The first comprehensive examination of the Book of Enoch and its prophecies, origins, and history
• Examines in depth Enoch’s full story of the Watchers, the fallen angels who came to Earth and shared corrupting forbidden knowledge
• Explores how Enoch was a vital component of Second Temple messianic Judaism, speculative Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, and Gnostic mythology
• Investigates the entire history of the Book of Enoch and its important esoteric offshoots, including the later 2 Enoch (the Slavonic “Book of the Secrets of Enoch”) and the so-called Hebrew “Book of Enoch” (3 Enoch)
Said to have been written by the prophet Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, the Book of Enoch disappeared for many centuries, except for one place: the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which held the book as canonical.
Revealing the profound influence of the Book of Enoch on world thought over the past two thousand years, Tobias Churton investigates the entire history of the Book of Enoch and its important esoteric offshoots, including the later 2 Enoch (the Slavonic "Book of the Secrets of Enoch") and the so-called Hebrew "Book of Enoch" (3 Enoch). He explains how Enoch was taken to Heaven where he received personal instruction from God and examines in depth Enoch’s full story of the Watchers, the fallen angels who came to Earth and shared corrupting forbidden knowledge. He explains how the Book was a vital component of Second Temple messianic Judaism and speculative Jewish mysticism, playing a key role in the development of both the Kabbalah and Gnostic mythology.
Informed by continuing studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Churton provides the first comprehensive examination of the Book of Enoch, clarifying and refuting many errors of understanding about Enoch’s apocalyptic and sometimes sensational prophecies.
https://amzn.to/3J1rWTN
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.
• Examines in depth Enoch’s full story of the Watchers, the fallen angels who came to Earth and shared corrupting forbidden knowledge
• Explores how Enoch was a vital component of Second Temple messianic Judaism, speculative Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, and Gnostic mythology
• Investigates the entire history of the Book of Enoch and its important esoteric offshoots, including the later 2 Enoch (the Slavonic “Book of the Secrets of Enoch”) and the so-called Hebrew “Book of Enoch” (3 Enoch)
Said to have been written by the prophet Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, the Book of Enoch disappeared for many centuries, except for one place: the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which held the book as canonical.
Revealing the profound influence of the Book of Enoch on world thought over the past two thousand years, Tobias Churton investigates the entire history of the Book of Enoch and its important esoteric offshoots, including the later 2 Enoch (the Slavonic "Book of the Secrets of Enoch") and the so-called Hebrew "Book of Enoch" (3 Enoch). He explains how Enoch was taken to Heaven where he received personal instruction from God and examines in depth Enoch’s full story of the Watchers, the fallen angels who came to Earth and shared corrupting forbidden knowledge. He explains how the Book was a vital component of Second Temple messianic Judaism and speculative Jewish mysticism, playing a key role in the development of both the Kabbalah and Gnostic mythology.
Informed by continuing studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Churton provides the first comprehensive examination of the Book of Enoch, clarifying and refuting many errors of understanding about Enoch’s apocalyptic and sometimes sensational prophecies.
https://amzn.to/3J1rWTN
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's the Opperman Report and now here is investigator in Opperman.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Okay, welcome to the Opperman Report. I am your host,
private investigator Ed Opperman. Now you can get a hold
of me at Opperman Investigations and Digital Fronts and Consulting
if you reach out to me through my email Oppermaninvestigations
at gmail dot com. Now, if you like the show,
be sure to check out our Patreon Opperman Report. Patreon
a lot of ton of exclusive stuff in there, but
I always encourage people even if you don't want to
(00:30):
subscribe to Patreon tons of free content. You should check
it out every day because I'm always putting up exclusive documents.
Soon as something comes up, I put it up immediately
as quick as I can for free. You know. See,
there's a lot of free stuff. Otherwise, go to Sprinker
dot com, Spotify, Apple Plays. Every Friday night, I put
up three hours of brand new content, a solo show
(00:52):
and two hours of interviews podcast interviews. Now, I know
I always say this, and I'm so excited about today's show,
but this is a topic I've always been interested in.
We have Tobias Churton now you could find him at
Tobias Churton dot com. And he's written a book about
the Book of Enoch, which has always been an interest
(01:14):
of mine, And like we were just saying, off the year,
there's so much sensationalism around this, the Books of Enoch Revealed,
the Wicked Watchers, Metatron, and the fruits of forbidden knowledge.
Mister Churton, are you there?
Speaker 1 (01:31):
I am here and delighted to be so.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yes, great, I've been enjoying our talk off the year
so much already before we get into the Book of
Enoch Revealed. Tell us about yourself. Who is Tobias Churt.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I'm a writer primarily these days, and have been writing
books practiced, I think almost one a year on average
since about two thousand and two, when my writing career
really kicked in because I left a magazine which I
used to edit, and before that I was working on
(02:04):
films and I did ten years in British television BBC
Channel four, all the big places, and I was a researcher, director, producer,
and I specialized in programs which investigated religious subjects, and
I emphasized the word investigator. We weren't in the business
(02:25):
of presenting or converting or evangelizing these were in some
ways pioneering investigations. I mean, we did the Gnostic Gospels
back in eighty six, was a peak viewing on British
television on Saturday nights. So when I came down from Oxford,
(02:47):
I had a rough time, as people do after university,
and then got into television. I met some wonderful people,
not many, but very good. The people I met were
at the high standard who encouraged me to They wanted
me to stay in the media as it were, and
I had this hankering to be a priest. I wanted
to be Archbishop of Canterbury or a film director, because
(03:09):
I worshiped Awson Wells and the Great tradition of directors,
which was sort of all the rage in the sixties seventies,
this idea of the director as an author, you could
paint your vision of the world through film, and that
really attracted me because I was poet. The cheapest form
of movie making is right poetry as a youth, and
(03:31):
you don't lose your shirt. You might lose your friends.
But so I regarded myself as artist, communicator, sometime visionary,
appreciator of unusual and extraordinary minds. I'm fascinated by history.
(03:52):
I can pretty well put events to practically any date
you like. Have a sort of global perspective, and I
don't mean in the financial sense, but I think about
all things happening in the world at the same time,
and that to me, time is one long continuum. A
lot of people say, oh, that's all in the past,
(04:13):
Whereas to me, if you ask me, the bulk of
our lives is the past. You know, even what I
just said is past. We're living in the past all
the time. Even our future is tomorrow's past. So and
all of that. So to me, the whole continuum of
human existence on the planet is of great interest. And
(04:35):
I think people are most interesting when they look beyond
the planet and their ordinary concerns and take a thought
for the greater what they used to call the greater verities,
And hopefully as long as you keep your feet on
the ground, very important and not get taken up by
fantasies and the wishful thinking and all the rest of it.
(04:56):
So I always wanted to investigate what are the facts
about anything? If I fine encounter mystery, I want to
get inside it. I want to frankly demystify it. If
I can and take the complication and make subjects which
people might think are esoteric or impossible or difficult, make
them as accessible as I possibly can. And that's that's
(05:18):
that's what I've been doing in in my books for
for many years.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I gotta tell you, I'm the luckiest man in the world.
I really am. I meet the most interesting people that
I meet, the most interesting people on the planet almost
every day. Man. But so thank you so much for
coming on the show. Man. What is it then? How
did you? What inspired you to go down this road?
I know the investigative, I know that the bug, you
know that gets in you can't stop that. But what
(05:44):
what made you search out this esoteric, this gnasticism, this.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
This Hmm, Well, I think it's very hard to say.
I think I always had it in me. I always
had that feeling that there was something else that while
you inherited various religious ideas from school or from you
some aspects of your parents or family, or just the
culture you live in or films and all that, I
(06:10):
always felt there was something there's something else going on
here that we're not really getting to. I suppose, in
a sense, i'd say I was a natural mystic. I
remember having experiences when I was age five in the
garden which gave me to see life in a different way.
(06:31):
To say, my brothers, you know, they didn't They were
very much of this world. I was always aware that
there was something else going on inside people and beyond them,
or as George Harrison put it, within you without you,
you know. But what made me do it, I don't know, really,
because I wanted to understand religion. I wanted people to
have an uplifting I hate it. I think part of
(06:55):
it is growing up in the sixties and seventies, it
became clear to me that the world was in a
kind of materialist fantasy, by which I mean that they
could only deal with things that were immediate, tangible, and
so on, whereas it seemed it always seemed to me
that all the important things are invisible, like feelings, for example,
(07:18):
you know, intuitions, things like that, they're not immediately tangible,
they don't have a price on them. And there was
a great ugliness of the way the culture was doing.
The more you learn about the past, the more ugly
the present starts to become. In many ways, I'm not
saying they didn't have ugliness in the past, my goodness,
they did. But what has lasted from the past is
(07:39):
that things of beauty and greatness. And I was aware
of a lack of greatness and a lack of beauty,
and that ties in with spiritual philosophies which have been
perennially suppressed by organized religion and by totalitarian governments of
every stamp left or right. They all ended up fearing
(08:01):
the truth. By with the truth, I mean the depth
of things, the heart, the heart of stuff. People look
to artists today for insight into the truth, and that's okay,
so long as the artist is looking for those things
as well and not just want to be noticed by
outrageous acts of surrealistic anarchy. So yeah, all of those things.
(08:29):
It was growing up in a I thought, in many
ways an ugly period, but also an exciting period that
just needed, as far as I could say, a kind
of spiritual injection, high mindedness and aspiration, and a real
vision of mankind or humankind as we tend to say today,
(08:50):
that was would transcend the normal and enable people to
be more individualistic and more insightful and think more for themselves.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Now we're here to talk about the book of emach revealed.
But would we have time for you to explain what
that experience was in the garden and how this shaped
your your what is your faith today, and how did
this come about.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
It's sort of I grapple. I grapple with faith because
I've got a very active intellect and I question everything.
