ENOCHIAN TWO

 

The Enoch-Metatron Trajectory: Apocalyptic Ascent, Hekhalot Mysticism, and the Two Powers Heresy

While Ethiopian Christianity preserved the horizontal cosmic tours of 1 Enoch, a parallel trajectory within esoteric Judaism transformed the seventh patriarch vertically—elevating him from a human scribe into an enthroned, angelomorphic vice-regent bearing the divine Name. In his landmark study The Enoch-Metatron Tradition (2005), Andrei A. Orlov demonstrated that the Old Church Slavonic apocalypse 2 Enoch provides the critical "missing link" proving continuity between early Second Temple Enochic literature and the medieval Sefer Hekhalot (3 Enoch).

2 (Slavonic) Enoch: The Second Temple Missing Link

Because 2 Enoch survived only in Slavonic, many earlier scholars neglected the text or dismissed it as a late medieval work of Bulgarian heretics. Orlov argued persuasively from the priestly and sacrificial practices embedded in 2 Enoch—specifically its polemics against Noachic traditions and its temple-oriented sacerdotalism—that the apocalypse originated in the Second Temple period prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. In 2 Enoch, the patriarch is translated to heaven by angels in his 365th year and ascends through the stages of the heavens to behold the vision of God's glory. There, Enoch undergoes a two-step initiatory procedure—first initiated by angels and then by the Lord Himself—which Philip S. Alexander describes as an "ontological transformation which blurred the distinction between human and divine, amounting to deification".

During this luminous investiture in 2 Enoch, God commands the archangel Michael to extract Enoch from his earthly clothing, anoint him with delightful oil ("greater than the greatest light"), and clothe him in the garments of divine glory, leaving "no observable difference" between Enoch and the glorious angels. Following this transformation, the angel Vrevoil (Uriel) dictates to Enoch for thirty days and thirty nights, during which Enoch writes 366 books containing the secrets of creation and the deeds of all humankind. Crucially, God then invites Enoch to sit permanently at His left hand with Gabriel ("Enoch, sit to the left of me with Gabriel"), granting him a seat of cosmic rule. As Orlov demonstrates, this elevation was forged through systematic mediatorial polemics against rival Jewish traditions exalting Adam (the original image of God), Moses (whose radiant face is surpassed when Enoch briefly returns to earth with a glowing countenance that 200 people gather to kiss), and Noah (as originator of priestly sacrifice), even styling Enoch as the one who takes away the sin of humankind.

3 (Hebrew) Enoch (Sefer Hekhalot) and the Apotheosis of Metatron

This mystical trajectory culminates in 3 Enoch (Sefer Hekhalot), a Hebrew Merkabah text in which Christopher Rowland and C. R. A. Morray-Jones trace the core transformation account back to at least the beginning of the Christian era. Framed as the heavenly ascent of Rabbi Ishmael, 3 Enoch recounts how Enoch was assumed into heaven in a fiery chariot as the divine Shekhinah departed the earth. Transformed into an angel in the seventh heaven, Enoch is renamed Metatron (a title derived from the Latin and Greek metator, meaning "guide" or "measurer"), given a royal throne and a name like God's ("the Lesser YHWH"), and made God's supreme intermediary before whom even the angels prostrate themselves. In 3 Enoch 45:1–6, Metatron reveals to Rabbi Ishmael the cosmic curtain (Pargod) of the Omnipresent One spread before the Holy One, upon which are printed all the generations of the world and all their deeds until the last generation. In the closely related Shi'ur Qomah materials, as Martin Cohen observes, Metatron functions as "the revealer of the most recondite secrets about Godhead".

The "Two Powers in Heaven" (Shtei Reshuyot) Crisis and Rabbinic Deflation

The elevation of Enoch-Metatron into an enthroned second power alongside God provoked a fierce theological reaction within formative Rabbinic Judaism. As Alan F. Segal established in Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (1977) and Daniel Boyarin further analyzed, Second Temple Jews had widely accepted binitarian conceptions of a divine vice-regent or second manifestation—such as Philo's Logos, the Son of Man of 1 Enoch 37–71, the plural thrones of Daniel 7:9, and the angel of Exodus 23:20–23—without perceiving any violation of monotheism. However, in the second century CE, in response to Christian claims that Jesus was the incarnate second Yahweh and Gnostic demiurgical doctrines, the rabbis pronounced the teaching of "Two Powers in Heaven" (Shtei Reshuyot) a heresy.

