EASTWARD, IN EDEN
And the Lord God planted a garden eastward, in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became four heads.1
These are the words of the Book of Genesis. They tell of the existence of a terrestrial garden created by God in a place called Eden. It is beyond the eastern gate of this idyllic realm that Adam and Eve are cast, once God has realized that they have tasted of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
So what exactly is the Garden of Eden? And what did it mean to the early Jews? And if it was connected with the story of the fall of the Watchers, then how did it link to the concept of heaven and paradise?
The word 'Eden' is considered by Hebrew scholars to mean 'pleasure' or 'delight',2 a reference to the fact that God had created the garden for the pleasure of humanity. This is not, however, its true origin. The word 'Eden' is in fact Akkadian – the proto-Hebrew, or Semitic, language introduced to Mesopotamia by the people of Agade, or Akkad, a race that seized control of the ancient kingdom of Sumer, in what is today Iraq, during the second half of the third millennium BC. In their language the word 'Eden', or edin, meant a 'steppe' or 'terrace',3 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 AD 1175.4 The English word 'heaven', on the other hand, is taken from the Hebrew ha 'shemim, a plural form of a word interpreted as meaning 'the skies'. It can also be used to refer to 'high places', such as lofty settlements.5 Moreover, the Hebrew word-root shm can also mean 'heights', as well as 'plant' or 'vegetation', implying, perhaps, that the word 'heaven' might more accurately be interpreted as 'planted highlands'.6
This quick round of etymological translation, in my opinion at least, conjured the image of a walled, agricultural settlement with stepped terraces placed in a highlands region. Was I doing the fabled Garden of Eden an injustice by thinking of it in such a mundane manner? And was I right to suggest that Eden, heaven and paradise had been one and the same place? Surely heaven is a utopian realm created by our psychological necessities, or at best the ethereal domain where the souls of the departed will rejoice with God and his angels on the Day of Judgement.
The Journey to Heaven
Hebrew myth records that the first mortal to enter the Garden of Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve was the patriarch Enoch.7 Scholars would suggest that this rather naïve assumption stemmed originally from a literal translation of the lines in the Book of Genesis which imply that Enoch had been translated to heaven and did not die in the usual manner. It is a theme dealt with in extraordinary detail within Enochian literature, where Enoch is not simply taken to heaven, he is actually given a guided tour of its seven individual 'heavens' before being returned to the physical world.
This quite extraordinary tale begins with the unexpected arrival of the two 'very tall' men, with radiant faces and raiments that have 'the appearance of feathers', who enter Enoch's home and demand that he go with them. Having made his departure, the righteous patriarch is then taken up on to the wings of these two 'men' who carry him off to heaven. On approaching the paradisical realm, Enoch is allowed to rest temporarily on a moving cloud, and here he gazes out over 'the treasures of the snow and ice' and espies 'the angels who guard their terrible store-places,.8 Also set out before him is 'a very great sea, greater than the earthly sea'.9 Turning to the first of the seven heavens, Enoch is then escorted through its gates, beyond which he finds two hundred astronomer angels and their elders who 'rule the stars and their heavenly service'.10 If, for one moment, I could consider that the patriarch might actually have visited some kind of terrestrial, as opposed to ethereal, domain, then might these words suggest an elevated observatory dedicated to the study of astronomy and the measurement of time?
Moving on to the Second Heaven, Enoch is abhorred to find angelic prisoners 'suspended', awaiting some form of eternal punishment.11 This made me recall the inhumane manner in which Shemyaza, the leader of the two hundred rebel Watchers, had been suspended upside down for his crimes against humanity. Those angels who guarded these poor, wretched souls are themselves 'gloomy in appearance, more than the darkness of the earth'.12 Seeing the mortal, the shackled prisoners cry out for the patriarch to pray for them, to which he responds: 'Who am I, a mortal man, that I should pray for angels?'13
Wise words from a man confronted with a scene he could never have thought possible – angels in prison. To incarcerate immortals hardly seemed like the righteous actions of incorporeal messengers of God.
