Book of Enoch (Part 4)
Presented on: Tuesday, March 12, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 13 of 54
Book of Enoch (Part 4)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, March 12, 1985
Transcript:
This is the fourth lecture on the Book of Enoch, and the reason that we're taking our time is that the Books of Enoch, the five disparate writings that were collected together and fused together to make the Book of Enoch during the whole of the second century BC are a taproot of mystery, speculation. They are also the source of a lot of Western magic. And so, we're taking our time and developing this imagery because it is profound and because, as we have said several times before, this has repercussions.
The archetypal symbolic images that are still current with us come into being at this time. The figures in the collective unconscious are not eternal in the sense of their manifestation. The images are collected about this time about 2100 years ago. In fact, it was at that time a well-known doctrine and was given the name the Platonic Year, which was 2160 years long. And it was this cycle, this great cycle that repeated itself so that if you imagine now a circle representing 2160 years, any place that one would inhabit upon that cycle, time cycle, the origins of that time cycle would still be present within. You would still be faintly echoing within you, and especially if there were no new era. That is to say, if the 2160-year cycle had not finished, they would certainly be operative. And so, in a very strange way, the Platonic Year, which, incidentally, is not a doctrine so much of Plato, but of the Middle Academy, later Platonism, not Neoplatonism, but the Middle Platonism, of which very little is known.
The chief philosopher in that formulation was not even called a Platonist, but was called a Stoic, and his name was Posidonius. Might as well give you a little information on this. Posidonius was born in Syria, not on the coast, but inland in the city called Apamea, which was the home of a lot of great thinkers and philosophers of that time. Posidonius, growing up there, was given probably a syncretistic education. Apamea was the place where the caravans from India ended. The elephants that were used in Hellenistic armies were all brought and trained there at Apamea. So, it was the end of the caravan route from India. We will see next month when we get into it, that Buddhism came through that caravan route and was changed all along the way, except for its basic doctrine and basic methodological approach. It was this quality that infuses Stoicism with the expectation that the polarities to be taken into consideration are not life and death, but the passions and tranquility. The basic Stoic concern is to achieve tranquility, not to achieve the good, that the good will take care of itself if you are tranquil, this is a Buddhist outlook.
Distinctively, Posidonius left at an early age, left Syria, left Apamea and went to Athens and studied for a few years under the great Middle Platonist Panaetius - Panaetius. He eventually moved to Rhodes and in fact is usually called Posidonius of Rhodes. He was... He died in 51 BC, born about 135 BC, he was the most famous philosopher of his day. Cicero studied under him and kept correspondence with him. Pompey, when he was going to capture the east, stopped and paid his respects to Posidonius.
The basic cosmological speculation in the Stoic philosophy owes its organization to the mind of Posidonius, and it is in his mind that for the first time, an amalgam is made that influences thereafter the Western occult tradition. That is to say, it influenced the general classical milieu at the time. But when the classical world fell to Christianity this aspect of the classical world was sustained and made the structure of the occult tradition. The structure was this: that at death the soul leaves the body, and depending on how one has lived, the soul is purified or less purified. It is lighter or it is heavier. When it leaves the body, it goes upward, and there are spheres controlled by the orbits of the planets on up to the fixed stars. The really pure soul, like an ethereal flame, quickly ascends throughout all the spheres and reaches the fixed stars or heaven. The less impure stop at various hierarchical, spherical realms along the way, which are associated with later with Sefirot, the spheres which are associated with planets so that astrology and Hebraic cosmology come into a confluence with Platonic form making in the mind of Posidonius between 135 and 50 BC.
This is exactly the time that the Enochian literature hits the consciousness of the classical world. So, we have an interesting phenomenon. We have the old Chaldean science of astrology. We have the Hebrew prophetic tradition. We have the Platonic cosmology. We have a slight Buddhist element. And we have a tremendous syncretistic generation of people that lived around 100 B.C., 30 years, give or take, on either side of it. And this realm produces the kinds of integrations that will hold and refine themselves for the next 200 years. And out of this will come all of the great religious movements of the Roman Empire. Out of this will come Christianity. Out of this will come all the Gnostic sects. Out of this will come Rabbinic Judaism. Out of this eventually will come the Western occult tradition. It all comes to be at this time.
Yes, there were traditions before then. The traditions before then were all localized. Astrology was a Chaldean science - it existed in Babylonia. If you look at Pythagoras and Plato, they never once mentioned it. It comes into being at this time. And all of these disciplines which were localized, become spread through a syncretistic blend across the face of the civilized world, because they all come into being at a time when Roman power comes into control of all of the various kingdoms. This is why we had to take a month off, to trace the rise of Rome, and to realize that the Roman Empire is the perfect vehicle for spreading syncretistic religion because the Roman individuals were not individual-minded, they were group-minded. There was no such thing as a Roman having a particular religious outlook. He had a whole collection of religious outlooks, and that the Roman penchant for organizing on terms of an exterior doctrine, the strength of the community, made it the perfect vehicle for spreading syncretistic blended ideas.
