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from Galactic2 Website
Part 1 - Ashes
of Angels
These words form the opening lines to what must be one of the most astonishing yet chilling fragments of religious text ever written.
They are the assertions of the antediluvian patriarch Enoch as he describes the sheer distress and horror that accompanied the miraculous birth of a son to his grandson, Lamech. The passage is taken from the Book of Noah, an ancient script of Hebrew origin appended to the more famous Book of Enoch, a pseudepigraphal (i.e. falsely attributed) work, considered by scholars to have been put together in stages during the first half of the second century BC.
The predicament conveyed by these revealing lines seems manifestly clear:
From this specific appearance Lamech can only conclude that his wife has been unfaithful, since the infant resembles “the children of the angels” who are “not like US”. This seems an extraordinary conclusion on the part of Lamech, and a very strange subject for a religious scribe to invent without good reason.
If it can, for a moment, be accepted that this account records an actual event in the history of human kind, then it implies that the strange appearance of this child matched the offspring of angels, and must by inference have been the product of the union between a mortal woman and a divine “messenger”, a “heavenly intelligence” in the service of God himself. Surely this is impossible, for according to Judaeo-Christian tradition angels are incorporeal, having neither form nor substance.
They are certainly unable to reproduce by immaculate conception. If this is correct, then the story of the birth of Lamech’s strange son is in direct contradiction to the rabbinical teachings of Judaism and the creed of the Christian faith. Yet here it is, in print for all to see - heretical words implying that angelic beings were able to produce children by cohabiting with mortal women.
For any reader with an open mind, this is a perplexing enigma further deepened by a more personal portrayal of the birth of Lamech’s son, which is to be found in a poorly preserved fragment of religious text, discovered with many other rolled-up brittle scrolls inside a cave overlooking the Dead Sea in 1947. Known to scholars today as the Genesis Apocryphon, this unique work was written in Aramaic, the Syriac language adopted by the Hebrew scribes following the—ws’ exile in Babylon during the sixth century BC.
Dating back to a similar age as the Book of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scroll in question would have originally contained an alternative, fuller account of the events featured in the Book of Genesis; however, it was so badly damaged when found that only the birth of Lamech’s son, an account of Noah’s Ark and the biblical Flood, along with the wanderings of the patriarch Abraham, have been preserved. The fragmentary text was translated by Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin in I954 and published under the title A Genesis Apocryphon two years later by the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
With respect to the account of the strange birth of Lamech’s son, it differs principally from the version given in the Book of Enoch, in that the narrator has altered from the patriarch Enoch to Lamech himself - it is he who recalls the scene in his own words.
The narrative begins just after the strange birth as Lamech starts voicing his suspicions concerning the suspected infidelity of his wife, here named as Bathenosh - and referred to also as his sister - for he says:
Turning to his obviously distraught wife, Lamech makes her swear by the Most High that she will tell him the truth and admit if she has lain with anyone else.
In reply she beseeches him to accept her word, saying:
It is clear that Lamech is accusing his wife of sleeping not with angels in general, but with having had relations with a specific race of divine beings known in Hebrew as ‘irin’ (‘ir’ in singular), meaning “those who watch” or “those who are awake”, which is translated into Greek as ‘egregoris or grigori’, meaning watchers. These Watchers feature in the main within the pages of pseudepigraphal and apocryphal works of—wish origin, such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees.
Their progeny, according to Hebrew tradition, are named as nephilim, a Hebrew word meaning “those who have fallen” or “the fallen ones”, translated into Greek as ‘gigantes’, or “giants” - a monstrous race featured in the Theogony of the hellenic writer Hesiod (c. 907 Bc). As in the biblical account, this ancient Greek work focuses on the creation of the world, the rise and fall of a Golden Age, the coming of the giant races and finally a universal flood. Bathenosh’s touching plea of innocence to her husband and brother Lamech comes across as most convincing, and provides tantalizing evidence that this ancient account may contain some grain of truth.
