The Atlantis Blueprint (27 page)

A glance at this strange manuscript must have told Bruce why early Christian scholars had regarded it as so important – it claimed to be a vital missing portion of the history of the world. Enoch was the grandson of Adam and the son of Cain, and was also, in turn, the father of Methuselah, who was in turn the grandfather of Noah. Bruce may have considered it merely as an interesting extension of the Biblical canon; he was a highly educated Scot, living in the age of Voltaire and Gibbon, who may have regarded the contents of the Book of Enoch as so much quaint and absurd myth. On the other hand, as a Freemason it is equally possible that he read Enoch with intense personal interest because of the Masons’ ancient tradition that Enoch had foreseen the destruction of the world by the great flood.

This was in 1770, a year after he had arrived in Abyssinia. When he returned from Gondar, a civil war was taking place. Bruce decided to join in, since he was an army commander, but it ended in the defeat and flight of Ras Michael and the slaughter of his followers.

Bruce survived and was able to leave the country he had come to detest. It was a long and exhausting trip back to civilisation – about eighteen months – and he spent some time recuperating in Italy and Paris before finally returning to London in June 1774.

This exotic story had no happy ending. We might expect that Bruce’s travels would have brought him fame, for the eighteenth century dearly loved travellers’ tales – James Boswell had become a celebrity on the strength of visiting Corsica, while an impostor named George Psalmanazar who claimed to be a native of Formosa (now Taiwan) acquired fame and became a close friend of Dr Johnson. Bruce’s reception was more like that of Marco Polo on his return from China; those who had read Marco’s travels took them for fiction. James Bruce suffered a similar reception when he told his stories of men eating steaks off live cattle and chopping off parts of their fellow human beings with the same ferocity. People listened politely, hiding a smile of disbelief, which may have been partly because of the manner in which Bruce told the story, for he was unable to conceal his high opinion of himself.

He went to London, found a needy clergyman called Latrobe, and spent a year dictating his
Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile.
He promised to pay his amanuensis when the five volumes were finished, although it is typical of his mean and ungenerous nature that he delayed payment then tried to fob Latrobe off with five guineas. It is almost satisfying to record that the book was received with malice and derision. He died five years later after tripping on the stairs and falling on his head.

It has to be admitted that, for all his character defects, Bruce produced one of the great travel books. He had also performed another important service to literature by bringing back the Book of Enoch – no fewer than three copies, in fact, one of which he presented to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and another to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (he kept the
third himself, next to the Book of Job, where he claimed it belonged). Once again, his timing was poor. In the midst of the Age of Enlightenment, interest in religion was at a low ebb and churches were half empty. Nobody was interested in an obscure apocryphal book of the Bible, and it remained untranslated.

The Book of Enoch finally appeared in English in 1821, more than a quarter of a century after Bruce’s death, translated by a Hebrew scholar named Richard Laurence. At least the world was now ready for it – the age of Romanticism had arrived, with its interest in ghosts, demons and the supernatural. This story of libidinous fallen angels thrilled a wide audience.

We might say that the Book of Enoch takes its origin from the passage in Genesis 6 that tells how the sons of God – angels – took note of the fact that the daughters of men were fair and decided to take them as wives. And then ‘there were giants in the earth in those days… when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, and the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown’.

The Book of Enoch elaborates this story. It seems that in the days of Jared, Enoch’s father, 200 rebel ‘angels’, who are called the Watchers, descended on the top of Mount Hermon, over 9,000 feet high, and prepared to go down to the plains with the intention of having sexual intercourse with mortal women.

