Book of Enoch (Part 3)
Presented on: Tuesday, March 5, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 12 of 54
Book of Enoch (Part 3)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, March 5, 1985
Transcript:
I think those who have made it have realized that this material is not available anywhere else. That's right. The reason is, is that no one in the world knows. It's not that I know and no one else knows. It's that no one has known, but that the field of information is like a matrix, and we have generated a lot of information. We've enriched this matrix of information, but no one has really circuited through this matrix - a coordinate intelligence. And what I'm doing is taking a template of viewpoints with a methodological firmness and passing them through this matrix and trying to deliver to you spontaneously as you hear it. What comes out - what does this super enriched soup of transformation that actually occurred about 2000 years ago look like? What does it read out when we pass certain disciplined methodologies through it?
One of the few individuals who attempted to handle one strand in this area was a man named Goodenough and the Bollingen Series, published in 13 volumes, his great work, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period. And I made sure that the PRS library got my set of this, so I don't have it here in the Whirling Rainbow Library. But the PRS has it. But of course as you must know or might know, it's put up into a side room and you have to have special permission to go up and use it, and they're only open 12 hours a week, and that's generally from 1 to 4 on weekdays. So, it's almost unfortunately inaccessible. When I find another set, I'll buy it, but I found volume 12, which is summary and conclusions. Volume 13 was the general index with maps. But volume 12, I found another copy. And so, I'm going to give you a couple of paragraphs of good notes - conclusions.
He spent a whole lifetime in this field. He is of Jewish background. Tremendously intelligent. Tremendously honest. Not orthodox but what we would call humanist. He would like to know also what are there in this matrix of information? What forms are there? Now, he went through a whole series of volumes, 11 volumes, reviewing archaeological data. And reviewing whatever literary data and his object was to try to disclose for us what was Hellenistic Judaism. What were the Hellenistic, Hellenized Jews like? Because they're essentially important to everyone. They were, to use a phraseology that I sometimes use, magnetized human beings. Whatever they came into contact with, whoever and whatever became magnetized and polarized because of the tremendous element energy. It's like if you rub a piece of iron against a magnet long enough, the piece of iron will become polarized and thus magnetized. The Hellenized Jews were a magnetic center for the interpenetration of cultures. And that they were forced into this situation against their will, time and time again. The archetypal situation was the Babylonian captivity, where they were just physically taken away into captivity and for several hundred years had to live under Persian rule. And we have seen that only certain elements of the Jewish population survived, those who interiorized their sense of significance and values. And when they came back into power in the period of the Second Temple, the Maccabean times, they tended to express external, exteriorize this internal capacity, so that the internal synthesis became the structural projection upon which the exterior forms began to gel and take shape.
It did produce a Jewish kingdom with a Jewish king. The Maccabees up to John Hyrcanus. It lasted for about two generations down and was swallowed up by the Hellenistic kingdoms. But what did not disappear and what actually thrived on the adversity was the interiorized synthesis that the Jewish individual survived - the person, the human person - and survived because they could participate in this tremendous confusion without being a part of it. And eventually at the end of the second century BC, around 100 BC, this pattern had become conscious, self-conscious. They realized we have survived this long, we have gotten this far, just in reaction to events and situations that have constantly occurred to us. Let's take hold of the tiger by the tail. Let's see what comes out when we consciously do this.
And these communities of the elect began to congregate. They were like utopian communities, but they were utopian from an interior standpoint. And what they were experimenting with; what is going to come out of us when we add self-consciousness to this integrated capacity, which we have discovered that we have, that you can beat us, you can kill us, you can exile us, you can drag us across the face of the earth. We are still who we are. You can make us speak different languages. We are still who we are. We can speak many languages. We are still who we are. Let us consciously then experiment with communities of individuals like ourselves and see what comes out. And what came out was universally efficacious because what emerged against the context.
