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Was it all an angelic thought experiment turned real? The angel Semyaza worried he would take the blame. Ever since the first generation of mankind had multiplied, the Watchers had been observing the women from above and selecting wives in their minds. The temptation was too great for them to stay in the clouds. “Let us all swear an oath and bind ourselves not to abandon this plan,” they avowed. Two hundred angels slid down the icy slopes of snow-capped Mount Hermon, connecting the predations of heaven to an innocent earth.
The Watchers taught the women how to dye their clothes in colours and line their eyelids in kohl. Their chief Semyaza instructed in enchantment and root-cuttings. Other angels taught the constellations. Ezequiel revealed the science of clouds, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the auguries of the moon. When the women became pregnant, they gave birth to a race of giants called Nephilim, or “fallen ones,” who swiftly began to devour everything in their path. When the people could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them in attack. It was then that the angels first taught mankind how to wage war. Azazel gave lessons in the manufacture of swords and knives, shields and breastplates, and the people armed themselves for the first time.
God looked down upon His creation, a riot of bloodshed alternating with sex. He told the archangel Uriel to inform Noah that He was sending a catastrophic flood. To the archangel Raphael, God ordered, “Bind Azazel hand and foot; cast him into a cleft in the mountains and cover him with night. The whole earth has been corrupted through the works taught by him – to Azazel ascribe all sin.” God then turned to Gabriel: “Send out the Nephilim one against the next, so they slay each other in civil war.” He turned to Michael, “Seize Semyaza and his associates. When they have watched their sons kill one another, imprison them for seventy generations, tied up in the darkness of a cave.”
In the family tree branching from Adam and Eve, their descendant Enoch, great-grandfather to Noah, is said to have been the first writer. “And he was the first among men born on earth to learn to write and to acquire knowledge and wisdom,” recounts the Book of Jubilees, from the second century BCE. Descending from the sky, the Watchers, a type of heavenly being tasked with surveillance, illicitly taught Enoch their alphabet and how to shape letters into words. Mankind’s earliest texts were written in the language of angels. Enoch authored treatises on astronomy and divination, and was the first to describe the seasons and the names and order of the months: “And he was the first to write a testimony; and he warned the sons of men about what would happen in future generations on the earth.” In his testament, Enoch recalled how, when God rained punishments upon the wayward angels for procreating with women and teaching celestially stolen knowledge to humankind, the angels approached Enoch and begged the patriarch to intercede on their behalf. Enoch wrote a petition to God; then sat down beside the waters of Dan in the Galilee and fell asleep.
Compiled around the third century BCE, the collection of writings known as the Book of Enoch were once major scriptures in early Jewish and Christian thought, and circulated widely in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Coptic, Latin and Syriac. “Behold, visions fell down upon me,” Enoch related, and told of how, in his sleep, he undertook a journey to heaven and then to the underworld. In a voyage presaging that of Muhammad or Dante, Enoch ascended to the fiery seat of divine power, where he met God face-to-face to discuss the problem of the angels and the origins of evil on earth. As the first to travel to heaven and establish an incandescent intimacy with God, Enoch would be remembered not only as the first writer, who wrote of the earth’s first war, but also the first mystic. Traces of Enoch appear in the Book of Genesis, which records of the antediluvian sage, “he walked with God.” Enoch lived for 365 years, according to Genesis 5:23-24, then “he was no more; for God took him.” The line has been interpreted to mean that Enoch departed for a heavenly afterlife without ever having to undergo the inconvenience of death.
By the second century CE, a consensus had begun to form that Enoch, despite his wisdom and his renown, had gotten something profoundly wrong. Jewish sages such as Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai rejected Enochic ideas of angelic sin, and as the canon of the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, began to coalesce, the writings of Enoch became increasingly marginalised along with what the venerable Rabbi Akiva had called “outside books”. While early Church fathers such as Justin Martyr and Tertullian had taken Enoch as an authoritative prophet, and fragments of his word are scattered in the New Testament, by the time of St Augustine the North African theologian was warning that Enoch’s writings were among those “too ancient for the Church to allow,” and vulnerable to suspicions “that they are rather counterfeit than true.” As Christian orthodoxy was forged over the fourth and fifth centuries, Enochic scriptures were destroyed or buried in desert troves of heretic manuscripts. By the early Middle Ages, Enoch had all but vanished in the West. No copies of the Book of Enoch were thought to be extant in Europe; only his name, and a skeleton of his myth, would be preserved over the centuries by occultists, kabbalists and freemasons. Some said Enoch entered Islam, hiding under the name of the prophet Idris. In the 16th century, the English astronomer John Dee attempted to recover the lost language of the angels taught to Enoch, deciphering the “Enochian” alphabet through a series of revelations. Inspired by his own visions, William Blake depicted Enoch in several drawings with bare feet, for his slippers were rumoured to have been left behind when God lifted him up.
Over the centuries of his absence in Europe, Enoch had indeed survived – and was living in Ethiopia, where he remained an important patriarch within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It was said that Enoch had waited out the flood in the Garden of Eden and knew everything that would befall humankind; he was to keep a diary of human history until Judgement Day. In manuscripts written in Ge‘ez, an ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia, the collected testaments of Enoch, or Mashafa Henok Nabiy, were perpetuated as canonical scripture and usually placed in the Old Testament immediately before Job. On an expedition to Ethiopia in 1773 to locate the source of the Nile, the Scottish imperialist James Bruce commandeered a manuscript of Mashafa Henok Nabiy and paid Gondarine artisans to create three more deluxe gift copies of it, which he ceremoniously presented to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Louis XV in Paris, and Pope Clement XIV in Rome. Bruce’s “discovery” of the lost Book of Enoch ignited a surge of interest, yet European and American scholars ignored the fact that what they had found was an Ethiopian artifact, transmitted and transformed over a thousand years by the innovation of its own priests and scribes. Instead they viewed Ethiopia as the mountainous and isolated, faithful preserver of the West’s ancient texts, a cave in which the manuscripts, like the rebel angels, had long been tied up.
