gobekli tepe - genesis of the gods (46 page)

FIRSTS FOR HUMANITY

The secret arts and sciences of heaven revealed to humanity by the rebel Watchers, as I first noted in
From the Ashes of Angels,
correspond with a number of firsts for humanity in the centuries and millennia after the initial Neolithic revolution. This we can see beginning with the construction of Göbekli Tepe in the mid-tenth millennium BC and continuing in one form or another across the Near East and Middle East for the next four thousand years.

In addition to the earliest expression of animal domestication and agriculture, the earliest use of beaten and smelted metal took place in the Near East, as did the earliest manufacture of linen fabric, the first brewing of beer and fermenting of wine. Some of the earliest creation of figurines using fired pottery occurred in this region, as did the first known construction of stone buildings for both secular and religious purposes.

This very same epoch saw the first use of stone drills, arguably made of flint, to penetrate large, polished beads made from semiprecious stone, such as quartz, agate, and carnelian, to create beautiful necklaces. At the same time, we find the first use of green malachite powder for cosmetic purposes. Interestingly, the Watchers were accused of teaching women how to beautify themselves, just as they are said to have introduced humanity to working with metal,
⁴
something that took place for the first time at Çayönü in southeast Anatolia.

THE SONS OF GOD

So who were the Watchers, and how do they fit into the bigger picture? Bible scholars are convinced that the book of Enoch and other similar examples of Enochian literature derive from a few brief passages in Genesis 6, which speak of how the
bene ha-Elohim,
the “Sons of God,” who are synonymous with the Watchers, came upon the “daughters of men” and, finding them fair, lay with them to produce
gibborim,
“giants,” generally interpreted as alluding to the Nephilim. However, this is the original account:

The fallen ones [Nephilim] were in the earth in those days, and even afterwards when sons of God [bene ha-Elohim] come in unto daughters of men, and they have borne to them—they [are] the heroes, who, from of old, [are] the men of name [gibborim]. (Gen. 6:4).

Clearly, the Nephilim were actually already existent when the Sons of God, that is, the Watchers, took mortal wives, and there is good reason to suggest that the Watchers and Nephilim are simply different names for the same antediluvian population that thrived in the Bible lands prior to the Flood of Noah. Yet to think that these meager lines should have inspired the story of the Watchers in the book of Enoch seems unlikely. More plausible is that it was the other way around: the few lines in the book of Genesis are interpolations, later insertions, based on quite separate source material, most likely some variation of the Watchers story.

After reading the book of Enoch
,
I became convinced that these Watchers, or “fallen ones,” like the Anunnaki of Sumero-Akkadian tradition, were very powerful human individuals who lived during some distant age of humankind. They were advanced enough to give us the rudiments of civilization, recalled in the manner in which the fallen angels revealed to mortal kind the forbidden arts and sciences of heaven. What is more, their sexual liaisons with the “daughters of men” expressed their quite obvious human nature, as well as their ability to cocreate in order to produce flesh and blood offspring that resembled both themselves and their mortal wives.

VISAGE LIKE A VIPER

Yet these rebel Watchers, or fallen angels, bore no recognizable wings. In Enochian literature they are described only as tall in stature, with long, white hair, pale skin, ruddy complexions, and mesmeric eyes that quite literally shine like the sun.
⁵
One crucial passage in a fragmentary text known as the Testament of Amram likens the visage of one Watcher to that of a “viper,” suggesting a long, narrow face of apparent serpentine appearance.
⁶

At other times, the Nephilim, as the offspring of the Watchers, are called Awwim, “Serpents,”
⁷
while in one instance a Nephilim is described as the “son of the serpent named Tabâ’et,”
⁸
with Tabâ’et being one of the rebel Watchers. A Watcher named Gâdreêl is even cited as the serpent that “led astray Eve,”
⁹
implying that the serpent of Eden was in fact a Watcher, or fallen angel. More crucially these strange beings are occasionally described as flying like birds,
¹⁰
or they are described as wearing iridescent dark cloaks,
¹¹
or garments with “the appearance of feathers”
¹²
(see figure 32.1). Very clearly it suggests the Watchers are in fact quite human shamans, or some kind of ruling elite, and not simply heavenly beings that have become flesh and blood in order to lie with mortal women.

As we have seen, vultures feature heavily in the early Neolithic art of central and eastern Anatolia, often in humanized form, where they seem to be associated with the passage of the soul into the sky world, a path taken also by the shaman after entering trancelike states. It is likely that to achieve these astral journeys the shaman put on the paraphernalia of the vulture, like the articulated wings found at Zawi Chemi Shanidar in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq, a site more or less contemporary with Göbekli Tepe.

HUMAN ANGELS

Is it possible that the memory of how a shamanic or ruling elite seen as responsible for humanity’s sudden leap forward at the beginning of the Neolithic age has been preserved in Judaic literature as the story of the Watchers and Nephilim? Were these fallen angels remembered in Mesopotamian myth as the Anunnaki, the gods of heaven and earth, that “fashioned” the first humans from blood and clay, and later revealed to us the rudiments of civilization?

Figure 32.1. Left, artist Billie Walker John’s conception of a Watcher based on descriptions given in Enochian material, and, right, a 3-D sculpt by graphic artist Russell M. Hossain of a Watcher based on Billie Walker John’s 1995 illustration.

