by Colin Wilson
Lamech went to Methuselah, and told his father, I have begotten a strange son, not like a human being, but more like the children of the angels…’ Lamech suspected that his son had been fathered by one of the Watchers. Methuselah was unable to reassure him, but went off in search of his father, Enoch, who had retired to a far-off land (called Paradise in a fragment of the same story found among the Dead Sea Scrolls). Enoch told Methuselah to reassure his son. The newborn child was indeed his own, and he was to be named Noah. Enoch had foreseen in a vision that the world was going to be destroyed by a deluge, but that Noah and his children would ‘be saved from the corruption’ that would engulf the earth. (It is apparent these events take place before the rebel Watchers arrived on earth.) So it seemed that God had chosen Noah as the father of the new race of humanity.
Still, one cannot help feeling a mild suspicion that Enoch may not have been entirely truthful with Methuselah, and that perhaps this future race would have a touch of the fallen angel in its composition…
The Book of Enoch that Bruce brought back from Abyssinia was not the only version. In fact, many later fragments were found, even in Greek and Latin; yet another, in the Slavonic language, contained some interesting additions to the story.
We should note that the Book of Enoch was not written down until about 200 BC, almost certainly by some member of the Essene community at Qumran on the Dead Sea, but the oral tradition was much older. The Slavonic version, known as The Secrets of Enoch,5 was probably compiled by a Jewish writer living in Alexandria around the time of Jesus.
It contains the account which opens this chapter of Enoch’s abduction by tall beings to a place of continuous light which was covered in snow and ice.
After they reach their destination Enoch is then taken on a tour that includes a hideous pit which became the prototype for the Christian hell:
And the men then led me to the Northern region, and showed me there a very terrible place. And there are all sorts of tortures in that place. Savage darkness and impenetrable gloom; and there is not light there, but a gloomy fire is always burning, and a fiery river goes forth. And all that place has fire on all sides, and on all sides cold and ice, thus it burns and freezes. And the prisoners are very savage, and the angels terrible and without pity, carrying savage weapons, and their torture was unmerciful.
And I said: ‘Woe, woe! How terrible is this place!’ And the men said to me: ‘This place, Enoch, is prepared for those who do not honour God; who commit evil deeds on earth.’6
Hell was a Christian concept that – like the Devil – was unknown to the Jews. ‘Sheol’, sometimes translated as ‘hell’, simply meant a place where rubbish was destroyed, and this passage, which seems to prefigure Dante’s Inferno, was probably a major reason that the Book of Enoch ‘vanished’. The idea that ‘heaven’ might include a place of torment would have been unacceptable to the Church Fathers.
After his glimpse of ‘hell’, Enoch was taken on a tour – this time by the angel Raphael – around Paradise, or the ‘Garden of Righteousness’. This seems to be the Garden of Eden, for when he commented on a particularly beautiful tree with a delicious fragrance, he was told that this was the Tree of Knowledge from which Eve plucked one of the fruits (apparently these fruits hung in clusters like grapes, so they cannot be apples). What seemed to be worrying the Lord – who is referred to as Yahweh-Elohim – is a second tree called the Tree of Life. If man ate the fruits of this tree, his life would be immensely extended.
Now comes one of the most interesting passages in the Book of Enoch: ‘And I saw in those days how long cords were given to the Angels, and they took themselves wings and flew, and went towards the north. And I asked an Angel, saying unto him: “Why have they taken cords and gone off?” and he replied: “They have gone to measure.”’
Knotted ‘cords’ were used by Egyptian priests to plan their temples. These cords were nothing less than practical geometric survey tools. Christian O’Brien, an engineer with surveying experience, translates this passage into secular terms: ‘Then I saw how long measuring “tapes” were given to some of the angels and they hurried off towards the north. So I asked the angel with me why the others had taken tapes and gone away, and he replied, “They have gone to make a survey”’7
Angels undertaking a survey? It doesn’t make sense within the Christian concept of angels. But what if these beings were ancient scientists pursuing a geological and geographic survey?
For the Book of Enoch also reveals the all-important purpose of the survey with the words: And these measures shall reveal all the secrets of the depths of the earth…’8 The survey was geological.
