Post by Indilwen on Aug 4, 2010 15:45:00 GMT 12
FORBIDDEN LEGACY OF A FALLEN RACE:
Turning to the archaeological reports and transactions on excavations in Kurdistan, I searched long and hard.
What I found astounded me.
For instance, in the late 1950s Ralph and Rose Solecki, two noted anthropologists, were uncovering the different occupational levels inside a huge cave overlooking the Greater Zab river at a site known as Zawi Chemi Shanidar, when they made a discovery of incredible significance to this debate.
They unearthed a number of goat skulls placed alongside a collection of wing bones belonging to large predatory birds. All of the wings had been hacked from the bodies of the birds in question, while many had still been in articulation when found. Carbon 14 dating of the organic deposits associated with these remains indicated a date of 10,870 years (+/-300 years), that is 8870 BC.
The bird wings were subsequently identified as those of four Gyptaeus barbatus (the bearded vulture), one Gyps fulvus (the griffon vulture), seven Haliaetus albicilla (the white-tailed sea eagle) and one Otis tarda (the great bustard) - only the last of which is still indigenous to the region. There were also the bones of four small eagles of indeterminable species. All except for the great bustard were raptorial birds, while the vultures were quite obviously eaters of carrion.
The discovery of these severed bird wings had posed obvious problems for the Soleckis.
Why had only certain types of birds been selected for this purpose, and what exactly had been the role played by these enormous predatory birds in the minds of those who had placed them within the Shanidar cave?
Shaman’s Wings
In an important article entitled ‘Predatory Bird Rituals at Zawi Chemi Shanidar’, published by the journal Sumer in 1977, Rose Solecki outlined the discovery of the goat skulls and bird remains. She suggested that the wings had almost certainly been utilized as part of some kind of ritualistic costume, worn either for personal decoration or for ceremonial purposes.
She linked them with the vulture shamanism of Catal Huyuk, a protoneolithic community in central Anatolia (Turkey), which reached its zenith a full 2000 years after these bird’s wings had been deposited 565 miles away in the Shanidar cave.
Rose Solecki recognized the enormous significance of these finds, and realized that they constituted firm evidence for the presence of an important religious cult in the Zawi Chemi Shanidar area, for as she had concluded in her article:
The Zawi Chemi people must have endowed these great raptorial birds with special powers, and the faunal remains we have described for the site must represent special ritual paraphernalia. Certainly, the remains represent a concerted effort by a goodly number of people just to hunt down and capture such a large number of birds and goats...
(Furthermore, that) either the wings were saved to pluck out the feathers, or that wing fans were made, or that they were used as part of a costume for a ritual. One of the murals from a Catal Huyuk shrine... depicts just such a ritual scene; i.e., a human figure dressed in a vulture skin...
Here was extraordinary evidence for the existence of vulture shamans in the highlands of Kurdistan c.8870 BC!
What’s more, all this was happening just 140 miles south-east of the suggested location for Eden and Dilmun on Lake Van at a time when the highland peoples of Kurdistan were changing from primitive hunter-gatherers to settled protoneolithic communities.
Might these goats skulls and predatory bird remains have some connection with the "yet uncertain forces" behind the sudden Neolithic explosion in this region? Remember, I had already established that the Watchers wore coats of feathers, plausibly those of the crow or vulture.
My mind reeled with possibilities. What on earth had been going on in this cave overlooking the Greater Zab, which, of course, has been cited as one of the four rivers of paradise? Had it been visited by Watchers, human angels, in the ninth millennium BC?
The presence of the predatory bird remains made complete sense, but what about the fifteen goat skulls - how might they have fitted into the picture?
A Goat for Azazel
The Pentateuch records how each year on the Day of Atonement a goat would be cast into the wilderness "for Azazel", carrying on its back the sins of the Jewish people. Moreover, Azazel, one of the two leaders of the fallen angels, was said to have fostered a race of demons known as the seirim, or ‘he-goats’.
They are mentioned several times in the Bible and were worshipped and adored by some Jews.
There is even some indication that women actually copulated with these goat-demons, for it states in the Book of Leviticus:
"And they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices unto the he-goats (seirim), after whom they go a whoring", perhaps a distant echo of the way in which the Watchers had taken wives from among mortal kind.
This clear relationship between the Watchers and he-goats is so strong that it led Hebrew scholar J.T. Milik to conclude that Azazel,
"was evidently not a simple he-goat, but a giant who combined goat-like characteristics with those of man".
In other words, he had been a goat-man - a goat shaman.
So it seemed that not only were the Watchers "bird-men", vulture shamans indulging in otherworldly practices, but also goat shamans.
It is bizarre to think that this association between Azazel and the goat was the impetus behind the goat becoming a symbol of the devil, as well as the reason why the world is so adverse to the inverted pentagram today.
The Peacock Angel
Kurdish scholar Mehrdad Izady also sees the predatory bird remains of the Shanidar cave as evidence of a shamanistic culture whose memory influenced the development of angel lore. Kurdistan is home to three wholly indigenous angel-worshipping cults - the most notorious and enigmatic of these being the Yezidis of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Their beliefs centre around a supreme being named Melek Taus, the ‘peacock angel’, who is venerated in the form of a strange bird icon known as a sanjaq. These statues, which sit on a metal column similar to a candlestick, are usually made of copper or brass.
