The Book of Enoch

The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish apocalyptic work attributed to the antediluvian patriarch Enoch, who "walked with God." Composed in stages in the last centuries BCE and preserved complete in Ge'ez, it contains some of the earliest developed angelology and heavenly cosmology in the Western tradition.

Its story of the Watchers — angels who descend, take human wives, and teach forbidden arts — supplies an origin myth for evil and hidden knowledge that shaped later demonology and esoteric lore. Enoch is carried through the heavens and shown the secret order of the cosmos, the courses of the luminaries, and the judgement of souls, framing the visible world as the surface of a vast unseen architecture.

Excluded from most later canons, it nonetheless marked early Christianity, Kabbalah, and centuries of Western occultism, where Enoch becomes the archetype of the human being who ascends by knowledge to walk among the angels.