Enochian Magic - Rediscovery By The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn

Rediscovery By The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn

Dee and Kelly never referred to their magic as 'Enochian' but rather called it 'Angelic'. However in modern occultism it is commonly known as Enochian. It is not quite clear how much of Enochian magic was put to use by Dee and Kelley. Indeed, whether Dee and Kelly ever practiced Enochian is still up for debate. The angels told them not to work Enochian, and there are no diary records of works being done except for one healing talisman that the angels instructed them how to make. Dee and Kelley's journals are essentially notebooks which record the elements of the system, rather than records of workings they performed utilising the system.

Some writers assert that Thomas Rudd was the centre of a group of angel magicians who may have used Dee and Kelly's material. The Angelical material of Dee and Kelley also had a considerable influence on the magic of Rosicrucianism. However, little else became of Dee's work until late in the nineteenth century, when it was incorporated and adopted by a mysterious and highly secret brother-hood of adepts in England, who called themselves the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The rediscovery of Enochian magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the 1880s led to Mathers hammering the material into a comprehensive and workable system of ceremonial Magick. They invoked the Enochian deities whose names were written on the tablets. They also traveled in what they called their Body of Light (a poetic term for the aura) into these subtle regions and recorded their psychic experiences in a scientific manner. The two major branches of the system were then grafted on to the Adeptus Minor curriculum of the Golden Dawn.

Enochian as an operative system is difficult to reconstruct based upon original manuscripts like the collection of Sir Hans Sloane in the British Museum, but contemporary occult organizations have attempted to make it usable. The Golden Dawn was the first, but their knowledge was based upon only one of Dee's diaries and their planetary, elemental, or zodiacal attributions have no foundation in the original sources.

The Golden Dawn also invented the game of Enochian chess, so that aspects of the Enochian Tablets can be used for divination. The four chessboards do not have any symbols on them, just sets of squares colored in certain ways. Each board is associated with one of the four elements of magick. Pat Zalewski's book (1994) on the subject is definitive.

The papers of the Sphere Group, a sub-group of the Golden Dawn founded by Florence Farr which experimented with Enochian magic, have been edited and published in Kuntz, (1996).