Somehow it could just be based on a real-life event that occurred in a past age of mankind. If so, then exactly who, or what, were these Watchers and Nephilim who could lie with mortal women and produce offspring recognizable by their physiological traits alone? Are there any grounds whatsoever on which to consider that these apocryphal stories were based on the miscegenation between two different races of human beings, one of whom has been misidentified or falsely equated with the angels of heaven? If not, then exactly what were such stories meant to convey to the reader?
After Methuselah has tracked him down in a far-off land (referred to in the Genesis Apocryphon as ‘Parwain’ or Paradise) and conveying the fears of his son Lamech, the ever-righteous Enoch throws light on the situation when he states:
So the lid is finally lifted as the reader of the Book of Enoch is told that some of the angels of heaven have succumbed to carnal sin and taken wives from among mortal women. From this unholy union have come flesh-and-blood offspring, giant in stature, who, it must be presumed, match the description of the child born to Bathenosh.
Part 2 - The
Sons of God
The first lines in question, making up Chapter 6, verses 1-2, are indelibly imprinted in my mind and read as follows:
(JW: There is more discussion of those verses by religious people than any other verses in the Bible, as far as I know. Most people just say they don’t understand what they mean.)
By sons of God the text means heavenly angels, although the Hebrew original, bene ha-elohim, should really be translated as sons of the Gods, a much more disconcerting prospect (and something to be returned to in a subsequent chapter). In verse 3 of Chapter 6, God unexpectedly pronounces that his spirit cannot remain in men for ever, and that since humanity is a creation of flesh, its lifespan will be shortened to an hundred and twenty years.
Yet in verse 4 the tone suddenly reverts to the original theme of the chapter, for it says:
In the hundreds of times I have read these isolated words out aloud I have wondered to myself.- what could they possibly mean?
There is no consensus in answer to this question, and scholars, mystics and speculative writers have all given their own interpretations over the past two thousand years. Theologians agree in general that such accounts are not to be taken as literal fact, but only as a symbol of humanity’s fall from a state of spiritual grace to one of conflict and corruption in the days prior to the Great Flood.
What the texts are saying, the theologians would argue, is that if evil and corruption on this scale does occur in the world, then only those of the purest heart and spirit - individuals exemplified by Noah and his righteous family - will be spared the wrath of God. It is therefore a purely allegorical teaching intent on conveying to the reader the inevitable consequences of wickedness. The references in verses 2 and 4 to the sons of God coming unto the daughters of men, so the scholars believe, demonstrate how even those closest to the purity of -od can become infected by corruption and evil.
It was usually accepted among religious teachers that any such unholy union between angels and mortal women could only, because it was against Gods will, lead to the creation of monstrous offspring.
It was this thought-provoking concept which had, according to the early Church Fathers, inspired the creation of various apocryphal and pseudepigraphal works dealing with the fall of the angels and the corruption of mankind before the time of the Great Flood.
Celestial Mafia
The majority would probably have been unaware that these problematical verses even existed in the Book of Genesis. Others, who did have some knowledge of the matter, are unlikely to have been able to expand on it, while only a very small minority would have believed in the actual existence of fallen angels. Many commentators would have been unable to explain exactly how such stories related to the physical world we live in, while other more fundamentalist Jews or Christians have seen such corruption and wickedness as the actions of bloodline descendants of those first fallen angels who cohabited with mortal women before the time of the Flood.
Such suggestions may seem far-fetched, but in the United States there is an organization known as the Sons of Jared, who take their name from the patriarch Jared, the father of Enoch, during whose age the Watchers were said to have been cast down from heaven. In their manifesto, the Sons of Jared vow implacable war against the descendants of the Watchers, who, they allege, as notorious Pharaohs, Kings and Dictators, have throughout history dominated mankind.
The Jaredite Advocate, the voice of the Sons of Jared, quotes lavishly from the Book of Enoch and sees the Watchers as like super-gangsters, a celestial Mafia ruling the world. Is this simply a view gained from dogmatically accepting the fall of flesh-and-blood angels of heaven? How many individuals have the Sons of Jared accused or persecuted, believing them to be modern-day descendants of the Watchers?
