Several years ago my artist friend Bill was studying The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and got interested in the description of Enochian Chess. He bought a couple ordinary chess sets and painted them to create the Enochan Chess Set as described in the book.
The board is a 64-square Enochian tablet, each square divided along the diagonals into quadrants, colored various combinations of red, blue, yellow, black. There are four kings, four queens, four bishops, four knights, four rooks, and four sets of four pawns each. Each piece is two-tone combining two of the four colors in various combinations. The kings also are partly colored white. (The colors red, blue, yellow, black, white symbolize fire, water, air, earth, spirit, respectively).
After Bill had finished painting the board and pieces, he made me a gift of them. Then we realized to our chagrin that we had no idea how to make use of the Enochian design of chess – the instructions in the book were silent on this question. Apparently W. Wynn Westcott had designed Enochian Chess but never worked out how to actually do the game. I’ve had it sitting in my closet all these years unused. All we can tell from looking at it is that there are four players. Perhaps the ancient Indian caturanga game which also used four players might be of help by analogy.
Has anyone ever played Enochian Chess? I’ve looked at some Enochian Chess websites, but they exist only to plug commercial versions of the game, without explaining it sufficiently. Any ideas?