Passing swiftly on to the Third Heaven, Enoch eventually finds himself in the Garden of Eden, which he describes as:
a place such as has never been known for the goodliness of its appearance. And I saw all the trees of beautiful colours and their fruits ripe and fragrant, and all kinds of food which they produced, springing up with delightful fragrance. And in the midst (there is) the tree of life, in that place, on which God rests, when He comes into Paradise. And this tree cannot be described for its excellence and sweet odour. And it is beautiful more than any created thing.14
From the roots of this tree come four streams – one of pure honey, one of milk, one of oil and the last of wine. These separate into four directions and 'go down to the Paradise of Eden' before 'they go along the earth, and have a revolution in their circle like also the other elements'.15 There is also:
another tree, an olive tree always distilling oil. And there is no tree there without fruit, and every tree is blessed. And there are three hundred angels very glorious, who keep the garden, and with never ceasing voices and blessed singing, they serve the Lord every day.16
The Garden of Eden appears to have more in common with an Israeli kibbutz, or with the gardens of a Christian monastery, than with an ethereal kingdom peopled by angelic hosts. Moreover, the reference to the Tree of Life on which God 'rests, when He comes into paradise' is strangely reminiscent of the Tree of All Remedies, or the Tree of All Seeds, on which the Simurgh bird rests in Persian tradition. This heavenly tree is said to have been placed in the centre of the Vourukasha Sea, which is itself located in the Airyana Vaejah, the Iranian domain of the immortals. Curiously enough, like the Garden of Eden, the Vourukasha Sea is seen as the gathering point of all water, fed by a mighty river named Harahvaiti. From this waterway come two separate rivers that flow out towards the east and west and spread throughout the whole of the land. They then return to the sea, their waters cleansed of any impurities.17
The two men then show Enoch 'a very terrible place' where crazed prisoners are held captive by ruthless angels who carry savage weapons and commit unmerciful torture. It is a place of darkness, with only a gloomy fire that burns constantly. The text relates that this dreadful prison is reserved for all those who do not honour the word of God and commit anyone of a whole list of heinous crimes that were undoubtedly added to by each different story-teller or translator who retold this tale.18
In the Fourth Heaven Enoch enters what appears to have been another observatory, where he is able to study the 'comings and goings forth and all the rays of the light of the sun and moon'.19 Here he is able to measure the descent of the celestial bodies and compute their light, for he says that the sun 'has a light seven times greater than the moon'.20 He also realizes that there are 'four great stars' with another 8,000 stars in their charge.21 Here, once again, the angels' apparent interest in astronomy is reaffirmed. The study of the stars is, of course, listed among the forbidden sciences revealed to mortal kind by the rebel Watchers.
And so to the Fifth Heaven, where Enoch finds the two hundred Watchers who have transgressed the laws of heaven by revealing the forbidden arts and taking wives from among the Daughters of Men. For their misconduct, they have been incarcerated like lowly prisoners. As the mortal passes by they, too, call out for him to help their claim of innocence. These fallen angels are described as grigori – the Greek for Watchers. They are said to have looked 'like men', and to have borne a height 'greater than that of the giants (i.e. their Nephilim offspring)'.22 Enoch also recalls how 'their countenances were withered',23 bringing to mind the way in which the mythical Iranian kings would lose the royal farr if they turned their backs on the path of truth.
In the Sixth Heaven Enoch encounters seven bands of angels whose faces, he says, were 'shining more than the rays of the sun. They were resplendent, and there is no difference in their countenance, or their manner, or the style of their clothing'.24 Like the angels in the First Heaven, these shining beings watch 'the revolution of the stars, and the changes of the moon, and the revolutions of the sun', even further evidence that the term 'Watchers' relates not to their observation of mortal kind, but to their observation of the movement of stars and their study of the cycles of time. Here the angels 'superintend the good or evil condition of the world', a reference perhaps to the study of climatology and seismology, and the way in which it affects the earth. These Watchers also 'arrange teachings, and instructions, and sweet speaking, and singing, and all kinds of glorious praise', for 'these are the archangels who are appointed over the angels'.25
In the seventh and final heaven Enoch witnesses whole hosts of great archangels, Cherubim, Seraphim, and all sorts of incorporeal powers that attend the throne of God.26 In a separate rendition of this story, the patriarch finds himself alongside a wall built of 'crystals' that is surrounded by mysterious 'tongues of fire'.27 Its 'groundwork' appears to be made of the same crystal-like stone, while of the building's interior, he recalls: 'Its ceiling was like the path of the stars and the lightnings . . . A flaming fire surrounded the walls, and its portals blazed with fire.'28 The temperature here also seemed contradictory, for it appeared to him 'as hot as fire and [as] cold as ice', all at the same time. There were apparently 'no delights of life therein', in other words he found no furniture or decoration, showing the apparent spareness and emptiness of this 'house'. Yet then fear overcame Enoch, who suddenly found himself trembling and quaking at the awesomeness of the strange sights around him. I recall feeling exactly the same when I visited St Paul's Cathedral as a boy – the vastness of its interior seemed so overbearing that it made me cry.
