by Colin Wilson
Before leaving with these two strange visitors, Enoch had instructed his sons not to try to find him, which suggests that his destination was on earth, not in heaven. He was transported to a place full of ‘light without any darkness’ which was covered in ‘snow and ice’ that was ‘at the ends of the earth’.
Enoch lived centuries before the flood, so this is a rare description of the home of the gods before it was destroyed. He was told that he’d reached ‘heaven’. Christian and Barbara O’Brien, who have studied this material in detail, are inclined to translate ‘heaven’ as ‘highlands’.
We don’t have to travel far to recognise a very real place here on our planet that fits this description; a high place of endless days and polar conditions which lies at the end of the earth. Antarctica is the highest continent on the planet, having an average altitude more than twice that of the second-highest (Asia). Was the ‘heaven’ that the two strangers showed Enoch another name for Atlantis? Another name for Antarctica?
All of these fascinating details are found within the Book of Enoch. Revealed within its colourful pages are the methods of ancient scientists determined to measure and survey their planet. In doing so they left a record of their findings for us in the location of sacred sites around the globe.
This important book would have been lost for ever had it not been for the wanderings of one of the most eccentric characters of the eighteenth century, a Scotsman named James Bruce, who was born in 1730 and spent twelve years of his life in a mysterious quest in the unknown heart of Africa. One of the most interesting things he brought back was a forgotten book called the Book of Enoch, regarded as so sinister and blasphemous that a Christian could endanger his soul just by reading it.
Bruce was a Scottish aristocrat, descended from a line of kings that included Robert the Bruce, who defeated the English at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. James Bruce would have made a formidable opponent in battle, being 6 feet, 4 inches tall and powerfully built, with red hair and a loud voice. He was also an egoist of monstrous proportions, so it becomes possible to see why he inspired more than his due share of dislike and died a thoroughly embittered man.
As a schoolboy at Harrow, Bruce wanted to be a clergyman; his father wanted him to become a lawyer. Both were disappointed. Bruce’s attempt to study law so bored him that he had a nervous breakdown, and his father let him go his own way. His ambition was to travel to distant places and explore the unknown. He applied for permission to become a trader in India, then his attention was diverted by falling in love. Unfortunately, the girl — the orphaned daughter of a wealthy wine merchant, with vineyards in Spain and Portugal — was consumptive. Bruce and his new wife were on their way to Provence when she suddenly fell ill in Paris and died within days. Sick with grief, Bruce had her buried at midnight then rode through a storm to Boulogne, where he collapsed.
Back in Scotland he flung himself into the study of languages and history — he was particularly fascinated by the Freemasons and the Knights Templar — and went off on a trip to visit Templar sites in Europe. He had to return when his father died. At twenty-eight, Bruce had become the heir to the estates.
The Age of Steam was about to arrive, and the Industrial Revolution had already started. Bruce, of course, had no interest in such matters — his mind was in the Middle Ages, dreaming of knights and crusaders — but fortunately for him coal was discovered on his land at Kinnaird, and he leased it to a mining company, who paid him a generous royalty. Now he was able to indulge his passion for faraway places. He went to Spain and studied Arabic manuscripts in the Escurial, travelled down the Rhine by boat and studied antiquities in Italy.
Bruce was a Freemason, of the Canongate Lodge of Kilwinning. Through the offices of another Freemason, Lord Halifax, he was offered the post of consul at Algiers, which appealed strongly to his romanticism and promised spare time for archaeology. It proved harder work than he expected. The Bey of Algiers was capricious, difficult and occasionally violent, and on one occasion had a court official strangled in the consul’s presence. Bruce needed all his stubbornness and determination to avoid being tied up in a sack and thrown into the Mediterranean. After two years it was a relief to resign his post.
