VISAGE LIKE A VIPER
Many people believe the Old Testament to be littered with references to the appearance of angels, but this is simply not the case. In fact there are relatively few accounts featuring angels, and when they do crop up there is often no real indication of what exactly is taking place. For instance, in Genesis there are the three 'angels in the guise of men' who approach Abraham as he sits at his tent door by the Oak of Mamre, near the ancient city of Hebron in southern Palestine. They confirm the imminent birth of a son to his elderly wife Sarah and announce their planned destruction of Sodom, the city of iniquity by the Dead Sea. The Bible says that a feast was prepared for them, and that Abraham 'took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat [author's emphasis]'.1
'And they did eat . . .' Angels eating food? Surely incorporeal beings would not need to consume earthly sustenance.
Then there are the two angels who visit Lot and his wife in Sodom, immediately prior to the city's destruction. They are said to have entered Lot's house, where he 'made them a feast, and did bake unleavened bread, and', as in the case of the Abraham story, 'they did eat'.2 Men of Sodom surround Lot's home, calling upon him and shouting out 'where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them'.3 In other words they wanted to have sex with them. It is, of course, from this bible passage that we gain the term sodomy, or anal penetration.
Did the inhabitants of Sodom want sex with all strangers who visited the city, or was there something noticeably different about these 'men'?
Then we have the angel, or 'man', with whom Jacob wrestles in hand-to-hand combat4 at Penuel, or the whole host of angels whom Jacob sees moving up and down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth as he rests at a place known as Bethel.5
Are these really accounts of angels of heaven, or are they of mortal men?
Angels gain their name from the word angelos, the Greek rendition of the Hebrew mal'akh, meaning 'messenger', since they act as mediators between God and humanity. They are undoubtedly incorporeal beings, although, to allow for stories such as those concerning Abraham, Lot and Jacob, it has generally been accepted by Judaeo-Christian theologians that angels could take on physical form to carry out specific tasks on earth.
Whatever the actual nature of the angels of the Old Testament, to both the Judaic and Christian faiths they are purely that – angels, messengers of God, unconnected with the fallen angelic race of both Genesis 6 and Hebrew apocryphal tradition. At no time are the angels of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, ever equated with the Sons of God, the Watchers or the Nephilim, and there is never any insinuation that it was two hundred of their heavenly companions who took on physical form to lie with the Daughters of Men in the generations prior to the Great Flood. It is almost as if the writers of the Pentateuch either have no apparent knowledge of the connection between angels and the fall of the Watchers, or else they are deliberately avoiding the subject altogether.
Who, then, were the angels, whether heavenly or fallen? Where did they come from? Where did they live? What did they look like? Only by establishing these facts could I go on to speculate on the true origins of this apparent race or culture – lost to the pages of history. It seemed imperative that if I was to widen my knowledge of the fallen race, then I would need to uncover and study whatever had been written about them, not just in recorded Hebrew folklore and mythology, but also among the more recently translated Dead Sea Scrolls, which contained much new material on the nature of angels and the fall of the Watchers.
It was this last area of study that in 1992 provided me with a vital piece of evidence which altered my whole perspective of the Watchers. In a reconstructed apocalyptic fragment, translated by the Hebrew scholar Robert Eisenman and referred to as the Testament of Amram, there is a rather unnerving account featuring the appearance of two Watchers to Amram, the father of Moses the lawgiver. The relevant section reads as follows:
[I saw Watchers] in my vision, the dream-vision. Two (men) were fighting over me, saying . . . and holding a great contest over me. I asked them, 'Who are you, that you are thus 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 . . .].6
The ancient text then identifies this Watcher as Belial, the Prince of Darkness and King of Evil, while his companion is revealed as Michael, the Prince of Light, who is also named as Melchizedek, the King of Righteousness. It was, however, Belial's frightful appearance that took my attention, for he is seen as terrifying to look upon and like a 'serpent', the very synonym so often used when describing both the Watchers and the Nephilim. If the textual fragment had ended here, then I would not have known why this synonym had been used by the Jewish scribe in question. Fortunately, however, the text goes on to say that the Watcher possessed a visage, or face, 'like a viper'. Since he also wears a cloak 'manycoloured yet very dark', I had also to presume that he was anthropomorphic, in other words he possessed human form.
