from: http://www.peg.apc.org/~newdawn/42b1.htm
The Forbidden Legacy of
a Fallen Race -- Part 1
by Andrew Collins
Extracted from New Dawn No.40 (January-February, 1997)
Is civilisation the legacy of a race of human angels known
as Watchers and Nephilim? Andrew Collins, author of FROM THE
ASHES OF ANGELS, previews his history of angels and fallen angels
and traces their origin back to an extraordinarily advanced
culture that entered the Near East shortly after the end of the
last Ice Age.
Angels are something we associate with beautiful
Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance paintings, carved statues
accompanying gothic architecture and supernatural beings who
intervene in our lives at times of trouble. For the last 2000
years this has been the stereotypical image fostered by the
Christian Church. But what are angels? Where do they come from,
and what have they meant to the development of organised
religion?
Many people see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the
Old Testament, as littered with accounts of angels appearing to
righteous patriarchs and visionary prophets. Yet this is simply
not so. There are the three angels who approach Abraham to
announce the birth of a son named Izaac to his wife Sarah as he
sits beneath a tree on the Plain of Mamre. There are the two
angels who visit Lot and his wife at Sodom prior to its
destruction. There is the angel who wrestles all night with Jacob
at a place named Penuel, or those which he sees moving up and
down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth.
Yet other than these accounts, there are too few examples,
and when angels do appear the narrative is often vague and
unclear on what exactly is going on. For instance, in the case of
both Abraham and Lot the angels in question are described simply
as `men', who sit down to take food like any mortal person.
Influence of the Magi
It was not until post-exilic times -- i.e. after the Jews
returned from captivity in Babylon around 450 BC -- that angels
became an integral part of the Jewish religion. It was even
later, around 200 BC, that they began appearing with frequency in
Judaic religious literature. Works such as the Book of Daniel and
the apocryphal Book of Tobit contain enigmatic accounts of
angelic beings that have individual names, specific appearances
and established hierarchies. These radiant figures were of
non-Judaic origin. All the indications are that they were aliens,
imports from a foreign kingdom, namely Persia.
The country we know today as Iran might not at first seem
the most likely source for angels, but it is a fact that the
exiled Jews were heavily exposed to its religious faiths after
the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC. These
included not only Zoroastrianism, after the prophet Zoroaster or
Zarathustra, but also the much older religion of the Magi, the
elite priestly caste of Media in north-west Iran. They believed
in a whole pantheon of supernatural beings called ahuras, or
`shining ones', and daevas -- ahuras who had fallen from grace
because of their corruption of mankind.
Although eventually outlawed by Persia, the influence of the
Magi ran deep within the beliefs, customs and rituals of
Zoroastrianism. Moreover, there can be little doubt that
Magianism, from which we get terms such as magus, magic and
magician, helped to establish the belief among Jews not only of
whole hierarchies of angels, but also of legions of fallen angels
-- a topic that gains its greatest inspiration from one work
alone -- the Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch
Compiled in stages somewhere between 165 BC and the start of
the Christian era, this so-called pseudepigraphal (i.e. falsely
attributed) work has as its main theme the story behind the fall
of the angels. Yet not the fall of angels in general, but those
which were originally known as 'îrin ('îr in singular), "those
who watch", or simply `watchers' as the word is rendered in
English translation.
The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels,
or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and
`descend' on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind.
The site given for this event is the summit of Hermon, a mythical
location generally associated with the snowy heights of Mount
Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range, north of modern-day Palestine
(but see below for the most likely homeland of the Watchers).
The 200 rebels realise the implications of their
transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect
that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole
ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.
After their descent to the lowlands, the Watchers indulge in
earthly delights with their chosen `wives', and through these
unions are born giant offspring named as Nephilim, or Nefilim, a
Hebrew word meaning `those who have fallen', which is rendered in
Greek translations as gigantes, or `giants'.
Heavenly Secrets
In between taking advantage of our women, the 200 rebel
angels spent their time imparting the heavenly secrets to those
who had ears to listen. 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 brought 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 Azazel taught the art of "beautifying" the
eyelids, and the use of "all kinds of costly stones" and
"colouring tinctures", presupposing that the wearing of make-up
and jewellery was unknown before this age. In addition to these
crimes, Azazel 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 storytellers.
Other Watchers stood accused of revealing to mortal kind the
knowledge of more scientific arts, such as astronomy, the
knowledge of the clouds, or meteorology; the "signs of the
earth", presumably geodesy and geography, as well as the "signs",
or passage, of the celestial bodies, such as the sun and moon.
Their leader, Shemyaza, is accredited with having taught
"enchantments, and rootcuttings", a reference to the magical arts
shunned upon by most orthodox Jews. One of their number,
Pênêmûe, 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 Kâsdejâ,
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 babies.
These lines concerning the forbidden sciences handed to
humanity by the rebel Watchers raises the whole fundamental
question of why angels 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 spices, and know now to abort an
unborn child? None of these skills are what one might expect
heavenly messengers of God to possess, not unless they were human
in the first place.
In my opinion, this revelation of previously unknown
knowledge and wisdom seems 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.
More disconcerting were the apparent actions of the now
fully grown Nephilim, for it says:
"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."
By now the cries of desperation from mankind were being
heard loud and clear by the angels, or Watchers, who had remained
loyal to heaven. One by one they are appointed by God to proceed
against the rebel Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim, who
are described as "the bastards and the reprobates, and the
children of fornication". The first leader, Shemyaza, is hung and
bound upside down and his soul banished to become the stars of
the constellation of Orion. The second leader, Azazel, is bound
hand and foot, and cast for eternity into the darkness of a
desert referred to as Dûdâêl. 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 rebel Watchers are
forced to witness the slaughter of their own children before
being cast into some kind of heavenly prison, seen as an "abyss
of fire".
Seven Heavens
The patriarch Enoch then enters the picture and, for some
inexplicable reason, is asked to intercede on behalf of the
incarcerated rebels. He attempts to reconcile them with the
angels of heaven, but fails miserably. After this the Book of
Enoch relates how the patriarch is carried by angels over
mountains and seas to the "seven heavens". Here he sees
multitudes of angelic beings watching stars and other celestial
bodies in what appear to be astronomical observatories. Others
tend orchards and gardens that have more in common with an
Israeli kibbutz than an ethereal realm above the clouds.
Elsewhere in `heaven' is Eden, where God planted a garden
for Adam and Eve before their fall -- Enoch being the first
mortal to enter this domain since their expulsion.
Finally, during the life of Enoch's great-grandson, Noah,
the Great Flood covers the land and destroys all remaining traces
of the giant race. Thus ends the story of the Watchers.
The Sons of God
What are we to make of the Book of Enoch? Are its accounts
of the fall of the Watchers and the visits to heaven by the
patriarch Enoch based on any form of historical truth? Scholars
would say no. They believe it to be a purely fictional work
inspired by the Book of Genesis, in particular two enigmatic
passages in Chapter 6. The first, making up Verses 1 and 2, reads
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, the
original Hebrew being bene ha-elohim. 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
life-span will henceforth 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."
As the Pentateuch is considered to have been written by
Moses the lawgiver in c.1200 BC, it is assumed that the lines of
Genesis 6 influenced the construction of the Book of Enoch, not
the other way round. Despite this obvious assumption on the part
of Hebrew scholars, there is ample evidence to show that much of
Genesis was written after the Jews return from captivity in
Babylon during the mid-fifth century BC. If this was the case,
then there is no reason why the lines of Genesis 6 could not have
been tampered with around this time. In an attempt to emphasise
the immense antiquity of the Book of Enoch, Hebrew myth has
always asserted that it was originally conveyed to Noah, Enoch's
great grandson, after the Great Flood, i.e. long before the
compilation of Genesis. This claim of precedence over the
Pentateuch eventually led the Christian theologian St Augustine
(AD 354-430) to state that the Book of Enoch was too old (ob
nimiam antiquitatem) to be included in the Canon of Scripture!
Roots of the Nephilim
There is another enigma contained within the lines of
Genesis 6, for its appears to embody two entirely different
traditions.
Look again at the words of Verse 2. They speak of the Sons
of God coming unto the Daughters of Men, while in contrast Verse
4 states firmly: "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 seemed clear enough: there were two quite
separate traditions entangled here -- one concerning the fallen
race known to the early Israelites as the Nephilim (mentioned
elsewhere in the Pentateuch as the progenitors of a race of
giants called Anakim), and the other concerning the bene
ha-elohim, the Sons of God, who are equated directly with the
Watchers in Enochian tradition. Theologians are aware of this
dilemma, and get around the problem by suggesting that the angels
fell from grace twice - once through pride and then again through
lust. It seems certain that the term Nephilim was the original
Hebrew name of the fallen race, while bene ha-elohim was a much
later term -- plausibly from Iran -- that entered Genesis 6 long
after its original compilation.
In spite of the contradictions surrounding Genesis 6, its
importance is clear enough, for it preserved the firm belief
among the ancestors of the Jewish race that at some point in the
distant past a giant race had once ruled the earth.
So if the Watchers and the Nephilim really had inhabited
this world, then who or what were these seemingly physical
beings? Where did they come from? What did they look like? Where
did they live and what was their ultimate fate?
The Book of Enoch was a vital source of knowledge with
regard to their former existence, but I needed more -- other less
tainted accounts of this apparent race of human beings.
Then came an important break.