The Babylonian Talmud mentions Metatron explicitly in three passages—Chagigah 15a, Sanhedrin 38b, and Avodah Zarah 3b—deploying targeted polemics to subordinate him. In Chagigah 15a, the heretic Elisha ben Abuyah (known as Acher) enters Paradise and sees Metatron sitting on a throne; because rabbinic tradition taught that "on high there is no sitting" other than God's alone, Acher concludes heretically, "There are indeed two powers in Heaven!". The Talmudic redactors explain that Metatron was granted permission to sit solely by virtue of his functional character as the Heavenly Scribe recording the merits of Israel (a role echoed in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis 5:24, which calls Metatron the "Great Scribe"). To prove beyond doubt "who is the master and who is the slave," the angel Anafiel is ordered to strike Metatron with sixty fiery lashes (strokes with fiery rods)—an episode also inserted into 3 Enoch 16 as a secondary editorial addition aimed at minimizing Metatron's powers.

Similarly, in Sanhedrin 38b, a sectarian heretic (min) argues to Rabbi Idith from Exodus 24:1 ("Come up to the Lord") that Metatron should be worshiped because God's name is in him (citing Exodus 23:21). Rabbi Idith refutes the min by using Exodus 23:21 to prove that Metatron is merely an angel or guide (metator), not a deity, and lacks the authority to pardon transgressions; in the same tractate, the plural thrones of Daniel 7:9 are explained away as one throne for God's seat and the other merely as His footstool. Early Palestinian midrash in Genesis Rabbah 25 went even further by attacking the human Enoch directly: Rabbi Hama placed Enoch among the wicked; Rabbi Aibu claimed Enoch was fickle—alternating between righteousness and wickedness—so God took his life while he happened to be righteous; and Rabbi Abbahu and Rabbi Yose denied his bodily ascent altogether, arguing from the verb "take" that Enoch simply died an ordinary death. Outside rabbinic literature, Philo allegorized Enoch's translation as moral repentance, Josephus (Antiquities 9:28) stripped Enoch of his apocalyptic roles by attributing astronomical lore to Noah and Seth, and the Testament of Abraham stripped Enoch of the role of judging souls because he had never tasted death.

Linguistic Deconstruction of the Angelic Tongue: Syntax, Glossolalia, and Conlang Architecture

When John Dee and Edward Kelley invoked the figure of Enoch in the 1580s to authenticate their scried language, they drew upon the Renaissance Christian belief that Enoch had been the last antediluvian human to possess the pure language of the angels. For centuries, occult practitioners argued that the Enochian corpus exhibited extraordinary linguistic features beyond human fabrication. However, rigorous linguistic and historical evaluations conducted by the Australian linguist Donald C. Laycock (The Complete Enochian Dictionary, 1978/1999) and the scholar of esotericism Egil Asprem (Arguing with Angels, 2012) have thoroughly demystified the structural mechanics of the Dee–Kelley language. Laycock's analysis demonstrates that the Enochian material comprises two distinct strata produced by different psychological and textual procedures.

Stratum One: The Loagaeth and Trance Glossolalia

The earlier stratum, contained in the 98 great $49 \times 49$ letter tables of the Liber Loagaeth (MS Sloane 3189), was never translated by the angels. As Laycock and Asprem observe, the phonetic and syllabic patterning in the Loagaeth exhibits the exact structural traits characteristically found in meaningless language such as glossolalia ("speaking in tongues"), which is regularly produced under conditions of dissociative trance or scrying. Rather than encoding a lost Semitic grammar, Kelley's early vocalizations in the Loagaeth reflect trance-induced glossolalia transcribed by Dee into geometric grids.

Stratum Two: The Nineteen Calls and English-Mapped Conlang Structure

By contrast, the second stratum—comprising the Nineteen Angelic Keys or Calls—possesses a translated vocabulary and grammatical skeleton. Yet comparative linguistic analysis refutes Dee's claim that Hebrew was a debased version of Enochian; instead, the language of the Calls behaves as a hybrid constructed language (conlang) whose phonology, grammar, syntax, and verb conjugation closely match sixteenth-century English.

