The Enochian Mystery

In the British Museum in London there is a glass case containing a polished black disc made of obsidian — volcanic glass, impossibly smooth, roughly six inches across. The surface seems to absorb light rather than reflect it. The placard reads: "John Dee's Scrying Mirror, circa 1580." It was through this mirror that one of the most brilliant minds in Elizabethan England claimed to receive a complete language transmitted by angels — its own alphabet, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and an elaborate system of tables and hierarchies describing the structure of creation itself. The system became known as Enochian magic. And for four hundred years, the most serious occultists in Western history have treated it as real. I keep hearing about Enochian from this community. The Golden Dawn — the most influential magical order in Western history — built their entire initiatory system around it. Aleister Crowley worked it in the Algerian desert and claimed it produced the most intense experience...