Origins

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The Watchers and The Nephilim

http://www.chezbrodeur.net/erb/nephilim/leviathan/lev_p1.html

The mysterious passage quoted above, one of the Old Testament's most evocative and tantalizing, shines out of the dust of Genesis. It can probably be taken as an attempt by the Bible's authors to explain, and legitimize, the countless tales of gods and heroic demigods which far pre-dated the Scriptures in the ancient Near East and around the world. These mighty beings, Genesis would have us believe, have no connection with older, rival gods and goddesses; they are descended from the One God, fathered by his angels on human women.

The Bible, however, has seen many changes in its few centuries, and many translations throw different lights on the same material. The word given as "giants" in most modern versions is not always so. In several, notably the New English Bible, it is rendered in the original Hebrew: Nephilim. The Puritan theologian and witchhunter Cotton Mather, writing in 1712, called them by this name, and regarded the discovery of gigantic bones (which were probably mastodon) in America as scientific proof of the truth of Scripture; though his reference was strictly to Genesis and not to the books we're about to discuss.

Translation and reinterpretation have not been the only causes of change in the Bible. A wide body of material which was originally accepted as canonical was excised by the Councils of 633 and 637 CE for various reasons, mostly censorious. (For example, the Council banished the Infancy Gospels, wherein a cruelly arrogant Christ Child kills several innocent townspeople who merely got in his way.) Much of this material survives under the collective name of Apocrypha – from the Greek apokryphos, "hidden, secret" – under which name it was commonly included as an appendix in Bibles up to about the year 1600. We are fortunate that it does, as it is not only fascinating work of great antiquity but reflects traditions far older than itself. It is within the Apocrypha, notably the two Books of Enoch(not to be confused with the Liber Logaeth of Dr. John Dee, sometimes called by that name, about which more later) and the Book of Jubilees, that we find the full legend of the Watchers and the Nephilim, banished by fearful and bigoted Church Fathers from the Bible in use today. (Alas, the book that might tell us the most, the Book of Giants, is lost save for a few pricelsss pages – as far as I'm aware.)

The Apocryphal books tell us this: Originally the angels, or Sons of God, all surveyed the world and its beings from on high, and among them were those called the Grigori or Watchers. "The Watchers" can be translated with several shades of meaning, and depending on the translator means "observers" or "sentinels, sleepless ones"; whether they are vigilant or simply curious, they watch. Some texts say they were tempted by the beauty of human women ("the Sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair..."), while others grant them a compassionate Promethean urge to guide and teach or a touching desire for family and companionship; there were, we're told, no female Watchers. Whatever their motive, two hundred of the Watchers, led by the great angel Semjaza-Azazel, defied divine direction, descended to Earth and took a personal hand in humankind's education. Crafts and sciences, arts and letters, and the many skills of magic – all of which are described as "secrets...made in heaven", intended only for the Celestials to know – were shared with our distant ancestors. "And Azazel taught men to make swords and daggers and shields and breastplates...bracelets, and ornaments, and the metals of the earth, and the art of making up the eyes and beautifying the eyelids (...angels invent eye shadow...) ...Amezarak taught all those who cast spells and cut roots; Armaros the release of charms, spells, and magical skills; Baraqiel, astrology...Asradel, the path of the moon...Penemue: this one showed the sons of men the bitter and the sweet; he taught men the art of writing with ink and paper, and through this many have gone astray." Even reproductive choice was granted: "Kasdeyae: this one showed the sons of men the blows which attack the embryo in the womb so that it miscarries."

The lore they taught, however, takes a secondary role to the result of their sexual unions with womankind. (And considering the unrecorded difficulty of carrying a half-human fetus to term, Kasdeyae's may have been the wisest and kindest gift of all.) This was of course the birth of the Nephilim, sometimes called Naphalim or Naphidim, the "giants in the earth" of Genesis: "a monstrous race of giants with spiritual powers and earthly appetites". Some were indeed heroes, like the Biblical "mighty hunter before the Lord," Nimrod. Others were less noble. From I Enoch: "And they [the Watchers] took wives to themselves...and they taught them charms and spells...and [their wives] became pregnant and bore large giants... These devoured all the toil of men, until men were unable to sustain them. And the giants turned against them in order to devour men, and they began to sin against birds and against animals...and they devoured one another's flesh and drank the blood from it. Then the earth complained against the lawless ones."