Some academic scholars, on the other hand, while unable to accept any basis in fact behind the concept of fallen angels and their monstrous offspring, the Nephilim, would be willing to admit that the original authors of the Book of Genesis (traditionally accredited to Moses the lawgiver) based their material on previously existing folk legends, probably from Mesopotamia (the country known today as Iraq).
The historian S. H. Hooke, for instance, in his book Middle Eastern Mythology, accepts that:
This might well be so, but accepting Genesis 6: 1-4 as the product of far older Middle Eastern myths allows for the possibility that, sometime during a bygone age of mankind, there existed on earth, presumably in the bible lands themselves, an elite and probably superior race of human beings. These people presumably achieved a state of high civilization before degenerating into a corruption and wickedness that included the taking of wives from among the less civilized races and the creation of monstrous offspring of disproportionate size to their immediate family.
It might also be suggested that a series of global cataclysms thereafter brought fire, flood and darkness to the earth and ended the reign of this race of giants. Should we see accounts like Lamechs torment at the miraculous birth of his son Noah, and untold others like it, as tantalizing evidence for the idea that fallen angels were something far more than simply incorporeal beings cast out of heaven by the archangel Michael, as the theologians and propagators of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths have taught during the last two thousand years?
Could their very existence be confirmed by making an in-depth study of Hebrew myths and legends and then comparing these with other Near Eastern and Middle Eastern religions and traditions? Most important of all, might evidence of their physical existence on earth be incidentally preserved in the records of modern-day archaeology and anthropology?
Such thought-provoking possibilities were worth further consideration. If, at the end of the day, it was found that no such evidence for the existence of a now lost race in the bible lands could be discovered, then at least an age-old enigma would have been investigated thoroughly.
On the other hand, if there really was firm evidence that angels and fallen angels once walked among mankind as beings of flesh and blood, no different from you or me, then it could change our perspective of world history for ever.
Historical works from this period suggest that the Essenes not only accepted the Book of Enoch as part of their canon, but also used its listing of angels to perform rites of exorcism and healing. Recent studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls have also shown that the Essenes possessed an almost unhealthy interest in Enochian-style material featuring the Watchers and Nephilim. Although many of these works date only to the second century BC, the hidden teachings found among the Qumran community and known as Kabbalah imply that the Enochian and Noahic scriptures were passed on by word of mouth for thousands of years before finally being set down in written form by the Essenes themselves.
Even more remarkable was the general acceptance among many prominent theologians that fallen angels possessed corporeal bodies. Indeed, it was not until the age of the Church Fathers, from the fourth century onwards, that such matters were seriously questioned. For these people, fallen angels were not flesh-and-blood beings, and any suggestion that they might have been became tantamount to heresy.
This attitude led to the suppression of the Book of Enoch, which quickly fell out of favor. Most bizarre of all were the comments of St Augustine (AD 354-430) in respect of the antiquity of this pseudepigrapha work. He claimed that on account of it being too old (ob nimiam antiquitatem), the Book of Enoch could not be included in the Canon of Scripture.
The Church Fathers then went further in their attempts to stamp out the strange fascination with fallen angels among early Christians by condemning as heresy the use of the many hundreds of names given both to angels and fallen angels in various religious works. No longer was the Book of Enoch copied by Christian scribes, and those copies remaining in libraries and churches were either lost or destroyed, denying the world any knowledge of the works true contents for over a thousand years.
Subsequently, on top of all this, it became the policy of Catholic theologians to eradicate firmly from the teachings of the Church any notion that fallen angels had once been seen as material beings, a situation typified by this quote from the New Catholic Encyclopedia:
Yet why should such beliefs have become so abhorrent to the Christian faith after the great leaders of the Early Church of Jerusalem had preached so openly on this very controversial subject? It simply did not make sense, and suggested there must have been extremely good reasons for forcing this strain of thought underground, for that was exactly where it went - underground. From the extraordinary evidence collected together by the author, and presented in this book for the first time, there emerge firm grounds to suggest that initiates and secret societies preserved, revered, even celebrated the forbidden knowledge that our most distant ancestors had gained their inspiration and wisdom, not from God or from the experiences of life, but from a forgotten race remembered by us today only as fallen angels, demons, devils, giants and evil spirits.
