h I had a real live magician in her court. His name was Dr. John Dee and his exploits in service to the Virgin Queen are no less astounding then the legendary exploits of Merlin – more so, because we have detailed records of many of his magical deeds.

John Dee (1527-1608) was a true Renaissance magus, and considered by many to be the greatest mind of his day. His library in Mortlake England housed the most extensive collection of books in the country, perhaps the world. More than a brilliant scholar, he was the world’s most celebrated and widely published mathematician. He was also a master physician, chemist, engineer, geographer, theologian, and inventor. His maritime charts and navigational inventions helped make Britannia “ruler of the waves.” He even coined the term “Britannia!”

Dee was the Queen’s confidant and counselor from the very beginning of her remarkable reign. A master astrologer, he was allowed to choose the most auspicious date and hour for her coronation. Because Dee traveled extensively and could speak more than a dozen languages, Elizabeth enlisted his services as a spy. In fact, she called him her “eyes,” and as such he would sign his secret dispatches to her with a symbol that represented two vigilant eyes shaded by a hand: 007

Yes. Dr. John Dee was the original secret agent 007 – a tidbit of historical trivia that did not escape the attention of former British Intelligence officer Ian Fleming when he created his fictional super spy, James Bond. (Next time you’re in Washington DC be sure to visit the International Spy Museum where some of Dee’s espionage exploits are featured.)

But John Dee was more than his Queen’s James Bond. He was also her Merlin. Dee was a skilled and powerful magician who didn’t hesitate to use his magic ‘on Her Majesty’s Secret Service.’ In 1588, when it was learned that Spain had launched her mighty armada to destroy England’s fleet, Dee counseled Elizabeth to keep her ships at bay, assuring her that a terrible storm would soon smash the Spanish armada to pieces.

That’s exactly what she did – and that’s exactly what happened. Dee was credited with magically raising the tempest that saved England. The story of this event became instant legend. William Shakespeare, writing only 23 years later, would use Dee as the model for Prospero, the storm-raising magician in his play, The Tempest.

Not all of Dee’s magical adventures were so well publicized. For over three hundred years after his death only a handful of people were aware of an even more bizarre chapter in Dee’s life. While attempting to use remote viewing to spy upon enemies of the Queen, Dee made contact with spiritual intelligences who identified themselves as the same angels that communicated with the biblical Patriarch Enoch before the great flood.

Over a period of four years of almost daily encounters, these entities taught Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley (1555-1597) the sacred language of the angels and the magical procedures to use that language to communicate directly with these powerful forces.

Modern language experts, including the late Donald C. Laycock (who compiled an extensive dictionary of the Enochian language), recognize this “Enochian” tongue as a bona fide language, with its own grammar and syntax. When translated into English, the various angelic ‘Calls’ or ‘Keys’ that Dee and Kelley received from the angels are stunning in their poetic power and beauty.

Space does not permit me to describe the complex method by which the angels painstakingly taught their language to Dee and Kelley, but the story is the most remarkable magical tale of ever recorded -- and recorded it was. Dee took detailed and copious notes many of which survived the centuries and are accessible today to anyone who is interested.

Ironically, after spending years receiving the tools and instructions for this marvelous system of angelic communication, Dee and Kelley finally just seemed to run out of steam before they had a chance actually use it properly. It was as if they had received the blueprints for an automobile that they never got to build and drive.

After Dee’s death, the bulk of his manuscripts found their way to private collections, the British Museum, and British Library where they were preserved and catalogued, awaiting the day someone would recognize their significance and work the magic. In the late 1800s someone finally did, and since then the Enochian genii have been out of the bottle.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1887 by a handful of high degree English Freemasons and Theosophists for the purpose of teaching its members the principles of Occult Science and Magic. However, it was more than just a school of instruction. It was an initiatory society whose ceremonies were designed to step-by-step raise the consciousness of each member so that he or she might better understand and safely utilize higher and higher levels of occult information.

During its short life some very important and famous people were members of the Golden Dawn, including tea heiress, Annie Horniman, poet William Butler Yeats, the great actress, Florence Farr, and the notorious mountaineer-poet, Aleister Crowley. It is even rumored that Sherlock Holmes’ creator Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dracula’s Bram Stoker were part of the scene, although there is no hard evidence proving this to be true.

It was the founding fathers of the Golden Dawn who recognized Dee’s Enochian material for what it was. They realized that with a little innovation and organization they could pick up where Dee and Kelley left off and actually begin using system to communicate with angels.