More curious is that the oldest known sanjaqs are clearly not peacocks at all, showing instead a bulbous avian body and head with a hooked nose.
Two examples of sanjaqs, the metal bird icons venerated by the angel-worshipping Yezidi of Kurdistan. On the left is one
seen by Sir Austen Henry Layard in 1849, and on the right is another sketched by Mrs. Badger in 1850. Are these strange
icons abstract memories of Kurdistan's protoneolithic vulture shamans?
Izady has suggested that the sanjaq idols are more likely to be representations of a predatory bird like those apparently venerated by the shamans of Shanidar, in other words either the vulture, eagle or bustard.
The Jarmo People
All this was good news, for its helped vindicate the idea of an advanced culture existing in the mountains of Kurdistan at the point of inception of the Neolithic revolution.
If it was these vulture shamans who had carried this superior knowledge to the gradually developing farming communities of the lower foothills, then perhaps they really were the truth behind the myth of the Watchers who imparted the heavenly sciences to mankind.
There was, however, no description of these shamans beyond the appearance of their ceremonial garments.
Did they in any way resemble the tall, white-skinned individuals with shining countenances and viper-like faces referred to in the Enochian and Dead Sea literature?
Might there also be archaeological evidence for the former existence of a race bearing at least some of these distinctive features?
Indeed there is, for at a place called Jarmo, which overlooks the Lesser Zab river in Iraqi Kurdistan, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of an advanced protoneolithic community that thrived from around 6750 BC for up to 2000 years; indeed, the oldest known examples of primitive metallurgy have been found at Jarmo.
More interesting is the knowledge that these people were a dab hand at producing small sculpted images in slightly-baked clay.
Literally thousands of these figurines have been unearthed from the earliest occupational levels upwards. Most of them depict animals and birds. Some represent typically human heads, while others show a female figure, plausibly a representation of the Mother Goddess.
It almost appeared as if the Jarmo community enjoyed capturing images of the world around them, in much the same way that we take photographs today. Yet if this was the case, then how can we explain the presence among these small figurines of several anthropomorphic heads with elongated faces, slit eyes and clear ‘lizard’, or more correctly serpentine features? They are virtually inhuman in appearance and have more in common with bug-eyed aliens than abstract human forms.
Seeing pictures of these Jarmo heads sent a shiver down my spine, for the better examples bore striking similarities to the description of Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature.
Was it therefore possible that the neolithic people of Jarmo were depicting in partially abstract form the viper-like faces of the tall strangers in feather coats who would pay them uninvited visits?
Was it these strangers who had provided communities like the one at Jarmo with the knowledge of metallurgy as well as the basic rudiments of agriculture?
We can only speculate, but it is worth pointing out that obsidian tools found at Jarmo are known to have been fashioned from raw material obtained from the base of Nemrut Dag on Lake Van.
Did the Watchers deal in obsidian?
Might these finely-worked tools be a sign of their presence among other similar-like communities of Kurdistan?
Part Three
New Dawn No. 42
(May-June 1997)
By 5500 BC the inhabitants of the Kurdish foothills were beginning to descend in great numbers on to the plains of Mesopotamia.
It was around this date that Eridu (the biblical Erech), the Fertile Crescent’s first city, was established with its own temple complex that included an underground ritual pool.
Sometime around 5000 BC saw the arrival on to the northern plains of Mesopotamia of a new culture who are known today as the Ubaid (after Tell al’Ubaid, the mound-site where their presence was first detected during excavations by the eminent Near Eastern archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1922). They brought with them their own unique artistic style and funerary practices, including the habit of placing very strange anthropomorphic figurines in the graves of the dead.
The statuettes were either male or female (although predominantly female), with slim, well-proportioned naked bodies, wide shoulders, and strange reptilian heads that scholars generally refer to as ‘lizard-like’ in appearance. They bear long, tapered faces like snouts, with wide, eye-slits - usually elliptical pellets of clay pinched to form what are known as ‘coffee-bean’ eyes - and a thick, dark plume of bitumen on their heads to represent a coil of erect hair (similar coils fashioned in clay appear on some of the heads found at Jarmo).
All statuettes display either female pubic hair or male genitalia.
Each Ubaid figurine has it own unique pose.
By far the strangest and most compelling shows a naked female holding a baby to her left breast. The infant’s left hand clings on to the breast, and there can be little doubt that it is suckling milk. It is a very touching image, although it bears one chilling feature - the child has long slanted eyes and the head of a reptile.
This is highly significant, for it suggests that the baby was seen as having been born with these features. In other words, the ‘lizard-like’ heads of the figurines are not masks, or symbolic animalistic forms, but abstract images of an actual race believed by the Ubaid people to have possessed such reptilian qualities.
In the past these ‘lizard-like’ figurines have been identified by scholars as representations of the Mother Goddess - a totally erroneous assumption since some of them are obviously male - while ancient astronaut theorists such as Erich von Daniken have seen fit to identity them as images of alien entities. In my opinion, both explanations attempt to bracket the clay figurines into popular frameworks that are insufficient to explain their full symbolism.