Should such a view prove in any way
correct, then it must indicate one of the greatest secrets ever kept
from mankind. But where was I to start? How was I even to begin the
quest to unveil the forbidden legacy of this apparently fallen race?
The answer lay with its main sourcebook, the Book of Enoch, for only
by understanding its obscure origins and absorbing its bizarre
contents could I ever hope to uncover the true picture behind
humanity’s lost heritage.
THE SEARCH FOR THE
SOURCE
The Antediluvian Pillars Enoch had many associations with early modern Freemasonry, or speculative Masonry as it is known. According to one legend, Enoch, with foreknowledge of the coming Deluge, constructed, with the help of his son Methuselah, nine hidden vaults, each stacked one on top of the other. In the lowest of these he deposited a gold triangular tablet (a white oriental porphyry stone in one version) bearing the Ineffable Name, the unspoken name of the Hebrew God, while a second tablet, inscribed with strange words Enoch had gained from the angels themselves, was given into the safe-keeping of his son. The vaults were then sealed, and upon the spot Enoch had two indestructible columns constructed - one of marble, so that it might never burn, and the other of Laterus, or brick, so that it might not sink in water.
On the brick column were inscribed the seven sciences of man-kind, the so-called archives of Masonry, while on the marble column he placed an inscription stating that a short distance away a priceless treasure would be found in a subterranean vault. Enoch then retired to Mount Moriah, traditionally equated with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where he was translated to heaven. In time, King Solomon uncovered the hidden vaults while constructing his legendary temple and learned of their divine secrets.
On the other hand, perhaps the legends of
the hidden vaults referred to actual underground chambers located
somewhere in the Holy Land and constructed to hide sacred objects of
importance to the future of mankind.
Part 4 - Walked
with God
Whatever the writer of Genesis had been attempting to convey by these words, they were taken to mean that Enoch did not die like the other patriarchs, but was instead translated to heaven with the aid of Gods angels. According to the Bible, only the prophet Elijah had been taken by God in a similar manner, so Enoch (whose name means initiated) had always been accorded a very special place in Judaeo-Christian literature. Indeed, Hebrew mysticism asserts that on his translation to heaven Enoch was transformed into the angel Metatron. What does it mean:
All these legends and traditions concerning Enoch show that the patriarch was highly venerated in—wish mythology because of his trafficking with the angels. This position led many scholars to believe that apocryphal works, such as the Book of Enoch, were imaginative stories based on his much celebrated translation to heaven, where he now lives in the presence of God.
So what had he been looking for?
THE SEARCH FOR THE SOURCE Despite its rarity, the Kebra Nagast (or Book of the Glory of Kings) had long been known to exist, while its wild claims concerning the Queen of Sheba and the Ark of the Covenant were seen by Western scholars as having been concocted to give Ethiopian Christians an unbroken lineage and national identity stretching back to the time of Adam and Eve. Even so, there is compelling evidence to suggest that the Ark really did reach Ethiopia (although not at the time of King Solomon) and that James Bruce was well aware of this fact and even entered Ethiopia in 1768 with the express intent of bringing it back to Britain.
It is not, however, thought to have in any way resembled the actual work of this name. In addition to this, Dee and Kelley developed a whole written language, complete with its own ‘Enochian’ script or cipher, from their trafficking with angels. This complex system of magical invocation survives to this day and is still used by many occultists to call upon the assistance of a whole hierarchy of angelic beings.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, a major breakthrough occurred in the search for the lost Book of Enoch. A Flemish scholar named J. J. Scaliger, having decided to study obscure Latin literature in the dimly lit vaults of European libraries, sat down one day to read an unpublished work entitled Chronographia, written in the years AD 8º8-10 by a learned monk named George Syncellus. Having ploughed through lengthy pages of quite mundane sayings and quotes on various matters appertaining to the early Christian Church, he then came upon something quite different - what appeared to be extensive tracts from the Book of Enoch.
