Book of Enoch (Part 1)
Presented on: Tuesday, February 19, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 10 of 54
Book of Enoch (Part 1)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 19, 1985
Transcript:
This lecture and next week's lecture, and maybe the one after it will be on the Book of Enoch. The Book of Enoch as we have it, is a collection of five separate works [1 Enoch], and there was a sequel, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch [2 Enoch]. So, we have about six separate books to deal with, all under the name of Enoch. If there's any book that's indispensable for understanding the psychic turmoil of the classical world, the Book of Enoch is it. It is the most important single document that we have and in early Christian times, the Book of Enoch was canon - canonical. It was a part of what came to be the Old Testament. But as you will see, there were very good reasons for taking it out - both Jewish and Christian - and one of the few places in the world where the Book of Enoch survived was in Ethiopia. And it was the integrity of the Ethiopian Copts. It was the spiritual vision and integrity of those people that preserved for the world this most important book, collection of documents. And of course, the classic traveler in Ethiopia, a couple hundred years ago, was a man named [Giuseppe Acerbi] who brought the Codex Brixianus back with him with a lot of other documents - the Book of Enoch is one of them, another one is called the "Bandolier of Righteousness," which I will get to perhaps in a month or so.
You might be curious of why it would survive in Ethiopia. We only have time to mention the fact that in Ethiopia, the integrity of the religious experience was kept intact because there were no histories of councils to throw material out. There was rather the understanding that spiritual vision needs to have its exfoliate nature and the Ethiopian people historically we're exquisite at preserving everything that was needed in order to have a full spiritual vision.
In 1985 we hear of starving people in Ethiopia. This is a product of contemporary ignorance. Over many decades, actually, the Ethiopian people are among the most sophisticated spiritual people in the world. So, we have them to thank for preserving the Book of Enoch. In discussing this volatile material - and you'll see, perhaps you'll experience the volatility of it, its dynamic, explosive, visionary quality - it did change the nature of the times, and we are susceptible to the same archetypal imagery. Hopefully with our broad base and our educational methodology, we will be able to explore this in detail without falling, without succumbing, to some of the more radical responses that this literature calls forth.
Two elements are needed here too. Keep in mind one of them is the cyclic nature of time. The word that's usually used, the Greek word is aeon - either A-E-O-N or A-I-O-N - a Greek word meaning a great, great cycle of time. The platonic year. A great cycle of time. But the notion in an aeon is that time reveals reality; time is necessary to the revelation of reality. The other element that we need to keep focused for ourselves is the notion of pathos. And by keeping pathos as a notion, viable contemporaneously with the notion of an aeon of a cyclic time revelation, we'll be able to understand all of this material.
Now, there never was an emphasis quite like the emphasis of the Hebrew prophetic tradition. And I think I've recommended before Abraham Heschel's book on The Prophets. Out of the thousands of books that have been written, this book that appeared in 1962 - I have the first edition here, published by the Burning Bush Press, but it's in print in paperback from Harper Torchbooks. Here's Rabbi Heschel's conclusion of the of this whole investigation - five hundred pages of investigating the prophets - this is his conclusion. It's entitled "Involvement and Concern."
"Pathos is always disclosed as a particular mode or form." It's always particular. It's not general, it's specific. It is in fact personal. He writes, "There are, as we have seen, many and variable modes of pathos, such as love and anger, [grief and] joy, mercy [and] wrath. What is the basic feature they have in common? What is the ultimate significance of pathos?" He writes, "Pathos in all its forms reveals the extreme pertinence of man to God, His world-directedness, attentiveness, and concern. God looks at' the world and is affected by what happens in it; man is the object of His care and his judgment. The basic feature of pathos and its primary content of the prophet's consciousness is a divine attentiveness and concern. Whatever message he appropriates, it reflects that awareness. It is a divine attentiveness to humanity, an involvement in history, a divine vision of the world in which the prophet shares and which he tries to convey. And it is God's concern for man that is at the root of the prophet's work to save the people. The great secret is God's hidden pathos. A divine attachment concealed from the eye, a divine concern unnoticed or forgotten, hovers over the history of mankind."
And he goes on from there. Along with this, we have to keep the notion of an aeon, we have to keep pathos, and are together ideation in the forefront, or we're going to lose track when we get into the Book of Enoch. This is two quotations from Henry Corbin's fine collection of essays - Cyclic Time and Ismaili Gnosis, published in 1983 - but a portion of this book was published previously in the Bollingen Series as an essay in the Eranos Yearbooks, edited by Joseph Campbell.
