In Defense of Schueler Enochiana
John Dee and Edward Kelly started receiving what we now know as Enochian Magic in the 1580’s. It included many Christian elements common for magic of the time, but also an Enochian Language and Script, and many complex tables containing names of spirits that are unique to this system. This is true and well documented,
200 years later in the 1780’s a pair of lesser known magicians, used the frameworks and practices from existing systems to further investigate Enochian Magic and present a workable system. Not only did they relate it to the magic common at the time, but also to contemplative practices and the scientific advancements that had been made since Dee was alive.
How exciting is that? A system of Enochiana from the same time as the American Revolution? How much would you love to read that book? How jazzed would the Grimoire community be to translate and expound upon it?
Unfortunately that second paragraph isn’t true. It didn’t happen in the 1780’s. It didn’t happen in the 1880’s either, though that’s when the Golden Dawn was founded and when they started using bits and bobs of Enochiana in their system, finding that it added something very real and potent even if they did not fully understand it.
No, the work I am talking about didn’t happen in the 1780’s. It happened in the 1980’s. Therefore, its crap. Right?
Sadly that’s how people treat it.
Yesterday was April Fools so I made a little graphic of a fake Gerald Schueler book on Enochian Baking, kind of poking fun at the string of Enochian books that came out in the 80’s and 90’s: Enochian Magic, Advanced Enochian Magic, Enochian Tarot, Enochian Yoga, and Enochian Physics. A lot of people loved the joke, but sadly some of those people commented on how those books were crap.
They were not crap. Not at all. If you know me at all, I usually only poke fun at things I like and respect.
Enochian is almost like fragments of an alien technology that humanity doesn’t necessarily know how to use as intended, and possibly can’t even use as intended. Does that mean we leave it alone? Of course Not! We’re humans! You’ve all seen this movie! We strip that shit down and find out how it interfaces with the stuff we already have. Like a kid building a go kart with a lawnmower engine – we do something cool and useful with it. That’s what the Golden Dawn did. Its what Crowley did. It’s what the Schuelers did.
Enochian Magic is a basic run down of GD style magic, but uses all Enochian rather than Hebrew and Enochian. It’s perfectly workable. Advanced Enochian Magic expands upon this in some interesting ways and started getting deeper into how the Schuelers viewed Enochian as a spiritual system that led through the various Aethyrs rather than Sephira to get you from being and earthbound shlub to Ipsissimusing at the highest and most spiritual levels.
People seemed pretty okay with these books.
Given that the system, like the Golden Dawn and Theosophical systems, is meant to take you from Gross Mind to Subtle Mind, it actually makes complete sense to take a look at same basic system through the lens of Yoga as well as Magic. For all the shit that Enochian Yoga gets from people who make fun of it, there are actually a lot of pithy instructions and useful exercises. My first real mystical experience – not an experience where I perceived a vision, but an experience that changed the lens through which I perceive everything – came through working Enochian Yoga when I was 20.
If Enochian Yoga was straining the credulity of the Schuerlers system, I think we can say that Enochian Physics is when it officially jumped the shark for a lot of folks. I am not a physicist and neither was Gerald. I doubt many physicists would give a whole lot of credence to the theories in the book, but that’s not really what the book is about. Just like magicians have used metaphors of libraries, rays of light, electricity, magnetism, and psychological theories as ways to explain something too subtle to gather data about in the usual way – Gerald used the language of physics. What’s more is that he did a better job of it than half the people running around explaining the occult through “quantum” everything. He did at least as good a job with it as Peter Carroll did in Liber Null and Liber Kaos.
I won’t comment on the Enochian Tarot, because I never purchased it. Same with the various software programs that the Schuelers made available (Gerald was a retired systems analyst and Betty a computer consultant.) But I think you get the idea.
Is this what you want to read to understand Enochian as laid out by John Dee? No. But neither is anything from Crowley or the GD.
Is this what you want to read as an introduction to Yoga or Physics? No. But they never claim to be.
What they are is the product of working magicians who took something not fully understood and investigated it using both mundane and magical means. They presented their findings as a system that is rooted 400 years in the past, and also reflected the thinking of the time and place that they lived within. They are absolutely worthwhile and deserve to be treated with at least as much respect as any other book that came out at the time.