Enochian Vision Magick: A Guide to Angelic Language, Sacred Symbols and Visionary Practice

Mortlake, on the Thames west of London, in the early 1580s. A brightly painted wooden table stands in a quiet room, its legs resting on discs of wax engraved with names and stars. On the table sits a shew-stone, the scrying crystal of the day.

One man leans close and stares into it. The other holds a pen.

The man at the stone is Edward Kelley. He reports letters, one at a time, as a figure in the stone points to them on a lettered table. The man with the pen is John Dee, mathematician and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, and he writes down every letter, every question and every answer. Over seven years the two of them fill notebooks with a language Dee called Angelical, with prayers in that language, and with tables of letters so dense they look like maps of a city no one has visited.

Four centuries later, the letters still turn heads. They glow on tattoos, in visionary paintings and across the back of a cloak at a psytrance sunrise.

We're Magus and Lylyth Fawn, Los Angeles visionary artists who describe ourselves as "artists, astrologers, authors, musicians and magicians." Magick and ancient symbolism run through everything we make, and the Dee and Kelley records are some of the richest visual material in the Western tradition. This is our guide to Enochian Vision Magick: what Dee and Kelley actually recorded, what came after, and how to explore it with an open mind and steady feet.

What is Enochian Vision Magick?

Enochian Vision Magick is a visionary branch of Western ceremonial magick built on the records of John Dee and Edward Kelley, who said angels dictated a language, prayers and lettered tables to them between 1582 and 1589. Its practice centers on scrying, spoken Calls in the Angelical language, the Watchtowers of the Great Table and journeys through the Thirty Aethyrs.

The phrase is also the title of Lon Milo DuQuette's practical guide to the system, first published by Weiser in 2008, with a second edition in 2019. The tradition itself is far older, and it has passed through several hands since Dee's day.

People come to it in different ways. For some practitioners it's genuine communication with angelic intelligences. For others it's a disciplined form of visionary meditation. For artists like us, it's also a visual language of grids, seals and letters that seems to hum. The defining thread is the vision itself: seeing carefully, and writing it down.

Who were John Dee and Edward Kelley?

John Dee (1527–1608/9) was an Elizabethan mathematician, astronomer and astrologer who advised Queen Elizabeth I. Edward Kelley (1555–1597/8) was the scryer who worked with him from 1582 to 1589. Kelley gazed into the shew-stone and reported what he saw and heard; Dee asked the questions and recorded every session in detail.

John Dee was born in London in 1527 and became one of the most learned men in England. He wrote the Hermetic Monas Hieroglyphica in 1564 and, in 1570, a famous Mathematical Preface to the first English translation of Euclid's Elements. His library at Mortlake was the largest in the country (Wikipedia: John Dee). To Dee, mathematics and angels weren't rivals. Oxford's History of Science Museum notes that he saw angelic communication as "as viable a method as mathematics" for understanding the natural world (HSM Oxford).

Edward Kelley was born in Worcester in 1555 and approached Dee in 1582, at first under the name Edward Talbot (Wikipedia: Edward Kelley). He became Dee's regular scryer.

The journey. In September 1583 both families left England with the Polish nobleman Olbracht Łaski. The sessions continued in Kraków, at the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, and at Třeboň in Bohemia. In 1587 Kelley reported an angelic instruction that the two men share everything they had, their wives included; Dee broke off the spiritual conferences soon after, and in 1589 the partners parted for good.

After. Kelley stayed in Bohemia as an alchemist to Rudolf II, was knighted in 1590, was imprisoned in 1591 and died in custody at Most in 1597 or 1598. Dee went home to find his library plundered, became warden of Christ's College, Manchester, in 1595, and died at Mortlake in 1608 or 1609.

What were the angelic conversations?

The angelic conversations were structured scrying sessions in which Edward Kelley reported seeing and hearing beings who called themselves angels, and John Dee recorded their words. The sessions began with prayer and produced names, a 21-letter alphabet, poetic invocations called Keys, lettered tables and detailed visions, all preserved in Dee's manuscripts.

The objects are still with us, and they're breathtaking. Oxford's History of Science Museum holds a marble copy, made in the mid-1600s, of the Holy Table that Dee said the archangel Uriel instructed him to build; the painted wooden original is lost (HSM Oxford). The British Museum holds Dee's wax discs, which supported the table's legs and the shew-stone, the largest engraved with the Sigillum Dei (British Museum), along with a gold disc engraved with the Vision of the Four Castles that Kelley reported in Kraków in 1584 (British Museum).