He writes in here, of the notion of an aeon that the revelation in time space of an [R?] requires a focus. It does not present itself as a materiality so much as a light vision which manifests in materiality. And the focus of this manifestation is very often what could be called a witness - the Arabic word Hujjat - Hujjat, a witness. It combined with its two characteristics define the - He is "described [to us] as the person who from pre-eternity is the perfect homologue of the Imam; their concepts are one. It is the true kyriological name of the Imam; it is the Door of Compassion,' the Threshold of Knowledge' of the Imam. By virtue of the identity of their concept, the Hujjat is the mental or spiritual Epiphany of the Imam; in other [words], his person is not an Incarnation of the Imam but is the form of his coming to this world.' That is to say, that since the Imam, as epiphany of the divine attributes, is knowable only relatively to human creatures, the Hujjat, the Threshold of Consciousness,' is precisely this relation."
So that the witness, the prophet, ceases to be objectively himself and becomes manifestly a bridge. Or to be more correct, a bridging. He becomes a relationality. His person becomes transparent so that the relational light of meaning may shine. In this time space by virtue of his transparency. It is his ability to make himself transparent that guarantees the veracity of his being a witness. He adds nothing to the message. He makes nothing up. It is not speculative. His vision is not a dream. It's not a memory, is not an imagining. His vision shines through him from afar and in his transparency that makes it possible. So, he is a witness in this way. He is the threshold of consciousness. He is precisely the relation. Notice the dynamic emphasis here so that a prophet becomes dynamic. When he is at work, he is not statically there. He is no longer objectively obtainable.
"The second trait," writes Corbin, "that completes the characterization of his person brings us to the striking convergence of Imamology and Angel Christology. The mode of consociation'..." Consociation not association, but consociation. "...which places the person of the Hujjat in respect to the Imam is by no means the mode of carnal descent, of genealogical legitimacy. He is the Spiritual Child, the Adopted Child of the Imam. It is no accident that this term should remind us of the adoptianism of the Christology of the Ebionites and of the Shepherd of Hernias; ..." - which we will get into in about two months - "...indeed, the convergence of which we have just spoken becomes clear as soon as we give the Hujjat his archetypal proper name, the name of Salman the Persian, or Salman the Pure."
So, he is a spiritual child. He has taken in. He has adopted his person. So, he is a witness, and he is a spiritual child. And in this capacity, he is presented as the archetype of the Gnostic of the true believer. He may be said to mark the most personal spiritual experience which is available. This is very esoteric. As long as one would be objective - like I am here for you -there is no spiritual relation that obtains on this high order but were I to shift my focus from my person to the conscious relationality which it is capable of then I would shift modes from static to dynamic - from focal to relational - and in that mode, in that relational mode, it would be proper for my being to be synchronized with spiritual flow and spiritual movements. And it's by that transfiguration that one becomes shining; one becomes a man of light. It's very difficult.
Give you one example in Christianity. The Transfiguration of Jesus happens. Once it happens in Mark, the ninth verse of Mark. The spot where Jesus transfigures himself and Mark is given as the high mountain. Now the high mountain at this period of his mission was in the far north, the very edge of the north of Galilee, and the mountain was called Mount Hermon. The Transfiguration of Jesus in Mark takes place on Mount Hermon. He takes three disciples with him. He takes Peter, and he takes James, and he takes John, and they go up to Mount Hermon and Christ there transfigures himself. He becomes shiny. He becomes no longer available, but he becomes like a witness. He becomes like who becomes a changed metamorphose before them. And this is fraught with significance.
The very next passage in Mark they come down into the towns outside between Mount Hermon and Nazareth, and some of the disciples that had been left there have been suffering somewhat because a man has brought his son who is foaming at the mouth, and he wants the disciples to cast this demon out. And they've been casting demons out, and they can't cast this demon out. And the man comes up to Jesus and asks him, "Can you, can you help me?" And Jesus asks him if he has faith. And the man looks at him and says in Mark with tears in his eye. And so, Jesus calls out to the evil spirits in the son and calls them out, cast them out. And later on, as Mark relates, the disciples asking, "Why could we not cast him out?" And Jesus says, "For this one, you need to have a lot of prayer and fasting." Meaning that this is a very high yoga; that they've learned to doctor, they learned to treat wounds but that they haven't learned to heal yet. It's very early on in his career. He was demonstrating by action something very esoteric, and something involved with cosmology which without the Book of Enoch we would have no focus. We would have no idea of what this meant, the poignancy.
