The Enochian Language - History and Analysis of the Magic Angelic Alphabet revealed to Dr John Dee

the angelic conversations between dr john d edward kelly and the host of entities they are said to have contacted through the late 16th century are among the most fascinating mysterious and obscure events in the history of western esotericism indeed my whole interest in the field basically what i've spent decades studying began with my discovery as a teenager learning latin that an angelic language complete with grammar vocabulary syntax etc all the things that make a language a language had been revealed in a series of magical rituals in the late middle ages as you might imagine this made an enormous impression upon me languages are made up of more or less stable patterns which i knew all too well taking weekly latin exams and such patterns can't be just easily made up on the fly you can go ask talking about making up languages if it were an angelic language it might very well be proof of something much vaster than just atoms and void i immediately ordered the laycock complete enokine dictionary which i still have over two decades later and i've been studying as oterosism ever since in this episode we're going to continue our series on esoteric symbolism and languages you can check out the card above to explore more topics in that series by turning our attention to the enokian language in at least three episodes the first one is going to be about the enochian alphabet the second on the contents of the celestial book of enoch also known as the liber loga in the angelic language and that's how i'm going to pronounce the name of the book because that's how the angel said to pronounce it and who am i to argue with a bunch of angels and the third is going to be on the enochian calls which provide us our only substantial glimpse into angelic as a functioning language in this first episode i'll explore the origins of the enochian alphabet i'll be situating the project in the philosophical and spiritual landscape of 16th century semiotics or the study of representation more generally and i'll attempt a paleographic analysis of the two enochian scripts if you're interested in magic hermetic philosophy or the academic study of the occult make sure to subscribe and check out my other dozens of other topics in the study of esotericism also if you want to support my work of providing accessible scholarly and free content on topics and esotericism i hope you consider supporting my work on patreon or perhaps with a one-time donation you can find those links below and i really appreciate your consideration of supporting this channel it's really the only reason why this channel can continue to exist i hope you'll join me as i explore the very first revelations of the enochian language or the celestial speech to dr john d and edward kelly i'm dr justin sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] dr john d was no stranger to employing hermetic philosophy to search out what he called radical truths or those truths which are most fundamental to religion and philosophy his work prior to the angelic conversations were as saturated with esotericism symbolism and metaphysical power such as the enigmatic 1564 monas hieroglyphica to the rigor of rational mathematical deduction recall that he composed the introduction to the first english edition of euclid's famed textbook on geometry the elements indeed for d the rational and the mystical were perfectly at home with one another so it would be no wonder that he would eventually turn that analytical mind informed deeply by pious christian hermeticism to probe the fundamental depths of religious truth by attempting contact with the very messengers of god the angels by at least the early 1580s dee was experimenting with the technique of scrying or peering into a polished object or substance in order to supernaturally perceive the metaphysical world though he had little substantial success himself until the arrival of the alchemist and forger edward kelly in 1582 if you want to learn a bit more about kelly and his later alchemical writings check out my episode on that topic above now kelly had a talent so to speak for scrying and his doing so would set into motion the events that would lead to one of the most important events in the history of western esotericism the angelic conversations such conversations would include dozens of beings they would reveal at least three different systems of angelic magic a range of evocations rituals furniture and the celestial speech of the angels themselves before going forward i just want to offer a few words of clarification and disclaimer notice how i haven't been using the word enochian much for the angelic language well that's because the language isn't enochian in any important sense it's typically referred to as angelic or celestial or sometimes adamical and the record is left behind by d now that said i'm just going to often use the vernacular term enochian for both the sessions the magical system and the languages i mean i'm not a hypocrite or anything i'm just a i'm a victim i'm a victim of the tyranny of a sloppy vernacular that uses the word enoki under describe all of it further i also just want to point out that i'm bracketing any truth claims about the entities and revelations around the angelic conversations i want to present the texts without constantly having to disclaim myself using somewhat belittling terms like allegedly and so-called i'm just going to bracket the ontological status of madimi the daughter of fortitude the kardashians gulva and uriel or raphael for that matter whether these beings are real it's just gonna have to be a debate for another day lastly i'm also going to mostly bracket my skepticism skepticisms about edward kelly who is super shady to say the very least and try to deal again with the texts as we have them in the same way that i'm happy to discuss other mythological systems on their own terms including the one that i happen to subscribe to i can certainly extend that courtesy if only provisionally to the angelic conversations that all said let's discuss a language and texts that are supposed to usher in the apocalypse and when kelly read a few of those words out loud he actually got beat up with some spirits with shovels fun the first phase of the angelic conversations