And so, in the first century BC, concomitant with the rise of Roman power, you find the rise of these blended religious outlooks. And the key to all of this on the intellectual side is Posidonius. But the key to it on the visionary side are the Books of Enoch. The Book of Enoch comprised, as I said, of five separate books, fragments of a previous book called The Book of Noah, of visions of individuals who assumed the pseudonym of the name Enoch. All of this becomes, from its first writings in 180 BC to its final form around 100 BC - in those 80 years - becomes the center of what will become the seed of the Western occult tradition.
For instance, just to give you one idea, one indication out of hundreds, literally, that could be given. I'll show you this one thing, and then we'll go back and continue with our examination of Enoch. Uh, John Dee, the Elizabethan magus, the astrologer of Elizabeth the First, wrote a book called The Enochian Invocations and this is a complete record of the magical manipulation of spirit forms in order to control and communicate with the power hierarchies in the spheres of the universe. This is a translation made just last year.
Often with these kinds of works, wrote in Latin or in Greek, not in English. Here's a complete translation of them. So, you can see that the reason why we're taking our time and going at it in rather a slow fashion, circumspect, as I used to say, is that we would like to appreciate the tremendous religious quality of this time and not entangle ourselves in the archetypal responses that are still natural to us, to this material. The culture that we live in unconsciously still has these structures built in. For instance, one of the figures that is constellated archetypally in the Book of Enoch is the Antichrist, Belial, and it is still a very powerful image. Another figure that is constellated is the Christ, the Son of Man. All of these figures occur for the first time in a formed way, or we should say, in an early attempt to form them. They're given a semi-shape in the Book of Enoch. It is the use of this literature in the first century BC, from 100 BC to 0 BC. It's the use of this material that produces the millennial change.
So, now we'll go to the second section of the Book of Enoch. We've gone through the whole first section and that's on tape. And we started last week on the second section, and we noted that this was a second vision. So, right away there's an admittance that this first section was the first vision of Enoch. And this is the second vision of Enoch. And Enoch is now identified as being the son of so and so, who was the son of so and so back seven generations to Adam. And that Enoch comes out of the Seth line of Adam, so that Enoch is not simply an individual existentially independent, but he is what we call the timeline being'. He is a seven-generation long being. He has the visionary capacity because he has accrued this visionary power, and it is the integrity of the intact lineage that confers upon him this visible power. This is very much the similar idea to the Vajrayana idea of Lama's reincarnating, like the current Dalai Lama as the 14th Dalai Lama. And so, he is referred to in the Vajrayana as the Great Ocean because he is not simply one lifetime individual, but already fourteen lifetimes and several before that, so that he has the experience, the wisdom, of somebody who has lived hundreds of years in an intelligent fashion.
What would you be like if you could study for 300 or 400 years and retain all that? You would be incredibly wise. What would you be if you were a gifted visionary? So, Enoch is separate. He is different from all the prophets that came before. The prophets that came before spoke the word of God like Isaiah or Jeremiah, even though there were differences between the two of them. But now Enoch not only is capable of speaking the Word of God, but he is lifted up from his earthly life and taken to heaven. He's taken to the transcendental realms to see for himself, and then allowed to come back and tell what he has seen. And because he is a seven-generation timeline being originating in Adam, he has this tremendous capacity then to envision the completeness, as it were, of history. We no longer have references to Yahweh. The references to the divine are references to the Lord of Spirits. He is now the Lord of Spirit. He is not Yahweh. He is not a tribal god. He is not an entity who is mysteriously packed together and not unfolded. He is now Lord of the Spirits. He is unfolding himself, and because he is unfolding himself, very often Enoch will talk about eternal figures being under the wings of the Lord of the Spirits.
You can think prosaically at first of the wings of Horus outstretched. But what this is, is this is a metaphor, as it were, a symbol for the unfolding of the power of God, the power of God in his eternal personage, which when it unfolds, unfolds in time and especially Enoch will now see that underneath the wings of the Lord of Spirits, when he is taken up into heaven, he sees someone very special. In fact, he stretches language, and he says, this one is the elect one, the elect one. Remember now that Enoch has come back, and he is addressing himself to a community of the elect, he says that he cannot talk to all men. They will not hear what he has to say. He can only talk to communities of the elect, those who self-elect in the dignity of themselves, to prepare themselves to appreciate the profundity of reality. They are elect, not so much because they are singled out at random, but rather they respond. Something in them cues them to respond and because of this personal response, they come together on the basis of this responsiveness. It's a very powerful idea. Easy to miss its profundity.
I have to give you another example here from the other side of it. Benjamin Franklin said that there can be no community based on power because power is only viable if it is accrued and collected, which means that fewer and fewer have more and more power. That's the nature of power. That the only basis of community is on right, because rights are the only thing that men can share. And the more rights there are, the more their sharing increases. So, the communities of men must be based on right and not might will.
