Categotry Archives: enochian

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Liber Coronzom: An Enochian Grimoire – A.D. Mercer

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Categories: enochian, esotericism, grimoire, Tags:

Liber Coronzom coverReleased by Aeon Sophia Press, A.D. Mercer’s Liber Coronzom represents the first foray into matters Enochian for the Dutch publishing house. Its raison d’être is suggested in its very name, with Mercer intending to provide an authentic system of magic based on Dr John Dee’s records, rather than the adaptations made by the Golden Dawn and subsequently Aleister Crowley. Core to this authenticity is the name Coronzom, as it appears in Dee’s original hand, rather than the more familiar ‘Coronzon’ of Méric Causabon’s A True and Faithful Relation… or Crowley’s h-enhanced ‘Choronzon.’ Mercer spends some time documenting the instances where this name and its variants appear in the original documents, concluding with ‘Coronzom’ as the most accurate form. This is important as Mercer bases much of his system around the idea of Coronzom, calling it the Coronzomic Craft (and presumably not Cozonomic as it is also rendered in at least one instance).

After this preambulatory discussion of Coronzom, in which Mercer identifies him with Samael, the rest of Liber Coronzom follows and is divided into three books: Liber Hermetica, Liber Enochia and Liber Aethyrica. The first of these libers presents basic ritual techniques, variations of which will be familiar to anyone versed in western ceremonial magic: breathing exercises, white light visualisations, and a Golden Dawn pentagram-style ritual including the Kabbalistic Cross; as well as references to two specific, non-Enochian procedures: the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and the Bornless Ritual. At the same time, Mercer says the link ‘of’ (by which, one assumes, ‘between’ is meant) Enochian and Kabbalistic magic must be severed for the Coronzomic workings to be successful; which makes one wonder, why have any of those elements in the first place.

In Liber Enochia the focus naturally turns to more Enochian matters and Mercer provides a discussion of the Enochian language, and a variety of procedures including the banishing of Enochian entities, the opening of the four watchtowers, and the summoning of the Governors. This largely creates the toolkit for the system presented here, with watchtower openings and brief little intoned Enochian invokations being the order of the day.

Mercer incorporates his own innovations to Dee and Kelley’s template, making ritual use of a three-sided blade (which in his case is the somewhat incongruous Tibetan phurpa), and introducing what is described as a heretofore unknown shortcut through Enochian magic’s system of aethyrs. While on the surface this makes you think of some hidden formula being decoded from amongst the Enochian elemental tablets or one of Kelley’s transmissions, it appears to be simply that, a shortcut, wherein the way to get to the final ten aethyrs is to skip the other twenty. Genius. The vehicle for this shortcut is provided by the angels of the tenth aethyr, Zax: Lexarph, Comanan, and Tabitom. As the names of these angels are found within the Black Cross that quadfurcates the Great Table, the arguments goes, you can open all four of the table’s watchtowers, invoke those angels, go directly to Zax, do not pass Zip, do not collect 200 pennies. As Zax is the aethyr in which Coronzom resides, having done this you now have instant access to the mighty devil of dispersion and with that, the experience of the Abyss. Coronzom himself turns out to be a bit of a pushover and after a brief invocation, he is overcome and it is revealed that… *spoilers*… wait for it… they were you all along – and they would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling ceremonial magicians.

Once you have nimbly bypassed Coronzom, Liber Aethyrica follows and the final ten aethyrs from Zip to Lil are yours to explore… quickly. In fact, ‘explore’ might be too grand a word. Forget Crowley’s description of the aethyrs with all their fantastic landscapes and chimeric entities, these aethyrs are presented as briefly encountered, largely interchangeable zones that are passed through in brief, single-paragraph descriptions, always with a citadel in Lil in sight as a goal.

