The Book of Enoch and the Occult
An Excerpt From Harold Roth’s
The Forbidden Knowledge of the Book of Enoch: The Watchers, Nephilim, Fallen Angels and the End of the World
The Forbidden Knowledge of The Book of Enoch can be ordered here
And Enoch walked with God,
and he was no longer,
for God had taken him.
–Genesis 5:24
More than two thousand years after it was written, The Book of Enoch continues to attract readers. Part of its attraction is the very fact that in almost no religious practice was it ever absorbed into the company of approved sacred texts. This gives the impression that Enoch was suppressed by the religious powers. On the contrary, it wasn’t forbidden by any religion but simply lost its ability to represent the religion’s doctrines as they changed.
It all starts with a kernel of a story mentioned in Genesis 6:1-8. Several generations after the creation of the first human beings, people already fill the Earth. A group of angels, the Watchers, look down and see how beautiful the daughters of human beings are. They go down to Earth and take human women for their wives. The Nephilim, murderous giants who are the children of the Watchers and their human wives, are the result, and a plague of violence explodes on Earth. The Nephilim have rapacious appetites of all kinds. They not only ate human beings, but each other, and they raped animals of all kinds. They killed most human beings on Earth before the Divine sent a flood to wipe them out. Only Noah, his family, and the animals on his arc were spared.
This story is greatly expanded in the oldest part of Enoch, The Book of the Watchers, which dates back to at least 300 BCE in Judea. But scholars believe that the stories it is based on go back even farther. Over and over, in all sorts of different cultures, we hear stories about heavenly beings coming down to Earth and interacting with human beings in some way, whether it be in the form of myths like Prometheus or Lucifer bringing fire or light to people, or modern tales of aliens inspiring and helping us. Clearly the concept of an interaction between Heaven and Earth has often been important to us.
At least two different, older tales were combined in The Book of the Watchers. One held the Watcher Shemihazah at its center, and the other the Watcher Asa’el. These two angels brought very different bodies of forbidden knowledge to human beings. Shemihazah brought traditional occult arts like divination through all sorts of natural signs, from types of lightning to astrology; and dark arts like spellwork, including cursing and pacts. Asa’el brings the forbidden knowledge of metalwork, focusing on making armor, swords, and spears—the instruments of war, a way of distorting and debasing metalworking, changing it from forging instruments of agriculture, like hoes, shovels, and plows, to instruments of death. But like an old-time alchemist, he also brings the forbidden knowledge of dyes, silversmithing, and cosmetics. These are used by human beings, both men and women, to entice others into illicit sex, and that comes to be seen as the greater evil of the two bodies of forbidden knowledge the Watchers bring. Enoch sees Shemihazah and Asa’el as two completely different sources of evil.
Asa’el is mentioned in all sorts of items involved in Jewish magic. He’s identified in spell books from the Cairo Genizah. His name is inscribed on Babylonian incantation bowls, written on amulets from the Land of Israel, and found in Greco-Egyptian magical texts like The Greek Magical Papyri (PGM). In those works, he is not demonic or evil. On the contrary, he is an angel that magic workers can appeal to for help. To me, this says that he is possible to adjure in angel magic without the issue of raising a demon by accident. And for those who do work with demons, Asa’el is not a problem. Enoch himself is asked for help on some of the Babylonian incantation bowls. A few bowls mention Mount Hermon, which is where the Watchers made their oath to have sex with human women.
Some people believe in “witchblood”—an inherited, genetic feature peculiar to actual witches. Many of those who hold this idea believe that those born without witchblood cannot ever be witches. Some say this belief is modeled on the Enochic story of the Watchers coming down to Earth, having sex with women, and producing the Nephilim, who, in their belief, are the progenitors of this witchblood. But in my opinion, in no way could the Nephilim ever be the ancestors of witches, because for one thing, the Nephilim were completely unmagical. Remember, they raped and killed all human beings, they sexually assaulted and killed all the animals, including birds and fish, they killed and ate each other, and they despoiled the Earth. This does not sound like any sort of witchcraft to me. Not to mention that the Nephilim didn’t have any children, which kind of negates any possibility that they were the ultimate source of witchblood.