Moving quickly on to a second 'house' with a similar appearance, which 'excelled in splendour and magnificence and extent', Enoch now perceived a 'lofty throne' of crystal. Upon this were moving wheels as bright as the 'shining sun', and from beneath it appeared to come 'streams of flaming fire', so bright that he could not look upon them. And 'sat thereon' the throne was the Great Glory, whose 'raiment shone more brightly than the sun and was whiter than any snow'.29 I will give you Enoch's own recollection of how he felt at that moment:
None of the angels could enter and could behold His face by reason of the magnificence and glory, and no flesh could behold Him. The flaming fire was round about Him, and a great fire stood before Him, and none around could draw nigh Him.30
Following Enoch's brief encounter with the Great Glory of God, he is led away and, still in the company of the two feather-clad 'men', departs the seven realms of heaven. The Watcher-like figures take him as far as the 'extremity of heaven' and here they leave him to return to his own world.
Like anyone who has just witnessed some of the most awesome sights a mortal can ever expect to see, Enoch is mind-blown and afraid. In what must have been virtual madness, he falls on his face and screams out to himself, 'Woe is me! what has come upon me!'31
Here the story of Enoch's visit to paradise is concluded.
Clearly then, Eden was not some delightful garden created by God for the pleasures of Adam and Eve! Admittedly the Enochian text does resume its narrative, making the archangel Gabriel go back and fetch the half-crazed Enoch in an attempt to get him to re-enter heaven. There is even mention of the patriarch visiting an eighth, ninth and tenth heaven, yet this section has the look of a late interpolation hoping to emphasize to the reader that Enoch ends his life in paradise, in accord with the statements in the Book of Genesis concerning his translation to heaven.
Heaven – Fact or Fantasy?
No one would deny that the account of Enoch's visit to heaven is fanciful in the extreme; indeed, much of its phantasmagorical narrative is difficult to take seriously. In spite of this admission, I honestly believe that it contains a kernel of truth – first-hand, second-hand or probably even third-hand accounts of an actual settlement of an extraordinary nature that once existed in this world. Perhaps it was somewhere visited by someone who had no real understanding of the nature and purpose of what he or she was witnessing first-hand.
Enoch's words are virtually meaningless, but they hint at the very real possibility that, not only was the Garden of Eden equated with the location named heaven, but that it was also home to the Watchers. If these bold assertions were correct, then it suggested the existence of a remarkable highland settlement that included astronomical observatories, schools of learning, productive orchards containing fruit-bearing trees, well-attended cultivated terraces and seemingly even dark prisons and places of torture for those of the race who transgressed its heavenly laws.
Might the memory of this settlement have been preserved among the earliest Semitic or Iranian peoples living in the foothills and plains below this other-worldly domain? Did these lowland cultures preserve the memory of those who belonged to this settlement – a race which, through its extreme physiological features and shamanistic qualities, had become the viper-faced bird-men and shining angels of Hebraic tradition?
Might the descent of the Watchers 'on' Mount Hermon, as recorded in the Book of Enoch, refer not to their flight from heaven to earth, but to their actual descent down a hilly mountainside to the foothills and plains, where they were able to walk among the less evolved pastoral communities, like gods walking among men, like immortals walking among mortals, like the dead walking among the living?
Might the sight of these tall, feather-coated individuals with long radiant faces, snow-white hair, pale ivory-like skin and ruddy cheeks have instilled utter fear in these people, to such a degree that their appearances made them into the demons, devils and evil spirits of much later cultures?
Might the trafficking between these walking serpents of the highlands and the developing cultures of the lowlands have been the basis behind the idea of the Sons of God coming unto the Daughters of Men?