Dee's black scrying mirror is there too. A 2021 study in the journal Antiquity traced its obsidian to Pachuca in Mexico, making it an Aztec mirror that crossed an ocean before it reached an Elizabethan magus (Smithsonian).

Much of what we know reached print in 1659, when Méric Casaubon published Dee's later records as A True & Faithful Relation of What passed for many Yeers between Dr. John Dee… and Some Spirits.

Why is it called Enochian?

It's called Enochian because Dee believed the biblical patriarch Enoch was the last human, before Dee and Kelley, to know the language of the angels. Dee himself mostly called it Angelical, the Celestial Speech or the Holy Language. "Enochian" is the later name. The Book of Enoch is a separate, ancient body of texts.

The Book of Enoch belongs to ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature, full of heavenly ascents and angelic revelations. Enochian magick is the sixteenth-century system recorded by Dee and Kelley and developed by later occultists. They share a patron figure and a theme, revealed heavenly knowledge, but the Angelical language doesn't come from any ancient manuscript of Enoch (Wikipedia: Enochian).

Is Enochian a real language?

Enochian is a real, documented body of language: a 21-letter alphabet written right to left, a vocabulary, and 48 poetic Keys with English translations recorded in Dee's diaries. Whether angels revealed it is a matter of faith. Linguist Donald Laycock found its sounds and word order strikingly close to English.

According to Dee's records, Kelley first saw the 21-letter alphabet in the stone on 26 March 1583. Soon after came Liber Loagaeth, a book of letter tables the angels never translated. About a year later, at King Stephen Báthory's court in Kraków, came the Claves Angelicae, the Angelic Keys, with English translations (Wikipedia: Enochian).

Laycock's Complete Enochian Dictionary (1978) became a standard reference and was reviewed in the linguistics journal Language (Cambridge University Press). The honest summary holds three statements together: Dee and Kelley recorded a remarkable body of language; they attributed it to angels; and that origin sits beyond what history can prove.

A note for anyone planning a tattoo or a design: most online "Enochian translators" simply swap English letters for Enochian shapes. That's transliteration, not translation. Before you ink a phrase, check whether it's genuine Angelical vocabulary from the Keys, an angelic name, or English in Enochian letters.

Are there 19 Enochian Calls or 48 Enochian Keys?

Both numbers are right. Dee's manuscript gathers 48 Angelic Keys: eighteen individual Calls, plus a nineteenth Call that's spoken thirty times, once with the name of each of the Thirty Aethyrs. Count the nineteenth as one Call and you have 19; count each Aethyr version separately and you have 48.

The Calls are formal, rhythmic and poetic, not conversational. Practitioners place great weight on breath, rhythm and intention, though no single pronunciation is universally agreed. The nineteenth, the Call of the Aethyrs, is the gateway to the visionary journeys the system is famous for.

The Great Table, the Watchtowers and the Thirty Aethyrs

The Watchtowers. On 20 June 1584 in Kraków, Kelley described a vision of four castles, or watchtowers, standing at the four quarters of the world, the same vision engraved on the British Museum's gold disc. It was followed by the Great Table: a vast grid of letters in four quarters, from which angelic names are read along set lines and crosses. Our story The North Tower Is Listening, set at a Detroit techno festival, takes its name and its etched look from those towers.

The Thirty Aethyrs are thirty named visionary regions, numbered from the 30th, TEX, up to the 1st, LIL (Wikipedia: Enochian magic). Practitioners approach them as heavens, as layers of consciousness or as stages of initiation.

The Sigillum Dei Aemeth, the Seal of God's Truth, is older than Dee's sessions. Its design comes from the medieval grimoire Liber Juratus, the Sworn Book of Honorius, which Dee owned; the angels guided his revised version, engraved on the wax discs under the table. Its rings of names, numbers and a seven-pointed star make it one of the most beautiful pieces of sacred geometry in the Western tradition. (For more on that tradition, read our guide What Is Visionary Art?)

What came after Dee. The tradition you'll meet in modern books passed through three main stages:

Two people who say they "practice Enochian" may be doing very different things, so it helps to know which layer a book draws from.

Is Enochian magick dangerous or evil?

No. Enochian magick began as Christian devotion: Dee's sessions were steeped in piety and followed prayer and fasting, and he understood the angels as messengers of God. Its dramatic reputation comes mostly from fiction and later legend. Like any intense spiritual practice, it rewards preparation, balance and a grounded daily life.

As practitioners ourselves, we see it as the opposite of evil. In our experience, the Calls realign you with your truest path, clearing away what no longer serves you and opening the ways that do, and the angelic intelligences work with magicians who come with a pure heart. That's our belief, offered as belief.

