The sorely missed Jake Stratton-Kent used to advocate for not letting tools and rules get in the way of magical practice. I think most working magicians, having grappled with the technical demands inherent in traditional grimoires, would agree. I certainly would. But rather than a sensible discussion on why it’s good to err on the side of using paper when the skin of a wildebeest isn’t handy, I will start with a message from an angel—i.e. from within my Unverified Personal Gnosis. In an essay dealing with the vagaries of using vibrated words to connect with the Astral Light, why not start there?
On October 16, 2020, I used the (very simple, yet unaccountably unsettling) praxis of Frater Pera (from Codex Astarte—then a blog, now a Substack newsletter-blog) to evoke the angel, Elubatel, with whom I was already familiar via Geof Gray-Cobb’s amazing Miracle of New Avatar Power.* When I write, “familiar,” though, I don’t mean “on friendly terms.” Like many, my first exposure to this angel was through NAP’s “Chant for Success,” a working I stopped doing because the “success” always came at a high price. I think there’s a good reason for this, but that’s subject matter for a different essay.
Instead, I’ll note that, having deconstructed and reconstructed the modular components of the NAP system over and over, having used it to approach the spirits of the “chants” directly, and having learned a lot about ceremonial magic firsthand from the spirits (which I believe is an advanced application of Gray-Cobb’s system that you can discover if you carefully study the text), I’d developed an ongoing relationship with Elubatel unique to my personal gnosis and work.**
So in 2020, Elubatel appeared to me; though, it feels like I did this working in the recent past, like last week or a month ago.*** As usual, it was not the most pleasant sensation to have this particular angel come before me (or maybe I came before him). But I had only one question to ask. I was seeking insight into the 6th & 7th Book of Moses, which includes Elubatel, and wanted his advice on the best way to study it.
He said that one does not make notes on a grimoire. Rather, studying a grimoire is like gazing into a mirror and taking notes on yourself. In other words, everyone’s experience of a grimoire and of its workings and worldview will be subjective and self-revelatory to a large extent. He suggested that I seek the “reflection of the book in me” and that I should read it with no assumptions until it starts to show me things about myself. The aggregate of those “things” and the magical processes from the text associated with them will stand as my edition of the 6th & 7th Book of Moses. So it is with any magical book. To grimoire purists, this is complete garbage. Luckily, I am not a grimoire purist. But, as with all UPG, keep what I have written here in the appropriate perspective.
I mention this approach because it has helped me go further into the study of traditional grimoires and intermediate-to-advanced ceremonial workings. I’ve applied it successfully—call it the “reader response approach”—beyond grimoire work to many other magical concepts, practices, and disciplines. Recently, I found myself spirit-led to resume my Enochian magical experiments. I applied this to studying the Calls and want to share how that worked out relative to the pronunciation of Enochian.
In Enochian Magic for Beginners, Tyson writes “We can take some comfort in the knowledge that, no matter how badly we mispronounce Enochian words, we are almost certain to be closer to the original than MacGregor Mathers or Aleister Crowley, who both used Enochian magic with good results” (102). When I first read this, I decided I had been doing it wrong. I changed the way I was pronouncing Enochian from the Golden Dawn’s vocalization of every letter to Aaron Leitch’s phonetic pronunciation, which I believe remains the dominant view on the proper (or what comes closest to the proper) form.
Additionally, Aaron Leitch, in The Essential Enochian Grimoire, points out that “While it is good to know what sound each letter makes, it tells us little about what sounds are made when the letters are combined into actual syllables and words” (287). This seems to agree with Tyson’s claim that “no one really knows what pronunciation Dee and Kelly used, let alone how the angels intended the language to be pronounced” (102).
Michael Aquino, following Anton LaVey’s idea that Enochian was a sort of pidgin and not a real language, also wrote that in his opinion Enochian works no matter how you vocalize it. There is a Satanic Enochian, a Setian version, and there are many others as well which all seem to function just fine for various sorcerers using it in their respective magical currents. Still, grappling with my own portion of “grimoire insecurity,” I wanted to be as historically accurate as possible. So, while I got good visionary results from the Golden Dawn style, I switched to the Leitch method but didn’t experience the same powerful results.
Going back to the Golden Dawn pronunciation, after a lot of disappointment and frustration with the phonetic approach, and keeping Elubatel’s advice in mind, I realized a few things. One was that my mirror perhaps reflected a personal bias in favor of Mathers and Crowley. Another was that LaVey’s and Aquino’s experiments set forth an important point: the magic you do is in you; the rest is scaffolding. That includes Enochian magic, which should not be viewed as monolithic or absolute.
As Tyson points out, “To his credit, Mathers was able to add, in a more or less intelligent way, many details concerning the Watchtowers that are not clearly stated in the angelic conversations” (54). Crowley also had to invent Enochian words in order to work with the system. The angels did not smite him for it. I would extend that observation to the Left Hand Path students of Enochian in the tradition of The Satanic Bible, who replaced “God” with “Satan” and at times reinterpreted whole phrases from the Calls.