Linguistic Dimension	Structural Characteristics in the Dee–Kelley Corpus	Comparative & Philological Evaluation (Laycock / Asprem)
Orthography & Alphabet	Custom angelic script with specific letter names and English equivalents assigned by Dee; digitally mapped to ASCII codepoints.	Visually modeled on mid-sixteenth-century alchemical and cryptographic scripts, specifically Joannes Pantheus's Voarchadumia contra alchimiam (1550) and Johannes Trithemius's Steganographia.
Phonology & Phonotactics	Phonology is "thoroughly English," apart from difficult consonant clusters such as bdrios, excolphabmartbh, longamphlg, and lapch.	Unpronounceable sequences arise from grid-extraction methods; Laycock notes that taking every tenth letter on an English page and dividing the string into words looks remarkably like Enochian.
Syntax & Word Order	Word order closely follows English, except for the dearth of articles and prepositions; adjectives are rare but typically precede the noun as in English.	Matches English syntactic structure rather than Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Ge'ez. Compounds frequently join modifiers, demonstrative pronouns, and conjunctions to nouns and verbs.
Verb Morphology & Pronouns	Scant conjugation evidence; largest number of forms recorded for the irregular verb "to be" (zir, zirdo = "I am") and goh- ("say"); rare personal pronouns (ol).	The high irregularity of the copula "to be" (zir/zirdo) directly mirrors English verb irregularity rather than Semitic verbal morphology.
Lexical Etymology & Numerals	Core root words (Doh, I, Ia, Iad) combined with transparent biblical adaptations: luciftias ("brightness") and babalond ("wicked, harlot").	Luciftias resembles Lucifer ("light-bearer") and babalond resembles Babylon in both sound and meaning; Laycock declared that explaining the erratic numerical system remains the test for any future spirit-revelation.

Modern Esoteric and Cultural Transformations: From the Golden Dawn to Chaos Magic

For nearly three centuries following John Dee's death, his angelic manuscripts remained largely dormant until late Victorian occultists in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn adapted Dee's materials into "a complete system of training and initiation".

The Golden Dawn Synthesis and Enochian Chess

Within the Golden Dawn's inner order—the Rose of Red and Cross of Gold—founders William Wynn Westcott and S. L. MacGregor Mathers synthesized Dee's Watchtowers and Table of Union with Hermetic Qabalah, Tarot, astrology, and Egyptian deity symbolism in instructional texts such as the Book of the Concourse of the Forces. The crowning operational artifact of this synthesis was Enochian Chess (or Rosicrucian Chess), a four-player strategic and divinatory chess variant initiated by Westcott and completed in its final rules by Mathers.

Modeled in part on Chaturaji (the ancient Indian four-player chess) and historical Shatranj, Enochian Chess uses four distinct three-dimensional elemental boards—Fire, Water, Air, and Earth—each selected according to the subject of divination. Each 64-square board is divided conceptually into four elemental quadrants (fiery red for the Fire angle, watery blue for Water, airy yellow for Air, and earthy black for Earth), with the four corner squares (a1, a8, h1, h8) serving as Throne squares. In the Golden Dawn conception, the board is not a flat surface: each of the 64 squares represents the apex of a four-sided truncated pyramid extending into four elemental faces plus Spirit. Columns and ranks cycle through the four Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton (YHVH: Yod = Fire, Heh = Water, Vav = Air, Heh final = Earth), yielding 64 unique four-level elemental coordinates such as "Fire of Water of Air of Earth".

