famous Atlantis. But before you rush to join the
armchair aficionados who smugly dismiss this name
as his invention, please feel welcome to call it by any
of its other pre-submergence names:
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The Druids called their ancestral home Avalon,
the Aztecs Aztlan, the Egyptians Aalu or Amenti, the
Greeks Antilla or Atlantis, the Germanic tribes
Valhalla, and the Babylonians Arallu. All of them
fixed its location in the central Atlantic Ocean. 137
Ancient tectonic plate-shifts, continental-scope
reglaciation, and even magnetic polar repositioning
may have assisted mid-Atlantic mountain-range
volcanic explosions in stone-blanketing Atlantis, but
contrary to vulgar assumption, considerable tangible
evidence of Atlantis’ existence remains. 138 The
charmingly-appropriate search term for starters is
“forbidden archaeology” - at last look in 2018 over
335,000 website-results.
B. Investigating the Keys
1.
John Dee
On April 13, 1584 CE John Dee, mathematician
and magician to the court of Queen Elizabeth I,
undertook a series of Workings in Cracow, Poland.
With the assistance of Edward Kelley, he wrote into
his diaries a series of nineteen magical incantations
in what he called the “Enochian or Angelic
137 J.R.R. Tolkien, unable to resist temptation, included
Atlantis in his sagæ as Númenor. After the Valar got annoyed
and pulled the plug, it was renamed Atalantë, with its highest
mountaintop ( Meneltarma) barely above-water in emulation
of Atlantis’ Mount Pico in the Azores. Join Franklin Roosevelt
& Adolf Hitler for an Ahnenerbe-SS guided tour in M. Aquino,
We Break the Sword.
138 There are spurious rumors that one casino/resort of the
antediluvian empire miraculously escaped the 10,000 BCE
cataclysm and was rediscovered on Paradise Island in the
Bahamas, but the author dismisses this as too improbable for
serious consideration.
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language”. With each incantation or Key Dee
provided an English translation, also communicated
by the angels to Kelley.
2. Meric. Casaubon
In 1659 the Dee diaries containing the Keys were
published by Meric. Casaubon as A True and
Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers
between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. 139
3. Samuel Mathers
In the late nineteenth century the Casaubon text
of the Enochian Keys was adopted into the magical
inventory of the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn, a London-based Rosicrucian society. The
Golden Dawn altered and augmented the Keys in
order to align them with its own emphasis on the
Hebrew Cabala, and its publications assert a
mastery of the Enochian language by the leaders of
the Order. 140
4. Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley later incorporated the Golden
Dawn edition of the Keys into his A.'.A.'., again
139 Deacon, Richard, John Dee. London: Frederick Muller Ltd.,
1968, pages #138-156.
Casaubon, Meric., A True and Faithful Relation of What
Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some
Spirits. London: Askin Publishers, 1974, Introduction.
140 Regardie, Israel, The Golden Dawn. St. Paul: Llewellyn
Publications, 1970, Volume II, pages #260-269.
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claiming fluency in Enochian and constructing
rituals from Enochian words and phrases. 141
5. Anton LaVey
The Keys next appeared in 1969 CE, when Anton
LaVey took the Cabalistic version from Crowley’s
Equinox, replaced references to the Judæo/
Christian El with references to Satan, and included
the result in his Satanic Bible. 142
6. Francis Regardie
The general sensation caused by this book,
together with a considerable amount of indignation
on the part of old-line Cabalists, eventually inspired
a revival of interest in John Dee and his magical
diaries. Easily the most vehement of the “purists”
was the Rosicrucian scholar Francis “Israel”
back as the Mathers modifications. 143
7. Stephen Skinner
In 1974 Stephen Skinner brought out a second
(facsimile) edition of A True and Faithful Relation,
a copy of which I acquired in March of the following
year.
141 Crowley, Aleister, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. New
York: Hill & Wang, 1969, page #612.
142 LaVey, Anton Szandor, The Satanic Bible. New York: Avon
Books, 1969, pages #155-272.
143 Regardie (Ed.) in Crowley, Aleister, The Vision and the
Voice. Dallas: Sangreal Foundation, 1972, page #10.
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8. Michael Aquino
Upon comparing the facsimile Casaubon to the
Golden Dawn, Crowley, and LaVey Keys, I realized
the extent of the distortion that had taken place.
Being familiar with language and cipher
construction, I set out to unravel the original Keys to
determine their linguistic lineage.