So I have no sort of settled conviction in the
normal thinking mind of my day to day. But deep,
deep down, there's an absolute certainty which, as I say,
(09:38):
doesn't inform my daily anxieties. Most of the time. I'm
as worried about things as the next person, but there
is a deep sense. When I was in the garden,
I was five, and I write about this my new book,
which is a kind of history of heaven. And I
had this sudden realization that I couldn't die. And I
(09:59):
don't mean in the ordinary sense of that I wouldn't
my heart wouldn't stop breathing, all the rest of it,
and that I didn't mean that I was going to
go on the same forever or be translated in the
same state, but that what what was actually me was
not well more, you know that the idea of mortality
(10:23):
was just laugh laughable and I was ecstatic, meaning outside
of myself, and I ran into my mother. I can't
remember what I said. I was only five, but I
remember after that I was My brothers noticed that they'd
watched they had two elder brothers, and I'd sort of
sit with this sort of smile, this beautific smile of
(10:46):
nodding my head whenever we'd go to the cinema or
whatever it was, and it was like, I just it
just it was just this wonderful feeling that there was
an absolute, an absolute beauty in my soul and I
presumed in others too, and I wanted people to know
about it. So my brothers used to get very embarrassed
(11:07):
because if they'd bring a friend around to the house
and I'd want to kiss them, you know, to show
some love, because this feeling made me feel love for
things and people, and I just wanted to project love,
that's all. That's what I wanted to do. And obviously,
(11:27):
in the passage of time you find a lot of
people respond to that with the exact opposite. They don't
want this love outside in the world. They want it
furtively and privately or whatever. So that was and this
wasn't coming through the Beatles particularly or something like that.
(11:47):
It wasn't It wasn't that I'd heard All you Need
is Love. It was a deep spiritual conviction and a
sense of the divine as a transcendent reality. And so
my ordinary life became relative to that. But the transcendent
reality is what's fascinating me. And that's why I've investigated
(12:08):
things like the Book of Enot, which is absolutely imbued
with the idea that human history is a relative incident
in the in the total mind of what not want
of any other word we call God or the divine
or the transcendent, ultra ultimate reality. Of course, it's much
(12:33):
easier to dispense with all that and deal with the
tangible and the things you can put value on. But
I think we lose the best part of ourselves if
we do.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
I'd say, I have someone to check it there. I
could take the whole show up, just for the audience.
Knows I went the past couple of years. I was dying.
I was dying of a heart, and I can'template it
on my mortality and my death and the after alife.
I obsessed on this man. You know, I'm healthy now,
I'm great now, But I came to the same conclusion.
It's very very same conclusion that you did, that this
(13:05):
is not this is not it. We don't, we don't.
It doesn't end here. But let's get back to it.
Let's get back to the book. Enough about me. We
have a guest there, a brilliant guest, the Book of Enoch.
Now where how is the Book of Enoch documented? How
do we what's the origin of it? What's the you'ine investigator?
How do how do we rely on this?
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Yeah, it's it's it's got There are so many fascinating
things about this phenomenon of the Book of Enoch or
Books of Enoch. Actually, because we got to think called
first Enoch first knock. It is the book that was
first translated fifty Well, it was. I don't know. It's
difficult to know where to begin with this, but I'll
stay I'll say this. It was a formation text in
(13:49):
the formation period of Christianity in the first century and
second centuries after Jesus and he he almost certainly would
have been familiar with it from boyhood or its texts,
because there are numerous ones we know now from the
Dead Sea scrolls. One of the most important discoveries in
the Dead Sea scrolls at Cumrahan in Jordan was Aramaic
(14:15):
texts of aspects of the Books of Enoch, and this
proves contrary to most scholarship at that time that it's
the origin is pre Christian, whereas it had been dismissed
as a sort of Jewish suit of biographical apocrypha. Anyway,
(14:36):
it was suppressed in the Church of the fifth and
sixth centuries, and whereas it had originally functioned as holy
scripture in the first and second centuries. This, by the way,
Enoch is the only prophet quoted in the entire Christian
Bible who is not in the Bible, the only one
(14:58):
in the Epistle of Jude or Jude, if you read
the Greek. The Epistle of Jude in the New Testament
is a great lump of quote from the Book of
the Watchers, as it's called, which is in the Book
of Enoch, which Jude, who I think was Jesus' brother.
By the way, every good reason to think so I
wish we had more time for that one. But anyway,
(15:18):
in the Book of in the Book of Jude, it
is is actually quoted, so it's used as scripture as
prophecy by early Christians, even jesus own family. In the
second century, we have leading patristic, that is, church fathers
who quote from the Book of Enoch with approval. Something
(15:40):
happens between the second century and say the fifth and
sixth century, where the book goes out of Christian circulation
and disappears from the Western world. It by by five hundred.
It's there are no coherent references to the whole texts
body of texts. In seventeen seventy two, the Scottish explorer
(16:04):
James Bruce, a brave Scott went to Ethiopia, risked his life,
lived in the court of the Ethiopian king, where he
found that the Tewajedo Orthodox Church of Ethiopia still had
the Book of Enoch in their Bible. It's sat there
next to the Book of Job and this was completely unique. No,
(16:27):
it had been rumored that this was the case, that
there was, but people couldn't get to Ethiopia. It was
so difficult and so dangerous to make the journey in
this period. So seventeen seventy two, about the time of
Captain Cook discovering Australia, he brings a full copy several
copies out of Egypt. One he gives to the Pope,
(16:48):
who sort of lodges it in the Vatican Library and
sort of not really seen much. Again. He gives another
one to Louis the fourteenth, the King of France, and
he brings one back for the King of England, and
a copy and winds up in the Bodilin Library in
Oxford University, and there's an initial sort of splash like, wow,
(17:10):
we've got this book. But there was one problem with
the book he brought back from Ethiopia. It was written
in get Ez, the language of Ethiopia, and nobody could
speak gets so you had this text and Bruce himself
claimed to be familiar with Getez, but actually he hadn't
learned enough to do a translation, and he had to
(17:31):
sort of cover that up. As it turned out, it
took fifty years. Fifty years it languished on the shelf
Bodilin Library, Oxford until Richard Lawrence, who later became an
Anglican archbishop, translated it. He acquired Getz from his studies.
He was professor of Oriental Languages, and he produced the
(17:51):
first printed version in English of his translation of the
Book of Enoch and he interestingly puts on the title
page an apocryphal work, So in case you think this
might sort of influence people's view of the Bible or
the formation of the Bible, he's sort of saying, well,
(18:12):
let's say it's okay, but it's apocryphal, meaning it has
no authority to make doctrine. That's what the effective term
doesn't It doesn't mean apocryphal, doesn't actually mean that, but
that's the way it was used. The apocrypha are related
works to the Bible, but no authority. Now he was
aware that there was content in the Book of Enoch,
(18:34):
which is devastatingly shocking for i'd say the objective observer.
And it took years and years again before the layman,
if you like, the non professionals began to look at
this book and see that its implications were so astounding
(18:55):
and for the origin of Christianity and the origin of
Christian doctrine, and the nature of terms like the Son
of Man, which we all hear about in our church
that nobody seems to know what it means. They just
think it's sort of an interchangeable expression with the Son
of God. And you get the feeling in Luke one
(19:15):
of the Gospels, for example, that they're just interchange son
of Man, son of God. Well, they're not the same there,
And without the Book of Enoch we would have very
little notion of what why Jesus calls himself the son
of Man and he says the son of Man. In
Marx Gospel he says the son of Man will be
taken and he will be killed, and so on. So
(19:39):
you have this. Without the Book of Enot, we wouldn't
even understand have the beginning of understanding what this term
was meaning to people in Galilee and in Judea and
in Egypt, also in the in the early first century.
So that's one of just many aspects of it. But
probably the most extraordinary as respect of the content that
(20:02):
should excite people is anybody who reads their Book of Genesis,
first book of the Bible. First book of used to
be called the Penteateooch but still is the Penteitech and
was attributed to Moses quite ridiculously, but that was the tradition.
In the Book of Genesis, in chapter five it says
(20:23):
that Enoch walked with God and he was not for
God took him. Now that's a very strange thing. Walked
with God, meaning he walked with God, meaning he shared
the righteousness of God. He was he was intimate with
God's will, and he was not for God took him. Now,
(20:47):
that develops a tradition that Enoch never died. Interestingly, talking
about the Enoch never died, he was translated bodily while
alive to heaven because he was so righteous. So that
makes him a very different patriarch to all the other
patriarchs who mentioned in the book of Genesis. That's the
(21:09):
first thing. So you have the beginnings there of a
legendary figure. The only one I can think of other
than that would be Elijah, who is Elisha sees him
taken up in what looks like a chariot of fire,
and of course in the New Testament, Jesus also is
assumed a cloud removes him from the site of the
(21:30):
disciples in the beginning of the acts of the Apostles.
So you haven't got many people who made this translation,
and Enoch is the first and arguably the most significant historically. Now,
in the next chapter of Genesis, in chapter six, you
have a sort of confused little bit of fragments of narrative,
(21:50):
which if you read them, plain don't add up at all.
You're told that the sons of God, that human beings,
divided themselves over the planet and produced daughters, and the
sons of God, it says, looked on these daughters with
how can you say, extreme attraction, And according to Genesis,
(22:14):
they got it together with some of these daughters of men.