'Visage like a viper ...' What could this possibly mean?
How was I to interpret this metaphor used in connection with the terrifying appearance this being must have instilled in the minds of those who originally trafficked with the walking serpents of the Book of Enoch?
How many people do you know with a 'visage like a viper'?
For over a year I could offer no suitable solution to this curious riddle.
Then, by chance, I happened to overhear something on a national radio station that provided me with a simple though completely unexpected explanation.
In Hollywood, Los Angeles, there is a club called the Viper Room. It is owned by actor and musician Johnny Depp, and in October 1993 it hit the headlines when the up-and-coming young actor River Phoenix tragically collapsed and died as he left the club, following a night of over-indulgence. In the media publicity that inevitably surrounded this drugs-related incident, it emerged that the Viper Room gained its name many years beforehand when it had been a jazz haunt of some renown. As the story goes, the musicians would take the stage and play long hours, prolonging their creativity and concentration by smoking large amounts of marijuana. Apparently, the long-term effects of this drug abuse, coupled with exceedingly long periods without food and sleep, caused their emaciated faces to appear hollow and gaunt, while their eyes closed up to become just slits. Through the haze of heavy smoke, the effect was to make it seem as if the jazz musicians had faces like vipers, hence the name of the club.
This diverting anecdote sent my mind reeling and helped me to construct a mental picture of how a person with a 'visage like a viper' might look: their faces would appear long and narrow, with prominent cheekbones, elongated jawbones, thin lips and slanted eyes like those of many East Asian racial types. Was this the solution to why both the Watchers and Nephilim were described as serpents? It seemed as likely a possibility as any, though it was also feasible that their serpentine connection related to their accredited magical associations and capabilities, perhaps even their bodily movements and overall appearance.
Wingless Angels
A separate account of the appearance of two Watcher-like figures, this time to Enoch as he rests in his bed, closely parallels the way in which they appeared to Moses's father, Amram, and seems to throw further light on their apparent descriptions:
And there appeared to me two men very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps; and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers: . . . [purple], their wings were brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow. They stood at the head of my bed and called me by my name.7
I knew it was taking an enormous gamble to assume for one minute that these textual accounts from Judaic apocalyptic and pseudepigraphal works actually recorded true-life descriptions of a race that in theory never existed outside the minds of the original storytellers. On the other hand, I felt I would be better able to investigate any historical origin if I could discover a cohesive pattern among the religious literature under study.
So what could be learnt from this second account?
I could begin by stripping away the angels' golden wings, for this part of the text was undoubtedly a very late addition, since angels were rarely deemed to possess wings until well into the Christian era. In the Old Testament, for example, only heavenly hosts such as the Cherubim and Seraphim are ever described as having multiple wings, four or six being the usual number. This feature is thought to have been a borrowing from the iconography of Assyria and Babylonia, where sky genii and temple guardians were depicted with very similar sets of wings.8 Yet Cherubim and Seraphim were never strictly angels, or 'messengers of God', who almost certainly received their wings at the hands of early Christian artists and scribes influenced by classical iconography, which often portrayed mythological beings with wings.
For most of us our view of angels is typified no better than in the vivid detail of Pre-Raphaelite paintings by such artists as Edward Burne-Jones, Evelyn de Morgan and John William Waterhouse, and by the ornately carved statues of angels found in ecclesiastical buildings, including churches, cathedrals and minsters. These convey to us idealized impressions of angels which contain the notion that they must have had beautiful wings, like those of the finest swans. This vision, however, bears little resemblance at all to accounts of angels that appear either in the Old Testament or in the earliest Judaic religious literature. For confirmation of this, one has only to reread the account of the appearance of the Watchers to Amram – there is no mention of wings. Even in the Book of Enoch itself, there is concrete evidence to show that wings were grafted on to existing accounts of angels sometime after the first century AD, since earlier renditions of the text make no mention of wings at all.
