Title of the Blog

 "The Lost Children of Enoch" refers to one possible theory I am imaginatively-entertaining. It may not be the final theory, but in the midst of my perplexities it 'jumped out' at me immediately, and I thought 'this might be it!' The blog is therefore titled after that spontaneous moment of recognition, which may be logically-refuted or rationalized-away in favour of other theories but was undeniably striking in the moment.

In the conventional Bible, Enoch was a patriarch whose main notable biographical detail is that he 'walked with God':

21 And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:

22 And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

23 And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:

24 And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

-- Genesis 5:21-24

This would have been pre-Flood and therefore pre-Babel.

The Mormon tradition and scriptures expand on this detail as follows. Enoch is said to have received a very detailed advance description of the Gospel and the future Christian religion, and he and his people built a city called Zion that attempted to replicate Christian ideals in that far-past age of existence:

And behold, Enoch saw the day of the coming of the Son of Man, even in the flesh; and his soul rejoiced, saying: The Righteous is lifted up, and the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world; and through faith I am in the bosom of the Father, and behold, Zion is with me.

-- Moses 7:47 (in 'Pearl of Great Price')

As a reward for faithfully receiving the Gospel, the inhabitants of the entire city of Zion -- not just Enoch -- were 'translated' into immortality:

And all the days of Zion, in the days of Enoch, were three hundred and sixty-five years.

And Enoch and all his people walked with God, and he dwelt in the midst of Zion; and it came to pass that Zion was not, for God received it up into his own bosom; and from thence went forth the saying, ZION IS FLED.

-- Moses 7:68-69 (in 'Pearl of Great Price')

They are explicitly stated to be destined to accept a proper death and resurrection somewhere in the fulness of time, which may be more-painless than the ordinary human variety:

At the Second Coming of Christ, they will be changed in the twinkling of an eye from mortality to immortality to inherit exaltation in the Kingdom of God. After their ministry as translated beings, all translated beings receive what amounts to an instantaneous death and resurrection.

-- Mormon Wiki, 'Translated Beings' (to be replaced with a more-authoritative & authentic quote)

And they are stated to someday reunite with other Zions built in inspiration of Christ's teaching, in a rather exuberant event:

And the Lord said unto Enoch: Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other;

And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion, which shall come forth out of all the creations which I have made; and for the space of a thousand years the earth shall rest.

-- Moses 7:63-64 (in 'Pearl of Great Price')

(This doctrine, of course, dates from the time that the LDS had a plausible expectation of building some kind of 'best case' mortal-human society in North America in the near-future.)

I vary from, or extrapolate, this tradition further. As far as I understand these blessings of Enoch's Zion, the Enochians were granted advance knowledge of Christ's victory over death, and they were granted the fullest possible blessing possible after the Fall from Eden but before Christ's victory over sin and death. This kind of blessing might (indeed must!) be flawed and incomplete but it cannot subtract human capability.

If my extrapolation is true, then the Zion of Enoch would not be just a static city-state of immortals. For, to my mind, to be frozen into static, even pleasant immortality for thousands of years can only be reckoned a curse or at best a burdensome obedience. For the blessing to be a reward, the Enochians would be able to innovate, and expand, and develop their abilities and talents as a civilization; there is therefore at least one vital and somewhat enviable alter-human race elsewhere in Reality. Based on the benevolent character of God, their existence would have to have some mutually-beneficial purpose for ordinary mortal Men; there is therefore ongoing and hidden commerce of a sort. I imagine mortal-human innovations make their way to the Enochian realms, and vice-versa; there is unwitting or intentional collaboration of minds and a modern-day Enochian city could resemble an (undecayed and well-designed) modern-day Earth city to a disconcerting extent. By comparison, Tolkien's elves, to the extent they are actually humanoid and not a personification of nonhuman natural Beings, would be a more-ancient and 'pre-human' dwindling race; but these Enochians would be a younger and 'post-human' (but pre-Resurrection) vital and growing race. Due to humanity's increasing ability to observe an ever-larger chunk of our surrounding interstellar space as uninhabited, the Enochian Zion would have to be located in a far-distant corner of our dimension, or in another dimension entirely.

Now, remember that over the thousands of years since its founding, the Race of Enoch is still subject to sin. Which is to say, in the Fourth Gospel sense, to a tendency of created things to degrade and decay over time. This decay could apply to the original Enochian immortals as individuals -- who would, patiently awaiting Christ's victory over death, order their society around defending their minds and souls from moral degradation and staving off stultifying contentment and arrogance. But the tendency to decay would also apply to the Enochian society as a whole, and parts of the civilization would tend to splinter or fragment or depart from their original worldview in favour of various forms of wishful or sinful thinking. Various cataclysms or divine punishments might separate these splinter-groups from communion with Enoch's Zion entirely, or they might even deliberately flee as far as possible from contact with Zion to seek to establish their own colonies in distant corners of Creation or of Chaos. These, then, would be the 'lost children' of Enoch. They might eventually come to believe or teach various falsehoods about their nature and history, for a variety of reasons.

There is also a possibility of an 'Atlantean' or 'Numenorean' cataclysm which would have scattered the Enochian civilization entirely, and echoes of that cataclysm would have been heard by mortal humanity and retold in the corresponding myths. However, this is mentioned for the sake of completeness: it is an archetype that is generally said to happen to these kinds of 'blessed ahead of their proper time' nations of mortal Men. I do not feel it intuitively. I would suspect, rather, that within an unimaginably vast world, universe, or multiverse there would be a central civilization of Enoch's Zion which continues to adhere scrupulously to its original purpose, and there would be various splinter groups and offshoots that have become isolated from it, forgotten their origins and are in need of redemption. These, in fact, would be the 'lost children of Enoch' of this blog's title.