tendency to translate English phrases word for word. The earlier Loagaeth material is largely untranslatable strings of letters, while the Keys contain coherent sentences. Laycock’s view was that the Keys show signs of being composed rather than being a natural language, though how and by whom remains debated.

Pronunciation is a modern reconstruction. Dee left some phonetic notes, and the Golden Dawn later invented a system that inserts vowels between consonants, producing the long chanted sounds heard in ceremonial recordings today. That style is a nineteenth-century addition, not something Dee described.

The Forty-Eight Keys, the Watchtowers and the Thirty Aethyrs

The Keys are the heart of Enochian magic as later practitioners understood it. Tradition holds that there are forty-eight because a forty-ninth was withheld as too holy to deliver.

The first eighteen Keys

These are long invocations in a prophetic, apocalyptic register, calling on the powers of the elements and the governors of the Watchtowers. The first two are generally treated as introductory, and the remaining sixteen are assigned by later systems to the four tablets and their subdivisions.

The nineteenth Key and the Aethyrs

The nineteenth Key is a single text with a blank in which one of thirty names is inserted. Each name denotes an Aethyr, a region of a visionary cosmos arranged in concentric layers from the outermost, TEX, to the innermost, LIL. Dee received the names and the ninety-one governors of these Aethyrs but explored them little himself.

The Great Table and the Watchtowers

The Great Table is a grid of letters divided into four Watchtowers attributed to east, west, north and south and to air, water, earth and fire, joined by a small central tablet. Names of angels, kings and seniors are read from its rows, columns and crosses. Dee’s diaries record a reformed version in 1587 that reorders the tablets.

The Heptarchia and Sigillum

These earlier components, with their planetary kings and the elaborate wax seal, are less used today but are the parts Dee himself valued most. They connect Enochian to the older angel-magic of texts like the Heptameron.

From Manuscript to Occult System: Casaubon, the Golden Dawn and Crowley

Dee’s angelic diaries were never published in his lifetime. After his death some passed to the collector Robert Cotton, and in 1659 the scholar Meric Casaubon printed a large portion as A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, intending it as a warning against delusion. Other manuscripts were found hidden in a chest and eventually reached the British Museum through Elias Ashmole and Hans Sloane; they are now in the British Library as the Sloane and Cotton manuscripts.

The material lay dormant until the late nineteenth century, when the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built an elaborate Enochian system into its advanced grades. The order’s founders combined Dee’s tablets with the Tarot, astrology, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and their own colored pyramids and “Enochian chess.” Much of what is called Enochian magic today is this Golden Dawn synthesis, which goes well beyond anything in Dee’s notes.

Aleister Crowley took it further. In 1900 and again in 1909, in the Algerian desert with Victor Neuburg, he worked through the Thirty Aethyrs using the nineteenth Key and recorded his visions in The Vision and the Voice. Later twentieth-century groups, from Thelemic orders to the Church of Satan, which included Enochian Keys in its 1969 Satanic Bible, adapted the texts again. Each layer should be read as a reinterpretation rather than a recovery of Dee’s original project.

Common Misunderstandings About Enochian

Because the subject passed through so many hands, several claims circulate that the sources do not support.

• “Enochian is the language of the Book of Enoch.” The Ethiopic Book of Enoch was unknown in Europe until the eighteenth century. Dee knew only the name Enoch from Genesis and later legend; the two have no textual connection.
• “Dee called it Enochian.” He did not. He spoke of the angelic or Adamic language. The label was popularized by the Golden Dawn.
• “Enochian is a complete natural language.” The corpus is small, and its grammar mirrors English. It is better described as a constructed or received vocabulary with partial grammar.
• “The Keys are a dangerous summoning formula.” They are prayers and proclamations in a visionary style. Later occultists built rituals around them; the texts themselves contain no instructions for binding spirits.
• “Kelley simply faked it.” Possibly, and many historians lean that way, but the system’s internal complexity and Dee’s meticulous records make a simple hoax harder to prove than it sounds. The honest position is uncertainty.

For a wider look at how Renaissance thinkers understood angel magic, see our explainer on what the occult means.

Why People Search for Enochian Today

Enochian has a strong presence in popular culture, which drives much of the curiosity. The television series Supernatural used “Enochian” as the language of its angels and for warding sigils, giving the word a wide audience. Video games, horror films and metal albums use the script for atmosphere. None of these uses has much to do with Dee’s tables, but they send readers looking for the original.

A second audience is practitioners of ceremonial magic, for whom Enochian remains one of the most demanding systems in the Western tradition. A third is historians and linguists interested in Dee as a figure at the meeting point of science, religion and magic in the sixteenth century.

What unites these groups is the strangeness of the material. A respected scientist spent seven years transcribing a language from a crystal, and the result is coherent enough to analyze and strange enough to resist explanation. That tension keeps the subject alive.

How to Read the Enochian Sources

Readers who want the original rather than later reconstructions should start with Dee’s own diaries. The first five books of mystery, covering 1581 to 1583, have been edited and published in modern English editions; Casaubon’s 1659 True and Faithful Relation covers 1583 to 1587 and is available in facsimile. Joseph Peterson’s edition of the Heptarchia and the Keys, and the online transcriptions of the Sloane manuscripts, give direct access to the tables.

When reading a modern Enochian book, check whether it distinguishes Dee’s material from Golden Dawn additions. Colored tablets, elemental pyramids, Tarot attributions and chess boards are nineteenth-century. The twenty-one letters, the Keys with their English translations, the Great Table in its 1584 and 1587 forms, and the Heptarchia are sixteenth-century. Pronunciation guides are almost always modern.

This site describes Enochian as a historical and cultural phenomenon. It does not provide ritual instructions, and it makes no claim that any invocation produces results. Approached as a document, Enochian offers something rarer than magic: a detailed record of how a brilliant mind in the 1580s tried to speak with heaven, and what it believed it heard. Readers interested in the broader manuscript tradition can continue with our guide to famous grimoires.

Disclaimer

This article presents Enochian as a historical and cultural subject drawn from John Dee's manuscripts and later occult literature. The beliefs described are not endorsed, no ritual instructions are provided, and no claim is made that any practice produces results.