Furthermore, since most of the examples found were retrieved from graves, where they were often the only item of any importance, Sir Leonard Woolley concluded that they represented "chthonic deities" that is, underworld denizens connected in some way with the rites of the dead.
In addition to this realization, it seems highly unlikely that they represent lizard-faced individuals, since lizards are not known to have had any special place in Near Eastern mythology. Much more likely is that the heads are those of serpents which are known to have been associated with Sumerian underworld deities such as Ningiszida, Lord of the Good Tree.
Since the heads of the Ubaid figurines appear to be styled on the much earlier examples found at Jarmo in the Kurdish mountains, were they highly abstract representations of viper-faced Watchers?
That these figurines were found specifically in grave sites suggests that they were connected with some kind of superstitious practice involving rites of the dead.
What were the Ubaid attempting to achieve by placing such strange images alongside their deceased relatives?
Were they trying to ensure the safe passage of the soul into the next world, or were they attempting to protect the corpse once the burial had taken place?
In later Babylonian tradition there was a true fear that if the dead were not interred in the correct manner, then their souls would be taken down into the underworld to become blood-sucking Edimmu.
Is this what the Ubaid feared - that their departed would be made into vampires if the viper-faced Watchers were not appeased in the current manner?
Did this include the burial of figurines bearing abstract features connected with their distorted memory of the fallen race?
The Underworld
Although no trace of any underworld domain can today be found in Mesopotamia, chthonic citadels of extreme antiquity do exist in the Near East.
For example, beneath the plains of Cappadocia in eastern Turkey there are no less than 36 underground cities, the most famous being the one at Derinkuyu which is estimated to have housed some 20,000 inhabitants.
Those cities explored so far penetrate downwards for anything up to a quarter of a mile.
They have streets, complex tunnel systems, living quarters and communal rooms and areas. Each one can be sealed off from the outside world by rolling into place huge circular doors, while on the surface the only visible sign of their presence are upright megalithic stones marking the positions of deep wells that double-up as air shafts to the various levels.
No one knows who built these underworld domains. They are at least 4000 years old, while tentative evidence suggests they were constructed as early as 9000 BC, when the final thrust of the last Ice Age was about to bring arctic-style conditions to the Middle East.
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IndilwenPhotos Friends Message Indilwen FORBIDDEN LEGACY OF A FALLEN RACE:
Source: www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/alien_watchers16.htm
Andrew Collins broke into the alternative publishing arena with his ground-breaking tome From the Ashes of Angels (1996), the culmination of five years' work on the Watchers and Nephilim with the help of his friend and colleague Richard Ward. Since then he has written four more books that challenge the way we view the past:
Gods of Eden (1998), Gateway to Atlantis (2000), Tutankhamun: The Exodus Conspiracy (2002) and Twenty-First Century Grail (2004).
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Andrew lectures worldwide, and is the organizer of QuestCon, Britain's most popular annual event on revisionist history, forbidden archaeology and ancient mysteries. He lives with his wife Sue in the Essex seaside town of Leigh-on-Sea.
All notes and references used for this article can be found in the author’s book From the Ashes of Angels.
Part One
New Dawn No. 40
(January-February 1997)
Angels are something we associate with beautiful Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance paintings, carved statues accompanying gothic architecture and supernatural beings who intervene in our lives at times of trouble.
For the last 2000 years this has been the stereotypical image fostered by the Christian Church. But what are angels? Where do they come from, and what have they meant to the development of organized religion?
Many people see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, as littered with accounts of angels appearing to righteous patriarchs and visionary prophets. Yet this is simply not so.
There are the three angels who approach Abraham to announce the birth of a son named Izaac to his wife Sarah as he sits beneath a tree on the Plain of Mamre. There are the two angels who visit Lot and his wife at Sodom prior to its destruction. There is the angel who wrestles all night with Jacob at a place named Penuel, or those which he sees moving up and down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth.
Yet other than these accounts, there are too few examples, and when angels do appear the narrative is often vague and unclear on what exactly is going on.
For instance, in the case of both Abraham and Lot the angels in question are described simply as ‘men’, who sit down to take food like any mortal person.
Influence of the Magi
It was not until post-exilic times - i.e. after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon around 450 BC - that angels became an integral part of the Jewish religion. It was even later, around 200 BC, that they began appearing with frequency in Judaic religious literature.
Works such as the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Book of Tobit contain enigmatic accounts of angelic beings that have individual names, specific appearances and established hierarchies. These radiant figures were of non-Judaic origin. All the indications are that they were aliens, imports from a foreign kingdom, namely Persia.
The country we know today as Iran might not at first seem the most likely source for angels, but it is a fact that the exiled Jews were heavily exposed to its religious faiths after the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC. These included not only Zoroastrianism, after the prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra, but also the much older religion of the Magi, the elite priestly caste of Media in north-west Iran. They believed in a whole pantheon of supernatural beings called ahuras, or ‘shining ones’, and daevas - ahuras who had fallen from grace because of their corruption of mankind.
Although eventually outlawed by Persia, the influence of the Magi ran deep within the beliefs, customs and rituals of Zoroastrianism.