primarily has to do with the development of what is now typically called the heptarchic system of magic and runs roughly from march of 1582 to the earliest stirrings of the revelations of the angelic language itself roughly a year later starting around 1583 in march of that year the heptarchic system describes various layman's cycles especially the famed segillium daya emmett and other apparati for the invocation of various highly organized planetary angels and various kinds of spirits in many ways these sections lay out the magical technology to facilitate the further revelations and were not really that unlike medieval magic in the solomonic tradition more generally once the bulk of the magical technology had been revealed which i'm sure i'm going to end up doing a future episode on the slow and honestly perplexing revelation of the angelic language or celestial speech then begins indeed it appears that the heptarchic system the liber loga and its keys along with the watchtower system all seem to comprise a general magical system though none of the systems are complete or clear or really even terribly coherent since all the different debates and modern magic about just how to pull these off and then there are books the angels mentioned as really important but we learned basically nothing about them it's all tantalizing and can honestly be a bit crazy making trying to fit it all together to make it all coherently work so let's just not go crazy and ignore all those problems for now though to set the stage for the libre logo in the angelic language it's worth mentioning a couple of important aspects of the heptarchic system and renaissance magic more generally and that's to say magic squares and the idea of a divine or angelic language let's start with the squares as they appear pretty early on in the sessions themselves and in many ways contain the very first elements of the enokian language as you probably know such squares are widely attested as far back as ancient rome the sator square being of course the most famous but these also occur as far afield as chinese mathematics and arabic and jewish astral magic in fact they probably come from arabic and jewish astral magic for our purposes at least these squares are important in a few aspects they play an important role in the seminal volumes on occult philosophy by cornelius agrippa especially in his theory and practice of astral and in some senses angelic magic really i can't overstate just how important agrippa's three books of occult philosophy is going to be in this entire enokian saga these squares are typically alphanumeric grids in which the numbers add up to the same number across the rows or columns or sometimes diagonally or as in the famed squares of the abram melon ritual where they are populated with magical seed words often in hebrew and various forms of degradation what's key vis-a-vis this business of magical squares is that dee was already convinced that he possessed a text the book of soy hagios or the word holy backwards in greek that was already incredibly magically powerful specifically the tables of soy which are a series of 36 36 by 36 tables filled with letters and some kind of astrological correspondence dee felt that these tables were incredibly important so important that their contents were among the first questions he posed to the angels once contact was made through kelly indeed the angel uriel confirms that the text was given to adam in paradise in the garden of eden but apparently only the angel michael can read it as it turned out the text was actually generated by using a seed word fed into an algorithm which was only cracked in the 1990s after the text was rediscovered i've done a whole episode on the soy tables and their deciphering if you can call it that if you want to check out that episode in the card above now it's also worth mentioning here that such tables and squares were part and parcel of the cryptology of d's day and i would be positively remiss to ignore the intersection between angelic communications magic tables esoteric alphabets and uh international espionage which was kinda a thing in deev's day and d was knee deep in it yes secret angel code transmission was a thing and i'll be doing an episode on it and agrippa's tutor and confidante trethymius who in fact developed a whole secret angel code transmission system at some point in the future only on a channel like this could i say something like secret angel code transmission system and people not think that i'm completely out of my mind i mean you guys don't think i i am completely uh regardless of my relative sanity the whole business of magic squares is about to get turned up to 11 or really 49. sorry that that joke kind of went off the rails didn't it within the first couple of weeks of the angelic conversations the very first magical squares appear and seem to contain the names of various spirits and angels whose names and symbols adorn the famed cycle of god emet or truth which survives in beeswax deez wax in the british museum as you can see the names are extracted by reading the squares in various directions especially the second square which also contains a small amount of number letter substitution and translations of various sections of the rows conspicuously the second table is a seven by seven table which when read in various directions reveals the names of various angelic beings i think it's sometimes overlooked but this second square contains some of the earliest words in which will later be revealed as the enochian or celestial language the first square contains angelic names that are attested in other texts many of these angels names we know from other books however the second table contains the names of angelic beings known first and only to my knowledge at least in the angelic revelations to d and kelly specifically one of the angelic names el emesa who just goes by l so you know that's their nickname they're going to play a huge role in the period of the libra logo revelations as we will see the book of enoch and the celestial language will primarily appear in a series of 49 49 by 49 tables over the course of roughly 49 days starting on good friday that process can generally be said to begin with the appearance of the archangel raphael on march 23rd 1583 about a year into the angelic conversations more