Handwritten in Greek, these chapters showed that Syncellus had obviously possessed a copy of the forbidden work and had quoted lavishly from its pages in an attempt to demonstrate the terrible transgressions of the fallen angels. Scaliger, realizing the immense rarity of these tracts, faithfully reproduced them in full, giving the world its first glimpse at the previously unknown contents of the Book of Enoch. The sections quoted by Syncellus and transcribed by Scaliger revealed the story of the Watchers, the Sons of God, who were here referred to by their Greek title ‘Grigori’. It told how they had taken wives from among mortal women, who had then given birth to Nephilim and gigantes, or giants.
It also named the leaders of the rebel Watchers and told how the fallen angels had revealed forbidden secrets to mankind, and how they had finally been imprisoned until the Day of judgment by the archangels of heaven. We may imagine the conflicting emotions experienced by Scaliger - on the one hand excitement, and on the other horror and revulsion. As a Godfearing Christian of the seventeenth century, when people were being burnt as witches with only the most petty charges brought against them:
Merely by making copies of this forbidden text, he ran the risk of being accused of practicing diabolism. Yet this incredible chance discovery begged the question of what the rest of the book might contain. Would it be as shocking as these first few chapters appeared to suggest? Bruce must have been aware of the controversial nature of the sections of the book preserved for posterity by Syncellus in the ninth century he must also have been aware of the enormous implications of retrieving a complete manuscript of the Book of Enoch.
The earth-shaking consequences of these gracious acts of literary dedication can scarcely have been realized by Bruce himself during his lifetime, for they would ultimately lead to the recirculation of heretical stories concerning humanity’s forbidden trafficking with the fallen race. And yet from the very moment of Bruce's return to Europe with his precious Ethiopian manuscripts, strange events were afoot. Having deposited the copy with the Paris library, Bruce made tracks to return to England, where he planned to visit the Bodleian Library at his earliest convenience. Even before he had a chance to leave France, however, he learnt that an eminent scholar in Egyptian Coptic studies, Karl Gottfried Wolde, was already on his way from London to Paris, carrying letters from the Secretary of State to Lord Stormont, the English Ambassador, desiring that the latter help him gain access to the Paris manuscript of the Book of Enoch, so that a translation could be secured immediately.
Permission was duly granted to Wolde, who after admission into the National Library wasted no time in making the necessary translation of the text. Yet as Bruce was to later admit in his magnum opus on his travels to Ethiopia it has nowhere appeared. What therefore were the motives behind this extraordinary urgency in translating the Book of Enoch, before even the Bodleian Library had received its own copy? The absurdity of the situation lies in the fact that no outright translation of the valuable Geez text was to appear in any language whatsoever for another forty-eight years. Why this delay? Why should such an important piece of lost religious literature have been ignored for so long, especially since there were now not one but two extant copies available to the theological world?
This ridiculous situation must have infuriated James Bruce after he had gone to all the trouble of finding and securing these manuscripts in the belief that they would be presented to the public domain in a translated form before the expiry of his own life (he died in I794). Tempting as it may be to evoke the idea of some kind of organized conspiracy behind these extraordinary actions on the part of Wolde and the English Secretary of State, the truth of the matter was far more mundane and lay in the economical and political climate of the time. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a massive decline in the popularity of the Christian Church in many parts of Protestant Europe.
Attendance at church services was dwindling, and churches everywhere were being neglected and left to fall into ruin under the impact of Newtonian science and the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. In an age of reason and learning, there was little place for the alleged transgressions of angels, fallen or otherwise. Most of the general public were simply not interested in whether or not angels had fallen through grace or lust, while any theological debate as to whether or not fallen angels possessed corporeal bodies was simply not a priority in most peoples minds.