The background of this community of the elect, as we will see, was the righteous one. The communities of righteousness produced the capacity to see the form of man as the righteous one. And when that capacity was seen, it took only one generation for the discussions to center around the possibility of manifesting a righteous one, a messiah. It was not a condition where the Messiah comes all of a sudden as a big surprise. It's like having put your order in and made the specifications and saying, all these conditions have to be met. Whatever else there is, all these conditions have to be met. And the conditions kept refining themselves until around 50 BC, when we see the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. They had become quite refined but now the problem is, we don't know, no one knows any longer exactly what happened, because all of the participants, all of the beneficiaries of the participants in those events, all of them, without exception, covered up the integrating sensors. Ignored them, pushed them out of sight. The Christians didn't want to talk about them because they had something else to do. The Jews didn't want to talk about it, they had something else to do. The Romans all died off. Almost everybody who was involved in it disappeared.
And so, we didn't have material; we didn't have any images. We had nothing to work with. Till the late 19th century when archaeology began turning things up. And in the 20th century, when documents started turning up by the bushel, a lot of documents have turned out. And now they've all been translated. All the archaeological work has been done. All the monographs have been published. And we're one of the first groups who are taking a look at this. What happened? What happened? This conclusion was written in 1965 by E. R. Goodenough, who was the world's expert, one of the few. And as you can see, as a world expert, he's going to say, I don't really know, but we think some of these conclusions are viable, and here they are.
The foregoing summary shows that the study as a whole has really divided itself into three parts. For we have been trying to discover what impact Greek religion and thought had upon Jews of the ancient world, and we have examined three chief sources of information. First, there are the literary remains of admittedly Hellenized Jews. Then the archaeological remains from Jewish graves and synagogues of the whole range of Mediterranean civilization. And third, the biblical paintings of Dura.
Now they found it - Dura, which is in the Iraqi plain area. Archaeologists found an intact synagogue and what was shocking about the Dura synagogue, which was explored archaeologically in the late 1920s and in the 1930s by Americans. They found that all of the traditional pictures of Hellenized Jews were completely wrong. That all the scholarly conjecture about them had gone way off on a tangent. And actually, betrayed the actual situation. And this is what prompted Goodenough as a young student in the 30s. Well, if our picture is wrong, what is the picture? And so, he spent his whole life with this. And this is his summation here.
If there is any such thing as coherence among the three, among the archaeological remains, among the literary remains, and among the correlation of those two classes of material, types of material, with the actual integrated site of the Dura synagogue. If there is any such thing as coherence among the three, the painting should prove to reflect the ideas we have found in the literary remains and archaeological symbols. Literary remains and archaeological symbols which before were more or less categorized and ordered in a hodgepodge way on a speculative basis. But the speculative basis has been displaced now by an actual site that's intact, that we found no one made up the Dura synagogue. Those people built it, they worshipped in it, they lived in it. And so, the site itself does not lie. And how it integrates the material has to be given primacy over scholarly or religious scholarship.
This is what Goodenough said. He's a great, world-renowned scholar, but he's saying it is time to take our coats off and get to work because we have a whole new insight into the origins of this particular civilized situation that we happened to inherit. One of the far-reaching conclusions which Goodenough does not draw here, but in other works does, is that we are in trouble because we are living on lies. And it is no wonder that human beings can't integrate themselves, that civilizations can't work in our time because we don't have anything real to found ourselves on. We're just building sandcastles. So, here's some bedrock.
He writes, "Some of my Jewish friends believe that there is a fourth approach, that of examining the rabbinical writings for evidence, fragmentary as it might appear, of Greek influences even within the rabbinic schools. Saul Lieberman, for example, has begun on this kind of study, but I feel, only begun. A fifth approach would be in such a study of the Septuagint, as has never been systematically made, to see how the very process of using Greek words for Hebrew, the original meaning, would have been modified. For example, Greek speaking Jews thought of God as theos, which would have had quite a different conception from the Hebrew who thought of God as Adonai, Elohim, or Yahweh. Theos had been used for so great a number of gods that it meant rather, a level of being, than a person at all, and was rapidly becoming a metaphysical abstraction."
"But the Hebrew words were really the last one. Definitely proper names of one personal God. His name was Yahweh. Is there a conception? That's his name. It's different. A sixth source of information promises to be available in a new mystic Gnostic material that Gershom Scholem is bringing to us from the early rabbis to see what is naturally Hebrew, and what seems to have been taken over from Greco-Roman concepts. If these be the sources of information for the Hellenization of Judaism, and I would by no means consider it an ultimate list, it appears clear that in the foregoing study, we have by no means finished the task, and that conclusions must still be quite tentative. What the terms Hellenized Judaism will ultimately come to include, we cannot now say."