Rand was familiar with Andrew Collins’s book From the Ashes of Angels, which recounts the story of Enoch. Collins describes how, in the late nineteenth century, the Babylonian Expedition from the University of Pennsylvania discovered fragments of a broken clay cylinder at Nippur, in what was still called Mesopotamia. They were found in the temple of
Enlil, the supreme god of the Sumerians, less important only than Anu, Lord of the Universe, and were written in cuneiform wedge script. We may recall the tablets found in the mound of Kuyunjik in 1852, which proved to contain the epic of Gilgamesh, and might be forgiven for assuming that the translation of this cylinder became a matter of prime importance, but it was taken back to the University of Philadelphia by Professor Herman V. Hilprecht, where it was left in the basement of the museum, still in its packing case.
Hilprecht is known to the history of psychical research through another curious incident involving Nippur. In 1893, he was trying to decipher the inscription on what he believed was a ring from the temple of Bel. Exhausted by the fruitless effort, he fell asleep and dreamed that the priest of the temple of Bel showed him the treasure chamber and explained that the ‘ring’ was part of a votive cylinder that had been cut into three. Ordered suddenly to make earrings for Bel’s son Ninib, the priest had decided to carve up the cylinder. The third part, said the priest, would never be found, but the second part was still in existence.
The next day, armed with the new information, Hilprecht found that his dream had been correct. The second ring did exist among the catalogued items, and when the two parts were fitted together an inscription to the god Ninib could be read. It was later verified that the two rings had come from the treasure chamber of the temple of Bel. As the priest in the dream said, the third part was never located.
Another twenty years would pass before a professor from Bryn Mawr named George Aaron Barton assembled the fragments, scattered in three boxes. His discovery initially filled him with excitement. This was not a list of temple treasures, or even a hymn to Enlil, but a long, continuous narrative that deserved comparison with Gilgamesh. It was, Barton thought, possibly the oldest text in the world, and was nine tablets long. Barton ultimately concluded, though, that this was simply a version of the Sumerian creation myth. His translation of it, in a volume called Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions (1918),9 failed to excite even his colleagues, still less the general public, which was more concerned with the end of the Great War.
More than half a century passed before, in the 1970s, a copy of Barton’s book fell into the hands of a geologist named Christian O’Brien, who had spent much of his life working for British Petroleum in the Middle East. O’Brien had taught himself to read cuneiform script, and as he looked at Barton’s translation and the reproductions of the original texts, he concluded that Barton’s understanding left much to be desired. He set out to translate it himself.
O’Brien discovered that, far from being a ‘creation myth’ featuring Sumerian gods, the text seemed to be a down-to-earth account of how a group called the Anunnaki, or Anannage, built an agricultural community called Kharsag on a plateau in a mountain region. This settlement was also known as Ehdin – which, as O’Brien points out, reminds us of Eden. Readers of Sitchin’s Earth Chronicles will immediately recognise the Anunnaki as the beings from ‘the twelfth planet’ Niburu, who, the a
uthor claims, came to earth nearly half a million years ago in search of gold to be used (in some mysterious way) to protect their atmosphere from deterioration. Sitchin finds the evidence for these space visitors in the Old Testament, and in various ancient Sumerian texts (although not the Kharsag fragments). He believes that they actually created man as a slave to do the hard work of gold mining.
Christian O’Brien and his wife and co-writer Barbara Joy rejected the spacemen hypothesis. They are students of Eastern religion, and are inclined to accept the existence of ‘astral planes’, realms of existence beyond solid matter, so although they never commit themselves to where the Anannage came from, their belief seems to be that it is something more like a ‘parallel dimension’.10 (A similar division of opinion exists in the world of those who study UFO phenomena. At the time they first excited attention, in the late 1940s, most writers on the subject thought that flying saucers were visitors from other planets; more recently, there is an increased acceptance of the view that ‘they’ may be literally ‘extraterrestrial’ in the sense of being able to control a ‘higher vibration rate’ and should not be thought of as purely material.)
