The Book of Enoch

The book

A Jewish apocalypse from the centuries before the common era, preserved complete only in Ethiopic. Two hundred angels swear an oath on a mountain, come down, take wives, and teach humanity metalwork, cosmetics, sorcery and astronomy. Their children are giants who eat everything. The archangels petition; the flood is the answer. Enoch is taken up to see it all first.

Why Gustave Doré

Doré's Bible of 1866 is the most widely reproduced illustrated scripture ever made, and Enoch is the book adjacent to it that he could not have drawn — excluded from the canon he was working from, and not translated into a European language until 1821.

Everything he needed is nonetheless there: the Watchers' descent is a fall of angels, which he engraved definitively for Milton, and Enoch's tour of the cosmos is structurally the Paradiso. This cycle puts his hand on the apocryphal text his own Bible left out.

What to look for

Angels as terrible rather than decorative. The Watchers are the subject and the plates keep them enormous, lit from behind, and never sympathetic — which is how the text has them.

Plates

The Word of the BlessingThe Birth of the GiantsThe Sending of the AngelsThe Throne of the Great GloryThe Hollow Places of the DeadThe Mansions of the ElectSheol Gives Back the DeadThe Furnace of the SinnersThe Phases of the MoonThe White Bull and His LineThe Stars Cast into the FireThe Sword Given to the Righteous