Samizdat

“The most prolific descriptions of the Merkabah appear in the Books of Enoch. Enochian literature takes its name from Enoch son of Yared. Enoch was a “righteous man in his generation” and “walked with Elohim.”

It is believed that in ancient times there may have been as many as 100,000 volumes of Enochian literature, nearly all of whose last remains were lost in the fiery destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria. This literature was virtually unknown from the fourth (when banned by Hilary, Jerome, and Augustus) until the late nineteenth century CE, when three manuscripts deemed as authentic Enochian material were discovered.

Two of the manuscripts, I Enoch and III Enoch, were in Ethiopian translation: these were found in what was once Abyssinia, the domain of King Solomon’s infamous lover, the Queen of Sheba. The third manuscript, called II Enoch and the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, was preserved in two Slavonic versions: these were found in Russia and Serbia.”

–Daniel Feldman, Qabala: The Mystical Heritage of the Children of Abraham, 2001, pg.  64.