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Saulimedes' Enochian Chess Posts 4/6: Enochian Chess Today

Saulimedes' Enochian Chess Posts 4/6: Enochian Chess Today

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Saulimedes
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Here's something that might surprise you: people are still talking about Enochian Chess.

A Chess.com forum thread from 2012 (still occasionally revived) contains this observation: "Enochian Chess is the Occultist's Chess. It can be used both for Competition AND Divination."

Someone replies: "I just purchased my 4 boards. Just currently learning how to actually play it."

And then the inevitable lament: "If someone set up a website to play Enochian chess online, I would 100% sign up."

The Chess Variants community has taken notice too. Their essay strips away mystical elements to present Enochian Chess as pure game mechanics, concluding diplomatically: "Golden Dawn practitioners may take this essay to task for the method of presentation used, whereby the mystical nature of Enochian chess has been stripped away wherever possible. No offense is intended. Nor is it the design of this essay to endorse or refute anyone's belief system. Enochian Chess has been submitted to the Chess Variant Pages so that it may take its rightful place in the broader outline of chess variant history."

This is exactly right. The game belongs to chess history as much as occult history. It sits alongside Star Trek's Tridimensional Chess and Gygax's Dragonchess as a variant born from a particular subculture.

And like those variants, it has devotees who couldn't care less about the source material and just want interesting gameplay.

This brings us to Steve Nichols.

Nichols has been supplying Enochian Chess sets, books, and software since 1982, starting with support from Israel Regardie himself and a grant from the Prince's Trust. His Windows software allows one to four players to engage without constructing elaborate boards or carving Egyptian deities.

Nichols published a trilogy through Mandrake Press:

Volume I: Rosicrucian Chess of the Golden Dawn includes Moina Mathers's Alpha et Omega papers, play strategy, and Active divinatory methods.

Volume II: Celtic Chess presents Yeats's sixteen-board sub-elemental extension, developed with Maud Gonne and George Pollexfen from a notebook dated December 1898.

Volume III: Khemetic Chess (Hypermodern Magick) explores recent variants, Crowley's relationship to the system, and "No Self" Enochian Chess.

The community continues evolving. Modern practitioners have proposed:

  • Looney Pyramid adaptations
  • DIY approaches with "two cheapo chess sets and colored electrical tape"
  • Digital implementations
  • Simplified two-player versions
  • Four-dimensional expansions

Does the game work?

As divination? I genuinely don't know. As entertainment? Absolutely. As training for complex multi-agent thinking? Yes. As something that changes how you perceive pattern and possibility? The people who play regularly say so.

Whether that change is "magical" or "psychological" or "just getting better at a complicated game" depends on vocabulary preferences more than observable facts. Personally? I prefer a Chess game with imaginary gods over indian elefants every time. 

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