According to Enoch, it would seem that the rebel Watchers took mortal women into their beds, and their mistresses gave birth to ‘giants’ who were virtually ungovernable. They began to ‘devour’ human beings and developed a taste for blood. The simplest way to make sense of this passage is to assume that the offspring of the Watchers became violent and warlike, rather like the Abyssinians of Bruce’s day, whose endless brutality caused him to flee the country. It seems that the rebel angels also taught men the art of making weapons by
smelting metal, and that they encouraged sexual licence by teaching women how to wear ornaments and use make-up. They also instructed them in sorcery and ritual magic. The picture that emerges is that of an early tribal civilisation, where the women had so far been accustomed to bearing children and doing the hard work. The Watchers taught them that life could be more enjoyable if they treated sex as a means of pleasure. They also taught them how to abort any unwanted results of their promiscuity.

Modern readers might view this without disapproval, feeling that the women of that time probably needed encouragement towards liberation, which was, in fact, the view taken by Romantics such as Lord Byron and his friend Thomas Moore. Byron’s play
Heaven and Earth
appeared in the same year as the translation of the Book of Enoch, and is based on the passage in Genesis about the sons of God taking the daughters of men for wives. It ends with a spectacular evocation of the flood, and the notes mention that ‘the Book of Enoch, preserved by the Ethiopians, is said by them to be anterior to the flood’. In 1823, Moore published a poem, ‘The Loves of the Angels’, based on the same subject.

The rebel Watchers were not simply instructors in debauchery; one taught astronomy, another astrology, another knowledge of the clouds, another how to counter magic spells, and others knowledge of the sun, moon and earth. Despite their intentions, God decided they had to be punished, and sent off his own Watchers, including Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, to enforce his will. (These servants of God are also called Watchers, suggesting that not all the Watchers were rebel spirits.) The rebel Watchers were rounded up and imprisoned. (The God of the Old Testament seems to be as merciless as any human tyrant.) According to Andrew Collins, whose book
From the Ashes of Angels
(1996)4 is perhaps the best introduction to this topic, the location of the imprisonment of the rebel Watchers was close to the place where they descended, on Mount Hermon.

And so God decided to cleanse the earth with a great flood, of which the only survivor was Noah. But before that, Enoch has a further story to tell. It seems that his son Methuselah had a son named Lamech, whose wife bore a child, Noah. His appearance came as a shock to his father: the baby’s skin was not the same colour as that of other natives of the Middle East, that is to say, brown, but pure white and rosy red, like that of some native of a northern country. His hair was also white and his eyes were so beautiful that they seemed to light up the room.

Lamech went to Methuselah, and told his father, I have begotten a strange son, not like a human being, but more like the children of the angels…’ Lamech suspected that his son had been fathered by one of the Watchers. Methuselah was unable to reassure him, but went off in search of his father, Enoch, who had retired to a far-off land (called Paradise in a fragment of the same story found among the Dead Sea Scrolls). Enoch told Methuselah to reassure his son. The newborn child was indeed his own, and he was to be named Noah. Enoch had foreseen in a vision that the world was going to be destroyed by a deluge, but that Noah and his children would ‘be saved from the corruption’ that would engulf the earth. (It is apparent these events take place before the rebel Watchers arrived on earth.) So it seemed that God had chosen Noah as the father of the new race of humanity.

Still, one cannot help feeling a mild suspicion that Enoch may not have been entirely truthful with Methuselah, and that perhaps this future race would have a touch of the fallen angel in its composition…

The Book of Enoch that Bruce brought back from Abyssinia was not the only version. In fact, many later fragments were found, even in Greek and Latin; yet another, in the Slavonic language, contained some interesting additions to the story.

We should note that the Book of Enoch was not written down until about 200
BC,
almost certainly by some member of
the Essene community at Qumran on the Dead Sea, but the oral tradition was much older. The Slavonic version, known as
The Secrets of Enoch
,
⁵
was probably compiled by a Jewish writer living in Alexandria around the time of Jesus.

It contains the account which opens this chapter of Enoch’s abduction by tall beings to a place of continuous light which was covered in snow and ice.

After they reach their destination Enoch is then taken on a tour that includes a hideous pit which became the prototype for the Christian hell:

Hell was a Christian concept that – like the Devil – was unknown to the Jews. ‘Sheol’, sometimes translated as ‘hell’, simply meant a place where rubbish was destroyed, and this passage, which seems to prefigure Dante’s Inferno, was probably a major reason that the Book of Enoch ‘vanished’. The idea that ‘heaven’ might include a place of torment would have been unacceptable to the Church Fathers.