Turning to the Iranian traditions concerning the ahuras and daevas, I wondered whether knowledge of the angelic paradise visited by Enoch might lie behind the concept of the Airyana Vaejah, the Iranian Expanse, which had been the ancestral home of Iran's mythical kings.
All these things were certainly possible. More important, however, was to establish whether Eden existed in our minds alone, or whether it was out there somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered.
The Rivers of Paradise
If Eden had once existed as an actual geographical location, where might I start looking for it? Rivers appeared to be the answer, for the Bible records that in Eden one major water-course divided to become four 'heads', each of which grew into a river. The names of these are given as the Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates.32 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 rivers were identified by early theologians with, respectively, the Indus of Asia (although occasionally the Ganges of India), 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 other two were chosen as suitable substitutes simply because they were looked upon by scholars as the mightiest rivers of the classical world. 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 rediscovery of cartography in the sixteenth century AD.
Since that time the blatant discrepancy of the four chosen rivers of paradise has been used as evidence by religious critics to demonstrate that the Garden of Eden was merely a conceptual realm without any geographical reality. Yet, to the Israelites at the time of Moses, Eden was unquestionably an actual location, for as the Book of Genesis clearly states: 'And the Lord God planted a garden eastward, in Eden.'33
Eastward? Eastward of where? Eastward of Israel? Eastward of Jerusalem? As Jerusalem has been the holiest place in Palestine since the establishment of the Israelite kingdom at the beginning of the first millennium BC, then presumably the Genesis statement meant eastwards of this ancient city. So, if I was to take an easterly bearing from Jerusalem, where would it take me? Reaching for a large-scale map of western Asia, I laid it open and took up a ruler. The line followed a course just below the 3znd parallel through the modern Arab republics of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and finally into Iraq. So, had the ancient city-state of Babylon been implied by the compilers of Genesis? It seemed unlikely, since Babylon was seen by Jews as a place of gross iniquity, especially after their oppression at the time of the Captivity. Continuing eastwards, the line reached the southern extremes of the Lower Zagros mountain range. East of here were the Iranian plains, hardly the most obvious candidate for the birth-place of the Jewish race. Perhaps, then, the Zagros was being implied by the expression 'eastward, in Eden', for I was hardly likely to find the Mountain of God, on which Eden was said to have been situated,34 in the middle of the Iraqi desert.
That the Jews believed the Garden of Eden to be somewhere in the vicinity of Iraq is pretty clear, for all the earliest events in the Book of Genesis focus around this region, known within its pages as 'the land of Shinar'.35 This was a reference to the land once known as Sumer, or Sumeria, where from 3000 BC down to around 1900 BC there existed a series of city-states which controlled the plains between the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan and the Persian Gulf in southern Iraq. Here the descendants of Noah flourished in the generations after the Great Flood, until, the Bible tells us, a mighty tyrant named Nimrod constructed a tower that reached towards heaven itself – an act that prompted God to strike down this abomination and punish the world. Henceforth its population would be made to speak in many tongues instead of the one single language used until that time.36 One classical writer named Eupolemus records that the tower owed its foundation to 'the Giants', who included Nimrod himself. Apparently, after the structure was destroyed by divine wrath, these giants ('Titans' in Greek) had been 'scattered over all the earth'.37 Quite obviously the tower is seen to have been located at Babylon – which is erroneously said by Judaeo-Christians to have derived its name from the word 'babel', or confusion. Despite some sterling research by various scholars and archaeologists of the Victorian age, no hard evidence has ever been found to verify the actual existence of either Nimrod or his fabled tower.38
There were, however, other more sound reasons for locating the land of Eden in the highlands above the 'fertile crescent' of ancient Sumer. Some bible commentators have long considered that, since two out of four of the rivers of paradise rise in the mountains of Turkish Kurdistan, the other two must also be major rivers that have their headwaters in this same region. They have therefore seen fit to link these – the Pishon and Gihon – with the Greater Zab and Araxes, both of which do rise in northern Kurdistan.39 So strong had this link become by the time of the Babylonian Captivity that many Jews erroneously started to identify Eden with a place called Bit Adini, or Beth Eden, a town on the Lower Euphrates seized by the Assyrian army.40
Since there has never been any suitable alternative to this solution, Jews and Christians alike now accept that the Garden of Eden must have been located in this region of the world, firmly connecting the abode of the angels with the highlands of Kurdistan. Yet was this right? Could this region really have played such an important role in the development of Judaeo-Christian myth and legend? Certainly all the indications from Iranian and Mandaean sources appeared to suggest that their mountain of origin was situated somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Media, which once stretched westwards to encompass the whole of Iranian Kurdistan. But did these traditions refer to the same area where the Jews and Christians believed the Garden of Eden to have been located?
