The Nephilim: A Case of Antediluvian Awareness

[This paper was originally written for the official web site of the gothic rock band the Nephilim]

Andrew Collins, in his excellent work From The Ashes Of Angels, proposed in 1996 that the Watchers, the progenitors of the Nephilim, were migrants, possibly originating from the Nile Valley, who introduced a high level of culture to the Near East at the end of the last ice age. Moreover, that their presence in this region, known today as Kurdistan, led to the emergence of proto-Neolithic urbanisation, as indicated by sites such as Nevali Cori and Gobekli Tepe in eastern Anatolia.

I concur with his views up to a degree, and support his research into this line of enquiry. However, my first major point of departure is that they are described in all Judaeo-Christian sources as having existed before the great flood. Now many commentators have argued that this event was only a localised and relatively recent phenomenon, but in my view this argument simply does not stand up when we realise the extent to which such a catastrophic event is reported by virtually all the earliest cultures right around the globe. Moreover, there is plenty of geological and other evidence to suggest that such an event occurred approximately 11,500 years ago; indeed, the relatively sudden recession of the ice caps and accompanying rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age seems to point towards a major event disrupting the ecological equilibrium, and my preferred option from all the analysis performed by other experts is that some sort of sizeable extraterrestrial body impacted in the ocean possibly off the south-east coastline of North America at around this time; (in fact Andy himself is broadly in agreement with this major catastrophe scenario - see his more recent work Gateway to Atlantis). 

My second major point of departure from Andy is the other consistent message found not only in the Judaeo-Christian accounts of the Nephilim, watchers and fallen angels, but again in similar accounts from right across the globe, which describe this antediluvian race’s debasement and consequent destruction. In my view Andy’s suggestion that they were a civilising influence on the Near East does not properly address this fundamental message in all the ancient texts and traditions.

It is not easy for me to provide only a brief resume of my own reinterpretation of these traditions, because the evidence is plentiful but sometimes somewhat distorted, and the arguments sometimes complex. However, I will do my best.

We have to start with an appreciation that this theme of debasement and destruction is not the only one that consistently emerges from my long-term study of the ancient texts from the Near East, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Greece and Scandinavia, and of the most revered traditions of the native peoples of the Americas, Africa, Indonesia and Australasia. Apart from the fact that their origin traditions show an incredibly consistent esoteric insight when properly interpreted - something which in my view professional mythologists and theologians have consistently failed to appreciate - we also encounter remarkably consistent themes of the creation of mankind, of a golden age before debasement set in, and of the civilisation of mankind by various sages. When the fallen angel themes are also brought into the mix, and when we come to realise that in many cases the versions of the texts and traditions that survive have been through extensive editing for political and other purposes, we can see that we have an extremely difficult job in extracting the common elements and putting them into some sort of proper chronological, historical and philosophical perspective. And that is before we accept that in certain passages symbolism plays a sufficiently important part that no underlying historical record should be imputed to them.

Nevertheless, the following is my necessarily brief interpretation of these various themes. But before I elucidate further, I must indicate that it is entirely based on a spiritual worldview of karma and reincarnation. In my book Genesis Unveiled I explain in great detail what I mean by these often misrepresented terms, and also provide some compelling scientific and other evidence of why I believe such a worldview is not only not a matter of pure faith, but also rather more philosophically logical than the rational atheist stance of most influential academics in the West. I also believe that the fundamental tenets of such a worldview are universal and timeless, even if they have been somewhat distorted by even some of the more spiritual religions of the modern epoch, and that they were understood full well by various of our ancestors at different periods in human history. But for our current purposes the essential point is that while all physical forms have a soul of sorts, the human soul is the most advanced commonly found on our planet, and even then human souls can be in different stages of karmic advancement – and of course the whole point of repeated reincarnation is, in the most simplistic terms, to advance beyond the earthly realms and return to the ethereal source for good.