In 1978, as part of my perceived duties as master of a magical lodge, I began to teach what would become a 25-year weekly class at our home in Costa Mesa, California. Eventually, I thought it time to host a class series dealing with the Enochian system. We spent weeks constructing the various pieces of equipment and discussing the history and theory of angelic evocation. Finally, the evening came when it was time for us to contact our first angel.

The procedure is pretty simple. Before beginning, one person is chosen to be the visionary contact with the angel. The process is called “skrying” or “traveling in the spirit vision.” For some people this skill is remarkably easy to develop. Dee and Kelley used a small crystal ball and a black obsidian mirror to focus and manifest the presence of the entities, but many skryers simply close their eyes and ‘see’ visions with the mind’s eye.

We were understandably nervous and a little scared the first time we attempted contact. Our angelic subject was Laidrom, a rather highly placed elemental angel whose nature is of the element earth, and the planet Mars. Our skryer was a class member who always volunteered for our various psychic experiments but as yet had had little success.

Following Golden Dawn operating procedures, I performed the prescribed preliminary ceremonies. Then I turned on a small tape recorder and gave our skyer a copy of the appropriate Call to read in the angelic language. I sat down behind him while he read it aloud.

He did rather well considering he had never read it before. When he was finished he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Nothing happened. I asked him to read the Call again. He did so and after only a few seconds he said, “I have a landscape. I see a landscape.”

I very was relieved, and asked, “What does it look like?”

He went on to describe in vivid detail a bizarre desert landscape of flat, white crystalline powder stretching to the horizon. Huge gray columns of volcanic rock towered over the plane. Between the columns the ground was pockmarked with countless gaping pits. I was extremely pleased with this description. Laidrom was, after all, a spirit or angel of the element earth.

But here the vision seemed to stall. I asked our skryer to read the Call a third time. This time he described some movement. From out of a pit in the center of the scene arose a black cone. He said it sparkled from the inside, and upon its surface thousands of little sparks jumped from one star to another.

I asked, “Is this Laidrom?”

“It’s him! It’s him! I see him.”

He described a humanoid figure draped in the same material from which the cone was constructed. The angel had an egg-shaped head but no face. His hands were like mittens -- there were no fingers. Like visionary voyeurs, every person in the room ‘saw’ in his or her mind’s eye what our skryer was describing.

Then it occurred to me. Now that we’ve got this guy, what are we supposed to do with him?

Nobody expected what happened next. Our seer said, “Lon, I feel like...I feel...I could make strange sounds.”

I tried to sound calm. “Let yourself.” I told him. “Go with it.”

He then broke into a string of words that were completely unintelligible, pausing once or twice to giggle and say things like…”I feel silly doing this.” and, “This is BS!”

In a few moments the babbling stopped and he acted a bit embarrassed.

“I am sorry. Nothing like this ever happened before. I just felt like doing it.” He was sincerely apologetic.

Embarrassed, I didn’t know what to do next. I guess I hadn’t expected that this stuff would really work. As I had no specific questions prepared, I thanked Laidrom for coming and told him we hoped he would return again next time we called. I banished and closed the ceremony per Golden Dawn procedure. For a moment the class sat silent, then everyone started talking at once.

One of the class members had a copy of Laycock’s Enochian Dictionary and suggested we try to use it to see if all that strange babbling actually meant something. I rewound the tape and played it back from the beginning.

We painstakingly played with the phonetics of each word (and the word/words following) and attempted to match them with words in the Enochian Dictionary. It took less than an hour to break the sounds into three strings of words and phrases that we easily found in the Dictionary:

“Spirit of Earth, first worshiper friendly visit.”

“Stretch forth hands. Stretch forth and conquer Spirit of Earth”

“….(untranslateable)…Visit in peace.”

Our skryer insisted that he had not so much as even looked at the Enochian Dictionary or read any of the Calls before that evening. I didn’t doubt his truthfulness.

Needless to say we were all very impressed. At the end of the evening it was agreed that from then on class would meet two times a week to continue Enochian workings. For the next three years that’s what we did.

Sadly, our seer’s ability to break spontaneously into the Enochian tongue faded as he became more and more familiar with the language. His visions, however, became clearer, more informative, and more provocative. Although everyone in the class would eventually take their turn in the visionary driver’s seat, he would remain our primary skryer.