generally there the angel raphael delivers a series of sermons or speeches in which they describe the coming revelation of a medicinal liquor probably not liquor in that sense but but maybe which has some kind of radical curative power an idea which might have had alchemical overtones to d and kelly's ears if kelly had ears recall that raphael means healer of god and denotes him as medicina day in his records though something much grander than just liquor was at play the next day kelly notes a book beneath raphael's robes and this book is actually revealed to be the liquor raffia was referring to the book is said to have 48 leaves so this will later become 49 kinda with leaves or pages of gold written upon with still wet blood which raphael eventually informs d and kelly contains records of the angelic speech itself and it seems the secrets of creation history and the apocalyptic end of history itself no big whoop indeed it appears to be the very words by which the word the logos of gospel of john fame spoke the creation of the cosmos into being now you would think that the promise of such a revelation would have caused d at least to have buckled his seatbelt and concentrated a bit more on the topic at hand you know just the secrets of creation and the speech of the god christ himself nope dee and kelly basically go on to pester the angels about about buried treasure i'm serious buried treasure and the angels even rebuke them several times for this like i'm talking about the divine secrets of all of creation and the soon-coming apocalypse and you know dee and kelly are basically like yeah yeah yeah apoca logos blah blah blah let's do this buried treasure thing first right cool not cool guys not cool d and kelly i gotta admit this entire buried treasure thing and many parts like it are why i love the angelic conversations they are simultaneously mysterious and intriguing and then they're absolutely hilarious and downright irreverent like when dee and kelly respectively ask the angels to basically borrow money to buy a horse and other stuff or when d has to correct the latin or the mathematics of the angels they confuse squares and roots i mean i came for the angel keys to all creation but i stayed for the buried treasure the alchemical ciphers and of course the angelic prompted wife exchange program you know who i really feel bad for in all this is jane d john d's wife who must have been an amazingly strong and capable woman and eventually of course kelly's wife joanna who really did well for herself and her children when kelly was you know imprisoned for alchemical fraud debt and dueling in bohemia i'm definitely going to do an episode on both of these amazing women they really deserve it having put up with dee and kelly and these angels and the buried treasure and all this all that said on tuesday march 26th the archangel raphael begins to properly reveal the text to d and kelly first they're shown a 49 by 49 grid out of which the angel using a golden rod points to 21 various symbols grouped into three groups of seven which are read right to left like hebrew and are revealed to be the letters of the celestial speech or the angelic alphabet now typically called the enochian alphabet before turning to an analysis of the letters themselves it's worth discussing some of the finer points of renaissance semiotics or the study of representation and renaissance philosophy of language while modern semiotics and philosophy of language maintain that the relationship between sign and signifier is arbitrary this is just a fancy way of saying that the word dog or any similar word in any language has no inherent or metaphysical relationship to the furry creature denoted by that term that arbitrary relationship is by no means a given in pre-modern semiotics further there was a more general metaphysical debate stretching back centuries before even john d about whether categories like abstract categories like dog or human existed at all one camp the realists took a more platonic position and argued that general categories did have some kind of metaphysical existence while the nominalists held that such categories were just names hence the name nominalist though perhaps not totally arbitrary names as linguists now hold further it was a theological commonplace that god had created the world via speech and that language itself at least in some form still held some kind of metaphysical power this idea was held pretty anciently in judaism especially in texts like to say for yet and was imported both theoretically and practically and i mean practically to hear denote well magic pretty early on in the european middle ages hence all that hebrew which is often badly mangled that you see in so many magical texts down to this day still often pretty mangled now all this taken together produced a theory in medieval and especially the renaissance that the metaphysically powerful language by which god spoke creation into being the going candidate at this time was some form of reformed hebrew had been lost following the fall of man that whole adam and eve and talking snake bit but could be recovered somehow and this led to a sustained interest on the part of christians into the study of hebrew and even egyptian hieroglyphics this quest for a perfect divinely powerful language in which representation and being were merged was all the rage in the time of dr john d indeed in many ways this is all best captured in agrippa's discussion of language and specifically angelic language in his three books of occult philosophy i'm going to be making another episode on just that topic agrippa's philosophy of language and magic at some point soon so stay tuned for that in fact d himself tried to forge a whole new system of representation in his 1564 text the monus hieroglyphica and if you want a deeper dive into that really difficult text and the question of semiotics and magic make sure to check out my three-part series on that book what i'm trying to drive home here is that the angelic or enochian alphabet and by extension the angelic language would have probably struck d as perhaps the greatest spiritual and philosophical breakthrough in human history buried treasure withstanding and it's no wonder that the text which contains that language the liber loga would literally hold the secret to all being from the very beginning