Four armies occupy the corners, each comprising a King (Osiris, corresponding to Shin/Spirit and the Tarot Ace), a Knight (Horus, Yod/Fire, Tarot Knight/Prince), a Queen (Isis, Heh/Water, Tarot Queen), a Bishop (Aroueris/Thoth, Vav/Air, Tarot Prince), a Rook (Nephthys/Sekmet, Heh final/Earth, Tarot Princess/Ace), and four Pawns representing the Canopic Gods, the four Sons of Horus: Kabexnuv (hawk-headed, Knight's pawn), Tmoumathph (dog-headed, Queen's pawn), Ahephi (ape-headed, Bishop's pawn), and Ameshet (human-headed, Rook's pawn). An additional piece representing Ptah is placed on the querent's angle for divination. Traditional pieces were constructed as stiff paper stand-ups with color-coded backs (Kings white, Knights red, Queens blue, Bishops yellow, Rooks black), placed on the board in one of Eight Arrays (such as "Air of Air & Water") that determine which piece shares the corner Throne square with the King.

Play proceeds clockwise, with the active board determining the first mover (Yellow on Air, Red on Fire, Blue on Water, Black on Earth). Teams are permanently fixed into two elemental alliances: Red and Yellow (Fire + Air) versus Blue and Black (Water + Earth). Teammates cannot capture or check each other's pieces, and victory requires capturing both enemy Kings; when a King is captured, all pieces of that army become frozen on the board. There is no castling, no initial double-step for pawns, and no en passant; the Queen moves like the historical fers with a two-square diagonal leap. However, if four pieces of the exact same type from all four armies converge into a $2 \times 2$ formation on the central squares or corner clusters, the moving piece executes a catastrophic capture of all three other pieces regardless of team alliances.

Aleister Crowley, The Vision and the Voice, and the Abyss of ZAX (1909)

While the Golden Dawn's senior adepts studied the Watchtowers, none had dared to undertake the systematic ritual invocation of the Thirty Aethyrs governed by the Nineteenth Call. That task was assumed by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), who first sampled the lowest Aethyrs in Mexico in 1900 while mountaineering with Oscar Eckenstein, recording his early rituals and Enochian Calls in the notebooks A Booke Contayninge Sundry & Divers Matters Humain and Divine and Ol Sonf Vorsg (West MS. 36 at Northwestern University). Nine years later, in November and December 1909, Crowley and his disciple Victor Neuburg trekked across the Algerian desert from Biskra through the oasis of Aïn el-Ghamra (where the Aethyr BAG revealed crystalline cities and leonine angels) to Bou-Saâda, scrying one Aethyr per day using a two-inch engraved topaz to produce Liber 418, The Vision and the Voice.

The climax of the Algerian working occurred on December 6, 1909, beyond Bou-Saâda, during the invocation of the Tenth Aethyr, ZAX, which guards the threshold of the Abyss. In ZAX, Crowley and Neuburg conjured Choronzon, the "Dweller in the Abyss" (whose numerical value in Crowley's system is 333, signifying dispersion and the scrambling of incoming consciousness), within an equilateral triangle drawn in the desert sand using ritual blood from sacrificed pigeons. Declaring "I am the Master of Form, and from me all forms proceed," the entity allegedly broke the protective boundary with desert sand and grappled with Neuburg with bestial howls. Crowley interpreted this violent psychic disintegration—in which his identity was stripped away and emptied into the Cup of Babalon to enter the City of the Pyramids—as the permanent death of his ego, winning him the grade of Master of the Temple and cementing Choronzon in modern occult mythology as the ego-shredding gatekeeper of the Abyss.

Anton LaVey's Diabolical Inversion in The Satanic Bible (1969)

In 1969, the Enochian Calls underwent a sharp ideological inversion when Anton Szandor LaVey published The Satanic Bible as the doctrinal foundation of the Church of Satan. Prompted by Avon Books editor Peter Mayer, LaVey assembled the volume by combining his essays with heavily modified sources, including Ragnar Redbeard's Might is Right, Ayn Rand's philosophy, and the Nineteen Enochian Keys popularized by Aleister Crowley, which LaVey placed in the fourth section of the book, the "Book of Leviathan".

Although LaVey asserted in The Satanic Bible that the Enochian language was older than Sanskrit, he modified Crowley's version of the Keys by systematically replacing their heavenly and divine references with diabolical and infernal ones, creating a set of "Satanic Keys". Crucially, LaVey was an atheist and materialist who rejected the literal existence of Satan, angels, or demons, viewing Satan strictly as a Romantic and Nietzschean symbol of fleshly indulgence, autonomy, and rebellion against Christian morality. Within LaVeyan practice, chanting the Enochian Keys was never intended to summon supernatural spirits, but rather to utilize dramatic visual and auditory imagery for emotional reaction and therapeutic psychodrama.