Once again we find that Klaus Schmidt has had something interesting to say on the subject. Having separately speculated on the myths of the Anunnaki being some distant memory of the divine ancestors portrayed as the T-shaped pillars at Göbekli Tepe, in an interview given to the
Turkish Times
in 2006 he spoke of the stones as representing the “watchman [
sic
] of the period.”
¹³
Watchmen is simply another form of the name Watcher and actually appears in the book of Enoch (“And I related before them all the visions that I had seen in my sleep, and commenced to speak those words of justice and to upbraid the watchmen of heaven”
¹⁴
).

Whether Schmidt had in mind the Watchers of the book of Enoch when he said these words is not clear; either way, it is an interesting admission and one that does make complete sense. For instance, Christian O’Brien, in
The Genius of the Few,
not only identifies the Anunnaki with the Watchers but concludes that the Anunnaki’s highland settlement of Kharsag was one and the same as the earthly abode of the Watchers described in the book of Enoch.
¹⁵
These, it must be said, were incredibly forward-thinking ideas for 1985, when his book was published, particularly as the most popular theory at the time was that the Watchers and Anunnaki were ancient astronauts who came here in rocket ships two hundred thousand years ago and created human beings as slave labor to mine South African gold, which was then taken off planet.

These fanciful notions continue to prosper today. However, at least now we have a realistic alternative that with the discovery of Göbekli Tepe is becoming acceptable even among the academic community, thanks to the very bold stance taken on the subject by scholars such as Professor Klaus Schmidt. He recognizes that stories and legends preserved in ancient texts relating to mythical beings, accredited with being the founders of civilization, could well reflect a memory of the prime movers behind the initiation of the Neolithic revolution.

So if the Watchers were, in fact, not heavenly angels but human beings, then where exactly was their earthly abode? Where was the Mountain of Assembly on which the two hundred rebels swore allegiance before descending on to the plains below and taking mortal wives? As we shall see next, it was certainly not where the book of Enoch tells us, but much farther north in a mythical realm known as the Land of Darkness.

33

MOUNTAIN OF THE WATCHERS

T
here is a general belief that the events portrayed in the book of Enoch, if they do have geographical correspondences in the real world, must have occurred in the vicinity of Mount Hermon, where the Watchers are said to have made their pact before descending on to the plains below. Indeed, some of the place-names featured in the text can be found in the foothills around the mountain, which lies on the northern border of Israel in the Anti-Lebanon range. There is no denying that the stories acted out in the book of Enoch are
meant
to be seen as having occurred in the Promised Land of the Israelites, occupied in the wake of Abraham and his family’s departure from the city of Harran.

More likely, however, is that the setting for the events featured in the book of Enoch was eastern Anatolia, historical Armenia, where almost all the stories contained in the book of Genesis prior to the age of Abraham are played out. Not only is it the suspected setting for the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but it is also where Noah’s ark came to rest; where Abraham was brought up in Ur of the Chaldees (which was most likely Şanlıurfa, and not a city in southern Iraq, as is generally believed today); where Enoch built the first city (identified with Şanlıurfa—see chapter 34); and where Nimrod, the builder of the Tower of Babel, came up against Abraham and was later defeated by the Armenian cultural hero Hayk.

All of these biblical characters supposedly lived their lives in this region—their shrines and monuments still revered today. So if eastern Turkey
is
the geographical setting for the stories of the book of Genesis, then this is where we should start looking for the home of the Watchers and Nephilim, and not the area around Mount Hermon in the Levant.

ARMON NOT HERMON?

Although such an assumption might seem ludicrous to some, there is confirmation of this surmise in the book of Enoch itself. Whereas in some extant copies Mount Hermon is cited as the mountain where the rebel Watchers assemble to swear allegiance, in others it is called Armon, which introduces an entirely different ball game. For instance, the translation of the book of Enoch by German scholar Andrew Gottlier Hoffman reads:

Their [i.e., the rebel Watchers’] whole number was two hundred, who descended in the days of Jared, upon the top of Mount Armon. Therefore they called the mountain Armon, because they had sworn upon it, and bound themselves by mutual execrations.
¹

Now, it could be argued that
Armon
is simply a corruption of
Hermon,
but this was not the conclusion of John Baty, who made an English translation of Hoffman’s German language edition of the book of Enoch, published in 1836. He was sure that using the name Mount Armon for the Watchers’ Mountain of Assembly revealed its true geographical significance, for Armon, the name “the evil angels called that mount . . . in Hebrew signifies both the top of a mountain, and the residence of a famous chief,”
²
adding that “the land of Armenia received its name from Armen, the third of the leaders of the evil angels, who taught the signs of the earth.”
³
This, he felt, confirmed the origin of the name, for “the land of Armenia is in Hebrew the land of Ararat, and mount Ararat of the Armenians has been clearly shewn to be the mount on which the angels swore, the top of which was called Armon.”
⁴

MOUNT ARARAT AGAIN

So here Baty not only locates Armon in Armenia but identifies it also with Mount Ararat, the tallest mountain of the region, which, as we have seen, is taken by Christians to be the landing place of Noah’s ark. Yet as outlined in chapter 30, much older traditions, accepted by Babylonian Jews, Muslims, and Assyrian Christians, as well as indigenous Kurds belonging to various ethnoreligious groups, identify the ark’s Place of Descent as Mount al-Judi, the modern Cudi Dağ, near the town of Cizre in southeast Turkey.