It is an established occult history myth that Paul Foster Case considered Enochian dangerous because it caused the death of his friend and initiator, Michael Whitty.
Robert Word has dug up a copy of Paul Case’s Book H, a Golden Dawn Enochian manuscript for those in the Secord Order of the AO.
This manuscript is fascinating because it is dated 1922 and was returned to the AO after he was expelled later that year. When he had the manuscript, he was working on it, and there were typewritten notes correcting bits of it and clarifying the pronunciation. He was also researching Enochian. The year after he was expelled, he set up his own Order, which became BOTA.
Whitty’s death
However, this document’s date is two years after the death of Michael Whitty (which occurred six months after Case was initiated into the AO). Whitty died of a genetic illness and was a dead man walking by the time he met Case. While Whitty had access and presumably used Enochian, it did not kill him, something that Case knew. This document proves that rather than blaming Enochian for the death of his friend two years after the death of his friend due to using Enochian, Case was researching it practically. Clearly, he was not concerned about Enochian having harmful effects at this point in his esoteric career.
Case’s anti-Enochian ideas
In the “Wheel of Life” magazine, in March 1937, Case said that while B.O.T.A. was a direct off-shoot of the Golden Dawn:
“Its work has been purged of all the dangerous and dubious magic incorporated into the Golden Dawn’s curriculum by the late S.L. MacGregor Mathers, who was responsible for the inclusion of the ceremonials based on the skrying of Sir Edward Kelly.”
“There is much in these Golden Dawn rituals and ceremonies that is of the greatest value, but from the first grade to the last, it is all vitiated by these dangerous elements taken from Dee and Kelly. Furthermore, in many places, the practical working is not provided with adequate safeguards, so that, to the present writer’s knowledge, an operator working with the Golden Dawn rituals runs very grave risks of breaking down his physical organism, or of obsession by evil entities.”
This comment was written 20 years after he copied that Enochian manuscript, and it does not mention Michael Whitty. Also, the second paragraph about safeguards does not mention Enochian (later writers often slot this in square brackets to give a context that is not necessarily there). Those who have seen BOTA’s rituals say that Enochian is not the only thing purged from the group’s rituals—godforms are also banished along with other things that may be considered “dangerous”.
The problem with Case is that many of his thoughts and ideas were mythologised by his successor, Ann Davies, and biographer Paul Clark. Clark, too, desperately seeks to prove that both Davies and Case were occult gods. Master R told Davies, one of their channelling sessions, that she had no chance of understanding Cabbalah never looked at Enochian because Case appears to have abandoned it before she appeared on the scene.
Too much like hard work
What is more likely is that having worked hard on Enochian, Case could not get anything out of it. He had other things to play with, such as Tarot, Hebrew, and Alchemy. Case was not a prude and would not have objected to Dee and Kelly’s wife swapping (which was one “proof” of the system’s corruption levelled at the pair). Case later had an open relationship with his wife, which included Davies.
When Case wrote the above comment, he was under pressure to form his own Golden Dawn initiation system. To do that, it could only include things that he felt capable of teaching. Enochian would not be one of those things. This created a dilemma—thanks to Crowley (and later that year Regardie), Case would have to come up with a reason for excluding Enochian from his order. He did what many do in these situations – he pretended to save his students from danger.
It was one of those things that you could not get away with now. But when Case said those things the amount of Enochian information outside the Golden Dawn was limited. The main source for Enochian material was still A True and Faithful Relation of What passed between John Dee and Spirits. Copies of this were hard to find (at least until the Magical Childe edition in the 1970s). Even when Regardie’s Golden Dawn book came out just before WW2 its distribution was limited and the AO had shut down. Case could be sure that experts on Golden Dawn Enochian would be thin on the ground.
So its a myth
So the myth that Case believed Enochian killed his friend was perpetuated and carried to other orders. When I first began my experiments into Enochian (first Golden Dawn and then the Dee method) I was somewhat disappointed. When I first used it, it was a little rough energetically but that was because it had a power which I didn’t understand. Later, it caused no problems at all.
When I spoke to a senior Whare Ra person about it, he said that the members of the Order were not worried about Enochian; instead, they were more concerned about the Abramelin system which managed to do a number on one of their most significant chiefs.
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