Then, at the age of thirty-five, he prepared to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. His precise goal is still not entirely known. In The Blue Nile (1962),3 Alan Moorehead has no doubt that he was obsessed by finding the source of the Nile, which would certainly have brought him worldwide celebrity, since it was at that time still undiscovered. But he is also known to have been fascinated by the black Jews of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), the Falashas, perhaps because their presence suggested that the Ark of the Covenant might have been brought there by them from Jerusalem. As a man with a deep interest in scripture, James Bruce certainly wanted to find out more about the peculiar mystery of the Book of Enoch. The apocryphal book of the Old Testament had been held in veneration by early Christian theologians such as Origen and Clement of Alexandria, then it had disappeared. Rumour suggested that it contained scandalous information about angels and their sexual behaviour, perhaps explaining why the early Church decided to suppress it (if indeed that was the case).
Encountering many perils and adventures – such as shipwreck and brigands – Bruce made his way to Cairo, and from there travelled up the Nile. His aim was to go to Abyssinia, a country virtually unknown to Europeans – only two Catholic missionaries were known to have visited there, although Bruce had a low regard for Catholics, being fiercely Protestant.
The first part of his journey was pleasant enough – up the Nile by boat as far as Aswan. It was not the first cataract that deterred him there, but a local war. He decided to continue by the Red Sea. In a few weeks, he was facing unknown territory. Eventually, Bruce and his party found their way to the town of Gondar, which was then the capital of Abyssinia and consisted of about 10,000 clay huts with conical roofs, overlooked by the king’s palace, with its view down across the vast inland sea, Lake Tana.
The name Abyssinia means ‘confusion’, and Bruce found the country in turmoil – apparently its usual state – with the king and his vizier away on a punitive expedition. It was soon clear that an exceptionally high level of violence was regarded as quite normal. Soldiers rode around with the testicles of their enemies dangling on their lances. Their favourite meal was steak, which they ate raw, simply slicing it off the buttock of a living cow, after which the raw patch was covered in clay and the animal turned loose again. When Bruce first met the king, Tecla Haimanout, and his vizier, Ras Michael, on their return they were amusing themselves by putting out the eyes of a dozen captives.
Bruce was lucky; he might well have been castrated or beheaded. But Ras Michael took a liking to him, and gave him command of a troop of the King’s Horse. Bruce, never averse to showing off, dressed up in chainmail, stuck pistols in his wide cummerbund and impressed his hosts with his ability to shoot mountain kites while galloping on a black charger.
In due course, Bruce managed to do a little exploring. He was taken to a mountain top that was the source of a river called the Little Abbai, which his guide assured him was the source of the Nile. Bruce was suitably impressed, but his guide was quite wrong – the source of the White Nile is 1,000 miles further south in Lake Victoria, while the source of the tributary Blue Nile is actually in Lake Tana, several miles to the north of the mountain where they stood. Bruce was an enthusiast rather than a conscientious geographer. But in the Gondar monastery, on the shores of Lake Tana, he came upon a discovery that made up for his misidentification of the source of the Nile.
Abyssinia had been a Christian country since AD 320, but since it was so far from the great northern centres of Christianity it had maintained its own tradition. One of the most interesting parts of that tradition is contained in an epic called the Kebra Nagast, or the Book of the Glory of Kings. When Bruce went to Gondar, no one in Europe had ever heard of the epic. Its narrative tells how the Ark of the Covenant was brought to E
thiopia from Jerusalem in the ninth century BC. It seemed that the Queen of Sheba had her capital in Abyssinia. She was a beautiful young virgin, who had been on the throne for six years when she heard about Solomon and his wisdom and made the trip to Jerusalem to meet him. Both were impressed, and on the night before she left Jerusalem, he begged her to spend the night with him. She agreed on condition that she should retain her virginity. Solomon gave his word, with the unusual condition that it depended upon her taking nothing from him. Since she had no intention of taking anything, she agreed.
In the middle of the night, the queen got out of bed to drink from a bowl of water. Solomon woke up and pointed out that she had broken her promise. ‘But it’s only water,’ she protested. ‘What is more precious than water?’ asked Solomon. And since the queen had to agree with him, she yielded her virginity.