Postmodern Chaos Magic and Contemporary Cultural Diffusion

In the late 1970s and subsequent decades, the emergence of Chaos Magic in England—led by figures such as Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine (Condensed Chaos, Prime Chaos, The Pseudonomicon)—reframed Enochian practice once again. Influenced by the punk movement and scientific chaos theory, Chaos Magicians rejected dogmatism in favor of technical excellence, psychological deconditioning, and flexible belief shifting, treating ritual systems like Enochian magic as adaptable experiential tools for engaging the uncanny rather than fixed metaphysical dogmas.

Concurrently, Enochian motifs diffused widely into contemporary popular culture. In the television series Supernatural, Enochian is portrayed as the native language hardwired into the brains of angels such as Castiel and Naomi; its spoken form is used to open Lucifer's Cage or cast spells, while its written runic sigils are inscribed on walls, ribcages, or Enochian brass knuckles to ward off or combat celestial beings. In fantasy literature and gaming, Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (Going Postal and Making Money) use Dee's Enochian alphabet to represent the mystic Golem language, the French role-playing game Nephilim employs Enochian as its primary magical language, and Japanese manga and light novel series such as Angel Sanctuary and Kazuma Kamachi's Toaru Majutsu no Index adapt Dee's angelic language and Crowley's battle with Choronzon directly into their cosmological narratives.

Comparative Taxonomy of the Enochian Continuum

The following taxonomy synthesizes the five major historical epochs of the Enochian phenomenon across their primary textual corpora, linguistic vehicles, cosmological architectures, and ontological conceptions of the central mediator.

Historical Epoch & Tradition	Primary Textual Corpora	Linguistic Vehicle	Cosmological & Temporal Architecture	Ontological Status of Enoch / The Angelic Mediator
1. Mesopotamian Antediluvian Prototype (c. 1500–165 BCE)	Sumerian King List; Neo-Assyrian Enmeduranki ritual tablets; Utuabzu & Adapa myths; Berossus's Babyloniaca.	Sumerian and Akkadian (Babylonian/Assyrian).	Seven antediluvian cities (Eridu to Sippar); 360-day ideal year ($12 \times 30$) governed by the solar god Šamaš.	Enmeduranki: 7th mortal king seated on a golden throne in the divine assembly; founder of the bārû diviners; paired with the ichthyomorphic apkallū sages.
2. Second Temple Enochian Judaism & Qumran (3rd c. BCE–1st c. CE)	1 Enoch (5 booklets: Watchers, Similitudes, Astronomical, Dreams, Epistle); Book of Giants (4Q203, 4Q530); Jubilees.	Imperial Aramaic and Hebrew; translated into Koine Greek.	12 celestial portals; symmetric 364-day solar calendar ($4 \times 91$); terrestrial biosphere polluted by Fallen Watchers (Shemihazah) and Giants (Gilgamesh, Mahway).	Scribe of Righteousness & Son of Man: Antediluvian prophet, priest in Eden's sanctuary (Jub. 4:23), reader of Heavenly Tablets, and eschatological judge (1 En. 71:14).
3. Ethiopian & Eritrean Tewahedo Canon (4th c. CE–Present)	Mets'ihafe Henok (Family $\alpha$ and $\beta$ Ge'ez MSS); Haile Selassie bilingual Amharic Targum (1935).	Classical Ethiopic (Ge'ez) and Amharic.	81-book canonical cosmos; 365-day solar calendar (plus quadrennial leap year) with fixed liturgical feasts governed by angelic luminaries.	Canonical Prophet & First Scribe: Author of the oldest written sentence in human language; orthodox witness to final judgment and angelic order.
4. Slavonic Apocalyptic & Hekhalot Mysticism (1st–6th c. CE)	2 (Slavonic) Enoch; 3 (Hebrew) Enoch / Sefer Hekhalot; Shi'ur Qomah; Talmudic polemics (Chagigah 15a, Sanhedrin 38b).	Old Church Slavonic; Rabbinic Hebrew and Babylonian Aramaic.	Seven stacked heavens (Hekhalot); the cosmic curtain (Pargod) encoding all history before the Throne of Glory.	Metatron ("The Lesser YHWH"): Deified, angelomorphic vice-regent anointed with luminous oil (2 En.) and enthroned on high (3 En.); condemned by Rabbis as the Two Powers in Heaven heresy.
5. Elizabethan & Modern Western Esotericism (1581–Present)	Dee's Liber Loagaeth (MS Sloane 3189) & 19 Calls; Golden Dawn Concourse of Forces; Crowley's Liber 418; LaVey's Satanic Bible.	Enochian Conlang (custom script mapped onto English SVO syntax + glossolalia).	Four elemental Watchtowers, Table of Union, 64-square YHVH truncated-pyramid chessboard, and 30 concentric Aethyrs including the Abyss of ZAX.	Archetypal Initiator & Psychodramatic Vehicle: From Dee's pre-Babelic linguist to Crowley's ego-annihilating threshold (Choronzon) and LaVey/Chaos Magic's ritual tool.

