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Enochian ( ) is an occult
constructed language A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. ...
— said by its originators to have been received from angels — recorded in the private journals of
John Dee John Dee (13 July 1527 – 1608 or 1609) was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, teacher, occultist, and alchemist. He was the court astronomer for, and advisor to, Elizabeth I, and spent much of his time on alchemy, divinatio ...
and his colleague
Edward Kelley Sir Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot (; 1 August 1555 – 1597/8), was an English people, English Renaissance magic, Renaissance occultist and scryer. He is best known for working with John Dee (mathematician), John Dee in hi ...
in late 16th-century England. Kelley was a
scryer Scrying, also known by various names such as "seeing" or "peeping", is the practice of looking into a suitable medium in the hope of detecting significant messages or visions. The objective might be personal guidance, prophecy, revelation, or in ...
who worked with Dee in his magical investigations. The language is integral to the practice of
Enochian magic Enochian magic is a system of ceremonial magic based on the 16th-century writings of John Dee and Edward Kelley, who wrote that their information, including the revealed Enochian language, was delivered to them directly by various angels. Dee's j ...
. The language found in Dee's and Kelley's journals encompasses a limited
textual corpus In linguistics, a corpus (plural ''corpora'') or text corpus is a language resource consisting of a large and structured set of texts (nowadays usually electronically stored and processed). In corpus linguistics, they are used to do statistical ...
. Linguist
Donald Laycock Donald Laycock (1936–1988) was an Australian linguist and anthropologist. He is best remembered for his work on the languages of Papua New Guinea. Biography He was a graduate of University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and later ...
, an Australian Skeptic, studied the Enochian journals, and argues against any extraordinary features. The untranslated texts of the ''Liber Loagaeth'' manuscript recall the patterns of
glossolalia Speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia, is a practice in which people utter words or speech-like sounds, often thought by believers to be languages unknown to the speaker. One definition used by linguists is the fluid vocalizing of sp ...
rather than true language. Dee did not distinguish the ''Liber Loagaeth'' material from the translated language of the ''Calls'', which is more like an artificial language. This language was called Angelical by Dee and later came to be referred to as 'Enochian' by subsequent writers. The
phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
and
grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
resemble English, though the translations are not sufficient to work out any regular
morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines * Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts * Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies ...
. Some Enochian words resemble words and proper names in the Bible, but most have no apparent etymology. Dee's journals also refer to this language as "Celestial Speech", "First Language of God-Christ", "Holy Language", or "Language of Angels". He also referred to it as " Adamical" because, according to Dee's angels, it was used by
Adam Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as " ...
in Paradise to name all things. The term "Enochian" comes from Dee's assertion that the Biblical patriarch
Enoch Enoch () ''Henṓkh''; ar, أَخْنُوخ ', Qur'ān.html"_;"title="ommonly_in_Qur'ān">ommonly_in_Qur'ānic_literature__'_is_a_biblical_figure_and_Patriarchs_(Bible).html" "title="Qur'ānic_literature.html" ;"title="Qur'ān.html" ;"title="o ...
had been the last human (before Dee and Kelley) to know the language.


History

According to Tobias Churton in his text ''The Golden Builders'', the concept of an Angelic or
antediluvian The antediluvian (alternatively pre-diluvian or pre-flood) period is the time period chronicled in the Bible between the fall of man and the Genesis flood narrative in biblical cosmology. The term was coined by Thomas Browne. The narrative take ...
language was common during Dee's time. If one could speak the language of angels, it was believed one could directly interact with them.


