From the Ashes of Angels

And after some days my son, Methuselah, took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore him a son. And his body was white as snow and red as a rose; the hair of his head as white as wool and his demdema ('long curly hair'1) beautiful; and as for his eyes, when he opened them the whole house glowed like the sun . . . And his father, Lamech, was afraid of him and fled and went to Methuselah his father; and he said to him, 'I have begotten a strange son. He is not like an (ordinary) human being, but he looks like the children of the angels of heaven to me, his form is different, and he is not like us . . . It does not seem to me that he is of me, but of angels . . . '2

These words form the opening lines to what must be one of the most astonishing yet chilling fragments of religious text ever written. They are the assertions of the antediluvian patriarch Enoch as he describes the sheer distress and horror that accompanied the miraculous birth of a son to his grandson, Lamech. The passage is taken from the Book of Noah, an ancient script of Hebrew origin appended to the more famous Book of Enoch, a pseudepigraphal (i.e. falsely attributed) work, considered by scholars to have been put together in stages during the first half of the second century BC.3

The predicament conveyed by these revealing lines seems manifestly clear: Lamech has recently taken the hand of a woman who has given birth to a child that bears no resemblance whatsoever to its immediate family. His appearance is entirely unlike other 'human beings', for his skin is white and ruddy, his long curly hair is white and 'beautiful', while his eyes mysteriously enable the whole house to 'glow like the sun'. From this specific appearance Lamech can only conclude that his wife has been unfaithful, since the infant resembles 'the children of the angels' who are 'not like us'.

This seems an extraordinary conclusion on the part of Lamech, and a very strange subject for a religious scribe to invent without good reason. If it can, for a moment, be accepted that this account records an actual event in the history of human kind, then it implies that the strange appearance of this child matched the offspring of angels, and must by inference have been the product of the union between a mortal woman and a divine 'messenger', a 'heavenly intelligence' in the service of God himself.4

Surely this is impossible, for according to Judaeo-Christian tradition angels are incorporeal, having neither form nor substance. They are certainly unable to reproduce by immaculate conception. If this is correct, then the story of the birth of Lamech's strange son is in direct contradiction to the rabbinical teachings of Judaism and the creed of the Christian faith. Yet here it is, in print for all to see – heretical words implying that angelic beings were able to produce children by cohabiting with mortal women.

For any reader with an open mind, this is a perplexing enigma further deepened by a more personal portrayal of the birth of Lamech's son, which is to be found in a poorly preserved fragment of religious text, discovered with many other rolled-up brittle scrolls inside a cave overlooking the Dead Sea in 1947. Known to scholars today as the Genesis Apocryphon, this unique work was written in Aramaic, the Syriac language adopted by the Hebrew scribes following the Jews' exile in Babylon during the sixth century BC. Dating back to a similar age as the Book of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scroll in question would have originally contained an alternative, fuller account of the events featured in the Book of Genesis; however, it was so badly damaged when found that only the birth of Lamech's son, an account of Noah's Ark and the biblical Flood, along with the wanderings of the patriarch Abraham, have been preserved.

The fragmentary text was translated by Nahman Avigad and Yigael Yadin in 1954 and published under the title A Genesis Apocryphon two years later by the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.5 With respect to the account of the strange birth of Lamech's son, it differs principally from the version given in the Book of Enoch, in that the narrator has altered from the patriarch Enoch to Lamech himself -it is he who recalls the scene in his own words. The narrative begins just after the strange birth as Lamech starts voicing his suspicions concerning the suspected infidelity of his wife, here named as Bathenosh 6 – and referred to also as his sister – for he says:

Behold, I thought then within my heart that conception was (due) to the Watchers and the Holy Ones . .. and to the Nephilim ... and my heart was troubled within me because of this child.7

Turning to his obviously distraught wife, Lamech makes her swear by the Most High that she will tell him the truth and admit if she has lain with anyone else. In reply she beseeches him to accept her word, saying:

'O my lord, O my [brother, remember] my pleasure! I swear to thee by the Holy Great One, the king of [the heavens] . . . that this seed is yours and that [this] conception is from you. This fruit was planted by you . . . and by no stranger or Watcher or Son of Heaven . . . I speak to you truthfully.8

