From the Ashes of the Angels
Is the civilization the legacy of a race of angels-humans known as Watchers or nephilim? Andrew Collins, author of The Last Gods, gives us a taste of his narrative of fallen angels and traces their origin to an extraordinarily advanced culture that came into contact with the Near East at the end of the last Ice Age.
We usually associate angels with wonderful Pre-Raphaelite or Renaissance paintings, with statues that adorn Gothic architecture, or with supernatural beings who intervene in our lives in times of need. For the last 2,000 years this has been the stereotypical image promoted by the Christian Church. But who are the angels? Where they come from? And what did they mean for the development of organized religions?
Many see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, as a narrative peppered with angels appearing to virtuous patriarchs and visionary prophets. But that's not the case at all.
Angels became an integral part of the Jewish religion only after the return from the Babylonian exile, around 450 BC. And they began to appear frequently in Jewish religious literature even later, in around 200 BC.
The Book of Enoch
Compiled in various phases between 165 BC and the beginning of the Christian era, this so-called apocryphal (i.e. falsely attributed) work has as its main theme the story of the fall of the angels. But not just any angels, but rather those who were known as Irin (Ir is the singular form), meaning “those who watch” or simply “watchers”. The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebellious angels, or Watchers, decided to transgress the celestial laws, “descend” to the plains, and take wives among mortals.
While taking advantage of women, the 200 rebellious angels spent their time imparting heavenly secrets to those who would hear them. One of them, called Azazel, is said to have
"taught men to forge swords, and knives, and shields, and armor, and taught them the metals (of the earth) and the art of working them"
referring to the fact that the Watchers had taught humans the use of metals, women how to experience sexual pleasure and indulge in promiscuity – which in the eyes of the Jewish speakers was unspeakably blasphemous.
Other Watchers were accused of revealing knowledge to mortals in more scientific fields, such as astronomy, cloud science (or meteorology), “earth signs,” presumably geodesy and geography, as well as “signs” for the passage of celestial bodies, such as the Sun and Moon.
One of them, Penemu, instructed the men in the use of "ink and paper", implying that the Watchers also introduced the first forms of writing.
The above raises a fundamental question, why angels would have had such knowledge in the first place. One would never expect this knowledge to be necessary for an angel, unless he is also human.
It s therefore an extremely advanced civilization that passes some of its secrets to a less evolved culture.
If the Nephilim, mentioned in the Book of Enoch and in the Qumran literature, were, in reality, a more advanced people than the Jews, who came into contact with the themselves in prehistoric times, two questions arise spontaneously: who or what were these serpent-faced bird-men? And, above all, where did they come from?
Maybe in the Parsua region? Was from there that the Vigilantes came from? Had they descended from there to the plains to take mortal wives and reveal the forbidden arts and secrets of Heaven? All roads seem to lead to the mountainous region of modern-day Azerbaijan that extends west into the Taurus Mountains of eastern Anatolia and northern Syria, north into the region of Armenia, and southeast along the Zagros mountain range. This vast area inhabited mainly by nomads, warlike rebel bands, isolated religious communities and the occasional village or town, is known to the world as Kurdistan. However, according to biblical and apocryphal tradition, that was also the place where the Garden of Eden was located and the landing point of the Noah's Ark.
The Book of Genesis speaks of the creation of a garden "in the east, in Eden”...
So where was Eden located? All we know is that it was located among the Seven Heavens… The word “Eden” is translated from Hebrew as “pleasure” or “delight,” a reference to the fact that God created those gardens for the pleasure of mankind. This is not, however, its true origin. The word "Eden" comes, in fact, from Akkadian, a Semitic language introduced into Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) by the people of Akkad, a race that took control of the ancient kingdom of Sumer during the second part of the 3rd millennium BC.
In their language the word “Eden”, or edin, meant “steppe” or “terrace”. As regards the word "paradise", I discovered that it simply refers to a "wall", from the Persian roots pairi, "around", and deza "wall".
The writers of the Book of Genesis located both the cradle of humanity, the Garden of Eden, and the place of its regeneration after the Great Flood with the same region of northern Kurdistan, certainly a clue to the fact that the key to origins of the Vigilantes reside precisely in this geographical area.
The mythology of the Sumerians and their subsequent conquerors, the Akkadians, also placed the homeland of the gods in exactly the same region. In their religious literature this divine abode is called Kur, the celestial mountain. In that place the gods, called Anannage, or Anunnaki, lived in a paradisiacal realm made up of gardens, orchards, temples and irrigated fields which not only recalls the Seven Heavens described in the Book of Enoch, but is also referred to on more than one occasion as edin, the Akkadian word for “steppe” or “plateau.” Furthermore, linking Kur with the Jewish kingdom of angels is the fact that the Anunnaki, like the Enochian Watchers, were governed by a seven-member council. These were equivalent to the seven archangels of Judaism after the exile, and the six so-called Amesha Spenta, or "immortal saints", who, together with the supreme god Ahura Mazda, preside over the angelic hierarchies of the Iranian tradition. The Anunnaki, then, were another “version” of the Enochian and Dead Sea Watchers, whose homeland was a high-altitude agricultural settlement called Eden, located somewhere in the mountains of Kurdistan?
