Enochian

John Dee (pictured) recorded the Enochian corpus in his journals with the assistance of Edward Kelley as his scryer and collaborator.

According to Tobias Churton in his text The Golden Builders,[7] the concept of an Angelic or antediluvian language was common during Dee's time. If one could speak the language of angels, it was believed one could directly interact with them.

The language was recorded primarily in Latin script, however, individual words written in Enochian script "appear sporadically throughout the manuscripts".[13] There are 21 letters in the script; one letter appears with or without a diacritic dot. Dee mapped these letters of the "Adamical alphabet" onto 22 of the letters of the English alphabet, treating U and V as positional variants (as was common at the time) and omitting the English letters J, K, and W.[lower-alpha 2] The Enochian script is written from right to left in John Dee's diary.[14] Different documents have slightly different forms of the script. The alphabet also shares many graphical similarities to a script, also attributed to the prophet Enoch, that appeared in the Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam of Johannes Pantheus,[15] a copy of which Dee is known to have owned.[13]

The phonology of Enochian is "thoroughly English", apart from difficult sequences such as bdrios, excolphabmartbh, longamphlg, lapch, etc.[16] Similarly, Enochian orthography closely follows Early Modern English orthography, for example in having soft and hard ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩, and in using digraphs ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨sh⟩, and ⟨th⟩ for the sounds /tʃ ~ k/, /f/, /ʃ/, and /θ/.[17] Laycock mapped Enochian orthography to its sound system and says, "the resulting pronunciation makes it sound much more like English than it looks at first sight".[18][lower-alpha 3] However, the difficult strings of consonants and vowels in words such as ooaona, paombd, smnad and noncf are the kind of pattern one gets by joining letters from a text together in an arbitrary pattern. As Laycok notes, "The reader can test this by taking, for example, every tenth letter on this page, and dividing the string of letters into words. The 'text' created will tend to look rather like Enochian."[19]

Alphabet

The Enochian letters, with their letter names and English equivalents as given by Dee, and pronunciations as reconstructed by Laycock, are as follows.[lower-alpha 2] Modern pronunciation conventions vary, depending on the affiliations of the practitioner.[lower-alpha 4]

Letter	Letter name	English equivalent	Enochian phonology[20]	Golden Dawn syllabic reading[21][lower-greek 1]
	Un	A	long [ɑː] (stressed), short [a] (unstressed)	[ɑː]
	Pa	B	[b]; silent after m when before another consonant or final	[beɪ]
	Veh	C	[k] before a, o, u; [s] before e, i and in consonant clusters, with many exceptions; ⟨ch⟩ as [k] in most positions but [tʃ] finally.	?
	Gal	D	[d]	[deɪ]
	Graph	E	[eː] (stressed), [ɛ] (unstressed)	[eɪ]
	Or	F	[f]	[ɛf]
	Ged	G	[ɡ] before a, o, u; [dʒ] before e, i, finally, after d, and in consonant clusters.	?
	Na	H	[h] except in ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨sh⟩, ⟨th⟩; silent after a vowel (in which case the vowel is "lengthened" – that is, has the sound it would have if stressed)	[heɪ]
	Gon	I	[j] word-initially before a vowel; as a vowel: [iː] (stressed), [ɪ] (unstressed), plus diphthongs ai [aɪ], ei [eɪ], oi [oɪ]	[iː]
		Y	[j]	(same as I)
	Ur	L	[l]	?
	Tal	M	[m]	[ɛm]
	Drux	N	[n]	[ɛn], [nuː]
	Med	O	[oː] (stressed), [ɒ] (unstressed)	[oʊ]
	Mals	P	[p] but for ⟨ph⟩, which is [f]	[peɪ]
	Ger	Q	[kw]; the word q is [kwɑː]	?
	Don	R	[r]	[ɑː(r)], [rɑː]
	Fam	S	[s] or [z] as would be natural in English, but for ⟨sh⟩, which is [ʃ]	[ɛs]
	Gisg	T	[t] but for ⟨th⟩, which is [θ]	[teɪ]
	Van	U/V	[uː] (stressed) or [ʊ] (unstressed); [juː] in initial position; [v] or [w] before another vowel and word-finally	?
	Pal	X	[ks]	[ɛks]
	Ceph	Z	[z], rarely [zɒd]	[zɒd]

A number of fonts for the Enochian script are available. They use the ASCII range, with the letters assigned to the codepoints of their English equivalents.[22][23][24][25]

Laycock notes that there are about 250 different words in the corpus of Enochian texts, more than half of which occur only once. A few resemble words in the Bible – mostly proper names – in both sound and meaning. For example, luciftias "brightness" resembles Lucifer "the light-bearer"; babalond "wicked, harlot" resembles Babylon.[6] Leitch notes a number of root words in Enochian. He lists Doh, I, Ia, Iad, among others, as likely root words.[35] While the Angelic Keys contain most of the known vocabulary of Enochian, dozens of further words are found throughout Dee's journals.

Thousands of additional, undefined words are contained in the Liber Loagaeth. Laycock notes that the material in Liber Loagaeth appears to be different from the language of the 'Calls' found in the Angelic Keys, which appear to have been generated from the tables and squares of the Loagaeth.[5] According to Laycock:

The texts in the Loagaeth show patterning "characteristically found in certain types of meaningless language (such as glossolalia), which is often produced under conditions similar to trance. In other words, Kelley may have been 'speaking in tongues'. [...] there is no evidence that these early invocations are any form of 'language' [...] at all.[36]

The number system is inexplicable. It seems possible to identify the numerals from 0 to 10:[39]

• 0 – T
• 1 – L, EL, L-O, ELO, LA, LI, LIL
• 2 – V, VI-I-V, VI-VI
• 3 – D, R
• 4 – S, ES
• 5 – O
• 6 – N, NORZ
• 7 – Q
• 8 – P
• 9 – M, EM
• 10 – X

However, Enochian texts contain larger numbers written in alphabetical form, and there is no discernible system behind them:[39]

As Laycock put it, "the test of any future spirit-revelation of the Enochian language will be the explanation of this numerical system."[39]

Dee believed Enochian to be the Adamic language universally spoken before the confusion of tongues. However, modern analysis shows Enochian to be an English-like constructed language.[3] Word order closely follows English, except for the dearth of articles and prepositions.[5] The very scant evidence of Enochian verb conjugation is likewise reminiscent of English, more so than with Semitic languages such as Hebrew, which Dee said were debased versions of the Enochian language.[5]

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