A Discussion of Enoch between Rumormills and Vatic Project

[I am posting this as a supplement to Seawitch's post. This might be considered an executive summary of some of the material in the Vatic post and its original source material athttp://www.reversespins.com/enoch.html, which is much longer and more detailed. My original version of the post below was here: http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/read/216889 ]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Verses 1-4 of Genesis 6 have always been considered very peculiar:

¹And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, ²That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. ³And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. ¹There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.
- Genesis 6:1-4

This passage has been giving religious scholars headaches for centuries. It has the appearance of being a way-too-compressed version of some longer account. That longer account is thought by some to be the long-suppressed Book of Enoch. Until perhaps the second century A.D., the Book of Enoch was revered by Christians and Jews alike. Then it was decided there was a problem with it, it had to be suppressed. It was thought that all copies had been destroyed. But then it turned up in the archives of the Ethiopian Coptic Church in the 1800′s.

What was it about the Book of Enoch that made it seem so dangerous to the religious authorities? Apparently it was the idea that fallen angels, cast out of heaven, fell to Earth and basically took over, corrupting human civilization, raising the possibility that they and/or their descendants may still be here doing exactly that to this day. The religions were too intertwined with the power elite to allow such a concept to be given credence. So the Book of Enoch had to go.

Basically, the story given in the Book of Enoch, in Chapter 7onwards, is that a group of 200 angels concluded that Earth girls were hot, and they wanted some of the action. So unlike the earlier fallen angels, the third of heaven who were driven out with Lucifer, having fallen from pride, these 200 fell from lust. They took human form and cut their swaths among the Earth maidens, meanwhile teaching all kinds of iniquity such as war and vanity and lust and greed. Their offspring were the proverbial “giants among men”, basically taking over through terrorizing us mere mortals into submission.

This theory is best presented to my mind by none other than Elizabeth Clare Prophet, in “Forbidden Mysteries of Enoch: Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil” (1983). Yes, Ms. Prophet is the sect leader who predicted nuclear war for April 23, 1990 and had all her followers hide in fallout shelters. Her organization understandably declined after that. But Forbidden Mysteries of Enoch is a fairly level-headed work, with interesting commentary and fascinating footnotes, and containing the complete text of the Book of Enoch, and also the related Book of the Secrets of Enoch, and various other apocryphal texts and appendices. I prefer the earliest edition, titled as above.
The first chapter of a later edition, not too much changed from the original, is available online here:

http://www.aim-e.eu/documents/men_and_angels/of_men_and_angles.pdf
As for the Book of Enoch itself, there are two different translations available online:
R. Laurence translation, aside from the link in the above text, is also available here:
Part 1: http://reluctant-messenger.com/1enoch01-60.htm
Part 2: http://reluctant-messenger.com/1enoch61-105.htm

R.H. Charles translation:
http://nazirene.org/The_Book_of_Enoch.htm
Complete audio reading of the R.H. Charles edition:

Below is a picture of the edition of Ms. Prophet’s book that I have: ISBN 0916766608. This edition, besides her 84 page discourse on Enoch, contains the full text of The Book Of Enoch (Laurence), The Book Of The Secrets of Enoch, and The Book Of Jubilees. Later editions are not identical. Especially to be avoided, in my opinion, is “Fallen Angels Among Us: What You Need To Know”, which is mostly a pastiche of her posthumously published material.