John Dee and the Enochian Language: Asking the Angels for a Lost Book

In shortEnochian is a language recorded by the English scholar John Dee in 1583 and 1584 from the mouth of his assistant Edward Kelley, who claimed that angels were dictating it to him. Dee called it the language of the angels. The name Enochian was attached later, because Dee believed Enoch was the last human who knew it.

In March 1582 a young man nobody knew arrived at John Dee's house in the village of Mortlake, on the bank of the Thames, at first giving a false name. He said he could see spirits. Dee sat him in front of a crystal, and the young man, Edward Kelley, looked into it and said he saw an angel. Dee asked its name. The answer, as recorded in the diary that evening, was Uriel.

So began one of the strangest experiments in the history of science. It lasted about seven years, filled hundreds of pages, and produced an entire language. At its centre stood a book that no one in Europe had seen: the Book of Enoch.

The man who wanted to know everything

It is easy to dismiss John Dee as a sorcerer, but his contemporaries saw him as one of the most learned men in England. He was a mathematician and an astronomer, he wrote the preface to the first English edition of Euclid, and he advised the Queen's seafarers on navigation. When Elizabeth I came to the throne, it was Dee who chose her coronation day, according to the stars. At home he kept thousands of books and manuscripts, a collection considered the largest in all of England. Some of the objects he used, among them a black mirror of volcanic glass brought from Mexico, are on display today in the British Museum.

And precisely because he had read so much, Dee reached a discouraging conclusion. Books are not enough. The things that truly matter, he thought, are known only to the angels.

A book of which only the name remained

Among the books missing from Dee's library was one that troubled him especially. The Epistle of Jude in the New Testament quotes a sentence spoken by Enoch, the seventh from Adam. The Church Fathers mentioned a book bearing his name. Some said it was still kept by the Christians of Ethiopia. But in sixteenth-century Europe not a single page of it existed.

Dee knew from Genesis that Enoch walked with God and was taken to him. Whoever walked in heaven, he reasoned, must have spoken there with the angels in their own tongue, and written down what he heard in his book. If the book was lost, perhaps one could go back to the source. The angels who taught Enoch were still where they had always been.

The language dictated from the stone

And so, evening after evening, Kelley sat in front of the stone and described what he saw, and Dee sat beside him and wrote. In 1583 the angels began, according to Kelley, to hand the two men tables full of letters, and an alphabet of twenty-one characters never seen before. A year later, in the city of Kraków, long calls were dictated to them in an unknown tongue, together with their English translation. Some were delivered letter by letter, from the end to the beginning, because the angels warned that the words were too powerful to be spoken in order. In all, forty-eight calls were delivered, each of them meant, the angels said, to open a different gate in heaven.

Dee called it the language of the angels, and believed it was the speech Adam had used in Eden. Enoch's name returns again and again in his diaries. The angels told him, so he wrote, that Enoch had been the last human to receive this wisdom, and that it was now being handed to him. The name that stuck to it later, Enochian, was born here.

Meanwhile the two men wandered east, to Poland and Bohemia, and Dee was even received by Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. In 1589 Dee returned to England without Kelley. He found his library plundered, and died poor at Mortlake some twenty years later.

What the linguist found

The diaries were printed in 1659 by the scholar Meric Casaubon, who wanted to use them to show how dangerous it is to meddle with spirits. The result was the reverse. The book became a cornerstone of European occultism, and orders of mystics in nineteenth-century London built entire rituals on this language.

In 1978 an Australian linguist, Donald Laycock, examined the language the way one examines any other. He found that it has a vocabulary of its own, but its sounds are the sounds of English, and the order of words in a sentence is the word order of English. Kelley's angels, it turns out, spoke with the syntax of London.

The real book arrives

In 1773 the Scottish traveller James Bruce came back from Ethiopia with three copies of the Book of Enoch in his baggage. The book Dee had dreamed of had been there all along, in the churches of the Ethiopian highlands, just as rumour had said. It was translated into English only in 1821, by Richard Laurence of Oxford, and anyone who expected to find Dee's angelic language in it was disappointed. It contains no secret tongue and no alphabet of angels. Enoch does learn from Uriel in it, but what Uriel teaches him is the paths of the sun and the moon and the count of days in the year.

And the book contains something that would have embarrassed Dee even more. The great sin it describes is the sin of angels who came down to human beings and handed them secrets that were never meant for them. This is what they are told when sentence is passed:

You were in heaven, but not all the mysteries had been revealed to you. You knew a worthless secret, and in the hardness of your hearts you revealed it to the women, and through this secret men and women spread evil on the earth.

1 Enoch 16:3

The Enoch of the book gets his knowledge in a different way. He does not invite the angels into his house. He is taken to them, sees what he is shown, and comes back to write. According to the Book of Enoch, an angel who turns up in the room and starts revealing secrets is a reason to worry.

What John Dee was looking for

We tend to think of a lost book as an empty space. In practice a lost book is a screen, and every generation projects onto it whatever it happens to lack. Dee, a man of the sixteenth century, was convinced that a cipher lay hidden behind the world, and that whoever held the key would understand everything. So the lost book he imagined was a book of ciphers. The real book deals with entirely different questions: why there is evil in the world, and who will answer for it. Those questions are less thrilling than a cipher, and far more troubling.

It is worth remembering this whenever someone promises us the secrets of the Book of Enoch. The book is no longer lost, and it can simply be read.