The Place of Descent
Before I made any final judgements, I needed to understand why the early Israelites saw this far-off land as the place of origin of the human race. For this I turned to the Genesis account of the Great Flood with its hero Noah, who, as I already knew, had been born with clear Watcher traits.
As any Jew or Christian will know, Noah is warned by God of an impending deluge, and so gathers together his wife, his three sons, and his sons' wives, and together they construct an enormous sea-going vessel, made of gopher wood and pitched inside and out with bitumen. On this they assemble two of every kind of beast of the earth and bird of the air. The company wait on their 'Ark', and finally the rains come and the earth is covered with water to a depth of 15 cubits. For 40 days it rains unabated, and after a further 150 days the waters begin to subside. A raven is then unsuccessfully sent out by Noah to find land. Later a dove is dispatched for the same reason, and this time it returns with an olive leaf in its beak.
Soon afterwards the Ark comes to rest at a place referred to in the Bible as 'the mountains of Ararat', a mythical location known in Armenian tradition as Nachidsheuan, the Place of Descent. The use of the rather vague term 'mountains of Ararat' has long caused heated debate among theologians. 'Ararat' is the Akkadian rendition of 'Urartu', the name given by the Assyrians of Upper Iraq to a powerful Indo-Iranian kingdom, first referred to in texts dating back to 1275 BC. The Urartu culture grew to become a major influence in the Near East until its final demise around 590 BC.41 Initially the people of Urartu inhabited only the area around Lake Van – an enormous inland sea some sixty miles across and around thirty-five miles wide – situated on the border between Turkish Kurdistan and the Russian Republic of Armenia. Their kingdom gradually expanded, however, to encompass a wide geographical area that reached as far east as the shores of Lake Urmia in ancient Media, as far north as the Caucasus mountains and as far west as northern Syria.
The 'mountains of Ararat' could therefore be a reference to any one of a whole range of prominent mountains in what is today the desolate border area between the countries of Russian Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Despite this vagueness on the part of the Bible, Christians have seen fit to associate the 'mountains of Ararat' with the twin-peaks of Greater Ararat – the highest mountain (16,946 feet) in Turkish Kurdistan.
Over the years fundamentalist Christians, and more openminded explorers, have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to locate the remains of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. Sightings of alleged 'arks' in the vicinity of its bleak summits make extraordinary reading, and should not be dismissed out of hand;42 however, the Christians are alone in identifying Greater Ararat with the Place of Descent.
In the Koran, the holy book of Islam, the story of Noah's Ark and the Great Flood is repeated. Yet in this version the vessel comes to rest 'on the mountain of Judi' – Judi being an Arabic word meaning 'the heights'. A strong Kurdish tradition links this mythical location with Al Judi, or Cudi Dağ a mountain that rises to the height of 6,436 feet and is located some sixty-five miles south of Lake Van in Turkish Kurdistan.
