Dr. John Dee of Mortland, England was a brilliant 16th century scholar. He entered Cambridge at the age of 15 and by his early 20's was a well known lecturer in mathematics with other intellectual persuits including astronomy, mechanics, mathematics, military strategy and the occult. Dr. Dee was not only the perfect mix of scientist and magickian but is practically the patron saint of the occult. His works were revived by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and studied at length by Aleister Crowley making Enochian the basis for the High Magickal systems that have been built from it as a foundation.

In 1564, the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I appointed Dee as her Royal Advisor in Mystic Secrets. After casting her horoscope in what can only be assumed as a success, he was held in high regard to participate not only in advising the Queen of mystical advice, but also took an active role in British military and diplomatic affairs. The irony of the situation during the reformation period was that the nobility often engaged in an great interest of the occult, particularly horoscopes and fortune telling but society at the time also made a practice of arresting those accused of witchery and torturing them in public often to the death.

Dee began rather unsuccessfully experimenting with angelic communications or what we would call channeling today. To his fortune, fate introduced him to his cohort, Edward Talbot who is later known as Edward Kelly. It is Kelly who enabled Dee to successfully communicate with angelic forces. Kelly was a convicted counterfeiter who lost his ears as a result of his crimes and hid that fact under a cap. In 1581, the duo claimed to have made contact with the ArchAngel, Uriel. Other angels joined in the communications to give Dee and Kelly the keys to the enochian or angelic language. This worked by Kelly gazing into a "shew" stone whereby the angels would instruct Kelly to point to specific letters of this enochian language which were laid out on a table. Then they would reverse those letters, thereby obtaining the angelic messages. The letters looked like Cryllic all jumbled up and the words sounded like poorly transliterated Hebrew into English syntax.

Enochian Magick is so named for the biblical patriarch Enoch, who was supposedly the only man to ascend to Heaven while still alive and taught this angelic language. Enochian Magick has two parts, theurgy and geotry, the magick of the angels and demons.

The main content of Enochian Magick regarding the Watchtowers and the method of opening them with the 48 keys or calls. The Angles also dictated religious doctrine that the Earth was a Goddess who gave up part of her body to house human souls and gave the rest to feed and shelter them. This was wrong, according to the Angels and was to be corrected, believed to be a reference to the apocolypse in the bible

This system of magick was forgotten until about 1888 when the Golden Dawn was established and S. Matthews, one of the founding members, studied the material and his associates added the associations of colors, signs of the zodiac, the four directions and elements with the Watchtowers creating a method of intoning a specific key to evoke a specific angel or demon.