And then it says that they produced men of renown,
mighty men, men of renown, although the Hebrew word nepheline
for mighty men of renown is debated as to exactly
what it means. But at the same time, in the
(22:36):
same passage you have and there were giants in the earth,
and then the next and we're supposed to accept that
the sons of God, by the way, but let's be clear,
sons of God meant the beings who lived in the
heavenly court. There was God enthroned in the ultimate heaven,
and he's surrounded by these sons of God. We call
them angels or archangels, and our angels. Now, these sons
(23:01):
of God came to us and mate it. It's with
human women to produce heroes. That seems to be the
implication of Genesis. But then the next passage says, and
evils spread about the earth, and God decided to destroy
every living thing on earth. And that leads us into
(23:23):
the story of Noah with which we're all familiar, Noah
and his ark. So now, when you look at the
text of the Book of the Watchers in First Enoch,
all of this suddenly starts to make sense. And it
may well be that the Genesis text is based on
a legend that is a similar source, or maybe the
(23:45):
same source, as the Book of the Watchers, which is
generally dated to about two hundred BC e. Now, in
the Book of the Watchers, oh, yes, you have the
angels conspiring amongst each other and in secret to descend
upon Mount Herman and take their pleasure with the daughters
(24:08):
of men. And the end of result is that they
produce giants who are thousands of feet tall. And these
giants are not admirable, far from it, because of the miscegenation,
the fact that they're a mixture of heavenly origin and
therefore immortal with human they are kind of monstrousness, and
(24:33):
they cannibalize and destroy practically all life on mankind. And
their leader, as Azel, it says in the Book of
Enoch to him ascribe all sin Now, that's really an
extraordinary statement. So what the Book of Enoch is saying
in this section is that the corruption of human beings,
(24:58):
the corruption of god plans for us, are destroyed by
the action of these angels who impregnate human women and
produce monsters who nearly destroy the human race. And and
you have Enoch appealing to God, please deliver us from
these these terrible beings that are destroying everything. And God
(25:21):
eventually hears that, decides to pay heed to this this
cry and empowers Enoch to to confront Azazel and the angels,
and that story goes on. But here you have the
origin of evil, not ascribed by Adam and Eve and
the Apple, but really the super how can we say,
(25:45):
super lunary activity of angels. That's an extraordinary statement, an
extraordinary thing. Now where the influence of this book is
so fascinating to to to trace, because people, for example,
were probably heard the old Catholic doctrine and I'm sure
(26:07):
it's still taught that the sinners will be burnt forever,
you know, in eternal flames at the Great Judgment, and
in the Book of Enoch, the whole judgment of mankind.
Everything we know from the Book of Revelation, and it
really is a source text for the Book of Revelation,
Book of Daniel. I think you had this idea that
(26:29):
the sinners are going to be conspired to everlasting flames,
which seems a bit, a bit nasty really thing to do,
But of course, in the language of the old evangelical
sin invites this. Now, why are they burnt eternally? Now,
this goes back to the Book of Enoch story because
(26:51):
in there, because the giants are of heavenly orange, they
are immortal, and therefore God can't wipe them out like
he could human beings. So they have to be put
in an eternal punishment. That's the only way to deal
(27:11):
with eternal beings. They have to be eternally burnt, but
they can never be destroyed. But of course, by the
time this doctrine of the eternal hell fire reaches mainstream
Christianity in the second century and much later, it's divorced
from the Innochic background from which it began, and it
(27:32):
simply becomes God's mode of punishing ordinary sinners. But you
see in the Book of Enoch that it has a
totally different purpose. It was to get rid of the
offspring of these terrible giants who are wiped out in
the flood. In terms of that their power on Earth
is wiped out, but they are seen as still dwelling
(27:54):
in underground places, and you can see the connection there
with underground volcanic activity and all the mythology of caves
and steam from underground places. So that's where the demonic
operates in these They're allowed to exist in these strange places,
(28:15):
but always underground, and they can only operate locally. But
God has a big plan. He eventually he's going to
clean out the whole thing. And the Book of Enoch
gives you an extraordinary level of detail the history of
the Jews, in particular leading to this grand Judgment when
(28:37):
God will finally clean up the damage that's been done
by the watchers, i e. These wicked angels who fled
heaven in search of human women. This gives you an
idea of some of the impact of this, but there's
all sorts of other things. You know, if you think
(28:57):
about Jesus, the stories of him casting out demons and
teaching their disciples how to cast out demons. This is
this anti demon operation makes perfect sense within some the
worldview of somebody who's been brought up in the Enochic
influenced sphere, that there are these local places where demons
(29:18):
can get inside a person and take them over. And
part of the role of the Son of Man is
to to lead to finally complete the anti demon operation.
So you know there are I can't even begin in
(29:39):
this sort of space of time to explain just how
much power and influence and meaning there is in these
books of Enoch and of enormous significance which has been
suppressed by churches very much so for centuries, and only
(30:01):
now is starting to come through. In the scholarly field.
We now have the Enoch Seminar, which was organized by
Professor Boccaccini at Syracuse University that I was invited in
to give a talk to them a few years ago,
and I've contributed to their publications, and this is a
scholar And now the scholarship has really taken hold in
(30:25):
the Book of Enot. We have a much more mature
and developed idea of it. And what I wanted to
do with this book Books of Enot Revealed was give
the best of ancient and modern scholarship, right through on
all the aspects of the Enochic tradition. And I think
(30:45):
for anyone interested in the origin of Christian religion and
also Jewish religion obviously and Islamic quite honestly, because they
borrowed also these concepts. Because it's such an influential set
of texts, I think it will open minds to tremendously
(31:06):
and some people will immediately resist the thought of engaging
with it lest it upset some cozy views and established views.
But it's it's there, it is. This is an objective
study of the material, and I think it's a bloody
(31:27):
good story.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
What's the reason for suppressing this information. We're all adults here.
We have sober teachers like yourself, you know, we have
sober teachers like yourself that can you know, explain this rationally?
Why why can't we accept new information and adjust our faith?
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Well, of course we can, and people, obviously it does
help if you've got some sort of grounding in systematic
thinking at all. I mean, you wouldn't. You don't give
dynamite to the hands of a child if in that set.
In that sense. The trouble with all of these these
insights is that they can in the wrong hands, they
(32:05):
can be lead to people coming to ludicrous conclusions or
taking them literally, or not understanding the context in which
these this material was produced. That's why big thing in
the book is establishing the history and the period in
which these things were written. And that's just a fantastic
(32:26):
adventure into the human mind. Why is it suppressed, Well, Obviously,
historically the churches have had the number one role in
teaching religion because obviously, for most of history, the vast
majority of people couldn't read anyway, so they acquired their
religion through stories, through pictures, through traditions, and through festivals
(32:51):
and through just familiar customs. It's only the Reformation, when
the expansion of printing in the sixteenth century, that people
start to get to grips with the textual tradition and
start asking some serious questions, and the course, the end
result is the Reformation, which splits the church. So from
the point of view of organized religion, obviously it's never
(33:14):
been a help if every person starts to think for themselves, because,
as we all know, where two or three are gathered together,
there'll be an argument. The origin of all political parties
is that there's a quirk in human nature, which is,
if somebody says one thing, you can guarantee if somebody
will jump up as quickly as possible to contradict it.
(33:37):
Do you remember the old Monty Python sketch about did
you come here for an argument? No, yes you did,
No I didn't. No, Yes you did, No I didn't.
Argument isn't just contradiction, Yes it is, No, it doesn't.
There's this dualism, this duality which means that it means
(33:59):
that any anything that is striking or it truthful will
always create its own opposition, and it doesn't matter what
it is. You can't if you start playing baseball as
a bit of fun, how long before people get very
angry when one team doesn't win and the other loses,
(34:22):
and all the rest of it. It's this quirk in
human nature where there's a kind of division. So part
of the reason things are suppressed is not due to
any grand conspiracy, but the perversity of human nature, which
when you're a scholar you have to look at look
out for this sort of your own tendencies and that
(34:44):
of others to side with a point of view. It's
very difficult in history of religion and ideas because we
don't have all the evidence, and we obviously you make
a better case when you've got more evidence. The great
thing about the Enoch stuff is we now have sufficient
evidence to really move forward with this study, and I
(35:04):
think it'll be immensely influential when it sort of sinks in.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
A couple of questions. First, well, you mentioned Ethiopia, right,
How is it that Ethiopia they maintain this text unaltered?
And isn't Ethiopia to the place where they claim the
Arc of the Covenant is perhaps being held today?
Speaker 1 (35:28):
There is there is an active legend in the Orthodox
Tajedo Church of Ethiopia that they do have the Ark
of the Covenant. You know, how seriously do you want
to take it? I don't know, you know, maybe somebody does,
Maybe if somebody doesn't. I'd have thought, given the nature
(35:49):
of things today, if they had it, they'd be there'd
be some interest in exhibiting it. Yeah. As far why
why they had the Book of Eno, I think we know, well,
I say, we know there's a story even in the
Acts of the Apostles that one of the first people
who ever got to hear about what was going on
(36:10):
in Jerusalem after the Crucifixion and the gathering of the
Jesus Movement in Jerusalem, that one of the first persons
is a person who is acquainted with the Queen of Ethiopia.
And if I remember, it's the apostle Philip who makes
that contact, and I think it's I forget the detail,
but if I remember, the Ethiopian goes back and quote
(36:32):
converts Ethiopia to the faith there. It is certainly the
case that the faith of the Jesus Movement is planted
in Ethiopia very early on. It's one of the two
or three countries that really embrace it. The other one
would be Armenia, which are they're also one of the
earliest countries. And also I think around Edessa was also
(36:59):
Christian and he really took root there. But because of
Ethiopia's relative obscurity, not much is reported of it. It
wasn't part of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire only
stretched as far as southern part of the Old Egyptian
Ptolemaic Egyptian Empire. So it was from the Roman point
(37:21):
of view in which the Church of Jesus grows, it
was beyond the bounds it's in. They would have thought
of it as a sort of barbarian, you know, unknown place,
even though people came from Ethiopia obviously, and we have
the story of the Queen of Sheba in the Old Testament,
(37:41):
but it was relatively obscure, and much more obscure when
the Roman when the Roman Empire collapses, the Western Roman
Empire in the sixth century, it becomes even more obscure.
And in the Dark Ages, and I believe they were
dark personally, very dark. Indeed, in the Dark Ages it
comes quite cut off. And the history of Theopy is
(38:03):
fascinating in that period because it's invaded by other tribes.
And I remember there's one foreign queen who for bad
Christianity and destroyed churches and things like this. So they
tenaciously held on to their Christian tradition and it's created
its own unique tradition. The Catholic Church in the eighteenth
(38:28):
century renewed its interest in bringing the Catholic interpretation of
the faith to Ethiopia. That's about the time that James
Bruce goes there and he met some of the monks
who had been tasked to go into it. They were
all scared to go, especially when they heard of the
adventures he'd had in the seventeen seventies. They didn't really
(38:53):
fancy walking into Ethiopia, which was rather subject to battles
and war lords fighting a bit like Afghani is done,
has been for many years. So they didn't fancy preaching
the word. They didn't think they were going to have
an easy time, these Capuchin monks, but that's that's that's
how they managed to keep their tradition. Of course, today
(39:15):
some some Christians in Ethiopia are a bit embarrassed now
because they've realized that they're the only place in the
whole Christian world that has the Book of Enoch as
part of its text. And obviously you've now got other
evangelical churches operating in Ethiopia who write against it and
(39:37):
say that it shouldn't be in their Bible, you know,
this sort of thing. So we're also getting that's another
interesting We're also getting Ethiopian scholars now contributing to the
to the dialogue and excitement of investigating this extraordinary text
or texts.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
I should say, why can we take from this now?
