2 Book of Enoch: Anointed with Oil Like Sunlight

2 Enoch, the Slavonic book of Enoch, doesn’t stop at a vision. It describes a man stripped of his clothes, anointed with oil that shines like the rays of the sun, and left unsure his own hands are still his. This is The Order of Enoch, Part 2: what 2 Enoch actually says about the anointing oil, why the kaneh bosem question belongs in the story, and why the Buddhist god realm is the best address in samsara and still not a place to stay.

Last time, Enoch reached the door. This time, someone opens it. This is where the vision stops happening to Enoch, and starts happening as him.

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2 Enoch: Two Men, Ten Heavens and Terror First

2 Enoch is not 1 Enoch. It survives only in Old Slavonic manuscripts and takes Enoch through ten heavens, and scholars still argue about whether it is a first-century Alexandrian Jewish work or a much later Christian one dressed in older clothing. It opens with two men “exceeding big,” faces shining like the sun, and it doesn’t ease you in. Terror first.

Then the guides walk Enoch north to a very terrible place: fire that doesn’t consume anything, ice that freezes you while you’re still on fire, and fearful, merciless angels whose whole job is to administer both. I have to wonder whether Enoch is describing a vision or his own physiology. It is the same hell you’ll find in What the Hell Is Hell? →, and everything else in this book moves toward light.

Fire that consumes nothing and ice that freezes you while you burn: the cruel place of 2 Enoch 10.

The Anointing Oil: How Michael Remade Enoch

The terror collapses Enoch twice. In 2 Enoch 21 the angel Gabriel says, “Be brave, Enoch! Don’t be frightened! Stand up.” In 2 Enoch 22 the Lord looks like iron made burning hot and says almost exactly the same thing. Same script, two mouths, as if the body’s reaction to getting there is predictable enough to need a fixed line ready. Then comes the anointing oil:

🕯 — 2 Enoch 22, Andersen translation

“The appearance of that oil is greater than the greatest light, and its ointment is like sweet dew, and its fragrance myrrh; and it is like the rays of the glittering sun. And I looked at myself, and I had become like one of his glorious ones, and there was no observable difference.”

The Lord instructs the archangel Michael to strip Enoch of his earthly clothing, anoint him and reclothe him in garments of glory. That is not a metaphor for feeling inspired; it is an ontological change. Sight, touch and smell describe one substance in a single breath, which is synesthesia, one of the most consistently reported features of both LSD and DMT states.

Strip, anoint, reclothe: Michael remakes Enoch in 2 Enoch 22, with oil that echoes the kaneh bosem question.

Kaneh Bosem: Was the Holy Oil Cannabis?

Ezekiel opens his book as a priest, a man who would have known the Torah’s anointing-oil recipe by heart. Exodus 30:22–25 calls for myrrh, sweet cinnamon, kaneh bosem and cassia in olive oil. Most translations render kaneh bosem as “sweet calamus.” Sula Benet argued, on linguistic grounds, that it is an early name for cannabis, in the same root-cluster as Persian kanab and Assyrian qunnabu. That is a contested argument, not settled fact, and I wonder whether Enoch was describing an actual topical application. For the same question about the incense, start with Was the Ketoret a Drug? →

The Order of Enoch: Why 2 Enoch Almost Vanished

1 Enoch’s problem was a hostile church. 2 Enoch’s problem is quieter: it was barely transmitted at all, with no Hebrew or Greek manuscript tradition, no citation trail, and a first appearance in Western scholarship only in the nineteenth century.

That is not what happens to a text with an institution behind it. My hypothesis, and it is only that: underneath all three Enoch books runs what I call the Order of Enoch. It is my name, not a term from any manuscript, for a recurring line of religious psychedelic renegades who pushed further into direct experience than the church or the rabbis would sanction, and got called an Enoch for it. The cost lands in Part 3, when four rabbis walk into the same territory and only one walks back out whole.

Divine Identification: Grof, Strassman and Shanon

🔬 Science

Stanislav Grof documented a transpersonal category he called divine identification: subjects who didn’t just see a deity or archetypal figure, but reported becoming one, temporarily losing the boundary between self and the figure entirely.