Bearing this is mind, my argument is that at some point the human race had evolved sufficiently from a physiological and psychological point of view to play host to these new more advanced types of soul that had been waiting in the ethereal wings for a long time during the evolution of our planet, and of the various hominid species in particular. A number of creation traditions support this view, particularly those that report repeated failed attempts by the gods to create the perfect human, these failures being caused by their creations being “unable to speak” or to “sing the praises of the creator” – which would seem to indicate that they may have attempted to incarnate in human form before we were sufficiently advanced along the evolutionary path to act as an appropriate physical host.

If we now move onto the theme of the civilisation of mankind by various sages, while I would accept that there may be a post-catastrophe element to these that is often mistakenly interwoven with the original theme, I would argue that their primary historicity lies in the fact that not only did a number of human-type souls incarnate at some point in our history, but at about the same time a far smaller number of even more advanced souls – which I refer to as “angelic” – incarnated in order that they could educate their fellows about a spiritual worldview. These angelic souls, or sages, call them what you will, would have been sufficiently advanced that they could automatically remember, or at least tap into, their inherent memories of the existence of ethereal realms beyond the physical, which is where our real roots lie. In this way, a proper appreciation of the real mutliplanar nature of the universe would have been introduced to our planet for the first time.

As to when this might have occurred, I argue strongly that there is a major element of the archaeological record that has been hugely undervalued in terms of its cultural significance, and that is the first evidence of ritual human burial – which currently dates back to 100,000 years ago, this earliest proof of deliberate Homo sapien internment coming from a site in Israel. What better proof could we have that mankind had started to appreciate that something of their makeup, the soul if you will, survived after death?

As to the massive impact these first incarnations of advanced angelic and human souls had on the cultural development of our species, in my view this is where the traditions of the golden age come into play. While I spend some time arguing in Genesis Unveiled that such traditions should not be written off as the pure psychological influence of rose-tinted glasses, I also emphasise the extent to which a great many of them retain an unmistakably spiritual emphasis in their descriptions of how the golden race lived and thought.

And so we come back to the theme of debasement and destruction. Again a great many of the texts indicate that the debasement was essentially a progressive loss of the spiritual worldview that had reigned supreme during the golden age. Even the biblical commentaries of such notables as St Augustine and Josephus indicate that the “evil” of which the antediluvian Nephilim, watchers and fallen angels of the highly condensed and sparse Genesis narrative are accused is in fact an increasing preoccupation with the material world of possessions and power at the expense of contemplation of the ethereal and eternal.

In my view we have to impute from this that our antediluvian ancestors had reached a level of cultural achievement before the catastrophe sufficient for them to have been able to both amass and excessively concentrate on such physical distractions. To me, while I reject any Atlantean notions of high technology in great antiquity, this means that they would have been living in sizeable permanent settlements and trading extensively, mostly by navigating the oceans. Now, we have not found any definitive evidence of even this level of high culture dating back to the antediluvian epoch, and in my view we have no alternative but to explain this as the result of a combination of two factors, both related to the catastrophe itself. On the one hand the mostly coastal settlements would have been either wiped out by tsunamis or simply submerged by the rapid subsequent rise in sea levels of over 100 metres. On the other I am not convinced they were even building in stone, wood and other less durable materials being perfectly adequate in the temperate climates that would still have existed in many equatorial zones even at the height of the last ice age.

Of course a number of so-called anomalous artefacts have been found in various parts of the globe at various times that might provide tantalising evidence of this high level of antediluvian culture, and I examine them in detail in Genesis Unveiled, but for various reasons they cannot be relied upon heavily. However there is another argument in support of my case that stands up to the closest scrutiny even by academics. I have always rejected the claims by many of my colleagues that the early civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Americas could not have “developed overnight”, partly because I believe they underestimate the huge strides that a well organised society can make in an extremely short time – for which we only have to look at the progress of the western world from its mediaeval simplicity in the last half millennium – and partly because there is a development period of many millennia in the postdiluvian archaeological record from the relatively simple urbanisation of the Neolithic through to the major early civilisations.