Seeking contact and reported visions

In 1581, Dee mentioned in his personal journals that God had sent "good angels" to communicate directly with prophets. In 1582, Dee teamed up with the
seer In the United States, the efficiency of air conditioners is often rated by the seasonal energy efficiency ratio (SEER) which is defined by the Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, a trade association, in its 2008 standard AHRI ...
Edward Kelley Sir Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot (; 1 August 1555 – 1597/8), was an English people, English Renaissance magic, Renaissance occultist and scryer. He is best known for working with John Dee (mathematician), John Dee in hi ...
, although Dee had used several other seers previously. With Kelley's help as a
scryer Scrying, also known by various names such as "seeing" or "peeping", is the practice of looking into a suitable medium in the hope of detecting significant messages or visions. The objective might be personal guidance, prophecy, revelation, or in ...
, Dee set out to establish lasting contact with the angels. Their work resulted, among other things, in the reception of Angelical, now more commonly known as Enochian. The reception started on March 26, 1583, when Kelley reported visions in the crystal of a 21 lettered alphabet. A few days later, Kelley started receiving what became the book ''Liber Loagaeth'' ("Book fSpeech from God"). The book consists of 49 great letter tables, or squares made of 49 by 49 letters (however each table has a front and a back side, making 98 tables of 49×49 letters altogether). Dee and Kelley said the angels never translated the texts in this book.


Receiving the ''Angelic Keys''

About a year later, at the court of King
Stephen Báthory Stephen Báthory ( hu, Báthory István; pl, Stefan Batory; ; 27 September 1533 – 12 December 1586) was Voivode of Transylvania (1571–1576), Prince of Transylvania (1576–1586), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (1576–1586) ...
in
Kraków Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 ...
, where both alchemists stayed for some time, another set of texts was reportedly received through Kelley. These texts comprise 48 poetic verses with English translations, which in Dee's manuscripts are called , or ''Angelic Keys''. Dee was apparently intending to use these ''Keys'' to open the "Gates of Understanding" represented by the magic squares in ''Liber Loagaeth'':


Phonology and writing system

The language was recorded primarily in
Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...
, however, individual words written in Enochian script "appear sporadically throughout the manuscripts". There are 21 letters in the script; one letter appears with or without a diacritic dot. Dee mapped these letters of the "Adamical alphabet" onto 22 of the letters of the English alphabet, treating U and V as positional variants (as was common at the time) and omitting the English letters J, K, and W. The Enochian script is written from right to left in John Dee's diary. Different documents have slightly different forms of the script. The alphabet also shares many graphical similarities to a script, also attributed to the prophet Enoch, that appeared in the ''Voarchadumia Contra Alchimiam'' of Johannes Pantheus, a copy of which Dee is known to have owned. The phonology of Enochian is "thoroughly English", apart from a few difficult
sequences In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is called t ...
such as ''bdrios'', ''excolphabmartbh'', ''longamphlg'', ''lapch'', etc. Similarly, Enochian orthography closely follows Early Modern
English orthography English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and p ...
, for example in having soft and hard and , and in using digraphs , , , and for the sounds , , , and . Laycock mapped Enochian orthography to its sound system and says, "the resulting pronunciation makes it sound much more like English than it looks at first sight". Modern pronunciation conventions vary, depending on the affiliations of the practitioner. The Enochian letters, with their letter names and English equivalents as given by Dee, and pronunciations as reconstructed by Laycock, are as follows: A number of fonts for the Enochian script are available. They use the
ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
range, with the letters assigned to the codepoints of their English equivalents.


Grammar


Morphology

The grammar is for the most part without articles or prepositions. Adjectives are quite rare. Aaron Leitch identifies several affixes in Enochian, including ''-o'' (indicating 'of') and ''-ax'' (which functions like ''-ing'' in English). Leitch observes that, unlike English, Enochian appears to have a
vocative case In grammar, the vocative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed, or occasionally for the noun modifiers ( determiners, adjectives, participles, and num ...
, citing Dee's note in the margin of the First Table of ''Loagaeth'' – "Befes the vocative case of Befafes".


Compounds

Compounds are frequent in the Enochian corpus. Modifiers and indicators are typically compounded with the nouns and verbs modified or indicated. These compounds can occur with demonstrative pronouns and conjunctions, as well as with various forms of the verb 'to be'. The compounding of nouns with adjectives or other verbs is less common. Compounds may exhibit variant spellings of the words combined.


