Israel Regardie - The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic.pdf

VOLUME TEN
Recently the words in this dictionary have been checked against those found
in Casaubon's enormous tome. Even here, a fantastic number of errors were
perceived and I became aware of what a momentous task it had been to compile
this dictionary in the mid-thirties.
Though ordinarily 1 have assiduously avoided self-praise, I must confess, as
I examine this dictionary after a time interval of nearly fifty years, that as simple
dictionaries go, this is not such a bad job after all. The separation of the suffixes and
prefixes from the proper r a t words was, in itself, no mean accomplishment.
especially when one considers that no clue is to be found either in the Golden Dawn
documents or in Crowley's renditions of the Calls in Equinox !, #8. Languages are
not amongst my few accomplishments. My English is good, my French is execrable
(as the maitre d' of a French restaurant I used to frequent can testify), I know but
little Latin and Greek. So far as Hebrew is concerned, though I did study that
intensively years ago, with the intent of translating some old Qabalistic texts, that
project vanished into thin air before my second decade was out.
The Enochian language is not just a haphazard combination and compilation
of divine and angelic names drawn from the Tablets. Apparently, it is a true
language with a grammar and syntax of its own. Only a superficial study of the
invocations suffice to indicate this to be a fact. The invocations are not strings of
words and barbarous names, but are sentences which can be translated in a
meaningful way and not merely transliterated.
The Enochian language is without any history prior to the skrying of Edward
Kelley and John Dee. There is no record of its prior existence, regardless of some
fanciful theories which have been invented to account for it. Many present-day
philologists have often pointed out that it is impossible for any single human being
to invent a language of his own, complete with errors, such as we find in the
transcribing in Dr. Dee's diaries. Any inventor today would be careful enough to be
more thorough in the construction of his language than were Dee and Kelley, or
the Angels who originally dictated the Calls.
The Enochian alphabet consists of twenty-one letters which can be
transposed into English. The individual letters are known to us in both the printed
or elaborate style and also in a script or cursive form.
One of the curious anomalies about this Enochian alphabet is that each letter
has a name, as in other languages, such as in Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc., but
this Enochian name bears absolutely no relationship to the sound value of the letter
itself. Alpha in Greek is given the sound value of A; in Hebrew Gimel is given the
sound value of G, etc.: but in Enochian, Veh, has the sound value of C or K, not of
V, as one might at first have supposed.
Since the names of the letters are not commonly used, the use of the English
alphabetical order and pronunciation is recommended in order to avoid confusion
or unnecessary complication. In the text is shown the Enochian alphabet in both
the elaborate and cursive style and also in the order given us by tradition. In
passing, I should note that the cursive style is used but rarely, and for that reason
is not worth committing to memory.
In the original Golden Dawn papers written by MacGregor Mathers and
William Wynn Wescott, certain rules were laid down for the pronunciation of the
Enochian words. Mathers advised that the consonants should be followed by the
vowel which obtains in the
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