Moreover, there can be little doubt that Magianism, from which we get terms such as magus, magic and magician, helped to establish the belief among Jews not only of whole hierarchies of angels, but also of legions of fallen angels - a topic that gains its greatest inspiration from one work alone - the Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch
Compiled in stages somewhere between 165 BC and the start of the Christian era, this so-called pseudepigraphal (i.e. falsely attributed) work has as its main theme the story behind the fall of the angels. Yet not the fall of angels in general, but those which were originally known as ’îrin (’îr in singular), "those who watch", or simply ‘watchers’ as the word is rendered in English translation.
The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels, or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and ‘descend’ on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind. The site given for this event is the summit of Hermon, a mythical location generally associated with the snowy heights of Mount Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range, north of modern-day Palestine (but see below for the most likely homeland of the Watchers).
The 200 rebels realize the implications of their transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.
After their descent to the lowlands, the Watchers indulge in earthly delights with their chosen ‘wives’, and through these unions are born giant offspring named as Nephilim, or Nefilim, a Hebrew word meaning ‘those who have fallen’, which is rendered in Greek translations as gigantes, or ‘giants’.
Heavenly Secrets
In between taking advantage of our women, 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 "colouring tinctures", presupposing that the wearing of make-up and jewellery 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 storytellers.
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 their number, Pênêmûe, 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 Kâsdejâ, 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 rebel 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 angels, or 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 Dûdâêl.
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".
Seven Heavens
The patriarch Enoch then enters the picture and, for some inexplicable reason, is asked to intercede on behalf of the incarcerated rebels. He attempts to reconcile them with the angels of heaven, but fails miserably. After this the Book of Enoch relates how the patriarch is carried by angels over mountains and seas to the "seven heavens".
Here he sees multitudes of angelic beings watching stars and other celestial bodies in what appear to be astronomical observatories. Others tend orchards and gardens that have more in common with an Israeli kibbutz than an ethereal realm above the clouds.
Elsewhere in ‘heaven’ is Eden, where God planted a garden for Adam and Eve before their fall - Enoch being the first mortal to enter this domain since their expulsion.
Finally, during the life of Enoch’s great-grandson, Noah, the Great Flood covers the land and destroys all remaining traces of the giant race. Thus ends the story of the Watchers.
The Sons of God
What are we to make of the Book of Enoch? Are its accounts of the fall of the Watchers and the visits to heaven by the patriarch Enoch based on any form of historical truth? Scholars would say no. They believe it to be a purely fictional work inspired by the Book of Genesis, in particular two enigmatic passages in Chapter 6.
The first, making up Verses 1 and 2, reads as follows:
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose.
By ‘sons of God’ the text means heavenly angels, the original Hebrew being bene ha-elohim.
In Verse 3 of Chapter 6 God unexpectedly pronounces that his spirit cannot remain in men for ever, and that since humanity is a creation of flesh its life-span will henceforth be shortened to "an hundred and twenty years". Yet in Verse 4 the tone suddenly reverts to the original theme of the chapter, for it says:
The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them: the same were the mighty men which were of old, the men of renown.
As the Pentateuch is considered to have been written by Moses the lawgiver in c.1200 BC, it is assumed that the lines of Genesis 6 influenced the construction of the Book of Enoch, not the other way round. Despite this obvious assumption on the part of Hebrew scholars, there is ample evidence to show that much of Genesis was written after the Jews return from captivity in Babylon during the mid-fifth century BC.
If this was the case, then there is no reason why the lines of Genesis 6 could not have been tampered with around this time. In an attempt to emphasize the immense antiquity of the Book of Enoch, Hebrew myth has always asserted that it was originally conveyed to Noah, Enoch’s great grandson, after the Great Flood, i.e. long before the compilation of Genesis.
This claim of precedence over the Pentateuch eventually led the Christian theologian St Augustine (AD 354-430) to state that the Book of Enoch was too old (ob nimiam antiquitatem) to be included in the Canon of Scripture!
Roots of the Nephilim
There is another enigma contained within the lines of Genesis 6, for its appears to embody two entirely different traditions.
Look again at the words of Verse 2. They speak of the Sons of God coming unto the Daughters of Men, while in contrast Verse 4 states firmly:
"The Nephilim were in the earth in those days and also after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men".
And also after that...
The meaning seemed clear enough: there were two quite separate traditions entangled here - one concerning the fallen race known to the early Israelites as the Nephilim (mentioned elsewhere in the Pentateuch as the progenitors of a race of giants called Anakim), and the other concerning the bene ha-elohim, the Sons of God, who are equated directly with the Watchers in Enochian tradition.
Theologians are aware of this dilemma, and get around the problem by suggesting that the angels fell from grace twice - once through pride and then again through lust. It seems certain that the term Nephilim was the original Hebrew name of the fallen race, while bene ha-elohim was a much later term - plausibly from Iran - that entered Genesis 6 long after its original compilation.
In spite of the contradictions surrounding Genesis 6, its importance is clear enough, for it preserved the firm belief among the ancestors of the Jewish race that at some point in the distant past a giant race had once ruled the earth.
So if the Watchers and the Nephilim really had inhabited this world, then,
Who or what were these seemingly physical beings?
Where did they come from?
What did they look like?
Where did they live and what was their ultimate fate?
The Book of Enoch was a vital source of knowledge with regard to their former existence, but I needed more - other less tainted accounts of this apparent race of human beings.