This is the outside of the same idea that held for the communities of the elect, that it is only on the basis of their inner need, their inner thirst, their inner hunger for truth, that they come together at all. And when they come together, that inner need for truth is the basis of the structure of the community. And it makes, as it were, a mirror of integrity, a mirror of need, a mirror of mutual thirst for truth that is able to reflect, then the light of truth. That truth comes not as an object, but it comes as a light, and it needs to be reflected. And in the Book of Enoch, he writes, and he says of those who have based themselves on power, he says, "From that time those that possess the earth shall no longer be powerful and exalted." This is going to be a change. The powerful are going to be out of business, out of control. "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."
So that the face of God is not something that we see phenomenally but is communally perceived as a gestalt among the elect on the basis of their trust together, their need for truth together. And that community alone allows the face of God to be seen, as it were, to be precipitated out of the light. The very potent idea. Idea. It means, then, that the obverse of that process, which we will see in the Gospels, is that Jesus is able to transfigure himself into light. He is able to take the face of a human being and transfigure it back into light. And it is that light that is sent back them. So, this is the reverse of that. This is the sending of the light maturing the face of God on the community of the elect. But because of the focus of that community upon the person of God, the face of God begins to take on a persona, an individual persona. And it is this individual Godhead that Enoch first is the one to see in heaven, and he is the elect one. And when he sees him, he says, "And in that place mine eyes saw the Elect One of righteousness and of faith, And I saw his dwelling-place under the wings of the Lord of Spirits."
Now these were very powerful utterances. These images at the time were devastatingly visionary. Not to everyone, certainly not to the Roman barbers in Italy. Certainly not to the sophisticated gamblers in Alexandria, but to those individuals who were attentive to this sort of thing, who were following the visionary tone, the thread of continuity within themselves. They would read this, and this would, would suddenly open up in them a quality of understanding. And if they ran across somebody who had the same quality of understanding, there would be tremendous affinity between them all. During the first century BC, this drop-by-drop filtering process of taking sensitive, tuned-in individuals out of the societies of the time and collecting them in these communities of righteous - most of them out in the deserts - is what began this tremendous process of condensing, what we can only call here, "archetypal energy" into actual phenomenon, actual phenomenon. And this is what is happening here in Enoch.
Enoch then sees the throne, as it were. He sees the divine throne, and the throne is not so much a chair. The throne are four archangels that are held in a four-square position. That is, this is a basic primordial stability. And the four angels are looking out, away, so that the throne of God is no longer hidden, but is amplified, is expressive, it's looking outward. And there are four archangels that make this up. The first archangel is Michael, "Michael, the merciful and long-suffering: and the second, who is set over all the diseases and all the wounds of the children of men, is Raphael: and the third, who is set over all the powers, is Gabriel: and the fourth, who is set over the repentance unto hope of those who inherit eternal life, is named Phanuel." Spelled in English with an H. This word is in Aramaic and Hebrew, and is spelled with a P-H, because the transcription that they have, has been collated to the Greek. So, it's fun. You well, "And these are the four angels of the Lord of Spirits, and the four voices I heard in those days."
Notice here how in the visionary capacity that Enoch moves instantly from one sense to another. He doesn't need to be consistent. He doesn't need to make transitions. He moves from one sense to another because he is speaking from a visionary quality where all the senses have blended together. In fact, not only have all the senses blended together, but all time has blended together. This is why his vision is an eternal happening. He sees the eternalness of it, and the only way that he would be prepared for that is if he himself were able to transmute himself. And in fact, or we should say, not so much transmute himself, but be able to be transmuted. And we find, in fact, that this in fact begins to happen. And he writes about how he goes just so far, and he says, "And my face was changed; for I could no longer behold."
Now the note that the editor gives here in 1910 says, "the change of face here is not to be understood as a transfiguration, as in a sense, Isaiah 7:25." That's the scholarly footnote which is in error here. The essential Isaiah is a book called The Ascension of Isaiah, which again is translated from the Ethiopic. No copies of the Book of Enoch survived in the Mediterranean world, only in Ethiopia were they kept. Not only the Book of Enoch, but the Book of the Secrets of Enoch [2 Enoch] and many other documents like the Ascension of Isaiah.
The Ascension of Isaiah is from the early first century, about 88 AD, roughly around that time. And the reason that these were preserved in Ethiopia is that the Ethiopian Christians were not subject to the tremendous, nightmarish vicissitudes of the fall of the Roman Empire. They were not subject to the psychic catastrophes that were attendant upon the Neronian distortion of the classical world. Ethiopia was far enough away that it was preserved from this tremendous psychic holocaust, if you will. And so, the integrity of the Ethiopian Christian tradition was unbroken from earliest times right up to the present day. A very good friend of mine, Professor Wolf Leslau, who is an emeritus now of UCLA, is the great scholar of Ethiopic languages. He has about 40 dictionaries that have been published, and his largest one, in 3 volumes, was an English-Amharic dictionary. And he spent a whole lifetime, 40, 45 years going back and forth between UCLA and Ethiopia. And he said that the quality of the Ethiopian Christianity out in the, outside of the cities, in the rock cut churches and very often the churches would be in the form of a cross, cut into a plateau so that the church was the space in the rock.