The Dead Sea Connection
Hebrew scholars had long noted the similarities between some
of the reactionary teachings in the Book of Enoch and the gospels
according to the Essenes -- a fundamental, yet very righteous
religious community spoken of by classical scholars as having
existed on the western shores of the Dead Sea. This connection
was strengthened after 1947 when it was realised that among the
Dead Sea Scrolls, now considered to have been written by the
Essenes, were various fragments of texts belonging to several
copies of the Book of Enoch. Up until this time the only complete
manuscript copies available to the literary world had been
various copies written in the Ethiopian written language of
Ge'ez, the first of which had been brought back to Europe by the
Scottish explorer and known Freemason James Bruce of Kinnaird
following his famous travels in Abysinnia between 1769 and 1772.
Not only did the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm the authenticity
of the Book of Enoch, but they also showed that it had been held
in great esteem by the Essene community at Qumran, who may even
have been behind its original construction sometime after 165 BC.
More importantly, Hebrew scholars also began to identify various
other previously unknown tracts of an `Enochian' flavour among
the Dead Sea corpus, and these included further references to the
Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim. Many of these
individual fragments were eventually realised by Dead Sea scholar
J.T. Milik to be extracts from a lost work called the Book of
Giants.
Previously this had only been known from isolated references
in religious texts appertaining to the Manichaeans, a heretical
gnostic faith that swept across Europe and Asia, as far as China
and Tibet, from the third century AD onwards.
The Book of Giants continues the story told in the Book of
Enoch, relating how the Nephilim had coped with knowing that
their imminent destruction was due to the improprieties of their
Watcher fathers. Reading this ancient work allows the reader a
more compassionate view of the Nephilim, who come across as
innocent bystanders in a dilemma beyond their personal control.
Visage Like A Viper
Yet aside from this still very fragmentary treatise, other
Enochian texts have surfaced among the Dead Sea Scrolls which in
my opinion are just as important. One of these is the Testament
of Amram.
Amram was the father of the lawgiver Moses, although any
biblical time-frame to this story is irrelevant. What is much
more significant is the appearance of the two Watchers who appear
to him in a dream-vision as he rests in his bed, for as the
heavily reconstructed text reads:
"[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 empo[wered over me?' They answered me,
`We] [have been em]powered and rule over all mankind.'
They said to me, `Which of us do yo[u choose to rule
(you)?' I raised my eyes and looked.] [One] of them was
terr[i]fying in his appearance, [like a s]erpent, [his]
c[loa]k 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 text identifies this last 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 is, 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 many people do you know
with a "visage like a viper"? For over a year I could offer no
suitable solution to this curious metaphor.
Then, by chance, I happened to overhear something on a
national radio station that provided me with a simple, though
completely unexpected answer. 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
up-coming 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 the Viper Room gained its name many years
beforehand when it had been a jazz haunt of some renown. Story
goes that 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, would cause their emaciated faces to appear hollow and
gaunt, while their eyes would close 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 amusing anecdote sent my mind reeling and enabled me to
construct a mental picture of what a person with a "visage like a
viper" might look like; their faces would appear long and narrow,
with prominent cheekbones, elongated jawbones, thin lips and
slanted eyes ...
<cont'd in attached file>
from: http://www.peg.apc.org/~newdawn/42b1.htm
--------------------------------------
The Forbidden Legacy of
a Fallen Race -- Part 1
--------------------------------------
by Andrew Collins
Extracted from New Dawn No.40 (January-February, 1997)
Is civilisation the legacy of a race of human angels known
as Watchers and Nephilim? Andrew Collins, author of FROM THE
ASHES OF ANGELS, previews his history of angels and fallen angels
and traces their origin back to an extraordinarily advanced
culture that entered the Near East shortly after the end of the
last Ice Age.
Angels are something we associate with beautiful
Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance paintings, carved statues
accompanying gothic architecture and supernatural beings who
intervene in our lives at times of trouble. For the last 2000
years this has been the stereotypical image fostered by the
Christian Church. But what are angels? Where do they come from,
and what have they meant to the development of organised
religion?
Many people see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the
Old Testament, as littered with accounts of angels appearing to
righteous patriarchs and visionary prophets. Yet this is simply
not so. There are the three angels who approach Abraham to
announce the birth of a son named Izaac to his wife Sarah as he
sits beneath a tree on the Plain of Mamre. There are the two
angels who visit Lot and his wife at Sodom prior to its
destruction. There is the angel who wrestles all night with Jacob
at a place named Penuel, or those which he sees moving up and
down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth.
Yet other than these accounts, there are too few examples,
and when angels do appear the narrative is often vague and
unclear on what exactly is going on. For instance, in the case of
both Abraham and Lot the angels in question are described simply
as `men', who sit down to take food like any mortal person.
Influence of the Magi
It was not until post-exilic times -- i.e. after the Jews
returned from captivity in Babylon around 450 BC -- that angels
became an integral part of the Jewish religion. It was even
later, around 200 BC, that they began appearing with frequency in
Judaic religious literature. Works such as the Book of Daniel and
the apocryphal Book of Tobit contain enigmatic accounts of
angelic beings that have individual names, specific appearances
and established hierarchies. These radiant figures were of
non-Judaic origin. All the indications are that they were aliens,
imports from a foreign kingdom, namely Persia.
The country we know today as Iran might not at first seem
the most likely source for angels, but it is a fact that the
exiled Jews were heavily exposed to its religious faiths after
the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC. These
included not only Zoroastrianism, after the prophet Zoroaster or
Zarathustra, but also the much older religion of the Magi, the
elite priestly caste of Media in north-west Iran. They believed
in a whole pantheon of supernatural beings called ahuras, or
`shining ones', and daevas -- ahuras who had fallen from grace
because of their corruption of mankind.
Although eventually outlawed by Persia, the influence of the
Magi ran deep within the beliefs, customs and rituals of
Zoroastrianism. Moreover, there can be little doubt that
Magianism, from which we get terms such as magus, magic and
magician, helped to establish the belief among Jews not only of
whole hierarchies of angels, but also of legions of fallen angels
-- a topic that gains its greatest inspiration from one work
alone -- the Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch
Compiled in stages somewhere between 165 BC and the start of
the Christian era, this so-called pseudepigraphal (i.e. falsely
attributed) work has as its main theme the story behind the fall
of the angels. Yet not the fall of angels in general, but those
which were originally known as 'îrin ('îr in singular), "those
who watch", or simply `watchers' as the word is rendered in
English translation.
The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels,
or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and
`descend' on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind.
The site given for this event is the summit of Hermon, a mythical
location generally associated with the snowy heights of Mount
Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range, north of modern-day Palestine
(but see below for the most likely homeland of the Watchers).
The 200 rebels realise the implications of their
transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect
that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole
ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.
After their descent to the lowlands, the Watchers indulge in
earthly delights with their chosen `wives', and through these
unions are born giant offspring named as Nephilim, or Nefilim, a
Hebrew word meaning `those who have fallen', which is rendered in
Greek translations as gigantes, or `giants'.
Heavenly Secrets
In between taking advantage of our women, the 200 rebel
angels spent their time imparting the heavenly secrets to those
who had ears to listen. 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 brought 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 Azazel taught the art of "beautifying" the
eyelids, and the use of "all kinds of costly stones" and
"colouring tinctures", presupposing that the wearing of make-up
and jewellery was unknown before this age. In addition to these
crimes, Azazel 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 storytellers.
Other Watchers stood accused of revealing to mortal kind the
knowledge of more scientific arts, such as astronomy, the
knowledge of the clouds, or meteorology; the "signs of the
earth", presumably geodesy and geography, as well as the "signs",
or passage, of the celestial bodies, such as the sun and moon.
Their leader, Shemyaza, is accredited with having taught
"enchantments, and rootcuttings", a reference to the magical arts
shunned upon by most orthodox Jews. One of their number,
Pênêmûe, 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 Kâsdejâ,
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 babies.
These lines concerning the forbidden sciences handed to
humanity by the rebel Watchers raises the whole fundamental
question of why angels 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 spices, and know now to abort an
unborn child? None of these skills are what one might expect
heavenly messengers of God to possess, not unless they were human
in the first place.
In my opinion, this revelation of previously unknown
knowledge and wisdom seems 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.
More disconcerting were the apparent actions of the now
fully grown Nephilim, for it says:
"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."
By now the cries of desperation from mankind were being
heard loud and clear by the angels, or Watchers, who had remained
loyal to heaven. One by one they are appointed by God to proceed
against the rebel Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim, who
are described as "the bastards and the reprobates, and the
children of fornication". The first leader, Shemyaza, is hung and
bound upside down and his soul banished to become the stars of
the constellation of Orion. The second leader, Azazel, is bound
hand and foot, and cast for eternity into the darkness of a
desert referred to as Dûdâêl. 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 rebel Watchers are
forced to witness the slaughter of their own children before
being cast into some kind of heavenly prison, seen as an "abyss
of fire".
Seven Heavens
The patriarch Enoch then enters the picture and, for some
inexplicable reason, is asked to intercede on behalf of the
incarcerated rebels. He attempts to reconcile them with the
angels of heaven, but fails miserably. After this the Book of
Enoch relates how the patriarch is carried by angels over
mountains and seas to the "seven heavens". Here he sees
multitudes of angelic beings watching stars and other celestial
bodies in what appear to be astronomical observatories. Others
tend orchards and gardens that have more in common with an
Israeli kibbutz than an ethereal realm above the clouds.
Elsewhere in `heaven' is Eden, where God planted a garden
for Adam and Eve before their fall -- Enoch being the first
mortal to enter this domain since their expulsion.
