Enochian: The 'Angelic' Language John Dee Invented

Enochian is the name given to an "angelic language" recorded by Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley during scrying sessions in the 1580s. Dee was Queen Elizabeth I's court astronomer, astrologer, and advisor. Kelley was a spirit medium who claimed to see and hear angels through a crystal ball. Together they produced a body of material that includes 19 prayers called "Calls," an alphabet of 21 letters, and a vocabulary of roughly 1,000 words.

Unlike most fictional languages, Enochian is not a modern invention. It is a historical constructed language with primary documentary evidence. Dee's diaries and manuscripts survive in the British Library, where scholars can read the original texts and examine the handwriting of both men. The material was produced between 1582 and 1587, and it has been studied by historians of magic, linguists, and occult practitioners for over 400 years.

If you want to experiment with the script, our Enochian Translator converts English text into the Enochian alphabet. The translator handles the letter substitution. It does not produce grammatical Enochian sentences, because the grammar of Enochian is incomplete and disputed, as the surviving manuscripts do not contain enough text to reconstruct a full syntax.

John Dee (1527-1608) was one of the most educated men in Elizabethan England. He studied at the University of Cambridge and lectured in Paris on Euclidean geometry in his early twenties. He built one of the largest private libraries in Europe, containing approximately 4,000 books at its peak. Queen Elizabeth I appointed him as her advisor on astrological and mathematical matters, and he was responsible for selecting auspicious dates for the coronation according to Wikipedia's biography of John Dee.

Dee's interests extended beyond mathematics and astronomy into what we now call the occult. He believed that knowledge of the natural world could be supplemented by direct communication with angels, who would reveal hidden truths about the universe. To pursue this, he needed a scryer, someone who could see visions in reflective surfaces and relay what the angels said. Dee tried several scryers before partnering with Edward Kelley in 1582.

Edward Kelley (1555-1597) was a controversial figure. He had been convicted of counterfeiting in Lancaster and had his ears cropped as punishment, a common penalty for forgery in the 16th century. He claimed to possess a red powder that could transmute base metals into gold. He also claimed the ability to see angels in a crystal ball, which he called a "showstone." Whether Kelley was a genuine believer, a con artist, or some combination of both is still debated by historians. What is certain is that Dee trusted Kelley's visions completely and recorded them in meticulous detail.

Dee and Kelley conducted their scrying sessions at Dee's house in Mortlake, near London, and later in continental Europe after they left England in 1583. The sessions followed a consistent format. Kelley would sit at a table with the showstone and describe what he saw. Dee sat nearby with his diaries and recorded everything Kelley said, including the angels' names, the text they dictated, and the instructions they gave.

The angels communicated through Kelley in English, but they also dictated text in a language that Kelley said was the language spoken by Adam and the patriarchs before the Fall. Dee called this language "Enochian" after the biblical figure Enoch, who was said to have walked with God. The name is Dee's label. The angels themselves referred to it by other names in the sessions.

The Enochian alphabet was revealed to Kelley over several sessions between 1582 and 1587. According to the surviving diaries, the angels showed Kelley a grid of letters, and Kelley copied them down. The alphabet has 21 letters, written from right to left in some contexts and left to right in others, depending on the specific text. The letters do not correspond exactly to the English alphabet. Some represent sounds that do not map cleanly to Latin letters.

The sessions produced 19 "Calls" or "Keys," which are prayers or invocations in the Enochian language. Each Call is a complete text with its own Enochian script and an English translation that Kelley provided from the angels' dictation. The Calls are numbered 1 through 19, with the first Call being the longest and most complex. The Wikipedia article on Enochian provides an overview of the Calls and their structure, but the primary sources are Dee's own manuscripts.

The 19 Calls are the core textual corpus of Enochian. They range from a few sentences to several paragraphs. The first Call, for example, begins with the phrase "Ol sonf vorsg, goho Iad Balt" which Kelley translated as "I reign over you, says the God of Justice." The language has a distinctive sound profile, heavy in vowels and open syllables, which gives the spoken text a chanting quality.

The Enochian alphabet consists of 21 letters. Several letters do not have direct English equivalents. The script is angular and geometric, with letters composed of straight lines and right angles. It looks unlike any natural writing system, which has led to speculation about its visual origins, though there is no evidence that Dee or Kelley based it on any existing script.

The vocabulary of Enochian, as reconstructed from the Calls and the word lists in Dee's diaries, contains approximately 1,000 words. This is enough to identify grammatical patterns. Enochian appears to have a subject-verb-object word order in some passages, but the data is too sparse to confirm a consistent syntax. Some words appear in multiple Calls with consistent meanings, which suggests that the language is not pure gibberish. Either Kelley constructed it with some internal consistency, or the dictation process produced regular patterns by accident.