You can see the tremendous significance there, that it wasn't a building, but it was a space made in the earth for the receptivity of the Word of God. He said that it reminded him of qualities of Judaism, of this tremendous attention to every detail. He himself was of Jewish descent and belief. And he said, it's the only time that he's ever felt that Christianity really was at one time Jewish and very affine, that the experience with the Ethiopian Christian communities showed him very clearly that that quality was still there.
So, in the Ascension of Isaiah, there is this phrase that is used, and the phrase is, "And I said to the angel who was with me; for the glory of my appearance was undergoing transformation as I ascended to each heaven in turn: Nothing of the vanity of that world is here named.'" And remember, now, this is why I gave you the little introduction on Posidonius, on Stoicism. The soul is like a flame that after the death of the body, the soul leaps free of the body and like a spiritual flame ascends. And how high it ascends depends on the purity of the flame. And a very pure flame will ascend all the way up to the fixed stars, to the heavens, so that when Enoch is taken up to the heavens, he must undergo these transmutations. He cannot go there in the form that he is here on earth. He would not be able to function, not so much that he wouldn't have the right air to breathe, it's that his reality would not be in tune with the horizon of existence, which is attendant there, which is manifest there. So, the note by the great scholar is an error here.
"And my face was changed; for I could no longer behold" means that he has in fact begun to not only transcend, but to transmute as he transcends, so that at each level then he is different than what he was before and different from what he will become. The only unchangeable self. The only real self is in heaven, at the highest, at the end of the spheres. So, we do not know who we are really, until we finally make it to heaven, that who we are here is largely conditioned by the earth. That who we are, when we get to the realm of the various other spheres, the various other planetary aspects will be different from what we are here. But notice that all of them are changeable except the final one, the final phase, the final quality which is not visible to us. We only experience that those higher realms, as light, as pure light, as having no form, that is no form which can be objectively seen. This is why the mind must be brought into play, because only the mind then can compute, as it were, geometrically visionary, and understand somewhat of the divine form of the real self in heaven.
This is the beginning of a tremendous complication, as you can see. One of the hidden things in here, as I said before, and we have to take it easy on this, is that this is the basis of all Western occult magic, the manipulation of those spheres, of those levels. While one still preserves one's earthly body, one's earthly desires, one's earthly outlook is the very essence of what would be called evil. And that figure who I have to use a neuter here. It's not a he' or a she'. It's an it' that figure which embodies archetypally that characteristic, preserving the earthly body, trying to force it into heavenly realms, is the anti-Christ, and its name is Belial - B-E-L-I-A-L. You run across Belial in Revelations. And remember what we said, I think three weeks ago, that there were 200 angels called watchers that were sent to help man, and they descended on Mount Hebron. And those angels fell in love with women. They said, the daughters of men are comely. Let us take them to wife, let us have children with them. And the children of human females and angelic males produce giants. Not so much tall people, but people of great capacity, who, in their egotism, started to take over everything, so that eventually they ended up fighting each other. And when the giants died, because they were not fully mortal, because they were partially immortal, their souls did not fully. Will they die? And their bodies did not fully die. But because they were impure, they couldn't ascend into any other sphere, so they had to stay on the earth. So, they were like the source of evil spirits, the dead ghosts of these half angels, half men then began to pollute the earth.
And this is the kind of demonology and angelology that is all behind the writings at this time. So that one was caught in a real dilemma. The world had become extraordinarily complicated because on the demonic side and on the angelic side, there were powers that were beyond the control of a person. A person could no longer remain naive. You were in dire jeopardy if you were naive, but at the same time you had to remain pure because maintaining your purity was the only guide to safety. So, you have a peculiar set of conditions, almost a polarity. You may not be naive in anything, and you must remain pure in everything, which meant that eventually people caught up into this intensity.
This polarity took themselves out of regular society and formed ascetic communities. They performed the task of helping each other remain pure, and at the same time they studied together so that they would not be naive. And it began to produce, of course, a tremendous intensification of not only intelligence but visionary qualities. I don't mean to say that there are mutations, but it's just through long practice. They became very good at differentiating qualities and envisioning structures, and as they attenuated their capacities, when they would have dreams, so they would have visions, they would be tremendously convoluted and labyrinthine. And the Book of Enoch are the primal records of those kinds of visions.
