ABSTRACT
It is reasonable to insist that a text, ancient or modern, is not a transparent window into the soul of another human being, but a literary creation that is apt to follow quite non-psychological laws of its own. To refuse to ask psychological, or even psychoanalytic, questions of these texts is to limit our ability to answer those questions that the historians and textual scholars are willing to declare legitimate. It will be a great achievement if psychoanalytic thinkers and Judaica scholars, working together with good will and willingness to hear one another, can bridge the gap that must provoke such a response. The fantastic details of the heavenly structure—its impossible mixture of fire and ice, for example—also demand explanation. The Judaica scholar’s instinct is to turn to the Hebrew Bible and to look there for passages describing God and His surroundings, which the Enochian writer may be assumed to have creatively synthesized.
