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More
on the Book of Enoch
'Ashes To Angels' and deals with
the Book of Enoch and
other Apocryphal writings, &
the mysterious 'Watchers'
I don't necessarily agree with
it all, but I did find
it quite interesting reading.
I HAVE BEGOTTEN A STRANGE SON
-----------------------------
And after some days my son,
Methuselah, took a wife for his
son Lamech,
and she became pregnant by him and bore him a
son. And his body was white as snow and red as a rose; the
hair of his head as white as
wool and his demdema ('long
curly hair') beautiful; and as
for his eyes, when he opened
them the whole house glowed like
the sun ... And his father,
Lamech, was afraid of him and fled and went to Methuselah
his father; and he said to him,
'I have begotten a strange
son. He is not like an (ordinary) human being, but he looks
like the children of the angels
of heaven to me, his form is
different, and he is not like us
... It does not seem to me
that he is of me, but 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: Lamech has recently
taken the hand of a woman who
has given birth to a child
that bears no resemblance
whatsoever to its immediate
family. His appearance is entirely unlike other 'human
beings', for his skin is white
and ruddy, his long curly
hair is white and 'beautiful',
while his eyes mysteriously
enable the whole house to 'glow like the sun'. 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
Jews' 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: 'Behold, I thought then
within my heart that
conception was (due) to the
Watchers and the Holy Ones ...
and to the Nephilim
. . . and my heart was troubled within
me because of this child.' 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: 'O my lord, 0 my
[brother, rememberl my
pleasure! I swear to thee by the Holy Great One, the king of
[the heavens] ... that this seed
is yours and that [this]
conception is from you. This fruit was planted by you ...
and by no stranger or Watcher or
Son of Heaven ... I speak
to you
truthfully.'
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 Jewish 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?
The Book of Enoch seems to
provide an answer. Lamech,
fearful of his predicament,
consults his father, Methuselah,
who, unable to alleviate the
situation, embarks upon a
journey to find his own father
Enoch, who has withdrawn from
the world and now lives among the angels. 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:
'I have already seen this matter
in a vision and made it
known to you. For in the generation of Jared, my father,
they [the angels] transgressed
the word of the Lord, (that
is) the law of heaven.
And behold, they commit sin and
transgress the commandment; they
have united themselves with
women and commit sin together
with them; and they have
married (wives) from among them,
and begotten children by
them ... And upon the earth they
shall give birth to giants,
not of the spirit but of the flesh. There shall be a great
plague ... and the earth shall
be washed clean (by "a
deluge') from all the corruption. Now, make known to your
son Lamech
that the son who has been born is indeed
righteous, and call his name
Noah, for he shall be the
remnant for you; and he and his
sons shall be saved from the
corruption which shall come upon
the earth . . .
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.
This betrayal of the heavenly
laws of God was seen as an
abomination that would bring
only corruption and evil to the
human race, the punishment for
which was to be a deluge to
cleanse the world of its wickedness.
The Sons of God
---------------
Theologians are more or less
united in their opinion that
the widespread accounts of
fallen angels cohabiting with
mortal women, like those
included in the Book of Enoch, the
Genesis Apocryphon
and similar texts, are no more than
fanciful expansions of three
verses to be found in Chapter 6
of the Book of Genesis, squeezed
between a genealogical
listing of the antediluvian
patriarchs and a brief account
of Noah's Ark and the coming of the Flood. The first lines
in question, making up Chapter
6, verses 1-2, are indelibly
imprinted in my mind and read as
follows:
And it came to pass, when men
began to multiply on the face
of the ground, and daughters
were born unto them, that the
sons of God saw the daughters of
men that they were fair;
and they took them wives of all that they chose.
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:
The Nephilim
were in the earth in those days, and also after
that, when the sons of God came
in unto the daughters of
men, and they bare children to
them: the same were the
mighty men which were of old, the men of renown.
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 God 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 God's 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
---------------
So much for the theological
debate, but is it correct? Is
this all there is to know about
the origins of fallen
angels? And what about the adherents of the Jewish and
Christian faiths? How were they
able to interpret such
'myths'?
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:
Behind the brief and probably
intentionally obscure
reference in (Genesis) 6:1-4
there lies a more widely known
myth of a race of semi-divine
beings who rebelled against
the gods and were cast down into
the underworld ... The
fragment of the myth here
preserved by the Yahwist was
originally an aetiological myth explaining the belief in the
existence of a vanished race of
giants ...
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 Lamech's 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.
Fear of Fallen Angels
---------------------
There are clear signs that the
concept of angels and fallen
angels as corporeal
beings of flesh and blood, who lived in
a distant antediluvian age and
left as a legacy an intimate
knowledge of many things
forbidden to humanity, was once
widely accepted by certain
elements of the Jewish
population. These included the devout religious communities
that lived a pious existence in
the hot, rugged terrain on
the west bank of the Dead Sea
from about 170 BC to AD 120.
Known to history as the Essenes, their main centre is
thought to have been at Qumran,
where archaeologists have
uncovered extensive evidence of
occupation, including a
massive library
room where many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are
thought to have been written. 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.
With the advent of Christianity,
the Book of Enoch and other
such similar works became generally
available for the first
time. Many of the Early Church leaders, from the first to
the third centuries AD, used and
quoted openly from their
pages. Some Christian scholars held that mortal women had
been responsible for the fall of
the angels, while Paul in
Corinthians 11:10 advocated - according to the Church Father
Tertullianus (AD 160-230) - that women cover their heads so
as not to incite wantonness in
the fallen angels who liked
unveiled women with beautiful hair. 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 favour. Most
bizarre of all were the comments
of St Augustine (AD
354-430) in respect of the
antiquity of this pseudepigraphal
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. What ever could he have
meant by suggesting it was 'too old'? It was a most
extraordinary statement to be
made by a respected Church
father. Curiously enough, the Book of Enoch had also fallen
out of favour
among the Jews, after Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai,
in the second century AD, cursed
all those who believed that
the Sons of God mentioned in Genesis 6 were truly angels.
This was despite the fact that
the Septuagint, the Greek
version of the Old Testament,
uses the term 'angelos' in
place of 'sons of God'. The Church Fathers then went further
in their attempts to stamp out
the strange fascination with
fallen angels among early
Christians bv 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 work's
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: In the course of time
theology has purified the
obscurity and error contained in
traditional views about angels
(i.e. the belief that they
were corporeal in nature and cohabited with mortal women).
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
-------------------------
My quest to understand the
importance of the Book of Enoch
began with the man who
single-handedly revived the scholarly
world's interest in this
previously lost piece of Judaic
religious literature. His
name is James Bruce of Kinnaird,
and in 1768 he left England en route for Abyssinia,
modern-day Ethiopia, in search of something, and it was
certainly not the source of the Blue Nile,
as he claimed at
the time.
Bruce was a Scottish nobleman, a
direct descendant of one of
the most powerful families of Scottish history. He was also
an initiate of Freemasonry,
which in Scotland could trace
its roots back to the so-called
Rite of Heredom, first
instituted in early medieval times
and later incorporated
into the Royal Order of Scotland.' This in itself was a
chivalric military order of honour and valour founded on
the
rites of the Knights Templar by
James Bruce's own
illustrious ancestor, Robert
the Bruce, following the
celebrated defeat of the English
at the battle of
Bannockburn in 1314. Bruce himself was a member of the
Canongate Kilwinning NO. 2 lodge of Edinburgh, known to be
one of the oldest in Scotland, with side-orders and mystical
teachings entrenched in Judaeo-
Christian myth and ritual.
Freemasonry is an organization
with innumerable secrets, and
many of these would have been
known to the extremely know-
ledgeable
James Bruce. For instance, he would
have been
aware that in Scottish Masonic
tradition the patriarch
Enoch, Noah's great-grandfather,
was looked upon as one of
the Craft's legendary founders,
since he was accredited with
having given mankind the
knowledge of books and writing and,
most important of all to
Freemasons, to have taught mankind
the art of building.'
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
mankind, 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. Memory
of these two ancient pillars of
Enoch was preserved by the
Freemasons, who set up
representations of them in their
lodges. Known as the Antediluvian Pillars, or Enoch's
Pillars, they were eventually
replaced by representations of
the two huge columns named 'Jachin' and 'Boaz', said to have
stood on each side of the
entrance porch to Solomon's
Temple. What exactly the nine hidden vaults constructed by
Enoch were meant to represent is
completely unknown. They
might well refer to the nine
levels of mystical initiation
contained in the hidden
teachings of the Kabbalah, accepted
among the Dead Sea communities. 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.
Walked with God
---------------
The patriarch Enoch's legendary
status among both Jewish
mystics and modern-day
Freemasons stems from a very strange
assumption. In the Bible, Chapter 5 of Genesis contains a
genealogical listing of the ten
antediluvian patriarchs,
from Adam down to Noah. In each case it gives only their
names, their age when they
'begat' their first son, and the
age at which they died, with one notable exception - Enoch.
In his case, he is twice said to
have 'walked with God', an
obscure statement elaborated
only in the second instance
with the enigmatic words: 'and
he was not, for God took
him.' 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 God's 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: 'translated
to heaven'? As we know,
people are not carried off to
heaven by angels while still
living their life on earth. Either these words are
metaphorical or else they need drastic reappraisal. Might
Enoch have been simply taken
away from his people by
visitors from another land who
were looked upon as angels by
the rest of the community? And where was heaven, anyway? We
know it is deemed to be a place
'in the clouds', but did
this literally mean somewhere
beyond the physical world in
which we live? Once in this place called heaven, Enoch would
appear to have made enemies
immediately, for according to
one Hebrew legend, an angel
named Azza was expelled from
Paradise - the alternative name for the heavenly domain -
for objecting 'to the high rank given to
Enoch' when he was
transformed into Metatron. All these
legends and traditions
concerning Enoch show that the
patriarch was highly
venerated in Jewish 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.
The Search for the Book of Enoch
--------------------------------
James Bruce of Kinnaird was one giant of a man, 'the tallest
man you ever saw in your life -
at least gratis', or so said
one woman who met him. He was fluent in several different
languages, including some no longer spoken. These included
Aramaic, Hebrew and Geez, the written language of the
Ethiopian people. Even before
his travels in Abyssinia,
Bruce had journeyed far and
wide, visiting Europe, North
Africa and the Holy
Land, exploring ancient
monuments and
searching out old manuscripts
ignored by all but a few
inquisitive Westerners. In
spite of his Blue Nile story,
the noble Scotsman would appear
to have spent much of his
time in Ethiopia within the libraries
of ramshackle
monasteries, fingering through
dusty volumes of neglected
religious works, many hoary with
age and in a state of
advanced disintegration."
So what had he been looking for?
After nearly two
years of constant travelling, Bruce arrived at the sleepy
monastery of Gondar, on the banks of the vast inland sea
named Lake Tana. Having convinced the abbot of his
integrity, he was admitted into
the dark, dingy library
room, where he found, and was
finally able to secure, a very
rare copy of the Kebra Nagast, the sacred book
of the
Ethiopians. It told of a romantic love affair between
King
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba,
the legendary founder of the
kingdom of Abyssinia,
and of the birth of their illicit son
Menelik, who had conspired with his mother to abduct the
fabled Ark of the Covenant from Solomon's Temple. According
to the story, the Ark had been carried off to Ethiopia,
where it remained to that day.
Had Bruce in fact been searching
for a copy of this obscure
but very sacred book to take back with him to Europe?
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."
So was this the answer - a quest
for the lost Ark of God?
Had Bruce been the Indiana Jones
of his day? Perhaps. Yet
beyond his interests in the Kebra Nagast and the Ark of the
Covenant, Bruce could hardly have
been unaware of the
rumours circulating Europe regarding the existence in
Ethiopia of the forbidden Book of Enoch. Indeed, during the
early 1600s a Capuchin monk
visiting Ethiopia had secured a
religious text written in Geez which was at first believed
to be a long-lost copy of this very book. The find caused
much excitement in European academic circles. Yet when it
was finally studied by an
Ethiopian scholar in 1683, the
manuscript was identified, not
as the missing Book of Enoch,
but as a previously unknown text
entitled the Book of the
Mysteries of Heaven and Earth.'
No one really
knew what the Book of Enoch might contain.
Until the 1600's, its contents
were almost entirely unknown.
Yet its title alone was so
powerful that at least one person
attempted to learn its secrets from the angels themselves.
This was the Elizabethan
astrologer, magus and scientist, Dr
John Dee, who, working with an
alleged psychic, Edward
Kelley, used crystal balls and
other scrying paraphernalia
to invoke the presence of angels. The spirits told Kelley
they would provide him with the
contents of the Book of
Enoch, and there is evidence to
suggest that Dee did
actually possess a 'Book of
Enoch' dictated through Kelley's
mediumship."
It is not, however, thought to have in any way
resembled the actual work of this name. In addition to
this, Dee and Kelley 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.
Scaliger's Discovery
--------------------
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 808-10 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 judgement 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 God-fearing Christian of the
seventeenth century, when people
were being burnt as witches
with only the most petty charges
brought against them, what
was he to make of such claims? What, moreover, was he to do
with them? Angels lying with mortal women and the conception
of giant babies? What could this all mean? Was it true, or
was it simply an allegorical
story concerning the
consequences of trafficking with
supernatural beings such as
angels? Merely by making copies of this forbidden text, he
ran the risk of being accused of practising
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. It was perhaps for this very reason that he spent
so long talking to the abbots
and monks at the Ethiopian
monasteries. In the light of this supposition, it becomes
crystal clear that one of the
primary objectives of Bruce's
travels must have been to secure
and bring back to Europe a
copy of the Book of Enoch. And Bruce's efforts did not go
unrewarded, for he managed to
track down and obtain not one,
but three complete copies of the [Book of Enoch]. One Book
of Enoch, with which he returned
to Europe in 1773, was
consigned to the National
Library of Paris, one he donated
to the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the third he placed
'amongst the books of Scripture,
which I brought home,
standing immediately before the
Book of Job, which is its
proper place in the Abyssinian Canon.'
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 1794).
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. ln 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
people's minds.
THE SEARCH FOR THE SOURCE
-------------------------
Fuelled by Fallen Angels
------------------------
The Book of Enoch remained in
darkness until 1821, when the
long years of dedicated work by
a professor of Hebrew at the
University of Oxford were finally rewarded with the
publication of the first ever
English translation of the
Book of Enoch. The Reverend
Richard Laurence, Archbishop of
Cashel, had laboured for many
hundreds of hours over the
faded manuscript in the hands of
the Bodleian Library,
carefully substituting English
words and expressions for the
original Geez,
while comparing the results with known
extracts, such as the few brief
chapters preserved in Greek
by Syncellus during the ninth
century. It is fair to say
that the publication of the Book
of Enoch caused a major
sensation among the academic and literary circles of Europe.
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. A little later,
Victorian painters started
portraying this same subject
matter on canvas. One might even be tempted to suggest that
the Book of Enoch was a major
inspiration behind the darker
excesses of the so-called Gothic
revival, which culminated
in such literary works as Bram
Stoker's Dracula, in which
the eponymously named character is
himself a fallen angel.
Why should such satanic subjects
have inspired or repulsed
people to this extent? Why are people so fuelled by stories
of fallen angels? 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
1838 copy of Laurence's
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 rumour
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 1894. 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 survivors 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.
DEMONIC DOCTRINE
----------------
Reading the Book of Enoch for
the first time was quite an
unnerving experience, which on
more than one occasion sent
unexpected shivers down my spine. Here was perhaps one of
the oldest accounts of mankind. It had been passed down
orally from one storyteller to
the next over thousands of
years. Finally it became a book in its own right sometime
after 200 BC, almost certainly
at the hands of the Essene
community at Qumran on the Dead
Sea. Yet what were its
contents, and why had it caused
so much consternation to the
Jewish rabbis and the Early
Church of Christianity? I found
the Book of Enoch to be a colourful but often confusing and
contradictory patchwork of
material that required extensive
disentanglement before any
cohesive picture could be gleaned
from its contents. Much of it appears to have been written -
originally on sheets of fine
animal skin - during or shortly
after the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrian king who
ruled Judaea
at the time of the Maccabean revolt of 167 BC.
Among its 108 short chapters is
irrefutable evidence of the
battles fought and won against
the hated Syrian ruler by the
Jewish reactionary movement, the
Zadokite Hassidaeans,
under
the leadership of Judas Maccabeaus.
Other parts were written
shortly after this period, while
some passages even reflect
an age postdating the commencement of the Christian era. So
what does it contain? What element is it that so offends its
opponents?
In the opening chapters the
narrator reiterates the story
told in Genesis 6 concerning the
Sons of God coming unto the
Daughters of Men and taking
wives from among their number.
The reader then learns how, 'in
the days of Jared', two
hundred Watchers 'descended' on
'Ardis', the summit of Mount
Hermon - a mythical location equated with the triple-peak of
Jebel esh Sheikh (9,200 feet),
placed in the most northerly
region of ancient Palestine. In Old Testament times
its
snowy heights had been revered
as sacred by various peoples
who inhabited the Holy Land;
it was also the probable site
of the Transfiguration of Christ
when the disciples
witnessed their Lord 'transfigured before them.' On this
mountain the Watchers swear an
oath and bind themselves by
'mutual imprecations',
apparently knowing full well the
consequences their actions will
have both for themselves and
for humanity as a whole. It is a pact commemorated in the
name given to the place of their
'fall', for in Hebrew the
word Hermon or herem,
translates as 'curse'. Why the two
hundred angels should have
picked this location as opposed
to any other to make their
descent into the lowlands is
never made clear. Yet this is what they do, travelling down
to mix and mingle among humanity
in the hope of sampling the
delights of mortal women. The reader is then introduced to
Shemyaza, the leader of the Watchers, while eighteen of his
minions are also named; these,
it says, are 'their chiefs of
tens.' At this stage, I will not question the authenticity,
origin or reality
of this curious narrative, but simply
continue with the story as told in the Book of Enoch.
After the Watchers find themselves wives and
'go unto
them,' the women give birth to
the enormous Nephilim babies,
who grow up to become barbaric in every way possible. The
words here are pertinent and
must be quoted in full: 'And
they [the mortal women] became
pregnant, and they bare great
giants, whose height was three
thousand ells: who consumed
all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer
sustain them, the giants turned
against them and devoured
mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts,
and reptiles, and fish, and to
devour one another's flesh,
and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against
the lawless ones.' The height of the Nephilim,
here given as
3,000 ells, with one English ell
being the equivalent of
forty-five inches, is an
exaggeration of the sort so often
found in Jewish myth. It is used only to emphasize a
specific point, which is to
record that these 'gibborim', or
'mighty men', were of great
height and possessed enormous
appetites. More disconcerting is the suggestion that the
Nephilim turned against their mortal families and engaged in
what can only be described as cannibalism. 'Sinning' against
'birds, and beasts, and
reptiles, and fish' could either
mean that they were consumed by
the Nephilim as food, or
that the giants committed
barbaric sexual acts with them,
perhaps both. Whatever the answer, they would appear to have
developed a lust for drinking
blood, which must also have
been viewed as abhorrent by the
communities in which they
were born and raised.