So, here then, in the Book of Enoch, comes a whole list of astronomical secrets that are seen. And the basic quality that the Book of Enoch brings out is that the planets become trustworthy because they do not change their orbits. The sun will not leave its orbit. The moon will not leave its orbit. The relationship of the sun and the moon, in terms of the stability of their orbits, can be trusted in the same for all the planets. And so, you can see the tremendous preparation here for trusting to a computational method of finding out true relationships. The Pythagorean urge for numerical relationships becomes completely exploded and amplified by this new field of computational possibility. If we could have figured out what the relationships in music are and made good use of them, what can't we find out? If we figure out the relationships between all the spheres, which all must also remain constant so that astrology becomes a completely different entity from what it was to simplify it. It was the national religion of Chaldea, the personal science of a few priests in Babylon, and by this time it becomes the provenance of hundreds of thousands of speculating individuals across the Roman Empire. You could see what kind of change there is as a sea change. And this happens respectively, in every endeavor, which has a religious tone to it at this time.
Also, in the Book of Enoch, for the first time, we have the identification that there might be a feminine evil. We have identified that there is a feminine good called wisdom - sophia - and the Book of Enoch says, "Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men, And found no dwelling-place: [Wisdom returned to her place,] And took her seat among the angels." So, she went back. Wisdom went back. She couldn't find any dwelling place among men, "And unrighteousness went forth from her chambers: Whom she sought not she found, and dwelt with them, as rain in a desert, and dew on a thirsty land."
So that unrighteousness begins to constellate itself as a person, and it will become constellated mostly as a male. The Antichrist becomes a man, it becomes a bestial man. It's unfortunate because we have a connotation with bestial of stupid, but the Antichrist is extraordinarily clever. This is the very source of his evil because he is able to lead people astray by tremendously impressive shows of power, miraculously seeming powers, and also tremendous spiels of great complication. This is what makes the Antichrist so lethal. But here in Enoch, we have one of the rare times when femininity begins to constellate itself in a negative fashion. This almost never happens. But here we have it.
The second parable, and the second section is about the new heaven and the new earth. And this is the first time that these are talking, talked about in a broad way. "And this is the Second Parable concerning those who deny the name of the dwelling of the holy ones and the Lord of Spirits, And into the heaven they shall not ascend, And on the earth they shall not come: Such shall be the lot of the sinners who have denied the name of the Lord of Spirits."
You see what the denial is here? The denial of the name of the word is the name. Are we going too fast? Sorry to pile all this on you, but this is the nature of the document. The name changes. As you go up in the spheres the name changes. Your name here is not your real name. Your name at such and such a level is not your real name. Only when you reach your heavenly eternal self, the name that you have there, that is your real name, that is the formative name for you. If that name could be known, then that is your essential nature. You see, the heavenly language creates as it utters earthly language, just as descriptive. But heavenly language is creative when something is said that manifests. This is a tremendous idea. For instance, when this archetypal concern becomes integrated and becomes interiorized in human beings, the idea that heaven might be silent becomes a terrifying experience.
In the, towards the end of the 17th century, where all these ideas were being shattered by Newton and Descartes and Leibniz and so forth, by science and mathematics, Pascal wrote the famous phrase in French, translated means silent eternity' [or, eternal silence]. And those "infinite spaces terrifies me," because the whole notion, then, is that the that heaven is not silent. In fact, it is full of the divine speech of the angels and of the Lord of Hosts, who in their talking create the universe. And if they were silent, this would be not a holy place in the most emphatic way.
So, he writes, or they wrote here, "Who have denied the name of the Lord of Spirits, Who are thus preserved for the day of suffering and tribulation. On that day, Mine Elect One shall sit on the throne of glory, And shall try their works, And their places of rest shall be innumerable. And their souls shall grow strong within them when they see Mine elect ones, And those who have called upon My glorious name: Then will I cause Mine Elect One to dwell among them. And I will transform the heaven and make it an eternal blessing and light, And I will transform the earth and make it a blessing, And I will cause Mine elect ones to dwell upon it: But the sinners and evil-doers shall not set foot thereon."
Notice here that the implication is very, very clear and very forthright. As the pure flame souls are able to ascend into heaven, and as Enoch now has been taken up before death, and transformed, so that he may ascend to the highest heavens and see for himself, he is also able to come back. He's able to come back through those spheres back to earth. The Elect One is going to bring heavenly capacity back on that pioneered route. And just as Enoch's vision has pioneered that route for the Elect One to come, the Elect One pioneers that for the whole force of the Lord of Spirits to come. And when he comes, it will transform the earth. The earth will no longer be what it is. It will be a light blessing be transformed into light. The sinners, the unrighteous will have no place to be because they can't be in a realm of light. They don't exist there. This is the implication that is given, this is the beginning of a tremendous cosmological sense of an apocalyptic watershed running through this. Their ideas of vengeance and balance. I have to say this to you that a lot of the, a lot of the visionary capacities that are brought out here are heavily magnetized and polarized themselves.
