The Enochian Calls and Keys

The Enochian Calls, also referred to as Keys, are forty-eight invocatory texts in the Enochian language received through the skrying sessions of John Dee and Edward Kelley between 1584 and 1587. They are the primary operative texts of the Enochian magical system: spoken or chanted in ritual to invoke the angelic intelligences associated with each part of the Enochian cosmos, to open the elemental Watchtowers, and to enter the thirty regions called Aethyrs. Together they form the most substantial body of Enochian language text and the foundation of all active Enochian working.

The calls were not given as a single document but accumulated over the course of the skrying sessions. Dee recorded them meticulously, often alongside the English translations provided by the angelic communicators. The first call was received in April 1584 in Krakow; the remainder followed over the subsequent months. The transmission procedure was unusual: the letters of each call were dictated in reverse order, cell by cell through the skrying glass, and Dee then reversed the sequence to produce the readable text.

History and origins

The calls were first brought to wider occult attention through Meric Casaubon’s 1659 publication of Dee’s diaries under the title A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. This publication was intended by Casaubon as a cautionary tale, but it served instead to preserve the Enochian material and make it accessible to curious readers over the following centuries.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was the primary force that transformed the Dee-Kelley material from historical curiosity into active practice. Working with the manuscripts in the British Museum in the 1880s and 1890s, Golden Dawn members developed a coherent system of magical working based on the calls and the Watchtower tablets. S.L. MacGregor Mathers assigned correspondences, developed initiation rituals based on elemental attributions, and produced a set of working procedures that remain influential in Enochian practice today.

Aleister Crowley pushed the system further, skrying all thirty Aethyrs using the nineteenth call during travels in Algeria in 1909 with his friend Victor Neuburg serving as scribe. The result was The Vision and the Voice, a substantial document of visionary experience that has become a reference for practitioners exploring the Aethyr dimensions of the system. Crowley’s attributions and commentaries, not always consistent with the original Dee material, represent a significant creative development rather than a restoration of the original.

The twentieth century saw growing scholarly attention to the calls as texts. Geoffrey James produced the first modern annotated edition, and Aaron Leitch’s two-volume The Angelical Language (2010) provides the most detailed analysis of the calls’ language, structure, and meaning currently available.

In practice

The calls function as invocations in the technical sense: they call angelic forces into the practitioner’s ritual space and establish the conditions for communication, vision, or elemental working. They are not prayers in the supplicatory sense but declarations addressed to specific intelligences from a position of spiritual authority.

The first call addresses the divine source of the entire Enochian system, establishing the operator’s alignment with the highest principle. The second call activates the general angelic governance of the created world. Calls three through eighteen each address a specific sub-quadrant of the elemental Watchtower tablets, calling forth the four-letter name of the senior angel of that quadrant and the intelligences beneath it. A practitioner working with a particular element, such as Fire, would use the call corresponding to the Fire Watchtower before engaging with the names and angels inscribed there.

The nineteenth call is the most versatile and the most used. By substituting the name of each Aethyr in turn at the designated point in the text, the practitioner addresses and enters each of the thirty celestial regions. Crowley’s numbering runs from the first Aethyr (Lix) outward to the thirtieth (Tex, the outermost), though he encountered them in reverse order, beginning with the outermost and working inward.

Working with the calls effectively requires learning to pronounce the Enochian with some consistency and to chant or intone it at a pace that allows the meaning of the English parallel text to register. Most practitioners find that the resonance of the spoken Enochian, even before they have thoroughly learned the grammar, produces a distinctive quality of attention and inner openness that other ritual languages do not. The calls are best learned progressively, beginning with the first two and working systematically outward, rather than attempted all at once.

In myth and popular culture

The Enochian Calls are the most sustained body of alleged angelic language in the Western esoteric tradition, and their cultural presence reflects this. Aleister Crowley’s use of the nineteenth call to scry the thirty Aethyrs in Algeria in 1909, documented in The Vision and the Voice, became one of the most widely discussed accounts of visionary magickal practice in the twentieth century and introduced the calls to generations of subsequent practitioners through Crowley’s Thelemic publishing.

The Calls have attracted attention from linguists as well as magicians. Donald Laycock’s Enochian Dictionary (1978) analyzed the calls’ language and found both consistent grammatical patterns and suggestive parallels with English, feeding ongoing debate about whether the calls represent a genuine received language or an elaborated invention. This debate itself has cultural significance: very few allegedly received sacred languages have attracted serious linguistic analysis.

In fiction, the Enochian language and its calls appear in various supernatural television series and novels as a shorthand for authentic ceremonial power. The American television series Supernatural used an adapted Enochian in angel-related episodes across its long run, introducing the script to a wide audience, though the show’s treatment diverged substantially from the actual Dee-Kelley material.

Myths and facts

Several misconceptions affect how the Calls are understood by those new to Enochian.

• A common belief holds that there are nineteen calls. The count depends on how the nineteenth call is counted: it is one call that generates thirty variations by substituting the name of each Aethyr. The total corpus is forty-eight, counting each Aethyr variation separately; if the Aethyr call is counted once, the total is nineteen. Both counts appear in the literature and describe the same body of material.
• Many practitioners assume that the calls must be pronounced in a specific and known way for them to work. The pronunciation of Enochian is not fully specified in the original documents, and the several pronunciation systems in use today, including those of the Golden Dawn and of reconstructionist practitioners, differ from each other. Consistent, intentional pronunciation within a chosen system appears to matter more than adherence to a single standard.
• The calls are sometimes described as dangerous to read aloud outside a ritual context. The tradition of dictating them in reverse order during the original sessions is cited as evidence. The reverse-dictation procedure is well documented, but whether the calls are literally dangerous to speak casually is a belief within the tradition rather than a documented fact, and experienced practitioners hold a range of views on it.
• Some sources describe the calls as prayers. They are invocations in the technical sense, addressing angelic powers from a position of declared authority rather than petitioning from below, which is a meaningfully different structure.
• The assumption that the calls were composed by Dee is incorrect. Dee recorded them; Kelley received them through the skrying glass, with the communicating angels providing the text letter by letter. Dee explicitly distinguished his own writing from the received material.