As suggested by the shock reveal of Coronzom as your bad self (get down with them), there is much in Liber Coronzom that is framed within a psychoanalytical paradigm, particularly the Jungian variant. Other reviews here at Scriptus Recensera attest to how your mileage may vary when it comes to this approach, and it comes off a little dated, recalling the heady days of the 1990s when magic as science was all the attempt-at-credibility rage.

Throughout Liber Coronzom, Mercer writes somewhat informally with a degree of confidence if not fluidity, with, for example, the initial discussion of Choronzon vs. Coronzom having a conversational tone as he explores the issue hand in hand with the reader. There are, though, little things that begin to irritate as the book progresses, making for an ultimately frustrating read. There is a preponderance of filler words, the first use of ‘at the end of the day’ that I’ve seen in a book in a long time, and a considerable number of sentences that begin with ‘And.’ There are also little words and phrases used inappropriately: ‘gambit’ is used where ‘ambit’ must surely be intended, ‘thou’ pops its archaic head up in one sentence, only to be followed by ‘you’ in the very same sentence, and there are repeated conflations of ‘affect’ with ‘effect.’ Commas are used inconsistently: in one instance creating a Shatner-esque staccato with their frequency, but are then almost entirely absent in other places; or in completely the wrong place in still others. Elsewhere, stray words are left in the middle of sentences, while instructions that begin by detailing what an anonymous adherent should do, abruptly get personal and start speaking directly to the ‘you’ that is the reader. This is without mentioning other misspellings, punctuation errors and the use of incorrect homophones that riddle the book, making for a mistake on almost every two pages. This is all symptomatic of a complete lack of proofing, and makes it feel like you’re reading a first draft. It would have been beneficial to have an editor act as a brutal gardener to cut some of the redundancies, solecisms and erratum. Maybe they would have caught things like the titles that in two instances refer to things being ‘Enochain.’

There are multiple editions of Liber Coronzom including one as a high quality hardcover with a full colour cover, wrapped to front and back, featuring Henry Gillard Glidoni’s painting John Dee Performing an Experiment before Elizabeth I. The deluxe edition features black end paper, gold foil lettering to front cover and spine on a full black leather bound hardcover. A further devotee edition is limited to thirteen exemplars and has black end papers, a quarter grey goatskin leather bound over hand-marbled paper, and 23 kr gold decorations to the back and front cover and the spine. It is housed in a solander box, bound in full Italian grey cloth. And then there’s the X-Series edition limited to 50 exemplars and bound in blue cloth but with the cover featuring the same gold foiled title and design as the deluxe edition.

The version reviewed here, though, is none of these and is, it would appear, an iteration of the standard cloth-bound edition, with a blue cloth blinding and a foiled decagram on the cover, limited to 200 exemplars. I add the caveat of ‘it would appear’ as the current standard edition available from the Aeon Sophia Press website, also with only 200 exemplars, is now a black cloth version, with no decagram on the front and just the title rendered in a foiled blackletter Killigrew face.

Published by Aeon Sophia Press

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Arbor de Magistro – Nikolai Saunders

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Categories: enochian, magick, thelema, Tags:

Arbor de MagistroI first came across the work of Nikolai Saunders in Anathema Publishing’s Pillars journal in which he presented an invocation of Tiamat, penned, I found somewhat incongruously, in Enochian. That approach, and indeed that invocation, reoccurs in this book, where Enochian, aided and abetted by Latin, is the lingua rituale of choice.

As the subtitle The Grimoire of Aethyric Evocation indicates, Arbor de Magistro combines Goetic style invocations and evocations with Enochian cosmology, using the aethyrs and calls of the latter as the context within which the former are employed. Saunders argues that what this means is that a spirit from Goetia can be summoned whilst the practitioner is within an Enochian aethyr, and said spirit can then provide an alternate viewpoint to this realm. This combination of Solomonic and Enochian magick exemplifies occultism’s predilection for complexity, as Saunders says 91 Enochian governors and 30 aethyrs already provides about 2700 different combinations of spirits and aethyrs. With the addition of the 72 spirits from the Goetia to the 30 aethyrs, a grand total of around 5000 spirit-aethyr combinations emerge. Quite what you would do with so many ethereal beings in so many aethyrs I don’t know, but I bet they have a powerful union.