However, not only do we have the sites of Nevali Cori and Gobekli Tepe which Andy has done much to advertise, but more recently the site of Jerf el-Ahmar in Syria has proved to be an arguably even more extensive and sophisticated site, with communal and domestic buildings constructed from stone and definitive proof of settled agriculture. I include a number of rarely published pictures of this site, kindly  provided by the head of the Franco-Syrian archaeological team, in Genesis Unveiled, which is just as well because it has now been submerged underneath the flood waters of a newly constructed dam. The date of its earliest occupation? 11,500 years ago! And it is quite clear that in this case there is absolutely no precedent or development period for such sophisticated and settled culture in the archaeological record.

Is this all mere coincidence? Or does Jerf el-Ahmar represent the earliest rebuilding by the survivors of the catastrophe? And if so, what does that tell us about the level of culture that existed before it? Of course, it is here that my work and Andy’s come together, because I would argue that there is a post-catastrophe element to the theme of civilising sages in many of the traditions which has been confused and interwoven with the original antediluvian themes concerning the introduction of the golden age. In this respect I would argue that if, as seems likely, the catastrophe wiped out the majority of the human race and necessitated that the survivors start again pretty much from scratch, it also makes perfect sense that at this point a number of angelic souls incarnated once again to reassert a spiritual worldview for the post-catastrophe epoch. In effect, to give mankind another chance and a fresh start.

In fact it is incredibly confusing to study Judaeo-Christian material about the antediluvian epoch in isolation, and I would argue that the distortions in what are, remember, relatively late works that have been seriously edited, can only be appreciated once we place them in the context of other comparable traditions from around the world. So, for example, in Judaeo-Christian material the fallen angels and perhaps also their offspring the Nephilim are accused of introducing debasement by teaching civilising skills that in all other traditions around the globe are seen as entirely positive. In my view we lift the veil when we realise that a) the original fallen angel theme concerns the angelic souls who incarnated to usher in the golden age – an entirely benign operation that only involved “falling” to the extent that they “fell into incarnation on the physical plane”; b) part of the fallen angel theme does accurately reflect the reality of the debasement of the golden race; and c) the introduction of civilisation to mankind by angelic beings is not only related to the onset of the golden age, but also to the postcatastrophe rebuilding and reeducation process.

But what does all this mean? I have yet to provide my explanation of why the catastrophe occurred, and it will perhaps come as no surprise that, although I do not agree with the simplistic notion that the flood was “sent by god”, I do believe that it was a karmic event. In other words, just as karma operates on an individual level, so also can it operate on more universal levels - for example that of the human race as a whole. And if the ancient texts and traditions are at all reliable underneath the inevitable distortions, they indicate that the progressive but eventually wholesale degeneration of our antediluvian ancestors from the golden spiritual path they were originally taught to follow represented a sufficient departure from our natural state that universal karma came into play - operating on the surface as a natural catastrophe precipitated by the impact of an extraterrestrial body. And again, to those who suggest that it is an obvious psychological construct for a simplistic culture to blame themselves for any catastrophe, and to assume they had offended the gods, there are strong counterarguments that I present in the book.

Of course, it probably goes without saying that the real message of Genesis Unveiled is that, if I am more or less right in this analysis, we are once again dashing headlong down the material path and forsaking our spiritual roots in even more dramatic fashion. Will we wake up before it is too late, or will universal karma once more be forced to take drastic action? Let me be clear, I am no doom merchant. If a future catastrophe was predetermined – as some commentators wrongly suggest from, for example, Mayan prophecy and calendars - then karma, which is ultimately all about choice, would not be able to come into play. This is exactly why, for example, the Hindu doctrine of predetermined world cycles completely contradicts its own doctrine of karma, apart from other problems with its lack of scientific plausibility from a geological and archaeological perspective – and even despite the fact that when applied to the universe as a whole it is an entirely philosophical framework.