Now, Mount Hermon is the highest mountain in that whole range of mountains that separates Lebanon from Syria, or Israel from Jordan. Mount Hermon is about 9250 feet high - it's very high - that's 2800 meters. From the top of Mount Hermon, it is possible to see the Mediterranean Sea. It's possible on clear days to see the peninsula of Haifa. It's possible to see the peninsula of Beirut. It's possible to see Damascus, to see the Jordan River flowing down towards the Dead Sea. In other words, you can see a long way. But Mount Hermon is a very strange place. In fact, Hermon in some Hebrew dictionaries means forbidden,' forbidden place'. Perhaps a more accurate translation is that it's separate,' it doesn't belong. Don't take it into computation when you're dividing up real estate; don't count Mount Hermon as something you could own, it's separate. It's not in the regular flow of what man may have.
The connotation of this forbidden and this separateness is that it was a sanctuary or part of a sanctuary, a religious sanctuary - don't touch that place. And you'll see in a moment how utterly devastating Mount Hermon was. On the top of Mount Hermon - and it's a dome - it's like Mount Kailas in Tibet. Many sacred mountains have that snowcapped dome look to them. In our country the closest mountain to that is Mount Shasta. It stands out alone from the rest of the mountains or landscape, and its dome-capped hood is...
On the top [of Mount Hermon] are three knobs on this dome and each of these knobs in Mark is called a throne. John, according to Mark, the disciple that Jesus loved, said, here is a seat for Elijah, here is a seat for Moses, and here is a seat for you, master. And it shows the incredible, visionary quality of John's consciousness that he is naturally a witness. He is naturally... John alone of all the disciples, was a natural, prophetic witness - John with hyphens in between all those words. This is why Jesus loved him. In other words, he was a natural. What will we call it today? He had all the wild talents of the psyche and the mind. He was like William Blake. He could see things from when he was a little boy. He could see the angelic orders because he could translate himself into this dynamicness', this relationality. Mount Hermon is the place where the angels who were sent to teach man descended to the earth and those angels that descended to the earth coveted the daughters of men and began to take them to wife. And the children of those marriages became the evil spirits in the world. So, Mount Hermon is the site of this cosmic catastrophe, of this cosmological error as it were. And part of the reason that Jesus went to Mount Hermon to transfigure himself was to balance out this enormous travail. In other words, there's work to be done on all levels. There's work to be done physically. There's work to be done mentally, psychically. But there is cosmic spiritual work also needing to be done. And when he becomes transfigured, Jesus no longer exists, but the Christ manifests. And this was the indication in Mark that he had come of age. He was ready to roll up his sleeves on this gigantic task level and proceed.
Now the background to this. And you're beginning to see that Enoch focuses the whole Jewish tradition. That it does. We have to understand that the Judaism that we know today - Rabbinical Judaism, based on the Talmud and Mishnah, is a relatively late occurrence. It takes its energy. It takes its formation after 70 AD, after the devastation of the temple and the city of Jerusalem. And that before Rabbinical Judaism there was Hellenistic Judaism. And Hellenistic Judaism is constellated by the Enochian literature, by the Maccabean wars, and that before this there was a traditional Judaism. We call it Judaism. We don't call it Israeli-ism, we call it Judaism. Why is this?
We have to go back, as a prologue, to about 700 BC. The prophet at that time was Isaiah. And in the Book of Isaiah, we find the tremendous outcry which started with Amos, and was taken up by Hosea and Isaiah, culminates at the apex of this great prophetic movement of calling the people in a time of crisis, to repair the religious integrity of the people, because they were under siege. The Assyrian Empire which had been collected together by the time of Ashurbanipal was becoming enormously powerful and reaching out, taking more lands and more people in. And what they did in those days is they transplanted people and scattered them throughout the Empire so that there was a physical threat to the survival of the people. All of the outlying areas, what could be called Israel, were conquered around 700 B.C., the part that was not conquered, the southern part, Judea, held out for another century, about another 130 years. And Judea, understanding the catastrophe of what was happening, had time in that century and a third to refashion what we know as Judaism. And the apex of that refashioned Judaism is the prophet, Jeremiah.