As Tall as Trees
If we take away the wings we are left with two tall men, 'as I have never seen on earth'. Why is there this obsession with height in connection with the fallen race? Was there some deep-rooted psychological need for Judaeo-Christian angels to be of enormous stature? In the stylized art of Ancient Egypt the Pharaohs, considered to be incarnations of the god Horus, were always depicted larger than any other figure around them, including their consorts and courtly entourage. Symbolic art of this nature makes perfect sense, since it instantly elevates the Pharaoh to a position higher than the rest of his subjects. In this way we can understand why divine beings, such as angels, should be portrayed as larger than life in religious iconography, but why were both the rebel Watchers and the Nephilim repeatedly described as giant in stature, or like 'trees' as they are metaphorically referred to in some accounts?9 Surely their great size must convey something more than simply misappropriate iconography. Could we possibly be dealing with actual human beings of greater stature than their contemporaries? Was this one of the features that made them stand out from other people?
Shining Like the Sun
The skin on the hands of the angels who appear to Enoch is described as 'whiter than snow', which seems to be another feature common to the fallen race. Elsewhere in the Book of Enoch, the Watchers are referred to simply as 'like white men',10 while, in the account of the birth of Noah, the infant is seen as possessing a body 'white as snow and red as a rose'.11 This suggests a type of complexion not dissimilar from that of white Caucasians of today, who often experience a ruddiness of the skin when exposed to harsh outdoor weather. Is this a clue to the Watcher's place of origin – an environment that suffered much harsher climatic conditions? Since the Book of Enoch was written by olive-skinned Jews in a hot sunny climate, this type of reference is not to be regarded lightly.
In the same vein, the faces of the two 'men' who visit Enoch are described as shining 'like the sun', a metaphor invoked to denote Watcher-like beings in Hebrew myth and legend. What could the Jewish scribes have meant by using such a term? Was it simply to convey the divine nature of the beings in question, in a similar manner to the way in which saints and holy men are depicted with halos or nimbuses in Christian art, or was there another, more supernatural, explanation for such statements?
Some light is thrown on the matter in one fascinating account that follows shortly after the two men's appearance to Enoch. Having been transported to the various heavenly realms by these angelic beings, the antediluvian patriarch arrives at the seventh and final heaven, where he encounters the Lord seated upon a great throne. In the Lord's company are hosts of Cherubim and Seraphim, and Enoch is greeted by the archangels Gabriel and Michael, who are also described as Watchers in the Book of Enoch. The humble prophet is then made to undergo a form of ceremony in which he is anointed with oil by one of the archangels:
And the Lord said to Michael: 'Go and take from Enoch his earthly robe, and anoint him with My holy oil, and clothe him with the raiment of My glory.' And so Michael did as the Lord spake to him. He [stripped me of my clothes and] anointed me and clothed me, and the appearance of that oil was more than a great light, and its anointing was like excellent dew; and its fragrance like myrrh, shining like a ray of the sun. And I gazed upon myself, and I was like one of His glorious ones. And there was no difference, and fear and trembling departed from me.12
Seeing beyond the highly religious overtones of these lines, it is difficult not to question the nature of the ceremony which Enoch undergoes. Stripped of his clothes, he is anointed with an oil that has a fragrance like myrrh. It makes him shine 'like a ray of the sun', so that he appears no different from the archangels, making all fear and trembling depart from him.
Is there any possibility that the archangels, who obviously bore a close resemblance to Enoch in the first place, covered their bodies with a type of oil that made them shine 'like a ray of the sun'? Considering for a moment that we might well be dealing with highly distorted recollections of actual encounters between earthly individuals, then why should these exalted ones need to cover their bodies in oil? Was it simply for aesthetic or ritualistic purposes? Or was there some other more practical reason behind this act? It is too easy to jump to conclusions here, especially in the knowledge that the skin of the Watchers is, when described, almost always spoken of as 'white as snow' and ruddy in appearance. Yet might it be remotely feasible that the body oil was used to protect the skin from harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, in much the same way as we use a sun-block today? Such usage would undoubtedly give the skin a shimmering, reflective quality, especially in the presence of a flickering fire. And, as I was aware, the skin of white Caucasians is far more vulnerable to the harmful effects of the sun than that of any other race.
