Drun N

The Enochian or Angelic alphabet is a script of twenty-one letters recorded by the English mathematician and magus John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley between 1582 and 1589, who reported receiving it, together with an 'Angelic' or 'Enochian' language, from angels during scrying sessions. The letters are written from right to left and each has its own name. This letter is named Drun and corresponds to the Roman letter N. The esoteric weight of the Enochian system lies in its language, its 'Calls' or Keys, and the Great Table of Watchtowers rather than in the symbolism of individual letters; the script itself carries no traditional gematria, and later per-letter correspondences derive from nineteenth-century occultists such as the Golden Dawn, not from Dee and Kelley.

The name Enochian is not Dee's own: he called the system Angelical or Adamical, holding it to be the speech Adam spoke before Babel and restored to him by angels; Enochian is a nineteenth-century label from the later occult revival. What actually produced the alphabet is not settled even by the unusually full documentary record: every letter came to Dee through Edward Kelley's reported visions, and Dee's own diaries record his doubts about Kelley alongside his conviction that he was himself only the transcriber of an angel-received system. The letters appear early in that record, already written in Dee's own hand by 1583, during conversations that ran from 1582 to 1589, first at Mortlake on the Thames and then, as the two men travelled, at Krakow, Prague and Trebon in central Europe; the manuscripts recording them are now held in the British Library.

The system built around Enochian Drun is a more layered, later thing than the letter's origin in Edward Kelley's reported visions, recorded in John Dee's diaries between 1582 and 1589 and discussed elsewhere in this atlas. Dee himself organised the material Kelley brought him into a Great Table of angelic names governing four quarters he called Watchtowers, but it was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, active from the 1890s, that added a fuller correspondence system on top of Dee's own work, assigning each Watchtower one of the four classical elements and linking the whole structure to the tarot and the zodiac in ways Dee's own writing never spelled out.

Aleister Crowley, once a Golden Dawn initiate, later put the Enochian Calls to a very different use in 1909, scrying through what he termed the thirty Aethyrs in a series of sessions published as The Vision and the Voice, a personal application of the material well beyond either Dee's angelic conversations or the Golden Dawn's own elemental framework. Whatever weight the wider Enochian system carries in modern ceremonial magic, Drun itself remains simply one letter among twenty-one, its meaning bound up in the Calls that use it rather than in any property of the letter standing alone.

Sources The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie with The Vision and the Voice (Liber CCCCXVIII, XXX Aerum vel Saeculi)Aleister Crowley