Nine months later, back in Abyssinia, she bore a son. After twenty years, the young man returned to Jerusalem to see his father. Solomon became so fond of him that he anointed him king, and when the youth departed for Abyssinia the eldest sons of all Solomon’s courtiers went as his escort. They were dismayed and depressed at the thought of leaving behind the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred symbol of the Hebrews, which contained the Tables of the Law brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses, so the son of the high priest suggested that they take the Ark with them. This was accomplished, with the aid of the Angel of the Lord, who declared that the Ark itself had decided it was time to leave Jerusalem.
And that, according to the Kebra Nagast, was how the Ark came to Abyssinia.
When Bruce read this account he must have been immensely excited. It seemed to show that not only was the Abyssinian Church the oldest in the world, but that it could trace its roots back to King Solomon. And perhaps – who knows? – this might also have been true of the Freemasons. As to the Falashas, the black Jews of Abyssinia, perhaps they traced their descent from the courtiers who had accompanied the young king to Abyssinia. Had Bruce, in fact, heard of the Kebra Nagast in his Arabic researches – perhaps in the Escurial – and is it possible that his motive in coming to Abyssinia was not to find the source of the Nile, but to find the Ark of the Covenant?
Bruce’s next discovery was, if anything, even more exciting. In this same monastery, he was also allowed to read a copy of the long-lost Book of Enoch. It had aroused so much curiosity that Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer Dr John Dee had tried to obtain a copy by supernatural means. He and his magician assistant Edward Kelley had taken part in seances in which ‘angels’ (or spirits) had dictated the Book of Enoch – or at least, a Book of Enoch – to Kelley. (Whether the text was the same one discovered by Bruce will never be known, since it has vanished.)
A glance at this strange manuscript must have told Bruce why early Christian scholars had regarded it as so important – it claimed to be a vital missing portion of the history of the world. Enoch was the grandson of Adam and the son of Cain, and was also, in turn, the father of Methuselah, who was in turn the grandfather of Noah. Bruce may have considered it merely as an interesting extension of the Biblical canon; he was a highly educated Scot, living in the age of Voltaire and Gibbon, who may have regarded the contents of the Book of Enoch as so much quaint and absurd myth. On the other hand, as a Freemason it is equally possible that he read Enoch with intense personal interest because of the Masons’ ancient tradition that Enoch had foreseen the destruction of the world by the great flood.
This was in 1770, a year after he had arrived in Abyssinia. When he returned from Gondar, a civil war was taking place. Bruce decided to join in, since he was an army commander, but it ended in the defeat and flight of Ras Michael and the slaughter of his followers.
Bruce survived and was able to leave the country he had come to detest. It was a long and exhausting trip back to civilisation – about eighteen months – and he spent some time recuperating in Italy and Paris before finally returning to London in June 1774.
This exotic story had no happy ending. We might expect that Bruce’s travels would have brought him fame, for the eighteenth century dearly loved travellers’ tales – James Boswell had become a celebrity on the strength of visiting Corsica, while an impostor named George Psalmanazar who claimed to be a native of Formosa (now Taiwan) acquired fame and became a close friend of Dr Johnson. Bruce’s reception was more like that of Marco Polo on his return from China; those who had read Marco’s travels took them for fiction. James Bruce suffered a similar reception when he told his stories of men eating steaks off live cattle and chopping off parts of their fellow human beings with the same ferocity. People listened politely, hiding a smile of disbelief, which may have been partly because of the manner in which Bruce told the story, for he was unable to conceal his high opinion of himself.
He went to London, found a needy clergyman called Latrobe, and spent a year dictating his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile. He promised to pay his amanuensis when the five volumes were finished, although it is typical of his mean and ungenerous nature that he delayed payment then tried to fob Latrobe off with five guineas. It is almost satisfying to record that the book was received with malice and derision. He died five years later after tripping on the stairs and falling on his head.