This is the world's expert telling us just 20 years ago, quite legitimately, we really don't know. But the demonstration has gone far enough to justify some confident statements quite beyond those hitherto possible.
"In this final section, I shall accordingly outline what I have concluded as the most likely hypothesis from the material now at hand. I have repeated rather tiresomely, that the material proves very little beyond the tautological." That's an equivalence. A = A is a tautology. But surprising fact of its own existence. He's saying that the material indicates that it really existed. And in that tautological terseness there's a little bit of a lesson for us. It's a lesson in intellectual humility. Yes, the material is skimpy, but it is real, and you will founder all of the great cosmic speculations that are fantasized upon these little rocks, because they're not going to go away. So, they have to be taken into consideration. Whatever you're going to come up with, they have to be taken into consideration.
This is new. This is new because all the theological traditions Christian, Jewish, Islamic have completely set aside these fragments and said they're irrelevant. And Goodenough is saying we have to face the fact that they are relevant, that whatever else we're going to do, we have to take them into consideration. If this bends the fantasizing capacities of the mind back into some concrete shape, back into some form. He writes, "but it seems to me overwhelmingly probable that the actual artifacts in Rome and Dura are more reliable evidence for Jewish thought in Rome and Dura than are the Mishnah and early missions redeem of midrashim of the Rabbis in Palestine."
This is a very tough thing to say. This is equivalent of a Christian saying that all of Christian theology up to 1965 will have to be set aside, because we have excavated the Christian site, which shows us that we don't know what we're talking about. This is monumental. This is a watershed. This kind of realization. Does this undermine faith? No, because if faith had to exist as a speculative fantasy, ungrounded in reality, it was not worth harboring. If it was so wrong in its vectoring, if it was so fragile in that structure that it was confounded by a few bits of evidence from historical situations, then it was not worth harboring in the first place. So, man learns a little humility again. Come back, he goes on, and you can read the conclusion in the volume for yourself at your leisure.
Now, in this welter of material - archaeological, literary, and speculative - the difficult part is finding some place to start. Where do you start? Whereas the trustworthy center pole around which the circumambulation can give us a vision. The most trustworthy of all the documents that we have is the Book of Enoch because the Book of Enoch is primal, it's not written by a single author at a single time but is produced over about 100 years of time by at least five different authors. And so, it in itself is like a telescope, which if we open out the parts, we can see through one way microscopically and through the other way cosmically. And we can see in the five parts of the Book of Enoch, the five sections, a progressive development.
Now in itself, the use of the terms progressive here is prejudicial. So, I caution you that I'm using it in that way; I'm using it in a prejudicial way. That there was a development, that there was a history of an idea if you want. There was the fleshing out of a vision, and the basic core of that vision is delivered here. As we saw in the first part, the basic core of the division of the divisions and the revelation of behind those divisions is that the individual person has the capacity to direct themselves totally, personally, immediately, directly to the divine. You don't need an intermediary. You don't need a priesthood. You don't need a Torah. You don't need a doctrine. You don't need a committee. That the individual as himself, you can come in to direct and truthful contact with the divine.
This is the beginning of the Book of Enoch. This revealing of the fact and the ascription to this man of the name Enoch just harkens back, symbolically, to the biblical tradition. Because Enoch is the seventh son from Adam, and then he breaks cycle. Seven is a cycle of completeness and seven sevens is like an aion. After seven sevens then you have a jubilee. It means just like it sounds. It's a celebration point. It's a node that we've had a cycle of cycles. You know the phrase King of Kings. It's like that, that there's a sense of completed form. And when you have a cycle of completed forms, that in itself is a completed form, but of a transcendental kind. So that a jubilee is a transcendental point moment of celebration. And so, every 49th or every 50th would be this note, but also seven then becomes the basic alphabet. The basic working number of the vocabulary of meaning becomes a cycle of seven. So, the seventh son is very important. Enoch is the seventh son from Adam. He comes through the seventh line, not through Abel or Cain, but through Seth.