Like when we hear the predictions in the Bible, the
Second Coming, the thousand year reign, these kind of things.
What can we take from the Book of enact Does
it alter those predictions?
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Well, I would say that understanding the context of in
which those predictions emerge in the first century and before that,
before the build up obviously to the what we call
the apocalyptic narrative gets going around one sixty BC. And
(40:31):
this is where the emphasis in theological debate in Judaism
starts to move very heavily in the direction of end
of the world ism. I what is that line of
abra should should not the judge? Does not Abraham say
(40:54):
to God? Should not the judge of all the earth?
Do right? Well, we know that where as Ezekiel Jeremiah
had predicted that when the Babylonish captivity ended, things were
going to be better for the Jewish people, we know
that after the return of Jews from Babylon to parts
(41:17):
of Palestine that there was going to be It didn't
work out. Let's put it like that. It took years
to try and get some sort of temple together. They
were still under the control of the of the Syrians
and the and the Persians, and then later later the
(41:38):
Syrian Seleucids, who were the descendants of Alexander the greats generals,
and they had no real independence. So by the mid
second century BC, there's a kind of despair. Has God forgotten?
Has he failed to deliver on the prem promises that
(42:01):
the righteous would be rewarded with good times and that
they would be able to fully inherit the promised land.
And it's in that context of an oppressed still oppressed
and rather desperate people, and of heavily divided culture as well.
I mean the jew half the Jews favored in the
(42:22):
second century BC, you've got half the leaders of the
Jews are favoring the Seleucids in the north as Syrians,
and the others are favoring the Ptolemies from Egypt in
the south, and they don't know who to ally with
wears their best. You get a class of literature which
we call apocalyptic, which means apocalypsis to bring forth from hiding.
(42:46):
And this class of literature says, well, fear not. God
has always had this plan, and the times are now
leading very closely up to it, and the elect one
of God will come and he will lead the full
judgment of mankind. He will annihilate all evil. And this
(43:07):
is the context. Now if we don't understand this historic context.
You read things like the Book of Revelation, and you
read them without this context, you think, well, you can guess,
is this happening now? Is it happening today? Am I
living in the end times? There's always earthquakes, rumors of wars.
Will there's always been that. There's always been a rumor
(43:28):
of a war. There's always been earthquakes. Two thousand years,
especially with the Book of Enoch, it becomes absolutely clear
that these promises of the end are absolutely regarded as
imminent by the first century. In other words, the Jesus
movement flowers with difficulty exactly in this context of expecting
(43:54):
an imminent judgment. And that's absolutely plain from the Epistle
of Jude, who says, fear not, I know you, the
people who love Jesus are being persecuted and being brought
before the powers. But he's coming again. He's coming with
the angels, and you're going to see it, and we're
you know that all the empires, Roman Empire, and all
(44:16):
these oppressive forces are going to be got rid of. Well,
we know that that was the kind of hope that
led the Zelots to Masada. If you know the story,
and that in the end, by after the Barhaka Rebellion
(44:37):
in the second decade of the second century, the Jews
are kicked out of Jerusalem entirely. The Temple is leveled
and it's a pagan and the Jewish history and the
Temple history ends, and you have a completely diff In
other words, the Second Coming doesn't happen, and the Jews,
(45:00):
the Orthodox Jews, would say that the First Coming hadn't
happened either, So that coming simply gets projected into the future.
And in today's multi media electronic society, it is so
easy to ignite again these fantasies of the end time,
especially as now human beings have the capacity to bring
(45:22):
about their own end. So the idea of apocalypse, as
we saw in the Capola movie, has become completely misunderstood.
So we think of the apocalypse as a destructive thing,
whereas when these documents were written, it was a totally
hopeful thing. It was a positive thing. The emphasis wasn't
(45:43):
so much on the destruction, though the evil would be destroyed,
which is most people would think of a good thing.
It is that God's going to make a new heaven
and a new Earth, and the righteous will live there
forever and terrific. History's now wound up, a totally new
age begins. So obviously, if the more we know about
(46:08):
the history of these documents and the thought world in
which they develop, it's got to affect our own deepest
fears and concepts of our own future. It's no I
would this is my personal opinion. It is we simply
cannot rely on these documents to tell us what's happening now.
(46:31):
That doesn't mean they have no relevance, because I think
the conflict with evil has great relevance to us. Evil
is still very much present in ourselves, in our own attitudes,
in our stupidities, our blindnesses, our misreading of the things
around us, and of other people's motives. Politicians are always
(46:52):
there to take advantage of these fears, manipulate those fears,
develop movements that are allegedly going to cure us of
all these things we're afraid of, and so on. We
still have the problem of evil, we have to deal
with it. Who do we listen to? Well, I'd say
it's worth knowing about how man has dealt with evil
(47:16):
in previous times, and what conclusions they've come to, and
whether they have been the right conclusions. So I do
think we the debate about good and evil, and we'd
all like to think good will triumph in the end.
That is a basic faith that we have. But what
do we mean by end? Do we mean historically or
do we mean a transformation of the individual soul? What
(47:41):
kind of new age? Are we talking about an individual revelation?
Are we talking about a cultural breakthrough? And so on? Again.
Growing up in the sixties, there was the tremendously Inverticma's
apocalyptic feel that all of this sudden There was a
surge after World War II, almost like a denial of
(48:03):
the war. On one aspect that what, we're going to
the moon and everything, exploring the heavens for goodness sake,
we were actually suddenly far from being about to annihilate
ourselves with a nuclear weapons, that we were on the
verge of a new age of love and peace. I mean,
this was but of course that's a myth that's been
(48:25):
told after the event. Actually there was very little love
and peace in the sixties. I remember John Lennon only
started talking about love piece the peace thing, particularly at
the very end of the decade, and he was widely
ridiculed and regarded as quite mad. So actually the sixties
wasn't didn't have all of the patina that it's supposed
(48:47):
to have, but there were spiritual routes coming through. There
was the interest in Indian philosophy and personal transformation, all
a bit crude at the time, but these things are
coming through true, and people now have a much greater choice,
at least in our world, of where they find their
(49:09):
spiritual sustenance and you know, where they put their belief
and authority. We have to think about things ourselves more.
And obviously you don't have to, you can just accept
the package. But human being has been what they are.
I think we're curious people. We are we want to
(49:30):
investigate and we like I think truth has a wonderful flavor.
I think it has an aroma and you feel good
when you're near it. Not always the truth we'd like
to believe, but just truth. It is good to hear.
And that's why I do these books. I'm trying to
(49:51):
I'm trying to grapple with the possibilities that there's truth
in this material.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Thank you so much, man, Thank you so much. Now,
Tobias Churtons dot com, people can find you there but
you don't do like a podcast or anything that you
don't share this kind of knowledge like on a monthly
basis or a weekly basis where people can listen to you.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
I do get asked to do podcasts and interviews.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Yeah, but what about just teaching.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
Well, I did run a course in Exeter University a
few years ago, or which I which I wrote, I
was asked to write, and it was an ma a
Master of Arts course in Western esotericism. And I lectured
there and that that was a good experience. And then
the man who'd arranged the original funding for the course
(50:43):
at the university died very suddenly, and the people who
were backing it couldn't find what they wanted as somebody
to lead the course, and the course ended. I thought
it was ridiculous they didn't ask me because I didn't
have a doctorate, you know. I when I when I
graduated from university, I went straight into the world of work.
(51:05):
And I've always paid for my own research, even though
I'm very much aware of what other academics are doing.
But I always wanted to be independent of an academic
So anyway, so that course folded, although it's influence still persists.
So my teaching is, if you like, is in my books,
which go out to all who would like to know
(51:26):
about them, and I'm if people ask me to speak
about it. I I especially the podcast I Will Will
Will come, And also I'd be happy to do. You know,
I don't mind doing lectures as long as they're not
too specific groups. I mean, I used to have a
lot to do with the with Freemasonry, and I still
(51:47):
get a lot of invitations. I'd rather speak to people
in general rather than particular particular groups.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
Personally, we're almost out a time. And one of the
things when I asked you, what does you really want
the ordience to know? And you said, the importance of
this book. What is the most important thing we're going
to take away from this book? The Books of Enoch revealed?
Speaker 1 (52:08):
I think it will transform our understanding of the origins
of Christianity and give us food for thought of the
kind of spiritual spirituality for us today and for the future.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
Should we have concerns that these angels or these will
come back and.
Speaker 1 (52:36):
We are the wicked angels, We are the ones who
lust after the daughters of men and create monsters. So true.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
We'll leave on that note, brother. Well, real quickly, you
did some work on Crowley too, What is your what
is your take on Crowley?
Speaker 1 (52:53):
In Alister Crowley, it was always pronounced Crowley as in
holy right. Well, I I thought I encountered Alista Crawley
when I was a theological student and a friend of
mine lent him. One of his lent me his Confessions book,
which is I found a magnificent read, and I could
never square what I was reading with the reputation that
(53:16):
he had acquired, and I came to the conclusion that
he was profoundly misrepresented. Though he is a difficult man
to understand in some ways, but I found it very fruitful.