It was said that there the god Ea and his wife established “an age without infamy of complete happiness”. It is also described as a pure, clean and "shining abode of the immortals" where death, disease and suffering are unknown and some mortals have received the gift of "the life of a god". There are testimonies that suggest the existence of a much earlier mythical Dilmun in a mountainous area beyond the plains of Sumer.
Very curious is the fact that as in the Jewish and Iranian myths, even among the Annunaki there would be a lineage of fallen gods. While 300 remained in Heaven, another 600, under the command of Nergal, god of the underworld, settled among mortals, to whom they gave much knowledge.
The Sumerians were a unique population. No one knows what their true origin actually is and where exactly they got the knowledge to found their city-states in the 4th millennium BC. However, the Sumerians themselves had very clear ideas on this point. They claimed that their entire culture was inherited from the Anunnaki and that they came from an ancestral homeland located in the mountains. To emphasize this they used the ideogram represented by a mountain to indicate "the country", i.e. Sumer. Archaeologists have no problem accepting Kurdistan as the cradle of Near Eastern civilization. Shortly after the ice recession of the last Ice Age, around 8,500 BC, some of the earliest examples of agriculture, animal domestication, decorated pottery, metallurgy, and crafted obsidian tools and implements emerged in this region.
Kurdistan was the point of origin of the so-called "Neolithic explosion" which occurred from the 9th millennium BC onwards. It is thanks to the lifestyle of this community that the first known form of "token" barter developed. This primitive method of exchange would later lead to the creation of the first ideographic and syllabic system in the Mesopotamian plains during the 4th millennium BC.
But, what caused this “Neolithic explosion”? And why did it begin in this remote and rugged region? Something was missing, as Mehrdad R. Izady, a renowned scholar of Kurdish cultural history, observed:
“The inhabitants of these lands went through a stage of accelerated technological evolution, caused by as yet unknown forces. They soon found themselves far ahead of surrounding communities, the majority of which were already among the most technologically advanced civilizations in the world.”
What could these “yet unknown forces” be?
Was the Melek Taus worshiped by the Yezidis a Nephilim? Were the snake-faced human figurines of the Jarmo people representations of fallen angels? Is Kurdistan really the place of descent of the Watchers, and therefore the origin of the entire Western civilization?
In a locality known as Jarmo, overlooking the Little Zab, in Iraqi Kurdistan, archaeologists have brought to light evidence of an advanced Protoneolithic community, which flourished around 6,750 BC for around 2,000 years.
Around 5500 BC the inhabitants of the Kurdish highlands began their mass descent towards the plains of Mesopotamia. At about the same time, Eridu, the first city of the Fertile Crescent, was founded, with its temple complex, which included an underground ritual pool. Around 5000 BC a new culture known today as Ubaid arrived on the northern plains of Mesopotamia.
They brought with them their own peculiar funerary practices and unique artistic style, which included the habit of leaving very strange anthropomorphic figurines in the tombs of their dead. The strangest and most irresistible is by far the one showing a naked female being she holds a baby at her left breast. The infant's left hand is on her breast and it is very clear that she is breastfeeding. The image would be extremely touching, if it weren't for a chilling feature of the newborn: his eyes are elongated and he has the head of a reptile. This is very significant, as it suggests that the child was born with those characteristics. In other words, the lizard heads were not masks or symbolic animal forms but abstract images of a real race that the Ubaid people associated with reptilian characteristics. Could they be stylized representations of the viper-faced Vigilantes?
Late Babylonian tradition was permeated by a real fear that, if the dead were not buried properly, their souls would be led into the underworld to transform into Edimmu, the blood-sucking demons.
The world underground
Although there are no traces of underground domains in Mesopotamia, very ancient chthonic citadels do exist in the Middle East. For example, in Cappadocia, in eastern Turkey, there are no fewer than 36 underground cities, the most famous of which is Derinkuyu, which is estimated to contain approximately 20,000 inhabitants. The cities explored so far reach a maximum depth of almost half a kilometer and feature streets, complex tunnel systems, homes and rooms and common areas. Each can be sealed off from the outside world by swinging huge circular doors in front of the opening, while on the surface the only visible signs of their presence are standing megalithic stones marking the location of deep wells that also serve as ventilation channels for the various levels.
The people who built these underground kingdoms are still unknown.
