Book of Enoch (Part 6)
Presented on: Tuesday, March 26, 1985
Presented by: Roger Weir
Ancient Rome: Rome, Essenes, Alexandria, and the Book of Enoch
Presentation 15 of 54
Book of Enoch (Part 6)
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, March 26, 1985
Transcript:
Just to catch you up. I know that you're all wound up in Los Angeles. All wound up in 1985. But these lectures are meant to be of service and to be of help. Not so much unravel Los Angeles and unravel 1985 as to depolarize it. The activity that we're engaged in here is a very intelligent application of insight. If we try to arrange all of the psychic imagery that bombards us by now, we will be forever just fending off that which we don't like and collecting that which we like. And this is an endless limbo. We'll never live long enough to even accomplish getting our head above water with that kind of treadmill action. We live in a time when history has land slid into ourselves. Its frayed ends have electrocuted us in many ways. And so, we're taking the tack here. We're taking the time out to take the tack here to depolarize some of these powerfully magnetic images that have kept us enthralled. Maybe not so much consciously.
Those of you who have made it here without any promotion, without any help, usually are consciously all right. But it's what we call today unconsciously. It's what we call today, culturally. That our sense of problem seems unending because seemingly there isn't very much that one individual or an individual or any group of individuals can do. And it's true, as long as the problem is formulated as trying to arrange those images of which there are infinite hierarchies, indefinite patterns and cycles. So, we're going to change the tack. We're not going to play footsie with the problem. We're going to turn around and walk away from the problem as such, because by depolarizing it, by our individual action of refusing to feed energy into these tensions, that whole phantasmagoria collapses. Not into nothingness, not into confusion. But just as the poles converge and come back to a sense of unity, all of this imagery finds its natural place, natural form, and it takes the shape of a history, and that history plays itself out in terms of a scintillating horizon of intelligence evolving itself.
So then instead of trying to handcuff all the ghostly images that haunt us, instead of running on that conveyor belt, we're seeking to get off the whole treadmill. We're not going to run for anybody because when we depolarize the situation, what occurs very forcefully is an inner, abiding sense of presence, of unity. The earth is not flat. You're not going to fall off the edge of it. The inner levels of the psyche are not dangerous. They're not going to gobble you up. There's no big stick in heaven. I'm going to cudgel you because you were wrong, all of these threatening possibilities haunt us because at one time they were psychically real, to the point that they were constellated into forms, and those forms structured out and portioned out, are civilizations externally. And our minds to such an extent that the so-called unconscious today operates very effectively and smoothly, without ever consulting the new situation, the individual us, and so we need to go back patiently and review several of these historical echelons where all of this comes together. Where the power is fed into the forms, and they become electrified and capable of shocking us so that we dance to the tune of images that are actually archaic.
Now, the problem is very complex for us because we are children of a very peculiar civilization. Very, very peculiar. All of us that are here are very close in our relatedness to each other. We're investigating this year, this whole year, Ancient Alexandria as a convenient locus, a place on the map, but also a place in time - roughly from 300 BC to 300 AD - and within that time duration at that place, with all its attendant resonant traditions coming into it, was brought together into the grasp of the mind, into the grasp of the psyche, a powerful integration, a braiding together of many traditions. But it happened in a sequence. It's just like an RNA message unit sequence that can be understood, can be delineated, and portioned out.
So, we come to Alexandria with all of this attentiveness. We wish to understand as best we can. And I am trying to be as conscientious a guide, if I may use that term, of pointing out not only the salient sites and documents and people and events, but I am trying by my gesturing, feeling tones, to indicate to you both the solemnity of the task and the delightfulness of doing it right. There is a freedom that occurs here. It is an incredible, uncanny freedom. And while it may not be so universal and complete as one would like to expect, at least it's better than remaining caged. The first problem that came up was the collision of the Greek mind with the Egyptian society. It was almost a kind of an eerie collision. Much like a Martian spaceship landing on Earth, the Greek arrival in Egypt around 320 BC was not the first time that Greeks had met there. They'd been going there off and on for almost a thousand years. After the Trojan War, Menelaus and his contingency stopped in Egypt. They were repelled by the Pharaoh of the day, who celebrated the event of having driven the Sea Peoples' back into the sea.