Saunders’ book is presented within a cosmology that doesn’t feel too distant from many of the nightside and anticosmic systems that are prominent at the moment. It is by no means qliphothic, but it does employ a mythos that recalls that of the Dragon Rouge in which the core principles of the universe are Chaos, identified with Tiamat and Babalon, within which resides the second principle, Therion, the Beast, who as Leviathan is seen as the Serpent Father of the Abyss. With the way in which Crowley monopolised the use of the term Therion, this can lead to a few disconcerting moments when you momentarily think evocations are referring to good old Uncle Al.

While there is a little theory at the beginning, much of the book consists of rituals which can be summarised as aethyric evocations, group initiations, and sex magick workings. Your mileage will vary as to how effective or evocative the rituals seem to be. There’s a lot of Enochian text, a fair bit of Latin and a few geometric sigils; these are presented as scans of the pencil-on-paper originals, rather than rendered anew digitally. The group initiation rituals feel rather reminiscent of masonic-styled Victorian occultism, all blindfolded supplicants being led into the temple and the great mysteries and secrets being revealed to them after an “initiation hard-won.”

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One of the strange quirks of Arbor de Magistro is the decision to present almost all ritual text in triplicate, creating a magickal Rosetta Stone in which the text first appears in the Enochian script, followed by a transliteration of the Enochian into Latin characters, and finally, an English translation. While I can understand this if the letters were required for transcribing, I can’t imagine many people, no matter how proficient they are in Enochian, are going to choose to read the words in their Enochian characters when the transliterated version is sitting right beneath it. This quirk does, inadvertently, make Arbor de Magistro quite the page turner, but that’s more to do with how quickly you can flick through when almost entire pages are taken up with monolithic blocks of Enochian characters.

Arbor de Magistro is designed to the usual high standards of Fall of Man and published as a regular edition of 300 copies with a special Magister edition of 60 copies. The regular edition is octavo size, bound in black Senzo, with the Tree of the Master in matte gold on the cover, finished with black end-papers and a hand-sewn spine. The rather flasher Magister Edition is bound in dark grey leather, and comes in a handmade hinged and locked oak box, hand crafted and marked with the sigil of one of six different spirits: Pacasna, Thotanf, Valgars, Lucifer, Beezlebuth and Ashtaroth.

Published by Fall of Man.

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Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic & Modern Occulture – Egil Asprem

Categories: enochian, magick, Tags:

arguing-with-angels-cover1 Egil Asprem is part of what seems like a veritable renaissance of matters esoteric from Scandinavian academia; one that is often sympathetic and enthusiastic about their subject matter and its practitioners. Alongside Kennet Granholm, Jesper Aagaard Petersen and Per Faxneld, Asprem is one of several often long-haired, occasionally-bearded Scandinavian academics who you can’t help feeling might have a few black metal albums in their collection and have gone in to academia to legitimately pursue their once youthful interests. As its subtitle indicates, Arguing with Angels is an exploration of the role of Enochian magic in modern and not so modern occulture. As a result, this is not a book that considers the original workings by Dr John Dee and Edward Kelley in any exhaustive detail, but rather looks at how those foundations have been interpreted, reinterpreted, tweaked and expanded by occultists down through the centuries.

Approaches to Enochian magic are defined by Asprem as either purist, perennial, or pragmatic, with purist being a form that sticks strictly to the material from Dee’s diary. The latter two categories could be further defined as eclectic, and it is this description that could be applied to most versions of Enochian magic, whether it’s the Golden Dawn’s presentation of elements of the system as an expression of perennial wisdom with nary a mention of Dee, Crowley’s apparently unique interpretation of the aethyrs as magickal realms, or Gerald and Betty Schueler’s cosmopolitan approach that throws pop physics, yoga, tarot and sex magick into the mix. Asprem shows how the Golden Dawn’s overarching philosophy of personal knowledge and growth downplayed some of the more medieval grimoire stylings of Dee’s original system, with its inclusion of traditional, but somewhat vulgar, techniques, such as finding treasure or transporting a magician to far off lands. This also had an influence on Crowley, for whom the Enochian system was purely employed for self-development, as well as much contemporary magick that has followed on from him.