Then came an important break.
continued on next page ....
Turning to the archaeological reports and transactions on excavations in Kurdistan, I searched long and hard.
What I found astounded me.
For instance, in the late 1950s Ralph and Rose Solecki, two noted anthropologists, were uncovering the different occupational levels inside a huge cave overlooking the Greater Zab river at a site known as Zawi Chemi Shanidar, when they made a discovery of incredible significance to this debate.
They unearthed a number of goat skulls placed alongside a collection of wing bones belonging to large predatory birds. All of the wings had been hacked from the bodies of the birds in question, while many had still been in articulation when found. Carbon 14 dating of the organic deposits associated with these remains indicated a date of 10,870 years (+/-300 years), that is 8870 BC.
The bird wings were subsequently identified as those of four Gyptaeus barbatus (the bearded vulture), one Gyps fulvus (the griffon vulture), seven Haliaetus albicilla (the white-tailed sea eagle) and one Otis tarda (the great bustard) - only the last of which is still indigenous to the region. There were also the bones of four small eagles of indeterminable species. All except for the great bustard were raptorial birds, while the vultures were quite obviously eaters of carrion.
The discovery of these severed bird wings had posed obvious problems for the Soleckis.
Why had only certain types of birds been selected for this purpose, and what exactly had been the role played by these enormous predatory birds in the minds of those who had placed them within the Shanidar cave?
Shaman’s Wings
In an important article entitled ‘Predatory Bird Rituals at Zawi Chemi Shanidar’, published by the journal Sumer in 1977, Rose Solecki outlined the discovery of the goat skulls and bird remains. She suggested that the wings had almost certainly been utilized as part of some kind of ritualistic costume, worn either for personal decoration or for ceremonial purposes.
She linked them with the vulture shamanism of Catal Huyuk, a protoneolithic community in central Anatolia (Turkey), which reached its zenith a full 2000 years after these bird’s wings had been deposited 565 miles away in the Shanidar cave.
Rose Solecki recognized the enormous significance of these finds, and realized that they constituted firm evidence for the presence of an important religious cult in the Zawi Chemi Shanidar area, for as she had concluded in her article:
The Zawi Chemi people must have endowed these great raptorial birds with special powers, and the faunal remains we have described for the site must represent special ritual paraphernalia. Certainly, the remains represent a concerted effort by a goodly number of people just to hunt down and capture such a large number of birds and goats...
(Furthermore, that) either the wings were saved to pluck out the feathers, or that wing fans were made, or that they were used as part of a costume for a ritual. One of the murals from a Catal Huyuk shrine... depicts just such a ritual scene; i.e., a human figure dressed in a vulture skin...
Here was extraordinary evidence for the existence of vulture shamans in the highlands of Kurdistan c.8870 BC!
What’s more, all this was happening just 140 miles south-east of the suggested location for Eden and Dilmun on Lake Van at a time when the highland peoples of Kurdistan were changing from primitive hunter-gatherers to settled protoneolithic communities.
Might these goats skulls and predatory bird remains have some connection with the "yet uncertain forces" behind the sudden Neolithic explosion in this region? Remember, I had already established that the Watchers wore coats of feathers, plausibly those of the crow or vulture.
My mind reeled with possibilities. What on earth had been going on in this cave overlooking the Greater Zab, which, of course, has been cited as one of the four rivers of paradise? Had it been visited by Watchers, human angels, in the ninth millennium BC?
The presence of the predatory bird remains made complete sense, but what about the fifteen goat skulls - how might they have fitted into the picture?
A Goat for Azazel
The Pentateuch records how each year on the Day of Atonement a goat would be cast into the wilderness "for Azazel", carrying on its back the sins of the Jewish people. Moreover, Azazel, one of the two leaders of the fallen angels, was said to have fostered a race of demons known as the seirim, or ‘he-goats’.
They are mentioned several times in the Bible and were worshipped and adored by some Jews.
There is even some indication that women actually copulated with these goat-demons, for it states in the Book of Leviticus:
"And they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices unto the he-goats (seirim), after whom they go a whoring", perhaps a distant echo of the way in which the Watchers had taken wives from among mortal kind.
This clear relationship between the Watchers and he-goats is so strong that it led Hebrew scholar J.T. Milik to conclude that Azazel,
"was evidently not a simple he-goat, but a giant who combined goat-like characteristics with those of man".
In other words, he had been a goat-man - a goat shaman.
So it seemed that not only were the Watchers "bird-men", vulture shamans indulging in otherworldly practices, but also goat shamans.
It is bizarre to think that this association between Azazel and the goat was the impetus behind the goat becoming a symbol of the devil, as well as the reason why the world is so adverse to the inverted pentagram today.
The Peacock Angel
Kurdish scholar Mehrdad Izady also sees the predatory bird remains of the Shanidar cave as evidence of a shamanistic culture whose memory influenced the development of angel lore. Kurdistan is home to three wholly indigenous angel-worshipping cults - the most notorious and enigmatic of these being the Yezidis of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Their beliefs centre around a supreme being named Melek Taus, the ‘peacock angel’, who is venerated in the form of a strange bird icon known as a sanjaq. These statues, which sit on a metal column similar to a candlestick, are usually made of copper or brass.