In the early years of the twentieth century, two Englishmen, the Rev. W. A. Wigram and Edgar T. A. Wigram, spent some years studying the cultural history of Kurdistan. They discovered that the Kurds were in no doubt as to the authentic Place of Descent, for in their 1914 book The Cradle of Mankind, the Wigrams spoke of animal sacrifices being annually offered up by all faiths on Al Judi to commemorate Noah's landing here, for, as they reported at the time:
Christians of all nations and confessions, Mussulmans [i.e. Muslims] of both Shiah and Sunni type, Sabaeans (Mandaeans), Jews, and even the furtive timid Yezidis are there, each group bringing a sheep or kid for sacrifice; and for one day there is a 'truce of God' even in turbulent Kurdistan, and the smoke of a hundred of firings goes up once more on the ancient altar.43
This archaic festival would take place on 14 September – the generally accepted date on which the Ark came to rest on dry land. At the base of the mountain there is apparently a village named Hasana, where, according to the Wigrams, men 'still point out Noah's tomb and Noah's vineyard, though this last, strange to say, produces no wine now'.44
Such traditions are in themselves hollow, especially as the foothills around Greater Ararat proclaim similar such associations.45 Despite this confusion, the first-century AD Jewish writer Flavius Josephus also spoke specifically of 'Mount Judi near Lake Van' as the resting-place of the Ark.46
Whatever the exact location of the so-called Place of Descent, the importance placed on central and northern Kurdistan by the compilers of the Pentateuch was difficult to ignore. It had been standard practice for bards and story-tellers of all ancient cultures to use sites of national and/or local importance when reciting tales of a spiritual or cultural significance, especially in the company of kings and nobles. No one wanted to venerate holy places in far-off lands that might once have been occupied by their culture, but were now in the hands of their sworn enemies. Unless, that is, they held such a significance that they could never be forgotten or replaced. This could only mean that the Israelite tribes at the time of Moses believed that the highlands of Kurdistan held some deep spiritual significance to their race, for here they located not just their place of genesis, but also the point at which the world had renewed itself after a universal deluge.
Furthermore, according to the Jewish Talmud, the patriarch Abraham was said to have spent ten years in prison – three in Kutha, near Babylon, and seven in Kardu, the old Semitic name for Kurdistan,47 showing his own integral link with the region.
The Cradle of Mankind
If the highlands of Kurdistan really had played such an important role in the development of Hebrew myth and legend, then perhaps I was to take seriously the idea that the earthly paradise, and, by virtue of this, the abode of the Watchers, had actually been located in this country. Since the local Kurdish peoples were so sure about the whereabouts of the Place of Descent in the Noah story, then surely they would hold similar convictions concerning the location of the Garden of Eden. If an advanced culture like the Watchers really had existed in this geographical region, then its memory would surely not be forgotten. Indigenous cultures, such as the Kurds, who had led isolated and often nomadic lifestyles until comparatively recent times, must have retained the knowledge of such human activity in their midst.
The two Wigrams spent many years in Kurdistan recording previously unknown customs and legends. Indeed, so thorough was their study of the Kurdish race that modern scholars still use their much-sought-after book, The Cradle of Mankind, as a valuable reference work. So what had they learnt concerning the alleged existence of the Garden of Eden among the Kurdish highlands?
First, there seemed little doubt that the Kurds saw the four rivers of paradise as being the Euphrates, Tigris, Greater Zab and Araxes, the last of which empties into the Caspian Sea to the east. Indeed, so strongly did the local Nestorians, or Christians of the Assyrian Church, believe that the Greater Zab was the river Pishon that, according to the Wigrams, its patriarch would often sign-off his official letters 'from my cell on the River of the Garden of Eden'!48
It was, however, the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris that would appear to have most shaped the Kurds' belief in the Garden of Eden's geographical reality. These two rivers curl their way around the solid wall of mountains that act like an impenetrable fortress to encircle Lake Van. The Wigrams speculated that the Garden of Eden had been situated either in the vicinity of the city of Van, the site of the old Urartian capital of Tushpa on its eastern coast, or somewhere around the ancient city of Bitlis beyond its south-western shoreline.49
Descendants of Giants
Did the Garden of Eden, the birthplace of the human race, as well as the seven heavens visited by Enoch, once exist in the vicinity of Lake Van? Very possibly. Armenian legend asserts 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.50 What is more, the lake is also connected with the descendants of Noah. On the lake's west bank is the province of Tarawn, where, according to the fifth-century AD Armenian historian Moses of Khorenats'i, Noah's son Sem (Shem) had settled temporarily after the Ark had come to rest on the mountains of Ararat. He had lingered for two months by a river and a mountain, which even today bears the name Sim, or Sem. His son Tarban is also said to have settled in this same area, along with his thirty brothers, fifteen sisters and their husbands. It is for this reason that the location is also known as Ts'rawnk', meaning 'dispersion' – an apparent reference to the dispersion of Tarban's sons and family.51
The warm waters of this huge inland salt sea would have provided the area with a mild, temperate climate able to sustain human life and cultivation of the sort spoken of in the Enochian literature, while the wall of mountains surrounding the watery expanse would have acted as a natural shield against the intrusions of the outside world.