The Aramaic Greek translation complicates matters further: "And they bore to them three kinds: first large giants, and to the giants were born the Naphalim, and the Naphalim begot the Elioud. And they grew according to their greatness, and they taught themselves and their wives charms and spells." Jubilees agrees, adding that "They were all unalike.." Thus we can imagine three successive generations of angel-progeny co-existing on the earth, all skilled in magickal arts and all apparently peaceable – at least for a time. This correlates with traditions quoted by Davidson and Huson that the Nephilim – not the Watchers – can be credited with works as diverse as the forging, in Beowulf, of King Hrothgar's magical sword, and the building of the Tower of Babel; if the Nephilim existed long enough to master some creative arts, perhaps they also had time to reproduce. Sadly, it was not to last: Jubilees goes on to say, "and they devoured each other; the giant killed the Naphil, the Naphil killed the Eljo [Elioud], and the Eljo humankind, and one man another man..."

The loyal archangels Michael, Gabriel, Sariel and Uriel, who had not followed Azazel and were still faithfully observing Earthly affairs, saw all this and protested to God. It's highly interesting to note the tone of their complaint. "See then what Azazel has done," they say ( I Enoch IX), "how he has taught all iniquity on the earth, and revealed the eternal secrets which were made in heaven...and has made known spells, and has brought knowledge to men...and the sons of men practice his practices in order to know the secrets..." This is not simple righteous wrath toward violence and sorcery; these things were private property, and the archangels are jealously angry at their revelation to mankind. I Enoch (LXV:6-7, quoting the even more ancient Book of Noah) is explicit: "...they [humans] have learnt all the secrets of the angels...and all their secret power, and all the power of those who practice magic arts, and the power of enchantments and...of those who cast molten images for all the earth..." (Could this be one reason for the suppression of the Apocrypha? The chance that no condemnation of divination, astrology, spells, etc., as Devil-inspired would stand if these chapters, plainly claiming them as heavenly lore, remained in the Old Testament? The whole history of the Middle Ages might have been different... maybe. More likely, of course, it would have been asserted that the gift of heaven's wisdom was corrupted and diabolized by the givers' rebellion. Interesting notion at least.)

But it was the unauthorized act of revelation that outraged the archangels, and it was that act which God punished. "I shall restore the Earth, so that not all the sons of men shall be destroyed through the mystery which the Watchers made known." Divinely commanded, the obedient Watchers swept down and defeated their brothers, whose punishment was to watch the death of their children before being themselves imprisoned in the mountains and deserts of the Earth until Judgment Day, when they will be cast into the lake of eternal fire. (Azazel is the only Watcher whose burial place is believed to be known: under a heap of stones at the foot of the cliff of Haradan, in what is now the Sinai, where, regarded as a demon, he received every year the scapegoat driven into the desert with its burden of Israel's sins. — Alternately, he is sometimes said to have hurled himself into the sky and become the constellation Orion.) God sends the prophet Enoch to scold them in their imprisonment, saying that as spiritual beings they were never intended to have wives as mortal men do (of course, their creator could presumably have seen to it that they felt no longing for sex or love, but he apparently neglected to do so) and even scorning the knowledge they shared with humanity – "You were in heaven, but its secret had not been revealed to you and a worthless mystery you knew." – although the Four Archangels' concern surely contradicts this mocking remark. Other Apocryphal books say that even now they are held and tortured in the terrible Fifth Heaven, set aside for just this purpose. (I Enoch XIII describes the Watchers/Grigori as stricken mute with guilt and terror after Enoch's reproof, and indeed in II Enoch the Grigori imprisoned in the Fifth Heaven are voiceless giants.) The world, meanwhile, is swept clean in a great earthquake and flood, destroying the Nephilim's lands, to which many writers trace the worldwide legends of a catastrophic inundation.

But the Watchers' teaching continued to influence humankind in the ages after the Deluge, even though now condemned and studied in secret. In Jubilees VIII:1-5, Kainam, Noah's grandson, "came upon a writing which men of old had carved on a rock...it contained the teaching of the Watchers, in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun and moon and all the signs of heaven. And he wrote it down and said nothing about it..." fearing punishment from Noah, who blamed the Watchers for the Flood and constantly warned his clan against any dealings with them or their descent. (Must have been one blessed huge rock, unless the Watchers' skills included micro-engraving.) This is especially notable because Kainam is the brother of Chesed, father of Ur, who is said in the Apocrypha to have founded the famous Chaldean city of that name. "And [they] grew up and lived in Ur of the Chaldees," says Jubilees (XI:7-8) of Serug and Nahor, Kainam's descendants, "and worshipped idols...and [Nahor's] father instructed him in the learning of the Chaldees, how to divine and foretell the future from the signs of heaven." It's most tempting to conclude that Kainam's grandchildren through generations inherited and studied the written record he had made from the stone; that the legendary wisdom of the Chaldeans, which amazes history, had descended to them from the Watchers themselves.