These were the cutthroat Greek generals and survivors with their booty, whose conquest of Troy had blinded themselves to human values and thought that they could conquer anybody that they came in touch with. This is usually why, when they returned home, they were killed by their own families because they had become murderers. Not murderers one on one, but murderers of whole cities, sackers of empire. They were no longer fit to be lived with. And only three of them survived. Menelaus, who learned from the Egyptian experience; Nestor, who was old, too old to fight anymore; and Odysseus, who made his way through. He finally understood himself too.
The Greeks had been there long since, but they had never come en masse to stay permanently. There had been a trading center called Naucratis in the Nile Delta, inland about 50 miles or so from the Mediterranean coast. But they had been limited, much like Europeans were limited in China. You may have a couple of blocks along a waterfront in a certain city, and you may have a warehouse in another city on a waterfront, and that's as far as you go. If you want to deal inland from there or anywhere else in the city from there, you must have Egyptian agents to do that for you. So, there was no real contact.
But when Alexander went to Egypt, he went with the Iliad in a big jewel box that he had snatched from the Persian emperor. And he had the same mentality that the triumphant Greeks had after the fall of Troy. He relived all those fantasies which they were by Alexander's time. But he was genius enough to energize those fantasies to the level of visions. And he had serious business in Egypt because the archaic origins of the whole Greek mind are in Africa. The ancient traditions of the Greek came from the Minoan civilization. But those came from an African origin we can today through sophisticated mythological anthropology, trace mythic images.
We can trace Athena back to Libya about 6000 BC and we know that those images came from the Sahara, from the inland parts of the Sahara. So, it's no great surprise that raised on these secret traditions, when Alexander came to Egypt, he went all the way to Siwa to find out if he was a god. And Siwa is what the English used to call God forsaken. It's 200 miles, at least, in a straight line from the coast into the Libyan desert, which is merciless. And Siwa is famous for disappearing. That is to say, the configuration of the land changes all the time by the wind. The dunes are always different, and sea was down - it's in a chasm. You can be within 20 miles of sea. I never see it. Why would he go there? Why would a Greek educated by Aristotle go into the Libyan desert in Africa to find out if he were a god. Isn't Zeus supposed to be in Olympia? Wouldn't he go to Delphi? Why is this? Why is this? Because he was reliving in his time the unconscious archetypes that came to him from the time when they were constellated for him, which was about 3000 BC.
Alexander's unconscious was not the same as our unconscious. His unconscious went back to about 3000 BC, and he had to know - and that was the place. And when he got there, they recognized it, and they confirmed to him that he was a god. He was not a Greek god. He was a new kind of Greco-Egyptian god. The oracle was the Oracle of Amun-Ra. And so, Alexander became the son of Zeus, Amun-Ra, the whole configuration. So, when the Greeks went to Egypt at the beginning of the Hellenistic times, they came with a religious vision that was charged with what we would call today archetypal material. And if you look at the map of Egypt by 200 BC, after about 130 years - I think we showed this - there are two Egypt's. The Cambridge Ancient History map shows ancient Egypt with black lines connecting the cities written in black ink. And that's the traditional Egypt that had been there for 3000 years. And superimposed on that, like another kind of webbing, like another kind of artery system, are red lines with cities in red ink and they are all Greek, but they're no longer Greek, like in Greece or in Macedonia, they are Hellenistic Greek, which means they're Greco-Egyptian, which means that they are melded together, heated up and amalgamated together under pressure, under conscious, forceful blending. This activity, this crash of the Greek individual with his daringness and his outstanding mobility into the mysterious waters of Egypt, produced this hybrid.