The Secrets of Heaven
---------------------
The narrative then tells how the
rebel Watchers who walked
among humanity revealed the forbidden secrets of heaven. One
of their number, a leader named Azazel, is said to have
'taught men to make swords, and
knives, and shields, and
breastplates, and made known to
them the metals (of the
earth) and the art of working
them', indicating that the
Watchers were the first to bring
the use of metal to
mankind. He also instructed them on how they could make
'bracelets' and 'ornaments' and
showed them how to use
'antimony', a white brittle
metal employed in the arts and
medicine. To the women he taught the art of 'beautifying'
the eyelids, and the use of 'all
kinds of costly stones' and
'colouring
tinctures', indicating that before this time the
wearing of make-up and jewellery was
unknown. Through this
unforgivable act, the Daughters
of Men were believed to have
been 'led astray', and because
of it they became 'corrupt',
committing fornication not only
with the Watchers
themselves, but also, it must be
assumed, with men who were
not their regular partners. Azazel
also stood accused of
teaching women how to enjoy
sexual pleasure and indulge in
promiscuity - a blasphemy seen
as 'godlessness' in the eyes
of the Hebrew story-tellers. Linguistic experts believe
that
the names Azazel
and Shemyaza probably derive from the same
source, but were made into two
separate fallen angels before
their introduction to the Book
of Enoch; however, since they
both have quite independent
legends attributed to them, each
will be dealt with separately as and when they appear.
Other Watchers stand accused of
revealing to mortal kind the
knowledge of more scientific
arts, such as the knowledge of
the clouds, or meteorology; the
'signs of the earth',
presumably geodesy and
geography; as well as astronomy and
the 'signs', or passage, of the
celestial bodies, such as
the sun and moon. Shemyaza is
accredited with having taught
men 'enchantments, and
root-cuttings', a reference to the
magical arts shunned by most
orthodox Jews, but accepted to
some degree by the Dead
Sea communities. One of their
number, Penemue,
taught 'the bitter and the sweet', surely a
reference to the use of herbs and
spices in foods, while
instructing men on the use of
'ink and paper', implying that
the Watchers introduced the earliest forms of writing. Far
more disturbing is Kasdeja, who is said to have shown 'the
children of men all the wicked smitings of spirits and
demons, and the smitings of the embryo in the womb, that it
may pass away'. In other words, he taught women how to abort
their babies.
These lines concerning the
forbidden sciences handed to
humanity by the rebel Watchers
raise the whole fundamental
issue of why angels of heaven
should have possessed any
knowledge of such matters in the first place. Why should
they have needed to work with
metals, use charms,
incantations and writing;
beautify the body; employ the use
of antimony, and know how to abort an unborn child? None of
these skills are what one might
expect heavenly messengers
of God to possess, unless, that
is, they were human in the
first place. In my opinion, this revelation of previously
unknown knowledge and wisdom
seems more like the actions of
a highly advanced race passing
on some of its closely
guarded secrets to a less
evolved culture still striving to
understand the basic principles of life. A comparison might
be drawn with the way in which
supposedly civilized cultures
of the Western world have
introduced everything from whisky
to clothes, firearms, [file corruptioon] to indigenous races
in remote regions of the world. If such is what really
happened - members of one highly
advanced race passing on
its knowledge to a less evolved
culture still struggling for
survival?
Plight of the Watchers and Nephilim
-----------------------------------
One by one the angels of heaven
are appointed by God to
proceed against the Watchers and
their offspring the
Nephilim, described as 'the bastards and the reprobates, and
the children of fornication'. Azazel
is bound hand and foot,
and cast for eternity into the
darkness of a desert referred
to as Dudael. Upon him are placed
rough and jagged rocks and
here he shall forever remain
until the Day of judgement,
when he will be 'cast into the fire' for his sins. For their
part in the corruption of
mankind, the Watchers are forced
to witness the slaughter of
their own children before being
cast into some kind of heavenly prison, an 'abyss of fire'.
Although the Watchers' leader, Shemyaza, is cast into this
abyss alongside his brothers, in
other versions of the story
he undergoes a more dramatic punishment. Since he was
tempted by a beautiful mortal
maiden named Ishtahar to
reveal the Explicit Name of God
in exchange for the offer of
carnal pleasure, he is to be
tied and bound before being
made to hang for all eternity
between heaven and earth, head
down, in the constellation of Orion. 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 judgement of the angels
[author's 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, the 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.
If this were so, then memories
of these monumental and quite
horrendous events would appear
to have been distorted and
mythologized across the passage
of time, until they became
simply moralistic folk-tales in
a slowly evolving religious
history adopted by the Jewish
race during Old Testament
times. Did this provide a valid answer? To me it appeared as
credible as any. Yet if my solution was incorrect, then what
were the alternatives? There were two. Either the reader can
accept that religious literature
of this nature is pure
fantasy, based on the deep
psychological needs and values of
a God-fearing society. 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
the Book of Enoch. Which of these solutions seems easiest to
accept? Which of these choices feels most right to accept?
And even if the rebel Watchers
were once human beings of
flesh and blood, where did they
come from, in what
time-frame did they live, and
what was the true fate of
their progeny? Did they all either perish in the mass
genocide orchestrated by the
angels still loyal to heaven or
die in the cataclysms which culminated in the Great Flood?
Did any survive? 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: ...
because they are born from men
(and) from the holy Watchers
in their beginning and primal
origin; they shall be evil
spirits on earth, and evil
spirits shall they be called ...
And the spirits of the giants
(will) afflict, oppress,
destroy, attack, do battle, and
work destruction on the
earth, and cause trouble; they
(will) take no food, [but
nevertheless hunger] and thirst, and cause offences. And
these spirits shall rise up
against the children of men and
against the women, because they have proceeded (from them).
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.
Descendants of Noah
-------------------
Despite the Book of Enoch's
extraordinary material
concerning the story of the
Watchers, much of its later
chapters appeared to be
unconnected with my search to
discover the origins of the fallen race. Indeed, they seemed
to have been written by a different hand altogether. This
supposition was confirmed when I
realized that the chapters
featuring the fall of the
Watchers, the birth of Noah and
the Flood narrative had all been
taken from the much
earlier, now lost, apocalyptic
work known as the Book of
Noah. It would simply confuse
matters if I were to start
referring to the Book of Noah
instead of the Book of Enoch,
but knowledge that Noah, not
Enoch, was the original
narrator of this story is
important indeed and may well
provide the key to understanding
the reasons behind the
Essenes' interest in this demonic literature. 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.
Many Jews in the last two
centuries before Christ actually
believed that wandering holy
men, or zaddiks, 'the
righteous', were direct descendants
of Noah and could
therefore perform rain-making
feats - a divine virtue
bestowed upon them by birthright.
Renowned of the
rainmakers in Jewish tradition
was Onlas the Righteous, also
known as Honi the Circle-drawer. His
daughter's son, Hanan
the Hidden, and another grandson
named Abba Hilkiah, were
also able to repeat their grandfather's rain-making feats.
>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. More important, however, was the
knowledge that these wandering Zaddik-priests, who walked
freely among the Dead Sea
communities, were the teachers of
the Kabbalah,
the arcane knowledge passed on orally from
person to person. With their great understanding of the
Kabbalah, and their claimed descent from Noah, it seemed
extremely likely that it was
these wandering holy men who
had first conveyed knowledge of
the Watchers' story to the
Essenes. If this theory was correct, then who were these
wandering Zaddiks? Why did they believe
themselves to be
direct descendants of Noah? And where and when did they
obtain these stories concerning the fall of the Watchers?
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.
INSANE BLASPHEMY
----------------
Not everyone agreed on what the
Sons of God coming unto the
Daughters of Men actually
represented so far as the accepted
history of the Bible was concerned. By the late fourth
century, the Syrian
Church had begun to circulate a
brand-new religious text claiming
to give a true rendition
of the lines in Genesis 6. In this variation of the story,
the Sons of God are no longer
dark angels but the Sons of
Seth, a righteous community of
men and women who reside in
peace on the Mountain
of God. This mythical location lies
beyond the Gates of Paradise,
out of which humanity's First
Parents, Adam and Eve, had been
cast many generations
before. Living among the Sons of Seth are the now familiar
antediluvian patriarchs, such as
Jared, his son Enoch, his
grandson Methuselah and his great-grandson Lamech.
In their
midst is the entrance to the
so-called Cave of Treasures,
within which lie the earthly
remains of the first men and
women, including Adam and his
wife Eve, as well as the Three
Gifts of God. These latter are caskets
containing the
frankincense, gold and myrrh
destined to remain in the
possession of Israel and Judah until they are finally
presented to Christ at the time of the Nativity. Elsewhere
in the enormous cave burns a
perpetual flame symbolizing the
light of God given to Adam in his darkest hour. Down in the
lowlands lives a somewhat more
primitive culture that,
without the just guidance of
God, leads depraved lifestyles
of sin and corruption. Among them are the Daughters of
Cain,
the progeny of Adam's first son,
Cain, who, according to
Genesis 4, slew his brother Abel
and was cursed and 'sent
out' by God to dwell 'in the land
of Nod on the east of
Eden.'
The Daughters of Cain are easily
led into unbridled
debauchery, a vice that conjures
the manifestation of
Satanail, i.e. Satan or the Devil. Convinced that he can
take advantage of their wicked
ways to lead astray the Sons
of God, the arch-fiend hatches a cunning plan. He convinces
the naive Daughters of Men to
wear make-up and adorn
themselves with fine jewellery and exotic
garments. Satanail
then directs them towards the Mountain
of God, where the
Sons of Seth lead their pious
existence in the presence of
the Most High. The women try to convince the religious men
to come down from the heights so
that they may be tempted to
commit gross acts of fornication and indecency. To this end
the Daughters of Cain approach
the base of the mountain and
begin playing musical
instruments, dancing wildly, singing
loudly and calling to the 520
Sons of God to come and join
them in sweet pleasure. Hearing the women's enticing voices,
many of the men descend the holy
mountain and indulge in
carnal delights. Onlv the most
righteous - in other words,
figures such as Jared, Enoch,
Methuselah, Lamech and his son
Noah - refuse to be tempted by
this gross iniquity. As a
result of their unholy union,
giants are inevitably born
unto the godless women, and the
'fallen' Sons of Seth are
prevented by God from returning
to their mountain retreat
close to the Cave
of Treasures. The Most High
then
unleashes a great tempest and
deluge to purge the world of
all wickedness and corruption,
as in Enochian and Old
Testament tradition.
This alternative rendering of
the enigmatic lines of Genesis
6 appears at first to provide a
major breakthrough in their
interpretation, and this was the
opinion shared by a great
number of biblical scholars right down to the Middle Ages.
Removing any reference to fallen
angels nullified the story
of the fall of the Watchers as
it was portrayed in a
convincing and quite unnerving
manner within the Book of
Enoch. No fallen angels - no
truth to the Book of Enoch;
this was the philosophy of those
who believed in the reality
of the story of the Daughters of
Cain coming to the Sons of
Seth. It was an easy demolition of the ancient
text, if it
could be accepted that the Cave
of Treasures story was the
word of God.
Unfortunately, however, these
early Church Fathers, who
mostly belonged to the Syrian
Church, overlooked one tiny
point. The Book of the Cave
of Treasures, as it became
known, was almost entirely the
creation of an early
Christian writer named Julius Africanus (AD 200-245), and
written more out of pure ignorance than deliberate
design.
He observed that the term 'elohim' was used in the Old
Testament, as well as in other
apocryphal works, to denote
'foreign rulers' and from this
it was concluded that the
'bene
ha-elohim', the 'judges' Sons of the Elohim, were none
other than the early patriarchs,
the descendants of Adam's
third son, Seth. The deduction was made despite the more
obvious fact that the term 'bene ha-elohim' was also used
with
reference to heavenly hosts, or angels. In spite of the
text's clear failings, the early
Church Fathers quickly
adopted Africanus'
concept of the fall of the Sons of God
and pronounced it the only true
and authentic interpretation
of the Genesis text.
Yet even this did not stop the
spread of wild accounts
concerning the deeds of the fallen angels. The story of the
Daughters of Cain coming unto
the Sons of Seth was very
often placed alongside
alternative material concerning the
fall of the Watchers, taken
either directly or indirectly
from the Book of Enoch. An outstanding example of this is
the account of the fall of the
angels contained in the
Ethiopian Kebra
Nagast. Here, next to a precis
of the Cave
of Treasures story, is a
somewhat shocking reference to the
enormous size of the Nephilim babies and the way in which
they entered the world: And the
daughters of Cain with whom
the angels had companied
conceived, but they were unable to
bring forth their children, and they died. And of the
children who were in their wombs
some died, and some came
forth: having split open the
bellies of their mothers they
came forth by their navels... Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, the
eminent Egyptologist and
literary scholar who translated the
Kebra Nagast into English, openly
admitted that this
gruesome passage showed that the
unborn babies were so large
that they could not be born in
the ordinary way, but had to
be removed from the mothers by the umbilicus. In other
words, because of their immense
size, the Nephilim children
could only be born by using the
surgical operation we know
today as Caesarian section. This was a disconcerting
thought, which, although not
confirmed anywhere else in
Hebrew literature, will be
encountered again in connection
with the birth of giant children
in another Middle Eastern
country (see #9)
Mani the Ignorant
-----------------
Even though the Book of Enoch
had fallen foul of the
developing Christian Church
during the early fourth century,
there are firm indications that
some individuals had studied
its contents and had, as a
consequence, begun extolling its
dire consequences for mankind. One such indication of this
situation comes from a tract on
the Book of Enoch written by
St Jerome (AD 342-420), a Syriac Church
Father of renown and
scholarship, who had this to say
on the subject: 'We have
read in a certain apocryphal
book [i.e. the Book of Enoch]
that when the sons of God were
coming down to the daughters
of men, they descended upon Mount Hermon and there entered
into an agreement to come to the
daughters of men and make
them their wives. This book is quite explicit and is
classified as apocryphal. The ancient exegetes have at
various times
referred to it, but we are citing it, not as
authoritative, but merely to
bring it to your attention ...
I have read about this
apocryphal book in the work of a
particular author who used it to
confirm his own heresy ...
Do you detect the source of the
teachings of Manichaeus, the
ignorant? just as the Manichaeans say
that the souls desired
human bodies to be united in
pleasure, do not they who say
that angels desired bodies - or
the daughters of men - seem
to you to be saying the same thing as the Manichaeans?'
Manichaeus 'the ignorant', or Mani as he
is more commonly
known, was a much-hated prophet
of Parthian stock who had a
huge impact on the development
of Christian heresy from the
third century right through till the end of the Middle Ages.
And St Jerome was right. There is firm evidence to show that
Mani devised his holy scriptures and teachings after
studying the Book of Enoch. Mani was
born in the Babylonian
town of Ctesiphon, near modern-day Baghdad, in the year AD
215. Both his mother and father
appear to have been directly
related to the exiled Parthian
Iranian tradition, by the
prophet Zarathustra,
the Greek Zoroaster, sometime during
the sixth century BC (see Chapter 8). Perhaps influenced by
the knowledge that
Zoroastrianism acknowledged whole
hierarchies of angels and
demons, or daevas, Mani
appears to
have fully accepted the Enochian account of the fall of the
Watchers. As a consequence, he
formulated his own dualistic,
gnostic creed, complete with its own holy scriptures and
creation myths. In his sacred books he portrayed the
material world not as the
dominion of God, but as the domain
of the Rulers of Darkness, in
other words of Satan and his
fallen angels. All that remained of God was the divine
spirit trapped inside the
physical body, and only by
striving to find oneness with
God could humanity hope to
achieve a promised afterlife in the heavenly paradise.
According to an anathema of
Manichaeism written by its
Christian opposers,
Mani believed Adam to have been the
outcome of a fertilized embryo,
produced bv the intercourse
of male and female fallen
angels, then swallowed by Satan,
who subsequently coupled with
his spouse to bring forth the
First Man. Such a pessimistic
view of life meant that Mani
and his followers saw the very
roots of humanity not just as
evil, but as rotten to the core.
Mani preached a synthesis of different faiths, including
aspects of Buddhism,
Christianity, Zoroastrianism and
Mandaism, a strange religion native to Iraq and Iran. His
faith became extremely popular
for several centuries and was
carried by his dedicated
disciples and followers across the
Orient, reaching as far east as
central Asia, and as far
east as India and Tibet. Manichaeism was quite obviously
seen as a huge threat to the
other major religions of the
age. It was therefore condemned as outright heresy by the
ruling Sassanian
dynasty of Persian kings as well as by the
early Church Fathers of Asia Minor. Followers of the faith
were denounced as heretics and
put to death, while a more
horrific fate awaited Mani himself at the hands of fanatical
Zoroastrians at jund-i-Shapur, in south-west Persia. In AD
277 he was accused of preaching
false doctrines, and as a
consequence was thrown in
prison, where he was bound by
chains, tortured to the point of death and left to die. His
exhausted body was then publicly
humiliated in the most
gruesome manner: his skin was
flayed and stuffed with straw
before being strung up on the
gates of the town as blood
still issued from his warm
carcass, which was decapitated
and erected on a pole for all to see. Instead of quelling
the growing unrest against
Manichaeism by the Persian
people, the death of Mani incited a sanguine crusade against
his followers, who were rounded
up throughout the empire and
slaughtered by Zoroastrians -
the price, it seems, for
believing in the fall of the
angels and their corruption of
mankind.
Unorthodox Thoughts
-------------------
The existence of heresies such
as Manichaeism and other
forms of Christian gnosticism once again raised the whole
fundamental issue of the corporeal
nature of fallen angels
and the Sons of God in the minds
of the most eminent
theologians and churchmen of the day. One Church Father, St
John Chrysostom
(AD c. 347-407), the archbishop of
Constantinople, spoke out vehemently against the Book of
Enoch, stating indignantly that
it would be 'folly to accept
such insane blasphemy, saying
that an incorporeal and
spiritual nature could have united itself to human bodies.'
It had become blasphemous and
highly heretical to preach,
circulate or support the
doctrine contained within the Book
of Enoch, or indeed any other
apocryphal or pseudepigraphal
work. In no way did the Church want the spread of Jewish
traditions completely at
variance with its gradually
emerging corpus of scripture,
especially if these concerned
alternative views on the fall of
mankind and the descent of
the angels. Such subjects needed to be kept strictly out of
bounds. Is it possible for us to understand this fanatical
zeal towards the unorthodox - a
zeal that persisted in the
name of religion throughout the
Middle Ages and probably
cost the lives of countless
hundreds of thousands of
individuals accused of heresy and witchcraft? Why should the
Christian Church have been so
paranoid about a narrative
concerning a group of two
hundred angels who fell from grace
and lusted after the Daughters of Men? Surely not all the
heavenly messengers of God were
perfect, so why has there
been this blanket suppression of
anything even remotely
promoting such radical ideas
even through to the present
day?