And the difference between Isaiah and Jeremiah is the difference between an old Pentateuch mosaic prophet calling the people to repair the religion, a Judaized religious prophet calling upon the people to transform the very nature of Judaism, that the mosaic law must be transformed in a very specific way. That we are going to be picked up and scattered and if we put our trust in the Torah, they'll break us, and we won't survive. And so, we have to internalize the Torah. The Torah must become a personal ethical standard rather than an external Law.
And Judaism becomes refashioned from that period from Isaiah to Jeremiah in that century and a third. And the reason that Jeremiah's in the driver's seat is that his father Hilkiah was one of the master editors of putting the sacred books together there was a friend of Ezra, the high priest in the temple. But it was the genius, the intellectual genius, the editorial capacity, the scholarly integrity, of Hilkiah that helped put together all the books.
The Pentateuch that we have is not from the pen of Moses, from the pen of Hilkiah. Moses did not write it down. So, all of the oral traditions were put into writing. The Torah was formed and made an exteriorization. In the time between Isaiah and Jeremiah, because it no longer was viable to depend upon an oral transmission of the Law, because we don't know when we're all going to go or who's going to be left or what. And so, what had taken the personal space of the Jewish individual filled with the learning of the Law, all that was now made manifest and objective and put into a book. And in order not to leave a vacuum that activity was balanced by inculcating an ethical personality into the Judea, Jewish people.
So, the Israel tradition was shattered around 700 BC, and by 600 BC the Jewish tradition had come into being. And one could, at that period with Jeremiah, one can speak of a Jewish personality. You know, you don't have to believe in God, necessarily. It's a very nice thing when one is a Jew, one is of the Jewish faith. It is an ethical comportment to oneself and others, and founded on the possibility that one would have a personal relationship with God - the alterable reality with Yahweh.
And then, as if the trap had just been waiting to be sprung, the Babylonians who took over the Assyrian empire. Nebuchadnezzar snatched up the Jews about a generation after Jeremiah and took them off into Babylonian captivity, into exile, and the only tradition that survived was the Judah tradition. The Israeli tradition did not survive that captivity. Those people were dispersed. One hears an echo of it in The Lost Tribe. But in exile, Jeremiah's vision began to obtain more and more that internal, personal ethical comportment was a navel of the religious experience. That was what was important, and it was the integrity then of the internal experience that became the focus of where God was looking. As long as the Law is the Torah-filled man, then God dealt with man in terms of the Torah. But when the Torah was objectified and put out there, an internal ethical structure became the focus. Then the witnessing of the aion changed from an external chosen-ness to an internal electus. And righteousness was no longer according to the specs of the Law, but according to the intensity of the focus of the personal ethical comportment.
And so out of that comes this tremendous restructuring that the layers and sediment that had been laid down for millennia, and the character of the Semitic people became subjective to these tremendous pressures and intensities. And the coal turned to diamond. And that diamond quality of integrity, that crystalline ethical exactness, becomes illuminated in the Book of Enoch. So that the Enochian literature, which runs from about 180 BC to about 70 BC, increasingly discloses a radiant new vision because the witnessing capacity of Enoch is no longer witnessing something external. And he's gone. Even beyond witnessing something purely personal, internal, he is now witnessing something that is of cosmological visionary quality.
And this made everyone uncomfortable - everyone! The Greeks couldn't handle it; the Romans couldn't handle it; the Egyptians couldn't handle it; the Jews who were Orthodox couldn't handle it; and finally, the Christians couldn't handle it. And after the second century AD, everybody says, "look, let's just put it under the table. We have enough problems." And so, the Book of Enoch disappears from Western religious tradition, except for the Ethiopians and except for the mystical Arabian Sufis, and a few oral traditions like the Hasidean Judaism, and except for a few mystical Christian traditions like alchemy. And all these underground passages of the mind and of the tradition they're all fueled by this focus. And more than anything we have to understand the advent of Jesus as appearing as the finest crystal and witness to the whole cosmological drama. This was his purpose.
You can see it's going to take a while to get through all this. Let's go over this from a different standpoint and see if we can't just quiet this down. This is a book called Eschatology: A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, Judaism and Christianity by R. H. Charles. Charles is the great biblical scholar of the turn of the 20th century, and his works are still in print. The Oxford University Press still prints the big two volumes. This is the first of the two of the collection of Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. The Book of Enoch is one of those.
