Enochian · Overview

Enochian

From 1581 John Dee — mathematician, navigator's tutor, and an astrologer to Queen Elizabeth's court — kept a record of sessions in which Edward Kelley reported what he saw in a shewstone. Out of these came the Enochian alphabet of twenty-one letters, a set of tables, and verses with English translations beside them that Dee called the Claves Angelicae.

Most of what survives was printed once, badly and late: Meric Casaubon's A True & Faithful Relation of 1659, which he published to discredit Dee rather than to preserve him. The rest stayed in manuscript, so what can be shown here is limited by what those printed pages carry.

The script, the words, the figures

  • Alphabet All 21 letters, with what each answers to in English — and a box that writes what you type in them.
  • Glossary 4 words, each with a gloss and somewhere to check it. Deliberately not a dictionary.
  • Figures 6 plates from the diaries and the 1659 edition, reproduced from public-domain originals.

What this section does not have

There is no dictionary here. The recorded vocabulary contains roughly two hundred and fifty words, more than half of which occur only once. The 1659 edition is not a reliable public-domain text of the Keys — its scan turns a page into fragments such as ableto conſider and then noise — and the full modern word index is copyrighted and records occurrences rather than meanings. The glossary therefore includes only words that can be given a usable source locator.

There is no Great Table here. The four elemental tablets are grids of twelve letters by thirteen, but they do not appear in the 1659 edition. Modern transcriptions use later editions of Sloane MS 3191. This site instead reproduces Dee's diagram of the four Watchtowers as a camp, which the 1659 edition does print, and does not reconstruct the absent grids.

There is no translator here. The alphabet page converts English letters into Dee's script. It does not translate: the surviving material does not provide a grammar from which software could produce Enochian sentences.