Enochian will never be “complete” or self-contained (Can we say this of any magic system?). One always looks into it, as if into a mirror, and sees one’s own reflection. And so I looked. Scrying on the method itself, I learned that the Golden Dawn method works the way chanting (vibrating) the Heart Sutra works. In the latter, the meaning of the words, while important, is not as significant as their physical vibration in the body and from there into the world. When I vibrate “Hannya Shingyo,” I’m making it part of myself. I’m aligning my personal vibration with the vibration of the words, which changes me alchemically in a fundamental way. As Jonathan Back puts it in Spirits Walk With Me: an Enochian Odyssey, “By scrying each of the Aethyrs, working from Tex upwards, the Magician can be said to be absorbing the energies of the entire Table, with a resultant transformation of his or her psyche or spiritual nature. He or she turns spiritual lead into spiritual gold.”
It’s no different than vibrating god names in the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram or the Kabalistic Invocation of the Highest Divine Force. Donald Kraig reminds us that “all matter is made up of energy that vibrates. This results in the conclusion that if we can control vibration, we can control matter,” especially our own matter. So when we vibrate the Enochian Calls, we’re aligning ourselves with the Enochian current, with its Aethyrs and denizens in an intensely personal way. And each individual Enochian letter is part of that.
As a practical experiment, you can feel this by vibrating the letters of your first name. Notice, when you do that each individual letter carries the overall essence of the whole name as it applies to you—your matter / vibration / unique nature as a spiritual and incarnate being. So looking at your name in a delimited technical way as a collection of letter-sounds that only acquire meaning when they are combined as a word is misguided. Just as the Hebrew alphabet (or any alphabet) attributes levels of meaning to each semantic unit, so does Enochian. Therefore, using the Golden Dawn style of individual letter vibration is not only legitimate, it links both magical currents in a powerful microcosmic way.
The power in question is astral. J.H. Brennan writes the following in Astral Doorways: “It occurred to me eventually that the Astral Plane was not a place—one reason why magicians like Lévi prefer the expression Astral Light. . . . In London, seeking membership of an occult Fraternity, I put the question to one I thought should know. He told me ‘Astral Plane’ was an old term for the realm of the visual imagination” (2). It’s the “visual imagination” (the part of the mind that generates it) that gets stimulated when the Enochian Calls are vibrated.
For example, when I scryed the 27th Aethyr, ZAA,
using the Leitch-phonetic method, it felt rather flat, spiritually entering the
Aethyr was difficult, and though there was the usual “movement” in my sphere of
sensation, I had a rather underwhelming experience. When I did it Golden Dawn style, however, I
wrote the following experience in my magical journal:
This time, I saw the door into
the Aethyr as being of the same gray stone, but the letters were inscribed with
“ZAA” in brilliant blue light, which then became white light as I pushed
through. After a moment of disorientation, I found myself on a plane of
endless light. There was nothing but my body and light. And so
there was nowhere to go because every “place” was indivisible from every other
place. It was a world of homogeneity.
My “body” was the only dark thing, a hollow shell that also contained the same
light of ZAA. And I got the impression that my physical shell (which had
blackened as if it were burned) was a kind of falsehood, that it, too, was made
out of light but in a way that allowed me to believe I was distinct and
separate. And I understood that this was true and false at the same time,
depending on my point of view.
As soon as I had this thought, I saw another blackened shell (much like an
empty corpse) of an old man hovering before me. It’s eyes and mouth were
full of the same light. A voice came through the open mouth without the
features moving. It said, “These are fields of light. There is
nothing but light. The light shines on itself and the darkness is
illuminated.”
I had the insight that the darkness is illuminated meant that
it was (can be seen as) another form of the same light, just as I had sensed
this relative to my own distinctness. I then saw a vision of a ray of
light coming through a window and impossibly bending back so that it formed a
kind of endless loop into itself. The entire Aethyr seemed, for a brief
moment, like a giant crystal prism reflecting itself to itself.
The difference was outstanding. This is not to say that many Enochian magicians, maybe the majority, do not get dramatic results from the phonetic approach. Remember, I’m speaking from my own UPG, from the mirror-reflection of my self and the intense subjectivity of my visual imagination. I am merely pointing out what seems like an insight, voiced by Dion Fortune in Applied Magic: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, not where it is chartered by established authority” (66). In other words, with due respect to writers like Leitch, Laycock, and even the giants, Mathers and Crowley, for making Enochian coherent, one’s experience of this magic is like one’s experience of the Astral Plane, which is to say, highly subjective.
I want to encourage those who read this essay to remember that and to follow the wind of inspiration where it listeth without getting bogged down by grimoire insecurity and whatever approaches may be in vogue. Hence will the darkness be illuminated.
* I have much to say about this excellent, influential, hidden-in-plain-sight book / system and intend to repost one of my old essays about it very soon. If you want to work with it, get the 1974 edition, not the more recent, ignorantly edited reprint.
** Wanderer has something like that of his own here: https://www.sorcerousendeavors.com/sorcery-blog/working-with-elubatel. Take a look at his website if you’re interested in the musings of a smart, working sorcerer.
*** This, by the way, is a hallmark of powerful magical
work. It’s timeless. It casts a long shadow over your life for
better and often worse. It can also be
retro-causal.