In his book on eschatology. He's trying to trace the ideas, the notions of last things, of future life. He writes in here that, "The next analogy between the conception of Yahweh and that of the gods of the heathen nations is that as a national god His interests were absolutely identified with those of His nation. Though He might become temporarily estranged, He could never forsake His people. To imagine such a possibility would have been the act not merely of a blasphemer but of a madman. This was the popular view in Israel in the eighth century [BC] and even later." He's the God of our tribe or our tribes, our nation.
This conception was clung to even into prophetic times. "The people," writes Charles. "The people had hardly attained a certain religious level when the messengers of Yahweh urged them on to loftier heights in life and thought than their present achievement. Thus one by one the false views attaching to Yahweh in Israel were in the course of its divine education expelled. Hence we conclude that the essential superiority of Yahwism to the neighbouring Semitic religions lay not in its moral code, in which it was unquestionably superior, but in the righteous character of Yahweh which was progressively revealed to His servants." You have to imagine now a geometric structure for yourself. The broad base out in the world, triangulating and focusing into the interior of the individual, and that point inside illuminating and becoming an eye of vision.
This process took time. The interiorization of it progressively made past levels of understanding false gods. In a way, they were false views of the same god technically, but they soon saw that these were false gods. And after you do that a number of times, you become very touchy and very skittish about false gods. And the one guiding star that you have is the absolute conviction which you must demand of the universe, that God must be unified. Whatever he ultimately turns out to be, he must be unified. He cannot be piecemeal. He cannot be false in any of the numbers of ways. That he might be what is the call that has never wavered since the recognition of that. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord thy God is one" [the Shema]. If you press a rabbi close enough and you ask him, "What is the ultimate statement of the Jewish belief." That is why he was saying, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord thy God is one." But this is a corollary, but not either or. But the recognition of making that ethical statement and making it with certainty or making it with desperate certainty. The recognition involves paying attention to the fact that there are many. There are innumerable stages that one could get distracted from and lost on the way to existentially recognizing that you have secured that belief in yourself.
Hence, the concomitant always in Judaism is that man must be educated. He must learn to be himself. But he is not naturally in terms of this world himself. This is natural. Self is a cosmological focus which only blossoms after a long sojourn. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of experiences so that suffering in this world simply as the condition that we have to pass through transcendental perception. Love is an ekstasis, wisdom is a transcendental for the Jewish soul.
And we have to speak of the soul here now. For the Jewish soul there is a poignancy to these experiences. They are not transcended, they're imminent, even the correlative Islamic terms Imam almost gloriously goes with this manifest. What is the food that is sent to the people in the wilderness by the divine manna? It's coming to be. Don't you see? But it's coming to be not in an exterior way, but in an interior way. But further, not just in an interior way, but in an illuminated interior way. Hence, the statement by John, "Christ was the light of the world." Is simply grand in the way when one understands, finally, that the diction is not allegorical. It's not philosophical. It is cosmologically specific: "Jesus as Christ was the light of the world."
Now we have to understand that the soul in Judaism is not a thing. The body is real. The spirit is real. But the soul is temporary, it's not real. The soul is a focus of the spirit in the body. The psyche of man exists only by virtue of the inward flowing of the spirit, and there is only one spirit. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord thy God is one." There is only one spirit in the cosmos - the Guardian man, eminently focused, is the soul of that person, and when it is illuminated it is self-conscious of that condition. But this process of self-consciousness is fraught with polarity, which it has to be by its nature. And there is a possibility always of the self-consciousness coming to understand itself as an object, that the psyche, the soul, comes to see itself in egotistical terms.
And this is what happened to the angels that coveted the daughters of men. They said "let us..." They are very comely. "Let's take him to wife. Let's have children. Our children will be grand." They were. They were giants. Before, they were not giants in the sense of being eight feet tall or ten feet tall. They were masterful. They ran through human society like a hot knife through butter. But the poignancy, the ethical focus that made it evil, was that this cutoff the very relationality that actually existed, that the divine was the only spirit the angels forgot. And the angels are called watchers - the watchers.
You'll notice here that this is all the origin of the Gnostic demiurge. All of the Gnostic demiurgic powers come from this kind of an era in this kind of focus in the Book of Enoch, which we may not get to yet tonight. We'll get there, but we have to cover all this first, otherwise it's not understandable. You can open the book and you can read it. You know, they reprinted the Book of Enoch and the translation by Laurence Dunn in, I think, 1822 or something like that, and Madame Blavatsky used this translation is completely wrong. It's just an error. It's not fit to use. All of this material is dynamite. You have to know what you're doing. You have to be like a surgeon, and you have to go in and understand the living organism in order to heal. You cannot go in and butcher it and think then that because you're eating a piece of beef, that you thereby understand how to make a cow. It requires tact, intelligence, and perseverance.
