"Overall, I enjoyed The Lost Pillars of Enoch very much. The author presented a large amount of historical information in a balanced and insightful way, along with an occasional dose of humor that lightened the otherwise heavy subject matter. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in esoteric history and hermeticism. I’ve gained insight into how many of our current day ideas about spirituality, prophecy, and science have developed over time, and I’m encouraged that many of the myths we hold dear still have an important message for us."

Autorentext

Britain’s leading scholar of Western esotericism, Tobias Churton is a world author­ity on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. Holding a master’s degree in theology from Brasenose College, Oxford, he was appointed Honorary Fellow of Exeter University in 2005. The author of many books, including Gnostic Philosophy and Aleister Crowley in America, he lives in the heart of England.

Klappentext

Explores the unified science-religion of early humanity and the impact of Hermetic philosophy on religion and spirituality

• Investigates the Jewish and Egyptian origins of Josephus’s famous story that Seth’s descendants inscribed knowledge on two pillars to save it from global catastrophe

• Reveals how this original knowledge has influenced civilization through Hermetic, Gnostic, Kabbalistic, Masonic, Hindu, and Islamic mystical knowledge

• Examines how “Enoch’s Pillars” relate to the origins of Hermeticism, Freemasonry, Newtonian science, William Blake, and Theosophy

Esoteric tradition has long maintained that at the dawn of human civilization there existed a unified science-religion, a spiritual grasp of the universe and our place in it. The biblical Enoch--also known as Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth, or Idris--was seen as the guardian of this sacred knowledge, which was inscribed on pillars known as Enoch’s or Seth’s pillars.

Examining the idea of the lost pillars of pure knowledge, the sacred science behind Hermetic philosophy, Tobias Churton investigates the controversial Jewish and Egyptian origins of Josephus’s famous story that Seth’s descendants inscribed knowledge on two pillars to save it from global catastrophe. He traces the fragments of this sacred knowledge as it descended through the ages into initiated circles, influencing civilization through Hermetic, Gnostic, Kabbalistic, Masonic, Hindu, and Islamic mystical knowledge. He follows the path of the pillars’ fragments through Egyptian alchemy and the Gnostic Sethites, the Kabbalah, and medieval mystic Ramon Llull. He explores the arrival of the Hermetic manuscripts in Renaissance Florence, the philosophy of Copernicus, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, and the origins of Freemasonry, including the “revival” of Enoch in Masonry’s Scottish Rite. He reveals the centrality of primal knowledge to Isaac Newton, William Stukeley, John Dee, and William Blake, resurfacing as the tradition of Martinism, Theosophy, and Thelema. Churton also unravels what Josephus meant when he asserted one Sethite pillar still stood in the “Seiriadic” land: land of Sirius worshippers.

Showing how the lost pillars stand as a twenty-first century symbol for reattaining our heritage, Churton ultimately reveals how the esoteric strands of all religions unite in a gnosis that could offer a basis for reuniting religion and science.

Leseprobe
From Chapter 1. Saving Knowledge from Catastrophe
The World’s First Archaeological Story

Our investigation begins with a little-known story about the origins of knowledge--little known, but not without influence. Arguably the world’s first-ever story of archaeology, Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote it down in the 80s of the first century CE, that is about fifty years after his countryman Jesus was crucified.

A guest of the Flavian imperial dynasty in Rome (hence “Flavius”), Josephus hoped his history--The Antiquities of the Jews--would help Greek-reading Romans better appreciate Jewish people. This was timely. Thousands of Jewish warriors had been slaughtered during the previous two decades by imperial troops confronted with religiously motivated “zealots” trying to overthrow Roman jurisdiction. Having joined the rebels himself in the war’s early stages, Josephus shrewdly submitted to Rome, proclaiming that Roman general Vespasian fulfilled the East’s widespread expectation of a savior. When Vespasian established the Flavian dynasty as emperor in 69 CE, Josephus was rewarded.

Josephus wanted Romans to see that not all Jews were persistent rebels, nor were they habitually addicted to crazy beliefs. On the contrary, Josephus’s ancestors were, by Roman standards, rational people maintaining comprehensible traditions, supported by respectable ancient texts compiled long before Roman history began. Confident in his mission, Josephus believed that by presenting Jewish history, he was preserving truth for all humanity because Jewish history took everyone back to the beginning.

The progeny of the first human being is described by Josephus in Antiquities’ second chapter: Adam was not only the Jews’ ancestor, he was the Romans’ ancestor too.

The human race, however, got off to a bad start. Adam’s son Cain fathered a line of wicked reprobates, tainted by Cain’s outrageous murder of pious brother, Abel. Fortunately, Adam and Eve produced a third son, Seth. Seth fathered a lineage distinguished by respect for God and honorable conduct toward God’s creatures: virtues rewarded by access to knowledge of higher things. Josephus describes the higher things in terms of awareness of God, farsighted inventiveness, and knowledge of astronomy.

“They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And that their inventions might not be lost before they were sufficiently known, upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water, they made two pillars, the one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries on them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of Siriad to this day.”1

Josephus’s compelling image of antediluvian pillars is unique. Nowhere does it appear in the Hebrew Bible. In the Bible, pillars generally receive more bad press than good because Hebrew prophets perennially associated them with idolatry. We don’t know whence Josephus obtained his pillars story, or--and this is important--what the original story may have lost in Josephus’s rather casual telling of it. I say this because Josephus’s history frequently glosses over what non-Jews might find difficult. His pillar story utilizes his distinctive style of ameliorative, urbanely philosophical apologetic. For example, Josephus does not labor the point that conflagrations of fire and water were horrific punishments sent by an outraged deity determined to exterminate humanity--and practically everything else on earth. Josephus may have suspected such an emphasis might offend his Gentile audience with the whiff of unrestrained or fanatical vengeance, and Josephus knew very well that it was apocalyptic predictions of an imminent end of the world in favor of a national savior that had recently motivated Jewish zealots to rise against Rome. Such activities left Jews suspected, and heavily…