Who the Hell is this 'Enoch' guy anyway?

By Jason Miller

The first thing that most books on Enochian Magick teach you about is the history of its two founders Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelly (if you don't know who they are by the way, go pick up any book about Enochian Magick and read the introduction than come back to this article). Yet the first question that came to my mind when I first heard the term Enochian was “Who or what the hell is an Enoch?” It is precisely this question that no book that I have read has gone into with any detail so I intend to touch a little upon the subject. As distastefully as it may be to some occultists, to answer the question we must look to the Bible.

It turns out that Enoch is both a who and a what. The first mention of the name Enoch is made in genesis 4:17 where Cain (of “Sorry god, I killed my brother Able” fame) having been banished east of Eden to the land of Nod, laid with his wife and gave birth to their first son Enoch. In the next sentence the bible speaks of Cain building the first city which he named after his son. One has to wonder, if Cain was banished east of Eden and he is only the third living person on the planet where did he find a wife? Much less enough people to populate an entire city? Its also interesting to note that the first murderer built the first city. Surely those of you who live in large cities cannot help but grasp the irony.

In the next chapter of Genesis there is another Enoch mentioned. This is the important one for our purposes. This Enoch is the seventh descendant from Adam through his third son Seth. He is the son of Jared and the father of Methuselah It is also important to note that when tracing biblical genealogies multiples of seven generations marks the completion of a cycles. As an example Matthew traces Jesus' genealogy 14 generations from the exile in Babylon, 14 from the exile to king David, and 14 from King David to Abraham. This Enoch is indeed the end of a cycle for he is the first to get himself back into gods good graces. This is demonstrated by the fact that Enoch Never Died. In all other cases in the genealogy from Seth to Noah Genesis says “____ lived _____ years and than he died”. In the case of Enoch it says, “Enoch lived 365 years than was not, for god took him away”. Enoch didn't die, he ascended!

The next and last mention of Enoch in the bible is in Jude 14. Jude quotes Enoch, the seventh from Adam as saying; “See the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of holy ones to judge everyone and to convict all the ungodly of the ungodly acts they have done in the ungodly way, and of all the harsh words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” Jude is the second to last book of the bible and the author is setting the scene for the revelation of the apocalypse, but the important thing here is that Enoch has been shown to have left some kind of written record. An oral transmission would have been improbible since Jude was the brother of Jesus and Enoch lived before the flood. Now a scripture by someone who was so loved by god that he was spared mortal death would be of some importance, or so one would think. There is however no such book in the bible or the Apocrypha. At least there wasn't one known about publicly until the middle of the seventeenth century when the current work known as the Book of Enoch surfaced in Ethiopian manuscripts

This brings us back to 16th century Elizabethan England. Holy relics are becoming big business all over Europe. In an age where the assorted body parts of saints and splinters of wood are being enshrined in huge cathedrals imagine how important a copy of the lost book of Enoch, an antediluvian who never kicked it, must have been. Indeed in occult circles of the time the tome was much talked about and sought after. It was under these circumstances that John Dee, who had amassed the largest library in England at the time, had reached the decision that he had learned all he could from earthly sources and needed to contact the angels directly as a source of knowledge. To this end he began employing a number of seer's in scrying experiments, the most successful of whom was Edward Kelly. Out of the seances that followed came the language and system of magick known as Enochian. Now it should be noted that a good portion of what is practiced as Enochian Magick today including the prevalent ideas on the pronunciation of the language, was actually developed later by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Aurum Solis, and Aleister Crowley. Right now however we are only concerned with how Dee and Kelley “discovered” the Enochian language and system.

The discovery of the Enochian language actually came in stages. The earliest utterings of “Enochian” by Dee actually resemble Speaking in

Tongues or glossolalia. The recordings of this language show no signs of an actual language or any kind of syntax at all. This comprises Liber Logaeth or “Book of Speech from God”.  It was not until the first of the forty eight calls was dictated that the language we use today surfaced. Each of the calls use definite words repeated throughout with a real grammar. The pronunciation of these calls was very similar to English or at least the English spoken four centuries ago. The later pronunciation key invented by the G.D. is an attempt to come up with a system of pronunciation for both the Calls and the various names of the angels as pulled from the watchtowers and other assorted tablets. These names often appear to be randomly assembled letters (which they more or less are) and need special pronunciation because of the long strings of either vowels or consonants without any breaks.

Dee and Kelley believed themselves to have uncovered the secret language of angels, the same language that the antediluvians would have spoken, or at least they presented it as such. They were not however the first persons to come up with an Enochian alphabet, a text on alchemy called the “Voarchadumia” by Pantheus which was written in 1530 printed an eighteen character alphabet attributed to Enoch. As it turns out the British Museum copy of this manuscript has copious marginal notes by none other than Dr. John Dee. The notes date from 1559 and although the twenty-one character alphabet of Dee does not resemble Pantheus' alphabet it is conceivable that he at least got the idea from that text. What the characters do resemble slightly are the letters of the Ethiopian alphabet. Remember that the current Book of Enoch was discovered in Ethiopian. Donald Laycock suggests that it is entirely possible that Dee had a copy of this manuscript and could not translate it so he invented his own language based loosely upon it.

The idea that Dee and Kelley did not uncover the real language used by the biblical Enoch is not new. In fact the best source available today on the original seances, short of the original Sloan manuscripts in the British museum, is Merik Casaubon's true and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Dr. John Dee and some Spirits, which was written in 1659 as an attempt to debunk Dee and Kelley's work. The idea of passing off a system of magick as something it isn't for reasons of renown has been done before and since the advent of Enochian Magick. The Greater Key of Solomon the King could not possibly have been written by Solomon the king of Israel, it contains references to the Trinity and to Jesus Christ. For a more modern example look to any of the various Necronomicon's that popped up in the late seventies. One was a fairly well researched grimoire based on Sumerain texts, one was a collection of some damn fine artwork, one even claimed to be a translation of Dee and Kelley's Liber Logaeth! But I’d be willing to bet money that none of them were really authored by a Mad Arab named Abdul Alhazred. Yet the magick within at least one of them has proven to work quite admirably. Enochian magic also has shown itself to be an extremely accessible and well thought out system of magick that I have put to extensive use in my personal workings. Sometimes the spirits just need a good marketing technique to get the word out.

Frater Inominandum

Thelesis Camp O.T.O.