In our search to discover what these messages might mean, perhaps the Sabians of Harran, those “star-worshippers” whose city lies barely 25 miles from Göbekli Tepe, those followers of the wisdom god with their mysterious pilgrimages to the Pyramids of Giza, will be able to give us a clue.
Chapter 16
Written in the Stars
In Chapters Eight to Eleven we explored the secret tradition of the Sages, maintained in Egypt for thousands of years, perpetuating itself through recruitment and initiation down the ages. And we considered the possibility that these “mystery teachers of heaven,” these “Followers of Horus”—these “Magicians of the Gods”—played a key role, not once but many times, at crucial moments in Egyptian history, in moving that remarkable culture forward.
In Chapter Twelve we looked into the connection between the incredible megalithic site of Baalbek and an enigmatic group of colonists from ancient Canaan who settled near Egypt’s Giza plateau, where they made regular devotional offerings to the Great Sphinx, named by them variously as Hauron or Hurna after a Canaanite falcon deity.
In Chapter Fourteen we saw that another group, known as the Sabians and renowned as “star-worshippers,” came from even further away as pilgrims to the Pyramids of Giza. Their home city was Harran, located near Göbekli Tepe in what is now southeastern Turkey. There is no record of when these pilgrimages began but Harran had already been settled for thousands of years1 when the earliest surviving written reference to it appears in an inscription dated to around 2000 BC.2 What is remarkable is that Sabian pilgrimages to Giza were still taking place as late as AD 1228 when the Arab geographer Yakut el-Hamawi mentioned them in his Mo’gam-el-Buldan (“Dictionary of Countries”). As Egyptologist Selim Hassan notes in the passage quoted in Chapter Fourteen, Hamawi’s account shows that the Sabians “fully recognized the Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre as being monuments connected with the stellar cult.”3
Figure 57
This may seem like a small point, and “experts” on the Sabians have ignored it, but it proves the continuation of a hidden tradition. Ancient Egyptian religion and Ancient Egyptian culture ceased to exist hundreds of years before AD 1228 (the last known inscription in sacred hieroglyphs dates to AD 394), while Egyptologists did not rediscover the evidence of the stellar nature of the Pyramid “cult” until the early 1900s.4 There is, therefore, no way other than a hidden tradition that the Sabian “star-worshippers” could have known the Pyramids were connected to the stars or could have been motivated to make them objects of pilgrimage.
Ah but Harran … Harran—the fabled city of the Sabians. What a lowly mess it is today. Fashioned from mud-brick, a few of the traditional beehive-shaped houses still survive, grouped together into a center retailing trinkets for the amusement of tourists. The ramshackle modern town is located in the midst of a vast, desolate plain with the ridges of the Taurus mountains, blue and hazy, looming 25 miles (40 kilometers) to the north. Göbekli Tepe stands on one of those ridges, and indeed the two sites are theoretically intervisible5—in other words, if your eyes were good enough, you could see Göbekli Tepe from Harran, and vice versa.
What would have made such a sighting easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here—a temple dedicated to Su-En (usually contracted to Sin), the Moon God of the Sabians.6 After telling us that there were “powerful images in this temple,” the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314–394), describes the tower, noting that “from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran.”7
The Temple of the Moon God was already remotely ancient in the first millenium BC, when we know from inscriptions that several restorations were required. For example, repairs were carried out on it by the Assyrian King Shalamensar III (859–824 BC), and by Ashurbanipal (685–627 BC). Later, Nabonidus, who ruled the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 556–539 BC, rebuilt the temple.8 Like Thutmosis IV of Egypt, who restored the Great Sphinx of Giza (see Chapter Ten), Nabonidus was inspired by a dream to undertake this work.9
It is a remarkable thing that the “pagan” religion of Harran survived for several hundred years into the Islamic era. This owed much to the acceptance of the Sabians as a “people of the book” (the reader will recall from Chapter Fourteen that they successfully claimed Hermes as their prophet and offered a compilation of the Hermetic texts as their Scriptures). Thus when the Arab general Ibn Ghanam conquered Harran in the seventh century AD, he co-opted the site where stood the Temple of the Moon God, with its fabulous tower, for the construction of a Grand Mosque. It seems that the temple was destroyed to make way for the mosque, but that Ghanam offered the Sabians an alternative site in the city where they were permitted to build a new temple.10 They continued to practice their “star-worship” there, without significant disruption, until the eleventh century AD, when either in 1032, or in 1081—accounts are conflicting—a new generation of Muslim rulers turned against them, suppressed their faith and destroyed their last temple.11
Two centuries later the Mongol invasions began and Harran was frequently the scene of fierce conflicts. In a succession of episodes in 1259, 1262 and 1271, the city’s Islamic places of worship were destroyed.12 The Grand Mosque still lies in ruins today, but when we remember that the Temple of the Moon God once stood here under a lofty tower, it’s curious that the one almost intact architectural remnant, with a square base measuring only 4 meters (13 feet) on each side, stands more than 50 meters (164 feet) tall and overlooks the Harran plain, just as its Sabian predecessor did. No doubt it is merely a surviving minaret of Ibn Ghanam’s Grand Mosque—the architecture is definitely Islamic. Still it is thought-provoking, to say the least, that local people refer to it to this day as the “Astronomical Tower,” as though preserving an ancient memory of the time when their Sabian ancestors climbed the long-vanished spire of the Temple of the Moon God to observe the heavens.