Serpents That Walked
--------------------
Part of the answer lies in the
fact that there seems to be a
clear overlap between the story
of the fall of the Watchers
and the account of the
temptation of Eve by the Serpent as
portrayed in the Book of Genesis. Since this is such an
important subject in our quest
to understand the origins of
fallen angels, it will be worth
recalling exactly what
happened on that day in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve,
the idealized first man and
woman in Christian, Islamic and
Judaic mythology, live in a
state of innocence and grace
within the garden until the
Serpent of Eden questions God's
authority by telling Eve she
will not die if she eats the
forbidden fruit of the 'tree
which is in the midst of the
garden', for, it says: 'God doth
know that in the day ye eat
thereof, then your eyes shall be
opened, and ye shall be as
gods, knowing good and evil.' Accordingly, so Genesis
informs us, Eve saw that the
fruit of the tree 'was good for
foodí' and pleasant to the eyes, and that it was 'a tree to
make one wise [author's emphasis]'. She then picked and ate
of the fruit, giving it also to
her partner Adam to eat; the
result being that their eyes
were 'opened', enabling them to
realize that they were naked. In other words, eating the
fruit of the tree had somehow
managed to allow them to gain
the knowledge and wisdom to
understand their predicament in
the idealized world -all thanks
to the 'subtil' serpent who
'beguiled' Eve into eating of
the Tree of Knowledge of Good
and Evil. For this heinous crime against mankind, the
Serpent is then: 'cursed [by
God] above all cattle, and
above every beast of the field;
upon thy belly shalt thou
go, and dust shalt
thou eat all the days of thy life: and I
will put enmnity
between thee and the woman, and between thy
seed and her seed; it shall
bruise thy head, and thou shalt
bruise his heel.' Adam and Eve are also cursed by God, for
to Eve he says: 'I will greatly
multiply thy sorrow and thy
conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and
thy desire shall be to thy
husband, and he shall rule over
thee' - mortifying words which
have loomed over the heads of
Western women ever since. In
Adam's case, God rules that 'in
sorrow shalt
thou eat of it all the days of thy life'
referring, of course, to the forbidden
knowledge the couple
have gained through eating of the tree. In order that Adam
and Eve, with their new-found
'wisdom', do not want of the
garden's other tree, the 'tree
of life', and become immortal
like gods, they are cast out of Eden 'to till the ground
from whence he (Adam) was taken'.
This is the story of the
so-called 'fall of man', as well as
the roots of the misery and
suffering humanity is forever
forced to suffer because of this act of disobedience. As a
consequence of the sin committed
by our First Parents, we
are deemed to have inherited a
corrupt nature, with a
prevailing tendency towards
evil, the very stance adopted by
Manichaeism and many of the
other more obscure gnostic cults
that thrived during the first
four centuries of the
Christian era. The fall of
mankind was obviously compared by
religious scholars with the
angels' fall through lust and
pride, while the Serpent of
Temptation was commonly believed
by theologians to have been the
form taken by Satan to
corrupt mankind. Satan's chosen guise as a serpent to
beguile Eve was thought to have
been because of its sly and
cunning ability to hypnotize its prey into submission. The
snake's loathsome and frightful
appearance also made it an
ideal totem of the darkness, and thus of the Devil himself.
All these explanations are,
however, somewhat naive, for the
snake is a very ancient symbol
that represented the
conveyance of sexual desires,
hidden wisdom and secret
knowledge in many different
Middle Eastern faiths and
religions. The serpent makes an appearance in a great number
of creation myths featuring the
first humans and is often
portrayed as a wise benevolent
spirit, not a beguiling
messenger of temptation and evil. Moreover, the serpent has
an intrinsic association with
the first woman in these
myths, a fact confirmed in the
knowledge that the name Eve
is synonymous with both the word for 'life' and 'snake'.
For
instance, in Hebrew hawwah, i.e. Eve, means 'she who makes
live'. It is also
related to the word 'hevia', signifying a
female serpent. Furthermore, in Arabic 'serpent' is 'hayya',
which is itself cognate with 'hayat', meaning 'life'; the
Arabic for Eve being 'hawwa'. In other accounts from Jewish
lore, Eve is actually seen as
the ancestral mother of the
Nephilim, who were themselves described in Hebrew myth as
'awwim', meaning 'devastators' or 'serpents'.
Angels, too, are integrally
linked with the form
of the serpent: one of the
principal classes of angelic
being in Hebrew lore is the
Seraphim, or 'fiery serpents',
who are 'sent by God as his
instruments to inflict on the
people the righteous penalty of sin'. The link is further
strengthened by an occasional
statement here and there in
the Book of Enoch. In Chapter 69, for instance, where it
outlines the forbidden arts
taught to mankind by the
Watchers, one angel known as Kasdeja is accused of showing
men how to take away 'the bites
of the serpent, and the
smitings which befall through the noontide heat (i.e.,
sunstroke...) 'the son of the serpent named Tabaet'.
Although the exact meaning of
these lines is now lost, it
clearly mentions 'the son of the
serpent named Tabaet', a
reference, it seems, to a Nephilim born to a 'serpent', or
Watcher, named Tabaet. So if the Watchers are intrinsically
linked with the symbol of the
serpent, the conveyers of
sexual desire, hidden wisdom and
forbidden knowledge, then
how do they relate to the Serpent of Eden? One tantalizing
clue to this perplexing enigma
is to be found in Chapter 69
of the Book of Enoch, for
included among those Watchers who
have revealed the heavenly
secrets to mankind is Gadreel,
identified as the fallen angel who 'led astray Eve'.
The fallen angel who 'led astray
Eve'? Here is a very
revealing statement. What is it supposed to mean? And how
might it be equated with our knowledge
of the Fall of Man in
the heavenly paradise? If this particular passage is
contemporary with the book's
original construction during
the first half of the second
century BC, then it firmly
associates the rebellion of the
two hundred Watchers, during
the age of the patriarch Jared,
with the beguiling of Eve
and thus with the corruption of humanity. Despite this
realization, it would be foolhardy to accuse one Watcher
alone of this most heinous of
crimes, for it seems clear
that at some point in the distant
past the Watchers were
collectively seen as 'the
Serpent' who divulged the hidden
wisdom and knowledge to the
First Parents, a metaphorical
reference to humanity in general. In doing so, it caused
them to commit the first sin, the act of self-awareness. As
a consequence of this
interference in human affairs, our
ancestors were forced into a
material existence over and
beyond the natural evolution and
progression it would
presumably have achieved had the
Watchers not intervened to
change the course of destiny. That was certainly the way it
was beginning to look, and, if
correct, then it meant that
the story of the 'Fall of Man'
in the Garden of Eden was
merely a highly abstract
expression of the way in which the
Watchers supposedly corrupted
the minds of humankind. If
so, then which story influenced the other? And were we to
assume that, because of the
Watchers' interference in
humanity's affairs, humanity now
bears within it the seeds
of eternal corruption and evil? And what of the connection
with Satan, the Devil, God's greatest adversary? How did he
fit into this gradually emerging
picture, and what was his
association with the Watchers of the Book of Enoch?
The Devil in Disguise
---------------------
The name Satan comes from the
Hebrew ha-satan, meaning 'the
adversary'. In the Old Testament this term is used
exclusively to describe either
the enemies of God or the
enemies of the Israelite race in general. Never is the Devil
referred to as the evil one. Not until the advent of the New
Testament, the collection of
books and gospels relating to
the period subsequent to the
birth of the Christian era,
does the term ha-satan take on this
all-important role. At
this point Satan becomes an
angel fallen from grace and
expelled from heaven, along with
his fellow-rebels, by the
archangel Michael. References to Satan's own fall appear in
passages such as Luke 10:18,
where Christ is said to have
'beheld
Satan fallen as lightning from heaven'. It is,
however, only in the Bible's
final book, the Revelation of
St John the Divine, written
during the first century AD,
that the full story of Satan's
fall is revealed for the
first time. In Chapter
12, verse 9, it proclaims: 'And the
great dragon was cast down, the
old serpent, he that is
called the Devil and Satan, the
deceiver of the whole world,
he was cast down to earth, and
his angels were cast down
with him.' And then again, in Revelation 20:2-3, it says:
'And he laid hold on the dragon,
the old serpent, which is
the Devil and Satan, and bound
him for a thousand years, and
cast him into the abyss, and
shut it, and sealed it over
him, that he should deceive the nations no more.' This is
all that may be gleaned from the
holy scriptures concerning
the fall of Satan, although it
is clear that St. John the
Divine based his visions of
Satan and his fallen angels on
the story of the Watchers
contained in the Book of Enoch; an
assertion supported by the fact
that this apocalyptic work
was freely circulating among
early Christians around this
time. Having established Satan as God's arch-enemy, the
Christians adopted him as the
root of all evil in the world,
and any trafficking with either
him or his fallen angels was
seen as black magic, heresy,
sorcery and, of course,
witchcraft - acts that were
punishable by death throughout
Christendom until comparatively
recent times. In medieval
times, theologians, such as Peter Lombard (c. 1100-1160),
'saw Satan in the guise of the
serpent tempting Eve', while
other scholars, such as the
ninth-century Bishop Agobard,
held that 'Satan tempted Eve through the serpent.' Either
way, such ideas became
mainstream in the Christian
philosophy of the Middle Ages
and a general acceptance of
this assumption has helped to
mould religious thought right
through to the present day.
So, was Satan behind the story
of the Serpent of Eden? Perhaps
the medieval scholars actually
got it right, realizing that
the references in the Book of
Revelation to the casting out
of heaven of Satan and his
adversaries was one and the same
story as the pre-Christian
account of the fall of the
Watchers, alluded to in the
story of the Sons of God coming
unto the Daughters of Men in Genesis 6. Satan is referred to
in Revelation as 'the old
serpent', a synonym that seems
quite clearly to refer not just
to the Serpent of Temptation
but also to the rebel Watchers of the Book of Enoch. Since
the revealing to humanity of the
hidden secrets of heaven by
the Watchers appears to have
been the impetus behind the
rise of civilisation
as we know it today, and Satan and his
fallen angels are to be
identified with the fallen angels of
the Book of Enoch, then it
implies that, in Christian terms
at least, the genesis of the
civilized world can be
attributed not to the will of
God, but to the intervention
of his antithesis - the Devil. Mani's
dualistic world must
have been full of contradictions
- on the one hand he was
preaching the purity of God and
the wav of the Holy Spirit,
and on the other he taught that
the roots of evil lay within
us all. Was this why the early Church Fathers so vehemently
condemned the Book of Enoch's
portrayal of the fall of the
Watchers as 'insane blasphemy'?
The answer is no, since they
themselves came to accept this
very doctrine that St
Augustine named as 'original
sin', which placed the blame
not on the Watchers but on Eve. It is interesting to note
that Augustine, who condemned
the Book of Enoch as 'too old'
for inclusion in the Canon, had
himself at one time been a
Manichaean. It is more likely
that those heretics, such as
Mani, who wholeheartedly accepted and preached the demonic
doctrine outlined in Enochian literature, were always
persecuted in such ghastly ways for this reason alone. What
justification could there be for
such crimes against
humanity, and, more importantly,
just what is it the world
fears so much about fallen angels?
VISAGE LIKE A VIPER
-------------------
Many people believe the Old
Testament to be littered with
references to the appearance of
angels, but this is simply
not the case. In fact there are relatively few accounts
featuring angels, and when they
do crop up, there is often no
real indication of what exactly is taking place. For
instance, in Genesis there are
the three 'angels in the
guise of men' who approach
Abraham as he sits at his tent
door by the Oak of Mamre, near the ancient city of Hebron in
southern Palestine. They confirm the imminent birth of a son
to his elderly wife Sarah and
announce their planned
destruction of Sodom, the city of iniquity by the Dead Sea.
The Bible says that a feast was
prepared for them, and that
Abraham 'took butter, and milk,
and the calf which he had
dressed, and set it before them;
and he stood by them under
the tree, and they did eat [author's emphasis].' 'And they
did eat...' Angels eating food? Surely incorporeal
beings
would not need to consume earthly sustenance. Then there are
the two angels who visited Lot and his
wife in Sodom,
immediately prior to the city's destruction. They are said
to have entered Lot's
house, where he 'made them a feast,
and did bake unleavened bread,
and', as in the case of the
Abraham story, 'they did eat'.'
Men of Sodom surround Lot's
home, calling upon him and
shouting out 'where are the men
which came in to thee
this night? Bring them out unto us,
that we may know them.' In other words they wanted to have
sex with them. It is, of course, from this bible passage
that we gain the term sodomy, or
anal penetration among
males. Did the inhabitants of Sodom want sex with all
strangers who visited the city,
or was there something
noticeably different about these 'men'?
Then we have the angel, or
'man', with whom Jacob wrestles
in hand-to-hand combat at Penuel, or the whole host of
angels whom Jacob sees moving up
and down a ladder that
stretches between heaven and
earth as he rests at a place
known as Bethel. Are these really
accounts of angels of
heaven, or are they of mortal men? Angels gain their name
from the word 'angelos', the Greek rendition of the Hebrew
'malakh',
meaning 'messenger', since they act as mediators
between God and humanity. They are undoubtedly incorporeal
beings, although, to allow for
stories such as those
concerning Abraham, Lot and
Jacob, it has generally been
accepted by Judaeo-Christian
theologians that angels could
take on physical form to carry out special tasks on earth.
Whatever the actual nature of
the angels of the Old
Testament, to both the Judaic
and Christian faiths they are
purely that, angels, messengers
of God, unconnected with the
fallen angelic race of both
Genesis 6 and Hebrew apocryphal
tradition. At no time are the angels of the Pentateuch, the
first five books of the Bible,
ever equated with the Sons of
God, the Watchers or the Nephilim, and there is never any
insinuation that it was two
hundred of their heavenly
companions who took on physical
form to lie with the
Daughters of Men in the
generations prior to the Great
Flood. It is almost as if the
writers of the Pentateuch
either have no apparent
knowledge of the connection between
angels and the fall of the
Watchers, or else they are
deliberately avoiding the subject altogether. Who, then,
were the angels, whether heavenly or fallen? Where did they
come from? Where did they live? What did they look like?
Only by establishing these facts
could I go on to speculate
on the true origins of this
apparent race or culture - lost
to the pages of history. It seemed imperative that if I was
further to widen my knowledge of
the fallen race, then I
would need to uncover and study
whatever had been written
about them, not just in recorded
Hebrew folklore and
mythology, but also among the
more recently translated Dead
Sea Scrolls, which contained
much new material on the nature
of angels and the fall of the Watchers.
The Testament of Amram
----------------------
It was this last area of study
that in 1992 provided me with
a vital piece of evidence which
altered my whole perspective
of the Watchers. In a reconstructed apocalyptic fragment,
translated by the Hebrew scholar
Robert Elsenman and
referred to as the Testament of Amram, there is a rather
unnerving account featuring the
appearance of two Watchers
to Amram, the father of Moses the
lawgiver. The relevant
section reads as follows: '[I
saw Watchers] in my vision, the
dream-vision. Two (men) were fighting over me, saying ...
and holding a great contest over me. I asked them, 'Who are
you, that you are thus empowered over me?' They answered me,
'We have been empowered and rule
over all mankind.' They
said to me, 'Which of us do you choose to rule (you)?' I
raised my eyes and looked. [One] of them was terrifying in
his appearance, like a serpent,
[his] cloak many-coloured
yet very dark ... [And I looked
again], and ... in his
appearance, his visage like a viper, and [wearing. . .]
[exceedingly, and all his eyes
...]' The ancient text then
identifies this Watcher as
Belial, the Prince of Darkness
and King of Evil, while his
companion is revealed as
Michael, the Prince of Light,
who is also named as
Melchizedek, the King of
Righteousness. It was, however,
Belial's frightful appearance
that took my attention, for he
is seen as terrifying to look
upon and like a 'serpent', the
very synonym so often used when
describing both the Watchers
and the Nephilim. If the textual
fragment had ended here,
then I would not have known why
this synonym had been used
by the Jewish scribe in question. Fortunately, however, the
text goes on to say that the
Watcher possessed a visage, or
face, 'like a viper'. Since he also wears a cloak 'many
coloured yet very dark', I had also to presume that he was
anthropomorphic, in other words he possessed human form.
'Visage like a viper. . .'What
could this possibly mean? How
was I to interpret this metaphor
used in connection with the
terrifying appearance this being
must have instilled in the
minds of those who originally
trafficked with the walking
serpents of the Book of Enoch? How many people do you know
with a 'visage like a viper'?
For over a year I could offer no
suitable solution to this
curious riddle. Then, by chance, I happened to overhear
something on a national radio
station that provided me with
a simple though completely unexpected explanation. In
Hollywood, Los
Angeles, there is a
club called the Viper
Room. It is owned by actor and
musician Johnny Depp, and in
October 1993 it hit the
headlines when the up-and-coming
young actor, River Phoenix,
tragically collapsed and died as
he left the club, following a night of over-indulgence. In
the media publicity that
inevitably surrounded this
drugs-related incident, it
emerged that "All the Viper Room
gained its name many years
beforehand when it had been a
jazz haunt of some renown. As the story goes, the musicians
would take the stage and play
long hours, prolonging their
creativity and concentration by
smoking large amounts of
marijuana. Apparently, the long-term effects of this drug
abuse, coupled with exceedingly
long periods without food
and sleep, caused their
emaciated faces to appear hollow and
gaunt, while their eyes closed up to become just slits.
Through the haze of heavy smoke,
the effect was to make it
seem as if the jazz musicians
had faces like vipers, hence
the name of the club. This diverting anecdote sent my mind
reefing and helped me to
construct a mental picture of how a
person with a 'visage like a
viper' might look: their faces
would appear long and narrow,
with prominent cheekbones,
elongated jawbones, thin lips
and slanted eyes like those of
many East Asian racial types. Was this the solution to why
both the Watchers and Nephilim were
described as serpents?
It seemed as likely a
possibility as any, though it was also
feasible that their serpentine
connection related to their
accredited magical associations
and capabilities, perhaps
even their bodily movements and overall appearance.
Wingless Angels
---------------
A separate account of the
appearance of two Watcher-like
figures, this time to Enoch as
he rests in his bed, closely
parallels the way in which they
appeared to Moses's father,
Amram, and seems to throw further light on their apparent
descriptions: 'And there
appeared to me two men very tall,
such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone
like the sun, and their eyes
were like burning lamps; and
fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the
appearance of feathers: ... 'purple, their wings were
lighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow. They stood
at the head of my bed and called me by my name.'
I knew it was taking an enormous
gamble to assume for one
minute that these textual
accounts from Judaic apocalyptic
and pseudepigraphal
works actually recorded true-life
descriptions of a [missing word]
that in theory never
existed outside the minds of the original storytellers. On
the other hand, I felt I would
be better able to investigate
any historical origin if I could
discover a cohesive pattern
among the religious literature under study. So what could be
learnt from this second account? I could begin by stripping
away the angels' golden wings,
for this part of the text was
undoubtedly a very late
addition, since angels were rarely
deemed to possess wings until well into the Christian era.
In the Old Testament, for
example, only heavenly hosts such
as the Cherubim and Seraphim are
ever described as having
multiple wings, four or six being the usual number. This
feature is thought to have been
a borrowing from the
iconography of Assyria and
Babylonia, where sky genii and
temple guardians were depicted
with very similar sets of
wings.' Yet Cherubim and Seraphim were never strictly angels
or 'messengers of God' who
almost certainly received their
wings at the hands of early
Christian artists and scribes
influenced by classical iconography,
which often portrayed
mythological beings with wings. For most of us, our view of
angels is typified no better
than in the vivid detail of
Pre-Raphaelite paintings by such
artists as Edward
Burne-Jones, Evelyn de Morgan
and John William Waterhouse,
and by the ornately carved
statues of angels found in
ecclesiastical buildings,
including churches, cathedrals and
minsters.
These convey to us idealized impressions of angels
which contain the notion that
they must have had beautified
wings, like those of the finest swans. This vision, however,
bears little resemblance at all
to accounts of angels that
appear either in the Old
Testament or in the earliest Judaic
religious literature. For confirmation of this, one has only
to reread the account of the
appearance of the Watchers to
Amram - there is no mention of wings. Even in the Book of
Enoch itself, there is concrete
evidence to show that wings
were grafted on to existing
accounts of angels sometime
after the first century AD,
since earlier renditions of the
text make no mention of wings at all.
