Enochian · History
The conferences
Everything in this section comes out of the sessions held between 1581 and 1607, in which Edward Kelley reported what he saw in a shewstone and John Dee wrote it down. This page is about that record: how it was made, what became of it, and what of it can be checked today.
John Dee
Mathematician, astrologer, navigator and adviser to Elizabeth I, whose attempts to speak with angels produced what modern occultists call Enochian magic.
From the 1580s especially, he attempted contact with angels through crystal-gazing mediums, most famously Edward Kelley. The two travelled through Poland and Bohemia (modern Czechia) seeking aristocratic patronage while continuing with their sessions. Dee later returned to England, served as warden of Christ's College in Manchester, and spent his final years at Mortlake.
Historically he was both a scientist by the standards of his time and a serious practitioner of angelic magic, and his later reputation has swung between the two rather than holding both.
What is not settled. His exact date of death is uncertain, largely because Mortlake’s parish register for the period and his original gravestone haven’t survived. He’s generally believed to have died at Mortlake in late 1608 or early 1609, although December 1608 is the traditional date. His final years were marked by poverty, bereavement, and declining influence.
1527 to probably 1608 or early 1609. His place in the chronology carries the rest of his work, most of which has nothing to do with angels: Propaedeumata Aphoristica, Monas Hieroglyphica, Mathematical Preface to Euclid, and Spiritual and angelic diaries.
The record, and what happened to it
Dee's session-by-session record of what Kelley reported seeing and hearing in the shewstone: the twenty-one letters, the tables of Loagaeth, the forty-eight Claves Angelicae with English beside them, and the figures the sessions specified. Most of it stayed in manuscript; one late portion was printed, hostilely, in 1659.
The whole Enochian corpus comes from these sessions. Every later system — the Golden Dawn's, Crowley's — is a reading of this record.
The manuscripts are scattered (Sloane 3188, 3189, 3191 and others) and no single edition prints them all. Casaubon's 1659 printing covers only part of the sessions and was published to discredit Dee, not to preserve him; the earlier books were printed only in the twentieth century, in editions still in copyright.
Where it can be read
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A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits
edited by Meric Casaubon
1659
· Read at archive.org ↗
London, 1659. Public domain. Casaubon prints the later sessions from the manuscripts and prefaces them with an argument that Dee was deceived by devils, which is why the book exists at all.
What the record says, and where
Each of these is quoted from the Wellcome Collection's scan of the 1659 printing, at the leaf its citation names, with the long s normalised. The printed page numbers do not survive that book's scan reliably; a leaf is something you can open.
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contested nineteen Calls, or eighteen besides the first of Spiritual and angelic diaries
The count is disputed inside the session itself: one line answers that there are but eighteen besides the first to God, and the next that there are nineteen besides the first. Forty-eight is the number usually given for the Keys, and it is not the number this passage argues about.
The spiritual diaries of John Dee , A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits — 1659 edition, Wellcome scan leaf 290“these nineteen Calls … are the Calls, or entrances into the Knowledge of the mystical Tables: Every Table containing one whole leaf, whereunto you need no other circumstances.”
Read off https://archive.org/details/b30324282_0002/page/n290. Long s normalised; the ellipsis marks where the OCR of this line is unreadable. The angel speaking is Illemese.
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traditional the four Angels of the Earth on The four Watchtowers
The exposition of the vision of the four houses, which is what the plate draws.
The spiritual diaries of John Dee , A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits — 1659 edition, Wellcome scan leaf 261“The 4 houses, are the 4 Angels of the Earth, which are the 4 Overseers, and Watch-towers, that the eternal God in his providence hath placed, against the usurping blasphemy, misrule, and stealth of the wicked and great enemy, the Devil.”
Read off https://archive.org/details/b30324282_0002/page/n261, long s normalised. The marginal note beside it reads "4 Angeli Terrae".
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traditional 49 Tables and 49 Calls of Spiritual and angelic diaries
The 1659 contents page prints the promise of the tables against pages 76 and 77, which is the printed locator this section can verify; the session itself is on those pages.
The spiritual diaries of John Dee , A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits — 1659 edition, contents, entries XLII–XLIII (pp. 76–77)“Great mysteries promised. 49 Tables. 49 Calls, &c. Their virtue.”
Read off the contents page, https://archive.org/details/b30324282_0002/page/n85. The contents is where a printed page number survives the OCR.
Afterwards
The material was taken up again three centuries later: the Golden Dawn built rituals on the tables and the Calls, and Aleister Crowley worked from those. This section does not follow that line, because what it would be following is the order's reading of Dee rather than Dee — the rituals section is where the Golden Dawn's own material is kept, with its own sources.