Enoch and Idris

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Enoch and Idris are two names for what later tradition treated as one man: a sage so close to God that he did not die but was taken up alive, and who left behind a body of revealed wisdom. The identification runs from the Hebrew scriptures through the Quran into Islamic, Jewish, and Western esoteric thought, where the same figure is also recognised as Hermes Trismegistus.

The starting point is a single, famously brief verse. Genesis says only that Enoch, seventh from Adam, “walked with God; and he was not, for God took him” — and reports a lifespan of 365 years, the number of days in the solar year. Around that silence grew a large literature. The books gathered as 1 Enoch, composed across the last centuries before the Common Era, expand the figure into a visionary carried through the heavens, shown the courses of the stars, the storehouses of the winds, and the fate of the dead, and made the scribe of judgment. Scholarship treats these works as the product of several authors and periods, central to the Judaism of the Second Temple and preserved in full only in the Ethiopian church; later rabbinic tradition went further still, and in some texts the ascended Enoch becomes the angel Metatron.

Islam received the figure through the Quran, which names a prophet Idris twice and calls him truthful, a prophet, and one whom God “raised to a high place.” Early Muslim exegetes identified Idris with Enoch, and credited him with the first writing, the first tailoring of garments, and the study of the stars. It was Muslim scholars, drawing on late-antique learning, who then drew the third strand in: the astrologer Abu Maʿshar and others spoke of three figures named Hermes, the first of whom — the antediluvian teacher who raised wisdom before the Flood — was Idris, and so Enoch. Through this chain the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus and the biblical patriarch were held to be the same person, the source of astronomy, the calendar, and the hidden sciences.

What the traditions share is a particular kind of figure: not a lawgiver or a warner but a knower, one taken up rather than buried, entrusted with sciences older than the present world and charged with passing them on. That is why the later esoteric currents found the fusion so useful. To make Hermes a biblical prophet was to give the Hermetic writings a pedigree reaching back before Moses, and to anchor astrology and alchemy in scripture. The equations are themselves the interpretation — built by readers reaching across languages for a single ancestor of revealed knowledge, and best read as that reaching rather than as report. Each name still carries its own scripture and its own claims; what joins them is the shape of the story, told three times: a man who did not die, and left the knowing behind.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912) · Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Gnosis · Emanation