The reason for this being, just to break the spell of this for you, is that this was also in terms of a whole cultural development, going back to about 3000 BC. This was the culmination, the culmination from the time of Sargon in the time of the Gilgamesh epics and so forth. So, this is a culmination. This is why it's so powerful. This condenses several thousand years of imagery and insight into just a few pithy phrases. And this is why it is so tremendous, because of that quality, this writing here, this visionary capacity, which is truthful in terms of itself, is what can I use? This term is hypo-status-sized in a frozen form, subject to polarities. It's not a living dynamic. It's a scale model rather than a real thing, but the scale model is electrified, so it seems very, very earth shaking, visible, very luminous. But it is, after all, a scale model. So don't be, don't be overpowered by this. This is why I say at the beginning and for several weeks that these are tremendous, tremendously powerful images. And they actually constellate the collective unconscious in ourselves today. These images actually constellate that. So, one has to be very, very cautious. It's not cautious like trying to avoid slipping on ice. It's cautious in the sense of being circumspect, of recognizing and giving due and paying attention to the fact that these are dynamics which have us rather than us have them.
But if we're conscious about it and circumspect we swim in this ocean rather than drowned here. Then comes the vision of the Son of Man. And this is a tremendously powerful section of the Book of Enoch. And he says that there's going to be a final day when the earth is completely judged, and everything is changed, and "for the sinners there is judgment impending [with Me], So that I shall destroy them from the face of the earth."
Notice the firm face again. Why? Because the earth will be a light community reflecting the face of God, and there is no place for the unrighteous in that gestalt in the face of God, which will then be the face of the earth. "And there I saw One who had a head of days, And His head was white like wool, And with Him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man." The term for this figure is called traditionally the Anthropos - Anthropos.
Remember about a month and a half ago when we talked about the vision of the Book of Daniel, and when the three friends of Daniel were put into the furnace there was a fourth figure in that furnace whose eyes were red and whose hair was wool, white wool, and whose skin was a dark, tarnished, bronze looking quality. That was the first appearance of this eternal figure. So now it occurs here again in the Book of Enoch. He's not called old, but he is said to have a head of days, and his head was like white, like wool, so that his hair is very curly and out and is all white. It's like that. This, incidentally, is a perfect figure of an Ethiopian sage, and with him was another being whose countenance had the appearance of a man, and his face was full of graciousness, like one of the holy angels.
"And I asked the angel who went with me and who showed me all the hidden things, concerning that Son of Man, who he was, and whence he was, and why he went with the head of days? And he answered and said unto me: This is the Son of Man, who hath righteousness, with whom dwelleth righteousness, And who revealeth all the treasures of that which is hidden, because the Lord of Spirits hath chosen him, and whose lot hath the pre-eminence before the Lord of Spirits in uprightness forever. And this Son of Man, whom thou hast seen, shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats, and the strong from their thrones, and shall loosen the reins of the strong, and break the teeth of the sinners; And he shall put down the kings from their thrones and kingdoms, because they do not extol and praise Him, Nor humbly acknowledge whence the kingdom was bestowed upon them. And he shall put down the countenance of the strong, And [shall] fill them with shame. And darkness shall be their dwelling, And worms [shall] be their bed, And they shall have no hope of rising from their beds, Because they do not extol the name of the Lord of Spirits."
Can you see how with the material that you have now, the insight that you have now, how this language scintillates not with illusions so much, not with references so much, but the very syntax of the language, the very vocabulary of the language is fraught with visionary preciseness. And so, one that one can learn to speak and see in this language very well. Well, this is exactly what they did. And remember, now, the Book of Enoch was part of Holy Scripture until it was thrown out by church councils way into the third and fourth century AD. This was a part of the material that was Holy Scripture. We'll see when we get to figures like Clement of Alexandria in the second century AD, early second century. For them, the visions of Enoch were proof positive that the New Testament material was accurate and legitimate. It was one of the proofs of the early Christian community.
So, what is being given here then, is that this, Enoch is taken very much like Dante in The Divine Comedy, and Dante's guide is Virgil, but Enoch's guide are angels. And remember now that Enoch has seven angels as guides. Why seven angels? Because he has to go through all of the seven spheres up to the fixed heavens. There is no angel to guide him at the seventh heaven. That is why God speaks to him directly. The only guide in heaven is God. There are no angels who are God in heaven. The angels are brought together, the levels are brought together, and they form the throne upon which that being "sits," that it dwells, has its stability. That being has its stability and is the only guide to heaven. But what is hidden here? What is the ace and the death that comes out slowly and slowly?
By implication, it's never said here. It is never once said in the Book of Enoch, but the implication on every page is that a human being, some man, was capable of sustaining in himself all these transmutations that tremendous journey and coming all the way back home. That man is not some paltry thing, some dispensable animal. That man is an incredible being that in the universe, man is able to transmute to take the transmuted power and survive on every level, every hierarchy, even in heaven itself, as a man.
