FROM THE ASHES OF ANGELS

The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race

By Andrew Collins

Is civilisation the legacy of a race of human angels known as

Watchers and Nephilim? Andrew Collins, author of FROM THE
ASHES OF ANGELS, previews his history of angels and fallen
angels and traces their origin back to an extraordinarily
advanced culture that entered the Near East shortly after the
end of the last Ice Age.

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 - ie 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 now 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 (ie 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 'Œrin ('Œr 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 association 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
story-tellers.

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 root-cuttings', a reference to the
magical arts shunned upon by most orthodox Jews. One of their
number, Pˆnˆm–e, 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 Kƒsdejƒ, 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 D–
dƒˆl. 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, ie 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.

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 'Ahyƒ and 'Ohyƒ, 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.

Angels in Paradise
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
north-western 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 territories
beyond 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? It is from here that they
descending 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 god-kings 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 root pairi,
`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, ie 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 as Kharsag 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
Dilamƒn 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', ie 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 journal Sumer 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 Catal Hayuk, 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 Catal Hayuk 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?

The Serpent People

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 D„niken 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 Catal Hayuk. The
close proximity of both this unique `Christian' art and the
site of Catal Hayuk 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 Catal Hayuk? 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 (ie 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
as zep 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 (ie 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
a allegorical allusion to the Age of Leo? The indications are
that the lion of Leo come 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 9588 BC? Give
or take a few centuries, this date was remarkably close to
the time-frame 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 a kosmokrator, 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 (Michael
Joseph, hbk, œ16.99)

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, 1989Charles, R. H., The Book of Enoch or 1
Enoch, Oxford Univ Press, 1912
Eisenman, Robert H., and Michael 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, Turnstone Books, London, 1979
Izady, Mehrdad R., The Kurds - A Concise Handbook, Crane
Russak, London, 1992
Massey, Gerald, Ancient Egypt - The Light of the World, 2
vols., T. Fisher & Unwin, London, 1907Milik, J. T., The Books
of Enoch - Aramaic Fragments of Qumrƒn Cave 4, OUP, 1976
Morfill, W. R., trans., edit and intro R. H. 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