More curious is that the oldest known sanjaqs are clearly not peacocks at all, showing instead a bulbous avian body and head with a hooked nose.
Two examples of sanjaqs, the metal bird icons venerated by the angel-worshipping Yezidi of Kurdistan. On the left is one
seen by Sir Austen Henry Layard in 1849, and on the right is another sketched by Mrs. Badger in 1850. Are these strange
icons abstract memories of Kurdistan's protoneolithic vulture shamans?
Izady has suggested that the sanjaq idols are more likely to be representations of a predatory bird like those apparently venerated by the shamans of Shanidar, in other words either the vulture, eagle or bustard.
The Jarmo People
All this was good news, for its helped vindicate the idea of an advanced culture existing in the mountains of Kurdistan at the point of inception of the Neolithic revolution.
If it was these vulture shamans who had carried this superior knowledge to the gradually developing farming communities of the lower foothills, then perhaps they really were the truth behind the myth of the Watchers who imparted the heavenly sciences to mankind.
There was, however, no description of these shamans beyond the appearance of their ceremonial garments.
Did they in any way resemble the tall, white-skinned individuals with shining countenances and viper-like faces referred to in the Enochian and Dead Sea literature?
Might there also be archaeological evidence for the former existence of a race bearing at least some of these distinctive features?
Indeed there is, for at a place called Jarmo, which overlooks the Lesser Zab river in Iraqi Kurdistan, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of an advanced protoneolithic community that thrived from around 6750 BC for up to 2000 years; indeed, the oldest known examples of primitive metallurgy have been found at Jarmo.
More interesting is the knowledge that these people were a dab hand at producing small sculpted images in slightly-baked clay.
Literally thousands of these figurines have been unearthed from the earliest occupational levels upwards. Most of them depict animals and birds. Some represent typically human heads, while others show a female figure, plausibly a representation of the Mother Goddess.
It almost appeared as if the Jarmo community enjoyed capturing images of the world around them, in much the same way that we take photographs today. Yet if this was the case, then how can we explain the presence among these small figurines of several anthropomorphic heads with elongated faces, slit eyes and clear ‘lizard’, or more correctly serpentine features? They are virtually inhuman in appearance and have more in common with bug-eyed aliens than abstract human forms.
Seeing pictures of these Jarmo heads sent a shiver down my spine, for the better examples bore striking similarities to the description of Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature.
Was it therefore possible that the neolithic people of Jarmo were depicting in partially abstract form the viper-like faces of the tall strangers in feather coats who would pay them uninvited visits?
Was it these strangers who had provided communities like the one at Jarmo with the knowledge of metallurgy as well as the basic rudiments of agriculture?
We can only speculate, but it is worth pointing out that obsidian tools found at Jarmo are known to have been fashioned from raw material obtained from the base of Nemrut Dag on Lake Van.
Did the Watchers deal in obsidian?
Might these finely-worked tools be a sign of their presence among other similar-like communities of Kurdistan?
Part Three
New Dawn No. 42
(May-June 1997)
By 5500 BC the inhabitants of the Kurdish foothills were beginning to descend in great numbers on to the plains of Mesopotamia.
It was around this date that Eridu (the biblical Erech), the Fertile Crescent’s first city, was established with its own temple complex that included an underground ritual pool.
Sometime around 5000 BC saw the arrival on to the northern plains of Mesopotamia of a new culture who are known today as the Ubaid (after Tell al’Ubaid, the mound-site where their presence was first detected during excavations by the eminent Near Eastern archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1922). They brought with them their own unique artistic style and funerary practices, including the habit of placing very strange anthropomorphic figurines in the graves of the dead.
The statuettes were either male or female (although predominantly female), with slim, well-proportioned naked bodies, wide shoulders, and strange reptilian heads that scholars generally refer to as ‘lizard-like’ in appearance. They bear long, tapered faces like snouts, with wide, eye-slits - usually elliptical pellets of clay pinched to form what are known as ‘coffee-bean’ eyes - and a thick, dark plume of bitumen on their heads to represent a coil of erect hair (similar coils fashioned in clay appear on some of the heads found at Jarmo).
All statuettes display either female pubic hair or male genitalia.
Each Ubaid figurine has it own unique pose.
By far the strangest and most compelling shows a naked female holding a baby to her left breast. The infant’s left hand clings on to the breast, and there can be little doubt that it is suckling milk. It is a very touching image, although it bears one chilling feature - the child has long slanted eyes and the head of a reptile.
This is highly significant, for it suggests that the baby was seen as having been born with these features. In other words, the ‘lizard-like’ heads of the figurines are not masks, or symbolic animalistic forms, but abstract images of an actual race believed by the Ubaid people to have possessed such reptilian qualities.
In the past these ‘lizard-like’ figurines have been identified by scholars as representations of the Mother Goddess - a totally erroneous assumption since some of them are obviously male - while ancient astronaut theorists such as Erich von Daniken have seen fit to identity them as images of alien entities. In my opinion, both explanations attempt to bracket the clay figurines into popular frameworks that are insufficient to explain their full symbolism.
Furthermore, since most of the examples found were retrieved from graves, where they were often the only item of any importance, Sir Leonard Woolley concluded that they represented "chthonic deities" that is, underworld denizens connected in some way with the rites of the dead.
