Enochian Language: What John Dee Recorded in 1584

Kraków, Friday, April 13, 1584

It is half past eight in the morning and John Dee has prayed. That is how each of his "Actions" begins, as he called the sessions: a prayer, then silence, then the question to the seer whether anything can be seen. The seer is Edward Kelley. He looks into a stone that both men consider holy and describes what he sees. On this Friday a figure appears to him who calls himself Nalvage and carries a tablet — a surface made of small squares, forty-nine by forty-nine. Nalvage holds a rod and points at single squares.

Then begins what Dee records word for word. Kelley reports a letter and a position — the sixth, ascending, 109; the ninth, ascending, 405; the eleventh, descending. Dee writes P, A, L. Then the figure says what the word is to be called. Three letters, one word. It goes on hour after hour. When Dee grows impatient, the record preserves the answer the figure is supposed to have given: be patient, for I told thee it would be tedious.

The tedium has a system. The day before, Nalvage had announced how the transmission would work. In Dee's own spelling:

"in receiving of the calls, this is to be noted: that they are to be uttered of me backward: and of you, in practise, forward." — "I understand it, for the efficacity of them; else, all things called would appear: and so hinder our proceeding in learning."

The first sentence is the figure's speech as Kelley relayed it; the second is Dee's reply, printed in Meric Casaubon's 1659 edition of the diaries. Anyone who reads that line knows everything about this man's seriousness. He believes the words he is writing down letter by letter actually work. That is why they have to be given to him backwards.

Over the next three months a corpus of roughly a thousand words builds up this way, divided into eighteen calls and a nineteenth text that can be filled with thirty different names. Dee called them the Claves Angelicae, the angelic keys. The fair copy in his hand is in the British Library. And the language in it — which Dee himself never called "Enochian," but simply angelic, or the language of Adam — is the real subject of this story.

A scholar looking for the language of Adam

In 1584 John Dee was fifty-seven and one of the most learned men in Europe. Born in 1527, he had studied at Cambridge and Louvain, advised Elizabeth I on astrology and science from 1558, coached English navigators, and kept one of the largest private libraries in England at his house in Mortlake, near London. He wrote on optics, mathematics, astronomy and alchemy. That is the man who, from 1581 on, was trying to speak with angels.

Why, he said himself. Again and again he asks the figures in the stone for the same things: the lost Book of Enoch mentioned in the Epistle of Jude; the vanished writings of Esdras; the Book of Soyga, a magical manuscript he owned and could not decode. And the language given to Adam in paradise — the one original tongue in which the names of things still contained their nature. Dee did not want gold or power. He wanted to read the book of creation in the original.

The problem: Dee saw nothing himself. He needed a seer. On March 10, 1582, a man calling himself Edward Talbot, later known as Edward Kelley, walked into his house, looked into Dee's crystal, and Dee wrote down what he said. That division of labor is the core of the whole enterprise and the root of every doubt about it. Everything the "angels" ever said passed through Kelley's mouth. Without Dee's meticulous record there would be no material; without Kelley's eyes there would be nothing to record.

And Dee recorded everything, including what did not flatter him: quarrels with Kelley, "evil spirits" slipping in, rebukes from the angels because the two men asked about money. The early books, beginning on December 22, 1581, are not a polished revelation. They are a working journal, cracks and all.

Two languages, not one

When people talk about "the Enochian language" today they usually mean one thing. The manuscripts tell a different story: Dee received two quite different language systems.

The first came in the spring of 1583 at Mortlake. On March 26, 1583, Kelley saw in the stone an alphabet that Dee called "Adamical" — twenty-one letters with their own shapes and names, written right to left; Dee's earliest sketches survive in Sloane MS 3188. From March 29, Good Friday, the figures dictated a book line by line in tables of forty-nine by forty-nine cells. Dee was given its name, Loagaeth, glossed as "speech from God." The text itself was never translated, and was never offered for translation: thousands of words with no meaning supplied.

The second system is the Kraków one a year later, and it differs from the first in the one respect that changes everything: it came with a translation. For each of the eighteen calls, Nalvage supplied the English sense after the letters. "Ol sonf vorsg, goho Iad Balt" becomes "I reign over you, saith the God of Justice." Only through that did sounds turn into a language in which words can be recognized, found again and counted — and only through that did it become testable.

