Who Watches the Watchers?

Though I have been reading The History of Magic for a around a week now, I have only gotten to page 168, and that's after starting in page 55, skipping Waite's preface and Lévi's introduction. (the last time I tried to read those they had scared me off the book, so I just wanted to skip to the good stuff.) The reason it's been taking me so long is that I keep getting distracted. Since starting it I have taken pages and pages of notes and ideas, trying to draw connections between ideas I am reading now and have read or had before. Also, Lévi's writing is very allusive, and often refers to ideas of concepts I am not really familiar with, and often I find myself getting lost in Wikipedia trying to catch up, or trying to get an idea about something else just because I have been thinking about it. The text has really sent my brain off in a bunch of different directions. Last night, I broke my vow of not reading other stuff and read started reading the bible. I got up through all the stuff concerning Abraham and Isaac, stopping before it started into Jacob (that's about half of Genesis). It's very hard to read a book grounded in a Judeo-Christian worldview without having read that stuff!* While most of it I knew, I had no idea how all those stories fit together. I didn't know, for example, the relation between Lot and Abraham, or that they were contemporaries.

One section that I found very interesting was a little blurb about beings coming down from heaven to mate with mortal women and creating giants.

...Okay, I just got back from a little breather, because what I am going to launch into is quite complex, and textual. It concerns a topic which has been bothering me ever since I started reading Lévi: the formation of early religious pantheons.

Here is the text beings mating from my dad's old bible, Genesis 6:1-4, translated by Theophile J. Meek.** This is right before the story of the Flood:

Presently when men began to grow numerous over the earth, and had daughters born to them, the sons of the gods noticed that the daughter of men were attractive; so they married those whom they liked best. Then the LORD said,

"My spirit must not remain in man forever, inasmuch as he is flesh. Accordingly, his lifetime shall be one hundred twenty years."

In those days, as well as afterward, there were giants on the earth, who were born to the sons of the gods whenever they had intercourse with the daughters of men; these were the heroes who were men of note in days of old.

Pretty odd, huh? "Sons of the gods?" What's that doing in a the bible? It seemed like a clear example of some earlier version of the story getting left in the text and not edited out. In fact the entire section seems out of place stuck as it is between the ancestry list from Seth to Noah and the story of the flood. It has a lot of tropes in it that pop up in other religions, the existence of Giants before the flood, the existence of heroes who are the descendants of gods (Although usually the giants are separate from the heroes and the heroes live after the Deluge, not before it.) Then there was the fact that this passage is basically the same story that concerns the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which Lévi discusses in chapter one of The History of Magic: Basically, rogue angels leave heaven and mate with human women and then teach them the secrets of magic and technology. This corrupts men, and Gods casts those angels out of heaven and causes the flood to get rid of these pernicious influences. It seems to basically be a more fleshed out version of this story.

But who are these beings, then? Are they son's of gods? Sons of God? Angels? What's the deal with this story. So, I checked Wikipedia.

Now, according to the the section on the Book of Enoch, the beings that come down from heaven are the Watchers, or Grigori, angels "dispatched to earth simply to watch over people." The beings they father are called the Nephilim. This title is also accorded to them in some translations of the section from Genesis. The section on the Nephilim quotes this version of the same passage, from the New American Standard Bible:

Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

Here we have sons of God and Nephilim being the two groups being mentioned, instead of "the sons of the gods" and giants. Obviusly Nephilim is the actual word coming from the bible, and giants is just an equivalence, the same describing the Jotun of norse myth as giants. Wikipedia actually has a page on the phrase "sons of God," which outlines some theories about what the phrase means, but also includes the detail that is is a translation of "b'nei elohim." Elohim might mean Children of El, who was the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, and possibly is the source of the Judaic god. So this phrase means something like "the sons of the children of El." Elohim is also a term used only for God, which seems like a plural form meaning "The gods" that has been grandfathered in to mean only the one God, as if the one God is legion, or something. I think this explains why Meek translated the phrase as "sons of the gods," then.

Now, what's furtherly interesting, to me at least, is that in Canaanite mythology, El has many sons and children including Ba'al Hadad, Yam, and Mot, gods of storm, sea, and death, thus corresponding to Zeus, Poseidan and Hades, making El correspond to Cronus. And of course Ba'al, which means lord, pops up all over the bible as a false god. So it seems as if El is the future god of the Old Testament, and all these signs of the past religion litter the history of the Bible. And what seems especially ironic is, there seems to have been some type of war between Ba'al Hadad and his father, just like with Zeus and his father Cronus, but this time, the father won, not the son.

So were the sons of god in the original story the sons of El, Hadad and Yam and Mot? Or were the they fallen angels? In the book of Enoch, they are given names, none of them the names of Canaanite gods. The leader is Samyaza, whose name means "infamous rebellion" and might just be another name for Satan, and includes among their number Azazel, who is a pretty famous demon. Are the Watchers the first version of the story of the fallen angels, or are they another group of fallen angels? Are the watchers supposed to be the others gods in El's pantheon, who have been kicked out. What is going on here?

Who are the Watchers?

*In fact, one of the things that I have contention with in Lévi is his insistence on viewing occult phenomena from such a perspective. I mean, for argument's sake, a lot of the stories relating to evil, satanic spirits may simply be stories formerly involving pagan spirits. Those devils that aid St. Chaldean when he's a magician might have simply been tutelary gods, or nature spirits. I find it odd to talk about magic while leaving out all mention of the Celtic and Nordic mythic systems. Druids seem to me like they would be a pretty large portion of the occult, yet Levi doesn't really deal with how they relate to his system.

**That's one hell of a Christian name, no?