After some weeks of work, I concluded that
Enochian is not a true language. Rather it is an
artificial jargon, i.e. arbitrary words placed together
in roughly consistent sequences to simulate a true
language. It is so cleverly done that it can fool non-
linguists fairly easily:
9. Dictionarians
We have here fragmentary pieces of a very
ancient tongue - a language which is far older even
than the Sanskrit. 144
Immediately after admitting that he is no
philologist and is “without the least scientific
knowledge of comparative languages”, Francis
Regardie offers the above statement about Enochian
- which may be discounted accordingly.
The story continues, however: Aleister Crowley
included virtually the same sentence in his
Confessions (page #612), again with no supporting
evidence whatever.
Then Anton LaVey, assuming that both Regardie
and Crowley must have known what they were
144 Regardie, The Golden Dawn, Volume II, page #266.
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talking about, included virtually the same sentence
in his Satanic Bible (page #155).
Later attempts to validate Enochian as a
language or to place it historically - Donald C.
Laycock’s The Complete Enochian Dictionary
(London: Askin, 1978) and Geoffrey James’ The
Enochian Evocation of Dr. John Dee (Berkeley
Heights, NJ: Heptangle Books, 1984) - have met
with similar failure. James, following Laycock,
reaches the conclusion that the unpronounceable
words and random letter arrangements of Enochian
indicate that it was designed for non-material
entities [lacking vocal cords]! 145
The last word was written by Hans Holzer in his
The Truth About Witchcraft (1969), in which he
called the language “Inelkian” and labeled it “a form
of distorted Hebrew”!
It is even possible to “write” in Enochian as
Crowley did, altering suffixes to create the
impression of declension or conjugation. But a
comprehensive grammar, essential to a true written
or spoken tongue, is lacking.
10. Yuggothic
For an example of how a jargon may be used, see
pages #181-201 of the Satanic Rituals by Anton
LaVey. In 1971 I ghostwrote the entire section on
H.P. Lovecraft - introduction and rituals - for the
book.
It was the work of about two months to develop
the jargon that became the “nameless language” [I
145 I suspect that Laycock & James borrowed this idea from
H.P. Lovecraft, who used it to explain the bizarre names &
incantations he developed for his alien entities.
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called it “Yuggothic”] of the Ceremony of the Nine
Angles and the Call to Cthulhu.
A word that sounded properly “Lovecraftian”
would be constructed arbitrarily: El-aka = world,
gryenn’h = [of] horrors. Then the word would be
used consistently throughout the text of both rituals.
Slight modifications of endings would suffice for
different sentence constructions, and there you have
a “language” every bit as flexible as Enochian. 146
11. Cryptologic?
Once I realized Enochian to be a jargon, I
changed my approach. Now I suspected that it might
be some sort of cipher or code, Dee being famous for
his use of same.
I tested the first three Keys against a variety of
code-breaking techniques. 147 Once more I met with
no success. I had not held high hopes that I would.
The loose alignment of Enochian words to their
English counterparts, together with an entirely
different frequency of individual letters in the two
languages [even cancelling out the most divergent
letters], makes cipher improbable.
Only pure code - with Enochian words or letters
meaning something not revealed by their internal
design alone - remained. To uncover such a code,
one would simply have to know the words or
phrases in English triggered by a given Enochian
word or phrase, unrelated though the connection
might otherwise be. [For example, the otherwise
146 See Appendices #72-74 of The Church of Satan.
147 from my experience with the U.S. National Security Agency,
concerned among other things with cryptography.
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random appearance of “vorsg” might be code for “for
the Queen’s eyes only”, etc.]
Two avenues of investigation remained. First, if
it were true that Enochian were neither language
nor cipher, then there was still the possibility that it
might be a corruption of a genuine tongue. Regardie
[citing Mathers’ method], Crowley, and LaVey had
all accepted Kelley’s comment that “He seemeth to
read as Hebrew is read”. 148
12. Stripping Hebrew
I decided to eliminate this Hebrew-letter
pronunciation entirely, treating each word as a
phonetic unity and deemphasizing the vowels. [Thus
“vorsg” should be pronounced just that way, rather
than “vaoresaji”.]
My test case was the XIX Key, 30th Æthyr (TEX)
on the assumption that there might be visual results
per Crowley’s experiences in The Vision and The
Voice. 149
This time there was a certain success, in that I
experienced a sequence of unusual visions and
dreams. 150
Finally, during the evening of May 30, 1975, I
experimented with the XVII Key and was rewarded
148 Casaubon, op. cit. , page #120.
Crowley (Ed. Regardie), Gems from the Equinox. St. Paul:
Lewellyn Publications, 1974, page #408.
