Dee Had the Ethiopic Book of Enoch

I was just watching an episode of Angela’s Symposium:

In this, she discusses the Book of Enoch (specifically 1Enoch, or the “Ethiopic Book of Enoch) and its influence on John Dee.  This is something I explore in depth in my books (I think especially in The Angelical Language, Vol I).  In case you are not familiar, I discuss in that work how the mythos of 1Enoch became the basis for Dee’s Enochian system.  However, as that text was considered long-lost in Dee’s time (it wouldn’t be re-discovered until the 17th century), I had always assumed the story had simply survived orally until it reached Dee. 

But I was wrong!  At the time I published, I was not aware of a man named Guillaume Postel (d. 1581 – the year before Dee began his angelic workings).  Dee knew Guillaume, and Guillaume actually had a copy of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch!

Neither Dee nor Postel could read the book, as it was written in Ge’ez, but Postel had been told what was in it by the Ethiopian from whom he had purchased the book.  Postel, then, related this information to Dee – and THAT is how the mythos contained in the “long-lost” Book of Enoch made it, fairly intact I might add!, into the journals of Dr. John Dee.

Here is a link to the Ethiopic Book of Enoch’s Wiki page, in case you want to study more about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch#Ethiopic