The few archaeological expeditions mounted in Harran from the 1950s onward, while finding a number of inscriptions relating to the Moon God, have as yet revealed no physical traces of the pre-Islamic temples.13 A team from the Chicago Oriental Institute was about to start a major dig around the ruins of the Grand Mosque in 1986, but it seems that the Turkish authorities insisted on such restrictive practices that the project had to be abandoned.14 Current excavations by Harran University and the ŞanlIurfa Museum Directorate show little interest in recovery of substantive remains from the city’s pre-Islamic period.15
Thus far, based on the minimal archaeology done, datable artifacts from Harran itself go back to around 5000 BC,16 though there is every possibility that older remains will be found with further excavations. At a settlement mound called Asagi Yarimca, a few kilometers northwest of the city, characteristic Halaf monochrome wares dating to 6000 BC have been collected.17 And six kilometers south of Harran, excavations since 2006 by Turkish archaeologist Nurettin Yardimci have established the existence of an even older permanent settlement dated to 8000 BC.18
Since 8000 BC—10,000 years ago—marks the approximate epoch in which Göbekli Tepe was abandoned and the last of its stone circles deliberately buried, I was intrigued to learn that the site of Yardimci’s excavations has been known since time immemorial as Tell Idris—i.e. “the settlement mound of Idris.” This is interesting, because Idris, in the Koran, is the name of the Biblical prophet Enoch, the seventh of the ten patriarchs who lived in the times before the Flood.19 To be specific, Enoch is the son of Jared, the father of Methuselah, the grandfather of Lamech, and the great-grandfather of Noah himself.20 Moreover, Muslim traditions associate Idris/Enoch with Hermes.21 The Persian Islamic philosopher Abu Mashar (AD 787–886) expresses the matter as follows:
The name Hermes is a title. Its first bearer, who lived before the Flood, was … he whom the Hebrews call Enoch, whose name in Arabic is Idris. The Harranians declare his prophethood.22
This antediluvian Enoch/Idris/Hermes was a master of the sciences, “especially astronomy.” In addition:
He wrote many books, whose wisdom he preserved on the walls of Egyptian temples lest it be lost. It was he who constructed the pyramids.23
Abu Mashar’s comments contain strong echoes of the Edfu Building Texts, also supposedly derived from lost antediluvian books and inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Horus to ensure that their message would not be lost. And the sense here that the pyramids are remotely ancient and were built by Hermes—that “master of astronomy,” the Egyptian Thoth, as the reader will recall—finds resonance with the tradition of the “number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth,” reported in Chapter Eleven, which, in historic times, the Pharaoh Khufu wished to consult and copy in his own construction works at Giza.
Once again, confronted by such material, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that we may have stumbled across the traces of a project, set in motion by the survivors of a global flood cataclysm, to bring about “the resurrection of the former world of the gods.” Wherever this project took root, it seems to me, its essence was a tradition, passed down from generation to generation by initiated masters and thus theoretically capable of implementation in any place, and in any epoch, when the time was right.
With their ability to blend in and survive changing circumstances, with their knowledge of the astronomical qualities of the pyramids preserved until as least as late as the thirteenth century AD, and with their very name, as Selim Hassan rightly recognized, derived from Sba, the Ancient Egyptian word for “star,”24 the Sabians of Harran have all the hallmarks of carriers of the secret tradition.