As Tall as Trees
----------------
If we take away the wings we are
left with two tall men, 'as
I have never seen on earth'. Why
is there this obsession
with height in connection with the fallen race? Was there
some deep-rooted psychological
need for Judaeo-Christian
angels to be of enormous stature? In the stylized art of
Ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs, considered to be incarnations
of the god Horus,
were always depicted larger than any other
figure around them, including
their consorts and courtly
entourage. Symbolic art of this nature makes perfect sense,
since it instantly elevates the
Pharaoh to a position higher
than the rest of his subjects. In this way we can understand
why divine beings, such as
angels, should be portrayed as
larger than life in religious
iconography, but why were both
the rebel Watchers and the Nephilim repeatedly described as
giant in stature, or like
'trees' as they are metaphorically
referred to in some accounts? Surely their great size must
convey something more than
simply misappropriate
iconography. Could we possibly be dealing with actual human
beings of greater stature than their contemporaries? Was
this one of the features that
made them stand out from other
people?
Shining Like the Sun
--------------------
The skin on the hands of the
angels who appear to Enoch is
described as 'whiter than snow',
which seems to be another
feature common to the fallen race. Elsewhere in the Book of
Enoch, the Watchers are referred
to simply as 'like white
men', while, in the account of
the birth of Noah, the infant
is seen as possessing a body
white as snow and red as a
rose.' This suggests a type of complexion not dissimilar
from that of white Caucasians of
today, who often experience
a ruddiness of the skin when
exposed to harsh outdoor
weather. Is this a clue to the Watcher's place of origin -
an environment that suffered
much harsher climatic
conditions? Since the Book of Enoch was written by
olive-skinned Jews in a hot
sunny climate, this type of
reference is not to be regarded lightly. In the same vein,
the faces of the two 'men' who
visit Enoch are described as
shining 'like the sun', a
metaphor invoked to denote
Watcher-like beings in Hebrew
myth and legend. What could
the Jewish scribes have meant by using such a term? Was it
simply to convey the divine
nature of the beings in
question, in a similar manner to
the way in which saints and
holy men are depicted with halos
or nimbuses in Christian
art, or was there another, more
supernatural, explanation
for such statements?
Some light is thrown on the
matter in one fascinating
account that follows shortly
after the two men's appearance
to Enoch. Having been transported to the various heavenly
realms by these angelic beings, the antediluvian patriarch
arrives at the seventh and final
heaven, where he encounters
the Lord seated upon a great throne. In the Lord's company
are hosts of Cherubim and
Seraphim, and Enoch is greeted by
the archangels Gabriel and
Michael, who are also described
as Watchers in the Book of Enoch. The humble prophet is
then
made to undergo a form of
ceremony in which he is anointed
with oil by one of the
archangels: 'And the Lord said to
Michael: 'Go and take from Enoch
his earthly robe, and
anoint him with My holy oil, and
clothe him with the raiment
of My glory.' And so Michael did as the Lord spake to him.
He 'stripped me of my clothes
and anointed me and clothed
me, and the appearance of that
oil was more than a great
light, and its anointing was
like excellent dew; and its
fragrance like myrrh, shining like a ray of the sun. And I
gazed upon myself, and I was like one of His glorious ones.
And there was no difference, and
fear and trembling departed
from me.'
Seeing beyond the highly
religious overtones of these lines,
it is difficult not to question
the nature of the ceremony
which Enoch undergoes. Stripped of his clothes, he is
anointed with an oil that has a fragrance like myrrh. It
makes him shine 'like a ray of
the sun', so that he appears
no different from the
archangels, making all fear and
trembling depart from him. Is there any possibility that the
archangels, who obviously bore a
close resemblance to Enoch
in the first place, covered
their bodies with a type of oil
that made them shine 'like a ray of the sun'? Considering
for a moment that we might well
be dealing with highly
distorted recollections of
actual encounters between earthly
individuals, then why should
these exalted ones need to
cover their bodies in oil? Was it simply for aesthetic or
ritualistic purposes? Or was there some other more practical
reason behind this act? It is too easy to jump to
conclusions here, especially in
the knowledge that the skin
of the Watchers is, when
described, almost always spoken of
as 'white as snow' and ruddy in appearance. Yet might it be
remotely feasible that the body
oil was used to protect the
skin from harmful ultraviolet
(UV) radiation, in much the
same way as we use a sun-block today? Such usage would
undoubtedly give the skin a
shimmering, reflective quality,
especially in the presence of a flickering fire. And, as I
was aware, the skin of white
Caucasians is far more
vulnerable to the harmful
effects of the sun than that of
any other race.
Eyes Like Burning Lamps
-----------------------
More intriguing still is the
description of the angels'
eyes, for they are said to have
been 'like burning lamps' -
perhaps the missing words from
the terrifying appearance of
the Watcher Belial in the Amram
text. Yet why 'burning
lamps'? Was it simply the way in which the eyes of the
Watchers were somehow able to
reflect the flickering light
of a burning lamp? Or did it mean something more? Time and
time again the eyes of Watchers,
and angels in general, are
described as appearing 'like the
sun', and here, too, the
birth of Noah is a prime
example, for it is said that 'when
he opened them (i.e. his eyes)
the whole house glowed like
the sun.' 'Glowed like the sun.' What did this mean? Quite
obviously, there was no
hard-and-fast answer to this
perplexing mystery, yet if these
accounts recorded distorted
memories of an actual Middle
Eastern culture living long
ago, then their eyes must have
been singled out for a
specific reason. For the moment all I could conclude was
that they either reflected
sunlight, or their irises were
likened to the sun; in other
words, their eyes were perhaps
golden or honey-coloured in appearance, a characteristic
common among certain tribal
cultures of central Asia even
today.
As White as Wool
----------------
And what can be said about the
hair of the Watchers? Since
we know that Noah in every way
resembled the appearance of
the fallen race, then we must
assume that the revulsion to
his 'thick and bright' white
hair 'as pure as wool' also
indicates one of their recurring physiological traits. In
the account of his birth given
in the Ethiopian Book of
Enoch, the infant's hair is said
to have been like a
'demdema',
a Geez word similar to the English term
'Afro-cut'. More correctly, this
refers to 'long curly
hair', which will form
dreadlocks if left unkept for any
length of time. Applying this information, I had therefore
to presume that, besides their
pale white skin, the Watchers
possessed thick, curly white
hair, perhaps matted to form
long dreadlocks, similar to the
style sported by so-called
'travellers' in Britain today. This, too, would have made
them appear like white
Caucasians, who, it may be assumed,
looked quite alien to the
indigenous cultures which first
began relating stories
concerning the presence of these
apparently divine beings.
Children of the Angels
----------------------
A lot of emphasis is placed here
on the peculiar appearance
of the infant Noah in the belief
that he in some way
resembled the physical
appearance of the fallen angels and,
by virtue of this, angels in general. And yet what proof was
there that his strange birth
could be conceived as an actual
event in humanity's long history? Why not accept this
account as simply a metaphor for
an unholy union between a
conceptual being of light and a mortal woman? One answer is
the continued existence of an
extraordinary belief, perhaps
thousands of years old, that
some young children are 'born
of the angels', bearing not only
their assumed physical
characteristics but also their divine personas. I would
never have believed such a
thing, had it not been for an
account given to me by an
elderly woman, named Margaret
Norman, following a lecture in which I included details of
the birth of Noah and the
apparent physiological traits of
the fallen race. Today Margaret lives in the English county
of Essex, but
in her younger years she was a resident of
London, and it was here she learnt from her mother the
details of a story concerning a so-called 'angel child'. In
1908 a son was born to a German
father and English mother in
the suburb of Hampstead. It weighed a healthy eleven pounds
and possessed blue eyes and golden blond locks. Sadly, it
died at the age of three and a
half, but while it was alive
the infant was apparently adored
by everyone for its 'serene
and dreamy loving nature'. As Margaret's mother told her,
people would stop in the street,
place money in the infant's
pram for luck and refer to him as an 'angel child'. Most
peculiar of all was her mother's
insistence that the baby
'just shone', a statement on
which Margaret found it very
difficult to expand. I asked Margaret whether it was the
pale nature of its skin, the
smile on the baby's face or
perhaps some kind of inner
radiance that had led people to
believe this child 'just shone'. She could only shake her
head and say: 'I really
don't know. It was just something
about him.' Just shone . . ... and as
for his eyes, when he
opened them the whole house glowed like the sun'. These are
the enigmatic words used by the
Jewish scribes to describe
the infant Noah, who was himself
spoken of as 'like the
children of the angels'. Perhaps the way in which the
Watchers' eyes and faces had
shone 'like the sun' really did
relate to some kind of
intangible radiance no longer known
to the world today. Yet the idea that a child in
twentieth-century London was seen to have the appearance of
a Nephilim
baby, and be given money in the hope of receiving
good luck, is compelling
evidence that the birth of Noah, as
well as the many other
descriptions of Watchers and angels
in general, provides us with
eyewitness accounts of an
actual race that once walked the earth.
The Shamanic Solution
---------------------
'Their dress had the appearance
of feathers' - this is the
final piece of descriptive
narrative concerning the two
'men'
who appeared before Enoch. In the Testament of Amram,
the Watcher Belial is adorned in
a cloak 'many-coloured yet
very dark'. Despite the habit among medieval artists of
portraying angels with bodies
covered with feathers, which
has no real
basis in biblical tradition, I felt this
statement concerning feathers to be very important indeed.
It also seemed like an oversight
on the part of the scribe
who conveyed this story into written form, for having
added
wings to the description of the
two 'men', why bother to go
on to say they wore garments of feathers? Surely this
confusion between wings and
feather coats could have been
edited to give the Watchers a
more appropriate angelic
appearance. Somehow I knew that here was a key to unlocking
this strange mystery. It suggested that, if the original
fallen race had indeed been
human, then they may have
adorned themselves in garments
of this nature as part of
their ceremonial dress. The use of totemic forms, such as
animals and birds, has always
been the domain of the shaman,
the priest-magician of tribal communities. In many early
cultures the soul itself was
said to have taken the form of
a bird to make its flight from
this world to the next, which
is why it is often depicted as
such in ancient religious
art. This idea may well have stemmed from the widely held
belief that astral flight could
only be achieved by using
ethereal
wings, like those of birds - a view that almost
certainly helped to inspire the
idea that angels, as
messengers of God, should be
portrayed with wings in
Judaeo-Christian iconography. To enhance this mental link
with a shaman's chosen bird, he
or she would adorn their
body with a coat of feathers and
spend long periods studying
the bird's every action. They would enter its natural
habitat and watch every facet of
its life - its method of
flight, its eating habits, its
courtship rituals and its
movements on the ground. By so doing they would hope to
become as birds themselves, an
alter-personality adopted by
them on a semi-permanent basis. Totemic shamanism is more or
less dependent on the indigenous
animals or birds present in
the locale of a culture or
tribe, although in principle the
purpose has always been the same
- to use this mantle to
achieve astral flight, divine
illumination, spirit
communication and the attainment
of otherworldly knowledge
and wisdom.
So could the Watchers and Nephilim have been bird-men as
well as walking serpents? The answer is almost certainly
yes, for in one Enochian text discovered among the Dead Sea
Scrolls, the Nephilim
sons of the fallen angel Shemyaza,
named as Ahya
and Ohyi, experience dream-visions in which
they both visit a world-garden
and see two hundred trees
being felled by heavenly angels. Not understanding the
purpose of this allegory, they
put the subject to the
Nephilim council, who appoint one of their number, named
Mahawai, to go on their behalf to consult Enoch, who now
resides in an earthly Paradise. To this end Mahawai then:
'Rose up into the air' like the
whirlwinds, and flew with
the help of his hands like a
[winged] eagle ... over the
cultivated lands and crossed
Solitude, the great desert, And
he caught sight of Enoch and he
called to him ...' Enoch
explains that the two hundred
trees represent the two
hundred rebel Watchers, while
the felling of their trunks
signifies their destruction in
the coming conflagration and
Deluge.
More significant, however, is
the means by which
Mahawai attains astral flight, for he is said to have used
'his
hands like (a) [winged] eagle'. Elsewhere in the same
Enochian text, Mahawai is said to have
adopted the guise of
a bird to make another long journey. On this occasion, he
narrowly escapes being burnt up
by the sun's heat and is
only saved after heeding the
celestial voice of Enoch, who
convinces him to turn back and
not die prematurely - a story
that has close parallels with Icarus' fatal flight too near
the sun in Greek mythology. In addition to this evidence, a
variation of this same text
equates Shemyaza's sons 'not
(with) the ... eagle, but his
wings', while in the same
breath the two brothers are described
as 'in their nest',
statements which prompted the
Hebrew scholar J. T Milik to
conclude that, like Mahawai, they too 'could have been
bird-men'.
Is it really
possible that the Watchers might have belonged
to a race or culture which practised an advanced form of
bird shamanism? Were they shamans themselves, able to
communicate with the spirit
world and experience
dream-visions through astral flight? All the extant works
featuring the legends of the
Watchers and Nephilim are
primarily concerned with dream-visions,
the products of
astral flight and journeys to the other world. This strongly
supports the view that the
original source of these
visionary tracts was a race or
culture that employed the use
of shamanistic practices of the
sort expressed within their
very pages. The idea of bird-men acting as the bringers of
knowledge and wisdom to mortal
kind is not unique to the
Middle East. An African tribe called Dan, who live close to
the village of Man on the Ivory Coast, say that at the
beginning of time, in the days
of their first ancestors, a
race of 'attractive human birds
appeared, possessing all the
sciences which they handed on to mankind'. Even today the
tribal artists make copper
representations of these
bird-men, who are shown with
human bodies and heads
supporting long beaks, like those of birds of prey. Might
these 'attractive human birds'
have been what the Book of
Enoch describes as Watchers? The
bird-men of the Ivory Coast
would certainly appear to have
played a similar role to that
of the rebel angels in Hebraic tradition.
Could this new-found connection
between Watchers and
shamanism now throw further
light on their association with
serpents, the bringers of
knowledge and wisdom in so many
ancient mythologies? In the Book of Enoch, the Watcher named
Kasdeja is accused of showing men how to take away 'the
bites of the serpent', knowledge
that would in past ages
have gone hand in hand with the
magical duties of
priest-magicians, or shamans,
deemed to have power over
snakes. As in the case of bird shamanism, serpent shamans
would have adorned themselves
with snake relics and carried
serpent-related items, such as
snake charms and a long rod
or pole adorned with serpentine
symbols, helping to explain
why the Watchers and Nephilim were
referred to as serpents.
Furthermore, both birds and
snakes were seen by many Middle
Eastern cultures as ultimate
symbols of transformation of
the soul, bringing together
these two quite separate forms
of totemic practice. One thing was certain, the
ornithomorphic association with both the Watchers and the
Nephilim was clearly not meant to convey the idea that they
possessed heavenly wings in the traditional sense. It was,
however, possible that the
repeated usage of bird symbolism
in connection with angelic
beings may have led early Hebrew
and Christian scholars and
scribes to assume this very thing
- a confusion which, like so
many other mistranslations or
misrepresentations of early
religious scriptures, led to the
iconographic forms of angels and
fallen angels as we know
them today.
The Face of a Watcher
---------------------
It was beginning to appear as if
the whole concept of angels
had been born out of
misconceptions concerning either
references to heavenly beings in
Old Testament tradition,
who may well have had quite
earthly origins in the first
place, or mythological beings
and protective spirits
borrowed from other contemporary cultures. Strip these away
from the literature and you are
left with bizarre yet highly
descriptive accounts of
anthropomorphic figures, such as the
Watchers, who probably only
became synonymous with the term
'malakh',
or 'angel', long after their legends had been
accepted into Hebrew mythology. More disconcerting was the
knowledge that the world's
current perception of angels bore
little resemblance to their
earliest recorded appearances,
whether as physical denizens
that once walked this earth or
as incorporeal beings of faith alone. So what did they
really look like? Using the various individual components
deduced from the different
accounts given of the fallen race
found in Enochian
and Dead Sea literature, I asked an
accomplished artist, the author
and illustrator Billie
Walker-John, to draw a composite
picture of a Watcher.
Although this was simply meant
to be an interesting
exercise, the finished result was stunning to say the least.
The striking, almost amoral face of this walking bird-man
with his shaman's staff was
utterly mesmerizing, even a
little chilling in some respects. Most disturbing was the
knowledge that the black-and-white
drawing portrayed the
most accurate depiction of an
angelic being executed in
modern times. So who were these people? And why had the
world forgotten them?
WHEN GIANTS WALKED THE EARTH
----------------------------
If we read the Book of Genesis,
we can see just how out of
place the story of the Sons of
God coming unto the Daughters
of Men appears to be in
comparison with the rest of its
eclectic contents. Indeed, if it is correct to assume that
the account of the Fall of Man
and the Serpent of Eden
reflect an abstract rendition of
the fall of the Watchers,
then the whole story is included twice. Adding to the
mysterious nature of Genesis 6
is the fact that there are,
neither before nor after these
verses, any direct references
to the coming of the Sons of
God, the Nephilim or the Mighty
Men (gibborim).
Nor are there any references anywhere in the
Bible to equate the 'bene ha-elohim' with the
Watchers. This
information comes only from the Enochian literature of the
first and second centuries BC. To add to the confusion, the
term 'bene
ha-elohim' actually translates as 'the sons of
the gods', while the name 'elohim' is a female noun with an
irregular plural, implying not
'gods' at all, but 'sons of
the goddesses'. Never is this theological 'hot potato'
sufficiently explained, and for
my purposes it seemed best
to stick simply with the idea
that the term referred to
fallen angels alone, without evoking a fixed gender. So what
about the rest of the Pentateuch
- the first five books of
the Old Testament, traditionally
accredited to Moses the
lawgiver? Could this provide me with additional clues to the
origin of the Genesis chapter
concerning the Sons of God
coming unto the Daughters of
Men, along with their
subsequent incarceration and the
destruction of their
offspring, the Nephilim? Glancing
through the chapters of
Genesis that immediately follow
these enigmatic verses, we
read about the generations of
Noah and his subsequent role
as the saviour of both humanity
and the animal kingdom. It
is a story that all of us learn
in primary school, yet like
most of Genesis it is awkwardly
worded, confusing,
repetitive and highly contradictory in its statements. The
Bible says that God purged the
earth of its corruption and
iniquity by bringing about a
universal deluge, yet nowhere
does it say that the Sons of
God, the Nephilim or the Mighty
Men, were destroyed by these global cataclysms. This fact
has to be assumed by the reader
simply because Noah, his
wife, his three sons and their
wives, are the sole survivors
of the Great Flood. Moreover, there is much evidence to
suggest that some members
of the fallen race actually
survived these troubled times.
Races of Giants
---------------
Scattered throughout the
Pentateuch are enigmatic references
to the existence of giants
living in the bible lands long
after the generations of Noah. These terrifying individuals
almost invariably feature in
wars waged against foreign
raiders and the Israelite
peoples by indigenous Canaanite
tribes; Canaan
being the name given to Palestine, Jordan and
Lebanon in Old Testament times.
If we look at the later
chapters of Genesis, we will
find referrences to giants
living in the age of the prophet
Abraham, a date usually
fixed at around 2000 BC. Several verses deal with how
Chedorlaomer, the king of ancient Elam, a country placed in
the highlands of south-west Iran, encounters no less than
three tribes of giants, who rise
up against him and are
defeated by his forces in the land
of Canaan. They are
listed as the Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnalm ... the Zuzims in
Ham; and the Emims
in Shaveh Kiriathaim.