For most of the first year we concentrated on contacting angels like Laidrom – spirits of the elements; earth, air, water, and fire. These angels are specialists in their fields. For instance; angels of the element earth know a lot about geology, and the human body (especially the bones), and things that concern material things; water angels can reveal secrets of the oceans and waterways, the human circulatory system, and emotions, etc.;

Of all the Enochian Elemental angels we contacted during that three year period one in particular became the object of our repeated and concentrated workings. Its name is EHNB (We pronounced it ‘Ehenbah’). Without going into a lengthy and technical explanation of why EHNB is such a big shot in the heavenly hierarchy, we can just say he is the highest angel of the fifth element, Spirit. EHNB is the Archangel’s Archangel. Unlike lesser elemental angels (who know a lot about a limited subject) we discovered EHNB knows almost everything about everything.

During our first encounter with EHNB I asked, “What is the nature of your being?” He indicated that his nature was ‘universal’. When I asked, “What are your specific duties?” he answered; “The mechanism of the universe you understand or can ever understand is contained within me. I am everything. I do everything. I know everything.”

That’s a pretty impressive statement. But over the months we did indeed discover that EHNB was a pretty impressive angel. One evening we just flat out ran out of questions to ask. Then it occurred to me to ask him something we’d never ask an Enochian angel before.

“Are you aware of the periods of life and consciousness that we humans view as incarnations?” He answered, “Yes,” but added something to the effect that time is something we do not as yet understand.

I then asked if it could show us visions of our previous incarnations. Again the answer again was “Yes.”

“Then show me one of mine. “Show me how I died.”

The skryer immediately began to describe an urban scene of what appeared to be a city in the near east. A young man, dressed in a loose white shirt and pantaloons, and sporting a thick black mustache, stands on the flat roof of a building about two or three stories high. Telegraph poles and cables lined the street telling us that we are no farther back in time than the mid 1800s. Other young men similarly dressed are on the roof with me. We are all laughing. I pick up a pipe or a long piece of wood. I step to the edge of the roof and put my foot on a wire that stretches from my building to the one across the street. I fall. I die. The end.

I couldn’t speak. The story jogged something in my memory – something I hadn’t thought about in over 16 years. Before I could open my mouth, others in the room piped up, “Show me one of my previous incarnations!”

One by one we heard sad tales of mostly colorless last moments of mostly colorless lives; an Asian monk dieing of stomach cancer, an Irish toddler slipping into a flooded ditch. A few were very odd indeed. One women, I’ll call her Karen, had the most unusual death of the evening. She died as a man named Reggie in a duel staged in an 18th century English gambling “hell”. The most remarkable aspect of the whole vision was that it appeared that the duel was a well-planned, festive event where the dueling parties had even arranged luxurious refreshments for the spectators. A catered duel!

A few people asked for names and dates, and a few got answers. But there were no Cleopatras, no Napoleons – just vivid images of ordinary people dieing ordinary deaths. (Regie’s death being the exception.)

After that night’s session, we drank tea and talked about what happened. Even though our Asian monk (we’ll call him Bob) wasn’t particularly impressed with the images of his past life, another class member (a life-long friend of Bob) shared he once had a vivid dream in which he and Bob we monks in a Himalayan monastery and he sat with Bob as he died of a terrible illness. Our Irish drowning victim was unimpressed, but everybody believed that Karen could have been Reggie!

My mind, on the other hand, had been thoroughly blown.

Those of you who have read my autobiography, My Life with the Spirits, will remember that as an infant I had vivid memories of episodes of other lives. Whether these were genetic memories or visions of actual past lives no one can say with certainty. What I can tell you is that to the best of my recollection none of those ‘memories’ had the remotest resemblance to the one described by EHNB on that evening.

Be that as it may, sixteen years earlier during my first year of college, I volunteered to be the subject in a study of hypnotic age regression. I was hypnotized by a licensed hypnotherapist who regressed me past infancy to the last moments of a previous incarnation. I’d never been hypnotized before so I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t feel like I was in a trance. It was just like was daydreaming.

I casually told the therapist a story that effortlessly unfolded in my mind – a story that came that came as a complete surprise to me. It seemed so far fetched that after the session I completely wrote off the entire experience as utter nonsense and put the entire experience behind me –until that night with EHNB.

I was a young man. I had a thick black moustache that I could easily see when I lowered my eyes. I was dressed in loose white pants and a white shirt that was open to my navel. I was on a rooftop looking across to a building of the same height across the street. A wire joined the two buildings. Motivated by a professional wire-walking act I had recently seen, and urged on by my mischievous friends, I picked up a length of pipe to use as my balancing pole and stepped onto the wire. I fell. I died. The end.

Can we really talk with angels? I can’t answer that question for anyone but myself. But there’s one thing I know for sure. Until you’ve experienced an encounter with an Enochian angel, neither can you.

March 21, 2010

Issue/Publication: FATE MAGAZINE Volume 58, Number 9, Issue 665

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