Finally, during the life of Enoch's great-grandson, Noah,
the Great Flood covers the land and destroys all remaining traces
of the giant race. Thus ends the story of the Watchers.
The Sons of God
What are we to make of the Book of Enoch? Are its accounts
of the fall of the Watchers and the visits to heaven by the
patriarch Enoch based on any form of historical truth? Scholars
would say no. They believe it to be a purely fictional work
inspired by the Book of Genesis, in particular two enigmatic
passages in Chapter 6. The first, making up Verses 1 and 2, reads
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, the
original Hebrew being bene ha-elohim. 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
life-span will henceforth 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."
As the Pentateuch is considered to have been written by
Moses the lawgiver in c.1200 BC, it is assumed that the lines of
Genesis 6 influenced the construction of the Book of Enoch, not
the other way round. Despite this obvious assumption on the part
of Hebrew scholars, there is ample evidence to show that much of
Genesis was written after the Jews return from captivity in
Babylon during the mid-fifth century BC. If this was the case,
then there is no reason why the lines of Genesis 6 could not have
been tampered with around this time. In an attempt to emphasise
the immense antiquity of the Book of Enoch, Hebrew myth has
always asserted that it was originally conveyed to Noah, Enoch's
great grandson, after the Great Flood, i.e. long before the
compilation of Genesis. This claim of precedence over the
Pentateuch eventually led the Christian theologian St Augustine
(AD 354-430) to state that the Book of Enoch was too old (ob
nimiam antiquitatem) to be included in the Canon of Scripture!
Roots of the Nephilim
There is another enigma contained within the lines of
Genesis 6, for its appears to embody two entirely different
traditions.
Look again at the words of Verse 2. They speak of the Sons
of God coming unto the Daughters of Men, while in contrast Verse
4 states firmly: "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 seemed clear enough: there were two quite
separate traditions entangled here -- one concerning the fallen
race known to the early Israelites as the Nephilim (mentioned
elsewhere in the Pentateuch as the progenitors of a race of
giants called Anakim), and the other concerning the bene
ha-elohim, the Sons of God, who are equated directly with the
Watchers in Enochian tradition. Theologians are aware of this
dilemma, and get around the problem by suggesting that the angels
fell from grace twice - once through pride and then again through
lust. It seems certain that the term Nephilim was the original
Hebrew name of the fallen race, while bene ha-elohim was a much
later term -- plausibly from Iran -- that entered Genesis 6 long
after its original compilation.
In spite of the contradictions surrounding Genesis 6, its
importance is clear enough, for it preserved the firm belief
among the ancestors of the Jewish race that at some point in the
distant past a giant race had once ruled the earth.
So if the Watchers and the Nephilim really had inhabited
this world, then who or what were these seemingly physical
beings? Where did they come from? What did they look like? Where
did they live and what was their ultimate fate?
The Book of Enoch was a vital source of knowledge with
regard to their former existence, but I needed more -- other less
tainted accounts of this apparent race of human beings.
Then came an important break.
The Dead Sea Connection
Hebrew scholars had long noted the similarities between some
of the reactionary teachings in the Book of Enoch and the gospels
according to the Essenes -- a fundamental, yet very righteous
religious community spoken of by classical scholars as having
existed on the western shores of the Dead Sea. This connection
was strengthened after 1947 when it was realised that among the
Dead Sea Scrolls, now considered to have been written by the
Essenes, were various fragments of texts belonging to several
copies of the Book of Enoch. Up until this time the only complete
manuscript copies available to the literary world had been
various copies written in the Ethiopian written language of
Ge'ez, the first of which had been brought back to Europe by the
Scottish explorer and known Freemason James Bruce of Kinnaird
following his famous travels in Abysinnia between 1769 and 1772.
Not only did the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm the authenticity
of the Book of Enoch, but they also showed that it had been held
in great esteem by the Essene community at Qumran, who may even
have been behind its original construction sometime after 165 BC.
More importantly, Hebrew scholars also began to identify various
other previously unknown tracts of an `Enochian' flavour among
the Dead Sea corpus, and these included further references to the
Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim. Many of these
individual fragments were eventually realised by Dead Sea scholar
J.T. Milik to be extracts from a lost work called the Book of
Giants.
Previously this had only been known from isolated references
in religious texts appertaining to the Manichaeans, a heretical
gnostic faith that swept across Europe and Asia, as far as China
and Tibet, from the third century AD onwards.
The Book of Giants continues the story told in the Book of
Enoch, relating how the Nephilim had coped with knowing that
their imminent destruction was due to the improprieties of their
Watcher fathers. Reading this ancient work allows the reader a
more compassionate view of the Nephilim, who come across as
innocent bystanders in a dilemma beyond their personal control.
Visage Like A Viper
Yet aside from this still very fragmentary treatise, other
Enochian texts have surfaced among the Dead Sea Scrolls which in
my opinion are just as important. One of these is the Testament
of Amram.
Amram was the father of the lawgiver Moses, although any
biblical time-frame to this story is irrelevant. What is much
more significant is the appearance of the two Watchers who appear
to him in a dream-vision as he rests in his bed, for as the
heavily reconstructed text reads:
"[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 empo[wered over me?' They answered me,
`We] [have been em]powered and rule over all mankind.'
They said to me, `Which of us do yo[u choose to rule
(you)?' I raised my eyes and looked.] [One] of them was
terr[i]fying in his appearance, [like a s]erpent, [his]
c[loa]k 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 text identifies this last 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 is, 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 many people do you know
with a "visage like a viper"? For over a year I could offer no
suitable solution to this curious metaphor.
Then, by chance, I happened to overhear something on a
national radio station that provided me with a simple, though
completely unexpected answer. 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
up-coming 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 the Viper Room gained its name many years
beforehand when it had been a jazz haunt of some renown. Story
goes that 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, would cause their emaciated faces to appear hollow and
gaunt, while their eyes would close 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 amusing anecdote sent my mind reeling and enabled me to
construct a mental picture of what a person with a "visage like a
viper" might look like; 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 as to why both the Watchers and Nephilim were
described as walking serpents? It seemed as likely a possibility
as any, although it was also feasible that their serpentine
connection related to their accredited magical associations and
capabilities, perhaps even their bodily movements and overall
appearance.
The Appearance of Feathers
Another important reference to the appearance of Watchers
comes from the so-called Secrets of the Book of Enoch, also known
as 2 Enoch, a kind of sequel to the original work written in
Greek and dating to the first century AD. The passage refers to
the unexpected arrival of two Watchers as Enoch rests on his bed:
"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
brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow. They
stood at the head of my bed and called me by my name.
White skin (often ruddied "as red as a rose"), tall stature
and facial radiances "like the sun" all recur frequently in
connection with the appearance of angels and Watchers in Enochian
and Dead Sea literature. Yet what was this reference to their
dress having "the appearance of feathers"? Might it relate in
some way to the "cloak" worn by the Watcher named Belial who
appears in the Amram story, which was said to have been
"many-coloured yet very dark", precisely the effect one might
expect from a coat of black feathers, like those belonging to
crows or vultures perhaps?
In spite of the fact that Christian art has invariably
portrayed angels with wings, this tradition goes back no further
than the third or fourth century AD. Before this time true angels
(Cherubim and Seraphim did have multiple sets of wings) appeared
in the likeness of "men", a situation that often prompted textual
translators to add wings on to existing descriptions of angels.
This has almost certainly been the case in the above account
taken from 2 Enoch, which was re-copied many times during the
early years of Christianity.
With this observation in mind, I felt that the statement
concerning the Watchers dress having "the appearance of feathers"
was very revealing indeed. It also seemed like an over-sight 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 saying 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.
Bird Shamans
Somehow I knew it was a key to unlocking this strange
mystery, for it suggested that, if the Watchers 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 spirit walkers of tribal communities. In many
early cultures the soul 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 a
bird, something that almost certainly helped inspire the idea
that angels, as messengers of God, should be portrayed with wings
in Christian iconography.
To enhance this mental link with his or her chosen bird,
shamans would adorn their bodies with a coat of feathers and
spend longperiods of time studying its every movement. 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 actions on the ground. In doing so they would hope to
become as birds themselves, an alter-personality adopted on a
semi-permanent basis. Totemic shamanism is more-or-less dependent
on the indigenous animals or birds present in the locale of the
culture or tribe, although in principle the purpose has always
been the same -- using 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?
The answer is almost certainly yes, for in the Dead Sea text
entitled the Book of Giants, the Nephilim sons of the fallen
angel Shemyaza, named as 'Ahyâ and 'Ohyâ, experience
dream-visions in which they visit a world-garden and see 200
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, 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 [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 200 trees represent the 200
Watchers, while the felling of their trunks signifies their
destruction in a 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's
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".
This was compelling confirmation that angels were originally
a culture or tribe who practised a form of bird shamanism,
perhaps associated with a dark carrion bird such as the crow or
vulture.
Since the Enochian and Dead Sea literature was written by
olive-skinned Jews of the post-exilic period, it is quite clear
they were reciting traditions concerning a completely different
race from a completely different climate. So who were these human
angels, and where might they have lived?
Since we now know that the legends of the fall of the angels
most probably originated in Iran, more precisely in the
north-western kingdom of Media (modern-day Azerbaijan), then
there is every reason to associate these traditions with the
mountains beyond Media. This is tentatively confirmed by another
Dead Sea text entitled the Genesis Apocryphon which records that
after his ascent to heaven the patriarch Enoch spent the rest of
his life "among the angels" in "paradise". Although the term
"paradise" is used in some translations of the original text, the
actual word is "Parwain".