Later, in the Book
of Deuteronomy, which deals with
the wanderings of the
Jewish tribes, following the
Exodus out of Egypt at the time
of Moses, the text speaks of Canaan as
'a land of Rephaim',
or giants, where the 'Rephaim
dwelt therein aforetime'.
Because of their reported great
stature, in many
translations of the Bible from
the original Hebrew, the word
'giants'
is rendered instead of 'Rephaim'. Deuteronomy also
tells us that 'the Ammonites
call them Zamzummins: a people
great, and many, and tall, as the Anakim'.
As tall 'as the
Anakim'? Who then were the Anakim?
And how might they relate
to the Watchers and Nephilim?
Reaching for my weighty,
leather-bound edition of
Hitchcock's New and Complete
Analysis of the Holy Bible, I
turned to its edition of
Cruden's Concordance - the complete listing of all names,
terms and expressions found in the Bible. There are a number
of further entries for the Anakim, the most important of
which is found in the Book of
Numbers:
'And there we saw tke Nephilim, the sons of Anak, which come
of the Nephilim:
and we were in our own sight as
grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.'
So the Anakim
are specifically cited as the descendants of
the legendary Nephilim. Elsewhere
the Anakim are referred to
as the inhabitants of Canaan, 'a
land that eateth up the
inhabitants thereof - and all
the people that we saw in it
are men of a great stature'
Reading on, it actually names
the 'sons of Anak',
or Anakim, as Ahiman, Sheshai and
Talmai, although no further details are given concerning
their appearance. They are encountered by the spies sent out
by Joshua, Moses' successor,
to report back on the
inhabitants of Hebron, or Kirjath-arba, 'the chief
city of
the Anakim',
situated in what is today southern Palestine
before they are attacked and
finally defeated by one of
these 'spies', named Caleb. So the Anakim
were destroyed,
but survivors of their race
probably lived on, and certainly
did so in the minds of the Old Testament chroniclers. They
may have been three brothers
from the town of Hebron, one of
Palestine's most ancient cities, but there is every
indication that they were also a
powerful race in their own
right who inhabited Canaan from very earliest times.
The
word Anak
is generally taken by Jewish scholars to mean
'long-necked', or 'the men with
the necklaces', conjuring an
immediate image of the ring
collars worn even today by
certain tribes of central Africa. Was
this yet another
physical feature of the original
fallen race - long necks
bearing ringed necklaces? The enormous size of the Anakim
is, of course, to be taken with
a large pinch of salt; yet
why were the Anakim
seen as direct lineal descendants of the
Nephilim, the progeny of the fallen angels who were
supposedly wiped out at the time of the Great Flood? No
explanation is given, and the
reader is left to assume that
they must have been linked in
some way to the family of
Noah, who himself bore the
traits of the Watchers and
Nephilim.
King Og
of Bashan
-----------------
Most renowned of the giants of Canaan was
the legendary King
Og of the land
of Bashan, who with his brother Sihon
controlled vast areas of land
that stretched for many
hundreds of miles in every direction. Being himself a
descendant of the Rephaim, Og is said to have
resided 'at
Ashtaroth and at Edrei', the latter
being a giant city
identified with the modern
Jordanian town of Der'a, some
thirty miles east of the southern end of the Sea of Galilee.
Here archaeologists have
uncovered a vast subterranean city,
cut deep into the bedrock,
beneath the existing buildings of
the town, although how it might
be linked with King Og is
uncertain. The kingdom
of Bashan, the so-called 'land of the
Rephaim', or giants, supposedly extended from Mount Hermon
in the north of Canaan to Gilead in
the south, a region
geographically placed on the east side of the Jordan river.
It was here that almost six
hundred years before, according
to the Bible, the Elamite king Chedorlaomer
apparently
'smote the Rephaim',
King Og's own ancestors, in the age of
the patriarch Abraham. It is also interesting to note that
Og was said to have reigned 'in Mount Hermon', the most
northerly point of his kingdom
and the location where,
according to the Book of Enoch,
the rebel Watchers
'descended'.
Various Hebrew myths outside the
Bible cite King Og as the
progeny of Hiya,
a son of the fallen angel Shemyaza, and a
woman who subsequently became
the wife of Ham, the son of
Noah. Og
was said to have escaped the Deluge by clinging to
a rope ladder attached to the Ark and being daily fed
through a port hole by Noah himself. He took pity on the
giant after he swore to repent and become his slave!
Afterwards, however, Og apparently resumed his wicked ways.
Quaint as the story of Og's survival of the Deluge may seem,
it makes nonsense of biblical
chronology, for if this giant
king had existed at the time of
the Great Flood - which is
seen by theologians as having
taken place in '2348 BC' -
then he would have been been around 1,100 years old at the
time of Moses. Stories
such as this were almost certainly
concocted at a very late stage
in the development of Hebrew
myth and legend, their purpose
being to account for the
existence in Canaan of
outsized indigenous tribes such as
the Anakim,
the Emim, the Rephaim,
the Zuzim, as well as the
peoples under the leadership of
King Og, who were
encountered by the first
Israelites when they entered this
foreign land from Mesopotamia
at the beginning of the second
millenium
BC. Many of these giant races were quite obviously
looked upon as actual lineal
descendants of the Nephilim,
whose existence must still have
been entrenched in the minds
of the first Israelites. Yet there is very little evidence
whatsoever outside Jewish
religious literature for the
existence of these giant races
either from other
contemporary sources of the time
or from archaeological
discoveries made over the past
hundred years or so of
biblical exploration.
At first sight this may seem a
disconcerting realisation,
and one which has grave implications
for the historical
reality of the Watchers and Nephilim
in more distant times.
However, there is no reason why
'giants' should not have
existed in the bible lands in distant ages. Variations of
anything up to eighteen inches
between individuals of
different races or cultures were
not unusual in prehistoric
times. Indeed, such differences are still common today. One
has only to look at an American
basketball team to see that
seven-foot tall 'giants' exist,
and from a mythological
context it is this distinction
alone that leads us to evoke
terms such as 'giant' and
'dwarf' not the specific size of
cultures or races as a whole. Mention must also be made here
of the most famous giant of all
in biblical tradition, and
this is Goliath, David the
shepherd boy's gigantic opponent,
who is said to have belonged to
the Tribe of Gath and to
have fought alongside the Philistine army. In the well-known
story, presented in 2 Samuel,
this enormous figure of a man
was said to have been ten feet
tall and to have worn a
copper coat of mail weighing an incredible 120 pounds. He
also carried a spear weighing 15
pounds, which apparently
possessed a shaft 'like a weaverís
beam'. Could a person of
this size and strength ever have walked the earth? The
answer is very possibly yes, for
despite the lack of
archaeological evidence for the
presence in the past of
actual giant races, there is
compelling evidence to suggest
that individuals of this size did once exist. Too many
outsized human remains, worked
tools and stone coffins have
been unearthed in different
parts of the world, from ancient
times down to the present era, for such traditions to be
dismissed out of hand. These accounts, often published in
sane and sober journals and
books, refer mainly to isolated
discoveries and therefore do not
constitute hard evidence
for the existence of whole races of giants. Despite such
shortcomings, it does not follow
that the bold accounts of
giant races roaming the earth in
Old Testament times are
completely worthless. Far from it, they appeared vital to my
understanding of the roots
behind the terms and expressions
used by the chroniclers of
Genesis to recall the former
existence of the angelic race who fell from heaven.
Source of the Nephilim
----------------------
The Book of Numbers specifically
refers to the Anakim as
descendants of the Nephilim - not the Watchers, or the Sons
of God, but the Nephilim. This is
important, for it implies
that at the time of Moses, when
the core material for the
Pentateuch was being established
and recorded for the first
time, only the term 'Nephilim' was used to denote the giant
race who had fallen because of
its lust for mortal women in
antediluvian times. If, for a moment, we disregard the
contentious lines of Genesis 6
as much later interpolations
(see below), it would appear
that other terms for the fallen
race, such as Watchers and Sons
of God, were clearly unknown
to the Israelite tribes at the time of Moses, c. 1300 Bc.
This implies that Nephilim, a word meaning the 'fallen
ones', or 'those who have
fallen', was the original name
given by the Israelites to the fallen angels. Strange
confirmation of this suggestion
comes from rereading Genesis
6. Verse 2 speaks of the Sons of
God coming unto the
Daughters of Men, while in
contrast verse 4 states firmly
that: 'The Nephilim
were in the earth in those days, and
_also after that_, when the sons
of God came in unto the
daughters of men [author's
emphasis] 'And also after that'
The meaning was clear enough:
there were two quite separate
traditions entangled here - one
concerning the fallen race
known to the early Israelites as
the Nephilim, and the other
concerning the 'bene ha-elohim', the Sons of
God, who are
identified directly with the Watchers of Enochian
tradition.
So was this assumption correct?
Could I find some kind of
scholastic support for such a contention? Once again, I
would not be the first person to
point out the seemingly
paradoxical reference in Genesis
6:4 to two quite
independent fallen races, for
theologians have long pondered
over this puzzle. Yet only one modern-day Hebrew scholar has
attempted to explain its presence. In an important article
published in the Hebrew Union
College Annual of 1939, under
the rather uninspiring title of
'The Mythological Background
of Psalm 82', Julian Morgenstern
came to the quite
astonishing conclusion that
there must have been two quite
separate occasions when the
angels fell from heaven - once
through lust and a second time through pride. Despite the
originality of this solution, in
my view it simply muddies
the picture, for the easiest
answer would be to accept that
two separate renditions of the
same story somehow became
confusingly joined by the compilers of Genesis. On the one
hand, there was the story of the
Nephilim, the fallen race
seen by the early Israelites,
and perhaps even by the
indigenous tribes of Canaan, as
the progenitors of the much
later giant races of the Bible;
while on the other, there
were the quite separate stories
concerning the 'bene
ha-elohim',
the Sons of God, the Watchers of the Book of
Enoch. In some way the two
traditions had become fused as
one to form the enigmatic verses
of Genesis 6, while in the
Enochian literature the Nephilim were
demoted to being
purely the giant offspring of
patriarchs and giant races of
biblical tradition. Everything pointed towards the fact that
the lines of Genesis 6 had
either been added to the Bible at
a much later date, or else that
they had been seriously
tampered with to include the two
quite independent origins
of the Nephilim and Watchers. For
the moment, it was
important to examine the rest of
the Pentateuch to see
whether it could throw further
light on the origins and age
of the story of the Watchers.
A Goat for Azazel
-----------------
Only one other possible
reference to the fall of the angels
is to be found in the Pentateuch. According to the Book of
Leviticus, each year on the
feast of Yom Kippur, the Day of
Atonement, the Israelites would
sacrifice two he-goats. One
animal was offered up to God, so
that he might absolve the
Jews of their sins, while the
other was set aside 'for
Azazel', who is named as a leader of the Watchers in the
Book of Enoch. During this
sacrificial rite the priest is
said to have placed both hands
on the head of the goat 'for
Azazel' and to have confessed 'over him all the iniquities
of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in
all their sins'. He would then send the animal away 'by the
hand of a fit man into the
wilderness , where it would
plunge to its death over a steep
cliff, recalling the plight
of the fallen angel Azazel, who was seen as perpetually
bound and chained in the wilderness. In much later times,
a
red or scarlet ribbon was
apparently tied to the goat's head
to represent these sins, since
it states in Isaiah that
'though your sins be as scarlet,
they shall be as white as
snow'. Further expanding on the barbaric ritual of the
'scapegoat', as the goat is
referred to instead of 'Azazel',
are the words of rabbi Moses ben Nahmen, who in the twelfth
century AD Wrote:
God has commanded us, however,
to send a goat on Yom Kippur
to the ruler whose realm
is in the places of desolation.
>From the emanation of his
power come destruction and ruin
... His portion among the
animals is the goat. The demons
are part of his realm
and are called in the Bible seirim
(legendary
he-goats fostered by Azazel).
Whether or not this suggests the
survival into the Middle
Ages of the scapegoat ritual is
not specified, although it
does show the importance it must
still have held for the
Jews of medieval Europe. The
scapegoat was conceived as
embodying the spirit of Azazel, and in so doing it was able
to carry away the sins of the
Jews, a role which Jesus
Christ was voluntarily to
undertake in much later Christian
tradition. The association of the scapegoat with both sin
and impurity eventually led to
it becoming an animal of
Satan and the Devil in early
Christianity - a figurative
connection it sadly retains to this day. Even the inverted,
or reversed, pentagram, seen by
Western society as embodying
ultimate evil, stems exclusively
from this strange
association between Azazel and the
scapegoat ritual. Since
Victorian times,
this abhorred symbol has been seen as a
sign of the goat of the witches,
the two upright points
signifyingthe animal's horns 'attacking the heavens' an
empty and meaningless legend
that has no basis in ancient
religious law, either Jewish or Christian. How so simple a
design can have come to be so
reviled by so many people is a
mystery in itself. Yet knowledge that this association
between the Devil and the goat
stems back to the punishment
administered to Azazel makes the inverted pentagram one of
the only symbols actually to
preserve the memory of the fall
of the Watchers.
To Act Like Angels
------------------
Although the scapegoat ritual is
no longer practised, the
Day of Atonement is still
revered as the holiest festival in
the Jewish calendar. It forms the climax of a ten-day period
that begins with the Jewish New
Year - a date that usually
falls during either late
September or early October in the
Gregorian calendar. For Jews
world-wide, Yom Kippur is a
time when all sin is renounced
and everyone has to make the
choice between either obeying or
disobeying the divine
sovereignty of God. The day is marked by a twenty-four hour
period of prayer and fasting in
which a Jew must not eat,
drink, anoint with oil, wear
sandals or have sexual
intercourse. Instead he or she must continually praise God
in emulation of his angels, for
it is on this one day of the
year that Jews must attempt to
serve God _'as if they were
angels'_ [author's emphasis].
'As if they were angels?' Was
this simply a metaphorical
statement, or could there be some
more deep-rooted assertion behind this tradition? Throughout
the twenty-four hour period that
constitutes Yom Kippur, it
has always been believed that
Satan possesses no power over
the life of a Jew, and because
of this, God invites his
adversary to look in on the
homes of Jewish families to see
what they are doing. Satan will hopefully find them fasting
and praying like angels 'dressed
in white garments', upon
which he is forced to admit:
'They are like angels and I
have no power over them.' Whereupon God binds Satan in
chains and declares to His
people: 'I have forgiven you
all.' That Satan should be annually bound and chained while
the Jews themselves attempt to
emulate angels 'dressed in
white garments' is difficult to
understand in conventional
theological terms. To a non-Jew, such curious and somewhat
naive beliefs and customs are
baffling, to say the least,
yet since they relate to the
very day on which the rite of
the scapegoat once took place,
it seems likely that the
original adversary in this story
was not Satan at all but
Azazel. Moreover, the practice of becoming 'like angels' on
the Day of Atonement is almost certainly
a distant echo of
the fall of the Watchers and the
punishment supposedly
suffered by Azazel
because of his corruption of humanity,
prior to its destruction at the time of the Great Flood.
If this theory is correct, it
provides solid evidence to
suggest that the traditions
concerning the fall of the
angels existed in both Judaic
myth and ritual as far back as
the establishment of the
Israelite tribes following the
Exodus out of Egypt, the period when the scapegoat ritual
presumably first entered Mosaic tradition. Yet are the
contents of the Pentateuch really
to be trusted? How are we
to know that the references to
the scapegoat ritual were
themselves not much later interpolations? Furthermore, how
are we to know that the verses
concerning the existence in
Canaan of indigenous giant races were also not added at some
later date in its construction? For example, much of
Deuteronomy, in which these
references appear, is thought to
have been compiled, not at the
time of the Exodus of Moses,
but by Jewish scribes living in Jerusalem as late as the
seventh century BC. Moses is supposed to have left the
Pentateuch to the Jewish peoples
as its Torah, or Holy Law.
And yet it was only after the
time of the so-called
Babylonian Captivity in the
sixth century BC that much of
what we know today as the Old
Testament was first set down
in writing. Indeed, other than a small rolled silver
amulet,
inscribed in Hebrew with a form
of the Priestly Blessing
found in the Book of Numbers
(one of five books of the
Pentateuch) and dated to the
sixth century BC, there is no
hard evidence _whatsoever_ for
the existence of the Bible
before post-exilic times.
Emphasizing this rather
disconcerting situation may, I
realize, look rather cynical, though I certainly accept that
large tracts of the Old
Testament are not only period set
but also contain invaluable
information concerning the
history of the Middle East
from its very earliest times
through till the establishment of the Christian era. It was,
however, with this more sceptical view at the forefront of
my mind that I was going to have
to continue my search for
the original sources behind the
story of the Watchers, for
only by establishing how and
when this tradition first
entered Hebrew myth and legend
could I begin to understand
its true implications.
ANGELS IN EXILE
---------------
Exactly where did the legends of
the Watchers originate? Had
they been carried into the Essene communities of the Dead
Sea by wandering Zaddiks, the wild rainmakers who claimed
direct descent from Noah and
preached the teachings of the
Kabbalah? If so, then who were these people and where had
they obtained such stories? Had they been passed on by word
of mouth among the Israelite tribes since time immemorial?
Or did they have some more
recent point of origin, perhaps
in another Middle Eastern country? Maybe the key lay in the
Bible itself, which, despite the
late construction of some
of its individual books, could
often be dated like the rings
of a tree. To the trained eye the approximate date at which
certain religious themes,
passages or ideas first entered
mainstream Jewish thought could
be calculated with some
degree of accuracy. Therefore, if the term 'Ir',
'watcher',
appeared in the Bible itself,
then I had every chance of
predicting when and how the term
first filtered into
rabbinical teachings.
Reaching once again for Hitchcock's
New and Complete Analysis of the
Holy Bible, I turned to
Cruden's Concordance and thumbed through until I found the
entries for 'watcher'. There turned out to be just four. The
first, in the Book of Jeremiah,
speaks of 'watchers' who
'come from a far country, and
give out their voice against
the cities of Judah', foreigners being implied here, and not
angels. The other three references, however, all appeared in
the Book of Daniel, one of the
very last works of the Old
Testament. Before checking out
these entries in Daniel, I
again played with Cruden's Concordance, this time with
respect to named angels, like
those frequently mentioned in
the Book of Enoch. I quickly discovered that just two are
recorded in the whole of the Old
Tcstament - Gabriel and
Michael - and both appear only
in the Book of Daniel. Even
more significant was the
knowledge that only in the Book of
Daniel do there appear clear
descriptions of Watcher-like
beings that closely resemble
those found in both the Book of
Enoch and the Dead Sea
Scrolls. Why should this be so? What
was so special about Daniel?
