Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, March 2025
The Books of Enoch Revealed:
The Wicked Watchers, Metatron, and the
Fruits of Forbidden Knowledge
By Tobias Churton
Inner Traditions
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
www.InnerTraditions.com
2025, 416 pages, Paperback, U.S. 24.99
ISBN: 978-1-64411-925-9
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
British author Tobias Churton is a recognized authority on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism. In 2005 he was appointed Honorary Fellow of Exeter University specializing in Western Esotericism. He’s a prolific writer who has penned such previous titles as The Lost Pillars of Enoch and Gnostic Philosophy, and produced biographies about Elias Ashmole, William Blake, Aleister Crowley, and G. I. Gurdjieff.
In this latest volume, The Books of Enoch Revealed, Churton succeeds in presenting a comprehensive and scholarly examination of the complex history of the legendary biblical patriarch Enoch. Striving diligently to leave no stone unturned, Churton delves into every historical trace of the prophet Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, from the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the Slavonic “Book of the Secrets of Enoch,” the Hebrew “Book of Enoch,” and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mitch Horowitz, author of Modern Occultism, describes Churton as “one of the few living scholars capable of disassembling and reassembling all the moving parts without losing any along the way.” Andrew Collins, author of The Ashes of Angels, notes how the author “shows the text’s origins, its influences, and its impact on the early Christian world before its eventual banishment into oblivion and its eventual rediscovery by Scottish Freemason James Bruce in the eighteenth century.” Many revealing historical threads are pulled in this author’s stringent efforts to flesh out as much information and insight as possible in this endeavor. Many of them are threads that most readers have no idea even exist. One of these very significant threads is the thirteenth century Jewish “Book of Splendor,” commonly referred to as Zohar. Then too there’s the Book of Jubilees, the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Adam and Eve, the Book of Noah, and many other historical threads that mention Enoch.
Churton is a major historical scholar of our present time who has managed to turn back the many faded and forgotten pages of ancient times and provided deeper insights and understandings about various significant aspects from those very early epochs.
