This article investigates the provenance of the Angel Mythos. I have marked it up quite a bit and it links to other aspects of our evolving understanding of spiritualism and shamanism to say nothing of the plausible role of a material GOD actuality.
We also pick up more of
the references to the events that occurred with the Pleistocene
Nonconformity. What is now named is an Egyptian Elder civilization
and we may extend that naturally to a Global Elder Civilization of
which we presently have little data. However, I have already pointed
out the inevitability of such a culture that likely matched and
surpassed out present levels of technology.
Once again we are getting
further confirmation.
The
Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race
By ANDREW COLLINS—
April
17, 2013
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.
[
not that likely, but we do have an alternative in our handful of
reports regarding reptilian aliens – Arclein. Either way, the
ancient text is pretty exact. ]
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 long periods 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 territoriesbeyond 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 rootpairi, ‘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 asKharsag 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 journalSumer 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
aszep 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
akosmokrator, 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)
Be
sure to check out the author’s article with new information in New
Dawn 138 (May-June 2013).
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.
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