Madame Blavatsky on the Book of Enoch

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 20 pages

Twenty pages in two parts, drawn from the second volume of the Secret Doctrine. Its subject is the figure it calls mysterious and cosmopolitan — Enoch, variously Enos, Hanoch, and Enoichion to the Greeks — held to be the first Son of Man and symbolically the first sub-race of the Fifth Root Race. The reason he matters to the argument is stated at once: it is from his book that the early Christian writers took their first notions of the Fallen Angels.

The most useful passage is the one on terminology, and it is a good example of the method the whole library uses. The Book of Enoch is declared apocryphal — but what, she asks, is an apocryphon? The etymology gives the answer: from krypto, to hide, so that the word means simply a secret book, one kept in the temple libraries under the guardianship of the hierophants and never meant for the profane. The Enoichion, the Book of the Seer, was preserved for ages in the city of letters, Kiryath-Sepher. She then separates Enoch from Thoth of Memphis, the Greek Hermes and the Latin Mercury as individuals, while grouping them professionally in one category of initiators and recorders — the Edris of the Qur'an, the Thoth of Egypt, the Enoch of the Jews.

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