Enoch is transformed. But he is still recognizable to himself as Enoch. He still has his personality, as we would say, and this becomes one of the great keys that separates Greek thought from the Hebrew vision, that the divine is not just simply some transcendental level, universal level. It is a realm where the personal can exist as that person, so that once a person is not just a paltry focus of social conditions, not just a happenstance of your environment. One's real self, one's real person, is a tremendously powerful spiritual focus that survives intact all the way to the transcendental light of heaven and can come back from heaven all the way back to the earth. And this becomes the overwhelming point of concern for those communities who use this material for that 100, 150 years and became increasingly in their eyes, a definite happening. Not so much a goal or a purpose, but a definite occurrence that was bound to come. It was inevitable that there should then be the descent of this being that had an appearance like unto men, this Messiah. And the Book of Enoch in fact refers in four different ways to this figure. The first way is the Christ, or the Anointed One, and this title - found repeatedly in earlier writings, but always in reference to an actual contemporary king or priests - is now for the first time applied to the ideal messianic king that is to come. King is to come.
Remember that the necessary corollary to a king is that there is a kingdom. If a king manifests, then a kingdom also manifests. There is no king without a kingdom. There's no such thing as an "alienated king." In fact, the two come together. It isn't like one before the other, but the two come together. The return of a king to health is the return of the kingdom to health. If the king is wounded, the kingdom is wounded. If the Messiah comes, the kingdom of God also comes. It happens contemporaneously, so that in Enoch, for the first time, they're speaking of a cosmic person, not a cosmic being, but a cosmic person who is the king of that divine kingdom. This is a very powerful idea. Even more than an idea, it is a tremendously cutting vision. It is a vision that is understandable by all of the hairsplitting logic of Greek thought. This image survives intact through all of the arguments that Greek thought would say, and the thing that happens instead of Greek thought explaining away this tremendously potent, visionary quality, Greek thought itself becomes structured, almost in reaction to trying to argue this away, Greek thought becomes structured as an apology for this figure, and this is what produces Christianity - Christianity.
The Greek-based religious set of doctrines and New Testament writings and so forth - almost all of it's in Greek, almost none of it is in any other language. Not in Latin. It's not an Aramaic. It's not in Hebrew and Greek, because Greek, the Greek language gets restructured by these tremendously potent archetypal images that can't be argued away. And all the structures of Greek thought fractionate out, as it were, into justifications. But because they cannot identify these central figures, Greek thought then says, this figure taking the Christ is a mystery. And so, this mystical element, which is Latin and Greek thought, comes into focus exactly at the place that the Greek mind is most lovingly prone to accept, because the mystery that can't be explained by argument, by philosophy, by language is a person, and it is the daring person that is the quintessential aspect of the Greek psyche, not the Roman psyche, but the Greek psyche. The Romans are committee makers, the Greeks are individual makers.
So, the fact that God is a daring individual strikes the Greeks is exactly right. Well, of course he is. Zeus is a paltry thing compared to this. And the Greek mind becomes Christian within about one generation. Almost anybody who spoke Greek within that generation was an overwhelmed, overcome by the beauty and exactness of the phenomenon. Or, as we would say today, psychologically, of the noumenon. You can see what a tremendous happening this was. So, the Christ or the Anointed One is one of four. Here are the other three. He's also called the Righteous One. This title, which occurs in Acts 3:14, first appears in 1 Enoch as a messianic designation, the Righteous One. Righteousness is one of the leading characteristics of the Messiah righteousness.
And remember, we talked about two weeks ago how only the community of the righteous are able to see the Righteous One. That there are qualities of human beings which are invisible to profane people. They don't see it. It's like a vicious group of people could not see the loving qualities of someone. It is only a loving community that could appreciate and see this person is a loving person. It's like that righteousness is sort of the ultimate quality of divine humanness. Righteousness - it means integrity, it means put together in such a way that it doesn't ever unravel. That's righteousness - that it can't come unraveled. Why can't it come unraveled? Because it is a unity. It doesn't have any moving parts. It's not a multiplicity, it's a unity. It never has been anything but a unity. Therefore, righteousness can be trusted to be what it is because if it were anything else, it wouldn't be at all. It has that kind of a preciseness - precise quality.
Very often in our time, there's a grave misunderstanding of religious visionaries. We are told by secular miseducation that they're wishy washy, that they're ambiguous. The truth is, is that they are exceedingly precise. They are so precise that their pinpoint accuracy falls through the normal nets of logic that people have, because we're not refined enough to understand something as precise as righteousness. It's something that one has to experience. People say, okay, so it's called the Christ or the Anointed One, or he is called the Righteous One, or he is called third, the Elect One, the Elect One.
This title likewise first appears in 1 Enoch and passes over into the New Testament. And this is where in the Gospel According to Luke, when he calls Jesus the Elect One, it comes from Enoch. You know, Luke was a doctor in Rome. And when he wrote his testament, as it were, the Gospel According to Luke, it was one of the last ones to be written. And because he hadn't been there in person, he consulted everything that he could find that was trustworthy. And eventually brought basic materials together. And for Saint Luke, the Book of Enoch was one of the unquestionable sources of truth. One of the unquestionable sources out of Enoch, the phrase the "Elect One," because it was so specifically used. Luke also used it, and you can find it in Luke 9:35 and in 23:35, the Christ, the Elect One.
