Mark Booth - The Secret History of the World

Never part of the canon of Christian scripture as it was put together in the fourth century, the Book of Enoch was nevertheless sufficiently esteemed by writers of the New Testament for them to quote from it, evidently viewing it as an authority with a status something like sacred scripture. It is a measure of the status of this book that Jesus Christ evidently recognized its notions of a coming kingdom and the judgement of the world. Moreover the phrase used at his Transfiguration, ‘This is my Son, the Elect One’, is meant to show that Jesus Christ is the One promised by the Book of Enoch .

This is what the Book of Enoch has to say about the angels who loved women:

Enoch 6.1-4. ‘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 ourselves wives from among the children of men and beget us children.”… And all the others together with them took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them, and they taught them charms and enchantments… and they became pregnant.’

Later Enoch is given a tour of the Heavens, where the rebel angels — or Watchers — ask Enoch to intercede with God on their behalf. But when Enoch tries to do so, God only repudiates them, sending Enoch back:

‘And go say to the Watchers, who have sent thee to intercede for them: You should intercede for men, and not men for you… ’

The story of the rebellious angels is then retold, as it were, in God’s own words with additional details:

Enoch 6. 15-16. ‘Wherefore have ye left the high, holy and eternal Heaven, and lain with women, and defiled yourselves with the daughters of men and taken to yourselves wives, and done like the children of the Earth, and begotten giants as your sons. And though you were spiritual beings living the eternal life, you have defiled yourselves with the blood of women, and have begotten children with the blood of flesh and blood as those also who die and perish… And now as to the Watchers who have sent thee to intercede for them, who have been aforetime in Heaven, say to them: “You have been in Heaven, but all the mysteries had not yet been revealed to you, and you knew worthless ones, and these in the hardness of your hearts you have made known to women, and through these mysteries women and men work much evil on earth.” Say to them therefore: “You have no peace.”’

The Epistle of Jude 6:6 describes the Watchers as having ‘not kept their own appointed habitations’. A third century Christian writer, Commodorius, wrote: ‘The women who seduced the angels were of such lewdness that their seducers could not now desire to return to heaven.’

But beyond these few, strange fragmentary hints lies a set of characters very familiar to us all.

When the Epistle to Jude describes the Watchers as not having kept to their appointed seasons, it seems to be referring to them in some way as timekeepers. But the final, telling clue to revealing the hidden identity of these ‘fallen angels’ lies in their number, given in one of the versions the Book of Enoch as seven.

In all traditions seven is the number of the great gods of the solar system. Again we see that the biblical narrative has encoded within it stories of the same astronomical gods as those of Greece and Rome.

The angels who became sexually attracted to human women are none other than the gods of Olympus.

WE HAVE SEEN THAT THE BIBLE CONTAINS encoded within it an account of creation in which key roles have been played by Saturn, earth, the sun, Venus and the moon. We have followed the story from the purely material to the vegetable to the first stirrings of animal life. The age that followed would be marked by the arrival of the gods of the solar system; Jupiter — or Zeus, as he was known to the Greeks — became the king of all the gods. The gods of Mars and Mercury would fly into view during this age too.

The infant Jupiter had to be hidden from his father, Saturn. Mother Earth kept Jupiter on the island of Crete in a cave deep underground. Isolated from the other gods, the boy Jupiter lived on the milk of a goat-nymph and ate the honey of sacred bees.

Mother Earth hid Jupiter in this cave because she was afraid that Saturn and the Titans, the elder sons and daughters of Saturn, would come to destroy him. She knew that the birth of Jupiter showed that the reign of Saturn was coming to an end, but the transition from one age to another is always a painful one. The old order always tries to stay on beyond its allotted time.

The Titans were Saturn’s enforcers. They were the consciousness eaters. They wanted to swallow up the new life and create what Milton, who knew all about the secret history, called ‘a universe of Death’.

The Titans would always be the enemies of Jupiter. They failed to kill him while he was still an infant, but they did not cease to wage war on him, sporadically and in great battles, until finally and decisively Jupiter defeated them and imprisoned them underground. There these great forces of materialism became part of the very structure of the earth, and whenever volcanoes rumbled and threatened to erupt the ancients heard their discontent.

With the Titans imprisoned, Jupiter became for a while the undisputed ruler of Mount Olympus, king of the gods and god of a new age. He shook his magnificent locks and the whole earth trembled. He was the only god strong enough to throw the thunderbolt.

In his masterpiece The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony , the great Italian scholar and writer Roberto Calasso, who has done much to bring esoteric lore regarding the historical reality behind myths to a wider public, put it like this: ‘Olympus is a rebellion of lightness against precision.’ In other words the Olympic gods — Jupiter, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, Diana, Athena and the others — rebelled against the limitations imposed by Saturn. The Olympians flew through the air to perform magical deeds and defeat terrible monsters. It was a splendid, spectacular era that thrashes and writhes in the mind, inspiring some of history’s most imaginative art, sculpture and literature.

But it was also somewhat sinister, an age charged with moral ambiguity. The thunderbolt of Jupiter struck through a dense fug of testosterone, the feral reek of animal passion, the fell heartlessness of animal ferocity.

Jupiter raped Callisto and she was turned into a bear. He raped Io, turning her into a cow. He punished Lycaon for cannibalism by turning him into a wolf. Apollo’s lust for Hyacinth caused the beautiful youth to metamorphose into the flower and his rape of Daphne ended in her morphing into the laurel bush.

We should take note that all these myths are concerned with is the proliferation of natural forms, the cramming of every square inch of our planet with the almost infinite variety of plants and animals, the biodiversity that is its great natural glory. Zeus is not moral in a sense that Moses would have recognized, but he and his fellow Olympians direct the galvanizing fecundity, the myriad creativity of the biological world.

BUT WHAT OF THE STORY OF THE FISH GODS? How does that fit in?