It is clear that Lamech is accusing his wife of sleeping not with angels in general, but with having had relations with a specific race of divine beings known in Hebrew as , 'îrin (, 'îr in singular), meaning 'those who watch' or 'those who are awake', which is translated into Greek as ', egregoris or grigori, meaning 'watchers'. These Watchers feature in the main within the pages of pseudepigraphal and apocryphal works of Jewish origin, such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. Their progeny, according to Hebrew tradition, are named as , nephilim, a Hebrew word meaning 'those who have fallen' or 'the fallen ones', translated into Greek as , gigantes, or 'giants' – a monstrous race featured in the Theogony of the hellenic writer Hesiod (c. 907 BC). As in the biblical account, this ancient Greek work focuses on the creation of the world, the rise and fall of a Golden Age, the coming of the giant races and finally a universal flood.

Bathenosh's touching plea of innocence to her husband and brother Lamech comes across as most convincing, and provides tantalizing evidence that this ancient account may contain some grain of truth. Somehow it could just be based on a real-life event that occurred in a past age of mankind. If so, then exactly who, or what, were these Watchers and Nephilim who could lie with mortal women and produce offspring recognizable by their physiological traits alone? Are there any grounds whatsoever on which to consider that these apocryphal stories were based on the miscegenation between two different races of human beings, one of whom has been misidentified or falsely equated with the angels of heaven? If not, then exactly what were such stories meant to convey to the reader?

The Book of Enoch seems to provide an answer. Lamech, fearful of his predicament, consults his father, Methuselah, who, unable to alleviate the situation, embarks upon a journey to find his own father Enoch, who has withdrawn from the world and now lives 'among the angels'.9 After Methuselah has tracked him down in a far-off land (referred to in the Genesis Apocryphon as 'Parwain' or Paradise) and conveying the fears of his son Lamech, the everrighteous Enoch throws light on the situation when he states:

'I have already seen this matter in a vision and made it known to you. For in the generation of Jared, my father, they [the angels] transgressed the word of the Lord, (that is) the law of heaven. And behold, they commit sin and transgress the commandment; they have united themselves with women and commit sin together with them; and they have married (wives) from among them, and begotten children by them . . . And upon the earth they shall give birth to giants, not of the spirit but of the flesh. There shall be a great plague . . . and the earth shall be washed clean (by "a deluge") from all the corruption. Now, make known to your son Lamech that the son who has been born is indeed righteous, and call his name Noah, for he shall be the remnant for you; and he and his sons shall be saved from the corruption which shall come upon the earth . . . '10

So the lid is finally lifted as the reader of the Book of Enoch is told that some of the angels of heaven have succumbed to carnal sin and taken wives from among mortal women. From this unholy union have come flesh-and-blood offspring, giant in stature, who, it must be presumed, match the description of the child born to Bathenosh. This betrayal of the heavenly laws of God was seen as an abomination that would bring only corruption and evil to the human race, the punishment for which was to be a deluge to cleanse the world of its wickedness.

The Sons of God

Theologians are more or less united in their opinion that the widespread accounts of fallen angels cohabiting with mortal women, like those included in the Book of Enoch, the Genesis Apocryphon and similar texts, are no more than fanciful expansions of three verses to be found in Chapter 6 of the Book of Genesis, squeezed between a genealogical listing of the antediluvian patriarchs and a brief account of Noah's Ark and the coming of the Flood.

The first lines in question, making up Chapter 6, verses 1–2, are indelibly imprinted in my mind and read as follows:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose.11

By 'sons of God' the text means heavenly angels, although the Hebrew original, , bene ha-elohim, should really be translated as 'sons of the gods', a much more disconcerting prospect (and something to be returned to in a subsequent chapter).

In verse 3 of Chapter 6, God unexpectedly pronounces that his spirit cannot remain in men for ever, and that since humanity is a creation of flesh, its lifespan will be shortened to 'an hundred and twenty years'. Yet in verse 4 the tone suddenly reverts to the original theme of the chapter, for it says:

The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them: the same were the mighty men which were of old, the men of renown.12

In the hundreds of times I have read these isolated words out aloud I have wondered to myself: what could they possibly mean? There is no consensus in answer to this question, and scholars, mystics and speculative writers have all given their own interpretations over the past two thousand years. Theologians agree in general that such accounts are not to be taken as literal fact, but only as a symbol of humanity's fall from a state of spiritual grace to one of conflict and corruption in the days prior to the Great Flood.

