The world has over 6,000 languages, but how often have you heard Enochian? The Enochian language is a researched but still mysterious form of communication allegedly handed down from the angels themselves. Named for the biblical figure Enoch, the Enochian language has become a means of magic for the world of the Occult, although its validity has come into question over the years.

Recently the Enochian language became a hot topic on The Confessionals, as a guest shared their experience discovering the language while on a secret military mission aboard a peculiar, checkerboard-patterned aircraft. (Take a listen to Episode 122: Secret Military Enochian Language to hear his unsettling account.) So how did the Enochian language develop, and does it still have relevance? Here are 10 historical facts that shed light on this alternately angelic and satanic language:

1) Enochian is an occult or angelic language that was recorded in the private journals of John Dee and his colleague Edward Kelley in late 16th-century England. Dee was a man of science-turned-magic seeker, and Kelley was a spirit medium who worked with Dee in his magical investigations. The men claimed that the mystical language was revealed to them by the Enochian angels. It is also referred to as Celestial Speech, Angelical, The First Language of God-Christ, and Adamical, because they believed it was the language first used by Adam and Eve - perhaps even the language God used to speak everything into being.

2) Dr. John Dee, born in 1527, was an occultist, mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I who originally had little interest in the supernatural. Later on in his career, he became disillusioned with science and began experimenting with the occult. He believed he could recover lost spiritual wisdom in books of antiquity, among them the Book of Enoch.

3) The term Enochian comes from the Biblical figure Enoch. According to the Bible, Enoch lived 365 years before being taken up to Heaven - without dying. Genesis 5:24 says that he “walked with God” and Hebrews 11:5 states he “was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death.” He is one of two biblical figures, the other being the prophet Elijah, who left the Earth in this undead manner. John Dee believed Enoch was the last human to have known and used the language of angels.

4) In 1581, John Dee wrote in his personal journal that God had sent “Good Angels” to communicate directly with mankind. By the following year he was collaborating with seer and scryer Edward Kelley to communicate with these angels. They recorded hundreds of spirit conversations in their journals, including what they claimed was an angelic language called Enochian.

5) According to Dee and Kelley, The Enochian Alphabet was revealed to them during their “scrying sessions”, when various texts and tables were received from angels.  Scrying is a technique used by seers, psychics, and sorcerers to foretell the future and involves gazing into a reflective surface to supernaturally receive messages from other entities.

6) There are two different versions of the Enochian Alphabet, with one script differing slightly from the other. The first version is found in Dee’s own journals, and the second, which is generally the more accepted version, is in the book Liber Loagaeth, which features Kelley’s original drawings of the Alphabet. Though Enochian is composed of non-English letters, it bears very similar syntax and grammar to that of the English language. The Enochian letters do have English letter equivalents, but some letters are pronounced the same as in English while others are not. Computer analysis has also shown Enochian to have a grammatical relationship to English. Unlike English, however, the Enochian script is written from right to left.

7) Due to the loss of parts of John Dee’s original manuscripts over the decades, the meaning, validity, and authenticity behind the Enochian language has been called into question. There are some magicians that believe it to really be the oldest language in the world, predating all other human languages. Some circles consider it among the most powerful strains of magic and methods of contacting intelligences from other dimensions. Disbelievers in either magic or Enochian itself contest that the foundation of Enochian is so close to that of Dee and Kelley’s native English language that is it surely their own, and not a divine, invention. A number of linguists who studied it have noted discrepancies in Enochian that reveal it is not a consistent language.

8) More modern day occultists have also found it difficult to reconstruct the Enochian system, although progress has been made by studying the original manuscripts found in the Sir Hans Sloane collection. From these studies, there have emerged individuals and groups who have created a functional system of magic, including occultists like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, and founder of the church of Satan, Anton LaVey, who have used and popularized the Enochian language to certain extents.

9) In pop culture, the 1994 movie Stargate incorporated Enochian letters as the glyphs used to operate the arc angle. The Stargate film also focuses heavily on interstellar teleportation and ancient Egyptian culture. Interestingly, the movie debuted one year before the United States remote viewing program, known as “Stargate”, became public. 

10) Another aspect of modern Enochian magic is Enochian chess. Enochian chess is both a game and a divination tool, derived from the original tablets of John Dee. It is a complex system that requires a strong foundation in the study of the Qabalah, Geomancy, Tarot, Alchemy, and Astrology. Chess, a game of ancient origins, has a debatably occult-related subtext as an elaborate and interconnected system of coded messages for those who are trained in its interpretation. To learn more about how the game of Chess relates to the occult, click here to read “Ask a Wizard: What is the Occult Secret of Chess?”

With this knowledge, it is even more interesting for us to note how in Episode 122, the guest describes the outside of the aircraft, in which he discovered the Enochian language in use, to be designed with a black checkerboard pattern. Was the outside of the aircraft itself a form of communication or identification for someone (or something) familiar with the Enochian system? For now the answer remains as mysterious as Enochian itself.

The information above was obtained from Bryan Hill’s article Enoch: The Mysterious Lost Language of Angels and Wikipedia.

~ Lindsay W. Merkel