In 1986, the O’Briens brought out their account of the Kharsag inscriptions in The Genius of the Few: The Story of Those Who Founded the Garden of Eden .11 It is hardly surprising that, with its careful, scholarly and unsensational approach, it should have failed to make the impact of Sitchin or Velikovsky. Too controversial for the academics, it was too sober and erudite for the popular audience who devoured ancient mysteries, but since that time it has attracted an increasing number of readers.
The title The Genius of the Few is a quotation from André Parrot, O’Brien’s mentor in archaeology, who pointed out that the flame of Middle Eastern civilisation blazed up simultaneously in a number of places: Susa, Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Ashnunnak, Nineveh and Mari, ‘until, at last, thanks to the genius of the few… there was wrought forth, as in an alchemist’s crucible, a prodigious, many-sided art’.
What, ask the O’Briens, caused this simultaneous seeding of civilisation in so many places? They believe that the answer lies in the Anannage, or (as they prefer to call them) the Shining Ones, whose name is explained in the second chapter of The Genius of the Few. Why, O’Brien asks, does the Bible start with the sentence ‘In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’, when it says that the Elohim created the heaven and earth? Elohim is plural, not singular, so it should read ‘the gods created the heavens and the earth’. If the Bible had meant God, it would have used the singular form ‘el’, which actually means ‘shining’. It can be found in many ancient languages. In Sumerian it means ‘brightness’. In Babylonian, ‘ellu’ means ‘Shining Ones’. Even our English word ‘elf means a shining being, while in Cornwall – where I live – ‘el’ means an ‘angel’ (in old Cornish).
So the Bible is saying that ‘the Shining Ones’ who created heaven and earth said, ‘Let us make a man in our image.’ Yahweh, the leader of the Shining Ones, ‘planted a garden in Eden’, and the prophet Enoch did not ‘walk with God’ but with the Shining Ones.
O’Brien makes another important point. The word ‘heavens’ – ‘ha’shemin’ – originally meant ‘the highlands’. And ‘earth’ – ‘ha’ares’ – means ‘the ground’ or (in this context) the lowlands. So the Bible is actually saying that these Shining Ones (or angels) made the highlands and the lowlands, and the highlands included the Garden of Eden.
O’Brien also relates the story of the finding of the Kharsag material in Nippur, describing how it was unearthed from the Philadelphia museum basement by George Barton and translated as religious fragments, explaining why he found the Barton translation so unsatisfactory with lengthy quotations from the original text in Akkadian. O’Brien then tells the story of Kharsag after the Shining Ones had descended to earth. And he makes it clear that he regards these Shining Ones as more or less identical with the Watchers of the Book of Enoch.
Since talking about ‘Shining Ones’ or ‘Watchers’ may confuse, I suggest that here we refer to them simply as the civilisers, the ‘few’ whose genius created civilisation. The Kharsag epic makes it clear that they were not angels – otherwise they would surely have been immune to a plague that devastated Eden – but flesh and blood beings whose powers and talents were far beyond those of the human beings of the time.
The leader of the civilisers was called Enlil – the name of the god in whose temple the Kharsag cylinder was found. His wife, the Lady of Kharsag, was called Ninlil. They decided to name the settlement Edin, the Akkadian for ‘plateau’. Its other name, Kharsag, means ‘the lofty fenced enclosure’.
In other words, the Shining Ones built the first agricultural settlement in a world where human beings were primitive hunters. The spot they chose was surrounded by mountains – O’Brien believes it was at the point where modern Lebanon, Syria and Israel join. The time, the O’Briens believe, was about 8,200 BC. On the plateau of Eden the civilisers built houses of cedar wood, made a reservoir, and dug irrigation ditches. Enlil and other leaders among them had Great Houses, and there was even a maternity hospital. The surrounding hills were covered with orchards, they planted grain, and harvests were so plentiful that they allowed their neighbours to join the settlement and share the bounty.
Although Enlil was recognised as the leader, Eden was run on democratic lines, with a council of seven. If we suppose that the civilisers were mortal, then we must also assume that, over the 2,000 or so years that Kharsag existed, there were many Enlils, and that it became a title like ‘king’.