What the texts are saying, the theologians would argue, is that if evil and corruption on this scale does occur in the world, then only those of the purest heart and spirit – individuals exemplified by Noah and his righteous family – will be spared the wrath of God. It is therefore a purely allegorical teaching intent on conveying to the reader the inevitable consequences of wickedness.

The references in verses 2 and 4 to 'the sons of God' coming 'unto the daughters of men', so the scholars believe, demonstrate how even those closest to the purity of God can become infected by corruption and evil. It was usually accepted among religious teachers that any such unholy union between angels and mortal women could only, because it was against God's will, lead to the creation of monstrous offspring. It was this thought-provoking concept which had, according to the early Church Fathers, inspired the creation of various apocryphal and pseudepigraphal works dealing with the fall of the angels and the corruption of mankind before the time of the Great Flood.

Celestial Mafia

So much for the theological debate, but is it correct? Is this all there is to know about the origins of fallen angels? And what about the adherents of the Jewish and Christian faiths? How were they able to interpret such 'myths'? The majority would probably have been unaware that these problematical verses even existed in the Book of Genesis. Others, who did have some knowledge of the matter, are unlikely to have been able to expand on it, while only a very small minority would have believed in the actual existence of fallen angels. Many commentators would have been unable to explain exactly how such stories related to the physical world we live in, while other more fundamentalist Jews or Christians have seen such corruption and wickedness as the actions of blood-line descendants of those first fallen angels who cohabited with mortal women before the time of the Flood. Such suggestions may seem farfetched, but in the United States there is an organization known as the Sons of Jared, who take their name from the patriarch Jared, the father of Enoch, during whose age the Watchers were said to have been 'cast down' from 'heaven'. In their manifesto, the Sons of Jared vow 'implacable war against the descendants of the Watchers', who, they allege, 'as notorious Pharaohs, Kings and Dictators, have throughout history dominated mankind'. The Jaredite Advocate, the voice of the Sons of Jared, quotes lavishly from the Book of Enoch and sees the Watchers as 'like super-gangsters, a celestial Mafia ruling the world'.13

Is this simply a view gained from dogmatically accepting the fall of flesh-and-blood angels of heaven? How many individuals have the Sons of Jared accused or persecuted, believing them to be modern-day descendants of the Watchers?

Some academic scholars, on the other hand, while unable to accept any basis in fact behind the concept of fallen angels and their monstrous offspring, the Nephilim, would be willing to admit that the original authors of the Book of Genesis (traditionally accredited to Moses the lawgiver) based their material on previously existing folk legends, probably from Mesopotamia (the country known today as Iraq). The historian S. H. Hooke, for instance, in his book Middle Eastern Mythology, accepts that:

Behind the brief and probably intentionally obscure reference in (Genesis) 6:1–4 there lies a more widely known myth of a race of semi-divine beings who rebelled against the gods and were cast down into the underworld. .. The fragment of the myth here preserved by the Yahwist was originally an aetiological myth explaining the belief in the existence of a vanished race of giants . . .14

This might well be so, but accepting Genesis 6: 1-4 as the product of far older Middle Eastern myths allows for the possibility that, sometime during a bygone age of mankind, there existed on earth, presumably in the bible lands themselves, an élite and probably superior race of human beings. These people presumably achieved a state of high civilization before degenerating into a corruption and wickedness that included the taking of wives from among the less civilized races and the creation of monstrous offspring of disproportionate size to their immediate family. It might also be suggested that a series of global cataclysms thereafter brought fire, flood and darkness to the earth and ended the reign of this race of 'giants'.

Should we see accounts like Lamech's torment at the miraculous birth of his son Noah, and untold others like it, as tantalizing evidence for the idea that fallen angels were something far more than simply incorporeal beings cast out of heaven by the archangel Michael, as the theologians and propagators of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths have taught during the last two thousand years? Could their very existence be confirmed by making an indepth study of Hebrew myths and legends and then comparing these with other Near Eastern and Middle Eastern religions and traditions? Most important of all, might evidence of their physical existence on earth be incidentally preserved in the records of modern-day archaeology and anthropology?

Such thought-provoking possibilities were worth further consideration. If, at the end of the day, it was found that no such evidence for the existence of a now lost race in the bible lands could be discovered, then at least an age-old enigma would have been investigated thoroughly. On the other hand, if there really was firm evidence that angels and fallen angels once walked among mankind as beings of flesh and blood, no different from you or me, then it could change our perspective of world history for ever.