of being to its apocalyptic finale with that in mind let's now turn to the enochian or angelic alphabet as i mentioned the alphabet or un pa or given the first disclosure of the angelic alphabet might be called the pave is a series of 21 glyphs grouped into bunches of seven despite hundreds of years of research into the origins of the angelic script we can conclude that it basically bears little resemblance to other historical or esoteric alphabets of course numerous such esoteric and cryptographic alphabets had been produced in the middle ages one thinks here of hildegard of bingen's the script for her lingua ignota and many of these scripts were very likely known to d in fact a group of three books of occult philosophy contain several such alphabets which employ magical symbols whose use actually stretches all the way back to the greek magical papyri and were very likely extracted at least at that time from jewish magical practices indeed three of the magical alphabets in cornelius agrippa's three books of occult philosophy are directly derived from hebrew though interestingly for many reasons none of these alphabets seem to be the origin of the angelic script to be found in the d conversations with angels a more likely candidate may be a so-called enochian alphabet in the 1530 quasi-alchemical and generally impenetrable text the voarkadumia of pantheus d was gifted a copy of this text in 1599 and as i mentioned it does contain an alphabet that it calls enochian and i have to admit these enochian letters do bear some resemblance to d's angelic script though not so much the first version of the nokian alphabet more on that in a second and there's really no homology between the glyphs and their respective phonetic values between the two so-called enochian alphabets while it's possible that the voarkadumia inokian served as an inspiration for the john d edward kelly angelic script this connection does strike me as pretty tenuous to be honest further and i think this is really important it's not d we should be thinking about here it's kelly while kelly seemed to know agrippa quite well indeed he seems to have known and been practicing some form of solomonic goetic magic all the while engaging with the angels probably trying to get the demons to tell him where that buried treasure was knowing kelly it's not clear that he explored this notoriously difficult text the varakadunya and i'm not kidding i've read a lot of alchemical books and this is without any doubt one of the most obscure and further the connection between the two character sets really only applies if one is looking at the later angelic script and not the first one revealed on march 26th another possible genetic condition for the script could be tachography or shorthand kelly as you may know was a trained notary and shorthand would have been part of that training in all likelihood now he did use that training to engage in forgery but like i said i'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt kinda these symbols of course are survivals of a system of latin shorthand said to have been developed by one of the slave scribes of cicero named tero and in fact bears his name the tyronian notes in fact the most well-known tyronian symbol the symbol for et or and actually survives into use today especially in the irish national script again these shorthand symbols do to my eye at least bear a striking resemblance to both angelic scripts and given kelly's training in the notary arts this seems like a possible origin for the symbols oh yeah the script of the voynich manuscript also shares many similarities with medieval tachography but that's a that's a story for another day indeed this is probably the time to point out that the enokian alphabet isn't just one alphabet the first two times a script appears it is a much more cursive looking script with more stylized versions appearing later in the records and produced by kelly sometimes outside of the angelic sessions themselves now it's possible that kelly saw the more stylized versions and the cursor versions were just easier ways to write down those symbols in the midst of the conversations and indeed kelly seems to express just such a position as i mentioned there are 21 letters representing the basic sounds of english though lacking a j sound which isn't that surprising linguistically the ju sound is actually pretty rare and there are no sounds really foreign to english in the alphabet now this can be taken to be evidence of the non-supernatural origins of the language it seems like it would have all kinds of sounds that are foreign to english though i've always thought of that line in the quran where allah tells muhammad that quote indeed we have sent it down as an arabic quran that you might in fact understand it this ayat has always struck me as interesting because it seems to indicate that if muhammad weren't an arab and were a i don't know dna person the quran would have been revealed in navajo or better dna bizard despite the idea that the earthly quran is a copy of a celestial eternal quran it might just be that d got the anglican version i don't know someone else might have gotten a different version the polish version may have been completely lacking in vowels and the hawaiian version may have been mostly vowels who knows the first version of the alphabet seems to be less formalized but does not fundamentally appear to be corsiva and nature this just means that the letters don't seem to touch as it's being written both scripts are in fact textura in this regard the first script is composed of glyphs with a relatively simple ductus in fact rarely more than two strokes though there are some inconsistent serifs that are present at glyph termination the ductus seems to typically begin from a left-hand stroke to right indicating that the direction of the script is rtl which is later affirmed by the angels the baseline itself isn't really apparent but doesn't appear to be super linear as it is with hebrew in which the letters hang from the top line as opposed to sitting on the bottom line like in latin script in fact these letters seem to just float inside of the grids overall the first script while mysterious strikes me as rather uncalligraphic with little in the way of internal uniformity in glyph structure or ductus in other words it kind of looks homely