Now the Egyptian religion is very, very difficult to understand. It almost has never been understood since ancient times. And we're going to have to, in April and probably May, take a good long look at Egyptian religion. One of the characteristics of Egyptian religion is that the proof of the vitality of a god is that he is able to assume more forms, more amalgamated forms. The more forms he's able to assume, the more blendings there are, the more proof of the vitality of the God. So, when the Greek individual psyche came plunging into Egypt and forcing this transformation, the Egyptians on their part responded by creating thousands of new gods. And it was this Hellenistic explosion of this cross-cultural fertilization that repelled the Jews, for whom God was one. That's what the rabbi has. The cantor called the beginning of the story. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord thy God is one." And they were repelled in the most forceful, comprehensive way over this new development. They had plenty of problems with the Egyptians in the past, in the past thousand years. That had plenty of problems with the Persians, but they had never had the scale of problems religiously that they had now in Hellenistic times.
And by 200 BC, the Jewish religious mind was in eerie recoil against this ungodly outbreak and the Enochian literature written from roughly 180 BC to about 100 BC records this tremendous, cultural dream penetration through to the very basic primordial images of reality which they needed to save themselves. They were in dire jeopardy of being swallowed, of being co-opted by the Greco-Roman explosion of gods. And so, the wonderful Jewish time-honored tradition of calling for a prophet who would bring the people back to God, to the one God, came into play. The difficulty was that this Jewish insistence that God be one, had a parallel reverberation in the Greek mystery traditions, not in the old mystery traditions as in the Orphic renditions, because those were still secret, but those mystery traditions that had been transmuted by Plato in his Dialogues, and for the Platonically-educated, sophisticated Greek religious mind these gods were forms, and all forms have forms called the good, which is a transcendental intellectual form of all.
And there was a great resonance between the Jews who said, God must be one, and the esoteric Greeks who said, the form of all forms is one. When they are looking over this in around 200 to 150 BC, saw eye to eye and said, that's right, brother. And so, there was a transcendental matching of the mystical Jewish, and mystical Greek traditions that God is one, but he is transcendentally ineffable. And with that tremendous insight, with that tremendous revelation, as it were, there was a sudden prophetic outburst which the Book of Enoch records better than any other document that we have. And the central issue that comes out of the visions in the five parts of the Book of Enoch is that there is a face of God, but it cannot be seen phenomenally because God is a mysterious person, but not a phenomenal person, that his face cannot be seen individually, but only by a community, only by a refined, purified community, only by a community of the elect. And this community of the elect when they relate with each other, they do not relate on cultural terms, on human terms, so much as they relate to each other on archetypal terms, each able to join with the other so that the community as a whole becomes a mirror, a mirror-like capacity, and in the multiplicity of the community, the unity of the divine is made manifest and given a face. The face of the divine becomes the community of purified man and that becomes the prototype. That prophetic insight at the time of revelation is couched in the Book of Enoch by saying that Enoch is a pioneer. He is a man who has gone to heaven, and the angels have shown him the cosmic order, and he is coming back to earth to bring that message of the cosmic order.
And as his little pioneering trail, as a harbinger, there follows him at some undetermined time in the not so far future that representative of the Godhead that the Book of Enoch calls the Elect One, the Son of Man. He is the Son of Man, because He is for and of man, and brings the divinity, the face of the divinity into manifestation, into being because the elect community has been able to mirror the face of God in its collectivity. They focus that face into a person, and it's both Jewish and Greek at the very same time. It has a mystical African-Egyptian undercurrent to it that this capacity happens in a certain interval, which is absolutely essential. The timing of it is absolutely essential. And without knowledge of the timing, one will never see it. It will be an invisible event.