That is structurally the claim 2 Enoch makes: not “I saw glory” but “I am now among the glorious ones.” Rick Strassman’s DMT volunteers often reported a felt sense of rebirth, a new body and new senses, and none of them had read 2 Enoch. Benny Shanon’s ayahuasca catalogue lists “palaces and royalty” across unrelated cultures, the same territory as garments of glory. Reported patterns, not proof. For the clinical map, start with The Cartographer of Inner Space →

The God Realm: Heaven Is a Door, Not a Place to Stay

Buddhism has a name for a place like this: the god realm. Long life, bodies made of light, bliss for ages. Great views, terrible exit strategy, because it is built out of good karma, and when the karma runs out, the god falls. Anointed, clothed in glory, standing before the Lord “forever,” and the Buddhist answer isn’t “that’s fake news.” It’s that bliss alone frees no one. In my tradition the word is Detong, bliss and emptiness inseparable. The bliss was never the problem; mistaking it for a place to live is.

Heaven is a door you walk back out of, for everyone still standing in the fire. That is the Bodhisattva’s whole job. Enoch gets thirty days back on earth to teach his sons, then he is taken up. He stayed.

The god realm is the best address in samsara, but the door opens both ways.

He went in wearing his own clothes. He came out anointed, reclothed, and not sure the hands in front of him were still his. 2 Enoch doesn’t ask you to believe that happened. It just describes it, flatly, like a trip report.

Next time: 3 Enoch, the last of the Order of Enoch series, where Enoch becomes the angel Metatron and the rabbis who glimpse what that means don’t all come back in one piece. (Link this line to the 3 Enoch post once it is published.)

Prefer to read? The full transcript is available below. But I recommend listening first – my delivery adds context that’s hard to capture in text.