Synthesis: The Structural Persistence of the Enochic Archetype

Evaluating the entirety of the Enochian continuum—from seventh-place entries on cuneiform king lists in second-millennium BCE Mesopotamia to twenty-first-century Chaos Magic and television iconography—reveals that the label "Enochian" does not survive merely by historical accident. Across every religious and cultural epoch, the Enochic tradition functions as a structural counter-canon: an epistemic and cosmological framework invoked whenever a community seeks direct, unmediated access to the blueprints of the universe outside the boundaries of institutional orthodoxy.

In ancient Judaism, the Enochic movement offered a radically spatial and astral alternative to the Mosaic Torah. Where the Sinaitic tradition grounded authority in a historical covenant and human moral agency, Enochian Judaism grounded authority in cosmic geography, heavenly tablets, and the mathematical invariance of the 364-day solar calendar revealed by Uriel. When John Dee, the Golden Dawn, and Aleister Crowley later constructed grids of $49 \times 49$ squares, 64-square YHVH truncated pyramids, and 30 concentric Aethyrs, they replicated this exact Enochic impulse: reducing the infinity of the metaphysical realm into a navigable, mathematically indexed cartography.

Furthermore, every major phase of the Enochian tradition advances through the dialectical inversion of its predecessor's sacred symbols. Second Temple Jewish scribes in Babylonia inverted the revered Mesopotamian apkallū culture-heroes and the epic hero Gilgamesh into the Fallen Watchers and doomed Giants while absorbing Enmeduranki's solar priesthood into Enoch. Formative Rabbinic Judaism, threatened by Christian and Gnostic binitarianism, inverted the exalted Metatron of apocalyptic mysticism into a subordinate scribe whipped with sixty fiery lashes in Chagigah 15a and demoted the human Enoch in Genesis Rabbah 25. In modernity, Anton LaVey executed the same structural maneuver by inverting John Dee's pious Elizabethan angelic invocations into the diabolical proclamations of The Satanic Bible.

Across 1 Enoch 71, 2 Enoch 22, 3 Enoch 3–15, and Crowley's Vision and the Voice, the Enochian archetype has consistently served as Western religion's primary laboratory for testing the permeability of the boundary between mortal humanity and the divine. Whether conceptualized as being stripped of earthly garments and anointed with luminous oil to become "the Lesser YHWH" beside the Throne of Glory, or crossing the desert Abyss of ZAX to dissolve the ego in the Cup of Babalon, the Enochic initiate is defined by an ontological transfiguration that orthodox monotheisms repeatedly sought to police, censor, or institutionalize. Today, the legacy of the seventh patriarch bifurcates along a striking geographical and cultural fault line: in the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Churches preserve the ancient Aramaic-Ge'ez Book of Enoch as living, canonical scripture that regulates liturgical time and communal ethics, while in the Euro-American West—where the canonical book was excised in the fourth century—the void left by the vanished text was filled in the sixteenth century by Dee and Kelley's English-mapped angelic conlang, generating an autonomous esoteric tradition that continues to evolve across ceremonial magic, psychology, and global popular culture.