149 Crowley (Ed. Regardie), Gems from the Equinox, pages
#408-591.
150 See the record of one such example in Chapter #1.
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with spectacular results - the “Sphinx and Chimæra”
Working. 151
13. Word of Set
Then, in the first week of June, something quite
unexpected happened. I began to write a text in
installments of one or two hours per night. In the
same style as the future Book of Coming Forth by
Night, it declared the Enochian Keys to be a distant
corruption of something called the Word of Set.
There followed two “pure” Keys in English -
called “parts” of the Word of Set.
Before proceeding further I was forced to break
my concentration because of the sudden crisis in the
Church of Satan, and so the Word of Set remained
unfinished for the next six years.
As to the “breaking” of the Keys “by the doctrines
of Anton LaVey”, therein lies still another tale.
Anton’s principal contribution to the Crowley
Keys was to render them in what might be called a
“Black Mass” form, with Heavenly references
arbitrarily changed to Infernal ones.
One might presume that this would invalidate
the statements of the text.
Oddly enough, however, the use of these “Black
Keys” by the Church of Satan produced magical
results that were, if anything, far more powerful
than those of the “pure” system.
In my Working on the Word of Set, I used an
approach similar to Anton’s, seeking words to
express what I seemed to sense the Keys were
actually intended to say. In short I was endeavoring
151 Reprinted as the “Afterwords” of MindStar.
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to present the Keys in a still “Blacker” version than
that which appears in the Satanic Bible.
Moreover the North Solstice X Working which
resulted in the Book of Coming Forth by Night was
begun with this new First Part of the Word of Set
rather than with the First Enochian Key. Such would
seem to be the basis for the Book of Coming Forth
by Night’s reference to the “breaking” of the old
Keys.
Six years later the Working of the Word of Set
was finally completed - on April 13, 1981
(anniversary of John Dee’s initial Working).
In the Satanic Bible the Enochian Keys, even in
their altered form, are still garbled and
unintelligible. Hence Anton felt the need to venture
an interpretation of each one preceding its text.
These interpretations have no basis in previous
documents, and indeed previous commentators -
including Dee himself - had been unable to integrate
the Keys into a coherent translation.
After completing the Working of the Word of Set,
I found that the new translation needed no external
interpretation - at least not for those to whom it was
evidently addressed.
Obviously it is idiomatic and not a word-for-
word translation - as are all translations from
original hierogl
yphs.
In 1980, furthermore, I learned that the
Casaubon account of the Dee Keys was not as error-
free as I had previously supposed.
My benefactor was an Initiate of the Temple of
Set who kindly provided me with a complete
microfilm of the original Dee diary Keys from the
British Museum. Hence the “Enochian” text
reproduced with the Word of Set is an exact copy of
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the original as John Dee penned it, including
capitalization.
As I have noted above, this original does not lend
itself to grammatically-based translation or to word-
for-word correlation with Dee’s own English
“translation”.
[The most recent efforts to do so - in Donald
Laycock’s Enochian Dictionary - resulted in an
arbitrary subdividing of the Enochian text and the
addition of a modern-English-based punctuation in
order to “force” a correlation. The quality of the
result is self-evident.]
An “Enochian purist” might question the
translation provided by the Word of Set in that it is
not the English version recorded by John Dee in his
diaries.
My answer is simply that I approached the Keys
not as a historian seeking to reprint what Dee did,
but as a magician seeking to operate the same
“magical machinery” that Dee did - and to operate it
with greater care and precision than he did.
Hence it is not a case of my “corrupting Dee”, but
rather of my uncorrupting something which
predated Dee’s own existence, and which was, after
all, not of his [or Kelley’s] authorship.
Were one to take the position that the Keys are a
Dee/Kelley creation, then they would be
fraudulent as a GBM Working - and merely an
uncommonly-successful LBM stunt which has
mystified and obsessed occultists these many
centuries.
As it appears here, then, the Word of Set is an
eighteenfold sequence of statements addressed to
the original (“third ordering”) Initiates of the
Temple of Set in ancient times. The 19th Part is not
so much a statement as an operative invocation to
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be used for access to what Dee referred to as the
“thirty aires or æthyrs”.
14. Æthyrs
Use of this invocation is best described in