given the calligraphic material of the time and appears to my eyes as artificial or made up and not likely shaped by the calligraphic pressures which produced other historical scripts now of course aesthetic judgments don't really matter because we're looking at an angelic script allegedly and it just also might be the case that the script wasn't subject to historical pressures because the angels are well quasi-eternal and it just didn't evolve the more elaborate or formalized script or i might call it the more versal-like form of the script is the one better known to people as enochian and is clearly formed with a much more elaborate ductus here the glyphs seemed formed by several strokes that are built up somewhat like lombardic versals and sport very dramatic elaborate serifs and a couple of the elements seem to have the presence of punky or little dots which don't seem to appear in the first script but do seem important in the second here the ductus contains several strokes with the quill often seeming to draw the glyphs rather than being composed by the natural stroke of the nib that seems most apparent to me in the rather dramatic serifs of this script indeed if the same quill were used for both the notes here in sloan 3188 and the composition of the angelic letters then we certainly have glyphs which are drawn rather than naturally written even if they're built up from several versal-like strokes again the script does not strike me as natural with no clear linear trajectory though again a general rtl openness seems to dominate again kelly had some experience as a notary and a clerk and his handwriting is honestly a welcome relief in the manuscripts especially compared to ds which becomes positively incomprehensible by the manuscript of the cotton appendix where most of the continental conversations are recorded and so the more calligraphic version of the angelic script or the enochian script are perhaps thanks to that training as a notary or as a scribe though given these two scripts it does not appear that the first script is somehow minuscule and the later more formal version is majescule the enochian script seems to be exclusively magical throughout the entire sessions much like hebrew but unlike english are greek further neither script seems to have an upper or lower case it seems like they are both two scripts one more stylized and formal and perhaps one just more utilitarian though again kelly does indicate that the later more formal script is the angelic script properly speaking further we're told that this celestial speech is written as i mentioned earlier from right to left like hebrew and that like hebrew in greek the individual letters have names for instance the b sound is called pa and the o sound is called med etc however unlike hebrew and greek the names of each angelic letter do not seem to bear either a phonetic or seeming relationship to the letter attached to it for instance in protocyanic and hebrew and phoenician the second letter bet actually comes from a converted egyptian hieroglyphic for house which both becomes the shape of the eventual phoenician hebrew letter and is the reason why it's that letter the ba sound of byte or house is linked for that reason with the letter bait and the sound ba now that connection is lost when the aleph bait becomes the alpha beta of the greek language beta only really means the name of that letter and isn't connected any way to the greek word for house oykas so the relationship between the morphology of the glyphs their phonetic value and their nominal designation remain unsurprisingly completely mysterious it's also worth mentioning that light greek and hebrew there's also some connection between the angelic glyphs and their numerical value but this is also completely obscure and i'll be discussing the complicated mystery of enochian numbers in more detail when i get to the third part of this series on the enoki and calls what i find perhaps most surprising about the enokian or angelic alphabet is what isn't mentioned in the journals while the tables of enoch the libra logo and the calls and the watchtowers are given often painstaking detail the angelic script receives virtually no attention the nature of the ductus the presence of the puncti the relationship of the glyphs to the baseline etc none of this is really given any attention and neither d nor kelly seem to really inquire about it aside from sometimes they're interested in sort of what color the script should be when it's written out and even then the angels don't really often seem to care about this very much now given that i'm a calligrapher with an eye toward paleography i'm sure this is just me being a bit nitpicky but still this is the angelic script you would think we would get some kind of handwriting tutorial but i guess not they're too busy about buried treasure and alchemy and not how to write you know the most important language in all of existence priorities guys eyes on the prize learn how to write this thing well after insisting that both men memorize and become proficient with the angelic alphabet the angel raphael issues a dire warning about the medicine or book they are about to reveal oh liber liber lieber bonis evita mali suero morse ipsa o book book book life to the good truly death itself for the wicked this book is the famously mysterious lieber loga or the book of the speech of god also known in the angelic language as amzas nagheses harda which means either a name for god or is something like let those that fear god and are worthy read or somehow both it's said to be nothing less than the very discourse or logos by which the logos created all of being and will bring just that being to its apocalyptic finale i hope you'll join me in the next episode of this series as i explore the celestial tables of enoch the very speech of god i'll also be doing a book roundup in later episodes as well until then make sure to subscribe check out my other content and again consider supporting my work on patreon or with a one-time donation those links are below until then i'm dr justin sledge and thank you for watching esoterica where we explore the arcane in history philosophy and religion

Channel: ESOTERICA

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Length: 39min 13sec (2353 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 25 2021