Enochian · Overview

Enochian

From 1581 John Dee — mathematician, navigator's tutor, and an astrologer to Queen Elizabeth's court — kept a record of sessions in which Edward Kelley reported what he saw in a shewstone. Out of these came the Enochian alphabet of twenty-one letters, a set of tables, and verses with English translations beside them that Dee called the Claves Angelicae.

Most of what survives was printed once, badly and late: Meric Casaubon's A True & Faithful Relation of 1659, which he published to discredit Dee rather than to preserve him. The rest stayed in manuscript. This section carries what can be checked against those pages, and names what cannot.

The script, the words, the figures

  • Alphabet All 21 letters, with what each answers to in English — and a box that writes what you type in them.
  • Glossary 4 words, each with a gloss and somewhere to check it. Deliberately not a dictionary.
  • Figures 6 plates from the diaries and the 1659 edition, reproduced from public-domain originals.

What this section does not have

No dictionary. The vocabulary runs to roughly two hundred and fifty words and over half of these only occur exactly once. There is no public-domain text of the Keys — the 1659 edition's scan renders a page as ableto conſider and then noise — and the one full word index in print is a modern editor's copyrighted work, which records where words occur without saying what they mean. So words arrive here one at a time, with a locator, or not at all.

No Great Table. The four elemental tablets are grids of twelve letters by thirteen. They are not in the 1659 edition — a pass over all four hundred and ninety-six leaves turns up no letter grid, and the quadrant names survive its scan only in half — and the transcriptions that do print them are a modern editor's editions of Sloane MS 3191. What is here instead is Dee's own diagram of the four Watchtowers as a camp, which 1659 does print. A grid of invented letters would look exactly as convincing as a real one, which is precisely why there isn't one.

No translator. The alphabet page writes English letters in Dee's script. That is a change of script and nothing more: there is no grammar to translate with, and a machine that produced Enochian sentences would be composing them.