Forbidden knowledge is knowledge that an authority, whether a religion, a state or a scholarly establishment, has tried to restrict, discourage or leave out of the approved record. The idea runs from the tree of knowledge in Genesis and the fire Prometheus stole, through banned books, excluded scriptures and burned libraries, to classified government files. In practice most "forbidden" material is not secret at all: it is suppressed, omitted from a canon or curriculum, or simply obscure, and knowing which of those applies is the first step to reading it well.
It matters because the texts people are told to ignore often shape the ones they are told to read. The Book of Enoch is quoted in the New Testament, the Nag Hammadi codices changed how historians understand early Christianity, and the Dead Sea Scrolls pushed the manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Bible back by roughly a thousand years. 4biddenknowledge, the company Billy Carson built, takes its name from this idea; this article sets out what the record shows, where it gets exaggerated, and why Carson made it the organising principle of his work.
Where the idea of forbidden knowledge comes from
The idea of forbidden knowledge is ancient, and some of the oldest stories in the Western tradition are built around it. In Genesis 2 and 3, God forbids the first humans to eat from "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil"; they eat, their eyes are opened, and they are expelled from Eden. In Greek myth, as told by Hesiod in the Theogony and Works and Days, the Titan Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, and Zeus punishes him by chaining him to a rock where an eagle eats his liver.
The third great story is less well known. In the Book of the Watchers, the opening section of 1 Enoch (chapters 1 to 36), a group of angels called the Watchers descend to earth, take human wives and father the giants known as the Nephilim. They also teach. Chapters 7 and 8 list what humans learned from them: metalworking and the making of weapons, cosmetics and the colouring of the eyes, spells and the cutting of roots, and the reading of the stars and the signs of the moon. In this account forbidden knowledge arrives from above, and the flood follows. The full story is told in our guide to [the Book of Enoch, the Watchers and the Nephilim](/the-book-of-enoch-explained-the-watchers-nephilim-and-why-it-was-left-out).
All three share a structure: knowledge is powerful, it belongs to a higher authority, and taking it has a cost. The literary scholar Roger Shattuck traced that pattern through Milton, Faust and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996). It persists because it names a real tension between the drive to know and the fear of what knowing will do.
Secret, suppressed, omitted or simply obscure
The phrase forbidden knowledge covers four different situations, and they call for different responses.
Secret knowledge is deliberately kept from the public and exists in a controlled form somewhere: classified files, initiatory teachings passed only to members, trade secrets. Suppressed knowledge is material that an authority actively tried to destroy or ban, such as books placed on an index or burned in public. Omitted knowledge was not destroyed but was left out of a canon, a curriculum or a textbook, often for reasons of theology or scholarly judgment rather than conspiracy. Obscure knowledge is fully available to anyone who looks, but few people ever do because it sits in specialist journals, museum catalogues or untranslated languages.
A great deal of what is sold online as "forbidden" belongs to the last category. The Sumerian creation and flood stories, for example, are published in scholarly editions and searchable in university databases; they are simply not taught in most schools, as our overview of [the Sumerian tablets and what they say](/the-sumerian-tablets-explained-what-they-are-and-what-they-say) shows. Being honest about this distinction does not weaken the case for studying such texts. It strengthens it, because it moves the question from "who is hiding this?" to "why is this so rarely taught?" It also guards against two opposite mistakes: assuming that anything outside the mainstream must be false, and assuming it must be true because someone did not want it known.
The books left out: apocrypha, Enoch and the Nag Hammadi library
Many texts people call forbidden are scriptures left out of a particular canon, and different communities drew those boundaries in different places. The Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments include books such as Tobit, Judith, Sirach and the books of the Maccabees, which most Protestant Bibles either omit or print separately as the Apocrypha. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church goes further and treats 1 Enoch and Jubilees as scripture. So the Book of Enoch is not a lost book; it has been read continuously in Ethiopia, and the Letter of Jude in the New Testament quotes it directly (Jude 14 and 15). It fell out of use elsewhere, which is omission, not destruction.
The Nag Hammadi library is the clearest case of texts that were actively buried. In December 1945, farmers near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt dug up a jar containing thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices. They hold 52 tractates in Coptic, including the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, along with the Gospel of Philip, the Apocryphon of John and other texts associated with Gnostic Christianity. Why they were buried is not known. A common scholarly suggestion links the burial to the fourth-century narrowing of the canon, including the Easter letter of Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 that listed the 27 books of the New Testament, but that remains a hypothesis. Egypt's role in preserving these writings is one reason the [Ancient Egypt topic hub](/topics/ancient-egypt) returns to them often.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are the other landmark discovery. From 1947, Bedouin shepherds and then archaeologists recovered hundreds of manuscripts from caves near Qumran, including Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch. For decades, many of the fragments were available only to a small official editorial team, and publication moved slowly. That changed in 1991, when the Biblical Archaeology Society issued a facsimile edition and the Huntington Library opened its photographs to all scholars. The delay was real and widely criticised, but once published the scrolls enriched the picture of early Judaism and Christianity rather than overturning it.
Lost libraries and burned books
The destruction of knowledge is not a myth, but the most famous story about it is usually told wrong. The Library of Alexandria did not burn in a single night. It declined over several centuries. Julius Caesar's fire during the Alexandrian war of 48 BCE destroyed books, possibly warehouse stock near the harbour. The Emperor Aurelian's campaign to retake the city around 272 CE devastated the palace quarter where the library is thought to have stood. In 391 the Serapeum, a temple complex that housed a daughter library, was destroyed during the campaign against pagan temples led by Bishop Theophilus under the emperor Theodosius I. The popular tale that the Arab conquerors burned the remaining books in the 640s appears only in sources written centuries later and is treated by most historians as a legend. The real lesson of Alexandria is that knowledge is lost less through one dramatic fire than through neglect and changing priorities.