The dictation machine

According to Dee's record the Kraków procedure was always the same. Kelley saw the figure with the tablet. The figure pointed to a square and named a number, sometimes a direction. Kelley read off the letter and said it to Dee, who wrote it down. After three, four or five letters the figure said what the word was and occasionally how to stress it. At the end of a call came the translation, and the whole thing had to be reversed, because the words had arrived in reverse order. The last word of the first call, Iaida, "the Highest," was the first to be dictated.

Consider what that procedure means for the question of origin. If Kelley invented the language, he could not simply speak it. He had to deliver every word backwards, letter by letter, with a matching number and position on an imaginary tablet, for hours, in front of one of the best mathematicians of his age who wrote down every number — while keeping the translation in his head so that the words, read forwards later, would fit it. That is not impossible. It is a feat of memory you would sooner expect of a language prodigy than of a con man.

The Aztec mirror in the British Museum

In Room 1 of the British Museum, the Enlightenment Gallery, lies a black disc: 18.4 centimeters (about 7¼ inches) across, polished on both sides, with a small handle pierced by a hole, and a leather case with a handwritten label. The label is by Horace Walpole, the writer and collector who owned the disc around 1770. It says this is "the black stone into which Dr. Dee used to call his spirits."

Whether that is true was a matter of faith for two centuries. Dee's own notes speak of a "stone" and a "crystal," not a black mirror, and historians such as Deborah Harkness left open whether the disc ever sat on his table. The closest trace is a 1624 lawsuit, in which a witness described seeing in the house of John Pontois — who had inherited Dee's books and instruments — "a certain round flat stone like crystal" that Pontois said an angel had brought to Dr. Dee.

What the disc itself is got an answer in 2021 that nobody in the sixteenth century could have given. A team led by the archaeologist Stuart Campbell of the University of Manchester measured it with portable X-ray fluorescence and matched its chemistry to obsidian sources in Mexico. The result, published in Antiquity: the obsidian comes from Pachuca, in today's state of Hidalgo, the main obsidian source of the Aztec world. The disc is an Aztec mirror, probably made before or soon after the Spanish conquest of 1521, and brought to Europe among the first curiosities of the Americas. In Aztec religion such mirrors belonged to Tezcatlipoca, "Smoking Mirror," the god of divination. If you want to know how a black mirror is used for gazing today, our guide to scrying mirrors covers it, and our obsidian guide covers the stone.

Fire, return and rupture: Prague and Třeboň, 1584–1589

Kraków was a waystation. Dee and Kelley had left England in September 1583 with the Polish nobleman Albert Łaski; in August 1584 they moved on to Prague and the court of Emperor Rudolf II, who received Dee on September 3. Dee told him that God's angels had been instructing him for two and a half years and delivered a warning that the emperor would be cast down if he did not mend his ways. Rudolf, Dee noted, said he believed him — and then let him drop.

On April 10, 1586, the figures in the stone ordered the books burned — Loagaeth, the angelic keys and the book of the thirty "Aires." Dee burned three years of work. Twenty days later, on April 30, he wrote that he found the books under an almond tree in the garden, "without any sign or token of having been in the fire." You can read that as a miracle or as the obvious: that the books were never in the fire but set aside and laid out again — by whom, no source says. Dee read it as a miracle, and from then on his trust in the voices became unconditional.

The rupture came in Třeboň, in southern Bohemia, in the spring of 1587, when Kelley relayed an order that the two men share their wives. Dee resisted, prayed, recorded his resistance and his submission. Shortly afterwards the sessions ended. Dee returned to England in 1589 and found his library at Mortlake plundered; he died in poverty in 1608 or 1609. Kelley stayed in Bohemia as an alchemist and died in 1597 or 1598.

The cedar chest and the pie tins

Casaubon published the Kraków and Prague sessions in 1659 as a warning against mistaking evil spirits for good ones — and by doing so preserved them. The earlier books, with the alphabet and Loagaeth, and the fair copy of the keys, he never saw. What happened to them was written down in 1672 by Elias Ashmole, antiquary and founder of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, on the testimony of a widow.