In fact, the lineage is given at the beginning of the second section of the Book of Enoch. And in fact, it begins by telling us that this is the second vision which he saw. That same man who had direct contact with God, who we are going to call Enoch because of symbolical associations - that wasn't his name, but that's what we're calling him - because his significance is all bound up with the fact that he ends a whole cycle of complication and brings it clear that with him. We can finally see that this is the pattern. If we extend that pattern, we can see what the larger epicycle is going to turn out to be. And that's what the Enochian literature is all about, is saying, look, these are the patterns. And they show us that to complete these patterns that we're involved in, that there's going to have to be a messianic figure occur, not now but coming up. In fact, we can compute in our way when he is going to occur and where we can do all the correlations and we can say it's going to occur at such and such a place, at such and such a time.
What are we going to do in the meantime? We're going to get ready. What else would conscientious human beings do? They're going to prepare themselves. And so, the first century BC was a time of massive preparation for the millennium. They didn't see it as coming down to the year zero. And you have to now, symbolically see that we're going to talk about the year zero. All they saw was in terms of the patterning which they had figured out, its structure, that this event was coming, and it was coming closer and closer, and that in order to prepare it.
Now here's, "The second vision which he saw, the vision of wisdom." The vision of wisdom. The Greek word for wisdom is feminine sophia. There's always this natural peril. A man who beholds a vision is like a man who sees the woman. She is beautiful. For him she is a source of life. If he enters into a covenant with her, he will be able to live the good life. Not the fun life, but good as in Plato.
This is an interesting transposition of energies. The traditional Jewish god was masculine. Yahweh was masculine. And all the way through the tradition is that man has to open himself up to the divine as if he were a woman for the divine. He has to be faithful to the divine as if he were a wife for the divinity. You can say that this is a primitive tribal psychology, and it is, but it has its guts. It has its psychological tenacity. It means that man's faithfulness to his God. It preserves the divine marriage that is going on, but now the divine is feminine and man has to learn to be masculine. In this relationship, he has to learn to take care of the divine, as he would take care of his wife.
This is a massive switching of roles. It's what Jung calls psychologically an enantiodromia. You keep the shape, the psychological-archetypal shape, but you turn it upside down. Well, a lot of things that were false are going to fall off, but any structure that had integrity will still work, but it's going to work the other way now. And this is what happens in the first century BC, is that the whole psyche... Actually, by the second century BC, this turn, by the first century it was already in place. So, the second century BC is this whole turning this enantiodromia religious psyche of Jewish mankind turned on its head during the second century BC and put the ethical, judgmental, seat of control in man's hands rather than in the hands of the divine.
Now it's your turn to be conscientious. I've been keeping track of you for all these ages. Now you keep track of it here. The responsibility is yours. And, of course, that staggered the religious sensibility. Many people were numbed by it. As you can well imagine, it was catastrophic. But we're counting on you. We've always counted on you. Now we have to count on ourselves. Look at us. Right. Look at you now, you have to improve yourself. Now you have to take it in hand. Now you have to work on it.
You can see what an ethical crush it was. What a psychological trauma it was in large, big writing. So, here's, "The second vision which he saw the vision of wisdom" - sophia - "which Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel" - M-A-H-A-L-A-L-E-L - "the son of Cainan, the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, saw."
Notice the telescoping again. They describe him as Enoch, and then they describe him as Enoch, the son of so-and-so, the son of so-and-so. On down seven times, and then comma saw. This entity is not just who he is existentially, but he is also that historical aggregate combined. So that he becomes a time figure. He represents not only himself, but he represents a timeline. But it's not an infinite timeline it's a finite timeline. It is a seven-generation timeline. But Enoch, remember, lives a long time before he's of the early Genesis part. So, when they get to the Messiah, we'll see with Jesus right away - in Matthew, they describe him in terms of timelines that are 42 generations long.
This is an improved model. Enoch had this capacity to do all this and see all this with a seven-generation timeline. Here's a man who's 42 generations long. Notice the incompleteness. That in terms of the patterning, it should have been a 49-generation man. He was one cycle short. Or rather, he came as a 42-generation Messiah to show that there is a change that's going to happen when you have a 49-generation man, that is not going to look like what you thought he was going to look like. Jesus will say that man is going to be called the Holy Spirit. That person is no longer going to be anything like what you thought. And he says, in John, he says to John. John says, "why do you have to go, master?" He says, "if I don't go, the counselor will not come, and he has to come in order to complete the kingdom."