There was he had a He had aspects of his
of his attitude and spirit, which I think we can
all benefit from. We don't have to accept his personal religion,
(53:38):
which is extraordinary and very peculiar, and again asks it
leads you to ask many questions. But I think he
was He's been unjustly maligned. That doesn't mean he's anything
like perfect or anything. I don't think so. But I
don't think he was a Satanist. In there in the
concept of the movies of somebody who worshiped the devil
(53:59):
and relished the idea of evil triumphing or a world
in the grip of wicked forces. I don't think he
was a wicked I think he was extremely naughty, but
in the Victorian sense, he never quite in some aspects,
he never quite grew up. But he did love sex,
and he linked sex with spirituality, and I think that's
(54:22):
what he's been hated for most of all. Is very
disturbing for people that people like sex over here and
religion over there, and for him, he felt that sex
had been denigrated and put in the gutter, and that
its divine potential hadn't been explored. And he was pretty
fearless in that. Some of his poetry is very good,
(54:45):
and he's a wonderful writer at his best, his bloody
good writer. And he had had horribly difficult life in
many ways, but he never gave up, and he never
became a depressive. And I think there are aspects aspects
of his life, which is why I wrote the sixth
volume biography, which are instructive and if not instructive, extremely entertaining.
Speaker 2 (55:10):
Tobias charton. Thank you so much. I really really enjoyed this,
and I hope you remember me and next time you
have a project or something old, you'llver call me and
come back on the show you know, or anything you
want to talk about ever, And I would love to
have you back. I really great.
Speaker 1 (55:24):
Well I hope you remember me too well.
Speaker 2 (55:26):
I'm not going to forget you Tobias Churton dot com.
And the book we've been talking about today is The
Books of Enoch Revealed and it sounds like an incredible,
incredible research and brilliant working at books. So thank you
so much, sir, my pleasure, thank you. Connect
It's the Opperman Report and now here is investigator in Opperman.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Okay, welcome to the Opperman Report. I am your host,
private investigator Ed Opperman. Now you can get a hold
of me at Opperman Investigations and Digital Fronts and Consulting
if you reach out to me through my email Oppermaninvestigations
at gmail dot com. Now, if you like the show,
be sure to check out our Patreon Opperman Report. Patreon
a lot of ton of exclusive stuff in there, but
I always encourage people even if you don't want to
(00:30):
subscribe to Patreon tons of free content. You should check
it out every day because I'm always putting up exclusive documents.
Soon as something comes up, I put it up immediately
as quick as I can for free. You know. See,
there's a lot of free stuff. Otherwise, go to Sprinker
dot com, Spotify, Apple Plays. Every Friday night, I put
up three hours of brand new content, a solo show
(00:52):
and two hours of interviews podcast interviews. Now, I know
I always say this, and I'm so excited about today's show,
but this is a topic I've always been interested in.
We have Tobias Churton now you could find him at
Tobias Churton dot com. And he's written a book about
the Book of Enoch, which has always been an interest
(01:14):
of mine, And like we were just saying, off the year,
there's so much sensationalism around this, the Books of Enoch Revealed,
the Wicked Watchers, Metatron, and the fruits of forbidden knowledge.
Mister Churton, are you there?
Speaker 1 (01:31):
I am here and delighted to be so.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Yes, great, I've been enjoying our talk off the year
so much already before we get into the Book of
Enoch Revealed. Tell us about yourself. Who is Tobias Churt.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I'm a writer primarily these days, and have been writing
books practiced, I think almost one a year on average
since about two thousand and two, when my writing career
really kicked in because I left a magazine which I
used to edit, and before that I was working on
(02:04):
films and I did ten years in British television BBC
Channel four, all the big places, and I was a researcher, director, producer,
and I specialized in programs which investigated religious subjects, and
I emphasized the word investigator. We weren't in the business
(02:25):
of presenting or converting or evangelizing these were in some
ways pioneering investigations. I mean, we did the Gnostic Gospels
back in eighty six, was a peak viewing on British
television on Saturday nights. So when I came down from Oxford,
(02:47):
I had a rough time, as people do after university,
and then got into television. I met some wonderful people,
not many, but very good. The people I met were
at the high standard who encouraged me to They wanted
me to stay in the media as it were, and
I had this hankering to be a priest. I wanted
to be Archbishop of Canterbury or a film director, because
(03:09):
I worshiped Awson Wells and the Great tradition of directors,
which was sort of all the rage in the sixties seventies,
this idea of the director as an author, you could
paint your vision of the world through film, and that
really attracted me because I was poet. The cheapest form
of movie making is right poetry as a youth, and
(03:31):
you don't lose your shirt. You might lose your friends.
But so I regarded myself as artist, communicator, sometime visionary,
appreciator of unusual and extraordinary minds. I'm fascinated by history.
(03:52):
I can pretty well put events to practically any date
you like. Have a sort of global perspective, and I
don't mean in the financial sense, but I think about
all things happening in the world at the same time,
and that to me, time is one long continuum. A
lot of people say, oh, that's all in the past,
(04:13):
Whereas to me, if you ask me, the bulk of
our lives is the past. You know, even what I
just said is past. We're living in the past all
the time. Even our future is tomorrow's past. So and
all of that. So to me, the whole continuum of
human existence on the planet is of great interest. And
(04:35):
I think people are most interesting when they look beyond
the planet and their ordinary concerns and take a thought
for the greater what they used to call the greater verities,
And hopefully as long as you keep your feet on
the ground, very important and not get taken up by
fantasies and the wishful thinking and all the rest of it.
(04:56):
So I always wanted to investigate what are the facts
about anything? If I fine encounter mystery, I want to
get inside it. I want to frankly demystify it. If
I can and take the complication and make subjects which
people might think are esoteric or impossible or difficult, make
them as accessible as I possibly can. And that's that's
(05:18):
that's what I've been doing in in my books for
for many years.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
I gotta tell you, I'm the luckiest man in the world.
I really am. I meet the most interesting people that
I meet, the most interesting people on the planet almost
every day. Man. But so thank you so much for
coming on the show. Man. What is it then? How
did you? What inspired you to go down this road?
I know the investigative, I know that the bug, you
know that gets in you can't stop that. But what
(05:44):
what made you search out this esoteric, this gnasticism, this.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
This Hmm, Well, I think it's very hard to say.
I think I always had it in me. I always
had that feeling that there was something else that while
you inherited various religious ideas from school or from you
some aspects of your parents or family, or just the
culture you live in or films and all that, I
(06:10):
always felt there was something there's something else going on
here that we're not really getting to. I suppose, in
a sense, i'd say I was a natural mystic. I
remember having experiences when I was age five in the
garden which gave me to see life in a different way.
(06:31):
To say, my brothers, you know, they didn't They were
very much of this world. I was always aware that
there was something else going on inside people and beyond them,
or as George Harrison put it, within you without you,
you know. But what made me do it, I don't know, really,
because I wanted to understand religion. I wanted people to
have an uplifting I hate it. I think part of
(06:55):
it is growing up in the sixties and seventies, it
became clear to me that the world was in a
kind of materialist fantasy, by which I mean that they
could only deal with things that were immediate, tangible, and
so on, whereas it seemed it always seemed to me
that all the important things are invisible, like feelings, for example,
(07:18):
you know, intuitions, things like that, they're not immediately tangible,
they don't have a price on them. And there was
a great ugliness of the way the culture was doing.
The more you learn about the past, the more ugly
the present starts to become. In many ways, I'm not
saying they didn't have ugliness in the past, my goodness,
they did. But what has lasted from the past is
(07:39):
that things of beauty and greatness. And I was aware
of a lack of greatness and a lack of beauty,
and that ties in with spiritual philosophies which have been
perennially suppressed by organized religion and by totalitarian governments of
every stamp left or right. They all ended up fearing
(08:01):
the truth. By with the truth, I mean the depth
of things, the heart, the heart of stuff. People look
to artists today for insight into the truth, and that's okay,
so long as the artist is looking for those things
as well and not just want to be noticed by
outrageous acts of surrealistic anarchy. So yeah, all of those things.
(08:29):
It was growing up in a I thought, in many
ways an ugly period, but also an exciting period that
just needed, as far as I could say, a kind
of spiritual injection, high mindedness and aspiration, and a real
vision of mankind or humankind as we tend to say today,
(08:50):
that was would transcend the normal and enable people to
be more individualistic and more insightful and think more for themselves.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Now we're here to talk about the book of emach revealed.
But would we have time for you to explain what
that experience was in the garden and how this shaped
your your what is your faith today, and how did
this come about.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
It's sort of I grapple. I grapple with faith because
I've got a very active intellect and I question everything.
So I have no sort of settled conviction in the
normal thinking mind of my day to day. But deep,
deep down, there's an absolute certainty which, as I say,
(09:38):
doesn't inform my daily anxieties. Most of the time. I'm
as worried about things as the next person, but there
is a deep sense. When I was in the garden,
I was five, and I write about this my new book,
which is a kind of history of heaven. And I
had this sudden realization that I couldn't die. And I
(09:59):
don't mean in the ordinary sense of that I wouldn't
my heart wouldn't stop breathing, all the rest of it,
and that I didn't mean that I was going to
go on the same forever or be translated in the
same state, but that what what was actually me was
not well more, you know that the idea of mortality
(10:23):
was just laugh laughable and I was ecstatic, meaning outside
of myself, and I ran into my mother. I can't
remember what I said. I was only five, but I
remember after that I was My brothers noticed that they'd
watched they had two elder brothers, and I'd sort of
sit with this sort of smile, this beautific smile of
(10:46):
nodding my head whenever we'd go to the cinema or
whatever it was, and it was like, I just it
just it was just this wonderful feeling that there was
an absolute, an absolute beauty in my soul and I
presumed in others too, and I wanted people to know
about it. So my brothers used to get very embarrassed
(11:07):
because if they'd bring a friend around to the house
and I'd want to kiss them, you know, to show
some love, because this feeling made me feel love for
things and people, and I just wanted to project love,
that's all. That's what I wanted to do. And obviously,
(11:27):
in the passage of time you find a lot of
people respond to that with the exact opposite. They don't
want this love outside in the world. They want it
furtively and privately or whatever. So that was and this
wasn't coming through the Beatles particularly or something like that.