A London confectioner named Jones had bought a cedar chest from a joiner, who said it came from the estate of a surgeon who had acquired it from Dee's household. Twenty years later the couple moved it, heard something rattle, and found a secret drawer full of manuscripts. Not understanding them, Ashmole writes, their maid used "about one half of them" under pies and for similar purposes. The rest survived the Great Fire of London in 1666 and reached Ashmole in 1672. Today they are Sloane MS 3188 (the early sessions with the alphabet), 3189 (Loagaeth) and 3191 (the angelic keys) in the British Library, and they are digitized. About half is missing.

What the linguist found

Donald Laycock was a linguist at the Australian National University, a specialist in the languages of New Guinea, and a declared skeptic. In 1978 he published The Complete Enochian Dictionary, the first full dictionary of the Kraków language, and in its introduction, "Angelic language or mortal folly?", the analysis every serious discussion still has to reckon with.

He treated the two languages separately. Of Loagaeth he judged that some passages flow so fluently, with so much repetition, rhyme and alliteration, that one is almost forced to conclude Kelley produced at least the later texts aloud and at normal speaking speed. Such patterns are rare in ordinary language but typical of certain kinds of meaningless speech such as glossolalia — "speaking in tongues" — often produced in trance-like states. That is a description, not an exposé. But it explains why the first language was never translated: as far as anyone can tell, there is nothing to translate.

The language of the keys is a different case, and here Laycock's finding is uncomfortable for both sides. Its sound system is thoroughly English: the words can be pronounced with the habits of a sixteenth-century Englishman and evidently were meant to be. And, in his words, if the phonetics of Enochian are thoroughly English, the grammar is no less so. The word order of the keys follows English — subject, verb, object — almost without exception. A language Adam supposedly spoke in paradise behaves syntactically like Tudor English.

The second problem is the translation itself, which Laycock calls very free: it often uses five or six English words where the Enochian has one, supplies particles and pronouns with no clear Enochian counterpart, and leaves no grammar that could be reconstructed from the text alone. There is a vocabulary used consistently within the keys, and a translation that fits that vocabulary without being forced by it.

A statistical footnote came in 2020, when Marco Ponzi counted both corpora. The keys run to 1,075 words; the most frequent, od ("and"), appears 96 times, 8.9 percent — about as often as "and" in English prose. Loagaeth, with 4,439 words, has as its most frequent word a at only 1.4 percent, far too rare for a natural language, where a few function words always dominate. The direction matches Laycock's: the Kraków language behaves like a language; the Mortlake one does not. Linguists have reached a similar verdict on the modern phenomenon of "light language".

Who could have made it?

Three explanations are on the table, and none is as comfortable as it sounds.

The first is Dee's: angels gave the language. Nothing outside the record supports it, and the record is exactly what needs explaining. Laycock's finding speaks against it — a primordial language with Tudor syntax is a contradiction, unless one assumes the angels adapted to Dee. That cannot be refuted. It cannot be supported either.

The second is the popular one: Kelley made it all up to exploit Dee. Everything passed through Kelley's mouth, and in 1587 he delivered the message that suited him best. Against it stands the dictation machine: whoever could deliver the keys backwards, spelled out, with tablet coordinates and a matching translation, over weeks, must have commanded the language like a mother tongue. No draft by Kelley has ever surfaced, no confession, no witness. The accusation may be plausible; it is not evidence, and we do not pin a fraud on anyone, living or dead, without evidence.

The third is the eeriest because it needs no villain: that the language came from no conscious plan at all. Laycock's remarks on glossolalia point there. People in trance produce strings of sound with rhythm and structure without inventing them, and a mind that had stared into letter tables daily for a year might have begun, in Kraków, to generate words leaning on the grammar of its own mother tongue. That would explain the English syntax, the consistent vocabulary and the loose translation. It does not explain why the words came backwards.

