It seems inexplicable to find, to this day, authors belonging to mystical societies who yet continue in their preconceived doubts as to the “alleged” antiquity of the Book of Enoch. Thus, while the author of the Sacred Mysteries among the Mayas and Quiches is inclined to see in Enoch an Initiate converted to Christianity (!!),[1168] the English compiler of Éliphas Lévi's works, The Mysteries of Magic, is also of a like opinion. He remarks that:
Outside the erudition of Dr. Kenealy, no modern scholarship attributes any more remote antiquity to the latter work [the Book of Enoch] than the fourth century b.c.[1169]
Modern scholarship has been guilty of worse errors than this one. It seems but yesterday that the greatest literary critics in Europe denied the very authenticity of that work, together with the Orphic Hymns, and even the Book of Hermes or Thoth, until whole verses from the latter were discovered on Egyptian monuments and tombs of the [pg 533] earliest dynasties. The opinion of Archbishop Laurence is quoted elsewhere.
The “Old Dragon” and Satan, which have now become singly and collectively the symbol of, and the theological term for, the “Fallen Angel,” are not so described either in the original Kabalah (the Chaldæan Book of Numbers) or in the modern. For the most learned, if not the greatest of modern Kabalists, namely Éliphas Lévi, describes Satan in the following glowing terms:
It is that Angel who was proud enough to believe himself God; brave enough to buy his independence at the price of eternal suffering and torture; beautiful enough to have adored himself in full divine light; strong enough to still reign in darkness amidst agony, and to have made himself a throne out of his inextinguishable pyre. It is the Satan of the republican and heretical Milton ... the prince of anarchy, served by a hierarchy of pure spirits(!!).[1170]
This description—one which reconciles so cunningly Theological dogma and Kabalistic allegory, and even contrives to include a political compliment in its phraseology—is, when read in the right spirit, quite correct.
Yes, indeed; it is this grandest of ideals, this ever-living symbol—nay apotheosis—of self-sacrifice for the intellectual independence of humanity; this ever Active Energy protesting against Static Inertia—the principle to which Self-assertion is a crime, and Thought and the Light of Knowledge odious. As Éliphas says with unparalleled justice and irony:
It is this pretended hero of tenebrous eternities, who, slanderously charged with ugliness, is decorated with horns and claws, which would fit far better his implacable tormentor.[1171]
It is he who has been finally transformed into a Serpent—the Red Dragon. But Éliphas Lévi was yet too subservient to his Roman Catholic authorities—one may add, too jesuitical—to confess that this Devil was mankind, and never had any existence on Earth outside of that mankind.[1172]
In this, Christian Theology, although following slavishly in the steps of Paganism, has only been true to its own time-honoured policy. It [pg 534] had to isolate itself, and to assert its authority. Hence it could not do better than turn every Pagan Deity into a Devil. Every bright Sun-God of antiquity—a glorious Deity by day, and its own Opponent and Adversary by night, named the Dragon of Wisdom, because it was supposed to contain the germs of night and day—has now been turned into the antithetical Shadow of God, and has become Satan on the sole and unsupported authority of despotic human dogma. After which all these producers of light and shadow, all the Sun- and the Moon-Gods, have been cursed, and thus the one God chosen out of the many and Satan have both been anthropomorphized. But Theology seems to have lost sight of the human capacity for discriminating and finally analyzing all that is artificially forced upon its reverence. History shows in every race and even tribe, especially in the Semitic nations, the natural impulse to exalt its own tribal deity above all others to the hegemony of the Gods, and proves that the God of the Israelites was such a tribal God, and no more, even though the Christian Church, following the lead of the “chosen” people, is pleased to enforce the worship of that one particular deity, and to anathematize all the others. Whether originally a conscious or an unconscious blunder, nevertheless, it was one. Jehovah has ever been in antiquity only a God “among” other “Gods.”[1173] The Lord appears to Abraham, and while saying, “I am the Almighty God,” yet adds, “I will establish my covenant ... to be a God unto thee” (Abraham); and unto his seed after him[1174]—but not unto Âryan Europeans.