By the Rivers of Babylon
------------------------
The Book of Daniel is written
partly in Hebrew and partly in
Aramaic. Scholars usually date
its contents and style to
somewhere around 165 BC, the
very time-frame attributed to
the construction of the Book of
Enoch, with which it is so
often compared. From a historical point of view, the book
focuses on an era beginning in
around 606 or 605 BC, when
the Babylonian king
Nebuchadnezzar invades Judah and enters
Jerusalem. There he sacks the Temple
of Solomon and carries
away many of its treasures, and
on his return to Babylon
takes with him many of the city's leading craftsmen. He also
takes into his service three or
four noble youths, one of
whom is Daniel, who is thought
to have been around seventeen
years of age at the time. According to the Bible story, the
youths are taken into the care
of the royal court and
possibly even live in the king's palace. Daniel quickly
rises in popularity to become a
remarkable figure of great
renown, noted for his strict
adherence to the Torah, the
Holy Law established by Moses,
and for his 'wisdom'. He also
possesses other more highly
prized qualities, including the
ability to interpret dreams. In time Daniel becomes governor
of the province of Babylon as well as chief governor over
the city's 'wise men' - its
astrologers, Chaldeans (learned
men) and soothsayers. During this period Nebuchadnezzar
apparently experiences a very strange dream. None of the
'wise men' can interpret its
meaning, so the king summons
Daniel. In his presence,
Nebuchadnezzar then recites the
contents of his vision in which
he has seen 'a tree in the
midst of the earth', with 'fair'
leaves and fruit, that grew
and grew until it reached heaven. Beneath its boughs were
the beasts of the field
sheltering in shadow, while the fowl
of the air 'dwelt in its branches.' Nebuchadnezzar then
apparently saw 'a watcher and an
holy one [who] came down
from heaven'. This shining being cried out to the king,
telling him to cut the stump of his roots in the earth.
These verses in the Book of
Daniel are then followed with
lines:
'The sentence is by the decree
of the watchers, and the
demand by the word of the holy
ones; to the intent that the
living may know that the Most
High ruleth in the kingdom of
men, and giveth
it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up
over it the lowest of men.'
Daniel, having listened to
Nebuchadnezzar's recital of his
dream, explains that the mighty
tree represents the king
himself, whose 'greatness is
grown, and reacheth to heaven,
and thy dominion to the end of the earth'. It foretells, he
says, his imminent downfall,
unless, that is, he breaks free
of his bonds and accepts the
Most High as the only true
God.' Then finally, for the
third and last time, the term
'ir',
'watcher', appears in the text: 'And whereas the king
saw a watcher and an holy one coming down from heaven.'
Nowhere else in the Bible does
the term 'ir' appear in
connection with the appearance of angels. This placed its
usage firmly in the time-frame
of the Book of Daniel,
written at around the same time period as the Book of Enoch.
Even further supporting this
link is the way in which
Nebuchadnezzar's downfall is
prophesied by tree-felling
imagery, exactly as the
destruction of the Watchers is
described in some of the Enochian material found among the
Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Jews in Exile
-----------------
The prophet lived long, and was
still present at
Nebuchadnezzar's palace when
events took a turn for the
worse for the Jews back in his native Jerusalem. The city
had been left alone by the
Babylonian army for some years
when a new uprising forced
Nebuchadnezzar to return to Judah
and again besiege the capital. It fell in the year 598 BC,
and on his return to Babylon the king is said to have taken
into captivity an estimated 10,000 Jews. Another uprising in
586 BC apparently forced him to
return once more to
Jerusalem, and this time he not only sacked the Temple, he
also razed it to the ground. He is also said to have
returned to Babylon with almost the entire population of
Jerusalem. This must have amounted to a figure upward of
100,000. Henceforth the people
of Judah join those already
in bondage and enter what is
referred to in Jewish history
as the period of captivity, or exile. Nebuchadnezzar
eventually dies in 562 BC and is
followed by a succession of
rulers, the last of whom, Belshazzar, also features in the
prophet s story. Daniel apparently continues as governor and
dream-interpreter, eventually
rising to the position of
'third ruler' of Babylon, after the 'second ruler'
Belshazzar, and the 'first ruler' Nabonidus
(or Nabu-na-id)
- Belshazzar's
father, who has left the affairs of the
kingdom in the hands of his son
while he himself is off
fighting a war in Arabia. It is in the first year of
Belshazzar's reign that Daniel is himself troubled by an
apocalyptic 'night vision' in
which he sees many strange
things that act as portents of future events. In this the
prophet witnesses a Watcher-like
being, with an appearance
that could have been lifted
straight from the pages of the
Book of Enoch, for he says:
'I beheld till thrones were
placed, and one that was ancient
of days did sit: his raiment was
white as snow, and the hair
of his head like pure wool.
Comparisons with the
description of the infant Noah
as given in the Book of Enoch
are obvious. Had one account influenced the other - the Book
of Daniel or the Book of Enoch? Which came first?
The now elderly prophet is also
called upon by Belshazzar to
interpret strange handwriting
that appears on a wall during
a great banquet. The prophet predicts imminent doom, and
soon afterwards Belshazzar is killed as Babylon falls to the
Persians under the command of
Cyrus the Great; the date
being 539 BC. One of Cyrus' kinsmen, Darius, is set up on
the throne of Babylon, and it is after this date that Daniel
is cast into the lions' den because of his fidelity to God.
According to the story, the
prophet is saved from certain
death by divine intervention,
and afterwards Darius is said
to have issued a decree
enjoining 'reverence for the God of
Daniel'. Daniel himself
continues to experience
dream-visions. For instance, during the third year of Cyrus'
reign, presumably over Babylon, the prophet is said to have
fasted for three weeks and while
standing on the banks of
the great river Hiddekel - the ancient Akkadian
name for the
Tigris - beheld:
'A man clothed in linen, whose
loins were girded with pure
gold of Uphaz:
his body also was like the beryl, and his
face as the appearance of
lightning, and his eyes as lamps
of fire, and his arms and his
feet like in colour burnished
brass, and the voice of his
words like the voice of a
multitude.'
The similarity between the
divine being in this account and
the 'very tall' men with 'faces'
that 'shone like the sun'
and eyes 'like burning lamps'
who appear before Enoch as he
rests in his bed is undeniable. Only the colour
of their
skin has changed - from 'as white
as snow' in the Enochian
text to 'burnished' in the Book of Daniel. The Watcher-
being before Daniel can be seen
only by him; however, as the
prophet stands trembling at the
awesome sight, the
apparition announces that he has
been negotiating with the
Persians, yet, in the words of
the angel:
'The prince of the kingdom
of Persia withstood me one and
twenty days; but, lo, Michael,
one of the chief princes,
came to help me: and I remained
there with the kings of
Persia.'
The identity of the radiant being
is never made clear,
though its purpose in the waking
vision is to inform Daniel
of the fate about to befall the
excited Jews now that the
Persians have taken Babylon. Yet here is the first reference
in the Old Testament to the
archangel Michael, who is said
to have come to the aid of the
apparition during his
negotiations with the Persians,
a seemingly human action
surely outside the domain of angels. Exactly what is going
on here is unclear, though it is
worth noting that in Hebrew
tradition, Michael is the
archangel who presides over the
heavenly affairs of the Israelite nation.
After taking Babylon, Cyrus the Great continues westwards
until, just one year later, in 538 BC, he takes Jerusalem.
It is only then that the Jews of
Babylon are finally given
their freedom. An estimated 50,000 apparently return,
leaving six times
this amount in the land to which they had
been taken in bond. Many thousands more journey two hundred
miles eastwards to the city of Susa, the old Elamite capital
in south-west Persia, where Darius had established a summer
palace. Why there should have been this reluctance among the
Jews to return to their native
country is open to
speculation. Perhaps they did not wish to make the long
journey back to Jerusalem on foot, or had elderly relatives
who would never have survived the return. It is also
possible that many of the
Babylonian Jews saw new
opportunities opening for them,
not just in the land that
had become their only home, but in Persia itself.
Furthermore, both Cyrus and
Darius had extended a religious
tolerance to those Jews who
remained in Babylon and Persia,
enabling them to practise their faith
relatively unhindered.
According to the Book of Daniel,
the now elderly prophet is
among those who move on to the Persian court at Susa.
Earlier, however, during the
third year of Belshazzar's
reign, Daniel experienced
another dream in which he was
taken in mind to the city Of Susa. Here he witnessed a
symbolic struggle between a ram
and a he-goat (representing
the overthrow of the Persian Empire by the Greeks, which
does not occur until 330 BC). He also heard 'a man's voice
between the banks of Ulai (a river named the Choasper,
or
Kerkhan, lying some twenty miles north of Susa), which and
said, Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision.'
Following these lines, Gabriel
then makes his one and only
appearance in the Old Testament
to explain to Daniel the
meaning of his dream-vision. The archangel does not appear
again until he announces the
birth of both John the Baptist
and the virgin-born child to
Mary in the New Testament's
Gospel of Luke. Daniel finally
dies a very old man indeed;
however, the plight of the Jews in exile is not yet over.
Large numbers stay on in Babylon and Susa until the new
Persian king, Artaxerxes, signs a decree permitting the
restoration of the Jewish state
in 458 B C; the Temple of
Jerusalem having been completed and rededicated in 515 BC.
Yet still there is a reluctance
among the Jews to return to
their homeland. Some 5,000 return in the company of a
priestly scribe named Ezra,
following Artaxerxes' signing of
the decree, while in 445 BC a
further batch travel with a
Jew named Nehemiah, who, prior
to the journey, had been
cup-bearer, or vizier, to the king. After thirteen years
overseeing the restoration of
the revitalized Jewish nation,
Nehemiah returns to his royal
master in Persia, where he
finally ends his days. Any Jews still remaining in either
Babylon or Susa after this date are simply lost to the pages
of history.
A Man of Many Faces
-------------------
The works accredited to Daniel
contain potent, moralistic
stories that won favour among the Jews following their
return from exile. This was especially so during the
terrible suppression they
suffered under Antiochus
Epiphanes, the king of Syria, who ruled Judaea
at the
commencement of the Maccabean revolt of 167 BC - It is
almost certainly because of
these troubled times that many
of the fireside stories
remaining from the days of the
Babylonian Captivity were put into written form. In all
likelihood, Daniel was a
composite figure, a man of many
faces, who embodied the life and
deeds of more than one
individual, perhaps even certain
aspects of the various
kings whom he allegedly served. To the post-exilic Jews,
however, Daniel represented the
imprisoned spirit of God's
chosen people, from the time of
the Captivity right down to
the commencement of the Christian era. In the light of this,
could I now make sense of why it
was only in the Book of
Daniel that Watchers,
Watcher-like individuals and named
angels appeared as heavenly beings in the Old Testament?
Chart 1. RELEVANT BIBLICAL CHRONOLOGY.
---------------------------------------
C. 2000 BC
Abraham leaves the city of Ur; Chedorlaomer, the King of
Elam, encounters giant races in Canaan.
C. 1300-1200 BC
Exodus out of Egypt by the Israelites under the command of
Moses the Lawgiver.
Establishment of Twelve Tribes in
Canaan; giant races again encountered here.
C. 1020-970 BC
The future king David fights the
Philistines, including the
giant Goliath of the tribe of Gath.
970 BC
Following the death of David,
Solomon takes the throne of a
united Israel.
931-899 BC
Solomon dies and the kingdom
gradually splits into two
separate kingdoms - Israel in the north and Judah to the
south.
722 BC
The northern kingdom
of Israel falls to the Assyrians and
some 28,000 Israelites are taken
into captivity; this
signals the end of Israel as a nation. The captives never
return from Assyria.
606-605 BC
Nebuchadnezzar succeeds to the
Babylonian throne.
508 BC
Jerusalem, the capital of Judah, falls to Nebuchadnezzar.
The outgoing king, Jehoiakim, and many leading craftsmen are
deported to Babylon; these include the young Daniel.
Jehoiakim's son Zedekiah takes the throne.
586 BC
Nebuchadnezzar besieges Jerusalem once more. The city falls
and is destroyed; the Jews are
taken into captivity in
Babylon.
562-553 BC
Nebuchadnezzar dies and is
succeeded by three successive
kings: Amelmarduk, Neriglissar and, finally, Nabonidus.
Afterwards the regent, Belshazzar, takes control of Babylon
in the king's absence.
540-539 BC
Nabonidus is defeated by Cyrus, king of Persia. Anarchy
breaks out in Babylon; the Bible speaks of writing on the
wall appearing in Belshazzar's
palace during a banquet.
Cyrus' army enters Babylon and achieves easy victory.
538 BC
Cyrus takes Jerusalem; all captive Jews in Babylon are
allowed their freedom;
many move on to Susa in south-west
Persia.
537-5I5 BC
Restoration of the Temple
of Jerusalem under Zerubbabel.
478 BC
The Jews still in Susa; biblical story of Esther marrying
Xerxes, the Persian king, and
thus saving many Jews from
massacre.
458 BC
Ezra is sent to Jerusalem by the Persian king Artaxerxes.
He
takes with him a large number of
the remaining Jewish
exiles, as well as valuable gifts for the restored Temple.
445 BC
Nehemiah, the Jewish cup-bearer
to Artaxerxes at Susa,
returns to Jerusalem as its new governor. Kingdom
of Judaea
is founded.
165 BC The Book of Daniel is
written.
* *
*
On the Road with Raphael
------------------------
For the moment I would need to
set aside the Book of Daniel,
and the Bible as a whole, for I
felt this could tell me
little more about the origins of the Watchers. Instead, I
turned my attention to the
so-called Apocrypha, the
collection of seventeen books,
or portions of books, that,
although originally included in
the Christian Bible, were
dropped by the early Church
Fathers of the fourth century
AD. I was looking specifically
for one book, the Book of
Tobit, for it had emerged that this featured another of the
so-called archangels - in this
case Raphael, who never
appears in the Old Testament,
but does appear as one of the
holy Watchers in the Book of Enoch. The Book of Tobit
focuses on the lives of
Israelites belonging to the ten
tribes who were apparently
carried off to Assyria and 'the
cities of the Medes' after the
fall of the northern kingdom
of Israel to Shalmaneser, the Assyrian
king, in 722 BC. Yet,
unlike the Jews of the
Babylonian Captivity, these tribes
never returned from their exile,
and are assumed to have
lived on in isolated communities
for many generations
afterwards. Like the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch,
this apocryphal work was
actually constructed only sometime
after 200 B C.
The story in question features a
righteous man named Tobias,
the son of Tobit,
who is about to leave Nineveh, the old
Assyrian capital, for Ecbatana, one of 'the cities of the
Medes', in northwest Iran. Here Tobias is to win the hand
in marriage of a fair maiden named
Sara, the daughter of
Raguel. His companion on the long and wearisome journey is
Raphael, whose name means
'healer of God'. As they cross the
mountains towards their place of
destination, the archangel
- who withholds his true
identity and instead uses the name
Azarius - teaches Tobias many wise things. For example,
Tobias catches a huge fish in a
river, and Raphael instructs
him on how he can use each part
of its body by saying:
'Take out the entrails of this
fish and lay up his heart,
and his gall, and his liver for
thee; for these are
necessary for useful medicines
... the gall is good for
anointing the eyes, in which
there is a white speck, and
they shall be cured.'
Worthy words for a healer of
God, but an art surely beyond
the normal undertakings of a divine messenger of heaven. The
journey resumes, and on reaching
Ecbatana the archangel is
sent on to Rages, another Median
city, to collect bags of
money on behalf of Tobias' family. Tobias himself eventually
wins the hand of Sara,and on the party's return to Nineveh,
Azarius reveals his true identity as 'Raphael, one of the
seven holy angels', a reference
to the group of seven
archangels in Hebrew myth and legend. There seemed little
doubt that the story of Tobias
and Raphael's journey on the
road to Media was merely a
quaint fable, created for an
allegorical purpose by Jewish story-tellers. Yet the
appearance of the archangel in
this story seemed important,
for it was beginning to look as
though angelic beings with
specific descriptions,
identities, hierarchies and titles
had only been adopted bv the Jews after their return from
exile in Babylon and Susa. If this were true, then from
where exactly had these new influences come? Babylon under
the kings Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar in the sixth century
BC had been dominated by the
cult of Bel, or Bel-Marduk,
the
state god who was seen as a personification of the sun. His
worship was abhorred by the Jews
as pagan idolatry, even
though Daniel, on entering the
Babylonian court, had been
given the name Belteshazzar, meaning
'prince of Bel'. Since
Bel was the god of their oppressors, his cult would never
have found favour
among the captive Jews, so is unlikely to
have had any major influence on
the Jewish concept of
angels. On the other hand, Babylon at this time was a
cosmopolitan city attracting
religious cults from every
corner of Mesopotamia,
so might one of these have found
favour and
sympathy among the Jews? It is difficult to say,
though there is good reason to
believe that the Assyrian and
Babylonian winged temple
guardians and sky genii influenced
the development of the multi-winged Cherubim and Seraphim.
Yet these were never really
classed as 'malakh', the angels
or messengers of heaven.
Iranian Influence
-----------------
A more fruitful line of inquiry
was the major influence that
the Persian priesthoods undoubtdly exerted on the exiled
Jews. Many Jewish scribes,
prophets and administrators
achieved popularity and wealth
not just in the old Elamite
capital of Susa, but also much deeper into Persia,
especially in the north-western kingdom
of Media, modern-day
Azerbaijan, the setting for much of the Book of Tobit.
So
what religious influences might
the Jews have been exposed
to here? Before becoming a kingdom in its own right, Media
had been a confederation of
fierce, mostly highland tribes
who had been vassals of the
Assyrian Empire of northern Iraq
and Syria, before proclaiming their independence in 820 BC.
Thereafter they had been ruled
by a dynasty of kings, who
were known as 'king of kings',
the last of whom was
overthrown by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC. Two years later,
with the unification of all the
Iranian and Asian kingdoms,
Cyrus established the Persian Empire, initiating a royal
dynasty of kings referred to by
historians as the
Achaemenids. Cyrus now ruled a territory that stretched as
far north as the Russian
Caucasus, as far east as India and
the Chinese Turkman
Empire; as far south as Egypt and
Ethiopia, and as far west as eastern Europe.
It is not recorded to what faith
Cyrus belonged, though it
is likely he followed the
religion of the Magi, the Median
priestly caste of immense power,
who were said to have
guarded Cyrus' white marble tomb
at his capital city of
Pasargadae in southern Persia following his internment in
530 BC. Cyrus himself was
descended of the old Median
dynasty, so he also owed its
powerful Magian priesthood some
kind of loyalty. The origin of this priestly line is
unknown. The Medians were a mixed race, with indigenous
cultural and religious
influences from the mountainous
regions of north-west Iran. The only real comparison to
the
Magi was the Brahman priestly
caste of India, with whom they
shared many aspects of belief,
customs and worship (see
Chapter 8). The most famous Magi
were, of course, the three
'wise men' who, so the Bible
informs us, brought the three
gifts for the infant Christ at the time of the Nativity.
Had the Jews therefore been
influenced by the beliefs of the
Magi? It was strongly possible;
however, there was another,
rival religion beginning to take
a hold in Persia at this
time and this was Zoroastrianism.
The Fall of the Magi
--------------------
The Magi received their biggest
blow in 522 BC when a Median
usurper and Magus named Gaumata posed as the regent of
Cambyses II, Cyrus' successor,
while the king was on a
military campaign in north Africa. In so doing, the impostor
managed to seize control of the
Persian throne and proclaim
himself ruler of the empire. Cambyses,
on hearing of the
coup, set about returning to Persia, only to be mortally
wounded on the home journey. In spite of this tragic
accident, Gaumata
and his Magi co-conspirators were
eventually ousted and slain by Cambyses' successor, Darius,
having controlled the empire for several months. Thereafter
the Magian
priesthood was outlawed and persecuted throughout
Persia. Indeed, according to the Greek writer Herodotus, on
the anniversary of Gaumata's downfall, a festival known as
Magophobia was instituted. On this day people were
encouraged to kill any Magi
priests they came across, a
custom apparently still taking
place in the mid fifth
century when Herodotus himself visited Media.
