Enochian Calls

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An Enochian Call entry records one of the forty eight invocatory verses, also called Keys, that the Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley recorded in a language they called Enochian or Angelical during a series of documented sessions held between 1582 and 1584. Meric Casaubon printed the first edition of Dee's own diaries in 1659, giving scholars a primary, dated record of the calls' actual content and the sequence in which they were received, rather than a later reconstruction assembled from secondhand report.

An entry records a call's documented position in that sequence, its Enochian text as Dee's own diaries preserve it, and Dee's own accompanying English gloss where the diaries provide one, since the calls were recorded together with Dee's own working translation rather than left as untranslated verse.

Where a call's later occult use, in the Golden Dawn's own curriculum or in modern practice, departs from what the primary diary record actually shows, an entry keeps the two honestly separate, since Casaubon's edition documents only Dee's own recorded sessions and says nothing about how those sessions were later read and reused. A reader should also note Casaubon's own stated purpose in publishing the diaries, to warn readers against what he took to be diabolical delusion rather than to endorse the calls as effective magical instruments, so the primary source itself frames this material as a documented historical curiosity, not as a working manual.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Joseph Peterson's edition of Dee's angelic diaries is a critical scholarly presentation of the same primary sixteenth century manuscript record, prepared with editorial annotation and apparatus rather than as a bare transcription, and it stands as a working modern sourcebook for the whole documented Enochian system, the calls among it.

That modern critical apparatus matters for a call entry because Dee's own diary pages are not always plain to read, and Peterson's annotation notes where a call's wording or numbering has been read differently by different transcribers, so an entry can record that documented uncertainty honestly rather than presenting one silently chosen reading as the only one.

An Enochian Call entry therefore draws on both kinds of documented evidence where useful, Casaubon's earliest printed sequence and Peterson's modern critical notes on it, since the two serve different, complementary purposes, the first fixing what was recorded and when, the second flagging where later readers of that record have genuinely disagreed. Peterson's own edition also separately transcribes a shorter, related portion of the same diaries, the Heptarchia, cross checked against this fuller text.