So, we have a mystery here. The coming of the Paraclete, the coming of the of the Holy Ghost is a jubilee phenomenon - is a 49-generation timeline phenomenon. But because it's a complete transcendental cycle, it's no longer a man in the traditional sense. It's no longer a person in the traditional sense at all, that the last recognizable person in terms of these timelines would be Jesus. He's the last time that that divine energy has any resemblance left of human form. That after that, the evolution goes to a being, a person who no longer needs to have these kinds of limitations at all. And the first indication of that, of course, is on Mount Hermon, in the Transfiguration, Jesus turns into light. He says after this there's no such thing as this form. It becomes a light energy. And from there its modulations are the whole universe.
This is what was being said. And if you listen to the tape from last week, that was one of the central themes of what happened in the beginning of the first section of the Book of Enoch. Now in the second section, this is the second vision. And we have Enoch as a seven-generation timeline being. And this is the beginning of the words of wisdom. Actually, the word here, "beginning" is not bereshith, which would be beginning. It can also be used in Hebrew as sum. This is the sum of the wisdom as well as the beginning, so it has that kind of connotation. It's not only the beginning, it's the sum. In other words, this is a whole pattern of wisdom. And it's beginning for you because you're just opening it up. But actually, it's the whole sum of the wisdom. That's what is being said here.
"And this is the beginning of the words of wisdom which I lifted up my voice to speak and say to those who dwell on earth: Hear, ye men of old time, and see, ye that come after, the words of the Holy One which I will speak before the Lord of Spirits."
So, he's addressing himself to people who have come before him. Who are ostensibly hearing this, and the people who are yet to come, who are going to be hearing this. And he is able to say this because he is a timeline being. He exists in the past and he will exist in the future. He is not just existentially here at this moment, but he is here in all those generations also. So that the events that are happening are no longer on the writing point of the pen of Destiny, but that the whole page has now become germane. In other words, the context of what is occurring is what is real and not just the expressive writing point.
This idea, incidentally, was mystically best expressed, I think, in the quatrains of Omar Khayyam. The moving point of the pen writes, and the hand moves on. That kind of an idea. Sufi mysticism comes from this. Its taproot comes all the way back to this. So, he says here that he will speak before the words of the Holy One, "the Holy One which I will speak before the Lord of Spirits."
Now this is a new phrase, the Lord of spirits. He has been called before the Lord of History. He's been called many revered names, but never... there's one usage that's similar to this in the Book of Judith. But that's the only other place in the Old Testament that this would occur. But it occurs dozens of times in the Book of Enoch that Lord of Spirits. Again, what is important here is that Yahweh is no longer simply a person, however revered, however powerful, however large. But he is Lord of Spirits. He is now visible in that capacity of being Lord of Spirits, so that the spiritual realm now is germane. Whenever we address ourselves to him, we no longer talk only to a person, but to a whole realm. And so, we have to address ourselves not as a person, but as a page of context out of the generations of man.
This begins to transform man's vision of himself as a very powerful idea. I'll give you a little indication of this. When I was 12 years old, 11, 12 years old, and I'd be riding my bicycle. I would sometimes have the feeling that I was like a knight on a horse, and whenever that association would happen, I would feel that there were columns of horsemen, other knights, behind. When I would see myself riding a bicycle there was no indication of that at all. There was no intuition of that. But when I imagined myself, a knight riding a horse, I was always at the head of a column. It was a very peculiar thing. It's this kind of a situation that, in a certain perspective, in a certain psychological mood, the perspective of our existential self, merges with what we're calling here a timeline being. That all that exists at the present moment. This is not a past lives event. This is just the opposite of that. This is that everyone is present now so that the dimensions of a person begin to approximate larger slices of history than merely our own life.
This prepares us to view then, the divine as not a thing, not an object, but as a functional realm. This is, this is new, and the Book of Enoch says then it were better to declare to the men of old time. But even from those that come after, we will not withhold the beginning of wisdom till the present day.
Such wisdom has never been given by the Lord of Spirits, as I received, according to my insight, according to the good pleasure of the Lord of Spirits, by whom the lot of eternal life has been given to me.
He's saying this is new. This hasn't been in the Torah before. It is not in those documents. It's not in the Pentateuch. It's not in the prophets. It's not in the Books of Wisdoms. This is new. In other words, this is the cutting edge of a development. He writes, "now three parables were imparted to me, and I lifted up my voice and recounted them to those that dwell on the earth."