I was therefore quite stunned to find that among the ancient
traditions of the Mandaeans, a Magi-linked religion found mostly
among the Marsh Arabs of Lower Iraq, "Parwan" is a holy mountain
apparently located in the vicinity of Media in northwestern Iran.
Furthermore, both "Parwan" and "Parwain" would appear to
derive their root from the old Median word "Parswana", meaning
"rib, side, frontier", used to describe the peoples and
territories beyond the borders of Media.
These would have included the region of Parsa to its south
and, more significantly, the mountainous region known as Parsua
to its west.
Was Enoch therefore believed to have lived "among the
angels" in the harsh mountainous territories beyond the limits of
the ancient kingdom of Media? In the remote region of Parsua, to
the west of Media, perhaps? Is this where the Watchers came from?
Is it from here that they descended on to the plains to take
mortal wives and reveal the forbidden arts and secrets of heaven?
In Iranian tradition the realm of the immortals and the seat
of the mythical godkings of Iran (who like the fallen race of
Judaic tradition were said to have been tall in stature with
ivory white skin and shining countenances), was known as the
Airyana Vaejah, the Iranian Expanse. Traditions fostered by the
Magi imply quite clearly that this ethereal domain was located
among the mountains of Media.
All roads appeared to lead to the mountainous region of
modern-day Azerbaijan, which forms the eastern-most flanks of a
vast snow-capped expanse that stretches west to the Taurus
mountains of eastern Anatolia and northern Syria; north to the
remote regions of Russian Armenia; and south-east along the
length of the Zagros mountains, as they gradually descend towards
the Persian Gulf and act as a virtually impenetrable barrier
between Iraq and Iran.
This enormous, mostly desolate part of the earth, home in
the most part to wandering nomads, bands of warring rebels,
isolated religious communities and the occasional village, town
or city, is known to the world as Kurdistan -- the cultural and
political homeland of the much troubled Kurdish peoples.
Yet according to biblical and apocryphal tradition, it was
here also that the Garden of Eden, the resting place of Noah's
Ark and the stomping ground of the early patriarchs could be
found. It was here too that I now realised I would have to go in
search of the realm of the immortals.
Eastwards, in Eden
The Book of Genesis speaks of God establishing a garden
"eastwards, in Eden". Here Adam and Eve became humanity's first
parents before their eventual fall from grace through the
beguiling of the subtle Serpent of Temptation. Serpents were not
only a primary synonym for the Watchers and Nephilim, but the
Book of Enoch even states which "Serpent", or Watcher, led our
first parents into temptation. Interestingly enough, the
Bundahishn, a holy text of the Zoroastrian faith, cites Angra
Mainyu, the Evil Spirit and father of the daevas, as assuming
this same role, and like the Watchers he too is described as a
serpent with "legs".
So where was Eden? All we know is that it was situated among
the Seven Heavens, a paradisical realm with gardens, orchards and
observatories in which the angels and Watchers reside in the Book
of Enoch.
The word `Eden' is translated by Hebrew scholars as meaning
`pleasure' or `delight', a reference to the fact that God created
the garden for the pleasure of mankind. This is not, however, its
true origin. The word `Eden' is in fact Akkadian -- the
proto-Hebrew, or Semitic, language introduced to Mesopotamia
(modern-day Iraq) by the people of Agade, or Akkad, a race that
seized control of the ancient kingdom of Sumer during the second
half of the third millennium BC. In their language the word
Eden', or edin, meant a `steppe' or `terrace', as in a raised
agricultural terrace.
Turning to the word `paradise', I found that this simply
inferred a `walled enclosure', after the Persian root pairi,
`around', and daeza, `wall'. It is a late-comer to
Judaeo-Christian religious literature and was only really used
after the year 1175 AD.
The English word `heaven', on the other hand, is taken from
the Hebrew ha'shemim, interpreted as meaning `the skies'. It can
also refer to `high places', such as lofty settlements. Moreover,
the Hebrew word-root shm can mean `heights', as well as `plant'
or `vegetation', implying perhaps that the word `heaven' might be
more accurately translated as a `planted highlands'.
This quick round of simple etymology, in my opinion at
least, conjured the image of a walled, agricultural settlement
with stepped terraces placed in a highlands region. So is this
what Eden was -- a `walled, agricultural settlement' placed among
the mountains of Kurdistan? Had it been tended by angels under
the dominion of the heavenly Watchers as is suggested by the text
of the Book of Enoch? More importantly, where had it been
located?
The Rivers of Paradise
The Book of Genesis says that from Eden stemmed the
headwaters of the four rivers of paradise. The names of these are
given as the Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates. Of these
four, only the last can properly be identified by name. The
Euphrates flows through Turkish Kurdistan, Syria and Iraq before
emptying into the Persian Gulf. The other three were identified
by early biblical scholars respectively with the Ganges of India
(although occasionally the Orontes of northern Syria), the Nile
of Africa and the Tigris of western Asia, which, like its sister
river the Euphrates flows through Iraq and empties into the
Persian Gulf.
The first two were chosen as suitable substitutes simply
because they were looked upon by scholars as the mightiest rivers
of the classical world; only the connection between the Hiddekel
and the Tigris made any sort of geographical sense.
In no way could it be said that all four of these rivers
rose in the same geographical region, a problem that was
conveniently overlooked by theologians before the re-discovery of
cartography in the sixteenth century. Other sources, particularly
the Armenian Church, accepted the Euphrates and Tigris as two of
the four rivers of paradise, yet chose to associate the other
two, the Pishon and Gihon, with, respectively, the Greater Zab,
which rises in Turkish Kurdistan and empties into the Tigris, and
the Araxes, which rises in Armenia and empties into the Caspian
Sea.
Had the Armenian Church been right to do this? Possibly yes,
as they were the inhabitants of the geographical region in
question and may well have been privy to local traditions
unavailable to the outside theological world.
Whatever the identities of the four rivers of paradise,
Kurdish tradition places their headwaters in the vicinity of Lake
Van, an enormous inland sea -- some 60 miles across and around 35
miles wide -- situated on the border between Turkish Kurdistan
and Armenia. Indeed, legend records that the Garden of Eden now
lies `at the bottom of Lake Van', after it was submerged beneath
the waves at the time of the Great Flood.
Curiously enough, it is the mountain of Cudi Dag, or Mount
Judi, south of Lake Van that the Moslems as well as the various
different faiths of Kurdish extraction locate the so-called Place
of Descent, the site where Noah's Ark came to rest after the
Great Flood. The attribution of this very same location with the
more familiar Mount Ararat is a pure Christian invention that has
no real basis in early religious tradition.
All this therefore implied that the compilers of the Book of
Genesis placed both the birth-place of humanity, i.e. the Garden
of Eden, and its point of regeneration after the Great Flood in
the same general region of northern Kurdistan, surely a clue to
the fact that the key to the origins of the Watchers lay in this
same geographical area of the map.
The Heavenly Mountain
There is much more, however, for it is not just the Iranian
and Jewish races that cite Kurdistan as the cradle of
civilisation.
The mythologies of both the Sumerians, who ruled the various
Mesopotamian city-states from around 3000 BC onwards, and their
eventual conquerors, the Akkadians, placed the homeland of the
gods in this exact same region. The Akkadians originated as a
Semitic, or proto-Hebrew, race of uncertain origin, and in their
religious literature this heavenly abode is referred to as
Kharsag Khurra, the heavenly mountain. Here the gods, also known
as the Anannage, lived in a paradisical realm with gardens,
orchards, temples and irrigated fields that not only resemble the
Seven Heavens described in the Book of Enoch, but is
actually referred to on more than one occasion as edin, the
Akkadian for `steppe' or `plateau'.
Even further linking Kharsag with the Jewish domain of
angels is the knowledge that the Anannage, like the Enochian
Watchers, were governed by a council of seven. These undoubtedly
equate with the seven archangels of post-exilic Judaism as well
as the six so-called Amesha Spentas, or `bounteous spirits', who
with the supreme god Ahura Mazda, preside over the angelic
hierarchies in Iranian tradition.
Were the Anannage, the gods and goddesses of Kharsag, simply
another form of the Watchers of Enochian and Dead Sea literature,
whose homeland was a lofty agricultural settlement called Eden or
heaven, located somewhere amid the mountains of Kurdistan?
The Search for Dilmun
Kharsag is not the only name used by the ancient
Mesopotamians to refer to their place of first beginnings. This
cradle of civilisation was also known by the name Dilmun, or
Tilmun. Here, it was said, the god Ea and his wife were placed to
institute "a sinless age of complete happiness". Here too animals
lived in peace and harmony, man had no rival and the god Enlil
"in one tongue gave praise". It is also described as a pure,
clean and "bright" "abode of the immortals" where death, disease
and sorrow are unknown and some mortals have been given "life
like a god", words reminiscent of the Airyana Vaejah, the realm
of the immortals in Iranian myth and legend, and the Eden of
Hebraic tradition.
Although Dilmun is equated by most scholars with the island
of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, there is evidence to suggest that
a much earlier mythical Dilmun was located in a mountainous
region beyond the plains of Sumer. But where exactly was it
located?
Mesopotamian inscriptions do not say; however, the
Zoroastrian Bundahishn text and the Christian records of Arbela
in Iraqi Kurdistan both refer to a location named Dilamân as
having existed around the headwaters of the Tigris, south-west of
Lake Van -- the very area in which the biblical Eden is said to
have been located.