In addition to this realization, it seems highly unlikely that they represent lizard-faced individuals, since lizards are not known to have had any special place in Near Eastern mythology. Much more likely is that the heads are those of serpents which are known to have been associated with Sumerian underworld deities such as Ningiszida, Lord of the Good Tree.
Since the heads of the Ubaid figurines appear to be styled on the much earlier examples found at Jarmo in the Kurdish mountains, were they highly abstract representations of viper-faced Watchers?
That these figurines were found specifically in grave sites suggests that they were connected with some kind of superstitious practice involving rites of the dead.
What were the Ubaid attempting to achieve by placing such strange images alongside their deceased relatives?
Were they trying to ensure the safe passage of the soul into the next world, or were they attempting to protect the corpse once the burial had taken place?
In later Babylonian tradition there was a true fear that if the dead were not interred in the correct manner, then their souls would be taken down into the underworld to become blood-sucking Edimmu.
Is this what the Ubaid feared - that their departed would be made into vampires if the viper-faced Watchers were not appeased in the current manner?
Did this include the burial of figurines bearing abstract features connected with their distorted memory of the fallen race?
The Underworld
Although no trace of any underworld domain can today be found in Mesopotamia, chthonic citadels of extreme antiquity do exist in the Near East.
For example, beneath the plains of Cappadocia in eastern Turkey there are no less than 36 underground cities, the most famous being the one at Derinkuyu which is estimated to have housed some 20,000 inhabitants.
Those cities explored so far penetrate downwards for anything up to a quarter of a mile.
They have streets, complex tunnel systems, living quarters and communal rooms and areas. Each one can be sealed off from the outside world by rolling into place huge circular doors, while on the surface the only visible sign of their presence are upright megalithic stones marking the positions of deep wells that double-up as air shafts to the various levels.
No one knows who built these underworld domains. They are at least 4000 years old, while tentative evidence suggests they were constructed as early as 9000 BC, when the final thrust of the last Ice Age was about to bring arctic-style conditions to the Middle East.
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IndilwenPhotos Friends Message Indilwen FORBIDDEN LEGACY OF A FALLEN RACE:
Source: www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_alien/alien_watchers16.htm
Andrew Collins broke into the alternative publishing arena with his ground-breaking tome From the Ashes of Angels (1996), the culmination of five years' work on the Watchers and Nephilim with the help of his friend and colleague Richard Ward. Since then he has written four more books that challenge the way we view the past:
Gods of Eden (1998), Gateway to Atlantis (2000), Tutankhamun: The Exodus Conspiracy (2002) and Twenty-First Century Grail (2004).
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Andrew lectures worldwide, and is the organizer of QuestCon, Britain's most popular annual event on revisionist history, forbidden archaeology and ancient mysteries. He lives with his wife Sue in the Essex seaside town of Leigh-on-Sea.
All notes and references used for this article can be found in the author’s book From the Ashes of Angels.
Part One
New Dawn No. 40
(January-February 1997)
Angels are something we associate with beautiful Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance paintings, carved statues accompanying gothic architecture and supernatural beings who intervene in our lives at times of trouble.
For the last 2000 years this has been the stereotypical image fostered by the Christian Church. But what are angels? Where do they come from, and what have they meant to the development of organized religion?
Many people see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, as littered with accounts of angels appearing to righteous patriarchs and visionary prophets. Yet this is simply not so.
There are the three angels who approach Abraham to announce the birth of a son named Izaac to his wife Sarah as he sits beneath a tree on the Plain of Mamre. There are the two angels who visit Lot and his wife at Sodom prior to its destruction. There is the angel who wrestles all night with Jacob at a place named Penuel, or those which he sees moving up and down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth.
Yet other than these accounts, there are too few examples, and when angels do appear the narrative is often vague and unclear on what exactly is going on.
For instance, in the case of both Abraham and Lot the angels in question are described simply as ‘men’, who sit down to take food like any mortal person.
Influence of the Magi
It was not until post-exilic times - i.e. after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon around 450 BC - that angels became an integral part of the Jewish religion. It was even later, around 200 BC, that they began appearing with frequency in Judaic religious literature.
Works such as the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Book of Tobit contain enigmatic accounts of angelic beings that have individual names, specific appearances and established hierarchies. These radiant figures were of non-Judaic origin. All the indications are that they were aliens, imports from a foreign kingdom, namely Persia.
The country we know today as Iran might not at first seem the most likely source for angels, but it is a fact that the exiled Jews were heavily exposed to its religious faiths after the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC. These included not only Zoroastrianism, after the prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra, but also the much older religion of the Magi, the elite priestly caste of Media in north-west Iran. They believed in a whole pantheon of supernatural beings called ahuras, or ‘shining ones’, and daevas - ahuras who had fallen from grace because of their corruption of mankind.
Although eventually outlawed by Persia, the influence of the Magi ran deep within the beliefs, customs and rituals of Zoroastrianism.
Moreover, there can be little doubt that Magianism, from which we get terms such as magus, magic and magician, helped to establish the belief among Jews not only of whole hierarchies of angels, but also of legions of fallen angels - a topic that gains its greatest inspiration from one work alone - the Book of Enoch.