The Watchers are another story. They brought forbidden knowledge to human beings, which included not only astrology but root-cutting, binding and reversing spells, and various methods of divination. These skills, not the brutality of the Nephilim, are treasures for magic workers. But remember with whom those skills were shared: people. If witches are to look back upon ancestors for inspiration, it should be not to the Nephilim or even the Watchers but to our human ancestors who received that knowledge and most likely maintained it. Also, for Enoch, magical knowledge is preserved in language, specifically, in writing. That makes a hash of the often-met objection that “real” magic is only passed on orally, especially when we recall how often a practice is interlaced with grimoire magic, for example, traditional (European) witchcraft, Vodou, and so forth. I think this kind of eclecticism is something to be proud of rather than to disdain. Being eclectic seems to be a fundamental human trait.
The story of angels coming to Earth and having children with women inspires modern practitioners of magic, especially when we consider the forbidden knowledge that the Watchers shared with humans. I understand that. But the Watchers story is not the only example of this in human culture.
In his introduction to The Book of Enoch the Prophet, magic practitioner Lon Milo DuQuette states that we don’t know enough about Enoch to understand it. I think that this is true for most of us, and it throws into relief the flaw in modeling ourselves after figures in the story. He also points out that the Book of Enoch that has come down to us doesn’t have anything to do with Enochian magic, the Elizabethan astrologer and magician John Dee, the sorcerer Aleister Crowley, or any other prominent magician. He does mention Madame Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine, wherein she is quite fanciful about Enoch and who the Watchers represent. Personally, I cannot give her interpretation of the Watchers as alien spacemen any credibility. For me, alien spacemen have no place in magic or religion. They are a materialist incursion into the spiritual and magical universe, which can exist just fine without spacemen. Your lightyears may vary.
John Dee searched for Enoch for many years, perhaps because Enoch had a reputation as an astrologer and Dee was an astrologer himself. DuQuette wonders if perhaps Dee did have access to Enoch due to the dispersion of the libraries of English abbeys from 1536-1539, but we don’t find any note of it in his library catalogs or his own writings. He asked the angel Il about Enoch in 1583, and people often refer to his book about communing with angels as “Enoch.”
Contrary to popular belief, Dee never referred to the angelic language as “Enochian.” The angels told him it was called Logaeth. For me, the strongest connection between Enoch and Enochian magic is that both involved speaking with angels. But then so do the Picatrix, Hekhalot, and many other magical practices of various cultures.
Some have considered that Sloane MS. 3189, which contains the Liber Logaeth (Book of the Speech of God), is the Enoch-related book that Dee refers to during his travels in 1586, but if you look at it, you can see it has nothing to do with The Book of Enoch. It is simply Dee’s notes on his conversations with angels. You can see this and many other manuscripts at the British Library’s website, where they give access to a large and digitized collection of various things that help a person fiddle away hours of enjoyment.
One scholar’s explanation for Dee’s strong interest in finding Enoch ties that interest to the fear of a coming apocalypse and need to recover secret or lost knowledge to deal with such an event. This strikes me as pertinent to our own period—the scent of doom in the air has people scrambling for keys to understand and perhaps influence what is or will be occurring. I think this goes a long way toward explaining the intense interest in Enoch today.
The Forbidden Knowledge of the Book of Enoch: The Watchers, Nephilim, Fallen Angels and the End of the World is available at redwheelweiser.com
Harold Roth, is an author and artist and among the foremost authorities on plants within the modern occult community. He has studied Hebrew, as well as Jewish mysticism and magic for decades. The author of The Magic of the Sword of Moses and The Witching Herbs, Harold teaches classes on botanical magic, Kabbalah, and witchcraft. Visit him at haroldroth.com
The Forbidden Knowledge of the Book of Enoch:
The Watchers, Nephilim, Fallen Angels, and the End of the World
Harold Roth
ISBN: 978-1578638123
Book (Paperback)
Weiser Books