Furthermore, Ea (the Akkadian Enki) was said to have
presided over the concourse of Mesopotamia's two greatest rivers
-- the Tigris and Euphrates -- which are shown in depictions as
flowing from each of his shoulders. This would have undoubtedly
have meant that the head-waters, or sources, of these rivers
would have been looked upon as sacred to Ea by the cultures of
Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent.
More curious is the knowledge that, as in Hebrew and Iranian
myth, there would appear to have been a fall of the gods of Anu,
the Anannage. Whilst 300 of their number remained in heaven, some
600 others, under the leadership of Nergal, god of the
underworld, settled among mortal kind. Here they provided mankind
with everything from basic agriculture, to astronomy, land
irrigation, building technology and structured society.
Sounds familiar?
These rebel Anannage lived "in the earth", a reference to an
"underworld" realm connected with the ancient city of Kutha,
north of Babylon. In this "House of Darkness" lived "demons" and
Edimmu, giant blood-sucking vampires who would return to the
surface world after dark to steal the souls of the undead.
Could these infernal beings be a distorted memory of the
rebel Watchers and their monstrous offspring, the Nephilim? Might
these fallen angels have lived in underground cities after their
descent on to the plains?
The Bodies of Birds
Ancient Mesopotamia fathered whole pantheons of devils and
demons -- each class having its own appearance, functions and
attributes. Some were beneficial to mankind, while others caused
only pain, suffering and torment in the mortal world.
In the story of the goddess Ishtar's descent to the
underworld, preserved in Assyrio-Babylonian tradition, the
"chiefs" of the "House of Darkness" were said to have been "like
birds covered with feathers", who "from the days of old ruled the
earth, (and) to whom the gods Anu and Bel have given terrible
names". In one cuneiform tablet written in the city of Kutha by a
scribe "in the temple of Sitlam, in the sanctuary of Nergal" it
describes the incursions into Mesopotamia of a race of demons,
fostered by the gods in some nether region. They are said to have
waged war on an unnamed king for three consecutive years and to
have had the appearance of:
Men with the bodies of birds of the desert, human
beings with the faces of ravens,
these the great gods created,
and in the earth the gods created for them a
dwelling...
in the midst of the earth they grew up and became
great, and increased in number,
Seven kings, brothers of the same family,
six thousand in number were their people.
These "men with the bodies of birds" were looked upon as
"demons". They would appear only once a storm-cloud had consumed
the deserts and would slaughter those whom they took captive,
before returning to some inaccessible region for another year.
There seems every reason to suggest that these fierce
"demons" were not incorporeal spirits at all, but beings of flesh
and blood adorned in cloaks of feathers and bird paraphernalia.
But who were these human demons, and how did they relate to
the development of civilisation in Mesopotamia?
Uncertain Forces
The Sumerians were a unique people with their own language
and culture. Nobody knows their true origin or where exactly they
may have obtained the seeds of knowledge that helped establish
the various city-states during the fourth millennium BC. Yet the
Sumerians themselves were quite explicit on this point. They
said their entire culture had been inherited from the Anannage,
the gods of Anu, who had come from an ancestral homeland in the
mountains. To emphasise this point they used an ideogram of a
mountain to denote "the country", i.e. Sumer, and built
seven-tiered ziggurats in honour of these founder gods.
Was it possible therefore that the proposed Watcher culture
of Kurdistan provided the impetus for the rise of western
civilisation?
Archaeologists have no problem accepting Kurdistan as the
cradle of Near Eastern civilisation. Shortly after the recession
of the last Ice Age, c.8500 BC, there emerged in this region some
of the earliest examples of agriculture, animal domestication,
baked and painted pottery, metallurgy and worked obsidian tools
and utensils. Curiously enough, from c.5750 BC onwards for
several hundred years the trade in raw and worked obsidian
throughout Kurdistan seems to have been centred around an extinct
volcano named Nemrut Dag on the south-western shores of Lake Van,
the very area in which both the mythical lands of Eden and Dilmun
are likely to have been located.
Kurdistan was undoubtedly the point of origin of the
so-called Neolithic explosion from the ninth millennium BC
onwards. Indeed, it is because of this settled community
lifestyle in Kurdistan that the earliest known form of token
bartering developed. This primitive method of exchange eventually
led to the establishment of the first written alphabet and
ideogram system on the Mesopotamian plains sometime during the
fourth millennium BC. It is therefore understandable that
civilisation first arose in the Fertile Crescent during this same
age. From here, of course, it quickly spread to many other
regions of the Old World.
In the light of this information it appears that the
evolution of the Middle East seems cut and dry, the actions of a
few sophisticated protoneolithic farming communities located in
the mountains and foothills of Kurdistan being responsible for
the growth of civilised society. Yet what caused this so-called
`neolithic explosion', and why on earth did it start in this
remote, and very mountainous, region? Something was missing, for
as Mehrdad R. Izady, a noted scholar of Kurdish cultural history,
has observed:
The inhabitants of this land went through an
unexplained stage of accelerated technological
evolution, prompted by yet uncertain forces. They
rather quickly pulled ahead of their surrounding
communities, the majority of which were also among the
most advanced technological societies in the world, to
embark on the transformation from a low-density,
hunter-gatherer economy to a high-density, food
producing economy.
What might these "yet uncertain forces" have been? Were they
the Watchers, who were said to have provided mankind with the
forbidden arts and sciences of heaven? If so, was I overlooking
important evidence already unearthed by the spades of
palaeontologists and archaeologists that might support such a
wild hypothesis?
Turning to the archaeological reports and transactions on
excavations in Kurdistan, I searched long and hard. What I found
astounded me. For instance, in the late 1950s Ralph and Rose
Solecki, two noted anthropologists, were uncovering the different
occupational levels inside a huge cave overlooking the Greater
Zab river at a site known as Zawi Chemi Shanidar, when they made
a discovery of incredible significance to this debate. They
unearthed a number of goat skulls placed alongside a collection
of wing bones belonging to large predatory birds. All of the
wings had been hacked from the bodies of the birds in question,
while many had still been in articulation when found. Carbon 14
dating of the organic deposits associated with these remains
indicated a date of 10,870 years (+/-300 years), that is 8870 BC.
The bird wings were subsequently identified as those of four
Gyptaeus barbatus (the bearded vulture), one Gyps fulvus (the
griffon vulture), seven Haliaetus albicilla (the white-tailed sea
eagle) and one Otis tarda (the great bustard) -- only the last of
which is still indigenous to the region. There were also the
bones of four small eagles of indeterminable species. All except
for the great bustard were raptorial birds, while the vultures
were quite obviously eaters of carrion.
The discovery of these severed bird wings had posed obvious
problems for the Soleckis. Why had only certain types of birds
been selected for this purpose, and what exactly had been the
role played by these enormous predatory birds in the minds of
those who had placed them within the Shanidar cave?
Shaman's Wings
In an important article entitled `Predatory Bird Rituals at
Zawi Chemi Shanidar', published by the journal Sumer in 1977,
Rose Solecki outlined the discovery of the goat skulls and bird
remains. She suggested that the wings had almost certainly been
utilised as part of some kind of ritualistic costume, worn either
for personal decoration or for ceremonial purposes. She linked
them with the vulture shamanism of Çatal Hüyük, a protoneolithic
community in central Anatolia (Turkey), which reached its zenith
a full 2000 years after these bird's wings had been deposited 565
miles away in the Shanidar cave. Rose Solecki recognised the
enormous significance of these finds, and realised that they
constituted firm evidence for the presence of an important
religious cult in the Zawi Chemi Shanidar area, for as she had
concluded in her article:
The Zawi Chemi people must have endowed these great
raptorial birds with special powers, and the faunal
remains we have described for the site must represent
special ritual paraphernalia. Certainly, the remains
represent a concerted effort by a goodly number of
people just to hunt down and capture such a large
number of birds and goats... (Furthermore, that) either
the wings were saved to pluck out the feathers, or that
wing fans were made, or that they were used as part of
a costume for a ritual. One of the murals from a Çatal
Hüyük shrine... depicts just such a ritual scene; i.e.,
a human figure dressed in a vulture skin...
Here was extraordinary evidence for the existence of vulture
shamans in the highlands of Kurdistan c.8870 BC! What's more, all
this was happening just 140 miles south-east of the suggested
location for Eden and Dilmun on Lake Van at a time when the
highland peoples of Kurdistan were changing from primitive
hunter-gatherers to settled protoneolithic communities. Might
these goats skulls and predatory bird remains have some
connection with the "yet uncertain forces" behind the sudden
Neolithic explosion in this region? Remember, I had already
established that the Watchers wore coats of feathers, plausibly
those of the crow or vulture.
My mind reeled with possibilities. What on earth had been
going on in this cave overlooking the Greater Zab, which, of
course, has been cited as one of the four rivers of paradise? Had
it been visited by Watchers, human angels, in the ninth
millennium BC?
The presence of the predatory bird remains made complete
sense, but what about the fifteen goat skulls -- how might they
have fitted into the picture?
A Goat for Azazel
The Pentateuch records how each year on the Day of Atonement
a goat would be cast into the wilderness "for Azazel", carrying
on its back the sins of the Jewish people. Moreover, Azazel, one
of the two leaders of the fallen angels, was said to have
fostered a race of demons known as the seirim, or `he-goats'.