Their civilization should date back at least 4,000 years ago, while experimental evidence suggests that the construction of such settlements dates back to at least 9,000 BC, when the last gasp of the Ice Age was about to give an arctic connotation to the climate of the Middle East. At the same time the numerous active volcanoes sprayed rains of fire in the surrounding territories and, when the Ice Age finally decided to recede, floods comparable to the biblical deluge brought total destruction to the most depressed areas. Furthermore, Persian mythology tells us that the ancestors of the Iranian race survived the long winter of snow and ice by building a var, a word that indicates an underground city. The memory of such underground worlds was probably also at the basis of the Judeo-Christian belief in Gehenna or Hell – the fiery realm in which the fallen angels were imprisoned as punishment for having interfered in the affairs of humanity.
Let us also remember that, in history of Ishtar's descent into the underworld, the goddess encounters beings "like birds covered with feathers", who "since ancient times ruled the earth".
Children of the Djinn: the first factors
Although it is commonly accepted opinion that the Neolithic explosion began in the mountains of Kurdistan around 8,500 BC, this did not coincide with the birth of agriculture, the domestication of animals, the manufacturing of precision instruments and structured social communities. There is strong evidence that these practices already existed in several places on the banks of the Nile in southern Egypt and Sudan, around 12,500 BC. These advanced communities continued to develop uninterruptedly until 10,500 BC, when they suddenly stopped practicing agriculture for no known reason. Scholars have blamed this sudden and complete cessation of the sophisticated agricultural-based lifestyle of the Nile peoples on the destructive flooding of the Nile at the time. However, I believe there was more behind this incredible regression.
It almost seemed as if those who had taught these populations the rudiments of agriculture had walked away, leaving their obedient pupils to regress to a primitive hunting and gathering economy that was much more common in the period in question. It is therefore interesting to note that after its apparent disappearance from Egypt in 10,500 BC, agriculture did not reappear until its flowering in Kurdistan 1,500 years later. Is it therefore possible that the teachers of the Nilotic communities left Egypt for Kurdistan between 10,500 and 9,000 BC? Who really were these hypothetical agronomists, and what led them to abandon the cultivated land of Paleolithic Egypt in search of new homes?
A great civilization, far preceding the Egyptian one, would be the mother of the Pharaonic and Middle Eastern cultures. Was Egypt the cradle of the Fallen Angels? Why did they have to abandon the land of the Nile? A fallen race whose existence is now undeniable.
Angels were not incorporeal entities but flesh-and-blood characters, with light skin and red hair, who lived at the dawn of civilization, possessors of superior knowledge coming from a pre-diluvian era. They mixed with men and were called Watchers, or Nephilim or Shemsu Hor. Those who came into contact with them called them bird-men or serpent-men and described them in the Book of Enoch up to the Dead Sea Scrolls. From Cappadocia to Iraqi Kurdistan, legends and Neolithic traces of these people considered semi-divine abound. Where did they come from? The author answers: “from Egypt” because that is where the most ancient and advanced traces of this civilization would be found.
Many testimonies that have emerged in recent times suggest that the Great Sphinx of Giza was not built in the period of the pharaohs as has always been believed, but much earlier.
If the Great Sphinx was built as a signal for the equinoxes in the same period as the nearby pyramids, i.e. in the Pharaonic era, it would make more sense if it had had the shape of a bull, the Apis bull being the totem animal of that period. The fact that it represents a lion suggests a connection with the stars of Leo, having been built at a time when that constellation rose with the equinoctial sun.
The last Age of Leo occurred between 10,970 and 8,810 BC, so the Sphinx would have been built in that period. This is by no means a new theory. As far as I know, it was first expounded by the British astromythologist Gerald Massey, in 1907. In the extraordinary work entitled Ancient Egypt – The Light of the World, he boldly draws the following conclusions:
“We can date the Sphinx as a monument created by these great builders and thinkers, whose fame has survived so long, dating back 13,000 years”
More recent astromythological evidence, presented by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval in their book Keeper of Genesis, has convincingly demonstrated that the Great Sphinx, like the entire Giza plateau, dates back to 10,500 BC, in the same period in which Nile proto-agriculture was interrupted. Since we know that the large stone blocks removed from the enclosure, which collapsed around the Leonine monument at the time of its construction, were used to build the Sphinx itself and the valley temples, then presumably they too will date to the same period. All this indicates the presence in Egypt, around 10,500 BC, of an advanced culture in the fields of agronomy, engineering, construction technology, mythology linked to the stars and the earth, to the point of having a profound knowledge of the precessional cycle of 26,000 years of the earth. Who were these people? Were the builders of the Sphinx really the ancestors of the tall, viper-faced Watchers of Kurdistan? Folklore, legends and the spread of agriculture in the ancient world would seem to support this hypothesis. However, if this is correct, what caused the ancient Egyptian culture to migrate to the highlands of Kurdistan?