And I think tonight we'll have just probably time to get into the first parable. I don't want to rush this. I want to keep this viable, so we'll just go into it, the first.
Horrible. I have to wake Elisabeth up here. We don't want your snores on the way up here, okay?
This, incidentally, was written about between 80 and 90 BC. This section, the first section of Enoch, was written about 180 BC to about 160 around in those years, and this is between 90 and 80 BC. So, these are the 80s BC. The first parable is that when the congregation of the righteous shall appear - and that's the telling phrase when the congregation of the righteous shall appear. In other words, communities begin to occur. Enough people recognize something is wrong. Something is new. Something is different. And they get over their alienated state of just thinking that they're cracking up or they're going off the deep end, or they're the only one who imagines this, that enough people like that, that come into contact with each other and say, wait a minute, you're experiencing life the way I'm experiencing it. What's going on here? And those people and these people, let's get ourselves together. So, when the congregation of the righteous shall appear and sinners shall be judged for their sins and shall be driven from the face of the earth. And that's all one sequence.
Then the next sequence comes in juxtaposed against that. And when the Righteous one shall appear before the eyes of the righteous. Do you see? The Righteous One can only be seen by the righteous. Why? It's because he is a spiritual gestalt rather than a phenomenological object. And only from a certain standpoint and shared perspective is there any possibility of perceiving that reality? This is why in the mass you are given communion. It's only in a state of communion that the divine appears because the divine no longer appears on the altar. The sacrifice on the altar is no longer effective. It's the communion of the congregation that's the effective part. This is one thing that's been the spiritual meaning has been leached out of Christianity and Judaism so much that it's almost unrecognizable. The focus of a religious ceremony is with the congregation and not with the altar, not with the priesthood. It is the shared communion of the congregation that makes a context whereby the divine could be experienced, could be seen. This is the whole meaning of it. This is why the body, the manifestation of the divine, the blood, and the flesh are given to each individual in the congregation so that they participate in this capacity to sustain the gestalt spiritual body of the presence of the Lord in their community. It is the community that is holy and no longer the temple, no longer the altar, no longer the priesthood. As a radical change this is ripping out the very seams of the old Law.
This is why it was said then finally, in retrospect, that this is a whole New Testament that we can no longer add these books to the Old Testament. But this is so different, it's of a different nature. And of course, it was radically different when the Righteous One shall appear before the eyes of the righteous, whose elect works hang upon the Lord of Spirits. And light shall appear to the righteous and the elect who dwell on the earth.
In other words, they won't see a person so much, but they will experience a light. The seeing of the Lord of hosts will no longer be seeing some man with a beard or some man with red hair, but of experiencing the light of understanding, and that this occurs then, because the righteous one appears before the eyes of the righteous. And that righteous one does certain works whose sense of organization, whose integrity of purpose, hangs upon the Lord of Spirits. By their fruits you shall know them.
In other words, the defining qualities are not height and weight, but works. And it's the pattern of works that then become visible. And one sees that the righteous one is he who does these works in this kind of an order, with this kind of integrity and understanding - that is the light. Understanding - that is the light. This is where the gnosis comes in because without the understanding, without the seeing of that, there is no light, there is no gnosis. But the basis of the light, the basis of the gnosis is not some speculative psychological event, but it's rather a very basic fundamental. One almost might say sociological event. The first step in that whole manifestation of the light is to have a congregation of the righteous. Without that, nothing happens. There is no righteous one. There is no righteous one to produce these works that hang on the Lord of Spirits, and there is no light until there is a congregation of the righteous, so that there is a political message here.
Nobody wanted to hear this. There were no kingdoms anywhere in the world at that time that wanted to hear this. But the people have to trust themselves rather than somebody else to let this new kind of spirit happen. They had to learn that they themselves constitute the community. That by their willingness to overlook differences and to promote cooperation among themselves in whatever ways they could figure out. Man has to be pretty damn ingenious sometime to live with other people, as all of us know that they were willing to do that. Yes, it's hard. Yes, sometimes it seems impossible. But unless we do this, none of the rest of this manifestation is ever going to happen.
