← the temple John Dee and Edward Kelley · 1583
Twenty-one letters, given to Dee and Kelley at Mortlake in the spring of 1583, each with a name of its own and a value in the Latin alphabet, in an order that is nobody else's. Dee drew them in his record of the sessions, quickly, and they are redrawn here from that hand in the temple's line, roughly, since his pen was quicker than a stroke skeleton. Type below and it is written in them, right to left as his tables are written, or left to right if you ask. The language that goes with the letters, the nineteen Keys the angels delivered backwards a letter at a time, is on the shelf.
in Dee's order; tap one for its name, and it is added to the text
What they are. On 26 March 1583, by Dee's diary, Kelley saw in the stone a table of forty-nine by forty-nine squares and an alphabet to fill it with, and over the following days the letters came one by one with their names: Pa, Veh, Ged, Gal, Or, Un, Graph, Tal, Gon, Na, Ur, Mals, Ger, Drux, Pal, Med, Don, Ceph, Van, Fam, Gisg. They stand for the Latin letters b, c, g, d, f, a, e, m, i, h, l, p, q, n, x, o, r, z, u, s, t, which leaves out j, k, v, w and y, so k is written with Veh, y and j with Gon, v and w with Van, as Dee did. The book the letters were for, Liber Loagaeth, the Book of the Speech of God, was dictated after them, forty-nine leaves of forty-nine-by-forty-nine letters each, and nobody, Dee included, has read it. The Keys came the next year, in a language with a grammar of sorts and a vocabulary the angels glossed word by word, and they were delivered backwards, since to speak them forwards, the angels said, would have been to work them.
The letters here are drawn from the page of Sloane 3188 on which Dee wrote them out with their names, which the Esoteric Archives reproduce; later printed forms, Casaubon's in 1659 and the Golden Dawn's, tidy them in different directions, and this page follows the hand rather than either. The strokes are a sketch of each, not a facsimile. Nothing typed here is stored or sent; the image is made in your browser when you save it.
Dee's record of the sessions is British Library Sloane MS 3188 (1581 to 1583), transcribed as Mysteriorum Libri Quinque at the Esoteric Archives, where the alphabet page is reproduced; the sessions of 1584 with the Keys are in Casaubon's A True & Faithful Relation, 1659, on the Internet Archive. Public domain. The page is this site's own, in the temple's line like the sigil press and the talisman press. One script.