They are mentioned several times in the Bible and were worshipped
and adored by some Jews. There is even some indication that women
actually copulated with these goat-demons, for it states in the
Book of Leviticus: "And they shall no more sacrifice their
sacrifices unto the he-goats (seirim), after whom they go a
whoring", perhaps a distant echo of the way in which the Watchers
had taken wives from among mortal kind. This clear relationship
between the Watchers and he-goats is so strong that it led Hebrew
scholar J.T. Milik to conclude that Azazel "was evidently not a
simple he-goat, but a giant who combined goat-like
characteristics with those of man". In other words, he had been a
goat-man -- a goat shaman.
So it seemed that not only were the Watchers "bird-men",
vulture shamans indulging in otherworldly practices, but also
goat shamans. It is bizarre to think that this association
between Azazel and the goat was the impetus behind the goat
becoming a symbol of the devil, as well as the reason why the
world is so adverse to the inverted pentagram today.
The Peacock Angel
Kurdish scholar Mehrdad Izady also sees the predatory bird
remains of the Shanidar cave as evidence of a shamanistic culture
whose memory influenced the development of angel lore. Kurdistan
is home to three wholly indigenous angel-worshipping cults -- the
most notorious and enigmatic of these being the Yezidis of Iraqi
Kurdistan. Their beliefs centre around a supreme being named
Melek Taus, the `peacock angel', who is venerated in the form of
a strange bird icon known as a sanjaq. These statues, which sit
on a metal column similar to a candlestick, are usually made of
copper or brass. More curious is that the oldest known sanjaqs
are clearly not peacocks at all, showing instead a bulbous avian
body and head with a hooked nose. Izady has suggested that the
sanjaq idols are more likely to be representations of a predatory
bird like those apparently venerated by the shamans of Shanidar,
in other words either the vulture, eagle or bustard.
The Jarmo People
All this was good news, for its helped vindicate the idea of
an advanced culture existing in the mountains of Kurdistan at the
point of inception of the Neolithic revolution. If it was these
vulture shamans who had carried this superior knowledge to the
gradually developing farming communities of the lower foothills,
then perhaps they really were the truth behind the myth of the
Watchers who imparted the heavenly sciences to mankind. There
was, however, no description of these shamans beyond the
appearance of their ceremonial garments. Did they in any way
resemble the tall, white-skinned individuals with shining
countenances and viper-like faces referred to in the Enochian and
Dead Sea literature? Might there also be archaeological evidence
for the former existence of a race bearing at least some of these
distinctive features?
Indeed there is, for at a place called Jarmo, which
overlooks the Lesser Zab river in Iraqi Kurdistan, archaeologists
have uncovered evidence of an advanced protoneolithic community
that thrived from around 6750 BC for up to 2000 years; indeed,
the oldest known examples of primitive metallurgy have been found
at Jarmo. More interesting is the knowledge that these people
were a dab hand at producing small sculpted images in
slightly-baked clay. Literally thousands of these figurines have
been unearthed from the earliest occupational levels upwards.
Most of them depict animals and birds. Some represent typically
human heads, while others show a female figure, plausibly a
representation of the Mother Goddess.
It almost appeared as if the Jarmo community enjoyed
capturing images of the world around them, in much the same way
that we take photographs today. Yet if this was the case, then
how can we explain the presence among these small figurines of
several anthropomorphic heads with elongated faces, slit eyes and
clear `lizard', or more correctly serpentine features? They are
virtually inhuman in appearance and have more in common with
bug-eyed aliens than abstract human forms.
Seeing pictures of these Jarmo heads sent a shiver down my
spine, for the better examples bore striking similarities to the
description of Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature. Was
it therefore possible that the neolithic people of Jarmo were
depicting in partially abstract form the viper-like faces of the
tall strangers in feather coats who would pay them uninvited
visits? Was it these strangers who had provided communities like
the one at Jarmo with the knowledge of metallurgy as well as the
basic rudiments of agriculture?
We can only speculate, but it is worth pointing out that
obsidian tools found at Jarmo are known to have been fashioned
from raw material obtained from the base of Nemrut Dag on Lake
Van. Did the Watchers deal in obsidian? Might these finely-worked
tools be a sign of their presence among other similar-like
communities of Kurdistan?
By 5500 BC the inhabitants of the Kurdish foothills were
beginning to descend in great numbers on to the plains of
Mesopotamia. It was around this date that Eridu (the biblical
Erech), the Fertile Crescent's first city, was established with
its own temple complex that included an underground ritual pool.
Sometime around 5000 BC saw the arrival on to the northern
plains of Mesopotamia of a new culture who are known today as the
Ubaid (after Tell al'Ubaid, the mound-site where their presence
was first detected during excavations by the eminent Near Eastern
archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1922). They brought with
them their own unique artistic style and funerary practices,
including the habit of placing very strange anthropomorphic
figurines in the graves of the dead. The statuettes were either
male or female (although predominantly female), with slim,
well-proportioned naked bodies, wide shoulders, and strange
reptilian heads that scholars generally refer to as `lizard-like'
in appearance. They bear long, tapered faces like snouts, with
wide, eye-slits -- usually elliptical pellets of clay pinched to
form what are known as `coffee-bean' eyes -- and a thick, dark
plume of bitumen on their heads to represent a coil of erect hair
(similar coils fashioned in clay appear on some of the heads
found at Jarmo). All statuettes display either female pubic hair
or male genitalia.
Each Ubaid figurine has it own unique pose. By far the
strangest and most compelling shows a naked female holding a baby
to her left breast. The infant's left hand clings on to the
breast, and there can be little doubt that it is suckling milk.
It is a very touching image, although it bears one chilling
feature -- the child has long slanted eyes and the head of a
reptile. This is highly significant, for it suggests that the
baby was seen as having been born with these features. In other
words, the `lizard-like' heads of the figurines are not masks, or
symbolic animalistic forms, but abstract images of an actual race
believed by the Ubaid people to have possessed such reptilian
qualities.
In the past these `lizard-like' figurines have been
identified by scholars as representations of the Mother Goddess
-- a totally erroneous assumption since some of them are
obviously male - while ancient astronaut theorists such as Erich
von Daniken have seen fit to identity them as images of alien
entities. In my opinion, both explanations attempt to bracket the
clay figurines into popular frameworks that are insufficient to
explain their full symbolism. Furthermore, since most of the
examples found were retrieved from graves, where they were often
the only item of any importance, Sir Leonard Woolley concluded
that they represented "chthonic deities" that is, underworld
denizens connected in some way with the rites of the dead.
In addition to this realisation, it seems highly unlikely
that they represent lizard-faced individuals, since lizards are
not known to have had any special place in Near Eastern
mythology.
Much more likely is that the heads are those of serpents
which are known to have been associated with Sumerian underworld
deities such as Ningiszida, Lord of the Good Tree.
Since the heads of the Ubaid figurines appear to be styled
on the much earlier examples found at Jarmo in the Kurdish
mountains, were they highly abstract representations of
viper-faced Watchers?
That these figurines were found specifically in grave sites
suggests that they were connected with some kind of superstitious
practice involving rites of the dead. What were the Ubaid
attempting to achieve by placing such strange images alongside
their deceased relatives? Were they trying to ensure the safe
passage of the soul into the next world, or were they attempting
to protect the corpse once the burial had taken place?
In later Babylonian tradition there was a true fear that if
the dead were not interred in the correct manner, then their
souls would be taken down into the underworld to become
blood-sucking Edimmu. Is this what the Ubaid feared -- that their
departed would be made into vampires if the viper-faced Watchers
were not appeased in the current manner? Did this include the
burial of figurines bearing abstract features connected with
their distorted memory of the fallen race?
The Underworld
Although no trace of any underworld domain can today be
found in Mesopotamia, chthonic citadels of extreme antiquity do
exist in the Near East. For example, beneath the plains of
Cappadocia in eastern Turkey there are no less than 36
underground cities, the most famous being the one at Derinkuyu
which is estimated to have housed some 20,000 inhabitants. Those
cities explored so far penetrate downwards for anything up to a
quarter of a mile. They have streets, complex tunnel systems,
living quarters and communal rooms and areas. Each one can be
sealed off from the outside world by rolling into place huge
circular doors, while on the surface the only visible sign of
their presence are upright megalithic stones marking the
positions of deep wells that double-up as air shafts to the
various levels.
No one knows who built these underworld domains. They are at
least 4000 years old, while tentative evidence suggests they were
constructed as early as 9000 BC, when the final thrust of the
last Ice Age was about to bring arctic-style conditions to the
Middle East. At the same time rains of fire spewed out of active
volcanoes, and when the Ice Age finally receded floods comparable
with the deluge of the Bible wreaked havoc in low-lying areas.
Moreover, Persian myth records that the ancestors of the Iranian
race had escaped the long winter of snow and ice by building a
var, a word denoting an underground city (curiously, the word ark
means "city" in the Persian language).
The memory of such subterranean worlds are also likely to
have been behind the Judaeo-Christian belief in Gehenna and Hell
-- the fiery realm into which the fallen angels were cast as a
punishment for their interference in the affairs of mankind.
Cappadocia's Lunar Landscape
In the same general vicinity as the underground cities of
Cappadocia is a virtual lunar landscape made up of thousands of
enormous rock cones whittled into shape by fierce winds over many
thousands of years. Local tradition refers to them as peri
bacalari, the fire chimneys of the Peri -- beautiful fallen
angels born of Iblis, the Arab-Persian form of Satan. These
`fairy chimneys', as they are inappropriately referred to in
English, are today said to be haunted by the djinn, spectral
relatives of the angels who also once lived in heaven before
their fall.
