Egyptian-Hebrew stream·The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch)·Book I — Book of the Watchers·Chapter XVII — Enoch's First Tour: the Storehouses
Mountains of darkness; rivers of fire
Enoch is led to a place where he beholds mountains of darkness, the storehouses of all the winds, the foundations of the earth, the cornerstone of the earth, the four winds that bear the firmament, and the river of fire that flows into the great sea of the west.
Source context
- Theme
- Enoch's guided tour through cosmic regions: fire, rivers of darkness, luminaries, and the abyss at the ends of the earth
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Mesopotamian cosmology (Gilgamesh Epic)Cross-tradition congruence appears in the Gilgamesh journey to the waters at the world's edge and the mountains where sun-gods dwell, structurally parallel to Enoch's traversal of fire, darkness, and the cosmic rivers in Chapter XVII.
- Platonic cosmology (Phaedo, Timaeus)Cross-tradition congruence is present in Plato's descriptions of subterranean rivers, rivers of fire, and the outermost bounds of the cosmos as loci of cosmic order and judgment, paralleling the spatial schema of Chapter XVII.
- Egyptian funerary tradition (Amduat)Cross-tradition congruence appears in the Amduat's sequential traversal of the twelve hours of night — regions of fire, darkness, and luminous bodies — structurally analogous to Enoch's guided cosmological itinerary.
Chapter XVII
XVII-XXXVII. Enoch's Journeys through the Earth and Sheol.
XVII-XIX. The First Journey.
CHAPTER XVII.
1And they took ⌈and⌉ brought me to a place in which those who were there were like flaming fire, and, when they wished, they appeared as men. 2. And they brought me to the place of darkness, and to a mountain the point of whose summit reached to heaven. 3. And I saw the places of the luminaries ⌈and the treasuries of the stars⌉ and of the thunder ⌈and⌉ in the **uttermost depths**, where were a fiery bow and arrows and their quiver, and ⌈⌈a fiery sword⌉⌉ and all the lightnings. 4. And they took me to the living waters, and to the fire of the west, which receives every setting of the sun. 5. And I came to a river of fire in which the fire flows like water and discharges itself into the great sea towards the west. 6. I saw the great rivers and came to the great ⌈river and to the great⌉ darkness, and went to the place where no flesh walks. 7. I saw the mountains of the darkness of winter and the place whence all the waters of the deep flow. 8. I saw the mouths of all the rivers of the earth and the mouth of the deep.
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