Chapter xcii. records a series of prophecies extending from Enoch's own time to about one thousand years beyond the present generation,[148]
is faulty. The prophecies extend to the end of our present Race, not merely to a “thousand years” hence. Very true that:
In the system of [Christian] chronology adopted, a day stands [occasionally] for a hundred, and a week for seven hundred years.[149]
But this is an arbitrary and fanciful system adopted by Christians to make Biblical chronology fit with facts or theories, and does not represent the original thought. The “days” stand for the undetermined periods of the Side-Races, and the “weeks” for the Sub-Races, the Root-Races being referred to by an expression that is not even found in the English translation. Moreover the sentence at the bottom of page 150:
Subsequently, in the fourth week ... the visions of the holy and the righteous shall be seen, the order of generation after generation shall take place,[150]
is quite wrong. It stands in the original: “the order of generation after generation had taken place on the earth,” etc.; that is, after the first human race procreated in the truly human way had sprung up in the Third Root-Race; a change which entirely alters the meaning. Then all that is given in the translation—as very likely also in the Ethiopic text, since the copies have been sorely tampered with—as about things which were to happen in the future, is, we are informed, in the past tense in the original Chaldæan MSS., and is not prophecy, but a narrative of what had already come to pass. When Enoch begins “to speak from a book”[151] he is reading the account [pg 086] given by a great Seer, and the prophecies are not his own, but are from the Seer. Enoch or Enoichion means “internal eye” or Seer. Thus every Prophet and Adept may be called “Enoichion,” without becoming a pseudo-Enoch. But here, the Seer who compiled the present Book of Enoch is distinctly shown as reading out from a book:
I have been born the seventh in the first week [the seventh branch, or Side-Race, of the first Sub-Race, after physical generation had begun, namely, in the third Root-Race].... But after me, in the second week [second Sub-Race] great wickedness shall arise [arose, rather] and in that week the end of the first shall take place, in which mankind shall be safe. But when the first is completed iniquity shall grow up.[152]
As translated it has no sense. As it stands in the Esoteric text, it simply means, that the First Root-Race shall come to an end during the second Sub-Race of the Third Root-Race, in the period of which time mankind will be safe; all this having no reference whatever to the biblical Deluge. Verse 10th speaks of the sixth week [sixth Sub-Race of the Third Root-Race] when
All those who are in it shall be darkened, the hearts of all of them shall be forgetful of wisdom [the divine knowledge will be dying out] and in it shall a man ascend.
This “man” is taken by the interpreters, for some mysterious reasons of their own, to mean Nebuchadnezzar; he is in reality the first Hierophant of the purely human Race (after the allegorical Fall into generation) selected to perpetuate the dying Wisdom of the Devas (Angels or Elohim). He is the first “Son of Man”—the mysterious appellation given to the divine Initiates of the first human school of the Mânushi (men), at the very close of the Third Root-Race. He is also called the “Saviour,” as it was He, with the other Hierophants, who saved the Elect and the Perfect from the geological conflagration, leaving to perish in the cataclysm of the Close[153] those who forgot the primeval wisdom in sexual sensuality.