It has to be admitted that, for all his character defects, Bruce produced one of the great travel books. He had also performed another important service to literature by bringing back the Book of Enoch – no fewer than three copies, in fact, one of which he presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and another to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (he kept the third himself, next to the Book of Job, where he claimed it belonged). Once again, his timing was poor. In the midst of the Age of Enlightenment, interest in religion was at a low ebb and churches were half empty. Nobody was interested in an obscure apocryphal book of the Bible, and it remained untranslated.
The Book of Enoch finally appeared in English in 1821, more than a quarter of a century after Bruce’s death, translated by a Hebrew scholar named Richard Laurence. At least the world was now ready for it – the age of Romanticism had arrived, with its interest in ghosts, demons and the supernatural. This story of libidinous fallen angels thrilled a wide audience.
We might say that the Book of Enoch takes its origin from the passage in Genesis 6 that tells how the sons of God – angels – took note of the fact that the daughters of men were fair and decided to take them as wives. And then ‘there were giants in the earth in those days… when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, and the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown’.
The Book of Enoch elaborates this story. It seems that in the days of Jared, Enoch’s father, 200 rebel ‘angels’, who are called the Watchers, descended on the top of Mount Hermon, over 9,000 feet high, and prepared to go down to the plains with the intention of having sexual intercourse with mortal women.
According to Enoch, it would seem that the rebel Watchers took mortal women into their beds, and their mistresses gave birth to ‘giants’ who were virtually ungovernable. They began to ‘devour’ human beings and developed a taste for blood. The simplest way to make sense of this passage is to assume that the offspring of the Watchers became violent and warlike, rather like the Abyssinians of Bruce’s day, whose endless brutality caused him to flee the country. It seems that the rebel angels also taught men the art of making weapons by smelting metal, and that they encouraged sexual licence by teaching women how to wear ornaments and use make-up. They also instructed them in sorcery and ritual magic. The picture that emerges is that of an early tribal civilisation, where the women had so far been accustomed to bearing children and doing the hard work. The Watchers taught them that life could be more enjoyable if they treated sex as a means of pleasure. They also taught them how to abort any unwanted results of their promiscuity.
Modern readers might view this without disapproval, feeling that the women of that time probably needed encouragement towards liberation, which was,
in fact, the view taken by Romantics such as Lord Byron and his friend Thomas Moore. Byron’s play Heaven and Earth appeared in the same year as the translation of the Book of Enoch, and is based on the passage in Genesis about the sons of God taking the daughters of men for wives. It ends with a spectacular evocation of the flood, and the notes mention that ‘the Book of Enoch, preserved by the Ethiopians, is said by them to be anterior to the flood’. In 1823, Moore published a poem, ‘The Loves of the Angels’, based on the same subject.
The rebel Watchers were not simply instructors in debauchery; one taught astronomy, another astrology, another knowledge of the clouds, another how to counter magic spells, and others knowledge of the sun, moon and earth. Despite their intentions, God decided they had to be punished, and sent off his own Watchers, including Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, to enforce his will. (These servants of God are also called Watchers, suggesting that not all the Watchers were rebel spirits.) The rebel Watchers were rounded up and imprisoned. (The God of the Old Testament seems to be as merciless as any human tyrant.) According to Andrew Collins, whose book From the Ashes of Angels (1996)4 is perhaps the best introduction to this topic, the location of the imprisonment of the rebel Watchers was close to the place where they descended, on Mount Hermon.
And so God decided to cleanse the earth with a great flood, of which the only survivor was Noah. But before that, Enoch has a further story to tell. It seems that his son Methuselah had a son named Lamech, whose wife bore a child, Noah. His appearance came as a shock to his father: the baby’s skin was not the same colour as that of other natives of the Middle East, that is to say, brown, but pure white and rosy red, like that of some native of a northern country. His hair was also white and his eyes were so beautiful that they seemed to light up the room.