The Enochian language and the Angelic Keys of Kraków

An alphabet on its own does not make a language. What makes the Enochian case unique is that, besides the letters, John Dee's diaries preserve long and articulated texts, with a word-by-word English translation. These texts, which Dee called Claves Angelicae, that is, Angelic Keys, were received for the most part in 1584 in Kraków, during the long journey of Dee and Kelley through central Europe.

The journey to Poland and Bohemia

In 1583 Dee left England with Kelley and their families, in the retinue of the Polish nobleman Olbracht Łaski. The group stayed in Poland and then in Bohemia, where it hoped to win the favour of the Emperor Rudolf II, a great patron of alchemists and astrologers. It was during this period that Kelley reported receiving the Keys, dictated according to the diaries in an unusual way: first backwards, letter by letter, and only afterwards in order.

The Keys are nineteen poetic texts of solemn and apocalyptic tone. The last, the nineteenth, is repeated with small variants for each of the thirty Aethyrs, that is, the regions or heavens of the Enochian system. In Dee's reckoning, which speaks of forty-eight Keys, the first was considered so sacred that it could not be revealed. The names of the Aethyrs, such as LIL, ARN or ZOM, are short three-letter words that recur in the diaries and that later readers interpreted as levels of a progressive vision.

A language with a grammar

The first text communicated begins with the words Ol sonf vorsg, translated by Dee as I reign over you. This phrase alone shows that Enochian has its own vocabulary and a recognisable syntactic structure. Scholars who have analysed the corpus have identified verb forms, pronouns, suffixes and rules that recur with a certain consistency, even though the lexicon is limited to a few hundred words.

At the same time, many linguists have observed that Enochian syntax closely follows that of English, and that its sounds are those familiar to a sixteenth-century English speaker. For this reason most specialists regard Enochian as a constructed language, the conscious or unconscious product of the sessions, rather than a natural one. The question nonetheless remains open to different interpretations.

The language of Adam

For John Dee the stakes were very high. Like many scholars of his time, he believed that before the Tower of Babel humanity spoke a perfect language, the same one with which Adam had named the creatures. Recovering that language meant drawing closer to direct knowledge of nature and of God. The angels in the diaries present Enochian precisely as the language Adam spoke in the earthly Paradise.

In the twentieth century the Keys were taken up by various authors on occultism, who altered their pronunciation and use, and today they circulate in numerous versions. Comparison with the manuscripts, however, shows how far those versions have drifted from Dee's text. Anyone wishing to know Enochian in the form closest to the original must therefore go back to the diaries, which from the seventeenth century onwards have been transcribed and studied by numerous scholars.

The Enochian language is one of the oldest European examples of a constructed language with such rich documentation. Whether one regards it as revelation, invention or enigma, it remains an extraordinary testimony to the Renaissance dream of recovering the word of the beginnings. It is also a human document: the portrait of two men who, for years, searched the crystal for an answer to questions that books could no longer answer.