Many of these `fairy chimneys' were occupied during early
Christian times, while a number of them were actually fashioned
into rupestral or troglodyte churches from the sixth century
onwards. The oldest contain many fascinating images beyond the
accepted iconography of the Early Church. These include recurring
geometric designs and, in one case a stylised bird-man, which may
well reflect an art-style found in the 8000-year-old vulture
shrines at Çatal Hüyük. The close proximity of both this unique
`Christian' art and the site of Çatal Hüyük to the underground
cities cannot be overlooked. Remember too that in the story of
Ishtar's descent into the underworld the goddess encounters
beings "like birds covered with feathers", who "from the days of
old ruled the earth".
Is it possible that the dwellers of the underground cities
were indeed the forerunners of those who built the sub-surface
citadel of Çatal Hüyük? Might they have been connected with the
shamanistic Watcher culture of the Kurdish highlands, which lay
some distance to the east of Cappadocia?
Children of the Djinn
If so, then where might these strange shamanistic cultures
have originated? Did it simply develop in Turkey and Kurdistan
shortly after the end of the last Ice Age, or had its original
ancestors migrated from some foreign land? The angel-worshipping
cults of Kurdistan see themselves only as descendents of the
patriarch Noah, the saviour of humanity whose direct family
settled in their land. In contrast, the Kurdish Jews preserve a
very curious story concerning the origins of their gentile
neighbours, whom they refer to as "children of the djinn". They
say that long ago King Solomon ordered 500 djinn to find him 500
of the most beautiful virgins in the world. They were not to
return until every last one was in their possession. The djinn
had set about their immense task, going to Europe to seek out the
maidens.
Finally, after gathering together the correct number, the
djinn were about to return to Jerusalem when they learnt that
Solomon had passed away. In a dilemma, the djinn decided what to
do.
Should they return the girls to their rightful homes in
Europe, or should they remain with them? Because the young
virgins had "found favor in the eyes of the jinn, the jinn took
them unto themselves as their wives. And they begot many
beautiful children, and those children bore more children... And
that is the way the nation of the Kurds came into being".
In another version of the same story, 100 genies are
dispatched by Solomon to search out 100 of the world's most
beautiful maidens for his personal harem. Having achieved this
quota, Solomon then dies and the 100 genies decide to settle down
with the maidens amid the inaccessible mountains of Kurdistan.
The offspring of these marriages result in the foundation of the
Kurdish race, "who in their elusiveness resemble their genie
forefathers and in their handsomeness their foremothers".
As non-sensical as these legend may seem, they attempt to
explain the inexplicable foreign features of certain Kurdish
communities and point to their origin in the biblical kingdom of
Solomon, in other words modern-day Israel.
Mountain of the Madai
The Mandaeans of Lower Iraq are more specific about the
origin of their race. Although their direct ancestors are said to
have come from a mythical location known as the Mountain of the
Madai in Iranian Kurdistan, before that their most distant
ancestors apparently originated in Egypt. Even though this might
seem a mere fantasy on the part of the Mandaeans, it is a fact
that their language contains various words that are undoubtedly
of ancient Egyptian origin. More importantly, they believe that
after death the soul flies north (i.e. towards the mountains of
Kurdistan) where it enters a mythical domain known as Mataratha,
the place of judgement. Here the intelligences of the neter, the
watch-houses, can be found. The term neter can be used as a noun
in some Near Eastern languages to mean `watchers', the very
name of the first angels given in Enochian and Dead Sea
literature, while in the ancient Egyptian language this same word
is used to define the semi-divine beings who lived in a golden
age known as zep tepi, the First Time. Was it possible that the
Watchers of Kurdistan were descendents of the neter-gods of
Egypt?
The First Farmers
Although the neolithic explosion is known to have begun in
the mountains of Kurdistan sometime around 8500 BC, this was not
the genesis of early agriculture, animal domestication, precision
tool manufacture and structured community lifestyles. There is
strong evidence that they were all present at various sites along
the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan as early as 12,500
BC. These advanced communities continued to develop at a steady
pace until 10,500 BC, when suddenly they ceased farming for no
obvious reason. Scholars have put this complete and utter
cessation of a sophisticated agricultural-based lifestyle among
the Nilotic peoples down to the extremely high Nile floods which
occurred during this epoch. Yet in my opinion there was something
more behind this extraordinary U-turn on the part of these
communities.
It almost seemed as if those who had taught the Nilotic
peoples the rudiments of an agricultural lifestyle had suddenly
departed the scene, leaving their obedient pupils to return to
primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyles more familiar to the age in
question.
It is therefore interesting to note that after its apparent
disappearance from Egypt c.10,500 BC, agriculture does not
reappear again until it blossoms in Kurdistan a full 1500 years
later. Is it therefore possible that the teachers of the Nilotic
communities departed Egypt for Kurdistan sometime between 10,500
and 9000 BC? Who exactly were these hypothetical agronomists and
what made them leave the cultivated steppes of palaeolithic Egypt
for pastures new? More importantly, were they the ancestors of
the Watchers, the human angels of Enochian and Dead Sea
tradition?
Redating the Sphinx
Hard evidence now emerging from Egypt strongly suggests that
the Great Sphinx of Giza was not carved during Pharaonic times,
as has always been believed, but much earlier instead. As has
been widely publicised over the past few years, the geological
profile of this most ancient of monuments suggests that it was
fashioned before the gradual desiccation of the Middle East in
the fourth millennium BC. The intense weathering on its body
would appear to have been induced, not by sand erosion, but by
rain precipitation over the course of many thousands of years.
The last time that rain fell in such profusion was during the
period known to climatologists as the neolithic sub-pluvial which
occurred between 8000 and 5000 BC. This suggests that the Sphinx
was carved either during or before this time.
The Sphinx is quite obviously a lion, the head of which was
re-carved in Pharaonic times to represent a king wearing the
nemes-headdress. Orientated exactly due east, it gazes out
towards the point on the horizon where the sun rises each spring
and autumn equinox. Its function is like that of a time-marker, a
minute hand on a clock, recording the return of the solar orb as
it passes through its 365-day cycle. Yet it also possesses a less
obvious, though perhaps more important `hour' hand, and this one
marks the minuscule shift in the starry canopy as it turns about
its 26,000-year cycle of precession. This visual effect is caused
by the extremely slow wobble of the earth, which might be
compared with the swaying action of a child's spinning top if
revolving at a snail's pace.
Built in the Age of Leo
In astronomical terms the phenomenon known as precession
causes the 12 zodiacal constellations to shift backwards in line
with the ecliptic, the sun's path, in a regular sequence. In
simple terms, this means that the stars rising alongside the sun
make way for another constellation every 2160 or so years until
all 12 signs have completed this astronomical merry-go-around. To
`read' precession as a long-term time-cycle the ancients noted
which sign rose with the sun on the spring equinox, the
zero-point of the yearly calendar in many Middle Eastern
cultures. If we look today towards the eastern horizon just
before sun-rise on 21 March we will see the stars of Pisces. When
Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in 330 BC, the
stars of Aries the ram were seen rising with the equinoctial sun,
and when the Pyramids of Giza were built in c.2500 BC, it was the
stars of Taurus the bull that rose with the sun on the spring
equinox.
If the Great Sphinx was carved as an equinoctial marker at
the same time the neighbouring Pyramids were constructed in
Pharaonic times, then surely it would make more sense if it was a
bull. Making it a lion hints at a connection with the stars of
Leo, suggesting that it marked an age when the constellation of
Leo rose with the equinoctial sun. The last Age of Leo occurred
between 10,970 and 8810 BC, suggesting that the construction date
of the Great Sphinx fell somewhere within this time-frame. This
is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. As far as I
am aware, this theory was first put forward by British
astro-mythologist Gerald Massey in 1907. In an extraordinary work
entitled Ancient Egypt -- The Light of the World he boldly
concluded that "... we may date the Sphinx as a monument which
was reared by these great (Egyptian) builders and thinkers, who
lived so largely out of themselves, some thirteen thousand years
ago (i.e. in the age of Leo, its astronomical counterpart)."
More recent astro-mythological evidence presented by Graham
Hancock and Robert Bauval in their 1996 book Keeper of Genesis,
convincingly demonstrates that the Great Sphinx, as well as the
ground-plan of the Giza plateau as a whole, must date as early as
10,500 BC, the very time-frame given for the sudden cessation of
proto-agriculture along the Nile.
Since we know that the great stone blocks removed from the
sunken enclosure around the leonine monument at the time of its
construction were used to build the nearby Sphinx and Valley
Temples, then these too must date from the same distant epoch of
human history. All this indicates the presence in Egypt around
10,500 BC of an advanced culture adept in agronomy, engineering,
building technology, as well as astro-mythology and geomythics
that included a profound knowledge of the earth's 26,000-year
precessional cycle.
Who were these people? Were these builders of the Great
Sphinx really the ancestors of the tall, viper-faced Watchers of
Kurdistan? Folklore, legend and the spread of Old World
agriculture would appear to support this view. Yet if this was
the case, then what happened to make this Egyptian Elder culture
want to migrate to the highlands of Kurdistan?
Global Destruction
As has already been adequately demonstrated elsewhere
(Hapgood, 1958 & 1970; Hancock, 1995; Flem-Ath, 1995), there is
ample evidence that as the last Ice Age came to a close in the
eleventh and tenth millennia BC, the world was shaken by a series
of severe climatic changes and geological upheavals. Volcanoes
erupted, earthquakes shook the ground, floods poured across the
landscape and long periods of darkness blotted out the sun. This
led to the destruction of countless millions of animals and the
outright extinction of dozens of individual species.
Cataclysm legends across the world appear to record these
events in colourful and often symbolic detail.