COLD COLD OPEN 00:10 Last time, Enoch reached the door. This time, someone opens it, takes his clothes off him, and puts something else on him instead. The text says he’s anointed with oil that shines like the rays of the sun. It says the oil smells better than any light. And then it says the thing nobody prepares you for: he looks at his own hands, and he’s not sure they’re his anymore. This is where the vision stops happening to Enoch, and starts happening as him. WELCOME BACK / EARLY HOOK 00:44 Welcome back. Last episode in the Order of Enoch we talked about reaching a threshold. This one is about what’s waiting for you if you actually get through — because 2 Enoch doesn’t stop at a vision. It describes a full transformation, and it uses language a lot closer to a clinical transcript, or a Vajrayana empowerment, than most people expect from something this old and obscure. SECTION 1 — A DIFFERENT BOOK, A DIFFERENT PROBLEM 01:11 Let’s read together — 2 Enoch 1:6 “And I saw two men exceeding big, so that I never saw such on earth; their faces were shining like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps.” Two men, described in that much sensory detail, before Enoch has even left the ground. Whatever this book is, it doesn’t ease you in. It’s almost a nightmare. Remember, Terror first. Quick housekeeping, because this matters: 2 Enoch is not 1 Enoch. It’s a completely separate text, surviving only in Old Slavonic manuscripts, describing Enoch’s journey through ten heavens rather than one throne-approach scene. Scholars are genuinely split on when it was written — some argue for a first-century Alexandrian Jewish origin, others for a much later medieval Christian composition dressed in older clothing. We don’t actually know how old this book is. But it’s the first hinting that Enoch might not be a man but a tradition, and in my readings, the first tradition of prophetic psychonauts. SECTION 2 — THE CRUEL PLACE (WHAT ELSE ENOCH WAS SHOWN) 02:29 2 Enoch 10:1–2 “And those two men led me up on to the Northern side, and showed me there a very terrible place, and there were all manner of tortures in that place: cruel darkness and unillumined gloom, and there is no light there, but murky fire constantly flaming aloft, and there is a fiery river coming forth, and that whole place is everywhere fire, and everywhere there is frost and ice, thirst and shivering, while the bonds are very cruel, and the angels fearful and merciless, bearing angry weapons, merciless torture, and I said: Woe, woe, how very terrible is this place.” That’s chapter 10 — the angels fearful and merciless OMG the same guide walking Enoch to a place built with no mercy in it at all, and it’s worth stopping on before we move past it. Fire that doesn’t consume anything, because there’s nothing there left to burn. Ice that doesn’t just freeze you — it freezes you while you’re still on fire. I have to wonder here if Enoch is describing his physiological situation or side effects rather than a vision? There are Angels stationed down there whose entire job, forever, is administering both at once, with no pause and no exit built into the design. Everything else in this book is moving toward light. This is the one place it isn’t — and Enoch has to stand in it before he ever sees the oil. Once again this is the same ‘Hell’ you’ll find in the What the Hell series on the site, if you want to see where this book eventually lands him. SECTION 3 — THE ANOINTING 04:34 Let’s read further — Before he even reaches the room — 2 Enoch 21 (Andersen translation) “And I became terrified, and I fell on my face, and I said in myself: ‘Woe to me! What has happened to me?’ …Be brave, Enoch! Don’t be frightened! Stand up, and come with me and stand in front of the face of the LORD forever.” That’s chapter 21 — before he’s even in the room. Terror, collapse, face in the dirt — and then someone standing over him with a line that sounds rehearsed: don’t be afraid, get up, come with me. That’s the angel Gabriel talking. Keep that in mind — it’s not the last time someone says almost exactly this. Let’s read further — 2 Enoch 22:1-4 (via cojs.org/ Andersen translation) “The appearance of the face of the Lord is like iron made burning hot in a fire, and brought out, and it emits sparks and is very awesome. It is supremely awesome and supremely frightening to stand before the face of the Lord. And I fell down flat and did obeisance to the LORD. And the LORD, with His own mouth, said to me: ‘Be brave, Enoch! Don’t be frightened! Stand up, and stand in front of my face forever.’” That’s the image immediately before the anointing. Enoch doesn’t walk up to a gentle light — he walks up to a face like molten iron, and the text says outright it’s built to terrify. And this is god? I just don’t know anymore. And notice what happens the instant it gets to him: he’s flat on his face again, exactly like chapter 21. Except this time it’s not Gabriel saying the line — it’s the Lord Himself, with His own mouth, word for word almost identical to what the escort already said getting him there. Gabriel said it first. Now god says it again. Whatever this is, it’s standardized — the same script, run twice, by two different mouths, because the body’s reaction to getting there is apparently predictable enough to need a fixed line of dialogue ready for it. 2 Enoch 22:6-9 (Andersen translation) “And the LORD said to Michael: ‘Go, and extract Enoch from his earthly clothing. And anoint him with my delightful oil, and put him into the clothes of my glory.’ And so Michael did, just as the LORD had said to him. He anointed me and clothed me.” god instructs the archangel Michael to strip Enoch of his earthly clothing, anoint him, and reclothe him in garments of glory. Michael does it, and that’s Enoch’s own report of what it felt like. Let’s go deeper with Enoch — 2 Enoch 22 (Andersen translation) “The appearance of that oil is greater than the greatest light, and its ointment is like sweet dew, and its fragrance myrrh; and it is like the rays of the glittering sun. And I looked at myself, and I had become like one of his glorious ones, and there was no observable difference.” — 2 Enoch 22 (Andersen translation) Not a metaphor for feeling inspired — an ontological change. He goes in a man. He does not, as far as the text is concerned, come out one. This is the ‘Heaven’ half of the same site series that gave you Hell back in Section 2 — if the cruel place was the tour’s low point, this is where it was always headed. Read that back, slowly — sight, touch, and smell, all used to describe one substance, in the same breath. That’s not sloppy writing. That’s synesthesia — senses blending into each other — one of the most consistently reported features of both LSD and DMT states. There’s a strange thread connecting this anointing oil back to Ezekiel, the prophet who gave this whole season much of its opening vocabulary. It’s important because it’s the same technology. He identifies himself, in the very first verse of his own book, as: Ezekiel 1:3 “The word of the LORD came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi.” A priest — meaning a man who would have known the Torah’s own anointing-oil recipe by heart. That recipe, in Exodus 30:22-25, calls for myrrh, sweet cinnamon, ‘kaneh bosem,’ and cassia, blended into olive oil — the holy anointing oil used to consecrate priests, the tabernacle, and its vessels. Most translations render kaneh bosem as ‘sweet calamus’ or ‘fragrant cane.’ But in 1967, researcher Sula Benet published an argument that kaneh bosem is actually an early Hebrew name for cannabis, based on linguistic and etymological grounds. Benet’s case leans partly on the word itself — kaneh bosem sits in the same ancient root-cluster that gives us the word cannabis in the first place. Persian kanab, the term Zoroastrian-era Iran carried west along its trade routes. You remember the sales patter, as the sage reaches into his saddlebags on his Camel. “You have to try some of this; it will take you straight to heaven” as he lights some up and presses a sample into your hand. Or, if you want the version closer to how it actually sounds, Assyrian qunnabu, recorded in cuneiform centuries before Exodus was ever written down. Same root, different ancient languages, one word quietly traveling the whole trade corridor this podcast was written on. We don’t need Science to tell us that our skin can absorb a great many chemicals and medicines. I wonder if Enoch was describing an actual topical application of such things? SECTION 4 — WHY THIS BOOK ALMOST VANISHED 10:54 1st Enoch’s problem was a hostile church deciding what counted as scripture. 2 Enoch’s problem is quieter and in some ways stranger: it was barely transmitted at all. It has no Hebrew or Greek manuscript tradition to speak of, no citation trail through the early rabbis or most church fathers, and it only reached Western scholarship in the nineteenth century through Slavic manuscript discoveries. Nobody suppressed it in a council that we know of. They just stop copying it, well almost stopped. It just nearly wasn’t kept — and that’s not what happens to a text with a functioning institution behind it, printing copies, teaching from it, defending it in synods. That’s what happens to something that was never meant to travel through an institution in the first place. I have a name for what I think was actually running underneath all three of these books, and I want to say it plainly instead of just gesturing at it: the Order of Enoch. Not one man, and not a term from any manuscript — mine, for what looks like a recurring line of religious psychedelic renegades across centuries, each of them doing the same thing: pushing further into direct experience of the divine than the church or the rabbis were willing to sanction, and getting named an Enoch for it, or folded into his name — some of them claiming it themselves, on purpose, because there wasn’t another category that fit what they were doing. Ignoring the rules of an institution built to keep people away from exactly this kind of encounter has a cost. We’re going to watch that cost land directly, later in this trilogy, when four rabbis walk into the same territory and only one of them walks back out whole. That’s in part 3 I am just continuing past where things stop being comfortable. You decide what you believe. SECTION 5 — GROF AND THE DIVINE-IDENTIFICATION EXPERIENCE 12:55 Grof documented a specific transpersonal category he called divine identification — subjects who didn’t just see a deity or archetypal figure, but reported becoming one, temporarily losing the boundary between self and the figure entirely. That’s structurally the same claim 2 Enoch is making about its own protagonist: not ‘I saw glory,’ but ‘I am now among the glorious ones.’ This is a bit more like an ego strengthening than the more often reported ego death. SECTION 6 — STRASSMAN AND THE REBORN BODY 13:37 Strassman’s DMT volunteers frequently reported a felt sense of rebirth — a new body, a new set of senses, sometimes explicitly religious language of being remade or born again, all inside a fifteen-minute clinical session. None of them had read 2 Enoch. As with the part one in the Order of Enoch, we’re describing that reported pattern rather than quoting a specific volunteer — no verified verbatim quotation is used here, on purpose. SECTION 7 — BENNY SHANON AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE VISION 14:11 Benny Shanon, the Hebrew University cognitive psychologist who compiled roughly 2,500 documented ayahuasca experiences into Antipodes of the Mind (2002), catalogued ‘palaces and royalty’ as one of the recurring visionary categories people report across unrelated cultures — the same territory 2 Enoch is describing with its garments of glory and, as we’ll see in part 3, a royal crown of forty-nine stones. Shanon’s broader argument is that these categories recur independent of a subject’s religious background, which is exactly what makes Enoch’s transfiguration worth taking seriously as a pattern, whatever you conclude about its metaphysics. Shanon paid for that Sinai paper, by the way — not with his career, nobody pulled his chair out from under him, but with exactly the reception an institution gives a serious researcher who goes past the edge of what’s currently sanctioned: quietly filed under fringe, rarely engaged with directly, cited more by outsiders than by his own field. Carl Ruck, the Boston University classicist who argued back in 1978 that the Eleusinian Mysteries ran on a psychoactive brew, got the same treatment for the same reason. Different institutions, different centuries, same rule: go further into direct experience than your peers are willing to sanction, and there’s a cost. It isn’t always a body. Sometimes it’s just nobody in the room taking you seriously anymore. And let’s be honest here it’s 2 o’clock in the morning, do you take this seriously? SECTION 8 — THE DHARMA LANDING: EMPOWERMENT, NOT APOTHEOSIS 16:03 Buddhism has a name for a place like this. The god realm. Long life. Bodies made of light. Bliss that lasts for ages. It’s the best address in samsara. Great views. Terrible exit strategy. Because the god realm is built out of karma — good karma, but karma nevertheless — and when it runs out, the god falls. The texts even describe the warning signs: the radiance dims, the garlands wilt. Now read that back against Enoch. Anointed. Clothed in glory. “No observable difference” from the glorious ones. Standing in front of the face of the Lord — “forever,” says the text. The Buddhist answer isn’t “that’s fake news.” It isn’t “hoax.” It isn’t even that “it’s a rest stop.” It’s a trap. Good conditions don’t run on sleep. They run on more good actions. But up there, everything feels so good that nobody makes any. They’re spending, not earning — until the account’s empty. Bliss alone frees no one. When everything feels like arrival, everyone keeps practising. We said it back in season one: the molecule can give you the feeling. Only the path gives you the fruit. In my own tradition the word is Detong — bliss and emptiness, inseparable. The bliss was never the problem. Mistaking it for a place to live is. Because if the bliss has emptiness in it, heaven isn’t where you stay. It’s a door you walk back out of — for everyone still standing in the fire. That’s the Bodhisattva’s whole job. Enoch, in the text, gets thirty days back on earth to teach his sons. Then he’s taken up, and that’s the last anyone sees of him. He stayed. Hold on to that — because what he says to those sons is the last thing we’re going to read tonight. CLOSE 18:03 He went in wearing his own clothes. He came out anointed, reclothed, and not sure the hands in front of him were still his. 2 Enoch doesn’t ask you to believe that happened. It just describes it, flatly, like a trip report. Once again — 2 Enoch 39:3-6 (via cojs.org) “Ye, my children, you see my face, a man like yourselves; but I have seen the face of the Lord, like iron made burning hot in fire, sending forth sparks. For you see the eyes of a man like yourselves; but I have seen the eyes of the Lord, shining like the rays of the sun and terrifying the eyes of a man.” Terror first, then transformation. He says that to his own sons, students, or followers. not to a congregation. That’s Enoch, at the end of his own book, still trying to describe a face no vocabulary was built for. The traditions that survived this kind of claim built years of training around it. The ones that didn’t survive it usually didn’t build anything at all. LATE CTA / NEXT-EPISODE TEASER 19:16 Next time, that transformation gets a name, and the people around it panic. 3rd Enoch — the last in our series of the Order of Enoch. where Enoch becomes the angel Metatron, and the rabbis who glimpse what that means don’t all come back in one piece. You know I just can’t say Metatron with a straight face. This is QP catch you on the flip side. Sound is emptiness Emptiness is sound 🌀 Sound is Emptiness — Emptiness is Sound 🌀

2 Enoch: Anointed with Oil Like Sunlight — The Order of Enoch, Part 2 S2 E6

2 Enoch: Two Men, Ten Heavens and Terror First

The Anointing Oil: How Michael Remade Enoch

Kaneh Bosem: Was the Holy Oil Cannabis?

The Order of Enoch: Why 2 Enoch Almost Vanished

Divine Identification: Grof, Strassman and Shanon

The God Realm: Heaven Is a Door, Not a Place to Stay

Further Reading

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The primary sources behind 2 Enoch, free and in full:

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