The linguist Donald Laycock analyzed the Enochian corpus in his 1975 book The Complete Enochian Dictionary (Askin Publishers), which remains the standard reference for the language. Laycock compared Enochian vocabulary to English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and found that many Enochian words resemble English words with altered phonology. This suggests that Kelley, who knew English and likely had some Latin, may have constructed the language from familiar roots rather than receiving it from angels. Laycock's analysis is the closest thing Enochian has to peer-reviewed linguistic study.

Dee's diaries and papers are held in the British Library in London. The core Enochian manuscripts are Sloane MS 3188, Sloane MS 3189, Sloane MS 3191, and Cotton MS Appendix XLVI. These contain the original session records, the Enochian Calls in both Enochian script and English translation, the alphabet tables, and Dee's notes on the angelic hierarchies.

The survival of these manuscripts is what separates Enochian from most other "revealed" or channeled languages. When someone claims to have received a language from angels, spirits, or aliens, the usual problem is that there is no primary documentation. The claimant produces a text, but there is no record of how it was produced, no contemporaneous notes, and no independent verification. Dee's case is different. He recorded everything. The manuscripts contain the date of each session, the names of the angels who appeared, the exact text dictated, and Kelley's English translations. A historian can trace the development of the language session by session.

The British Library's manuscript collection is accessible to researchers. The Dee manuscripts have been transcribed and published in several editions, most notably by Meric Casaubon in 1659 in A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, and by Joseph H. Peterson in 2003 in John Dee's Five Books of Mystery. Casaubon's edition was the first publication of Dee's angelic conversations and introduced Enochian to a wider audience, though Casaubon himself was skeptical of Dee's claims.

After Dee's death in 1608, his angelic material was largely ignored for nearly 300 years. The manuscripts sat in private collections and eventually in the British Museum (now the British Library). The language might have remained a historical curiosity if not for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secretive occult organization founded in London in 1888.

The Golden Dawn, as described in Wikipedia's article on the order, incorporated Enochian into its ritual system. The order's founders, William Wynn Westcott and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, studied Dee's manuscripts and developed a system of Enochian magic that used the Calls, the alphabet, and the angelic hierarchies as operational tools. They treated the 19 Calls as invocations that could be spoken to contact specific angelic forces.

The Golden Dawn's version of Enochian was not identical to Dee's. The order added interpretations, correspondences, and ritual structures that Dee never wrote about. This is a common pattern in occult traditions: source material gets expanded and modified by each generation of practitioners. The Golden Dawn's Enochian system was later adopted and further modified by Aleister Crowley, who joined the order in 1898 and went on to found his own tradition, Thelema. Crowley published an Enochian Call in his 1904 book Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law) and used Enochian material in his ritual writings.

The result is that modern "Enochian magic" is a composite of Dee's original material, Golden Dawn additions, and Crowley's modifications. Anyone studying Enochian needs to distinguish between what Dee actually recorded and what later practitioners added. The primary sources are the British Library manuscripts. Everything else is interpretation.

Enochian has crossed from occult practice into popular fiction. The most prominent example is the television show Supernatural, which aired on the CW network from 2005 to 2020 across 15 seasons. In Supernatural, Enochian is treated as the literal language of angels. Characters use Enochian incantations to summon, banish, and bind angels. The show's writers borrowed real Enochian words and phrases from Dee's Calls and incorporated them into the script, though the grammar is often improvised for dramatic purposes.

Enochian also appears in video games. The Shin Megami Tensei series, developed by Atlus, uses Enochian-inspired elements in its demon summoning mechanics. The series draws on a wide range of occult and mythological sources, and Enochian fits alongside the Goetia, Kabbalah, and other systems that appear in the games. The use is typically atmospheric rather than linguistically accurate.

These fictional appearances have introduced Enochian to audiences who would never encounter it through occult literature. They also create a common misconception: that Enochian is a "real" angelic language with proven supernatural origins. It is not. It is a constructed language produced by two Elizabethan men during scrying sessions, recorded in primary documents, and preserved in a major research library. Its historical reality is well-established. Its supernatural claims are not.

You can compare Enochian's position to other historical or fictional scripts on our site. The Hieroglyphics Translator covers Egyptian hieroglyphs, a real ancient writing system with a documented 3,000-year history. The Atlantean Translator handles the invented language from Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a modern conlang created by linguist Mark Okrand. The Standard Galactic Alphabet maps English to a fictional cipher alphabet from a video game. Enochian sits between these categories: it is historically documented like hieroglyphs, but constructed like Atlantean or the Standard Galactic Alphabet.