The Book of Enoch
Compiled in stages somewhere between 165 BC and the start of the Christian era, this so-called pseudepigraphal (i.e. falsely attributed) work has as its main theme the story behind the fall of the angels. Yet not the fall of angels in general, but those which were originally known as ’îrin (’îr in singular), "those who watch", or simply ‘watchers’ as the word is rendered in English translation.
The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels, or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and ‘descend’ on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind. The site given for this event is the summit of Hermon, a mythical location generally associated with the snowy heights of Mount Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range, north of modern-day Palestine (but see below for the most likely homeland of the Watchers).
The 200 rebels realize the implications of their transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.
After their descent to the lowlands, the Watchers indulge in earthly delights with their chosen ‘wives’, and through these unions are born giant offspring named as Nephilim, or Nefilim, a Hebrew word meaning ‘those who have fallen’, which is rendered in Greek translations as gigantes, or ‘giants’.
Heavenly Secrets
In between taking advantage of our women, 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 "colouring tinctures", presupposing that the wearing of make-up and jewellery 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 storytellers.
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 their number, Pênêmûe, 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 Kâsdejâ, 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 rebel 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 angels, or 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 Dûdâêl.
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".
Seven Heavens
The patriarch Enoch then enters the picture and, for some inexplicable reason, is asked to intercede on behalf of the incarcerated rebels. He attempts to reconcile them with the angels of heaven, but fails miserably. After this the Book of Enoch relates how the patriarch is carried by angels over mountains and seas to the "seven heavens".
Here he sees multitudes of angelic beings watching stars and other celestial bodies in what appear to be astronomical observatories. Others tend orchards and gardens that have more in common with an Israeli kibbutz than an ethereal realm above the clouds.
Elsewhere in ‘heaven’ is Eden, where God planted a garden for Adam and Eve before their fall - Enoch being the first mortal to enter this domain since their expulsion.
Finally, during the life of Enoch’s great-grandson, Noah, the Great Flood covers the land and destroys all remaining traces of the giant race. Thus ends the story of the Watchers.
The Sons of God
What are we to make of the Book of Enoch? Are its accounts of the fall of the Watchers and the visits to heaven by the patriarch Enoch based on any form of historical truth? Scholars would say no. They believe it to be a purely fictional work inspired by the Book of Genesis, in particular two enigmatic passages in Chapter 6.
The first, making up Verses 1 and 2, reads as follows:
And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose.
By ‘sons of God’ the text means heavenly angels, the original Hebrew being bene ha-elohim.
In Verse 3 of Chapter 6 God unexpectedly pronounces that his spirit cannot remain in men for ever, and that since humanity is a creation of flesh its life-span will henceforth be shortened to "an hundred and twenty years". Yet in Verse 4 the tone suddenly reverts to the original theme of the chapter, for it says:
The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them: the same were the mighty men which were of old, the men of renown.
As the Pentateuch is considered to have been written by Moses the lawgiver in c.1200 BC, it is assumed that the lines of Genesis 6 influenced the construction of the Book of Enoch, not the other way round. Despite this obvious assumption on the part of Hebrew scholars, there is ample evidence to show that much of Genesis was written after the Jews return from captivity in Babylon during the mid-fifth century BC.
If this was the case, then there is no reason why the lines of Genesis 6 could not have been tampered with around this time. In an attempt to emphasize the immense antiquity of the Book of Enoch, Hebrew myth has always asserted that it was originally conveyed to Noah, Enoch’s great grandson, after the Great Flood, i.e. long before the compilation of Genesis.
This claim of precedence over the Pentateuch eventually led the Christian theologian St Augustine (AD 354-430) to state that the Book of Enoch was too old (ob nimiam antiquitatem) to be included in the Canon of Scripture!
Roots of the Nephilim
There is another enigma contained within the lines of Genesis 6, for its appears to embody two entirely different traditions.
Look again at the words of Verse 2. They speak of the Sons of God coming unto the Daughters of Men, while in contrast Verse 4 states firmly:
"The Nephilim were in the earth in those days and also after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men".
And also after that...
The meaning seemed clear enough: there were two quite separate traditions entangled here - one concerning the fallen race known to the early Israelites as the Nephilim (mentioned elsewhere in the Pentateuch as the progenitors of a race of giants called Anakim), and the other concerning the bene ha-elohim, the Sons of God, who are equated directly with the Watchers in Enochian tradition.
Theologians are aware of this dilemma, and get around the problem by suggesting that the angels fell from grace twice - once through pride and then again through lust. It seems certain that the term Nephilim was the original Hebrew name of the fallen race, while bene ha-elohim was a much later term - plausibly from Iran - that entered Genesis 6 long after its original compilation.
In spite of the contradictions surrounding Genesis 6, its importance is clear enough, for it preserved the firm belief among the ancestors of the Jewish race that at some point in the distant past a giant race had once ruled the earth.
So if the Watchers and the Nephilim really had inhabited this world, then,
Who or what were these seemingly physical beings?
Where did they come from?
What did they look like?
Where did they live and what was their ultimate fate?
The Book of Enoch was a vital source of knowledge with regard to their former existence, but I needed more - other less tainted accounts of this apparent race of human beings.
Then came an important break.
continued on next page ....