Reconsidering the Magi

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The 200 rebel angels spent their time imparting the heavenly secrets to those who had ears to listen. One of their number, a leader named Azazel, is said to have ’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’, indicating that the Watchers brought the use of metal to mankind. He also instructed them on how they could make ’bracelets’ and ’ornaments’ and showed them how to use ’antimony’, a white brittle metal employed in the arts and medicine.

To the women Azazel taught the art of ’beautifying’ the eyelids, and the use of ’all kinds of costly stones’ and ’coloring tinctures’, presupposing that the wearing of make-up and jewelery was unknown before this age. In addition to these crimes, Azazel stood accused of teaching women how to enjoy sexual pleasure and indulge in promiscuity - a blasphemy seen as ’Godlessness’ in the eyes of the Hebrew story-tellers.

Other Watchers stood accused of revealing to mortal kind the knowledge of more scientific arts, such as astronomy, the knowledge of the clouds, or meteorology; the ’signs of the earth’, presumably geodesy and geography, as well as the ’signs’, or passage, of the celestial bodies, such as the sun and moon. Their leader, Shemyaza, is accredited with having taught ’enchantments, and root-cuttings’, a reference to the magical arts shunned upon by most orthodox Jews.

One of our number, Pˆnˆm–e, taught ’the bitter and the sweet’, surely a reference to the use of herbs and spices in foods, while instructing men on the use of ’ink and paper’, implying that the Watchers introduced the earliest forms of writing. Far more disturbing is Kƒsdejƒ, who is said to have shown ’the children of men all the wicked smitings of spirits and demons, and the smitings of the embryo in the womb, that it may pass away’. In other words he taught women how to abort babies.

These lines concerning the forbidden sciences handed to humanity by the Watchers raises the whole fundamental question of why angels should have possessed any knowledge of such matters in the first place. Why should they have needed to work with metals, use charms, incantations and writing; beautify the body; employ the use of spices, and know now to abort an unborn child? None of these skills are what one might expect heavenly messengers of God to possess, not unless they were human in the first place.

In my opinion, this revelation of previously unknown knowledge and wisdom seems like the actions of a highly advanced race passing on some of its closely-guarded secrets to a less evolved culture still striving to understand the basic principles of life.

More disconcerting were the apparent actions of the now fully grown Nephilim, for it says:

And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

By now the cries of desperation from mankind were being heard loud and clear by the Watchers, who had remained loyal to heaven. One by one they are appointed by God to proceed against the rebel Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim, who are described as ’the bastards and the reprobates, and the children of fornication’. The first leader, Shemyaza, is hung and bound upside down and his soul banished to become the stars of the constellation of Orion.

The second leader, Azazel, is bound hand and foot, and cast for eternity into the darkness of a desert referred to as D–dƒˆl. Upon him are placed ’rough and jagged rocks’ and here he shall forever remain until the Day of Judgment when he will be ’cast into the fire’ for his sins. For their part in the corruption of mankind, the rebel Watchers are forced to witness the slaughter of their own children before being cast into some kind of heavenly prison, seen as an ’abyss of fire’.