And so, after 100 BC, more and more, we find the communities of the elect who have already disciplined themselves. They know what they're doing, but they begin working on perfecting their sense of timing. They disabuse themselves of ordinary senses of time. They become like what Shelley wrote of in Prometheus Unbound. They're able to see days, weeks, months as the rags of time. It has nothing to do with manifestation, nothing to do with the cycles of reality, with the patterning of incarnation. And so, they begin to look for a messiah figure who is going to appear not so much in a time-space, but in the right time-space. And this is why it's a mystery. And he is going to come because Enoch has pioneered this path back to man from heaven. Enoch brings back man's descriptive word of heaven, but the Messiah brings the whole force of heaven with him; Enoch is a scout. And the Messiah is not so much the cavalry coming to the rescue as the harbinger of a whole new echelon of civilization coming, a whole new quality of reality that is coming.
So, the Enochian material is extremely powerful and in its time was regarded as scripture. It was not until the church councils after 300 AD that the council said, "let's not talk about this. We have got a good thing going. We can keep it coherent without all of this. All this does is keep raising problems." And that's the nature of this material, is to raise the problems up. And so, when the Roman mind, which had swallowed whole this seething amalgam of Egyptian and Greek elements and Jewish elements, and even a few little Buddhist elements. The Roman mind had swallowed it whole. But there's a process in geology - I think it's called endomorphosis - where if the magma mass is of a hotter temperature than that which surrounds it, the magma mass that is surrounded sends its own structure from its superior heat out into and changes and crystallizes the outside. And this is just what happened to the Romans. They swallowed Egypt and the Holy Land in their empire, and within about 200 years, they'd become completely crystallized by the structuring power of this interchange.
The first indication of the illness was in the times of Nero, when the whole place went mad and Rome itself was burnt to the ground. It was an act of utter madness and the next 3 or 4 emperors were just one mad man after another. They were clinically insane. They regained a little bit of equilibrium. And then within a hundred years, the whole thing was rotten to the core. You know how the Roman church came into possession of its seat in Rome. The Emperor Constantine gave Rome to the church - take it - because it wasn't good, as he would have thought cynically in his mind, for anything else anymore.
By 300 AD, you would not be able to do anything with the Roman Empire anywhere except make it Christian. This is a great mystery until one understands the tremendous power that is going on here. And at the core of this power, the Book of Enoch is extraordinarily accurate in its imagery. Enoch, as we have mentioned, is not just one man, but he is the seventh in line from Adam. He is descended through Seth. He's not only descended through Seth. But his grandfather was an extremely important person, and his grandson was an extremely important person. It always happens that way. There are always parallels.
Enoch's the grandfather of Noah. Technically, what we would call great-grandfather. So, Noah was the 10th generation. But in mystical Jewish thought, this line has a purity to it which is accumulative, so that a seventh-generation person is what used to be called a jubilee. It is a node where the genius flashes a little more brilliantly. And there is another coordination where the tenth person, or that the tenth Sephirot, as it comes out later on, seven and ten become mystical, and then seven times ten, 70, becomes the amalgam, and the power of the 70 is because it is seven times ten. It is the multiplication, the melding, the blending, of the two orders together. And this is what produces that tremendous, mystical power then of those higher orders.
We very often, in our simplistic expectation, think of transcendental levels as simply being superior to these material levels. We often don't give credence to the fact that transcendental levels convey their power in blends, and it multiplies. It doesn't just braid together and become two - it becomes exponential. And so, spiritual power is of a whole different order from material power. Not only that, but that once men, once mankind is opened to that source, he becomes extraordinarily dangerous if he is not disciplined. And the Book of Enoch says that this is exactly the problem that descended upon man. The Book of Enoch records that 200 angels were sent to help men to look over man. Never called the watchers. They, looking upon the daughters of men, said "they are comely, let us take them to wife and have children with them." And the children were half of the human realm and half of the divine realm. It was a mixing of blood and spirit which was impure in terms of the Jewish lineage, which understand that blood and spirit do not mix in the Jewish mind.