Egypt's proposed Elder culture would have been right in the
thick of this global destruction. Certainly it is known that the
climatic changes during this epoch caused wide-spread flooding
along the Nile, the reason scholars have suggested for the
cessation of its proto-agriculture.
Father of Terrors
It seems likely that these troubled times forced Egypt's
high culture to fragment and disperse, hence the sudden cessation
of proto-agriculture among the various Nile communities. This
supposition is supported by vivid accounts of fire and flood from
Egypt itself. For example, surviving Coptic-Arab texts speak of
the land being devastated both by floods and a great fire that
came from "the constellation of Leo" -- a reference not
necessarily to some astronomical boloid coming from this part of
the heavens, but to the time-frame in which these events
occurred, in other words during the Age of Leo.
More telling is the myth of Sekhmet, the lion-headed deity
in the Egyptian pantheon. Because the human race had turned its
back on the ways of the sun-god Ra, or Re, whom it saw as "too
old", the fierce goddess unleashed an all-consuming fire. Her
mass genocide would have resulted in the destruction of humanity
had it not been for Ra's personal intervention. He sent an
intoxicating brew to cover the earth. Consuming this mixture made
Sekhmet drunk so that she fell asleep.
Assuming that Sekhmet's fierce fire was in some way
representative of an all encompassing conflagration that
devastated Egypt, then might the intoxicating brew that covered
the earth be a memory of a subsequent flood that also overwhelmed
the land? If so, then was Sekhmet herself simply an allegorical
allusion to the Age of Leo? The indications are that the lion of
Leo came to symbolise the age of chaos and destruction that
surrounded the end of the Ice Age, perhaps the reason why the
Arabs referred to the Great Sphinx as the "Father of Terrors".
In the story of Sekhmet the survivors of the human race
attempt to escape the goddess' devastating fire either by
climbing a mountain or by hiding in `holes' like `snakes' or
`worms'.
Similar means of protection against the cataclysms that
raged during the Age of Leo are found in mythologies around the
globe, while the presence of such stories in Egyptian legend
point towards the break-up of the Elder culture and its
subsequent re-establishment in other regions. Might this have
included Cappadocia, where underground cities would appear to
have been built as early as 9000 BC, and the mountains of
Kurdistan, where the Watchers may well have catalysed the
beginning of the Neolithic revolution as early as 8500 BC?
The date for this apparent diaspora of the Elder culture
towards the end of the last Ice Age can actually be pinned down
with some degree of accuracy. For instance, a ninth-century
Coptic-Arab text known as Abou Hormeis records that the
astronomer-priests of Egypt, having realised the imminent
destruction of their race, conceded that: "The deluge was to take
place when the heart of the Lion entered into the first minute of
the head of Cancer."
The `heart of the lion' was the name given in classical
times to the star Regulus, Leo's `royal star', which lies exactly
on the ecliptic, the sun's perceived daily course across the sky.
Since the constellation of Cancer follows Leo only in the
precessional cycle (Leo follows Cancer in the yearly cycle), then
this appears to confirm that this legend preserved, not just the
memory of probable historical events, but also the approximate
date in which they occurred.
At my request, electronics engineer Rodney Hale punched the
astronomical information contained in the Abou Hormeis account
into a computer using a Skyglobe 3.5 programme. He ascertained
that the last time Leo's `royal star' would have risen and been
visible on the eastern horizon just prior to the equinoctial
sunrise, was around 9220 BC. When the star Regulus, the `heart of
the lion', no longer rose with the sun on the spring, or vernal,
equinox, this would have been seen by the astronomer-priests of
Egypt as a signal that the Age of Leo had come to an end, and the
age of Cancer was either about to commence, or that it had
already entered its `first minute' of arc across the sky. This
information therefore suggested that it was at this point that
the Elder culture had departed Egypt in anticipation of a major
deluge that was about to over-run their land.
Kosmokrator
If we now turn to Iranian tradition we find that various
Zoroastrian texts, including the Bundahishn, speak of world
history beginning 9000 years before the traditionally accepted
date for the coming of its great prophet, Zoroaster, in 588 BC.
This gives a date of 9588 BC. It was at this time, so one text
states, that the faith's dualistic deities, Ahura Mazda and Angra
Mainyu, were born from "the fire of the air" and "the water of
the earth" -- cryptic references once again to fire and flood
during the age of Leo.
The twin deities vie for superiority over heaven and earth,
a battle that is only settled when Zoroaster is said to have
vanquished the daeva-worshipping Magi priesthoods during his own
life-time. Ever since this time the `Good Spirit', Ahura Mazda,
has ruled supreme.
Did all this imply that the ancestors of the Iranian
god-kings had first inhabited their mythical homeland, known as
the Airyana Vaejah, the Iranian Expanse, around 9585 BC? Give or
take a few centuries, this date was remarkably close to the
timeframe in which the Egyptian Elder culture would appear to
have broken up.
Since the Airyana Vaejah is equated with the Kurdish
highlands, might this tradition also record the arrival in the
region of those Elders who went on to establish the proposed
Watcher culture?
According to Iranian mythology, the dualistic forces of
Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were born to a supreme being known
as Zurvan, who symbolised `infinite time'. In the Roman cult of
the god Mithras, which developed from primary Iranian sources,
the concept of `infinite time' was symbolised by a lion-headed
deity.
Statues depicting this leonine figure show the twelve signs
of the zodiac on its chest and a snake curling up over the top of
its mane. Although the deity is not identified by name (although
it is occasionally linked with Aeon, a gnostic god of time),
scholars of Mithraism describe it as a kosmokrator, the
controlling intelligence behind the phenomenon of precession.
To find a lion-headed kosmokrator that originated in a
tradition that saw world history as having begun in 9588 BC,
during the Age of Leo, was impossible to ignore. Could it be
possible that although knowledge of the precessional cycle was
understood by the Elder culture of Egypt, later cultures who
inherited this tradition failed to comprehend its mechanics. So
instead of Leo making way for the age of Cancer, and then Gemini,
and then Taurus, the symbol of the lion became the one and only
kosmokrator, or guardian of infinite time, in much the same way
that the Great Sphinx became a precessional time-marker on the
plateau at Giza.
Tragedy of the Fall
Egypt's Elder culture never made it into the pages of
history.
The memory of their apparent descendents, the Watchers of
Kurdistan, is but a hollow victory on their part. Being
remembered as beautiful angels who fell from grace, or as
immortal gods and goddesses, or as lustful demons who corrupted
the minds of mankind, hardly befits their incredible achievements
in astronomy, agriculture, geomythics, building technology and
structured society. It was almost certainly the descendents of
the Egyptian Elder culture who paved the way for the growth of
civilisation in the Old World.
Yet these individuals did much more than this, for they
would also appear to have left the world an important legacy. It
can be traced in the astro-mythology and geomythics of the Giza
plateau as well as in the universal myths and legends concerning
global cataclysms and precessional data. It transcends all
language barriers and can be `read' by all. It is a simple
message repeated again and again, like a recurring SOS Mayday
signal, and it suggests that what befell their race could one day
happen again. For whatever reason, we as a race could sink into
oblivion without trace and be wiped clean from the pages of
history, unless, that is, we wake up from this collective amnesia
we seem to have been experiencing for the past eleven thousand
years and realise that we were never the first.
Free thinkers, mystics and maverick scholars have been
telling us that civilisation is much older than science would
like us to believe for the past hundred years or more. Often
their books repeat almost exactly the same evidence time after
time. The Pyramids, Tiahuanaco, the Maya, Piri Reis, Hapgood,
Plato and the Baghdad battery are just some of the buzz-words
repeated again and again. Yet no one other than believers has
ever taken these matters seriously.
With the re-dating of the Great Sphinx in particular, there
is now too much evidence to deny that at the end of the last Ice
Age a high culture existed in this world. Where these people came
from is completely unknown. Some might suggest Atlantis, others
will say they came from the skies, but to be honest we simply do
not know. What is far more important is that we take each step at
a time, and stick to hard facts, in the hope that this time the
whole world will share in these greatest revelations of our time.
All notes and references used for this article can be found
in the author's book "From the Ashes of Angels" (published
by Michael Joseph, London, ISBN 0-7181-4132-6)
Selected Booklist
Bauval, Robert, and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, Wm
Heinemann, London, 1996
Boyce, Mary, A History of Zoroastrianism, 1975, 3 vols.,
E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1989
Charles, R.H., The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch, Oxford Univ
Press, 1912
Eisenman, R., and M. Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered,
Element, Shaftesbury, Dorset, 1992
Flem-Ath, Rand and Rose, When the Sky Fell -- In Search of
Atlantis, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995
Fix, William R., Pyramid Odyssey, Jonathan-James Books,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1978
Hancock, Graham, Fingerprints of the Gods -- A Quest for the
Beginning and the End, Wm Heinemann: London, 1995
Hapgood, Professor Charles, The Path of the Pole, Chilton,
New York, 1970
Hapgood, Professor Charles, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
1966, Tumstone Books, 1979
Izady, Mehrdad R., The Kurds -- A Concise Handhook, Crane
Russak, London, 1992
Massey, Gerald, Ancient Egypt -- The Light of the World, 2
vols., T. Fisher & Unwin, London, 1907
Milik, J.T., The Book of Enoch -- Aramaic Fragments of
Qumran Cave 4, OUP, 1976
Morfill, W.R., edit and intro R. Charles, The Book of the
Secrets of Enoch, Oxford Univ Press, 1896
Ulansey, David, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries --
Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, OUP, 1989.
