Enochian Alphabet Made Easy

I'm a language junkie. I learned how to read and write in Japanese kana, Cyrillic, Greek, Baybayin, Runic, and to some extent, Hebrew. I also learned enough kanji to take the Japanese L3 certification test. I came across the Enochian alphabet several years ago as a budding mage, and as much as I would like to learn it, any attempt that I do just becomes futile.

I don't expect to use Enochian letters often, but I believe knowing how to read and write with it is part of immersing myself in the Enochian magic paradigm. Besides, this time, I intend to work with Lon Milo Duquette's method in "Enochian Vision Magic" instead of the good old, tried and tested, yet much more complicated, Golden Dawn method, and part of the LMD's ritual is reading the Enochian letters in the Holy Table out loud. I'm quite sure I will be using the letters in future talismanic works as well.

There were two things that put me off from studying the Enochian alphabet: One, it's not particularly pretty to look at. Two, it doesn't make sense at all. The Enochian alphabet only has 21 letters, but what makes it excruciatingly difficult to remember is that the name of the letters is so confusingly unrelated to the sound that it makes (except for the letters Ged and Van). To compare, in the Elder Futhark, the rune for M is called Mannaz, P is Perth, and S is Sowilo. In the Enochian alphabet, the letter M is called Tal, the letter P is called Mals, and the name of the letter S is Fam. What the heck?

So, instead of taking them separately, I thought of fusing the sound and the name together. The letters M, P and S will now be henceforth known as Mtal, Pmals, and Sfam. In case I need to call the letter-name out loud, I just have to omit the first part. To demonstrate:

What's written in Enochian letters: B-K-G-D-F-A-E
How the magician should spell them out loud: Pa, Veh, Ged, Gal, Or, Un, Graph (crazy, no?)
How I will see them instead: Bpa, Kveh, Gged, Dgal, For, Aun, Egraph 
How I will spell them out loud: 'pa, 'veh, 'ged, 'gal, 'or, 'un, 'graph (I just take off the first letter)

It's just like what happens when some Pinoys call each other by their first names. I've been called 'Tian pretty often by some of those who know me as Christian. Eric becomes 'Ric. Joseph becomes 'Seph. And so on.

I think it's better to treat Enochian letters more like Japanese characters than alphabet. The Japanese usually has two pronunciations for each character, called onyomi and kunyomi. In the same way, each Enochian characters can be pronounced in two ways.

I employ a pretty simple mnemonic device to remember the shape of the Enochian character. To each character, I associate an image that resembles that character, with the name of that image beginning with the associated letter. For example, for the letter Bpa I assigned the mnemonic butterfly because it does look to me like a crude butterfly perching on a branch seen from the side (though this doesn't ring quite true for Crowley's version of the letter). Unfortunately the rest of the alphabet looks so odd it wasn't as easy to assign a mnemonic, so the rest are admittedly pretty lame. But then, that's the thing with mnemonic devices, it doesn't have to be logical, what's important is that it resonates with you.

The Enochian Alphabet (from Wikipedia)

Latin equivalent	Enochian Name of the Letter	Murmur's Version	Mnemonic
B	Pa	Bpa	butterfly
K	Veh	Kveh	K
G	Ged	Gged	G that looks like J (this letter can be pronounced as G or J)
D	Gal	Dgal	D with wings
F	Or	For	F with a wing
A	Un	Aun	anchor
E	Graph	Egraph	elephant (a very crude elephant head: showing the head and the trunk)
M	Tal	Mtal	M toppled to its side
I	Gon	Igon	"Igon" Spengler's hair
H	Na	Hna	hawk (flying towards the Horizon)
L	Ur	Lur	luna (crescent moon with two Legs setting foot on the side)
P	Mals	Pmals	plump (a Plump, Pregnant woman lying on its back)
Q	Ger	Qger	quake (a Quake creating a rift on the land)
N	Drux	Ndrux	nail (Nailed so hard it made a dent on the wall)
X	Pal	Xpal	Professor X (don't ask why. May take too long to eXplain)
O	Med	Omed	okras (they're said to have medicinal properties)
R	Don	Rdon	rose (I don't know why but the curves remind me of rose petals)
Z	Keph	Zkeph	zipper (one hand holding the flaps of the pants together, and one hand about to pull the zipper up)
V	Van	Vvan	vortex (a bent tornado uprooting and swallowing a tree)
S	Fam	Sfam	skip (two legs Skipping on a Step)
T	Gisg	Tgisg	thorn

March 29 at a tea joint: Traced my own Sigillvm Dei Æmæth using a template and a couple of alphanumeric tables. It's tedious, but fun. I find myself palpitating and catching my breath as soon as I finished. I forgot I was working with divine and angelic names. Or it must be the caffeine from the bubble tea. Darn, and I need to make at least five more of this.

Posted in: enochian alphabet, enochian magic, golden dawn, high magic, lon milo duquette, magic