ENOICHION-HENOCH: THE BOOK OF ENOCH The “Book of Enoch” is declared apocryphal. But what is an Apocrypha? The very etymology of the term shows that it is simply a secret book, i.e., one that belonged to the catalogue of temple libraries under the guardianship of the Hierophants and initiated priests, and was never meant for the profane. Apocrypha comes from the verb crypto, [[krupto]], “to hide.” For ages the Enoichion (the Book of the Seer) was preserved in the “city of letters” and secret works — the ancient Kirjath-Sepher, later on, Debir (see Joshua xv., 15). Some of the writers interested in the subject — especially Masons — have tried to identify Enoch with Thoth of Memphis, the Greek Hermes, and even with the Latin Mercury. As individuals, all these are distinct one from the other; professionally — if one may use this word, now so limited in its sense — they belong one and all to the same category of sacred writers, of Initiators and Recorders of Occult and ancient Wisdom. Those who in the Kuran (see Surat XIX.) are generically termed the Edris, or the “Learned” (the Initiated), bore in Egypt the name of “Thoth,” the inventor of arts, sciences, writing or letters, of music and astronomy. Among the Jews the Edris became “Enoch,” who, according to Bar-Hebraeus, “was the first inventor of writing,” books, arts, and sciences, the first who reduced to a system the progress of the planets. In Greece he was called Orpheus, and thus changed his name with every nation. To accept Enoch as a Biblical character, a single living man, is like accepting Adam as the first one. Enoch was a generic title, applied to, and borne by, scores of individuals, at all times and ages, and in every race and nation. Enoch, or any of its equivalents, was a term, even during the days of the later Talmudists, which meant “Seer,” “Adept in the Secret Wisdom,” etc., without any specification as to the character of the title-bearer. When Josephus, speaking of Elijah and Enoch (Antiquities, ix., 2), remarks that “it is written in the sacred books they (Elijah and Enoch) disappeared, but so that nobody knew that they died,” it means simply that they had died in their personalities, as Yogis die to this day in India, or even some Christian monks to the world. They disappear from the sight of men and die — on the terrestrial plane — even for themselves. A seemingly figurative way of speaking, yet literally true. The Book of Enoch, in short, is a resume, a compound of the main features of the History of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Races; a very few prophecies from the present age of the world; a long retrospective, introspective and prophetic summary of universal and quite historical events — geological, ethnological, astronomical, and psychic — with a touch of theogony out of the antediluvian records. The Book of this mysterious personage is referred to and quoted copiously in the Pistis Sophia, and also in the Zohar and its most ancient Midrashim. Origen and Clement of Alexandria held it in the highest esteem. To say, therefore, that it is a post-Christian forgery is to utter an absurdity and to become guilty of an anachronism, since Origen, among others, lived in the second century of the Christian era, yet he mentions it as an ancient and venerable work. The secret and sacred name and its potency are well and clearly though allegorically described in the old volume. From the XVIIIth to the Lth chapter, the Visions of Enoch are all descriptive of the Mysteries of Initiation, one of which is the Burning Valley of the “Fallen Angels.”
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 19:39:23 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015