When Enoch awoke by the side of the river, he found the angels weeping at ‘Abelsjail, and told them what he had seen.
“Clouds invited me— a mist summoned me— lightning hastened me— the wind lifted me up.
I was carried to a fortress built of crystal, with a ceiling interlaced with stars. It was hot as fire and cold as frost. There was no life within it, and I grew frightened. I fell down on my face, and lo! A second building appeared, even more majestic than the first. A portal opened up for me in a triangle of flames, onto a scene so luminous I could hardly look upon it. The floor of the room was on fire and at its centre, a lofty throne, with wheels made of shining suns. There God sat, wrapped in robes whiter than any snow. He was surrounded by cherubim – a hundred thousand – and saints who never leave him, night or day. I trembled, prostrated before him, and dared not approach. The Lord called me: Come hither Enoch, and hear my word.
Go tell the Watchers who have sent thee: You should intercede for men, not men for you. You were holy, living the eternal life, yet you defiled yourselves with the blood of women, and sired children just like men who perish and die. These offspring, mixed of the ethereal and the flesh, shall be called evil spirits. This is their beginning, born from the Watchers and the daughters of men. After the deaths of the Nephilim, their souls will come forth from their bodies and remain, as the source of evil on earth. They will afflict, oppress, destroy, annihilate, decimate, raze, attack, battle, and ravage until the Judgement Day.
Say to the Watchers: You had lived in heaven, but all the mysteries hadn’t been revealed to you. You knew worthless ones, and those were the ones you taught. Through these mysteries women and men will bring about much evil on earth.
Tell them, Enoch: You will have no peace.”
The Book of Enoch offers a counter-myth of the origin of evil. In Genesis, as it is often interpreted, evil arises from a primordial act of human disobedience in the Garden, as Eve reaches for the forbidden fruit and brings down suffering and wickedness onto humankind. Yet Enoch, who has visited the Garden himself, sets all this aside. The serpent is nowhere to be seen. According to Enoch, the roots of evil are to be found not within human nature or human error, but high above us, in the empyreal realm. Evil arrives from someplace foreign and far away from humankind, rather than from within our own rotten cores. Evil, in Enoch’s testament, originates at three points of rupture. The first is the act of heaven mating with earth. Evil’s birth required angelic, erotic desire and then procreation; evil incubated in a mortal womb. The second turn is the revelation of secret knowledge and arts by the angels to men, with the craftsmanship of violence foremost among their illicit pedagogy. At the third turn, in the midst of the earth’s earliest war, evil rises again, quite literally, in the form of malevolent spirits coming up from the dead bodies of the slain Nephilim. While the Genesis version of evil “protects the reputation of heaven,” in the words of scholar James VanderKam, Enoch indicts heaven: the fall is the work of angels, not men.
From the first century CE, the reading of Adam and Eve’s transgression as marking the birth of evil became increasingly common, while Enoch’s version of events began to be suppressed for its locating of human sin in angelic descent. Traces of the same story linger in the Book of Genesis at 6:1-4, which tells of the sexual trespass of the “sons of God” with the “daughters of men” that conceived the Nephilim, yet the lines become a warning against the supposed crime of miscegenation, which unleashed the flood. While themes of sexual purity remained prominent, any notions that the teachings of fallen angels corrupted mankind vanished into the margins of the heterodox and the occult. One problem was that Enoch’s emphasis on angelic responsibility rendered the Christ narrative less plausible – Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross as redemption for the original sin of Adam makes less sense if it was actually a rampage of two hundred angels who caused the entrance of evil into our world. As Enoch’s testament describes the unruly stampede from Mount Hermon, at the border of what is now Syria and Lebanon, it looks even less likely that there is any sort of divine plan at work in this world. If evil comes from angels, it blurs the boundaries of what we could ever mean by the good.
It may also be the case that the Enochic scriptures were discarded almost everywhere because they proved less useful to terrestrial politics. The Adam and Eve aetiology of evil lends itself more clearly to the project of human governance than Enoch’s version. In interpretations of Genesis that became popular over the centuries in which the Christian foundations of political authority were laid, human nature is inherently criminal and incorrigibly wicked, requiring punitive modes of religiosity and control. Enoch instead appears to exonerate mankind: we are haunted by the ghosts of heaven and have powers that should not be our own.
Was Enoch wrong about evil? Perhaps more powerfully than the Genesis model, the writings attributed to him capture something intuitive about it, at once unspeakable, indefinable, and recognisable. Evil is the impossible becoming true. Enoch spoke to this in a mythic way, as he told of angels seducing women to birth giants, and of how humans learned impossible arts like divination, writing and enchantment. The impossible becomes true, “and what is true quickly becomes routine,” as Susan Neiman has written in Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2002). Evil becomes routine and mundane, as we learn to live with the roving, disembodied spirits of dead Nephilim. On New Year’s Day in 2024, according to rumours on TikTok and X, Nephilim were reportedly sighted at a Miami mall engaging in a gunfight with teenagers. The unexpected appearance of the word “Nephilim” in Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, sparked a theory that the reason why the United States invaded Iraq wasn’t because of the obviously nonexistent weapons of mass destruction but to recover the body of a Naphil held in an Iraqi museum. Semyaza and Azazel remain in a mountainous cleft, imprisoned for teaching us the basics of war, and they have no syllabus for justice. .