Don: The Enochian Letter for R

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 Don and corresponds to the Roman letter R. 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.