Anyone of the many mountains that soar into the sky around Lake Van might well have constituted the Mountain of Paradise – the curiously named Mount Nimrod, or Nemrut Dağ, on its southwestern shoreline, being a prime candidate. This preserves the name of Nimrod (or Bel), the mighty king of the land of Shinar, who in Armenian tradition not only was a giant, but also enlisted the aid of fellow-giants to help him build the mountain-like Tower of Babel,52 the story also recorded by the classical writer Eupolemus. One of these giants was, according to Moses of Khorenats'i, a figure named Hayk, the son of T'orgom, who was a direct descendant of Yapheth (Japheth), another of the three sons of Noah.
Hayk was said to have been the founder of the Araradian, or pre-Armenian, race,53 and it was on the north-west of Lake Van that he had established the province of Hark' – a place-name apparently reflecting the fact that it had been here that the ancestors of his father T'orgom had settled, presumably after the destruction of the Tower of Babel.54 Nemrut Dağ is likely to have derived its name from an Armenian tradition which asserts that Nimrod was killed by an arrow shot by Hayk during a major battle between two rival armies of giants to the south-east of Lake Van.55
I found it more than a little curious that the pre-Armenian race should claim descendency from a race of giants, or Titans, who supposedly settled close to Lake Van and were themselves descendants of Noah, the child born with distinct Watcher traits in Enochian and Dead Sea tradition. Indeed, in the Armenian language, the name Hayk is directly associated with the word 'gigantic', as if to emphasize the great stature of their most distant ancestor.56 Whatever the actual reality of this tradition, these local legends helped to strengthen the link between this area and the mythical homeland of the Watchers.
Nemrut Dağ, at 9,567 feet, also happens to be the largest inactive volcano in Kurdistan. It possesses an enormous crater six miles across, which is known to have been used in the past as an effective hiding-place for Kurdish rebels.57 Indeed, vulcanism has played a major role in the shaping of the local terrain, with the lava flow from Nemrut Dağ having provided the dam which allowed the formation of Lake Van in the first place. Among the other great volcanoes of Kurdistan is Greater Ararat, north-east of Van. So active has this region been, even in more recent ages, that the Wigrams were forced to admit that if the Garden of Eden had once been placed in this area, then it 'now lies buried beneath the lava of these volcanoes',58 as opposed to lying at the bottom of the lake.
I mention this vulcanism, for it is clear from the Book of Enoch that when Enoch visited the earthly paradise, the surrounding landscape contained 'a mountain range of fire which burnt day and night',59 an allusion perhaps to active volcanoes. On one occasion he witnesses 'a river of fire in which the fire flows like water and discharges itself into the great sea towards the west'.60 If this might be equated with the 'great sea' viewed by him on approaching the First Heaven, then it could imply that he had witnessed lava flowing into an expanse of water. Might the volcano have been Nemrut Dağ and the 'great sea' Lake Van? If so, then this great watery expanse might also provide us with a geographical location for the Vourukasha Sea of Iranian tradition.
I would not be the first to realize the obvious link between the vulcanism of Kurdistan and the fiery realms portrayed in the Book of Enoch. The French writer on ancient mysteries, Robert Charroux, in his 1964 book Legacy of the Gods reviewed the Watcher material presented in the Book of Enoch and surmised that the region of Kurdistan had been the setting for the fall of the angels. He added that: 'The guilty angels are hurled into the Valleys of Fire, which may refer to the Land of Fire (Azerbaijan) near which Noah's Ark landed.'61
Charroux had looked beyond the snowy heights of Mount Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range to seek a solution to the mysteries of Enoch, and had come to similar conclusions to myself. This was obviously good news, but it did little to prove the case. As the Wigrams had realized, any obvious remains of the Garden of Eden – and, more importantly, the Watchers' proposed settlement of 'Heaven' – were probably now buried beneath tens of feet of hardened lava flow. So there was little point in mounting an archaeological expedition to the area just yet. For the moment I would concentrate on the Kurds themselves, in an attempt to establish whether any of their religions, indigenous or otherwise, had preserved knowledge of the Watchers' presence, starting with the strange, devil-worshipping sect known as the Yezidi.