And the fourth usage. The fourth designation is the Son of Man. Why all these different names? Because of different facets. Different aspects. Why are there four names? Because the throne of God has four faces going out, four archangels going out, specifically each one for a specific function. So, these four names, the names are the defining throne or the defining seat of his stability. And all four taken together, then not so much define him, but locate him in terms of reality.
All this, this, this, and this - the presence, so that the presence is seen in terms of the location of these four coordinates. These names, these are Christ. He is a Righteous One. He is the Elect One. He is son of man. You see the confusion of people saying, oh, well, we don't understand this. We don't. It's very easy to understand it. It just takes a little intelligence and a lot of commitment. So, the Son of Man, the fourth quality, as it were. The human quality - the Son of Man - this definite title is found in 1 Enoch for the first time in Jewish literature and is historically the source of the New Testament designation and contributes to it in some of its most characteristic contents. For an account of the relations between the Enoch and New Testament uses of this title, we must refer to the appendix on the Son of Man at the close of this book, and there's a huge appendix quite detailed in going into this, because this is a tremendous issue, because this is the human side of that being who has the appearance of a man who is the king, but he's not the king of any kingdom that's here now that when he comes, he manifests the kingdom of the divine.
And I think we mentioned three weeks ago that the first transfiguration of Jesus in the New Testament takes place on Mount Hebron, but he takes Peter and James and John. He takes those three. See, it's like the three from the Book of Daniel. And he takes them to Mount Hebron, the place where the angels, the fallen angels, came down and seduced the daughters of men. And Jesus picks that spot with these three disciples to transfigure himself. And he turns himself into radiance, as it is said in Mark that he became a radiance, and they were unable to see him as he was, but they just experienced him as a radiance. And they ask him, "What was the meaning of this?" And instead of replying - because he's a teacher - instead of replying to the question, he takes them down off the mountain into the village. And the other disciples are there trying to cast out evil spirits trying to heal the sick. And there was one man there who they couldn't heal. And so, they brought him before Jesus just after the Transfiguration. And so, he cast out the demonic out of this man called its name out. And the man was freed from this possession. So, the disciples then, later on, said, "Why couldn't we cast this man out?" And Jesus finally then linking up the Transfiguration and this kind of happening and the whole development before us said, "Well, you just haven't studied enough. These are very complex demons, and they require more learning." In other words, you have to know the names of them. In order to know the names of them you have to know the languages of these various spheres. And because some of these fallen angels were from the highest sphere, from heaven itself, the leader of these fallen angels, the Satan, the Antichrist, is a match. In fact, an overmatch for anybody except for the Christ. Except for the Son of Man. Except for the Elect One. Except for the Righteous One. That he is the only one that matches that fallen one. That's why he has called then the Antichrist. And if one technically were to pursue this, one would also call him the Anti-Elect, the Anti-Righteous, the Anti-Son of Man or the Son of Anti-Man. Those also should be applied you see.
Well, you can see what a tremendous complication is rising. And all of this unbelievably is happening with just a handful of people out in the deserts where the Jordan River runs into the Dead Sea, in the deserts outside of Alexandria and the deserts south of Jerusalem. There might have been 5 or 6 communities at most, with populations ranging from maybe 200 to 300 people. This was like an incredible pilot light that was being lit and burning all the time, that the power of Rome was consolidating the external power of the civilized world at that time. And these two elements come exactly into collision at a time when Alexandria and Jerusalem have their point of greatest tension. It's almost like a choreography of the elephant and the flea, the Roman elephant dancing and the flea flying, and then coming together and the elephant jumps because of being bitten by the flea. And this tremendous jump, this tremendous flinch of Roman power breaks the psychic collective nerve of the Roman people at the time of Nero. And the archetypal happening at that time was the Emperor Nero burning down to the ground the whole city of Rome. It was an unbelievable happening. And what it was, was a tremendous vomiting up of royal authority in terms of the material world. And Nero becomes associated with the Antichrist. And Christian speculation at that time begins to separate itself from Jewish speculation.
Christianity is a Jewish phenomenon up until about the 60s AD, and from then on one can speak of a Jewish community and a Christian community. They become quite separate. One of the responses to Nero will be the rabbinic tradition, the Sanhedrin coming together and saying, we've got to go back to the Torah. We've got to go back to Moses. All these other things have to be thrown out. This is what got us into trouble. And so, you find Judaism sealing itself off from any further manipulations, as they would say, and you find the Christian communities increasingly thinking to themselves some change has now happened. It isn't going to happen, has already happened. Let us try and understand what this is.
Well, we have to continue with this next week. We've run out of time. Thanks again for staying with an overload situation. But that's the way it is.
END OF RECORDING