(11:47):
It wasn't It wasn't that I'd heard All you Need
is Love. It was a deep spiritual conviction and a
sense of the divine as a transcendent reality. And so
my ordinary life became relative to that. But the transcendent
reality is what's fascinating me. And that's why I've investigated
(12:08):
things like the Book of Enot, which is absolutely imbued
with the idea that human history is a relative incident
in the in the total mind of what not want
of any other word we call God or the divine
or the transcendent, ultra ultimate reality. Of course, it's much
(12:33):
easier to dispense with all that and deal with the
tangible and the things you can put value on. But
I think we lose the best part of ourselves if
we do.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
I'd say, I have someone to check it there. I
could take the whole show up, just for the audience.
Knows I went the past couple of years. I was dying.
I was dying of a heart, and I can'template it
on my mortality and my death and the after alife.
I obsessed on this man. You know, I'm healthy now,
I'm great now, But I came to the same conclusion.
It's very very same conclusion that you did, that this
(13:05):
is not this is not it. We don't, we don't.
It doesn't end here. But let's get back to it.
Let's get back to the book. Enough about me. We
have a guest there, a brilliant guest, the Book of Enoch.
Now where how is the Book of Enoch documented? How
do we what's the origin of it? What's the you'ine investigator?
How do how do we rely on this?
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Yeah, it's it's it's got There are so many fascinating
things about this phenomenon of the Book of Enoch or
Books of Enoch. Actually, because we got to think called
first Enoch first knock. It is the book that was
first translated fifty Well, it was. I don't know. It's
difficult to know where to begin with this, but I'll
stay I'll say this. It was a formation text in
(13:49):
the formation period of Christianity in the first century and
second centuries after Jesus and he he almost certainly would
have been familiar with it from boyhood or its texts,
because there are numerous ones we know now from the
Dead Sea scrolls. One of the most important discoveries in
the Dead Sea scrolls at Cumrahan in Jordan was Aramaic
(14:15):
texts of aspects of the Books of Enoch, and this
proves contrary to most scholarship at that time that it's
the origin is pre Christian, whereas it had been dismissed
as a sort of Jewish suit of biographical apocrypha. Anyway,
(14:36):
it was suppressed in the Church of the fifth and
sixth centuries, and whereas it had originally functioned as holy
scripture in the first and second centuries. This, by the way,
Enoch is the only prophet quoted in the entire Christian
Bible who is not in the Bible, the only one
(14:58):
in the Epistle of Jude or Jude, if you read
the Greek. The Epistle of Jude in the New Testament
is a great lump of quote from the Book of
the Watchers, as it's called, which is in the Book
of Enoch, which Jude, who I think was Jesus' brother.
By the way, every good reason to think so I
wish we had more time for that one. But anyway,
(15:18):
in the Book of in the Book of Jude, it
is is actually quoted, so it's used as scripture as
prophecy by early Christians, even jesus own family. In the
second century, we have leading patristic, that is, church fathers
who quote from the Book of Enoch with approval. Something
(15:40):
happens between the second century and say the fifth and
sixth century, where the book goes out of Christian circulation
and disappears from the Western world. It by by five hundred.
It's there are no coherent references to the whole texts
body of texts. In seventeen seventy two, the Scottish explorer
(16:04):
James Bruce, a brave Scott went to Ethiopia, risked his life,
lived in the court of the Ethiopian king, where he
found that the Tewajedo Orthodox Church of Ethiopia still had
the Book of Enoch in their Bible. It's sat there
next to the Book of Job and this was completely unique. No,
(16:27):
it had been rumored that this was the case, that
there was, but people couldn't get to Ethiopia. It was
so difficult and so dangerous to make the journey in
this period. So seventeen seventy two, about the time of
Captain Cook discovering Australia, he brings a full copy several
copies out of Egypt. One he gives to the Pope,
(16:48):
who sort of lodges it in the Vatican Library and
sort of not really seen much. Again. He gives another
one to Louis the fourteenth, the King of France, and
he brings one back for the King of England, and
a copy and winds up in the Bodilin Library in
Oxford University, and there's an initial sort of splash like, wow,
(17:10):
we've got this book. But there was one problem with
the book he brought back from Ethiopia. It was written
in get Ez, the language of Ethiopia, and nobody could
speak gets so you had this text and Bruce himself
claimed to be familiar with Getez, but actually he hadn't
learned enough to do a translation, and he had to
(17:31):
sort of cover that up. As it turned out, it
took fifty years. Fifty years it languished on the shelf
Bodilin Library, Oxford until Richard Lawrence, who later became an
Anglican archbishop, translated it. He acquired Getz from his studies.
He was professor of Oriental Languages, and he produced the
(17:51):
first printed version in English of his translation of the
Book of Enoch and he interestingly puts on the title
page an apocryphal work, So in case you think this
might sort of influence people's view of the Bible or
the formation of the Bible, he's sort of saying, well,
(18:12):
let's say it's okay, but it's apocryphal, meaning it has
no authority to make doctrine. That's what the effective term
doesn't It doesn't mean apocryphal, doesn't actually mean that, but
that's the way it was used. The apocrypha are related
works to the Bible, but no authority. Now he was
aware that there was content in the Book of Enoch,
(18:34):
which is devastatingly shocking for i'd say the objective observer.
And it took years and years again before the layman,
if you like, the non professionals began to look at
this book and see that its implications were so astounding
(18:55):
and for the origin of Christianity and the origin of
Christian doctrine, and the nature of terms like the Son
of Man, which we all hear about in our church
that nobody seems to know what it means. They just
think it's sort of an interchangeable expression with the Son
of God. And you get the feeling in Luke one
(19:15):
of the Gospels, for example, that they're just interchange son
of Man, son of God. Well, they're not the same there,
And without the Book of Enoch we would have very
little notion of what why Jesus calls himself the son
of Man and he says the son of Man. In
Marx Gospel he says the son of Man will be
taken and he will be killed, and so on. So
(19:39):
you have this. Without the Book of Enot, we wouldn't
even understand have the beginning of understanding what this term
was meaning to people in Galilee and in Judea and
in Egypt, also in the in the early first century.
So that's one of just many aspects of it. But
probably the most extraordinary as respect of the content that
(20:02):
should excite people is anybody who reads their Book of Genesis,
first book of the Bible. First book of used to
be called the Penteateooch but still is the Penteitech and
was attributed to Moses quite ridiculously, but that was the tradition.
In the Book of Genesis, in chapter five it says
(20:23):
that Enoch walked with God and he was not for
God took him. Now that's a very strange thing. Walked
with God, meaning he walked with God, meaning he shared
the righteousness of God. He was he was intimate with
God's will, and he was not for God took him. Now,
(20:47):
that develops a tradition that Enoch never died. Interestingly, talking
about the Enoch never died, he was translated bodily while
alive to heaven because he was so righteous. So that
makes him a very different patriarch to all the other
patriarchs who mentioned in the book of Genesis. That's the
(21:09):
first thing. So you have the beginnings there of a
legendary figure. The only one I can think of other
than that would be Elijah, who is Elisha sees him
taken up in what looks like a chariot of fire,
and of course in the New Testament, Jesus also is
assumed a cloud removes him from the site of the
(21:30):
disciples in the beginning of the acts of the Apostles.
So you haven't got many people who made this translation,
and Enoch is the first and arguably the most significant historically. Now,
in the next chapter of Genesis, in chapter six, you
have a sort of confused little bit of fragments of narrative,
(21:50):
which if you read them, plain don't add up at all.
You're told that the sons of God, that human beings,
divided themselves over the planet and produced daughters, and the
sons of God, it says, looked on these daughters with
how can you say, extreme attraction, And according to Genesis,
(22:14):
they got it together with some of these daughters of men.
And then it says that they produced men of renown,
mighty men, men of renown, although the Hebrew word nepheline
for mighty men of renown is debated as to exactly
what it means. But at the same time, in the
(22:36):
same passage you have and there were giants in the earth,
and then the next and we're supposed to accept that
the sons of God, by the way, but let's be clear,
sons of God meant the beings who lived in the
heavenly court. There was God enthroned in the ultimate heaven,
and he's surrounded by these sons of God. We call
them angels or archangels, and our angels. Now, these sons
(23:01):
of God came to us and mate it. It's with
human women to produce heroes. That seems to be the
implication of Genesis. But then the next passage says, and
evils spread about the earth, and God decided to destroy
every living thing on earth. And that leads us into
(23:23):
the story of Noah with which we're all familiar, Noah
and his ark. So now, when you look at the
text of the Book of the Watchers in First Enoch,
all of this suddenly starts to make sense. And it
may well be that the Genesis text is based on
a legend that is a similar source, or maybe the
(23:45):
same source, as the Book of the Watchers, which is
generally dated to about two hundred BC e. Now, in
the Book of the Watchers, oh, yes, you have the
angels conspiring amongst each other and in secret to descend
upon Mount Herman and take their pleasure with the daughters
(24:08):
of men. And the end of result is that they
produce giants who are thousands of feet tall. And these
giants are not admirable, far from it, because of the miscegenation,
the fact that they're a mixture of heavenly origin and
therefore immortal with human they are kind of monstrousness, and
(24:33):
they cannibalize and destroy practically all life on mankind. And
their leader, as Azel, it says in the Book of
Enoch to him ascribe all sin Now, that's really an
extraordinary statement. So what the Book of Enoch is saying
in this section is that the corruption of human beings,
(24:58):
the corruption of god plans for us, are destroyed by
the action of these angels who impregnate human women and
produce monsters who nearly destroy the human race. And and
you have Enoch appealing to God, please deliver us from
these these terrible beings that are destroying everything. And God
(25:21):
eventually hears that, decides to pay heed to this this
cry and empowers Enoch to to confront Azazel and the angels,
and that story goes on. But here you have the
origin of evil, not ascribed by Adam and Eve and
the Apple, but really the super how can we say,
(25:45):
super lunary activity of angels. That's an extraordinary statement, an
extraordinary thing. Now where the influence of this book is
so fascinating to to to trace, because people, for example,
were probably heard the old Catholic doctrine and I'm sure
(26:07):
it's still taught that the sinners will be burnt forever,
you know, in eternal flames at the Great Judgment, and
in the Book of Enoch, the whole judgment of mankind.