And it took about 100 years of community experiences like this experience to produce a working model where there was, in fact, a community of the righteous. And because of the problems of the time, they found that more and more they had to just simply let go of what we would call regular, normal life functions because the problems of being together in this high pressure, psychological expectant state force them into pairing off and getting rid of all of the surplus.
So, we'll see by the time we get to the description of the Essene communities, like those of around Qumran, they look like the most ascetic monastic communities you could ever run across. It was the only way they could make it work. It was just simply the only way. And where in 100 BC, there might have been 1 or 2 Essene communities. By the time you get into the second century AD, there are so many monastic communities that they form almost cities along the Nile River. Saint Pachomius was in charge of 14 monastic communities that had thousands of people in them each. And this is where the amplification of that happened. Then this was significant to the early Christians because they said, look, look what's happened, look at the amplification. We must be doing it right. The earliest working models had maybe 2 or 3 dozen people. These latest models have several thousands of people. Yet we have a direct continuity to them. And that's when they took it back to the cities. When they were able to have a working model of several thousands of people in the deserts. Then they took it back to the cities. They went to Rome. They went to all the big cities and took it in there, and it was like the Jews coming back out of exile.
The early Christians reversed that ascetic movement of going away from the world and brought it back into the world, because they realized that that was the light they had to deliver. It was the re-energizing of a dead and corrupt world structure by the light of their understanding of how things work, how people actually get along. And when it came back in, it took only about a hundred years before the entire Roman world was Christians.
Oh yes, you can say ostensibly Christian, but if you look at the evidence, it was pretty well that way. It was what they call in politics, "a victory by acclamation." The ayes drowned out the nays by far but none of that makes sense until we come back, and we can see the genesis of that and understand, first of all, there has to be a congregation of the righteous. There has to be that capacity for, "good people," to be able to come together and work together continuously year after year, generation after generation, if need be. That without that capacity, man can do nothing. And remember, man has the ball. Now he has the ethical responsibility. The divine is no longer the man of the family. The divine is now the woman of the family. And man has to take care of her. He has to be faithful to her. He has to be responsive that the family of his transcendental capacities is going to only be intact if he works within that and responds to it.
So, first of all, there has to be a congregation of the righteous. And in Enoch it says, "When the congregation of the righteous shall appear, And sinners shall be judged for their sins, And shall be driven from the face of the earth." This is a telescope phrase. The first line is that one will be able to judge what is right, judge what is wrong; make a decision. To be able to say this is wrong. Not because we don't like it, but because we understand the pattern, and this destroys the pattern of life. This is like such a graphic thing as the 1980 epidemic of AIDS. What is wrong with AIDS? AIDS destroys the immunological system. It's that kind of concreteness. So, there is the ability to judge right and wrong, to make judgments, to see. Then this whole ocean of evil will be driven from the face of the earth. What was that ocean of evil? It wasn't from an original sin. It wasn't because of Adam, because the first part of Enoch showed the vision that it's fallen, transcendental capacities. The fallen angels who come in and mix. They mix angelic powers with human blood, and that produces the giants. And when the giants die, that produces the evil spirits. This was the mythological statement so that the world is dominated now by evil spirits. This is why one addresses the divine as the Lord of Spirits because on that level, in that mode, he is Lord.
Before we had the primal notion in Judaism that what was a soul and man was the divine element in man, symbolized very often as his breath. The breath of life. God was the breath of life in man. That was the divine aspect. And when man's body died, that breath went immediately back to the divine. That only when the divine was projected down into a body, that portion of the divine projected into this body was the soul of the man. The soul was nothing by itself. It was simply that projection of the divine into this body. It's like an overlapping. But when the evil spirits came in and the mixing of the angelic powers with the blood of man happened - there's a kind of alchemy that happens. This is a basic alchemical image. The alchemical image is the white semen of men and the red blood of women that produces the embryonic seed which in its permutations is the essence of organic transformation. So that man's essential nature - as a physiological being, as a timeline being - is an ongoing transforming permutation matrix which achieves a purposive apotheosis in an ultimate pattern. This is a lot of hyphens. I have to talk this way for a moment. So, things have to change. They can no longer remain objective and old fashioned because the conditions are different.