And so, we're having to be surgeons here and go in. But the difficulty is that so many of these notions and ideas are so powerful that at the time when we become self-conscious of them, when we begin to understand them, they blur just at that moment because they have a significance for us, which is transpersonal. It's not only archetypal, but it has also its subconscious levels. And so, wisdom has a very distinctive tone. She disappears from view just as you're about to see her. Because one is not right, one is not pure. She's not going to be seen by the impure. This is just a way of saying that just when we look for that very spot, we've got a sty in our eye exactly at that very spot. And so, we say, "well, it doesn't exist. It doesn't obtain."
So we're having to come to this in the old traditional circumambulation way, because that's the only way to guarantee to ourselves a sense of presence that even if we don't see it exactly, we understand in the bones, as it were, that we've been touched, that not only is all of this true, not only is this all veracity and excellence and provable and all of that credible back then, but now also. And this, of course, is the kicker in the works because all this is still going on. Still happening.
So, the early notion of Yahweh, of God, being a national god, our tribal god. That, of course, the core of the tribe is the family structure, the family relation. And so, in terms of eschatology of future life, death and burial become very problematical events. And the key to this was the family grave - family grave. One didn't desire just to be buried anywhere but to be buried in the family grave. And we'll see in the Book of Enoch that Enoch, in his vision, is shown the huge hollow graves, four of them for the entire relation of the family of man. With death and burial comes a third element death and burial. A third element comes in and that is the context then. Burial in the earth, death from life, back to dust into the earth. And the early understanding was that in the underground, in the earth is that realm called Sheol - Sheol. But Sheol is more important than hell. You know, hell, it was rather a recent conception. I think Milton's Paradise Lost is the first real good description. Dante's Inferno. If you read Dante's Inferno and you read Milton's Paradise Lost, you begin to get some idea of the recentness of that kind of conception, that Sheol is ancient.
This is what [R. H.] Charles writes how we have just seen, "Thus Samuel was buried in his own house [and Joab]. But as no family stood in isolation, but was closely united with others, and as these together made up the clan or the tribe, and the tribes, in due time were consolidated into the nation, a new conception arose."
Why did it arise with Samuel? Because Samuel made the first king. Samuel was a prophet. He was a witness, he was a Hujjat, who saw that it was time to have a king. When you have a king, you have a kingdom - it makes a kingdom. It thus makes the afterlife, the burial, a matter of the kingdom. And for the first time you have the glimmer, you have the spark, of the kingdom of the dead. In Samuel's prophetic vision, making David the king, he not only becomes the king of the tribes of the Jewish people in life, but sets up the complement to it, the kingdom of the dead, so that Sheol becomes a very interesting conception at this time, united into one, into this new conception the designation Sheol was given. Shares the Kingdom of the dead. This is his early ascent. This is 700 years before Enoch. And by the time we get to Enoch, we will see this conception just opened up, almost kaleidoscopically. So, he writes, Charles writes, "Sheol - We have just seen that in all probability, Sheol was originally conceived as a combination of the graves of the clan or nation, and as thus its final abode. In due course, this conception was naturally extended till it embraced the departed of all nations, and thus became the final abode of all mankind, good and bad alike. It has already reached the stage in [Ezekiel and in Isaiah and in Job]." The phrase used in Job is "the house appointed for all living." And then in Ecclesiastes. But his Qohelet Ben Sira, it's called "his eternal house," the eternal house.
Now, think now. Everything that obtains in the kingdom will obtain in a complementary, complementary way in the Kingdom of the dead would be a holy city, Temple, the high priest. All of this was beginning to stir all of this archetypal significance beginning to disturb. Oh, there must be, there must be. Even if we can't see it yet, well, then there must be a one who pre-exists in eternity holds the whole kingdom together in an archetypal way. And this is, as we'll see in Enoch, the beginnings of the recognition that there must be a messiah. But that we haven't been able to see him because we're not pure enough yet. That's what's getting in our way, is our minds, our ideas.