The practical wisdom is the same for any visionary work:

• Start with history. Read about Dee the scholar before you open a ritual manual.
• Keep a journal. Record the date, your state of mind, the method and exactly what you saw. Write first, interpret later. Dee's meticulous notes are the reason any of this is still with us.
• Keep your daily life strong. Sleep well, take breaks, and never let ritual stand in for medical or mental-health care.
• Hold interpretations lightly. A vision can carry deep spiritual, psychological or artistic meaning without settling every question about where it came from.

Enochian Vision: the angelic script, made to wear

Our Enochian Vision design is our homage to this tradition. It reads like a page from an illuminated grimoire: a pentagram in a circle, panels of angelic sigil script, an open book and a carved altar below, rendered in a different palette for each colorway. On the darker colorways it reads as pure "techno monk" on a techno floor, and it looks just as at home under a psytrance sunrise.

The cloak. The Enochian Vision Gold men's festival cloak ($250) is inspired by the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs. It has a micro-mink outer, an ultra-soft microfiber fleece lining in black or white faux fur, a double front zipper and four pockets, unisex in XS–5XL. Enochian Vision cloaks also come in teal, red, orange, purple and blue, plus pink in the women's cut.

For the cold nights and camp mornings: the Enochian Vision cotton pullover hoodie ($100) carries the full print on 310 g/m² 100% cotton with a kangaroo pocket, XS–6XL (allow for 3–5% shrinkage after the first wash). The Enochian Vision hooded blanket with ears ($150) turns the grimoire into 300 g/m² fleece with a cat-ear hood, a quarter zip and an oversized front pocket, in one oversized size (4XL).

For the dance floor: the Enochian Vision crushed velvet T-shirt ($60) sets the pentagram glowing green above bronze and gold script, in 240 g/m² crushed velvet that catches every laser, sizes XS–5XL. Unity bought one as a gift for their partner, a festival DJ, and wrote in March 2025: "The quality is exceptional and the unique design is purely divine."

The Watchtowers, made to wear. Our Watchtowers design answers the Great Table in silver, grey and black engraved linework: circular sigils, arcane diagrams and botanical filigree, like an alchemist's etching. The Watchtowers women's sheer mesh bodycon dress ($55, 2XS–5XL) layers over black for a dark room and a long techno set.

For the design's story, read Write One True Thing, a techno festival love story in the English woods with a book left in a stone hand. And when the night turns cold, our guide to how to stay warm at a festival at night has the full layering formula.

Explore more visionary layers: men's cloaks · women's cloaks · cotton hoodies · crushed velvet · hooded blankets

Frequently asked questions

Who created Enochian magick?

Enochian magick grew from the angelic conversations of John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley, recorded between 1582 and 1589 in England, Poland and Bohemia. Dee and Kelley credited angels with the material. In the 1880s the Golden Dawn built it into a ceremonial system, and Aleister Crowley later popularized the Aethyr visions.

What is scrying?

Scrying is a visionary practice of gazing steadily into a reflective or translucent surface, such as a crystal, a black mirror or still water, and recording the images, words or impressions that arise. Edward Kelley scried for John Dee with a crystal shew-stone, and Dee's obsidian mirror is now in the British Museum.

What are the Thirty Aethyrs?

The Thirty Aethyrs are thirty named visionary regions in Enochian magick, numbered from the 30th, TEX, up to the 1st, LIL. Practitioners open each one with the nineteenth Call, spoken with that Aethyr's name, and treat them as heavens, layers of consciousness or initiatory stages. Crowley's scrying journeys became The Vision and the Voice.

What is the Sigillum Dei Aemeth?

The Sigillum Dei Aemeth, or Seal of God's Truth, is an intricate circular seal of names, numbers and a seven-pointed star. Its design comes from the medieval grimoire Liber Juratus. John Dee revised it during his angelic sessions and had it engraved on wax discs, which the British Museum holds today.

Can Enochian symbols be worn on clothing?

Yes. Enochian letters, tables and seals have inspired visionary art, tattoos and occult clothing for decades, and wearing them is a way to carry the tradition's beauty with you. The strongest designs respect the source: genuine letter forms, documented phrases and an artist who knows what each symbol means and where it came from.

Written by Magus & Lylyth Fawn, the Los Angeles artists behind Magus Fawn. Magus makes VR and digital visionary art and produces Psy EDM. Lylyth makes fractal digital art and runs design and customer care. We've been selling wearable art since 2020 (4.8★ from 147 reviews as of October 2026), and every piece is made to order here at magusfawn.com. Come say hi on Instagram @magusfawn.