And then there is the layer that has nothing to do with the sixteenth century. The name "Enochian" is not Dee's. It spread when the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn turned his material into a ritual system in the 1880s and 1890s — see the order's history — and Aleister Crowley worked through the thirty Aires in the Algerian desert in 1909. In the United States the keys reached their widest audience in 1969, when Anton LaVey printed an adapted version of them as "The Enochian Keys" in The Satanic Bible. Most of what circulates as Enochian magic today is those later layers — a nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition built on a sixteenth-century one. Dee drew on the correspondence thinking of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, which he owned. Whether the keys "work" when spoken, no source can say, and so this piece does not say either.

What is documented — and what isn't

• Documented: Dee (1527–1608/09) and Kelley held sessions between 1582 and 1589; the records survive in Dee's hand in the British Library (Sloane MSS 3188, 3189, 3191) and in print from 1659. The angelic keys were received from April 13, 1584, in Kraków, in reverse order, letter by letter.
• Documented: per Laycock (1978), the language of the keys has English phonetics and English word order; its translation is very free; no grammar can be reconstructed from the text. Loagaeth shows glossolalia-like patterns and was never translated.
• Documented: the obsidian mirror in the British Museum comes from Pachuca, Mexico, per the 2021 X-ray fluorescence analysis, and is an Aztec object.
• Handed down, not secured: that this particular mirror was used in the sessions; that half the early manuscripts ended up under pies.
• Not proven: that angels dictated the language; that Kelley consciously invented it; that the books were really in the fire in 1586; that speaking the keys has any effect.

Frequently asked questions

Is Enochian a real language?

It is a language system with its own alphabet, a consistent vocabulary and a supplied translation — but, per Laycock's 1978 analysis, with English phonetics and English word order, and without a grammar that could be reconstructed from the text. It is not a naturally grown language; that it was consciously invented is not proven either.

Why were the angelic keys dictated backwards?

According to Dee's record of April 12, 1584, the figure in the stone announced that the calls would be given backwards and spoken forwards in practice. Dee noted his own explanation: otherwise everything called would actually appear. Whether the reversal was a safeguard, a memory trick or part of a trance process, no source says.

What is the difference between Liber Loagaeth and the angelic keys?

Loagaeth (1583, Mortlake) consists of large letter tables with thousands of words and no translation. The keys (1584, Kraków) are eighteen calls plus a text for the thirty Aires, each with an English translation. Only the keys can be studied linguistically, and only they are what is usually called Enochian today.

Was John Dee's mirror really Aztec?

Yes. A 2021 X-ray fluorescence study published in Antiquity traced its obsidian to Pachuca, Mexico. What is not secured is whether this exact mirror was used in Dee's sessions; the attribution rests on Horace Walpole's label and a 1624 witness statement.

Did Edward Kelley fool John Dee?

That is the most common reading, but it is not proven. There is no confession, no draft of the language and no witness, and the Kraków procedure would have required an extraordinary feat of memory. The question is historically open.

Where can I see the originals?

Sloane MSS 3188, 3189 and 3191 are in the British Library in London and digitized online. Dee's 1659 printed record is fully viewable at the Internet Archive, and Joseph Peterson's transcriptions are at esotericarchives.com. The obsidian mirror is on display in Room 1 of the British Museum.

Sources & further reading

• John Dee, ed. Meric Casaubon, A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, London 1659 — full scan at the Internet Archive.
• John Dee, ed. Joseph H. Peterson, Mysteriorum Libri Quinque (Sloane MS 3188), with Ashmole's 1672 account of the cedar chest; Liber Loagaeth (Sloane MS 3189).
• Stuart Campbell, Elizabeth Healey, Yaroslav Kuzmin and Michael D. Glascock, "The mirror, the magus and more: reflections on John Dee's obsidian mirror," Antiquity 95 (2021), open access.
• British Museum, Dr Dee's Magical Mirror, 1966,1001.1.
• Donald C. Laycock, The Complete Enochian Dictionary, 1978, introduction "Angelic language or mortal folly?"; Marco Ponzi, "Zipf's Law and Angelic Languages," 2020.
• Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee's Conversations with Angels, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

This piece reconstructs a historical case from its sources. It contains no instructions and makes no promise of effect. Questions about an order: 28@templeofdesire.com.