How the various strands of occultism have dealt with Enochian magic is often indicative of their approach to magick in general, so what is presented here can act as a summary of Western Esotericism shot through an Enochian lens; or shew stone, if you will. Following the Golden Dawn and Crowley, Asprem argues that the next sea change in occultism was sparked by the Satanism of Anton La Vey. This is exemplified by his treatment of the Enochian calls in the Satanic Bible, where they are presented in a disenchanted, secularised way and employed not because they use the language of the angels, but because as a barbarous tongue they, according to La Vey, just work. This pragmatic, relativistic approach, in which something is used because it appeals, rather than because it belongs to any authentic tradition, was subsequently carried through into Chaos Magic and other recent eclectic forms of occultism. While the materialist La Vey may have used the Enochian Calls in the Satanic Bible simply to pad out the page count and meet a publishing deadline, former Church of Satan priest Michael Aquino returned to a more esoteric, though no less eclectic, approach. Enochian played a central role in the communications with the Egyptian god Set that provided the foundation for Aquino’s Temple of Set, with his Greater Black Magic working resuming the type of occult narrative employed by Crowley: received texts, magickal aeons, and magick as fundamentally a form of self-development.

The final chapter of Arguing with Angels, Enochiana Without Borders, is one of the most interesting, simply because it addresses something that is so recent and paradigm-shifting that it remains largely undocumented, namely the growth of Enochian studies online. Asprem details the heady first days of the internet where bulletin board and news-group occultists were some of the earliest of early adapters, before that method of communication gave way to email groups such as the Hollyfield-based Enochian-L and ultimately, the Yahoo! Group Enochian. Having been involved in email groups at their peak, although not Enochian ones, there is a familiarity with Asprem’s description of the method of communication they provided and the ability for disparate voices to come together from across the globe. The digital nature of these communities means that Asprem has a rich archive with which to analyse the state of modern Enochiana, in which figures such a Benjamin Rowe and others were able to write exhaustively and influentially about the subject without worrying about the publishing house gatekeepers of yesteryear. Several theoretical approaches figure largely in Asprem’s work. The division between the purist and pragmatic expressions of Enochian magic allows for a thorough consideration of the problem of authenticity with occultism. This, in turn, informs discussion of both the disenchantment of magick and the often resulting replacement with a psychologised model. Similarly, the concluding chapter provides a discussion on how occultists see the nature of the angels they are arguing with, whether as literal entities, aspects of the mind, or something else.

Following a summary from Asprem, Arguing with Angels concludes with an appendix of Dor Os Zol Ma Thil (The 12 Black Hands and the falling seats), an Enochian text received by Norwegian occultist Runar Karlsen in 1991. This is a lengthy transmission with an awkward and stilted English translation that I was, at first, looking forward to reading. But now, my bookmark sits resolutely in the middle of it, abandoned due to the torturous nonsensical gibberish of the content. While I’m certainly open to seeing new Enochian material indicative of any living system, I would have hoped it made more sense than sentences like: Visit the holiness within the not-made olive of mine. The Fire enters the whole weeping creation. Visit the man of mine become that man, go forth and feel born. You heard the angel, umm, go forth and feel born; but don’t forget to visit the man of mine first.

As both a survey of Enochiana and occultism in general, this is a valuable, unique work. Asprem clearly has some empathy for, if not a direct connection with, his subject matter, but this does not prevent him from approaching it pragmatically; something that is important when considering a magickal system that involves chatting with angels.

Published by State University of New York Press. ISBN: 978-1-4384-4190-0