And what the Book of Enoch is saying is that they have been different for a long time, only we didn't know it. That this change didn't happen. Now it happened way back when. Some of the original elements in the Book of Enoch were in a previous book called the Book of Noah, and the Book of Noah was the more archaic version. But the Book of Noah was such a beginning approximation, it was so insufficient in a way that when the powerful, integrated vision of the writers of the Book of Enoch came in, they excerpted the parts of the Book of Noah that could still be used, that were still viable, and integrated them into a larger pattern, more forceful, comprehensive pattern. So that's what we have here. The basic pattern is that there's a congregation of the righteous. When they are a congregation, they have a relationality between themselves that allows for the Righteous One to be seen. The Righteous One, then having that base of congregation community to work from, produces a series of acts, and the acts in the congregation are balanced by the Righteous One, and from that balance, when that is seen, that produces the light. It's just like making a critical mass. It's going to produce a nuclear fission when that critical mass is reached. And that's just what happens psychologically. The Messiah was like a spiritual atom bomb. Spreading, not radiation, but light. And this is just how it was seen at that time.
I know that you're being strained somewhat by this. Let me go just a little further on and then we'll just continue next week.
"Where then will be the dwelling of the sinners." That is, when light appears to the righteous and the elect dwell on the earth. "Where then will be the dwelling of the sinners, And where the resting-place of those who have denied the Lord of Spirits? It had been good for them, if they had not been born." Because they will have no place to be, their only place to be will be an unreality. When the kingdom comes to nature, when the divine founds itself in human life in a real way, the only place that those who have denied this will have to be is in unreality. There won't be any natural universe where they can be. And this, of course becomes extremely poignant in the first century AD, because to all the Jewish elect communities that have been computing and handling this kind of a pattern now for about 150, 160 years. When they saw Nero set fire to the whole city of Rome, it looked to them exactly like the readout should look, they're living in unreality. They don't have any place to be. Burning Rome, the Emperor burning his own capital city, the Eternal City, was the perfect symbol that the kingdom had come home. And that's when Peter went to Rome around that time.
He said, this is the time, this is the place, this is the moment, "When the secrets of the righteous shall be revealed and the sinners judged." Notice how that goes together. The righteous get revelation and the sinners get judged. It's a polarity. It always happens in tandem. The judging of sinners as an ethical act. The revelation to the righteous is an epistemological act. The knowing and the deciding come together. They always happen together. So, there's always this.
"And the godless driven from the presence of the righteous and elect, From that time those that possess the earth shall no longer be powerful and exalted: And they shall not be able to behold the face of the holy, For the Lord of Spirits has caused His light to appear On the face of the holy, righteous, and elect."
Other words, they're still praying to an objective God who's in stone somewhere over there. And the divine is manifesting in the community of the righteous. It's on their faces that he exists. He is not phenomenally there anywhere. He is communally present in the community itself. That's why the community was the focus of the religion and not the priesthood, and not the altars, and not the icons. All this would be set aside by council after council until it was weeded out of Christianity, until it was weeded out of Judaism. This was the forbidden realization that the religious presence of the divine was in the community, the congregation, and not anywhere else. You don't give the communion. You don't give the wine and the bread to the altar, to the priesthood. You don't leave it exposed somewhere out in the sun, and you don't bury it in the ground. You give it to the people because the congregation was the only reality there was for the new dispensation.
And this was an insight which was intolerable to power systems because the whole notion of empire is based upon people serving the system, and the system being in control of the few, and the few responsive to the head man. And so divine realization is an acid to tyranny because when really understood, it dissolves all the false forms of government. You can cheerfully give Caesar what is Caesar's. His face is on the coin. Where is the face of the Lord? It's in the congregation of the righteous who have learned the truth. And having learned that truth, they are free. No one has any hold on them. The kingdom is not some golf course up in the sky. It's the free relationality of wholesome people together. Sharing the same vision.
The roots and the seeds of this expressively are here in the Book of Enoch, and we'll just go on with this next week. I don't mean to tire you with this, but I won't let it go. I'm as tenacious as you can get. If it takes two months to read this book with you, I will. We have about 8 or 9 books like this to go through until we get to where Alexandria hosts the Messiah. Oh, yeah. He's born in Bethlehem, but he is taken into Egypt you know. Where do you think they took him? They never tell you. They never tell you. Well let's end there and we'll go next to...
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