SupernatEnochianLanguage226

Harry Edwards (222: pp 6-7), discussing John Dee, does not refer to what is clearly the most important work on the ‘Enochian language’: the book-length treatment titled The Complete Enochian Dictionary (London, 1978 and York Beach, Maine, 1994) by the still-lamented and amazingly talented Australian linguist Donald C. Laycock and his colleague Stephen Skinner. Laycock died – tragically young – in 1988, but the 2nd edition was completed by Skinner with two prefaces. It should be noted that TWO bodies of data – a supposedly angelic language and an otherwise unknown script, both labelled ‘Enochian’ – were allegedly channelled to Kelley and were recorded in writing by Dee (the former in roman script). (The patriarch Enoch is discussed in Genesis and the apocryphal Book Of Enoch). Notions about the language used in Eden are obviously speculative at best.

Laycock’s book is much more than a dictionary, in particular including extensive discussion of Enochian grammar (see below). As far as the ‘Enochian language’ is concerned, nineteen ‘Calls’ or ‘Keys’ providing the bulk of the data are supplied with English translations; the content is that of religious/mystical invocations (narrative, exhortative, etc.). Laycock and Skinner discuss earlier interpretive works from 1662 (when the texts were re-discovered) and after (up to the twentieth century), each influenced by contemporary ideas. They are highly critical (Laycock was involved with the Australian Skeptics) but are also open minded despite the nature of the material; they are inclined to consider Enochian largely non-paranormal (although Skinner is obviously convinced of the reality of Dee’s angels, at least). Laycock and Skinner concluded that ‘Enochian’, unusually in this context, patterns rather like a genuine but altogether unknown language, albeit with some most uncommon features including unprecedently heavy/wide-ranging ‘suppletion’ (unrelated stems in different tenses, etc.) in the verb paradigms.

Some Enochian words are pronounceable as English, some as if from ‘exotic’ languages, some barely pronounceable at all. There is a highly suspicious one-to-one correspondence with the Roman alphabet with English spelling rules. This issue arises again in the context of word-order within sentences. There are often several Enochian words in sequence corresponding with one English word, or less commonly the reverse, with no analysis offered. Most of the vocabulary is unfamiliar, though some words appear to have Latin, Greek or Hebrew etymologies. There are highly anomalous systems involving negation and numerals. Interpretation is difficult because of the high percentage of ‘hapaxes’ (words occurring only once in the corpus of data).

The above is drawn from my 2013 book Strange Linguistics (Lincom-Europa, Munich). Further comment on Enochian is available on request from me.