Conjugation

Conjugation can result in spelling changes which can appear to be random or haphazard. Due to this, Aaron Leitch has expressed doubt as to whether Enochian actually has conjugations. The very scant evidence of Enochian
verb conjugation In linguistics, conjugation () is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb ''break'' can be conjugated to form the words ''break'', ...
seems quite reminiscent of English, including the verb 'to be' which is highly irregular. Laycock reports that the largest number of forms are recorded for 'be' and for ''goh-'' 'say': :: Note that ''christeos'' 'let there be' might be from 'Christ', and if so is not part of a conjugation. For negation of verbs, two constructions are attested: e.g. ''chis ge'' 'are not' (''chis'' 'they are') and ''ip uran'' 'not see' (''uran'' 'see').


Pronouns

While Enochian does have personal pronouns, they are rare and used in ways that can be difficult to understand. Relative possessive pronouns do exist but are used sparingly. Attested personal pronouns (Dee's material only): :: Demonstrative pronouns: ''oi'' 'this', ''unal'' 'these, those', ''priaz(i)'' 'those'.


Syntax

Word order closely follows English, except for the dearth of articles and prepositions. Adjectives, although rare, typically precede the noun as in English.


Vocabulary and corpus

Laycock notes that there are about 250 different words in the
corpus Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...
of Enochian texts, more than half of which occur only once. A few resemble words in the Bible – mostly proper names – in both sound and meaning. For example, ''luciftias'' "brightness" resembles
Lucifer Lucifer is one of various figures in folklore associated with the planet Venus. The entity's name was subsequently absorbed into Christianity as a name for the devil. Modern scholarship generally translates the term in the relevant Bible passage ...
"the light-bearer"; '' babalond'' "wicked, harlot" resembles
Babylon ''Bābili(m)'' * sux, 𒆍𒀭𒊏𒆠 * arc, 𐡁𐡁𐡋 ''Bāḇel'' * syc, ܒܒܠ ''Bāḇel'' * grc-gre, Βαβυλών ''Babylṓn'' * he, בָּבֶל ''Bāvel'' * peo, 𐎲𐎠𐎲𐎡𐎽𐎢 ''Bābiru'' * elx, 𒀸𒁀𒉿𒇷 ''Babi ...
. Leitch notes a number of root words in Enochian. He lists ''Doh'', ''I'', ''Ia'', ''Iad'', among others, as likely root words. While the ''Angelic Keys'' contain most of the known vocabulary of Enochian, dozens of further words are found throughout Dee's journals. Thousands of additional, undefined words are contained in the ''Liber Loagaeth''. Laycock notes that the material in ''Liber Loagaeth'' appears to be different from the language of the 'Calls' found in the ''Angelic Keys'', which appear to have been generated from the tables and squares of the ''Loagaeth''. According to Laycock:


Relation to other languages

Dee believed Enochian to be the
Adamic language The Adamic language, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the ''midrashim'') and some Christians, is the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden. It is variously interpreted as either the language used by God t ...
universally spoken before the
confusion of tongues The Tower of Babel ( he, , ''Mīgdal Bāḇel'') narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and mi ...
, however, modern analysts view Enochian as an English-like
constructed language A constructed language (sometimes called a conlang) is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose, which may include being devised for a work of fiction. ...
. Word order closely follows English, except for the dearth of articles and prepositions. The very scant evidence of Enochian
verb conjugation In linguistics, conjugation () is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb ''break'' can be conjugated to form the words ''break'', ...
is likewise reminiscent of English, more so than with
Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigra ...
such as Hebrew, which Dee said were debased versions of the Enochian language.


See also

*
List of magical terms and traditions The occult is a category of supernatural beliefs and practices, encompassing such phenomena as those involving mysticism, spirituality, and magic in terms of any otherworldly agency. It can also refer to other non-religious supernatural ideas like ...
*
Renaissance magic Renaissance magic was a resurgence in Hermeticism and Neo-Platonic varieties of the Magic (supernatural), magical arts which arose along with Renaissance humanism in the 15th and 16th centuries CE. These magical arts (called ''#Artes magicae, art ...


Notes


References


Citations


Works cited


Primary sources

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Secondary sources

* * * * * * *


Further reading

* * * . * * * * * * {{Authority control Alphabets Constructed languages Constructed languages introduced in the 1580s * Language and mysticism Languages attested from the 16th century Sacred languages