Everything we know from the Book of Revelation, and it
really is a source text for the Book of Revelation,
Book of Daniel. I think you had this idea that
(26:29):
the sinners are going to be conspired to everlasting flames,
which seems a bit, a bit nasty really thing to do,
But of course, in the language of the old evangelical
sin invites this. Now, why are they burnt eternally? Now,
this goes back to the Book of Enoch story because
(26:51):
in there, because the giants are of heavenly orange, they
are immortal, and therefore God can't wipe them out like
he could human beings. So they have to be put
in an eternal punishment. That's the only way to deal
(27:11):
with eternal beings. They have to be eternally burnt, but
they can never be destroyed. But of course, by the
time this doctrine of the eternal hell fire reaches mainstream
Christianity in the second century and much later, it's divorced
from the Innochic background from which it began, and it
(27:32):
simply becomes God's mode of punishing ordinary sinners. But you
see in the Book of Enoch that it has a
totally different purpose. It was to get rid of the
offspring of these terrible giants who are wiped out in
the flood. In terms of that their power on Earth
is wiped out, but they are seen as still dwelling
(27:54):
in underground places, and you can see the connection there
with underground volcanic activity and all the mythology of caves
and steam from underground places. So that's where the demonic
operates in these They're allowed to exist in these strange places,
(28:15):
but always underground, and they can only operate locally. But
God has a big plan. He eventually he's going to
clean out the whole thing. And the Book of Enoch
gives you an extraordinary level of detail the history of
the Jews, in particular leading to this grand Judgment when
(28:37):
God will finally clean up the damage that's been done
by the watchers, i e. These wicked angels who fled
heaven in search of human women. This gives you an
idea of some of the impact of this, but there's
all sorts of other things. You know, if you think
(28:57):
about Jesus, the stories of him casting out demons and
teaching their disciples how to cast out demons. This is
this anti demon operation makes perfect sense within some the
worldview of somebody who's been brought up in the Enochic
influenced sphere, that there are these local places where demons
(29:18):
can get inside a person and take them over. And
part of the role of the Son of Man is
to to lead to finally complete the anti demon operation.
So you know there are I can't even begin in
(29:39):
this sort of space of time to explain just how
much power and influence and meaning there is in these
books of Enoch and of enormous significance which has been
suppressed by churches very much so for centuries, and only
(30:01):
now is starting to come through. In the scholarly field.
We now have the Enoch Seminar, which was organized by
Professor Boccaccini at Syracuse University that I was invited in
to give a talk to them a few years ago,
and I've contributed to their publications, and this is a
scholar And now the scholarship has really taken hold in
(30:25):
the Book of Enot. We have a much more mature
and developed idea of it. And what I wanted to
do with this book Books of Enot Revealed was give
the best of ancient and modern scholarship, right through on
all the aspects of the Enochic tradition. And I think
(30:45):
for anyone interested in the origin of Christian religion and
also Jewish religion obviously and Islamic quite honestly, because they
borrowed also these concepts. Because it's such an influential set
of texts, I think it will open minds to tremendously
(31:06):
and some people will immediately resist the thought of engaging
with it lest it upset some cozy views and established views.
But it's it's there, it is. This is an objective
study of the material, and I think it's a bloody
(31:27):
good story.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
What's the reason for suppressing this information. We're all adults here.
We have sober teachers like yourself, you know, we have
sober teachers like yourself that can you know, explain this rationally?
Why why can't we accept new information and adjust our faith?
Speaker 1 (31:44):
Well, of course we can, and people, obviously it does
help if you've got some sort of grounding in systematic
thinking at all. I mean, you wouldn't. You don't give
dynamite to the hands of a child if in that set.
In that sense. The trouble with all of these these
insights is that they can in the wrong hands, they
(32:05):
can be lead to people coming to ludicrous conclusions or
taking them literally, or not understanding the context in which
these this material was produced. That's why big thing in
the book is establishing the history and the period in
which these things were written. And that's just a fantastic
(32:26):
adventure into the human mind. Why is it suppressed, Well, Obviously,
historically the churches have had the number one role in
teaching religion because obviously, for most of history, the vast
majority of people couldn't read anyway, so they acquired their
religion through stories, through pictures, through traditions, and through festivals
(32:51):
and through just familiar customs. It's only the Reformation, when
the expansion of printing in the sixteenth century, that people
start to get to grips with the textual tradition and
start asking some serious questions, and the course, the end
result is the Reformation, which splits the church. So from
the point of view of organized religion, obviously it's never
(33:14):
been a help if every person starts to think for themselves, because,
as we all know, where two or three are gathered together,
there'll be an argument. The origin of all political parties
is that there's a quirk in human nature, which is,
if somebody says one thing, you can guarantee if somebody
will jump up as quickly as possible to contradict it.
(33:37):
Do you remember the old Monty Python sketch about did
you come here for an argument? No, yes you did,
No I didn't. No, Yes you did, No I didn't.
Argument isn't just contradiction, Yes it is, No, it doesn't.
There's this dualism, this duality which means that it means
(33:59):
that any anything that is striking or it truthful will
always create its own opposition, and it doesn't matter what
it is. You can't if you start playing baseball as
a bit of fun, how long before people get very
angry when one team doesn't win and the other loses,
(34:22):
and all the rest of it. It's this quirk in
human nature where there's a kind of division. So part
of the reason things are suppressed is not due to
any grand conspiracy, but the perversity of human nature, which
when you're a scholar you have to look at look
out for this sort of your own tendencies and that
(34:44):
of others to side with a point of view. It's
very difficult in history of religion and ideas because we
don't have all the evidence, and we obviously you make
a better case when you've got more evidence. The great
thing about the Enoch stuff is we now have sufficient
evidence to really move forward with this study, and I
(35:04):
think it'll be immensely influential when it sort of sinks in.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
A couple of questions. First, well, you mentioned Ethiopia, right,
How is it that Ethiopia they maintain this text unaltered?
And isn't Ethiopia to the place where they claim the
Arc of the Covenant is perhaps being held today?
Speaker 1 (35:28):
There is there is an active legend in the Orthodox
Tajedo Church of Ethiopia that they do have the Ark
of the Covenant. You know, how seriously do you want
to take it? I don't know, you know, maybe somebody does,
Maybe if somebody doesn't. I'd have thought, given the nature
(35:49):
of things today, if they had it, they'd be there'd
be some interest in exhibiting it. Yeah. As far why
why they had the Book of Eno, I think we know, well,
I say, we know there's a story even in the
Acts of the Apostles that one of the first people
who ever got to hear about what was going on
(36:10):
in Jerusalem after the Crucifixion and the gathering of the
Jesus Movement in Jerusalem, that one of the first persons
is a person who is acquainted with the Queen of Ethiopia.
And if I remember, it's the apostle Philip who makes
that contact, and I think it's I forget the detail,
but if I remember, the Ethiopian goes back and quote
(36:32):
converts Ethiopia to the faith there. It is certainly the
case that the faith of the Jesus Movement is planted
in Ethiopia very early on. It's one of the two
or three countries that really embrace it. The other one
would be Armenia, which are they're also one of the
earliest countries. And also I think around Edessa was also
(36:59):
Christian and he really took root there. But because of
Ethiopia's relative obscurity, not much is reported of it. It
wasn't part of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire only
stretched as far as southern part of the Old Egyptian
Ptolemaic Egyptian Empire. So it was from the Roman point
(37:21):
of view in which the Church of Jesus grows, it
was beyond the bounds it's in. They would have thought
of it as a sort of barbarian, you know, unknown place,
even though people came from Ethiopia obviously, and we have
the story of the Queen of Sheba in the Old Testament,
(37:41):
but it was relatively obscure, and much more obscure when
the Roman when the Roman Empire collapses, the Western Roman
Empire in the sixth century, it becomes even more obscure.
And in the Dark Ages, and I believe they were
dark personally, very dark. Indeed, in the Dark Ages it
comes quite cut off. And the history of Theopy is
(38:03):
fascinating in that period because it's invaded by other tribes.
And I remember there's one foreign queen who for bad
Christianity and destroyed churches and things like this. So they
tenaciously held on to their Christian tradition and it's created
its own unique tradition. The Catholic Church in the eighteenth
(38:28):
century renewed its interest in bringing the Catholic interpretation of
the faith to Ethiopia. That's about the time that James
Bruce goes there and he met some of the monks
who had been tasked to go into it. They were
all scared to go, especially when they heard of the
adventures he'd had in the seventeen seventies. They didn't really
(38:53):
fancy walking into Ethiopia, which was rather subject to battles
and war lords fighting a bit like Afghani is done,
has been for many years. So they didn't fancy preaching
the word. They didn't think they were going to have
an easy time, these Capuchin monks, but that's that's that's
how they managed to keep their tradition. Of course, today
(39:15):
some some Christians in Ethiopia are a bit embarrassed now
because they've realized that they're the only place in the
whole Christian world that has the Book of Enoch as
part of its text. And obviously you've now got other
evangelical churches operating in Ethiopia who write against it and
(39:37):
say that it shouldn't be in their Bible, you know,
this sort of thing. So we're also getting that's another
interesting We're also getting Ethiopian scholars now contributing to the
to the dialogue and excitement of investigating this extraordinary text
or texts.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
I should say, why can we take from this now?
Like when we hear the predictions in the Bible, the
Second Coming, the thousand year reign, these kind of things.
What can we take from the Book of enact Does
it alter those predictions?
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Well, I would say that understanding the context of in
which those predictions emerge in the first century and before that,
before the build up obviously to the what we call
the apocalyptic narrative gets going around one sixty BC. And
(40:31):
this is where the emphasis in theological debate in Judaism
starts to move very heavily in the direction of end
of the world ism. I what is that line of
abra should should not the judge? Does not Abraham say
(40:54):
to God? Should not the judge of all the earth?
Do right? Well, we know that where as Ezekiel Jeremiah
had predicted that when the Babylonish captivity ended, things were
going to be better for the Jewish people, we know
that after the return of Jews from Babylon to parts
(41:17):
of Palestine that there was going to be It didn't
work out. Let's put it like that. It took years
to try and get some sort of temple together. They
were still under the control of the of the Syrians
and the and the Persians, and then later later the
(41:38):
Syrian Seleucids, who were the descendants of Alexander the greats generals,
and they had no real independence. So by the mid
second century BC, there's a kind of despair. Has God forgotten?