After his glimpse of ‘hell’, Enoch was taken on a tour – this time by the angel Raphael – around Paradise, or the ‘Garden of Righteousness’. This seems to be the Garden of Eden, for when he commented on a particularly beautiful tree with a
delicious fragrance, he was told that this was the Tree of Knowledge from which Eve plucked one of the fruits (apparently these fruits hung in clusters like grapes, so they cannot be apples). What seemed to be worrying the Lord – who is referred to as Yahweh-Elohim – is a second tree called the Tree of Life. If man ate the fruits of this tree, his life would be immensely extended.

Now comes one of the most interesting passages in the Book of Enoch: ‘And I saw in those days how long cords were given to the Angels, and they took themselves wings and flew, and went towards the north. And I asked an Angel, saying unto him: “Why have they taken cords and gone off?” and he replied: “They have gone to measure.”’

Knotted ‘cords’ were used by Egyptian priests to plan their temples. These cords were nothing less than practical geometric survey tools. Christian O’Brien, an engineer with surveying experience, translates this passage into secular terms: ‘Then I saw how long measuring “tapes” were given to some of the angels and they hurried off towards the north. So I asked the angel with me why the others had taken tapes and gone away, and he replied, “They have gone to make a survey”’
⁷

Angels undertaking a survey? It doesn’t make sense within the Christian concept of angels. But what if these beings were ancient scientists pursuing a geological and geographic survey?

For the Book of Enoch also reveals the all-important purpose of the survey with the words: And these measures shall reveal all the secrets of the depths of the earth…’8
The survey was geological.

Rand was familiar with Andrew Collins’s book
From the Ashes of Angels,
which recounts the story of Enoch. Collins describes how, in the late nineteenth century, the Babylonian Expedition from the University of Pennsylvania discovered fragments of a broken clay cylinder at Nippur, in what was still called Mesopotamia. They were found in the temple of

Enlil, the supreme god of the Sumerians, less important only than Anu, Lord of the Universe, and were written in cuneiform wedge script. We may recall the tablets found in the mound of Kuyunjik in 1852, which proved to contain the epic of
Gilgamesh,
and might be forgiven for assuming that the translation of this cylinder became a matter of prime importance, but it was taken back to the University of Philadelphia by Professor Herman V. Hilprecht, where it was left in the basement of the museum, still in its packing case.

Hilprecht is known to the history of psychical research through another curious incident involving Nippur. In 1893, he was trying to decipher the inscription on what he believed was a ring from the temple of Bel. Exhausted by the fruitless effort, he fell asleep and dreamed that the priest of the temple of Bel showed him the treasure chamber and explained that the ‘ring’ was part of a votive cylinder that had been cut into three. Ordered suddenly to make earrings for Bel’s son Ninib, the priest had decided to carve up the cylinder. The third part, said the priest, would never be found, but the second part was still in existence.

The next day, armed with the new information, Hilprecht found that his dream had been correct. The second ring did exist among the catalogued items, and when the two parts were fitted together an inscription to the god Ninib could be read. It was later verified that the two rings had come from the treasure chamber of the temple of Bel. As the priest in the dream said, the third part was never located.

Another twenty years would pass before a professor from Bryn Mawr named George Aaron Barton assembled the fragments, scattered in three boxes. His discovery initially filled him with excitement. This was not a list of temple treasures, or even a hymn to Enlil, but a long, continuous narrative that deserved comparison with
Gilgamesh.
It was, Barton thought, possibly the oldest text in the world, and was nine tablets long. Barton ultimately concluded, though, that this was simply a version of the Sumerian creation myth. His translation of it, in
a volume called
Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions
(1918),
⁹
failed to excite even his colleagues, still less the general public, which was more concerned with the end of the Great War.