Mystery of the Watchers
Apart from his genealogy in the line of patriarchs before Noah, and the enigmatic statements that he “walked with God” and was mysteriously “taken up” by God without experiencing death,25 the canonical Bible has nothing else to tell us about Enoch. Happily much more information is available in several ancient non-canonical works—i.e. works that Biblical redactors for one reason or another chose not to include within the officially sanctioned scriptures. Of these the most famous by far is the Book of Enoch. Prior to the eighteenth century, scholars had believed it to be irretrievably lost. Composed long before the birth of Christ,26 and considered to be one of the most important pieces of Jewish mystical literature, it was only known from fragments and from references to it in other texts. All this changed, however, after polymath adventurer James Bruce of Kinnaird visited Ethiopia in the years 1770–72. Among other remarkable achievements there,27 he procured and brought back to Britain several copies of the Book of Enoch that, in antiquity, had been translated into Ge’ez, the Ethiopic sacred language. These were the first complete copies ever to be seen in Europe.28
I note in passing that the Book of Enoch has always been of great significance to Freemasonry. Indeed, certain Masonic rituals—in curious resonance with Islamic traditions—identify Enoch with the Ancient Egyptian wisdom god Thoth and also with his Greek avatar Hermes.29 An entry in The Royal Masonic Cyclopedia, first published in 1877, tells us that Enoch was the inventor of writing, that “he taught men the art of building,” and that, before the Flood, he “feared that the real secrets would be lost—to prevent which he concealed the Grand Secret, engraven on a white oriental porphyry stone, in the bowels of the earth.”30 The Cyclopedia contains its own hint of a secret tradition transmitted down the ages, when it further suggests that Enoch was himself a Freemason and that at the end of his days on earth “he delivered up the Grand Master’s office to Lamech.”31
The Book of Enoch is a very strange document, purporting, among many other elements, to be a vision of the future cataclysm of the Flood, and why it is to be unleashed upon the world. In a series of dreams,32 Enoch receives advance notice of the warning that God will give to his descendant Noah that “a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth, and destroy all that is on it.”33 This, of course, is familiar ground—merely a précis, or restatement, of what we can read in Genesis. So, too, is the passage that follows in which Enoch is given to understand that arrangements will be made for Noah to escape so that “his seed may be preserved for all the generations of the world.”34
What comes next is intriguing. Regardless of the fact that the express purpose of God’s Deluge is to kill off most of mankind—apart, of course, from Noah and his descendants—there is talk of the need to:
heal the earth which the angels have corrupted … that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things which the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons.35
This is only the second mention of these mysterious “Watchers” in the Book of Enoch. The first, a few pages earlier, tells us nothing about them except that they “shall quake” at the prospect of the coming events.36 So far we have no real clue as to who or what they are except that they have transgressed some divine law by teaching “secret things”—apparently dangerous things—to humanity, and that they (and most of the human race through the agency of the Deluge) are to be punished grievously because of this.
Certain names of the Watchers, or at any rate the leadership of the Watchers, are given—Azazel, Semjaza, Armen, Rumjal, Turel, Armaros, Danjal, Kokabel and about a dozen more.37 More specifically, we’re told about the nature of the “secret things” that they taught to mankind:
And Azazel 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, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraquijal taught astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezequeel the knowledge of the clouds, Araquiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon …38
Next we begin to understand that the Watchers are divided into two mutually opposed groups, because we read that the leaders of one group summon Enoch—remember this is all happening to him while he is in a dreamlike, visionary state—to deliver a message to the leaders of the other group, named as “the Watchers of the heaven.”39 It seems these “Watchers of the heaven” (sometimes also referred to as “the heavenly Watchers”40) have “defiled themselves with women, and have done as the children of the earth do, and have taken unto themselves wives.”41 They have also “wrought great destruction upon the earth.”42 For this they are going to be punished in various deeply unpleasant and terrifying ways.43
Obedient and dutiful, Enoch sets off, bearing his heavy message of murder and mayhem from the Watchers to … the Watchers.
So what’s going on here?
A more careful scan of the pages reveals the backstory:
And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another, “Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.” And Semjaza, who was their leader, said unto them: “I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin.” And they all answered him and said: “Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.” Then sware they all together and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And they were in all two hundred, who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon …44
Now things are becoming clearer. “Watchers” is a general term referring to angels. Among them are bad angels. They want to have sex and make babies with beautiful human women and while they’re at it, as we can gather from passages quoted earlier, they’re going to teach mankind a thing or two about metals, and the constellations and the course of the sun and the moon (or the ecliptic as this “course”—this “path”—is known to
astronomers today). As the first step in implementing their plan these bad Watchers descend upon Mount Hermon, which happens to be in ancient Canaan, now Lebanon, and only 45 miles (73 kilometers) from Baalbek.
Meanwhile there are good angels, “the Holy Angels who watch”45—among them Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraquel, Gabriel and Remiel.46 And it’s these good Watcher angels who appear to Enoch in a dream and give him that message of death and destruction to take to the bad Watcher angels on Mount Hermon. He tells us specifically where he received this dream:
I went off and sat down at the waters of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon … I fell asleep and behold a dream came to me and visions fell down upon me and I saw visions of chastisement and a voice came bidding me to tell it to the sons of heaven and reprimand them. And when I awakened I came unto them …47
As I read these passages, set before the Flood, when the people of Lebanon and ancient Turkey were still at the hunter-gatherer stage of development, it seems more and more obvious to me that Enoch is a shamanic figure. And like all shamans, everywhere, in all times and places, he sets great store by visions—which in his case come in the form of dreams received “in sleep.” What’s interesting, however, is that when he wakes up from this visionary state, he’s able to go to a real physical place on Mount Hermon where the bad Watchers are and talk to them face to face:
And I recounted before them all the visions which I had seen in sleep, and I began to speak the words of righteousness, and to reprimand the heavenly Watchers.48
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