However, its disturbing contents were not simply being read by scholars, but also by the general public. Churchmen, artists, writers, poets all sampled its delights and were able to form their own opinions on the nature of its revelations. The consequences of this knowledge passing into the public domain for the first time were to be enormous in many areas of society. Romantic writers, for instance, became transfixed by the stories of the Sons of God coming unto the Daughters of Men, and began to feature these devilish characters in their poetic works.
It also seems certain that the Book of Enoch was readily accepted as a work of great merit among the Freemasons, who used it to revive their ancient affiliation with the antediluvian patriarch; indeed, my own I838 copy of Laurences translation once belonged to the library of the Supreme Council 33, the highest ranking enclave of Royal Arch Freemasons in Britain. There is even a rumor that the third copy brought back to Europe was presented by Bruce to the Scottish Grand Lodge in Edinburgh.
Gradually, as the Oxford University edition of the Book of Enoch reached wider and wider audiences, scholars began checking in library collections across Europe, the result being that many more fragments and copies of the Enochian text in Ethiopian, Greek and even Latin were found tucked away in neglected corners. New translations were made in German and English, the most authoritative being that achieved in 1912 by Canon R. H. Charles. Even a sequel to the original text entitled the Book of the Secrets of Enoch was found in Russia and translated in I894.
Since that time, the authenticity of the Book of Enoch has been amply verified with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Many fragments of copies written in Aramaic have been identified among the hundreds of thousands of brittle scraps retrieved over the years from the caves on the Dead Sea, where they were placed in around AD 100 by the last survivor of the Essene communities at Qumran and nearby En-Gedi. The Ethiopian copyists had kept true to the original Aramaic text, which had probably passed into their country in its Greek translation sometime during the second half of the fourth century AD.
For generation after generation, the Book of Enoch had been copied and recopied by Ethiopian scribes, the old battered and torn manuscripts being either cast away or destroyed during the many bloody conflicts that took place in Abyssinia over a period of fifteen hundred years. The fact was that somehow the Book of Enoch had survived intact, despite its heavy suppression by the Christian Church, and it was to the authoritative English translation made by Canon R H. Charles in 1912 that I would next turn to discover for myself the dark secrets within its pages. Only by absorbing the obscure contents of this unholy treatise could I begin to understand why its forbidden text had become abhorrent to so many over the previous centuries.
The suggestion that the rebel Watchers had to look on as their children were murdered hints at a form of infanticide in which those born of the union between fallen angels and mortal women were systematically rounded up and slaughtered as their fathers watched helplessly. If this supposition is correct, then it could explain the fear and revulsion instilled in Lamech and Bathenosh at the birth of their son Noah, who apparently resembled a Nephilim baby- their horror being connected not simply to their own son’s strange appearance, but to the fact that the offspring of the Watchers were being murdered by those angels still loyal to heaven.
Following the incarceration of the rebel Watchers, Enoch is summoned to ‘heaven’ and addressed by the archangels, who are also, confusingly, referred to as Watchers. They request that he intercedes on their behalf and puts to the rebel angels the crimes they have committed against mankind. Enoch accepts this task and goes to see them in their place of incarceration. On his approach, he finds them all afraid, and fear and trembling seized them. Fear of punishment is surely a human tendency, not the emotions one might expect of incorporeal messengers of God, and where was this prison, so accessible to Enoch? The text suggests it was near the waters of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon. ‘The waters of Dan’ refers to one of the tributaries of the river Jordan in northern Palestine.
The root of the Hebrew word dan means to judge, and Canon R. H. Charles in a footnote to this particular reference in his widely accepted translation of the Ethiopian text, concedes that this location was specifically chosen because its name is significant of the subject the writer is dealing with, i.e the judgment of the angels [authors italics]. The geographical positioning of this story is therefore symbolic and not actual. Clearly the author of the Book of Enoch is attempting to create some kind of sound geographical perspective to the narrative, in this case establishing the rebel Watchers place of incarceration close to the location of their original descent upon Mount Hermon. In other words, many of the sites given in the Book of Enoch were chosen simply to give credence to the stories it contains.