When Moses sought to disobey by not carrying out his capacity as a messenger, he was on the road with his wife Zipporah and his little baby son. And in Exodus you can read the account of it, given where the Spirit of God burst in upon them through the door and moved to kill Moses because he had transgressed, he wasn't going to carry out his mission. And it was only through the intervention of Zipporah that Moses was spared. She ran to the crib and cut the foreskin off her baby and threw it at the feet of the murderous, moving presence of God and claimed the right for protection of her husband on the basis of a blood oath that had been taken in ancient times. And this is why circumcision is practiced today. This is why the Jewish lineage is through the woman today. This is why Moses was not allowed to go into the Promised Land. He was, his life was spared, but he was not to go in and was saved only by a blood covenant established by the woman. Blood and spirit do not mix, and because of this blood oath, the Spirit of God would not kill Moses. This is why, when blood and spirit were brought together by the angels, now fallen angels, the children of those matches were, as the Book of Enoch says, giants not so much that they were tall, but they were extremely powerful.
I know that we have talked about this before, but we have to go over this several times as such a thing as circumambulating a center too hot to approach. There's such a thing as showing reverence in the right way and just going around the material several times.
The focus of that interchange where the angels came down to earth to join with the daughters of men was Mount Hebron, in northern Israel. It's now today in southern Lebanon. On one side of Hebron is the Baqa'a Valley, occupied by Syria. The southern slopes of Hebron are occupied by Israeli troops. The western slopes by Lebanese troops. In the northern slopes by the Moslem insurgents. So, it's again today, 1985, the scene of four powers competing. The children of those marriages, when they died, did not go to heaven, but stayed on the earth and they became the original evil spirits. They were not eternal, but they were extremely long-lived. In other words, they were like radioactive. They had long, half-lives. They're going to be around for a long time. Lethal. In fact, present day radioactivity is a very good metaphor for the spiritual travail that the book of, the Book of Enoch, in the Ethiopian version, gives us. And as those children grew and lived and tried to take over things and died, the accrual of all these evil spirits began to pollute the earth, as if making yet unlivable because of the radioactivity it had taken the complication of life on Earth out of the natural order and put it into the supernatural order. The Earth had become haunted by evil. It wasn't just some hard feelings because somebody committed an original sin in a Garden of Eden.
This is a whole new echelon of problems. This was a whole new dimension of evil. This was evil in the sense of contamination, that there is no longer any naturality. There is no longer any possibility for man who needs nature to be true to himself. He could not any longer be true to himself. There was no chance all of nature was polluted. All of it was radioactive, as we're saying now, metaphorically. And so, he had to flee to a new land. It was as if the earth were deluged by evil. In Noah's time, it was deluged by water, and now it was deluged by evil, and only spiritual fire could purify that contamination.
And so, the Book of Enoch says again and again that this high-level spiritual fire is going to come, and it's going to electrocute the whole ground upon which evil grows. In other words, the psychic polluting the spiritual blood, mixed pollution of the earth is going to be frazzled, and the only people who are going to survive are those who go into the ark of the new Law, because it's the ark of the new Law that's going to float, as it were, on this spiritual fire.
So, we'll see the mysteries of original baptism deal with water hearkening all the way back to the covenant with Noah, but that the second baptism is by spiritual fire, which is delivered by the Holy Ghost. And it's that that saves eternally. So, the Book of Enoch has this tremendous material in it. And you can understand, because all of this raises every basic issue again and again, that the councils threw it out. They didn't just, they didn't pick it up and throw it on the floor. They just said, "we're not going to discuss this." And it disappeared, eventually.
The Dark Ages and their initial stage were all social engineering. But unbeknownst to anybody, it became a habit that grew worse and worse and worse and lasted for many centuries. The only place that kept the Book of Enoch intact was in Ethiopia because they were not subject to the fall of the Roman Empire. Ethiopia kept its integrity, its intelligence, its religious vision intact all that while, and we talked about how the archetypal Ethiopic Christian church is not a building above the ground but is a space in the shape of a crosscut into a rock so that the presence of the Lord is in the heart of the rock, the heart of the stone. The temple of that spiritual presence is not a structure made by man, but it's a non-structure. The demiurge is everywhere, and it doesn't bother me at all.