The Lady of Kharsag, Ninlil, is also referred to as the Serpent Lady, which led George Barton to assume that she was some kind of snake goddess. In fact, Andrew Collins cites another ancient fragment of text about the Watchers, which describes one of them as having a ‘visage like a viper’. Collins is inclined to feel that this suggests a hollow, gaunt face with slit-like eyes.
This use of another ancient fragment of text offers an opportunity of raising a question that may be troubling some readers: why should anyone take seriously these strange tales and legends about lustful fallen angels and Shining Ones who planted the Garden of Eden? We recognise the stories about the Greek gods as no more than myth; no one believes that Zeus really lived on Mount Olympus with his wife Hera and spent half his time turning himself into a bull or a swan to seduce mortal maidens.
One explanation is that the many different texts about – for example – Enoch or the Watchers suggests that these stories were passed down by word of mouth through many generations before they were written down. When we read the Iliad, we soon come to feel that this is not just an idle tale invented by a minstrel or bard: it is based on real events. And archaeological research leaves no doubt that they occurred. The sheer number of ancient texts leaves little doubt that there were about a dozen different works about Enoch and the Watchers. As with the Iliad, they have the ring of folk memory.
As to the epic of Kharsag, it seems to tell a lengthy and detailed story that also has the ring of fact. For example, the story continues to tell how, after centuries of prosperity, harsh weather came to Eden, with storms, floods and bitter cold. Considered in the light of what we know happened at the end of the last Ice Age, after 14,000 BC, when the climate fluctuated wildly and periods of warming were suddenly replaced again with much colder conditions, it seems likely that Kharsag would find itself under siege to the weather.
But it was more than just bad weather. There were tremendous storms, one of which O’Brien describes as the thousand-year storm, and the House of Enlil was destroyed by fire. Perpetual darkness fell, and heavy, non-stop rain caused flooding. Enlil said, ‘My settlement is shattered… By water alone it has been destroyed.’ But the final words of the lady Ninlil are perhaps the most significant: ‘The Building of Learning is cut off… the creation of Knowledge is ruined.’ Clearly, one of the major purposes of the settlement of Kharsag was to create knowledge. For the O’Briens, the Shining Ones were
bringers of knowledge to the human race.
At this point, at the end of Tablet 9, the Kharsag epic breaks off. We do not know how many more tablets remain undiscovered, but the O’Briens believe that the Shining Ones went on to become the civilisers of humanity and the founders of Middle Eastern civilisation. In a later compilation called The Shining Ones,12 which includes The Genius of the Few, they even suggested that the civilisers played some part in the civilisation of Central and South America and Atlantis. It also states that ‘unquestionably, the most rewarding descriptions of the Garden of Eden… occur in the Book of Enoch’. They speak at some length of Enoch, suggesting that when he was taken by the angels to see the seven heavens, he actually visited Kharsag – the Garden of Eden. They point out that Enoch visited a Great House, that he described magnificent trees, and even the great reservoir.
We have already noted the passage from the Book of Enoch in which the angels are given long cords and sent off to ‘measure’. It is O’Brien’s view that the ‘angels’ were laying out part of the Garden of Eden, perhaps the irrigation system, but for Rand the passage could bear a completely different interpretation. The angels hurried off to the north, and from the South Pole all directions are north.
As to why the angels should be making a survey, Rand thought he already knew one possible answer. Having already concluded that a great number of the world’s sacred sites, such as Giza and Lhasa, were arranged on a symmetrical grid of ‘sacred latitudes’, it seems likely that there had been some kind of worldwide survey. The same thing is suggested by Hapgood’s ancient maps, ranging from China to an Antarctica free of ice. It looks as if ancient peoples who existed ‘before civilisation’ had an extraordinarily comprehensive knowledge of the surface of our globe.
Rand’s theory was that this survey was conducted by what was then the world’s most technically advanced civilisation, Atlantis, which was prompted by the recognition that some catastrophe was going to occur – almost certainly involving a movement of the earth’s crust – and that its purpose was to find out how far the crust mantle had already shifted. This, Rand felt, was why surveyors would set out to ‘make a survey’.