The corruption still left in the world after the imprisonment of the Watchers, and the death of their Nephilim offspring, is to be swept away by a series of global catastrophes, ending in the Great Flood so familiar within biblical traditions In a separate account of the plight of the Nephilim, this mass-destruction is seen in terms of an all-encompassing conflagration sent by the angels of heaven in the form of fire, naphtha and brimstone. No one will survive these cataclysms of fire and water save for the seed of Noah, from whose line will come the future human race. This is how the Dead Sea communities and the earliest Christians understood the Book of Enoch, yet never is there any insinuation that the rebel Watchers were beings of flesh and blood, only that they assumed physical form in order to lie with mortal women.
Having read and reread the story of the fall of the Watchers several times over, I began to realize that such a view of events could be seriously challenged, for there seemed compelling evidence to suggest that the rebel Watchers - and, by virtue of this, angels of heaven themselves - might originally have been a race of human beings who existed in the Middle East at a distant point in history.
Or he or she can accept that incorporeal angels not only exist, but that they can also descend to earth, take on human form and then couple with mortal women, who afterwards give birth to giants that grow up to become ruthless barbarians of the sort portrayed in Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch provided no immediate answers, though my mind lingered over one particular passage in Chapter 15 concerning the final fate of the Nephilim:
The text here speaks of evil spirits - demons and devils might be more appropriate terms. Yet if it could for one moment be assumed that blood descendants is what was originally intended, then these enigmatic lines imply that those born of Nephilim blood are, by virtue of their ancestral spirit, destined to afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth. These are chilling thoughts indeed, yet in the puritanical words of the Book of Enoch these corrupted souls are also destined to become the damned, who will take no food, [but nevertheless hunger] and thirst.
The djinns, the malevolent spirits of Islamic tradition, are said to suffer from a devouring hunger and yet cannot eat while in East European folklore, as well as in popular romance, there are likewise supernatural denizens that drink blood yet can take no food, [but can nevertheless hunger] and thirst, and these are, of course, nosferatu - vampires. Whatever the reality of such beings in anthropological terms, vampires live on in the dark, sinister world of Gothic horror, which, as I had already realized, owes much of its character to the way in which the initial publication of the Book of Enoch in 1821 influenced the inner visions of the poets and artists of the romantic movement.
Perhaps the spirit of the fallen race
does therefore live on in the collective unconscious of modern-day
society. Perhaps the descendants of the Nephilim, the hybrid
offspring of the two hundred rebel Watchers, are still inside us,
their presence hinted at only by the unsettling knowledge that our
dark past holds hidden truths which are now beginning to reveal
themselves for the first time -secrets that only a few enlightened
souls have ever realized are preserved in the heretical Book of
Enoch, this demonic doctrine, as it was aptly described by the Canon
R. H. Charles.
Part 7 -
Descendants of Noah
Because of the covenant Noah had made with God at the time of the Great Flood, the Dead Sea communities accredited him with having been God‘s first bringer of rain, or rainmaker, and saw themselves as direct lineal descendants of this rain-making line - a point emphasized again and again in their religious literature.
From research into rain-making traditions, it seems probable that the priests would achieve these inexplicable weather changes by retiring from the community and drawing rings of sand on the ground. They would then stand in the centre of this magic circle and perform their supernatural conjuration - the effectiveness of such wild talents never being doubted when they were not drawing down rain, the Zaddiks would live wild existences, crossing great distances on foot and spending long periods among the harsh, rugged hills on the west bank of the Dead Sea. Here they would enter into the isolated caves and spend long periods deep in meditation and contemplation.
Until I could answer these questions the authenticity of the Book of Enoch must inevitably remain difficult to assess as historical fact. For the moment, I needed to understand more about the roots behind the story of the Watchers, how their fall came about and, most important of all, its point of origin.
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