I have many choice words from Hollywood Boulevard for him. Yes, I can imagine you'll have to take his chances with people like us. This is a peculiar quality which has almost not been appreciated even up to our own day. The African understanding of spirituality is not in what is said but in the gist of everything that is not said. And everything that is not said is the meaning ground that translates what is said into a unity. And this is an archaic Egyptian idea of spirituality, which has been kept intact right up to the present day. And when we get into Egyptian religion, we'll see. But this mysterious nothing ground, what man cannot say, that is what is real. And so, what is important in African religions is that there be an articulation of form in terms of the formless. And that by keeping track of the gist of the formlessness that is not said, one not only reads between the lines, but one understands unity, because what can be said is the world of multiplicity. What cannot be said is of divine unity, and it is that that is real. What can be said is always contingent, always provisional in terms of the real. But the Roman mind, completely magnetized by this trauma, by this travail of oceanic proportions, became diseased in its psychic content in thinking that religion must depend upon a psychic formula.
And so, the church changed from a spiritual insistence on non-present unity. To the codifying of the explicit what could be said? This is called dogma. So, God became defined in dogma rather than presented in spirit. The Book of Enoch pulls the rug out from under the whole church structure.
Now, it's very peculiar. It's very peculiar. I'm going to go into this more on Sunday when I lecture on it at PRS at 11:00 Sunday morning - but in European civilization there was another Enoch. His name was Dante. And Dante also went to the transcendental realms, also went to heaven, and also brought back a vision very much like Enoch brought back. And Dante also wrote a very wonderful treatise, On World Government, saying that the basis for world government is the unity of God and not the multiplicity of man. But he meant this mystically, very much like what we are talking about here in the Book of Enoch. And then the De Monarchia he criticizes the papacy and the structure of the church as being demonic in its essence. This is pretty hard going if you wrote something like this in 1320. But just like the Book of Enoch precipitated this whole Hellenistic explosion of religious insight, Dante precipitates the whole Hermetic Renaissance 500 years from the beginning of Enoch. Takes us up to 300 AD, 500 years after Dante. Dante takes us up to about 1820. Same kind of activity. Similar in scale, similar in intent, happens all over again.
Where does that put us? You say puts us right on the verge of a dark age. Only man can learn. He doesn't even have to accept defeat when it's bona fide. It can change the rules of the game, but it takes a consciousness to affect this. It takes a stamina. The old Rosicrucian formulation was that one must become a spiritual athlete. You have to really prepare for the long run. It's a long go. So, the Enochian material, which incidentally, we're going to finish up tonight, but there was another part of the Enochian material that was preserved only in the Old Slavonic. And this is material that comes from about 10 BC. And it wasn't even known to the historical consciousness until about 1892. It had dropped out of almost all traditions except the Russian folklore tradition, which is why Russia had such a mystical strain in it, and why, towards the end of the 19th century, the Russian mystical strain produced all these enormous figures like Blavatsky and Tolstoy and many of the others that that we would run across because this was resurfacing. Once you see structure, once you're able to see large scale structure, you can almost read time and space like a map, and one gets. You can almost predict where something should be, where an occurrence should be. And you look and you don't see anything for a while, and then you investigate, and you see that people just had not given sufficient attention.
And you look closer. And there they are. There are the people, there are the events just as predicted, so that we have a tremendous capacity by the late 20th century, spiritually to grow. Dante says, and De Monarchia was the one thing man must do. He must grow in his intelligent understanding of himself. That is what he must do that is his fiat in the Enochian material. The first time Enoch sees the Righteous One, the Elect One, the Son of Man, the Son of God, He is seen under the wings of the spirit. Well, he calls him at this rate no longer Yahweh, but he calls him Lord of the Spirits. And he says, under the wing. And the Lord of Spirits was sitting on a four-part throne. Four of the archangels were looking out. And from the confluence of their square, the back side of themselves - that was the throne of the presence of the Lord of the Spirits. And I think we gave these angels last time - Michael and Raphael and Gabriel and Phanuel, those were the four.
