The Enochian alphabet of John Dee and Edward Kelley

In the spring of 1583, in the house at Mortlake on the Thames, the mathematician and astrologer John Dee carefully recorded the words his collaborator Edward Kelley claimed to hear from the angels. Among these revelations was an alphabet of twenty-one letters, which Dee called the angelic language and which would later become known as Enochian. It is one of the best documented esoteric alphabets, because the diaries of the sessions largely survive.

Two men and a stone

John Dee, born in London in 1527, was one of the most respected intellectuals of Elizabethan England: mathematician, geographer, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I and owner of one of the largest private libraries in the country. He died in poverty in 1608 or 1609. Edward Kelley, younger than him, entered his life in 1582 as a scryer, that is, a seer able to see figures in a stone or a mirror.

The sessions followed a precise routine: Kelley gazed into a crystal sphere or a polished disc, described what he saw and repeated the words of the spirits, while Dee wrote. The diaries feature angelic figures such as Uriel, Michael and Raphael, and a child-like being called Madimi. Historians still debate Kelley's role: deliberate deception, suggestion or sincere conviction. The sources allow us to describe the sessions, not to solve the riddle.

The twenty-one letters

The Enochian alphabet has twenty-one letters, each with its own name and a phonetic value close to the Latin one. The names handed down include Un, Pa, Veh, Gal, Graph, Or, Ged, Na, Gon, Ur, Tal, Drux, Med, Mals, Ger, Don, Fam, Gisg, Van, Pal and Ceph. The letters are written from right to left and have shapes that do not clearly derive from any known alphabet, although some scholars have seen in them echoes of Hebrew or earlier magical scripts.

According to the diaries, the letters were shown to Kelley as yellow figures on a transparent ground, and Dee copied them out with care. They were used to write the Liber Loagaeth, a book made up of large tables of letters, and later the texts of the invocations dictated by the angels. The Liber Loagaeth, also called the Book of Enoch because the angels linked it to the biblical patriarch taken up into heaven, contains pages packed with letters arranged in grids, whose meaning remained obscure even to Dee himself.

The manuscripts and the first publication

Dee's papers had an adventurous history. Part of them was found in the seventeenth century hidden in a chest, and today most of the material is kept in the British Library, above all in the Sloane collection. In 1659 the scholar Meric Casaubon published a selection of the diaries under the title A True and Faithful Relation, with the declared aim of showing that Dee had been deceived by evil spirits. Paradoxically, it was precisely that book that made Enochian known to a wide public.

In the nineteenth century the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888, reworked the Enochian material and incorporated it into its own ritual system, giving it a circulation that continues to this day. Many modern versions of the letters derive from those reworkings rather than from the original manuscripts. The very name Enochian, moreover, is not Dee's: it became established later, from the link with Enoch suggested in the diaries.

The Enochian alphabet remains a singular historical object: a writing system whose place, years and protagonists at birth we know precisely, but not its true origin. For Dee it was the language of the angels; for the historian it is a precious document of the culture and anxieties of a great Renaissance intellectual.