We're learning all the time from the Greeks, from the Romans, from the Egyptians, from the Babylonians. And all the time we're looking over there and over there and over there and never in here. And this is where it is. So, we need to have some witness, some prophet, to go in and pioneer that vision. And the Books of Enoch are the record of that hundred years where that vision was pioneered and laid out. And because of the overall configuration of turning the Law into a book, and the prophet's utterances into books and adding to it so the Enochian literature comes into being and culminates the whole prophetic vision with the expectation that as soon as we get purified, as soon as we manifest that threshold of consciousness in the soul of the people, He will come because He has been waiting all this time, only for that door to materialize in the hearts of the people. And when that materializes, then he will come. It'll be closer even than automatic. It's triggered from pre-eternity to happen that way.
Well, you can see with this kind of thought and certainty and drive that by the time of about 80 BC, there were many elements in the Jewish religious community that were absolutely determined and dedicated that no matter what it cost in terms of experience and suffering, they were going to manifest this threshold of purity in the universe. And when Pompeii came into Jerusalem in 63 BC and brought all the Roman power with him, the external Jewish factions were vying to try to get close to Roman power. But to these interiorized, messianic questing Jewish persons, it was just another indication that times are ripe and we're doing something right because we're drawing the focus of all the power here. So, let's just keep on. Let's just keep on in a very strange way, the cosmological sophistication of Alexandria projects itself out, almost like a transference to the little unseen communities out in the deserts and wildernesses. But it's important to keep in mind that in the Enochian literature, they're not as seen. That is to say, they are prophetic Jews.
There's going to be a great difference. And when we see it, I guess we're going to have to see it next week. There's a great watershed that happens that between the Enochian literature and the Essene literature, some new element piercingly comes into Jewish ethical interior questing that was not there before. And we will see that that new element is an arrow of Buddhism. And the Essene's more than ever are Buddhist-influenced Jewish questing communities. One of the hallmarks of the Essenes was no marriage. In the Enochian literature. One of the hallmarks is that man should live a natural life in marriage as a part of the joy of a natural life. That chair, that rant, that separation will come sometime between 80 BC and about 40 BC. Just before the taking over by Augustus of the world.
We need to have this page from Charles. And then I think we'll have to stop for the evening. We'll get to Enoch. Well, plenty of time. We'll do it.
He writes, "Thus the spirit of life is found also in the brute creation according to both these passages (Psalms). A conflation of both these phases is given in the breath of the spirit of life', which the lower creation is said to possess. Since therefore the breath of life', or the spirit of life' is common to man and the rest of the animal creation, the spirit of life, conceived as thus existing in all living things is life in an impersonal sense. The spirit, therefore, in man can never in this sense be the bearer of the personality." Watch how this opens up. "On the other hand, though the spirit is not personally conceived, yet, since it remains in the man so long as he lives and forms in him a thing apart by itself, it must be regarded as forming part of man's composite personality. Accordingly, we have here a real trichotomy of spirit, soul, and body. But if we examine these elements more closely, we see that the soul is the result of the indwelling of the spirit in the material body and has no independent existence of its own."
This is why all [Sikhism?] is a sham. All the psychic levels of imagination, memory, and mentality are illusion. And all of them. This is why in the Book of Enoch, when the evil spirits, the fallen angels, are enumerated there, given their names, not all 200 of them, but the 20 leaders. Each one of them is said to have taught such and such charms to man. Astrology to man, and this and that, and the other to man. And all of them are these psychic involvements of structuring on the soul power level. "It," writes Charles, "is really a function of the material body when quickened by the spirit. So long as the spirit is present, so long is the soul a living soul', but when the spirit is withdrawn, the vitality of the soul is destroyed, and it becomes [a dead soul or] a corpse."
That is in terms of nature. But when the fallen angels have children with the daughters of men, and those children come to be, they have some immortality in them. And so, the psychic level doesn't just wither, but continues as evil spirits. Is this that infects man. Is this that has to be rebuked and cast out. It is this that is the key to cosmological healing. And we'll see, I guess next week, why in such a peculiar way we have to understand that the Christ did not save souls. He returned the flow of the spirit to its unity. But to say that Christ saved souls is a very propaganda of the demiurge.
Well, we better wait till next week but you're beginning to see that when I say this is dynamite material, I don't mean just colloquially. Very good. Well, that's right. If it's the fallen angels that go for the daughters of men to have children, then the thing of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary seems very suspect. I didn't take those doctrines.
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