The relegation of the Magian priesthood to one that was
scorned and hated by the people
allowed the sudden rise in
popularity of what later became
known as Zoroastrianism, a
revitalized form of Iranian
religion named after its much
celebrated founder, Zoroaster. From the reign of Darius
onwards, Zoroastrianism grew to
become the new state
religion with its own holy
books, priest hood and temples in
every major town and city. It did everything it could to
stamp out Magianism,
even though Zoroastrianism probably
owed almost its entire creed to
the Median religion's
ancient teachings.
The Tower
of Daniel
-------------------
The Median capital of Ecbatana, the modern city of Hamadan,
was held to be a very sacred
place by both the Magi and the
Zoroastrians. It was therefore
quite astounding to find that
it had been not only the place
of destination of the
archangel Raphael in the Book of
Tobit, but also the site of
a 'tower' - constructed by the
prophet Daniel and sanctioned
by his patron, Darius I. According to the Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus (AD 37-97), the
only writer to have
preserved any knowledge of this
elegant building's great
renown, it was said to have
been:
'... wonderfully made, and it is
still remaining, and
preserved to this day; and to
such as do see it, it appears
to have been lately built, and
to have been no older than
that day when any one looks upon
it ... Now they bury the
kings of Media, of Persia, and Parthia, in this tower, to
this day; and he who was
entrusted with the care of it, was
a Jewish priest; which thing is also observed to this
day.'
Chart 2. RELEVANT PERSIAN
CHRONOLOGY.
-------------------------------------
2000-1000 BC
Establishment of Iranian tribes
in central and western Asia,
following migrations from the plains of southern Russia.
C. 2000-550 BC
Assyria, Media, Babylonia and Lydia are the dominant powers
in the Near
East.
630 BC
Traditional birth-date of
Zoroaster, the founder of the
Zoroastrian faith.
581 BC
The birth of Cyrus the Great, a
direct descendant of the
Median dynasty of kings.
559-548 BC
Cyrus assumes throne of Anshan in western Persia and then
conquers the rest of the Iranian
continent; establishment of
the so-called Achaemenid period of
Persian history.
539 BC
Babylonia falls to Cyrus.
530-522 BC
Death of Cyrus and reign of his successor
Cambyses II.
526-521 BC
Dynastic troubles; a Magian usurper seizes the Persian
throne for four months. Cambyses dies
on return from Egypt.
His successor,
Darius I, assumes control.
485 BC Coronation of Xerxes, son
of Darius.
464-330 BC
Reigns of Artaxerxes I to Darius III.
330 BC
Defeat of Persia by Alexander the Great; end of independency
and influence; cessation of Achaemenid
dynasty of kings.
247 BC
Establishment of Parthian
dynasty in Persia.
224-5 AD
Ardashir I defeats Parthians in three
decisive battles and
establishes second Persian Empire, also known as the
Sassanian dynasty of kings.
640 AD
Fall of the Sassanian
kings after their final defeat by the
invading Arabs; end of Persian
Empire.
* * *
If this was correct, then it
clearly demonstrated the
immense esteem accorded to the
Jewish priesthood by the
Persian kings, and presumably by
the Magi, right down to the
first century of the Christian
era when Josephus wrote these
enigmatic lines. Nothing more was known about Daniel's
tower, though classical writers
say that Ecbatana was
originally surrounded by seven
walls, each rising in gradual
descent and painted a different colour, reminiscent of the
seven-tiered ziggurats of Assyria and Babylonia.
Quite obviously there must have
been a trafficking of ideas
and philosophies between the
Magi of Media, the Zoroastrians
of Persia and the Jewish exiles. Yet, if this were so, just
how much of it might have
influenced the contents of the
Book of Enoch and the writing of
the Dead Sea Scrolls? More
important still - had Iran been the point of origin of the
post-exilic concept of angels,
both of the heavenly and
fallen varieties? From even a cursory glance at the
teachings of Zoroastrianism, it
seemed the answer was always
going to be yes.
The Angels of Zaroaster
-----------------------
Like Judaism, Zoroastrianism is
a monotheistic religion. And
like Judaism, it also accepts a
whole pantheon of angels, or
yazatas, who act in accordance with the faith's supreme
being, Ahura Mazda, the 'wise lord'.
Those angels closest to
godhead are known as the Amesha Spentas, or Amshashpands,
whose origins are thought to
have developed out of much
older Indo-Iranian myths of
central Asia dating back to the
second or third millenium BC. These
six 'holy, immortal
ones', or 'bounteous immortals',
with Ahura Mazda, are
equated directly with the Judaic
concept of the seven
archangels, who are found, not
just in the Book of Tobit,
but also in the Book of Enoch and the Dead Sea
literature.
Two notable scholars of Hebrew,
W O E. Oesterley and T H.
Robinson, recognized the
influence of Zoroastrianism on
Judaism in connection with
everything from its concept of
angelology to its understanding
of demonology, dualism,
eschatology, world-epochs and
the resurrection of the soul,
especially in the case of the Book of Enoch. Furthermore,
they concluded that these
adoptions from the Persian
religion undoubtedly occurred
when the Jews were in exile at
Susa.
These very same opinions have
been shared by scholars of
Persian antiquity, such as
Richard N. Frye, a former Aga
Khan Professor of Iranian
Studies at Harvard University, who
outlined the powerful
cross-fertilization between
Zoroastrianism and post-exilic
Judaism in his 1963 book The
Heritage of Persia.
There seemed little doubt that I
was on the right track in
my conclusion concerning the
Persian influence on the Book
of Enoch, so what about the
story of the Watchers - had this
come from Iran as well? Canon R.
H. Charles, the Hebrew
scholar whose English version of
the Ethiopic Book of Enoch
still stands among the finest to
be produced, appeared to
think so. He concluded that the myths concerning the Sons of
God coming unto the Daughters of
Men, as presented in
Genesis 6, belonged 'to a very
early myth, possibly of
Persian origin, to the effect
that demons had corrupted the
earth before the coming of
Zoroaster and had allied
themselves with women'.
This same opinion was voiced by
Professor Philip Alexander,
probably one of the foremost
authorities on the Book of
Enoch. In an important paper
entitled 'The Targumim and
Early Exegesis of Sons of God in
Genesis 6', published in
the Journal of Jewish Studies in
1972, he had this to say
about the origin of the Sons of
God:
'Angelology flourished in
Judaism after the Exile under the
influence of Iranian religion. It is very likely that the
interpretation of the Sons of
God, as angels was one of the
ways in which these rather alien
ideas were grafted into the
stock of pre-exilic religion and naturalized.'
In other words, there seemed
every possibility that the
legends concerning the Sons of
God had first been introduced
to Genesis, or certainly revised
and restored, at the time
when the priestly Scribes were
busy re-editing the Old
Testament, following the Jews'
final return from Persia
around 445 BC. Since the 'Sons of God' was simply another
name for the Watchers, it
implied that the traditions
concerning their fall, as
presented in the Book of Enoch,
had stemmed originally from Iran.
Truth and the Lie
-----------------
Persia would also appear to have had a major influence on
the Dead Sea literature. For example, in the Testament of
Amram it features the two Watchers who appear to Amram, the
father of Moses, as he rests in bed. They ask him 'which one
of us do you choose to rule
you?', following which they
identify themselves as 'Belial
... [Prince of Darkness] and
King of Evil' and 'Michael ...
Prince of Light and King of
Righteousness'. Elsewhere in the
Dead Sea Scrolls, Belial,
the Evil One, is equated with
adjectives such as 'Darkness'
and 'Lying', and 'the Liar',
while his equal and opposite
number, Michael, or Melchizedek,
is tied with terms such as
'Light', 'Righteousness' and
'Truth'.
The concept of the beholder of
the vision being made to
choose between light and
darkness, truth and lie,
righteousness and falsehood, is
matched exactly in the
Zoroastrian holy books, where an
individual is asked to
choose between asha, 'righteousness' or 'truth', and druj,
'falsehood'
or 'the Lie'. These dualistic principles are
represented on the one hand by Ahura Mazda, the 'wise lord',
and on the other by Angra Mainyu (often abbreviated
to
'Ahriman'
in Persian texts), the 'wicked spirit' or 'prince
of evil', who is the Iranian
equivalent of Belial, Satan or
the Devil. The idea of a choice is also strangely
reminiscent of the way in which
a Jew must choose between
either the path of good or the
path of evil during the
annual festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Further confirmation of this
link between Zoroastrianism and
Dead Sea literature comes from the fact that the followers
of the truth among the Essenes were known as 'the Sons of
Zadok', i.e. 'Righteousness' or 'the Sons of Truth', while
the followers of Belial were
known as 'the Sons of Darkness'
and 'the Sons of Lying'. Now we may compare this with
Zoroastrian literature where it
speaks of the ashavans, the
'followers of Righteousness' or
the 'followers of Truth',
and the drvants - the 'followers
of the Lie.'
These were important realizations,
for they overwhelmingly
confirmed the clear relationship
not just between
Zoroastrianism and Judaism, but
also between the Iranian
faith and the teachings of the Dead Sea
communities, which,
like Daniel, adhered strictly to the laws of Moses. Since
there seemed every likelihood
that these same religious
communities were also
responsible for such apocryphal and
pseudepigraphal works as the Book of Enoch and the Testament
of Amram,
there seemed everv possibility that the source
material for the legends
concerning the fall of the Watchers
really had come from the rich mythology of Iran. Yet before
I followed in the footsteps of
Daniel and departed Palestine
for the land in the east that
lay beyond the mountains of
Babylonia, I still needed to establish one final fact: had
anyone ever actually suggested
that the Book of Enoch was
composed outside of Palestine?
Laurence's Lucky Hunch
----------------------
Canon R. H. Charles appeared to
confirm the Persian
influence on the Book of Enoch,
but what about Richard
Laurence, Archbishop of Cashel, who translated the first
English edition of the Ethiopic
text deposited in the
Bodleian Library by James Bruce
of Kinnaird in 1773? What
had he to say about the text's country of origin? I read his
lengthy introduction to the Book
of Enoch and was astonished
by what I found. Once he had decided to consider the
latitude in which the text is
set, he then made a detailed
study of the length of days referred to in Chapter 71. He
found that the author of the
Book of Enoch had divided these
into eighteen parts, or
segments, with the longest day
consisting of twelve parts; the
equivalent of sixteen hours
in our own twenty-four-hour clock. Laurence realized
that a
longest day of this length does
not occur in Palestine, this
fact instantly dismissing it as
the original setting for the
Book of Enoch. In this
knowledge, he searched for a
northerly latitude that
experienced a longest day of the
time span indicated in the text. In so doing, he was able to
conclude that the author was
referring to an indigenous
climate:
'not lower than forty-five
degrees north latitude, where the
longest day is fifteex hours and a half, nor higher perhaps
than forty-nine degrees, where
the longest day is precisely
sixteen hours. This will bring the country where he wrote,
as high up at least as the
northern districts of the Caspian
and Euxine
(or Black) Seas; probably it was situated
somewhere between the upper parts of both these seas.
If the latter conjecture be well
founded, the author of the
Book of Enoch was perhaps one of
the tribes which
Shalmaneser carried away, and 'placed in Halah
and in Habor
by the river Goshan,
and in the cities of the Medes'; and
who never returned from captivity.'
Laurence knew he was in the
right area. To his mind, the
Book of Enoch could _not_ have
been written in Palestine,
but had been composed much
further north in the region of
Russian Armenia Georgia or the Caucasus, some 5 degrees
north of Iran. Although I had doubts concerning the precise
region implied here, I had
surmised similar conclusions
myself after studying the
descriptions of the Watcher-like
entities referred to in the Enochian
texts. These in no way
resembled the olive-skinned Jews
of Palestine, but instead
conjured the image of tall,
fair-skinned individuals with
white hair and dark feather
coats, surviving in a much
cooler climate, like that
experienced in more mountainous
terrains.
Despite these almost wild
assertions he had made, the
archbishop could not help but
continue to believe that the
Book of Enoch must have been
written by a Jew, but one
obviously living in the region under question. As a
consequence, he put forward the
theory that the text's
author had perhaps belonged to
one of the ten tribes
supposedly deported to Assyria and
Media following the fall
of Israel in 722 BC.
Such a hypothesis made little
sense, although the proposed
link between the author of the
Book of Enoch and the ancient
kingdom of Media did strike some sort of a chord. In the
archbishop's day, scholars had
no clear understanding of
Zoroastrianism, nor could they
have conceived of its heavy
influence on Jewish religious
thought, this fact making
Laurence's detailed observations
all the more pertinent to
my own study. Clearly, then, here was yet further proof
that
I should look towards Iran, and in particular to the Magi
priesthood of Media and the
Zoroastrian faith of Persia, for
the next set of keys to
unlocking the mysteries of the
fallen race.
TERRIBLE LIE
------------
I needed to know everything
there was to know about the
beliefs, customs and devotional worship of the Zoroastrians.
I needed to know whether it had
been their teachings, or
those of the Magi priesthood of
Media, that provided the
knowledge for the Judaic
understanding of angelology, and in
particular the story concerning the fall of the Watchers.
Books could provide me only with
background information, and
I realized
I needed much more. I also needed direct contact
with this living religion, which
still existed as a faith in
certain parts of India, mostly around Bombay. It was to here
that tens of thousands of
Zoroastrians migrated from Persia
during the ninth century AD in
the hope of escaping the
increasing persecutions of the Arab invaders. In India the
Zoroastrians were called Parsees
- the people of pars, or
Persia - and it is by this name that they are still known to
the outside world. I also discovered that at the beginning
of the twentieth century a
community of Zoroastrians
established themselves in London, and here erected a temple
of worship which remains in use today. I had obtained their
address from a friend, and after
various letters and
telephone calls in which I put
forward my interest in the
subject, was rather reluctantly
invited to attend one of
their seasonal services at the London address. The
Zoroastrians' cloak of secrecy
was totally understandable.
The ignorant had always seen
their beliefs, customs and
worship as, at best,
non-Christian, pagan and archaic in the
extreme, while over the
centuries the Muslims of both Iran
and India had systematically attempted to eradicate their
faith completely. Since the fall of the Shah's Pahlavi
regime in 1979, those
Zoroastrians still remaining in Iran
had been forced either to flee
the country or to worship in
seclusion away from the eyes of the Islamic authorities.
This was why Zoroastrian House
in London was surrounded by
so much secrecy. There was much I had already learnt about
both the Zoroastrians of Persia and the Magi of Media, but
the relevance of this historical
information still needed to
be assessed in my own mind. Any queries could be put to the
elders of the temple, who had
agreed to speak to me once the
service was over. The journey to the quiet London suburb was
by tube. With me was my research assistant Richard Ward,
and
a female colleague named Debbie Benstead.
Once out of the
underground, we quickly found
the address I had scribbled
hastily on a piece of paper the
previous week, and looking
up saw a large stone building,
with an appearance not unlike
a late Victorian church and hall combined. Ascending the
front steps we entered a
stone-floored lobby, already
bubbling with activity. Groups of Asians chatted together in
their native Persian and Indian
tongues - the men dressed in
working suits with white
skullcaps on their heads, the women
in colourful saris and bright
headscarves.
Our white appearance and foreign
presence easily revealed us
as outsiders, prompting a few nervous glances. In response,
we smiled politely and attempted
not to contravene any
temple etiquette. Dressed as formally as our tastes would
allow, we waited for someone to
approach, until finally,
after one or two almost suspicious
looks, a well-to-do Asian
broke away from his conversation and moved towards us. He
introduced himself as the
secretary of the society and,
having welcomed us to the
temple, checked to make sure that
Richard and I had brought
skullcaps to wear, and that Debbie
had a scarf to cover her hair. Cleanliness and purity was of
the utmost importance to their
faith, for which reason the
head must always be suitably
veiled to prevent loose hairs
from contaminating the sanctity of the temple. With our
headcovers firmly in place, I engaged the secretary in
conversation and foolishly
referred to Zoro as 'fire
worshippers'. The man looked sternly towards me and replied
curtly: 'We are not 'fire-worshippers'. Many people make
this mistake. We _venerate_ fire as a symbol of our father,
Ahura Mazda.'
I felt like sinking into the
ground, and apologized
profusely. I should have been more careful with my words.
Fire in all its aspects had been
sacred to Iranians, before
even the birth of Zoroaster, its
great prophet whose history
was shrouded in mystery and imagination. According to
classical sources, Zoroaster
lived '258 years before
Alexander' - that is 258 years
before Alexander the Great
destroyed the almighty Persian Empire and sacked its famed
white-stone city of Persepolis in 330 BC. This gave a date
Of 588 BC, although there seemed
no real indication whether
this was when the great teacher
was born; when he received
his first visionary revelation
at the age of thirty; when he
converted his mentor, a central
Asian king named Vishtaspa,
to his new faith at the age of
forty; or when he died at the
age of seventy-seven. Nor was there any good reason to
suppose that this date meant
anything at all, for the creed
of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra as he was known to the
Iranians, was purely a
revitalization of a much older
Indo-Iranian religion of immense
antiquity, preserved in its
fullest extent by the Magian
priesthood of Media.
Direct comparisons could be
drawn between the material in
the Zend-Avesta, the sacred
writings of Zoroaster (Zend
being an ancient Persian
language), and the mythology and
teachings found in India's oldest work of literature, the
Rig Veda, which dates to c. 1750
BC - a time-frame often
ascribed to Zoroaster himself. Other sources have suggested
that there were not one but two,
three, four or even more
prophets of history who each
bore the title 'Zarathustra',
which struck me as the most
sensible solution to the
problem.
The Latin writer Justin wrote
that Zoroaster was the
inventor of magic and that he
had made a study of the
doctrine of the Magi, who, like
their counterparts, the
Brahmans of India, venerated
fire as the sacred symbol of
godhead. According to a Byzantine historian, Gregorius
Cedrenus, the Magi were founded by the Hellenic hero Perseus
as a cult to guard and protect
the sacred immortal fire that
burned perpetually in an unknown
temple, for he recorded:
'Perseus,
they say, brought to Persia initiation and magic,
which by his secrets made the
fire of the sky descend; with
the aid of this art, he brought
the celestial fire to the
earth, and he had it preserved
in a temple under the name of
the sacred immortal fire; he
chose virtuous men as ministers
of a new cult, and established
the Magi as the depositors
and guardians of this fire which
they were charged to
protect.'
Zoroaster was said to have
immersed himself in the Magi's
strange philosophies and
teachings, which included the
origin of the universe and the
study of astrology and
astronomy. Other traditions even claim that Zoroaster was
himself a native of Media, and
that he had been the
_restorer_ of the religion of
the Magi, in much the same way
that Martin Luther 'reformed'
the corrupt practices of the
Catholic Church.
Very little was known about the
true history and religion of
the Magi. Once their political power had been suitably
curtailed by Darius I, they were
confined to more menial
duties, such as conducting
religious rituals, performing
animal sacrifices, interpreting
dreams and omens, casting
spells and communicating with
the spirit world - the actions
of magicians in every sense of
the word, and it is from this
usage that we gain terms such as magic, magician and magus.
The Magi are known to have
worshipped the very oldest
Indo-Iranian deities, such as Ahura, an early form of Ahura
Mazda, his son Mithra, and Ardvi Sura Anahita, goddess of
the waters; the last two being
much later incorporated into
the religious festivals of
Zoroastrianism, like the one we
were about to witness.