Eyes Like Burning Lamps
More intriguing still is the description of the angels' eyes, for they are said to have been 'like burning lamps' – perhaps the missing words from the terrifying appearance of the Watcher Belial in the Amram text. Yet why 'burning lamps'? Was it simply the way in which the eyes of the Watchers were somehow able to reflect the flickering light of a burning lamp? Or did it mean something more?
Time and time again the eyes of Watchers, and angels in general, are described as appearing 'like the sun', and here, too, the birth of Noah is a prime example, for it is said that 'when he opened them (i.e. his eyes) the whole house glowed like the sun'.13
'Glowed like the sun ...' What did this mean?
Quite obviously, there was no hard-and-fast answer to this perplexing mystery, yet if these accounts recorded distorted memories of an actual Middle Eastern culture living long ago, then their eyes must have been singled out for a specific reason. For the moment all I could conclude was that they either reflected sunlight, or their irises were likened to the sun; in other words, their eyes were perhaps golden or honey-coloured in appearance, a characteristic common among certain tribal cultures of central Asia even today.
As White as Wool
And what can be said about the hair of the Watchers? Since we know that Noah in every way resembled the appearance of the fallen race, then we must assume that the revulsion to his 'thick and bright' white hair 'as pure as wool'14 also indicates one of their recurring physiological traits. In the account of his birth given in the Ethiopian Book of Enoch, the infant's hair is said to have been like a demdema, a Ge'ez word similar to the English term 'Afro-cut'. More correctly, this refers to 'long curly hair',15 which will form dreadlocks if left unkept for any length of time. Applying this information I had therefore to presume that, besides their pale white skin, the Watchers possessed thick, curly white hair, perhaps matted to form long dreadlocks, similar to the style sported by so-called 'travellers' in Britain today. This, too, would have made them appear like white Caucasians, who, it may be assumed, looked quite alien to the indigenous cultures which first began relating stories concerning the presence of these apparently divine beings.
Children of the Angels
A lot of emphasis is placed here on the peculiar appearance of the infant Noah in the belief that he in some way resembled the physical appearance of the fallen angels and, by virtue of this, angels in general. And yet what proof was there that his strange birth could be conceived as an actual event in humanity's long history? Why not accept this account as simply a metaphor for an unholy union between a conceptual being of light and a mortal woman?
One answer is the continued existence of an extraordinary belief, perhaps thousands of years old, that some young children are born 'of the angels', bearing not only their assumed physical characteristics but also their divine personas. I would never have believed such a thing, had it not been for an account given to me by an elderly woman, named Margaret Norman, following a lecture in which I included details of the birth of Noah and the apparent physiological traits of the fallen race.16
Today Margaret lives in the English county of Essex, but in her younger years she was a resident of London, and it was here she learnt from her mother the details of a story concerning a so-called 'angel child'. In 1908 a son was born to a German father and English mother in the suburb of Hampstead. It weighed a healthy eleven pounds and possessed blue eyes and golden blond locks. Sadly, it died at the age of three and a half, but while it was alive the infant was apparently adored by everyone for its 'serene and dreamy loving nature'. As Margaret's mother told her, people would stop in the street, place money in the infant's pram for luck and refer to him as an 'angel child'. Most peculiar of all was her mother's insistence that the baby 'just shone', a statement on which Margaret found it very difficult to expand.
I asked Margaret whether it was the pale nature of its skin, the smile on the baby's face or perhaps some kind of inner radiance that had led people to believe this child 'just shone'. She could only shake her head and say: 'I really don't know. It was just something about him.'
'Just shone . . .'