Fear of Fallen Angels

There are clear signs that the concept of angels and fallen angels as corporeal beings of flesh and blood, who lived in a distant antediluvian age and left as a legacy an intimate knowledge of many things forbidden to humanity, was once widely accepted by certain elements of the Jewish population. These included the devout religious communities that lived a pious existence in the hot, rugged terrain on the west bank of the Dead Sea from about 170 BC to AD 120. Known to history as the Essenes, their main centre is thought to have been at Qumrân, where archaeologists have uncovered extensive evidence of occupation, including a massive library room where many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are thought to have been written.

Historical works from this period suggest that the Essenes not only accepted the Book of Enoch as part of their canon, but also used its listing of angels to perform rites of exorcism and healing.15 Recent studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls have also shown that the Essenes possessed an almost unhealthy interest in Enochianstyle material featuring the Watchers and Nephilim.16 Although many of these works date only to the second century BC, the hidden teachings found among the Qumrân community and known as Kabbalah imply that the Enochian and Noahic scriptures were passed on by word of mouth for thousands of years before finally being set down in written form by the Essenes themselves.17

With the advent of Christianity, the Book of Enoch and other such similar works became generally available for the first time. Many of the Early Church leaders, from the first to the third centuries AD, used and quoted openly from their pages.18 Some Christian scholars held that mortal women had been responsible for the fall of the angels, while Paul in Corinthians 11:10 advocated – according to the Church Father Tertullianus (AD 160–230) – that women cover their heads so as not to incite wantonness in the fallen angels who liked unveiled women with beautiful hair.19 Even more remarkable was the general acceptance among many prominent theologians that fallen angels possessed corporeal bodies.20 Indeed, it was not until the age of the Church Fathers, from the fourth century onwards, that such matters were seriously questioned. For these people, fallen angels were not flesh-and-blood beings, and any suggestion that they might have been became tantamount to heresy. This attitude led to the suppression of the Book of Enoch, which quickly fell out of favour. Most bizarre of all were the comments of St Augustine (AD 354–430) in respect of the antiquity of this pseudepigraphal work. He claimed that on account of it being too old (ob nimiam antiquitatem), the Book of Enoch could not be included in the Canon of Scripture.21 What ever could he have meant by suggesting it was 'too old'? It was a most extraordinary statement to be made by a respected Church father.

Curiously enough, the Book of Enoch had also fallen out of favour among the Jews, after Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai, in the second century AD, cursed all those who believed that the Sons of God mentioned in Genesis 6 were truly angels. This was despite the fact that the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, uses the term angelos in place of 'sons of God'.22

The Church Fathers then went further in their attempts to stamp out the strange fascination with fallen angels among early Christians by condemning as heresy the use of the many hundreds of names given both to angels and fallen angels in various religious works.23 No longer was the Book of Enoch copied by Christian scribes, and those copies remaining in libraries and churches were either lost or destroyed, denying the world any knowledge of the work's true contents for over a thousand years.

Subsequently, on top of all this, it became the policy of Catholic theologians to eradicate firmly from the teachings of the Church any notion that fallen angels had once been seen as material beings, a situation typified by this quote from the New Catholic Encyclopedia: 'In the course of time theology has purified the obscurity and error contained in traditional views about angels (i.e. the belief that they were corporeal in nature and cohabited with mortal women).24

Yet why should such beliefs have become so abhorrent to the Christian faith after the great leaders of the Early Church of Jerusalem had preached so openly on this very controversial subject? It simply did not make sense, and suggested there must have been extremely good reasons for forcing this strain of thought underground, for that was exactly where it went – underground.

From the extraordinary evidence collected together by the author, and presented in this book for the first time, there emerge firm grounds to suggest that initiates and secret societies preserved, revered, even celebrated the forbidden knowledge that our most distant ancestors had gained their inspiration and wisdom, not from God or from the experiences of life, but from a forgotten race remembered by us today only as fallen angels, demons, devils, giants and evil spirits. Should such a view prove in any way correct, then it must indicate one of the greatest secrets ever kept from mankind.

But where was I to start? How was I even to begin the quest to unveil the forbidden legacy of this apparently fallen race? The answer lay with its main sourcebook, the Book of Enoch, for only by understanding its obscure origins and absorbing its bizarre contents could I ever hope to uncover the true picture behind humanity's lost heritage.