What Is Enochian Magic?
Channel: Rev Jonathan Barlow Gee
Date: 2023-07-19

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14. What is Enochian magic, what uses does it have?

Nowadays, the answer to that depends entirely on who you ask, because there are many different independent and group practitioners who follow very different traditions and schools of thought about it. For example, in Anton Lavey’s “Satanic Bible,” one of Dee’s “calls of the Ayres” is quoted, but the name of the “angel” being invoked in Dee’s original is replaced with the name “Satan.” Likewise, in Aleister Crowley’s work, “The Vision and The Voice,” he adds more such “calls” in the Enochian language and describes their effects as being very much different from the more placid visions of Dee. In the knowledge lectures of the original modern members of the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,” a system is described that has since come to be called “Neo-Enochian,” that assigns each cell on Dee’s 4 Watchtowers its own elemental attribute per column and row, as well as a corresponding zodiac sign attribute derived from a crossing of these elements per row and column. So, for example, Aries was the result at the crossing of the element of Fire for a row with the element of Fire for a column, the sign of Scorpio a crossing of Water and Water, Gemini of Air and Air, etc. Much of this “Neo-Enochian” work was the product of SL Mathers (1854-1918) writing as “Frater SRMD” and remains understood by very few even today. Of course, the original “Enochian” system of magic as it was designed by or imparted to John Dee and Edward Kelley (from 1582 until 1587) consists of the usual liturgical chants to be intoned as prayers (the 18 out of 30 “calls of the Ayres”) and the 4 Watchtower tables as a “Lamen” onto which are assembled the 91 (actually 92) sigils of the “intelligences of the places in the earth.” Although there is no real evidence of any Goetic influence on Dee in the “Enochian” magic system, Meric Causabon, an early Dee biographer, suggests there was such, and so since then many have confused the arrangement actually used by Dee for discoursing with the “Enochian” angels and that used in standard “ceremonial magic” or “ritual summoning” such as in the Goetia and other grimoires. Therefore, rather than assemble the components of his rituals as Dee himself did, many modern magi would prefer to use the “Goetic” model of “ceremonial summoning” as a short-cut for manifesting the “intelligences” Dee’s method only allows communication with more indirectly, via scrying. The combination of Goetia and Enochian magic systems should not be dove into recklessly as did Crowley by publishing certain Goetic “curses,” translated into the “Enochian” language, in his appendix to Mather’s edition of the “Lesser Keys of Solomon” grimoire. Recall that Dee, while off designing a system of magic to search for “buried treasure,” had his library raided and his home ransacked and that Crowley, who added his “curses” among the “calls of the Ayres” as “authentic” Enochian translations, suffered a lifelong addition to heroin and you maybe reminded why practicing this method of “magic” could be considered “dangerous” to one’s overall welfare and general wellbeing.