Global Destruction
As others have demonstrated, there is plenty of evidence that as the last ice age came to an end between the 11th and 10th millennia BC, the world was rocked by a series of drastic climate changes and geological upheavals. Volcanoes erupted, earthquakes shook the earth, floods submerged large regions, and long periods of darkness blotted out the sun. This led to the death of countless millions of animals and the total extinction of dozens of species. Legends that tell of cataclysms seem to have codified these events with colorful and often symbolic details. The ancient Egyptian culture therefore found itself in the midst of this terrible era. It is known for certain that the climatic upheavals of the period caused enormous floods along the Nile and for scholars this would be the reason for the end of proto-agriculture.
This supposition is supported by vivid accounts of fires and floods found in Egyptian tradition itself. For example, Coptic-Arabic texts speak of devastation caused by floods and a great fire originating from the constellation of Leo – a reference not necessarily to some celestial body falling from that sector of the sky but rather to the time period in which such events occurred, that is, in the Age of Leo.
The surviving humans managed to escape the devastating fire of the goddess by taking refuge in the mountains, hiding in holes like snakes... this includes Cappadocia, whose underground cities appear to have been built around 9000 BC and the mountains of Kurdistan... a text Coptic-Arabic of the 9th century, known as Abou Hormeis, reveals that the Egyptian astronomer-priests, having understood that the destruction of their race was imminent, agreed that:
"The flood would take place as soon as the heart of the Lion entered the first minute of the Cancer head”.
The “heart of the lion” was the name given in the classical period to the star Regulus, the “royal star” of Leo which is located exactly on the ecliptic. Since the constellation Cancer follows Leo only in the precessional cycle (as Leo follows Cancer in the annual cycle), this seems to confirm that this legend has preserved not only the memory of probable historical events but also the approximate date in which they took place. It should also be noted that Cancer is still a symbol of chaos and destruction today. At my request, electrical engineer Rodney Hale used the Skyglobe 3.5 program based on the astronomical data contained in the Abou Hormeis text. He thus ascertained that the last time in which the "royal star" of Leo rose and was visible above the horizon and in the East just before the equinox, occurred in 9,220 BC.
Turning towards Iranian tradition, we will discover that the several Zoroastrian texts, including the Bundahishn, state that the history of the world began 9,000 years before the coming of its great prophet, Zoroaster, in 588 BC, the traditionally accepted date. This dates it back to 9,588 BC.
It was almost certainly the descendants of the Egyptian culture of the ancestors who paved the way to civilization in the ancient world.
However, those individuals did much more: it would appear that they left the world an important legacy. A legacy that can be traced in the mythology of the stars and earth on the Giza plateau, as well as in universal myths and legends concerning world cataclysms and precessions. It transcends any language barrier and can be “read” by everyone. It's a simple message repeated over and over, like a recurring SOS signal, suggesting that what happened to their race could happen again. For whatever reason, our civilization could sink into oblivion without a trace and be swept from the pages of history, unless we wake up from this collective amnesia that seems to have lasted for 11,000 years and realize that our race does not it was never the first.
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In Egypt, however, we find the work of a priestly class, the Shemsu Hor, who acts in the same way and with the same knowledge as those who emigrated to Anatolia and Kurdistan. It is therefore more correct to talk about diaspora. The traces of this passage from East to West and vice versa were well documented between 1997 and 2000 by the English researcher David Rohl (author of the essay Eden in the East) who conducted a series of seven research expeditions in the vast eastern Egyptian desert with the aim of finding specimens of rock paintings from before the time of the pharaohs.
116 lithic art sites dating back 7,000 years have been documented, brimming with exotic images of early Egypt.
There are images of boats, animals and hunters and, in key locations, also what appear to be maps drawn on aerial views.
Many of the hunting scenes appear to have a shamanistic character: the human figures wear animal tails around their waists or horns and feathers on the head. Representing themselves as bulls or birds, hunters attempted to acquire the power and strength of captured animals. These uses were also transferred into the religious art of the Pharaonic era when the gods were represented wearing long feathers or crowns made up of solar disks set between bovine horns. The shamanism of the Nephilim bird-men or rather, of the Egyptian Shemsu Hor is therefore detectable in this rock art and confirms that this people, whose existence was supported by Egyptologists of the caliber of Walter Emery and Flinders Petrie, acted in Egypt for millennia until to the birth of Pharaonic Egypt. Some pre-dynastic Egyptian representations of the bird-goddess or snake-goddess are completely similar to those of the Jarmo and Ubaid cultures, confirming this indissoluble yet unrecognized bond.
Adriano Forgione