Other losses were deliberate and well documented. In July 1562, at Maní in Yucatán, the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa presided over an auto-da-fé at which Maya books were burned along with religious images. In his own account, the Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, he wrote that the books contained superstition and lies of the devil and that they burned them all. Only four Maya codices are known to survive today: the Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices and the Maya Codex of Mexico. With a certain irony, de Landa's own Relación later became an important aid to deciphering Maya writing.
Institutional censorship left a paper trail too. The Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Prohibited Books, was first issued in its Roman form under Pope Paul IV in 1559 and was not abolished until 1966. Its listings included Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (suspended in 1616 "until corrected") and Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. That is suppression in the strict sense.
Modern forbidden knowledge: classified programmes and UAP
In the modern era, the closest thing to forbidden knowledge is classified government information, and the subject where that is most visible is unidentified aerial phenomena. The United States Air Force investigated UFO reports under Project Blue Book from 1952 until 1969, when the programme closed following the University of Colorado study led by physicist Edward Condon.
That changed on 16 December 2017, when The New York Times reported the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a Pentagon effort that had studied unexplained aerial reports, and published Navy cockpit videos of objects pilots could not identify. The Department of Defense formally released three of those videos in 2020, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a preliminary UAP assessment in 2021. None of this established what the objects were. It did show that a subject dismissed in public had been studied in private, exactly the gap the phrase "forbidden knowledge" describes.
Billy Carson's reading: why 4biddenknowledge exists
Billy Carson's position is that the texts and questions left out of mainstream education are worth studying on their own terms, and that people should read them for themselves rather than rely on someone else's summary. He founded 4biddenknowledge Inc. in Florida around that idea, launching the 4biddenknowledge website and YouTube channel in the 2010s. The work has since grown into the 4BK TV streaming service, the 4biddenknowledge Podcast and YouTube channels with more than three million subscribers combined; the about Billy Carson page has the wider background.
In Carson's framing, "forbidden" does not have to mean hidden by a conspiracy. It means knowledge a person was never given: ancient texts outside the school syllabus, alternative readings of ancient civilisations, research into consciousness, reports of unidentified aerial phenomena, and personal practices such as biohacking. His books reflect that range. The Compendium of the Emerald Tablets is his line-by-line commentary on Maurice Doreal's twentieth-century esoteric text, discussed in depth in our guide to [the Emerald Tablets of Thoth](/emerald-tablets-of-thoth-explained). Woke Doesn't Mean Broke applies the same spirit of self-education to money, and Manifestation Codes to the mind.
His interpretations are often bolder than mainstream scholarship. He reads the Mesopotamian gods as memories of real beings, a view compared against the Assyriological consensus in our article on [who the Anunnaki were](/who-were-the-anunnaki-sumerian-texts-vs-ancient-astronaut-theory). The site's approach is to present his reading as his reading, alongside what the texts say and what historians conclude, and to let readers weigh them. Part of the mission is to show that consciousness itself belongs on that list of subjects worth exploring.
Watch, read and go deeper
Billy Carson explores these subjects at length on 4BK TV, and the [Billy Carson 4biddenknowledge series](/watch/billy-carson-4biddenknowledge-podcast) is the place to start. The wider catalogue of documentaries and series streams on 4BK TV. For a conversation that takes the theme head-on, listen to the podcast episode on forbidden knowledge and secrets disclosed at the Gaia ancient civilizations conference. Related guides on consciousness and the mind are gathered at the [consciousness topic hub](/topics/consciousness).
Frequently asked questions
What does forbidden knowledge mean?
Forbidden knowledge is knowledge that an authority has restricted, discouraged or left out of the approved record. It covers secret material, suppressed books, texts omitted from a canon or curriculum, and information that is simply obscure; most of what is called forbidden today falls into the last two groups.
Is the Book of Enoch a forbidden book?
The Book of Enoch was never banned outright. It is part of the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, it is quoted in the Letter of Jude, and fragments of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most other churches simply stopped treating it as scripture, so it is better described as omitted than forbidden.
Was the Library of Alexandria destroyed in one fire?
No. Historians see a gradual decline, including Julius Caesar's fire in 48 BCE, Aurelian's fighting around 272 CE and the destruction of the Serapeum in 391. The story that Arab conquerors burned the books in the 640s appears only in much later sources and is generally regarded as legend.
What was the Index of Prohibited Books?
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was the Catholic Church's list of books its members were forbidden to read. Its Roman form was first issued under Pope Paul IV in 1559, and the Index was abolished in 1966. It included works by Copernicus and Galileo among many others.
Why is it called 4biddenknowledge?
Billy Carson chose the name to reflect the company's focus on subjects left out of mainstream education, including ancient texts, ancient civilisations, consciousness, UAP and biohacking. In his framing, "forbidden" means knowledge people were never given rather than knowledge that is necessarily secret.
Sources and further reading
- The Bible, Genesis 2 and 3, and the Letter of Jude
- Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, translated by M. L. West (Oxford World's Classics)
- George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, 1 Enoch: A New Translation (Fortress Press)
- Marvin Meyer, ed., The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2007)
- Geza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Penguin Classics)
- Roger S. Bagnall, "Alexandria: Library of Dreams," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (2002)
- Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, in the Alfred M. Tozzer edition (Harvard, 1941)
- Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996)