As the celebrants began filing
their way through to the
temple, we followed up behind,
smiling politely at those
leading the way. Beyond the entrance door was a large
auditorium with rows of chairs
in two huge aisles, many
already occupied by men and
women idly chatting between
themselves or moving around, as
if waiting for the beginning
of a theatrical production. Beyond the first row was a
raised stage supporting a huge,
polished brazier, heaped
high with small pieces of dry
sandalwood in readiness for
the 'yasna' festival, as it was
known. Around its base were
offerings of harvest fruits,
milk, wine, water, as well as
markers to indicate the four directions. On a beam above the
front of the stage was a winged
disc in which the
Assyrian-style representation of
Ahura Mazda stood within a
dove-tail plume of feathers.
Before Debbie was able to take a
seat, an Asian woman
approached her and placed a hand on her shoulder. With a
somewhat concerned expression on
her face, the woman spoke
first in her own language. Then, using broken English and
careful hand gesture she conveyed her message. Debbie
quickly realized
that she was inquiring whether or not she
was menstruating. Like all forms of impurity, menstrual
blood is considered offensive to
the divine presence of
Ahura Mazda. Luckily for Debbie, it was not the wrong time
of the month, and once she had
conveyed this fact to the
woman, the exchange of smiles
indicated she could take a
seat.
As we waited patiently, and
somewhat expectantly, for the
harvest ceremony to begin, I
watched in disbelief as people
in the auditorium continued to
socialize - walking about and
exchanging places as if in a public place. Surely some kind
of mental stillness and
contemplation ought to precede such
an important religious service?
A middle-aged woman sitting in
the next row smiled in our
direction, as if she wished to engage us in conversation.
Not quite knowing what to do or
say, I asked about the
significance of the festival. Understanding my question, she
went and fetched a typewritten
sheet containing an itinerary
of the evening's proceedings. Presiding over this harvest
festival was, it said, 'Tir', the 'yazata', or
'archangel',
who in the Zoroastrian calendar
governs the month of June,
as well as the, thirteenth day
of each month and the
influence of planet Mercury.
The Persian angel Tir is a prime example of how
Zoroastrianism has influenced
the Judaic understanding of
angelology, for in Hebrew
mysticism he becomes Tirsel, who,
like his Persian counterpart,
presides over all activities
appertaining to the planet Mercury. Similarly to the Essene
communities of the Dead Sea, Zorastras believe there to be
an angel watching over every
day, every month, every season
and every planet. Indeed, these 'watches' made by the
angelic intelligences in respect
of terrestrial and
celestial cycles of time might
well explain the usage of the
term 'ir',
'watcher', in both the Enochian and Dead Sea
literature. The Zoroastran understanding
of angels certainly
stemmed from the Magi, from whom
Zoroaster established his
own teachings.
The more that I learnt about
Iranian mythology and religion,
the more I began to realize
that it was not so much
Zoroastrianism that was going to
provide me with any real
answers but Magianism, the faith of
the Magi. Unfortunately,
however, since so little had
been preserved of their actual
myths and rituals, I could only
determine this priestly
caste's true significance by
studying the religion it had
created - Zoroastrianism.
It was known, however, that the
Magi had recognised two
opposing types of supernatural
beings - the 'ahuras' and the
'daevas'. The ahuras were
seen as shining gods living in a
state of heavenly glory, while
the daevas were looked upon
as 'false gods', or 'dark and
malignant genii', intimately
associated with the affairs of humanity. Indeed, the daevas
were seen as ahuras
who had fallen from grace to become
earth-bound devils (dev or div
in Persian, from which we get
the word devil), 'begotten' of Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman, the
wicked spirit'. Despite the dark nature of the daevas, their
name actually derives from the
word devata, meaning, as in
the case of the ahuras, the
'Shining Ones'.
Once the Arabs had cut their way
across Persia in the
seventh century AD, Angra Mainyu became transformed
into a
character named Eblis, or Iblis - an angel 'born
of fire',
who was said to have refused to
bow down before Adam at the
command of God, and as a result had been cast out of heaven.
Before his fall through pride,
however, Eblis had been known
by- the name Azazel,
the name given to one of the leaders of
the Watchers in the Book of
Enoch; a strange connection not
explained in Islamic myth. In Arabic folklore Eblis
was seen
as the father of the divs, or djinn, and from him
sprang the
evil Peri
(pari in Persian, Pairika
in the Zend-Avesta),
beautiful angels who disguised
'their malevolence under
their charming appearance'.
Tales concerning divs proliferate in ancient Iranian
mythology, where they are
portrayed as essentially
human-like, yet of great height
with horns, large ears and
tails. They were often sorcerers or magicians who possessed
'superior power and
intelligence' beyond that of mortal
beings. In spite of the fact that they could vanish at will,
their clear physical nature was
displayed on the
battlefield, where they were
frequently dispatched by sword
or battleaxe. If one takes away the horns, long ears and
tails, which were undoubtedly
added at a later stage in the
development of the legends to
demean the character of the
divs, then
you are left with very human-like individuals.
Indeed, a div is described as 'a
god, or personage of a
higher class in the scale of earthly beings'. Although the
word here is 'earthly', rather
than 'mortal', in my opinion
the divs'
great stature, their superior intelligence and
their alleged supernatural
capabilities made them prime
candidates for the role of
progeny of the daevic race,
comparable with the Nephilim of Judaic
tradition.
Belief in the physical reality
of divs and Peri
persisted in
Iran right through to the early twentieth century. For
instance, in the remote border
region between Iran and
Afghanistan, close to the Amu Darya (Oxus) river, the Tajik
tribesmen spoke of the divs, or 'divy', as coming
'down from
their mountain lairs during
winter to remain near
settlements, returning only in spring'. Of equal mystery was
the belief among the Tajik
tribesmen of the lowlands that
beautiful Peri
could tempt mortal beings into sin and 'take
the form of snakes, turtles and
frogs', all creatures under
the dominion of Angra Mainyu.
More importantly, there appeared
to be some indication from
early Zoroastrian sources that a
kind of fall of the ahuras,
or 'shining ones', had preceded
the appearance of Zoroaster
on earth, for according to one
commentator, the prophet
'dashed to pieces the bodies of
the angels, because they had
made an evil use of them for
wandering on the earth, and
especially for amatory dealings with earthly women'. These
were the words of
nineteenth-century biblical scholar Franz
Delitzsch, who fully recognized the extraordinary similarity
between this account and the
improprieties committed by the
Watchers in the Book of Enoch.
The Amesha
Spentas of Iranian lore are undoubtedly to be
equated, not just with the seven
archangels, but also with
the seven adityas,
or suryas, found in the Hindu Rig Veda;
one of whom, the sun god, is named as Surya.
Ancient Indian
myth and legend records that the
suryas' evil enemies were
the ahuras
(spelt asuras), who were giants, skilled in the
magical arts. Like the Watchers of the Book of Enoch, the
Vedic ahuras
were condemned for having misused the secret
wisdom of the gods - casting
them in the role of malevolent
spirits comparable with the
fallen angels of
Judaeo-Christian traditions.
By coincidence, Surya also happened to be one of the names
of Metatron,
the angelic form adopted by Enoch after his
translation to heaven. Moreover, some Ethiopian manuscripts
of the Book of Enoch give the
archangels prefixes such as
'Asarya,
'Asurye and Suryan,
clearly confirming the powerful
relationship between Judaism and
the Indo-Iranian myths
found in both the Zend-Avesta and the Rig Veda.
I was getting closer, but I
still needed further evidence of
the relationship between the
concept of Watchers and the
ancient Iranian belief in the
fallen ahuras, or daevas,
corrupting humanity. Perhaps the answers I was looking for
could be found within the sacred books of the Zoroastrians.
Suddenly my thoughts were
distracted. The constant, low
babble permeating the busy
auditorium had been broken by the
sound of tinkling bells, played in specific sequence. The
strange cacophony came from a
closed room positioned behind
the seated audience. Soon afterwards, five priests entered
into view, all dressed in long,
white linen robes, with
white waist cords, white
skullcaps and long white muslin
masks across their noses and mouths. They walked briskly in
single file towards the stage,
continually chanting prayers
as they went. Having ascended to the level of the fire
brazier, a huge overhead
extractor fan was switched on by
unseen hands. One priest immediately began to kindle a low
fire in the enormous brass
container, as further pieces of
sandalwood and spoonfuls of
frankincense were added to the
flickering flames. The thick, wafting incense charged the
air with a sharp, overbearing
aroma that was both unique and
vibrant.
Having sat in a circle on the
floor around the blazing fire,
the fire priests joined hands
and began saying prayers and
hymns taken from the Zend-Avestas.
Each one chanted over the
voices of his fellow
supplicants, without co-ordination or
harmony, to produce an
enchanting yet discordant babel I had
never before experienced in a religious ceremony.
Every so often the priests would
pass a small white flower
between themselves. It was offered with both hands, which
were then grasped by a neighbour's
hands. The first priest
would then remove his hands to
leave behind the flower,
before completing the gesture by
briefly cupping the second
priest's hands with his own. On other occasions, all five
supplicants would join hands and
link with the flame of
truth by means of a ritual poker
placed in the fire by one
of the priests; a connection
that seemed essential to the
success of the ceremony. Once in a while members of the
audience would reach for their
own battered copies of the
Zend-Avesta and begin
halfheartedly reciting certain
'gathas',
before giving up and talking with their
neighbours.
The Zend-Avesta is the
Zoroastrians' most sacred text, but
there are other books of equal importance. One of these is
the Bundahishn,
a sacred text written in the late Persian
language of Pahlavi. Among its many
themes is a unique
creation myth, in which the
stalk of the sacred rhubarb
plant grows and grows until it
divides to form two separate
human beings - Masya and Masyanag, the father
and mother of
the mortal race. The couple exist in a state of purity, but
are then seduced by Angra Mainy (the daevas in one
account).
As a consequence of this
seduction, the first couple give
worship to him (or them) and not
Ahura Mazda, named in the
text as 'Ormuzd'. In so doing,
these first mortals are
deprived of their original
purity, which neither they, nor
any of their descendants, are
able to recover unless through
the aid of Mithra,
the deity who presides over the salvation
of the soul.
The Zoroastrians believe that since
the first couple
committed the carnal sin in
thought, word and deed, both
they and their descendants became tainted for ever. In spite
of the fact that the Bundahishn dates only to a time when
their forebears first migrated
from Iran to India in the
ninth century, the text is
thought to be based on a now lost
Zend original of great antiquity.
In many ways the creation story
presented in the Bundahishn
might be compared directly with
the story of the Fall of Man
found in the Book of Genesis. Yet even more remarkable is
the knowledge that, in some
Persian teachings, Angra Mainyu
is known as 'the old serpent
having two feet', words that
immediately conjured an image of
Belial, the Watcher with a
'visage
like a viper' found in the Testament of Amram.
I would not be the first person
to spot the obvious
comparisons between the Persian
and Hebrew accounts of the
Fall of Man. As early as 1888 C. Staniland
Wake, in his
ground-breaking work,
Serpent-Worship and Other Essays,
admitted, after discussing the
similarities between the two
quite separate myths, that:
The Persian account of the fall
and its consequences agrees
so closely with the Hebrew story
when stripped of its
figurative language that we
cannot doubt that they refer to
the same legend, and the use of
figurative language in the
latter may well lead us to
believe that it was of later date
than the former [i.e. the Bundahishn].
There is every reason to believe
that the Judaic concept of
the Fall of Man, the Serpent of
Temptation and the fall of
the angels derive either
directly or indirectly from
Zoroastrian or pre-Zoroastrian
sources. The serpent of the
Bundahishn is Angra Mainyu,
who is therefore the figurative
form of the daevas
(or fallen ahuras) who seduce humanity at
the time of the Fall, just as
the Serpent of Temptation is
the personification of Belial, Shemyaza or Azazel, the names
given to the leader of the
Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea
religious literature.
The Law of the Daevas
---------------------
It was intriguing to think of
the prophet Mani rediscovering
the Book of Enoch, as well as
other lesser-known Enochian
literature, during the third
century of the Christian era
and then re-introducing it back
into the newly resurrected
Persian Empire both in translation and within his own
heretical teachings. These he had carried as far east as
central Asia, one
of the traditional homes of his
predecessor, the prophet Zoroaster. If the legends of the
Watchers had originated in
ancient Iran, then Mani was
taking them back to their own
heartland some seven hundred
years after they were originally
carried into Judaea by the
returning Jewish exiles. Could Mani have
been aware of the
Persian origin of these
traditions? Might this have been why
he recognized in them the doctrine of truth? If so, then
why
were Mani
and his Manichaean followers so horrendously
persecuted by fanatical
Zoroastrians, who publicly
humiliated his body following
the prophet's inevitable death
at jund-i-Shapur,
near Susa in south-west Persia, during the
year AD 277?
The answer almost certainly lay
in the fact that during his
ministry on earth, Zoroaster is
said to have preached out
fervently against the daevo-data, 'the law according to the
daevas'.
This was the 'law' accepted and promoted by those
individuals who, instead of
choosing the true path of Ahura
Mazda, adhered to the deceitful
ways of the karapans
(priests)
and the kavi's (prince-priests). Although these
terms were loosely used to refer
to any non-Zoroastrian
priest, they especially denoted
the Magi priests of Media,
whose principal philosophies
featured the eternal struggles
between the ahuras and the daevas. Although the Magi
accepted the supremacy of Ahura, the prototype of Ahura
Mazda, they also made sacrifices
to Angra Mainyu, showing
their spiritual allegiance to
the Prince of Darkness as
well.
Such blasphemies made the Magi
and their followers the
children of Angra
Mainyu of the 'druj'
'falsehood' or 'the
Lie'. In effect, they were
accused of being liars for
accepting and preaching such unholy matters. So vehemently
did Zoroaster, and presumably
all orthodox Zoroastrians,
hate followers of the Lie, that
in one ancient text the
prophet had this to say about
those who accepted the law of
the daevas:
Whether a man dispose of much or
little wealth, he should
show kindness to the follower of
Truth, but should be evil
to the follower of the Lie
... (for the man) who is most
good to the follower of the Lie
is himself a follower of the
Lie.
In other words, those who dared
even to listen to the Lie
taught by the Magian priests would themselves become
followers of the Lie. It was almost as if the Zoroastrians
wanted to make sure that no one
should even want to listen
to the terrible Lie being told
by the Magi, for fear that it
might corrupt their opinions,
and in so doing make them
followers of the Lie themselves. Such an extreme,
fundamental attitude towards the
teachings of a rival faith
is quite bizarre. It almost conjures up the image of a Magi
priest approaching a Zoroastrian
who, in fear that he might
be told the terrible Lie, covers
his ears and says: 'No, I
don't want to hear it - it's a lie. I know it's a lie.'
Exactly what sort of 'Lie' could
have made a great prophet
like Zoroaster so want to
prevent his followers from even
hearing it? Was it something he had [heard?] the Magi say
when he himself had studied
their religion, before embarking
on his own career as a teacher of righteousness? What was
it
that Zoroaster had to hide? What was the terrible Lie?
Surely it cannot have concerned
the Magi's religious
practices or their knowledge of astrology and astronomy.
These would not have caused the
type of consternation
implied by Zoroaster's fanatical
attitude towards their
teachings.
It seems more likely that he was
directing these accusations
at their belief in the daevo-data, 'the law according to the
daevas'.
The fact that the Magi had sacrificed animals in
the name of Angra
Mainyu must have meant that they never
denounced his progeny, the daevas, as
evil. Far from it, for
it would appear that they saw
them as equal in power to the
ahuras, with a role to play in both the religion of Iran and
the affairs of humanity.
Even if this solution is
correct, then surely such dualistic
principles should never have
posed such a terrible threat to
the teachings of Zoroaster and his followers. There must
have been more to it than this -
something that made them
want to persecute anyone who
even contemplated listening to
such 'falsehood'. Might the Lie have been more shocking than
history has implied?
Was it possible that the Magi
believed the material world to
be the domain of Angra Mainyu, because the daevas had
planted their seeds of evil
among humanity by revealing the
secret wisdom of the ahuras? The
story in the Bundahishn of
the corruption of the first
couple confirms the existence of
such a view in Zoroastrian
thought. Even further supporting
this supposition is the
knowledge that the mark of the Magi
is to be found in many parts of
the Bundahishn, showing
their influence on its final
[copy?] either in its lost Zend
original or in the surviving Pahlavi
version.
The fanatical persecution of Mani and his followers seems to
be a revealing example of how
fundamental Zoroastrians
reacted to someone resurrecting
the Terrible Lie once told
by the Magi priests, the followers of daevo-data.
I wondered how many
participating in this seasonal festival
were aware of the transgressions
of the daevas, or of the
persecution of those who had
once taught about their
corruption of humanity?
As in the case of Jews,
Christians and Muslims, such matters
did not feature in their
day-to-day worship, and so are
unlikely to have been known to them. The yasna
festival we
attended continued for over an
hour and a half, with no real
change in the proceedings. Occasionally men and women would
approach the stage, pick up a
small piece of cut sandalwood
from a low pile supplied for
this purpose, then hand it to
the fire-priest. He would acknowledge their presence before
placing their offering among the lapping flames. It appeared
to be a means of ensuring good
fortune, in much the same way
as a Catholic or Orthodox
Christian might light a small
candle and leave it burning in a church.
At other times,
members of the audience would walk around,
talking to each other and doing
their own thing, seemingly
oblivious to what was taking place on the stage before them.
This apparent irreverence was
most disconcerting, especially
as we ourselves could do little
more than sit in silent awe
for the duration of the service. Yet simply being here
instilled in us an overwhelming
sense of privilege and
humility. Here was a fire ritual that probably dated beyond
the origins of the Magi to the
mists of antiquity, perhaps
even to a time when the fallen ahuras, the Shining Ones of
Indo-Iranian myth,
once walked the earth.
With the festival over, Richard,
Debbie and myself were
taken into the society's library
room and asked to put our
questions to the secretary and
an Iranian scholar, who was a
member of the respected Royal Asiatic Society. They listened
carefully to my queries
concerning Zoroastrian angelology
and directed me to various rare
out-of-print books on the
subject. Unfortunately, they themselves were unable to help
me with my research, though they
did speak of traditions
connecting the prophet Enoch
with the region of Cappadocia
in eastern Anatolia,
the details of which they promised to
send me by return post (they never arrived).
Afterwards the three of us were
invited to join a communal
meal in a canteen area on the same floor as the temple. We
were provided with a welcome
vegetarian curry and listened
to stories of clandestine
Zoroastrian services currently
taking place within underground temples in Iran. At one
point an over-zealous woman
approached our table and began
sprinkling holy water in our
direction - a sign, it would
seem, that we had been accepted
into their fold, for one
night at least. We left Zoroastrian House, our heads buzzing
with the rich imagery
surrounding the strange religious
festival we had been allowed to witness. We were not invited
back, and in many ways there has
never been any need for a
second visit. Somehow I felt I was correct to compare the
dualistic elements of the Magian faith with the story of the
Watchers. Yet to investigate the
matter more fully I needed
further evidence of the apparent
trafficking between the
semi-divine daevas
and mortal kind, like that so vividly
described in Hebrew myth and legend. If this could be found,
then it would strengthen the
case in favour of an Iranian
origin for the Judaic legends of
the fall of the angels, and
help to explain why the
Zoroastrians had become so terrified
of the sheer potency of the Lie. This I was to eventually
discover; not, however, in the
holy books of the
Zoroastrians, or among the lost
teachings of the Magi, but
in a place that I would have
considered to be a most
unlikely source indeed - in the
'Shahnameh', the legendary
history of the Iranian kings.
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