ABSTRACT
The 'ancient allusions' to The Book of Enoch remained in the Bible, in works by the Fathers of the Christian Church and in Jewish mystical texts such as the Zohar. The Ethiopic Book of Enoch contains five distinct works: The Book of the Watchers, The Similitudes of Enoch, The Astronomical Book, The Book of Dreams and The Epistle of Enoch. In the context of William Blake's illustrations to The Book of Enoch, the phallus complements the Venus Pudica. Chaste love gives female and male bodies a virtue that is 'stable and permanent'. This first Enoch design echoes, while translating into gendered terms, Emanuel Swedenborg's cosmic geography. Emanuel Swedenborg explains, 'the male man and the female man were so created, that from two they may become as one man, or one flesh, and when they become one, they are then, taken together, man in his fulness'.
