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Angel, by Edward Burne-Jones, 1878 [Public Domain Image]

The Book of Enoch the Prophet tr. by Richard Laurence [1883]

The book of Enoch is one of the strangest of the books left out of the Biblical canon. Filled with goetic angels and demons, and visions of inconceivable lands beyond the sky, writers have tied Enoch into everything from archaeoastronomy, Astrology, Alchemy, the Kabbalah, and Gnosticism. In the middle of this is what appears (to me, at least) to be an operations manual for a Neolithic observatory, with rules for when to look for various celestial bodies through 'gates.'

Before the 1917 R.H. Charles translation of the Book of Enoch, was the 1883 Laurence translation. This is the translation that many of the prominent 19th century esoteric scholars read, particularly Madam Blavatsky. While it doesn't have as much critical apparatus as the Charles translation, it does have a certain poetry lacking in the more modern, critical edition.

Production Notes: I've divided the files not at the chapter boundaries, but into files of 20 chapters for the convenience of readers. Many of the chapters are quite short, and they are not numbered sequentially due to inconsistencies in the two source editions.

--J.B. Hare, Jan. 30, 2008