'. . . and as for his eyes, when he opened them the whole house glowed like the sun'. These are the enigmatic words used by the Jewish scribes to describe the infant Noah, who was himself spoken of as 'like the children of the angels'. Perhaps the way in which the Watchers' eyes and faces had shone 'like the sun' really did relate to some kind of intangible radiance no longer known to the world today. Yet the idea that a child in twentieth-century London was seen to have the appearance of a Nephilim baby, and be given money in the hope of receiving good luck, is compelling evidence that the birth of Noah, as well as the many other descriptions of Watchers and angels in general, provides us with eyewitness accounts of an actual race that once walked the earth.
The Shamanic Solution
'Their dress had the appearance of feathers' – this is the final piece of descriptive narrative concerning the two 'men' who appeared before Enoch. In the Testament of Amram, the Watcher Belial is adorned in a cloak 'many-coloured yet very dark'. Despite the habit among medieval artists of portraying angels with bodies covered with feathers, which has no real basis in biblical tradition, I felt this statement concerning feathers to be very important indeed. It also seemed like an oversight on the part of the scribe who conveyed this story into written form, for having added wings to the description of the two 'men', why bother to go on to say they wore garments of feathers? Surely this confusion between wings and feather coats could have been edited to give the Watchers a more appropriate angelic appearance.
Somehow I knew that here was a key to unlocking this strange mystery. It suggested that, if the original fallen race had indeed been human, then they may have adorned themselves in garments of this nature as part of their ceremonial dress. The use of totemic forms, such as animals and birds, has always been the domain of the shaman, the priest-magician of tribal communities. In many early cultures the soul itself was said to have taken the form of a bird to make its flight from this world to the next, which is why it is often depicted as such in ancient religious art. This idea may well have stemmed from the widely held belief that astral flight could only be achieved by using ethereal wings, like those of birds – a view that almost certainly helped to inspire the idea that angels, as messengers of God, should be portrayed with wings in Judaeo-Christian iconography.
To enhance this mental link with a shaman's chosen bird, he or she would adorn their body with a coat of feathers and spend long periods studying the bird's every action. They would enter its natural habitat and watch every facet of its life – its method of flight, its eating habits, its courtship rituals and its movements on the ground. By so doing they would hope to become as birds themselves, an alter-personality adopted by them on a semi-permanent basis. Totemic shamanism is more or less dependent on the indigenous animals or birds present in the locale of a culture or tribe, although in principle the purpose has always been the same – to use this mantle to achieve astral flight, divine illumination, spirit communication and the attainment of otherworldly knowledge and wisdom.
So could the Watchers and Nephilim have been bird-men as well as walking serpents?
The answer is almost certainly yes, for in one Enochian text discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls17 the Nephilim sons of the fallen angel Shemyaza, named as 'Ahyâ and 'Ohyâ, experience dream-visions in which they both visit a world-garden and see two hundred trees being felled by heavenly angels.18 Not understanding the purpose of this allegory, they put the subject to the Nephilim council, who appoint one of their number, named Mahawai, to go on their behalf to consult Enoch, who now resides in an earthly Paradise. To this end Mahawai then:
[. .. rose up into the air] like the whirlwinds, and flew with the help of his hands like [winged] eagle [. . . over] the cultivated lands and crossed Solitude, the great desert, [. . .]. And he caught sight of Enoch and he called to him . . .19
Enoch explains that the two hundred trees represent the two hundred rebel Watchers, while the felling of their trunks signifies their destruction in the coming conflagration and deluge. More significant, however, is the means by which Mahawai attains astral flight, for he is said to have used 'his hands like (a) [winged] eagle'. Elsewhere in the same Enochian text, Mahawai is said to have adopted the guise of a bird to make another long journey.20 On this occasion, he narrowly escapes being burnt up by the sun's heat and is only saved after heeding the celestial voice of Enoch, who convinces him to turn back and not die prematurely – a story that has close parallels with Icarus' fatal flight too near the sun in Greek mythology.
