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To: alt.magick From: shaxemcguinest981@hotmail.com (Shaxe) Subject: Enochian and Goetia Compared Date: 12 Sep 2002 21:43:17 -0700 Okay, I'm still trying to figure out why Duquette recommends using the Enochian Calls with Goetic operations. Since no one seems to know, I thought I'd do my best to compare and contrast the two systems, to see how someone might think they'd work together. First off, they both surface around the Elizabethan age. The world had just emerged from the Middle Ages, but it hadn't quite managed to break into the Enlightenment yet. So on the one hand, they are both forward-looking systems. There's a certain amount of pre-Enlightenment freethinking going on in them. They don't adhere as slavishly to traditional planetary or elemental categories as do, say, Agrippa or the Greater Key of Solomon. The planetary/zodiacal atrributions of the Goetia seem almost an afterthought. The Enochian Tablets may be broken down into elemental and planetary forces, but those forces seem to behave differently in Enochian operations than they do otherwise. Nor do they adhere rigorously to traditional categories of morality. The goets are not so much absolutely evil as they are flawed, incomplete, cunningly self-interested, or just plain insane. The Enochian entities may be angels, but their nature is so alien that they cannot really be classified into human moral categories. Likewise, neither system adheres as strongly to orthodox religion as does the Sworn Book of Honorius or similar books. On the other hand, they have a bit of the medieval naivete about them. Science had not yet made the world so cynical about magick as to produce the Faustian, pact-with-the-Devil style grimoires you see in the 18th century. So that's it in terms of history. What about construction? On the one hand, the Enochian system, though incomplete, is painstaking, while the Goetia has the air of being a bit thrown together. On the other hand, they both rely on material that was either channeled or made up. Dee received his system through Kelly's scrying (or invention). And the Goetic sigils, since they do not appear in the earliest published versions of the spirit catalog (in Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft) and since they follow no known rules of sigil contruction, must either have been made up or discovered with the spirit vision. In terms of effect, they both rely on a trick known by all good horror film directors: if given inadequate data, the human mind will fill in the blanks. If you can't see what a monster looks like, you begin to suspect. And your suspicion is invariably scarier than the special effects. In Enochian, you have only a nearly unpronounceable name and an elemental attribution that describes the spirit's nature only in the grossest and most inadequate terms. In Goetia, you have to work with a bizarre description that tells you almost nothing of substance about the spirit. Sure, there is an improbable physical description and a random assortment of the tasks assigned it (which are usually nearly identical to the tasks of several other spirits). But the Goetia descriptions tantalize more than they inform. If you summon Bartzabel, you pretty much know what you're gonna get; but if you summon Valefor or Haagenti? Much more unpredictable. Finally, most of the Goetic spirits are theromorphic; according to some reports, so are the Enochian ones. Any thoughts?
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