The Nephilim – and, some say, their children, the Elioud/Eljo – were physically exterminated by the avenging angel horde. But, though their half-mortal bodies could be slain, their half-angel souls could not, nor could they be held in chains. They remain on the earth, wandering at will, and though chaotic and destructive will not be punished for their deeds until the Final Judgment "in which the great age will be brought to an end". Occult tradition holds that now and then a Nephilim spirit will incarnate in human form (the souls of those who quit the body violently, it's said, are most pure...). The Apocrypha claim the disembodied Nephilim are the origin of demons, and accuse them of many crimes. Jubilees places the blame for the Flood squarely upon the fornication of the Watchers and the iniquity and bloodshed of the Nephilim. "And now the giants who were born from souls and flesh will be called evil spirits upon the earth," charges I Enoch XV-XVI, "From the day of...the slaughter and destruction of the giant Nephilim, the mighty ones of the earth, the great famous ones, the spirits that have gone out from their souls as from the flesh will destroy without judgment." Even the mortal women who are their mothers are cursed to become sirens and demonesses. In Jubilees X:1-6, Noah's sons beg him to protect their children from "unclean demons" who are "leading astray, blinding and killing" them; Noah, petitioning God to "let not wicked spirits rule over [my grandchildren] and destroy them", adds, "Thou knowest what thy Watchers, the fathers of these spirits, did in my day..." making it clear that the demonic spirits and the Nephilim are considered one and the same. (One wonders if Kainam was one of these grandchildren being "led astray" by a "demonic" Nephilim familiar. Maybe it was helping him interpret the stone...)

It's interesting to note that, although God commands that all the Nephilim be destroyed, giants continue to appear throughout the Old Testament, always opposing the armies of God. (Godwin does cite, though briefly, a tradition that beings called Gibborim – simply "giants" – were saved by "dark angels" from the Flood.) The Anakim or Sons of Anak, to whom Joshua's forces "were as grasshoppers in their sight"; the Zamzummim; Goliath of Gath and his vengeful brother Lahmi; and King Og of Bashan, he of the nine-foot-long iron bed; all appear and deal direly with such heroes of God as Joshua, David and Moses. All, too, are referred to not simply as giants themselves but as "those born to the giant" or "those who come of the giants" – as descendants of a giant clan or race. Surely these great beings are the remaining children of the angelic bloodline of the Nephilim and Watchers, the last sad traces of which will be found centuries later in the ogres of fairytale.

Paul Huson, in his Mastering Witchcraft, asserts that the Watchers really are the beings the modern witch calls gods, "the parents of giant and human alike", based on prehistoric racial memories of the millennnia-past age when they walked the Earth beside us. Indeed, nearly every human race speaks in its legends of tall, wonderful strangers of amazing skill, who came to their land in ancient times and taught their great-ancestors everything they needed to know; virtually every useful invention still practiced by humanity has been attributed to these visitors. The modern trend is to attribute such influences to advanced alien civilizations, as in the books of von Daniken and others, but our many-greats-grandmothers and -fathers had no doubt that they had walked and spoken with gods and the children of gods. (It's a story we need and love in all its variations: even the Nazi theorist Hoerbiger argued that the great mystery civilizations of the Atlantidean period were built by mutant human giants of vast cosmic awareness and knowledge, the benign and rightful – and, of course, proto-Aryan – kings and teachers of humanity.) More to the point, they are, Huson reminds us, the source of magic: the original spark we cherish at the heart of all our Work is a trace of starry wisdom from beyond Earth. (We'll meet this theme again.)

The Nephilim are thus the youngest members of an old family, descended from the riotous and voracious children of Sumerian Tiamat, the rebel giants of Norse myth (who, it's worth noting, are described in the sagas as skilled in magic, famed for their knowledge of chants, runes and spells), the Greek Titans and Cyclops; and before them the monsters, oldest of all. Even the genies of Arab fable are members of the family: the Djinn, the Firstborn of Fire, are close kin to the Watchers. Considered chaotic entities who must be fettered for the good of the world, they are bottled and cast into the sea even as the Watchers are locked into the mountains of the Earth. — Elements of the tale vary, but always the central theme is of awesome beings, often fathered or mothered by a Celestial and possessed of great powers, which prove dangerous and untamable and wreak havoc until put down by the combined might of the gods. Always they represent the primordial Chaos, the power born before the gods, which civilized pantheons may subdue and submerge but never destroy. Less than divine, they can be defeated; but, more than mortal, they cannot be killed, and must be exiled or imprisoned for eternity. If they are released it means at least terrible danger, at worst Ragnarok, Apocalypse, Doomsday.