In addition to this evidence, a variation of this same text equates Shemyaza's sons 'not (with) the . . . eagle, but his wings', while in the same breath the two brothers are described as 'in their nest',21 statements which prompted the Hebrew scholar J. T. Milik to conclude that, like Mahawai, they too 'could have been bird-men'.22
Is it really possible that the Watchers might have belonged to a race or culture which practised an advanced form of bird shamanism? Were they shamans themselves, able to communicate with the spirit world and experience dream-visions through astral flight? All the extant works featuring the legends of the Watchers and Nephilim are primarily concerned with dream-visions, the products of astral flight and journeys to the other world. This strongly supports the view that the original source of these visionary tracts was a race or culture that employed the use of shamanistic practices of the sort expressed within their very pages.
The idea of bird-men acting as the bringers of knowledge and wisdom to mortal kind is not unique to the Middle East. An African tribe called Dan, who live close to the village of Man on the Ivory Coast, say that at the beginning of time, in the days of their first ancestors, a race of 'attractive human birds appeared, possessing all the sciences which they handed on to mankind'. Even today the tribal artists make copper representations of these bird-men, who are shown with human bodies and heads supporting long beaks, like those of birds of prey.23
Might these 'attractive human birds' have been what the Book of Enoch describes as Watchers? The bird-men of the Ivory Coast would certainly appear to have played a similar role to that of the rebel angels in Hebraic tradition.
Could this new-found connection between Watchers and shamanism now throw further light on their association with serpents, the bringers of knowledge and wisdom in so many ancient mythologies? In the Book of Enoch, the Watcher named Kâsdejâ is accused of showing men how to take away 'the bites of the serpent',24 knowledge that would in past ages have gone hand in hand with the magical duties of priest-magicians, or shamans, deemed to have power over snakes. As in the case of bird shamanism, serpent shamans would have adorned themselves with snake relics and carried serpent-related items, such as snake charms and a long rod or pole adorned with serpentine symbols, helping to explain why the Watchers and Nephilim were referred to as serpents. Furthermore, both birds and snakes were seen by many Middle Eastern cultures as ultimate symbols of transformation of the soul, bringing together these two quite separate forms of totemic practice.
One thing was certain, the ornithomorphic association with both the Watchers and the Nephilim was clearly not meant to convey the idea that they possessed heavenly wings in the traditional sense. It was, however, possible that the repeated usage of bird symbolism in connection with angelic beings may have led early Hebrew and Christian scholars and scribes to assume this very thing – a confusion which, like so many other mistranslations or misrepresentations of early religious scriptures, led to the iconographic forms of angels and fallen angels as we know them today.
The Face of a Watcher
It was beginning to appear as if the whole concept of angels had been born out of misconceptions concerning either references to heavenly beings in Old Testament tradition, who may well have had quite earthly origins in the first place, or mythological beings and protective spirits borrowed from other contemporary cultures. Strip these away from the literature and you are left with bizarre yet highly descriptive accounts of anthropomorphic figures, such as the Watchers, who probably only became synonymous with the term mal'akh, or 'angel', long after their legends had been accepted into Hebrew mythology. More disconcerting was the knowledge that the world's current perception of angels bore little resemblance to their earliest recorded appearances, whether as physical denizens that once walked this earth or as incorporeal beings of faith alone.
So what did they really look like?
Using the various individual components deduced from the different accounts given of the fallen race found in Enochian and Dead Sea literature, I asked an accomplished artist, the author and illustrator Billie Walker-John, to draw a composite picture of a Watcher. Although this was simply meant to be an interesting exercise, the finished result was stunning to say the least. The striking, almost amoral face of this walking bird-man with his shaman's staff was utterly mesmerizing, even a little chilling in some respects. Most disturbing was the knowledge that the black-and-white drawing portrayed the most accurate depiction of an angelic being executed in modern times. So who were these people? And why had the world forgotten them?
Fig. 3. Billie Walker-John's composite impression of a Watcher or angelic being based on descriptions given in early Judaic sources such as the Book of Enoch and Dead Sea literature. This most ancient image of a so-called 'angel' contrasts markedly to the more familiar images conveyed by Renaissance art and nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite paintings (see also Plate 22).