Interspersed with the Enochian literature are fragments from the Book of Noah that preceded the Enochian material, and this is a fragment about the first world judgment. There will be two, they say, and in those days shall punishment come from the Lord of Spirits, and he will open all the chambers of waters which are above the heavens, and of the fountains which are below the earth. And all the water shall be joined with the waters that which is above the heavens is the masculine, and the water which is beneath the earth is the feminine.
I think we have mentioned from time to time that celestial structuring often is referred to traditionally as having a holy tone. The heavens are holy, and more properly the earth is sacred, so that a man becomes holy as a woman becomes sacred. The earth can be made sacred by sacrifice. The heavens are holy. From their beginning it is necessary to sacrifice to make sacredness occur. The holy is of itself. The sacred man has to participate in to make occur. This is why man must purify the earth, says the Book of Enoch, to make it sacred, because only the sacred as a vessel can receive the Holy and the Holy One, that is the Holy One. The holy sense of unity manifests as a cosmic person, can only be received by a sacralized community. And so, this becomes the overriding vision in the Book of Enoch, that there should be a community of the saints, there should be a purified community to receive this person, and that this is extremely difficult, and this will cause a great consternation.
The Book of Enoch then goes through the whole experience of the dream vision of remembering the deluge. What happened when they go through the whole thing that the deluge took this form and this kind of history, and this is the way things were saved, because they are reading out to us a prototype, a template, as it were, for action in this new time of crisis. We have to build an ark, but instead of an ark of wood to float upon physical waters, we now have to build an ark of the spirit, an ark of the community to float upon these psychic waters. And so, it's the ark of the community that receives the attention. What are the dimensions? What are its capacities? Who's going to do this? And someone is going to have to navigate this holy ark of the community. And that is why the Son of Man, why the Elect One, is coming to navigate that ark for us. And He is going to be the product, as it were. The multiplication of Enoch times Noah - seven times ten. He is going to be like 70. He's going to be that perfect one, that perfect number, that perfect quality. And when he comes, there will be a set timing interval which will be distinctive and the Book of Enoch calls this the "Apocalypse of Weeks." Why weeks? Because weeks are a seven-day structure. They're very peculiar seven-day structure. Six of the days go to make the form and the seventh day as a free presence within the form.
There's not a day like other days. It's not that you just don't work on the Sabbath. It's not that you. It's a time to have picnics with the kids on the Sabbath. That's a complete misunderstanding of it. The Sabbath is a day which is made sacred. And the sacred is always a presence. It's the inner part of the container. The six days of the week are the container of time. The seventh day is the non-day which does occur within the six, which creates a sacred space, as it were, and it is the counting esoterically of the sacred space intervals that one can compute what time it is in the universe. And when the "Apocalypse of Weeks" runs its archetypal course, that will be the day.
And so, the Book of Enoch in the fifth section, written around 100 BC, goes into this timing, this esoteric timing for the communities of the elect to tell when it's going to happen and where. And so, they prepare themselves from 100 B.C. on, it's almost like the railroad tracks are laid and one is waiting at the station. Where are you going? To locate the station. It's going to be there. And so, the Essene communities who become the purified sect of the time, who are keeping track of this esoteric calculating, locate themselves strategically. They locate themselves outside of Jerusalem, not very far down. Jerusalem is up in the mountain and down across the wilderness of Zin, down into the valley where the Dead Sea is and the Jordan River emptying into the Dead Sea, right there at that spot at Qumran, where one of the communities was, and just outside of Jerusalem, on the main caravan routes that went inland out towards Egypt, around Bethlehem, that also had a community, and further out into Egypt, just outside of Alexandria. There was a spot in Apamea in northern Syria. There was a community so that they were strategically located at the junctures, at the nodes, as it were, where all of these traditions were coming together. Trade routes, religious traditions as civilized energies, esoteric capacities, and locating themselves at these traditions.