Has he failed to deliver on the prem promises that
(42:01):
the righteous would be rewarded with good times and that
they would be able to fully inherit the promised land.
And it's in that context of an oppressed still oppressed
and rather desperate people, and of heavily divided culture as well.
I mean the jew half the Jews favored in the
(42:22):
second century BC, you've got half the leaders of the
Jews are favoring the Seleucids in the north as Syrians,
and the others are favoring the Ptolemies from Egypt in
the south, and they don't know who to ally with
wears their best. You get a class of literature which
we call apocalyptic, which means apocalypsis to bring forth from hiding.
(42:46):
And this class of literature says, well, fear not. God
has always had this plan, and the times are now
leading very closely up to it, and the elect one
of God will come and he will lead the full
judgment of mankind. He will annihilate all evil. And this
(43:07):
is the context. Now if we don't understand this historic context.
You read things like the Book of Revelation, and you
read them without this context, you think, well, you can guess,
is this happening now? Is it happening today? Am I
living in the end times? There's always earthquakes, rumors of wars.
Will there's always been that. There's always been a rumor
(43:28):
of a war. There's always been earthquakes. Two thousand years,
especially with the Book of Enoch, it becomes absolutely clear
that these promises of the end are absolutely regarded as
imminent by the first century. In other words, the Jesus
movement flowers with difficulty exactly in this context of expecting
(43:54):
an imminent judgment. And that's absolutely plain from the Epistle
of Jude, who says, fear not, I know you, the
people who love Jesus are being persecuted and being brought
before the powers. But he's coming again. He's coming with
the angels, and you're going to see it, and we're
you know that all the empires, Roman Empire, and all
(44:16):
these oppressive forces are going to be got rid of. Well,
we know that that was the kind of hope that
led the Zelots to Masada. If you know the story,
and that in the end, by after the Barhaka Rebellion
(44:37):
in the second decade of the second century, the Jews
are kicked out of Jerusalem entirely. The Temple is leveled
and it's a pagan and the Jewish history and the
Temple history ends, and you have a completely diff In
other words, the Second Coming doesn't happen, and the Jews,
(45:00):
the Orthodox Jews, would say that the First Coming hadn't
happened either, So that coming simply gets projected into the future.
And in today's multi media electronic society, it is so
easy to ignite again these fantasies of the end time,
especially as now human beings have the capacity to bring
(45:22):
about their own end. So the idea of apocalypse, as
we saw in the Capola movie, has become completely misunderstood.
So we think of the apocalypse as a destructive thing,
whereas when these documents were written, it was a totally
hopeful thing. It was a positive thing. The emphasis wasn't
(45:43):
so much on the destruction, though the evil would be destroyed,
which is most people would think of a good thing.
It is that God's going to make a new heaven
and a new Earth, and the righteous will live there
forever and terrific. History's now wound up, a totally new
age begins. So obviously, if the more we know about
(46:08):
the history of these documents and the thought world in
which they develop, it's got to affect our own deepest
fears and concepts of our own future. It's no I
would this is my personal opinion. It is we simply
cannot rely on these documents to tell us what's happening now.
(46:31):
That doesn't mean they have no relevance, because I think
the conflict with evil has great relevance to us. Evil
is still very much present in ourselves, in our own attitudes,
in our stupidities, our blindnesses, our misreading of the things
around us, and of other people's motives. Politicians are always
(46:52):
there to take advantage of these fears, manipulate those fears,
develop movements that are allegedly going to cure us of
all these things we're afraid of, and so on. We
still have the problem of evil, we have to deal
with it. Who do we listen to? Well, I'd say
it's worth knowing about how man has dealt with evil
(47:16):
in previous times, and what conclusions they've come to, and
whether they have been the right conclusions. So I do
think we the debate about good and evil, and we'd
all like to think good will triumph in the end.
That is a basic faith that we have. But what
do we mean by end? Do we mean historically or
do we mean a transformation of the individual soul? What
(47:41):
kind of new age? Are we talking about an individual revelation?
Are we talking about a cultural breakthrough? And so on? Again.
Growing up in the sixties, there was the tremendously Inverticma's
apocalyptic feel that all of this sudden There was a
surge after World War II, almost like a denial of
(48:03):
the war. On one aspect that what, we're going to
the moon and everything, exploring the heavens for goodness sake,
we were actually suddenly far from being about to annihilate
ourselves with a nuclear weapons, that we were on the
verge of a new age of love and peace. I mean,
this was but of course that's a myth that's been
(48:25):
told after the event. Actually there was very little love
and peace in the sixties. I remember John Lennon only
started talking about love piece the peace thing, particularly at
the very end of the decade, and he was widely
ridiculed and regarded as quite mad. So actually the sixties
wasn't didn't have all of the patina that it's supposed
(48:47):
to have, but there were spiritual routes coming through. There
was the interest in Indian philosophy and personal transformation, all
a bit crude at the time, but these things are
coming through true, and people now have a much greater choice,
at least in our world, of where they find their
(49:09):
spiritual sustenance and you know, where they put their belief
and authority. We have to think about things ourselves more.
And obviously you don't have to, you can just accept
the package. But human being has been what they are.
I think we're curious people. We are we want to
(49:30):
investigate and we like I think truth has a wonderful flavor.
I think it has an aroma and you feel good
when you're near it. Not always the truth we'd like
to believe, but just truth. It is good to hear.
And that's why I do these books. I'm trying to
(49:51):
I'm trying to grapple with the possibilities that there's truth
in this material.
Speaker 2 (50:00):
Thank you so much, man, Thank you so much. Now,
Tobias Churtons dot com, people can find you there but
you don't do like a podcast or anything that you
don't share this kind of knowledge like on a monthly
basis or a weekly basis where people can listen to you.
Speaker 1 (50:15):
I do get asked to do podcasts and interviews.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Yeah, but what about just teaching.
Speaker 1 (50:22):
Well, I did run a course in Exeter University a
few years ago, or which I which I wrote, I
was asked to write, and it was an ma a
Master of Arts course in Western esotericism. And I lectured
there and that that was a good experience. And then
the man who'd arranged the original funding for the course
(50:43):
at the university died very suddenly, and the people who
were backing it couldn't find what they wanted as somebody
to lead the course, and the course ended. I thought
it was ridiculous they didn't ask me because I didn't
have a doctorate, you know. I when I when I
graduated from university, I went straight into the world of work.
(51:05):
And I've always paid for my own research, even though
I'm very much aware of what other academics are doing.
But I always wanted to be independent of an academic
So anyway, so that course folded, although it's influence still persists.
So my teaching is, if you like, is in my books,
which go out to all who would like to know
(51:26):
about them, and I'm if people ask me to speak
about it. I I especially the podcast I Will Will
Will come, And also I'd be happy to do. You know,
I don't mind doing lectures as long as they're not
too specific groups. I mean, I used to have a
lot to do with the with Freemasonry, and I still
(51:47):
get a lot of invitations. I'd rather speak to people
in general rather than particular particular groups.
Speaker 2 (51:53):
Personally, we're almost out a time. And one of the
things when I asked you, what does you really want
the ordience to know? And you said, the importance of
this book. What is the most important thing we're going
to take away from this book? The Books of Enoch revealed?
Speaker 1 (52:08):
I think it will transform our understanding of the origins
of Christianity and give us food for thought of the
kind of spiritual spirituality for us today and for the future.
Speaker 2 (52:29):
Should we have concerns that these angels or these will
come back and.
Speaker 1 (52:36):
We are the wicked angels, We are the ones who
lust after the daughters of men and create monsters. So true.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
We'll leave on that note, brother. Well, real quickly, you
did some work on Crowley too, What is your what
is your take on Crowley?
Speaker 1 (52:53):
In Alister Crowley, it was always pronounced Crowley as in
holy right. Well, I I thought I encountered Alista Crawley
when I was a theological student and a friend of
mine lent him. One of his lent me his Confessions book,
which is I found a magnificent read, and I could
never square what I was reading with the reputation that
(53:16):
he had acquired, and I came to the conclusion that
he was profoundly misrepresented. Though he is a difficult man
to understand in some ways, but I found it very fruitful.
There was he had a He had aspects of his
of his attitude and spirit, which I think we can
all benefit from. We don't have to accept his personal religion,
(53:38):
which is extraordinary and very peculiar, and again asks it
leads you to ask many questions. But I think he
was He's been unjustly maligned. That doesn't mean he's anything
like perfect or anything. I don't think so. But I
don't think he was a Satanist. In there in the
concept of the movies of somebody who worshiped the devil
(53:59):
and relished the idea of evil triumphing or a world
in the grip of wicked forces. I don't think he
was a wicked I think he was extremely naughty, but
in the Victorian sense, he never quite in some aspects,
he never quite grew up. But he did love sex,
and he linked sex with spirituality, and I think that's
(54:22):
what he's been hated for most of all. Is very
disturbing for people that people like sex over here and
religion over there, and for him, he felt that sex
had been denigrated and put in the gutter, and that
its divine potential hadn't been explored. And he was pretty
fearless in that. Some of his poetry is very good,
(54:45):
and he's a wonderful writer at his best, his bloody
good writer. And he had had horribly difficult life in
many ways, but he never gave up, and he never
became a depressive. And I think there are aspects aspects
of his life, which is why I wrote the sixth
volume biography, which are instructive and if not instructive, extremely entertaining.
Speaker 2 (55:10):
Tobias charton. Thank you so much. I really really enjoyed this,
and I hope you remember me and next time you
have a project or something old, you'llver call me and
come back on the show you know, or anything you
want to talk about ever, And I would love to
have you back. I really great.
Speaker 1 (55:24):
Well I hope you remember me too well.
Speaker 2 (55:26):
I'm not going to forget you Tobias Churton dot com.
And the book we've been talking about today is The
Books of Enoch Revealed and it sounds like an incredible,
incredible research and brilliant working at books. So thank you
so much, sir, my pleasure, thank you. Connect
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