Enochian is an intriguing form of magic as it not only pertains to reshaping one’s reality but also to getting superhuman knowledge through the secret language of God. Stay tuned if you want to learn something more about John Dee and the books of Enoch.

Hello everyone I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel, your online resource for the academic study of magic and magic-practising religions and traditions. I know that my video over-viewing the Enochian system of magic is quite popular and so I thought I’d share some more information on the topic.

The content of this video will be drawn from a book chapter called “A Man Who Never Died, Angels Falling From The Sky” by György E. Szönyi which is part of the book “Hermes Explains”, edited by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Marco Pasi, and Peter Forshaw published by Amsterdam University Press.

But now let’s move on to the topic shall we?

Dr John Dee, Renaissance mathematician, and philosopher, now mostly remembered as the esotericist who created the Enochian system of magic is particularly fascinating in relation to magic. Dee was not seeking to merely affect and improve his reality but also to acquire superhuman knowledge and the secret language of Adam, which would grant him communication with the creator. To this purpose he began his journey through ritual communications with the angels, helped by the scryer Edward Kelly.

His role model was Enoch, a figure who, both in the Bible and in the Quran, is mentioned as having a special and close relationship with God. Another passage of the Bible suggests that Enoch had a book of prophecies which might contain great and fearful wisdom.

These were all information which Dee acknowledged, thanks to a fellow scholar called Guillaume Postel, who was also interested in esotericism and studied numerous languages including Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic. Postel had spent some time in Rome, with the Jesuit Order, where he met an Ethiopian priest who conversed with Postel about the story of Enoch as canonized in the Bible of his own church.

As Szönyi reports, Postel could not read the text itself, which did not belong to the biblical canon and it is today counted among the pseudepigrapha but it was easy for him to summarize, to the eagerly listening Dee, what he had learned from the Ethiopian. He also spoke about the book of Enoch in many of his own publications, of which, Dee became a collector and a reader. The long search for the mysterious book of Enoch was finally appeased in the late 18th century when the book finally arrived in Europe. A Scottish explorer, during his search for the source of the Nile in Africa, found two copies of the Ethiopian Bible. He then brought them to the University of Oxford where the scholar Richard Lawrence worked on the text to produce the English translation and edition of the book of Enoch.

However, the textology of the book of Enoch is rather complex and there are a few versions of the text which convey conflicting narratives. The Ethiopian aforementioned text is now referred to as One Enoch and its first 22 chapters are known as the Book Of The Watchers, which we already mentioned in a previous video on how angels came to be seen as demons. In this book, 200 rebel angels come to earth and teach humankind dangerous and occult sciences such as magic, metallurgy, warfare, and make-up. They also are said to have fallen in love with the daughters of men and from their union, the destructive giants, called Nephilim, were born. The flood was then sent by God as a result of this rebellion because, you know, that’s what anybody would do when they get angry at their employees, right?

Differently from Genesis, which does not mention Enoch in relation to this episode, in One Enoch, he is said to have spoken to God on behalf of the angels to basically make peace between them, which was, unfortunately, denied by God. During this first journey to heaven, Enoch was warned about the coming deluge. While on his second journey to heaven, the secrets of nature and of the cosmos were bestowed upon him.

Since Laurence’s edition of One Enoch, scholars have discovered that most of the stories comprised in the book, were originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic in the second temple period with large fragments surviving among the dead sea scrolls. During the first or the second century of the common era, the book of Enoch was translated into Greek and the story of the watchers entered the Chronographia by the Byzantine George Syncellus. From this, another translation was made into the Ge’ez, the language of the Christian church of Ethiopia, where the book was accepted as part of the Old Testament and is nowadays known as One Enoch. Thus, the Greek translation was revealed to be essential as a stepping stone for further historical developments and reception of the text. The book was in fact then translated into old church Slavonic and incorporated among the sacred texts of the Orthodox Christian Church as Two Enoch. Later, between the fourth and the sixth century of the common era, another book in Hebrew was created. As explained, by Gershom Scholem, we see here a strong influence of the early Merkabah Mystic Tradition. The visions of Enoch, here become accounts given by Rabbi Ishmael who, in a state of trance, visits the heavenly palaces. The Patriarch Enoch sees here a metamorphosis into the angel Metatron when his own flesh was transformed into fiery torches. This specific book became later known as Three Enoch.

Now I think it might be noteworthy to highlight the main differences between these three books of Enoch. In the Slavonic version, Two Enoch, we find Metatron as the new transfigured version of Enoch. While the Hebrew, Three Enoch, further elaborates on Metatron and frames Enoch’s angelic translation by the dream narrative of Rabbi Ishmael. As Szönyi keeps on explaining, none of these three texts was widely known during the European middle ages and the early modern period.

After long debates among the Church Fathers, One Enoch was not accepted as canonical by the Catholic Church and was then forgotten for a long time. Two Enoch was only used within the Orthodox Slavic community, while Three Enoch was mainly known among Hebrew mystics. Yet the figure of Enoch kept on living in people’s imagination as the perfect example and forerunner of the deification of man, especially after he and Elijah were identified as the witnesses who measure the temple in Saint John’s Revelation.

In conclusion, the vision of Enoch as the one with a privileged access to the divine, almost a demiurge, living in between heaven and earth, carrying the secret understanding of magic and of god-like knowledge, preceded and survived the actual three books which cover his story. John Dee did not have access to these texts and yet the sheer legends of a man yearning to achieve godly knowledge on earth were inspiring enough for Dee to start his journey to creating a new form of magic by conversing with angels.

This is it for today’s video. Before wrapping up the video please allow me to publicly welcome to the inner symposium my new patrons, as well as the new members who joined my channel, and my gratitude also goes to those who kindly donated via PayPal. You guys are the ones who keep the symposium going and I deeply thank you for that. So if you like this video, smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, and activate the notification bell – so that you will be always notified as soon as I upload a new video and you will be the first one to watch it and comment on it and hopefully like it. And as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.

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REFERENCES

Asprem, E. 2012. Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture. New York: State University of New York Press.

Laurence, R. (2018) The Book of Enoch the Prophet, Franklin Classics.

Szönyi, G. E. (2019) ‘A man who never died, angels falling from the sky… What is that Enoch stuff all about?’, in Hanegraaff, W. J., Pasi, M., and Forshaw, P. (eds), Hermes Explains, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, pp. 232–242.

Szonyi, G. E. 2004. John Dee’s Occultism: Magical Exaltation Through Powerful Signs. New York: State University of New York Press.

First uploaded 22 Mar 2021