Friday, May 22, 2015

John Dee and the "Enochian" language

ENOCH WAS NOT JUST FOR THE SECOND TEMPLE ERA: Enochian: The Mysterious Lost Language of Angels (Bryan Hilliard, Ancient Origins).
In the year 1581, occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley, claimed to have received communications from angels, who provided them with the foundations of a language with which to communicate with ‘the other side’. This ‘angelic’ language contained its own alphabet, grammar and syntax, which they wrote down in journals. The new language was called "Enochian" and comes from John Dee's assertion that the Biblical Patriarch Enoch had been the last human to know the language.

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The essays in Ancient Origins have been of mixed quality lately, but this one is a good summary of the story of John Dee, his "scryer" Edward Kelley, and their angelic revelations, which included the "Angelic" (later "Enochian") language; and also a good overview of the current state of the question in scholarship and among practicing magicians. Nice photos too. Dee's massive diary of his angelic séances has been useful in my own work on ancient revelatory praxis and experience (see my 2012 SBL paper here). And I have more on John Dee etc. here and links.