The Apocalypse of Weeks went through, and we have to understand here the importance of seven times seven being 49 and ten times ten being 100. And then seven times ten being 70. In order to mark a beginning of this timing, these communities of the wise, the esoteric, came together and not in the Book of Enoch, but in another document, which we'll get to probably in a month or so. They created what was called the Book of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs. A gathering of the tribes is what we called it in the late 60s. Let's bring all of the traditions together. Twelve tribes of Israel, the esoteric representatives, which were the originators. The twelve sons of Jacob.
And so, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs are the channeled visions of the unseen elect tuning in and going back to the original twelve founders of those twelve tribes and bringing their visions about the contemporary time together to mark a starting point. And that was around 100 BC, roughly 100, maybe 103 BC. And from there they counted on. And it could either be in 49 years, it could be in 70 years. It could be in 100 years. There were three nodes there. And so, in 50 BC there was great expectation. And that's when we found that the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon was written in Alexandria, because if it was going to be in 50 BC, it would be in Alexandria that's where it would be and that's why there was such tremendous struggle at that time in Alexandria. It was in 50 BC around in there that the Great Library of Alexandria was burnt. Julius Caesar came in just about 5 or 6 years before then. These were apocalyptic events. And the esoteric communities at that time in that place said, this may be it. But it wasn't. It didn't happen. And around 30 BC, when Cleopatra fell and Augustus took over the world, and the Roman Empire became the cosmic universal state, everybody said, maybe this is it. But it wasn't. And so, after 30 BC, when they realized that it wasn't going to be in Alexandria and it wasn't going to be with the Roman aegis, that it was then going to be back in the Holy Land, and it was going to be in about 25 or 30 years. And as the day approached, it became a matter of public knowledge. It was such an explosive dynamite waiting. They'd been waiting for five or six generations. By then it became a matter of public ridicule. All there waiting for the Messiah. So public and not so ridicule.
Was it that the king appointed by Mark Antony, named Herod, at a certain place, on such and such a day, had all the male children killed just to cover his bets? How did he know? Because the computation was exceedingly accurate by that time. They said, this is the year. That's the place. That's why there were wisemen on the move. Not just three, but thousands of them from all over coming to the place at the time. What is the guiding star? Not some physical star. Not some supernova. The guiding star of man's spirit. Who would learn to compute, to predict spiritual events. And so, the Book of Enoch is like a little manual of how to tune yourself up scientifically. To look at the world of spirit and understand it comprehensively and live your life in accordance with that. The problem for us, the major problem is not understanding the Jewish side. It's just because most of us don't have the training or the opportunity. It's not even so much the mystical Greek side that can be mastered, but what is always stuck in our craw and almost never understood, was the ancient Egyptian religion of the plurality of gods vitality and the mystery of God's negentropy. That his unity is in an underside to the material world, and his unity is not in the world. That if you try to understand divinity by the world, that's the very essence of profane. And so that has to school himself to look where form is, not to understand.
The continuity of nothingness is so called, and the intelligibility of that universal realm that does not occur in time or space. He calls this in Egypt eternity. And it is on that horizon of the eternal that the divine occurs, but not to us, but to himself. So, we need, starting next week for at least 3 or 4 weeks, I think, to look at ancient Egyptian religion as best we can. I am, of course, not as well versed in this area as I am with the Greek and Jewish traditions. I will do my best. I will bring the material out for you. I will be more of a reporter than a teacher, probably. You're encouraged to look at all of this for yourself. But we need now to understand the Egyptian religion somewhat, the African element here, because it's exactly the African spirituality that is a blind spot for so many people in the world today. They simply do not understand that you don't look in the same way for the focus. The focus is there, but it's there not because we put it there and that's the point that the Egyptians will make. It is there long before any of us occur.
Well, let's take a break there.
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