The Watchers’ Fall

In the days of Jared, seventh patriarch from Adam, two hundred angels came down out of heaven and did not go back. They belonged to the order the Hebrew names the Irin: the Watchers, the ones who do not sleep. Their charge was vigilance. They had been set at the rim of the created world to keep it — and instead, two hundred of them looked down at the daughters of men, wanted what they saw, and came down to take it.

The place has a name, and the name is a confession. Mount Hermon, in the upper Galilee, the same summit Christ would one day climb to be transfigured in glory. The Watchers reached it first. What they did there is fixed in the mountain’s own name, which carries the Hebrew root cherem: a thing cursed, a thing given over to destruction. The fullest account is set down in 1 Enoch 6 through 11, the chapters the tradition calls the Book of the Watchers. It is not a gentle text, and it was not written to be one.

The oath between them

Before a single one of them had touched the earth, the two hundred swore an oath. The reason is the most human detail in the whole account, and the most damning. Semjaza, their chief, was afraid. Not of God — not yet. He was afraid of standing alone.

“And Semjaza, who was their leader, said to them: I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin. And they all answered him and said: Let us all swear an oath, and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing. Then sware they all together and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And they were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it.” 1 Enoch 6:3–6 (R. H. Charles translation, 1912)

Read what he actually says. I fear ye will not indeed agree to do this deed, and I alone shall have to pay the penalty of a great sin. That is not the voice of a tempter promising delights. It is the voice of someone arranging an alibi. He does not ask the others to want the thing more. He asks them to bind themselves to it first — to swear, before anything has been done, so that no one of them can later wake in the night, repent, and turn back without betraying all the rest.

This is the first sin, and it comes before the descent, before the daughters of men, before the Giants. It is also the one sin on this page the modern reader already knows from the inside. Every collective that has ever done what no single member would have dared alone began exactly here: with the promise that turns retreat into treachery. The Watchers did not fall because they were strong. They fell because each of them made certain he would not be the one who stopped it.

The chiefs of the descent

1 Enoch does not leave them anonymous. Chapter 6 names twenty of them — the chiefs of tens, each with a body of fellow Watchers under his command, each carrying one forbidden art down into the world of men. Fourteen of the twenty the older books match to a specific office. Here they are, and here is what each one taught.

The seven remaining names in the list of twenty are not given specific offices in 1 Enoch and are recorded only as chiefs of tens. The wider tradition (the Book of Jubilees, the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Slavonic 2 Enoch) preserves some of the same names and elaborates others.

The cohort of the fall, in image

The fourteen named chiefs above, set as the older devotional engraving tradition would have drawn them — the fallen of the angelic order, in the blackwork manner.

What they taught

If the oath was the first sin, the teaching was the second. The Watchers had taken human women; now they began to teach them. Not wisdom — creation had its own channels for wisdom. They taught the things those channels had withheld. The older books set down the syllabus:

• The making of weapons (swords, knives, the technologies of war and personal harm).
• The cosmetic arts (the painting of the face, the dyeing of hair, the technologies of self-presentation that the older tradition reads as the precondition of vanity and seductive deception).
• Writing with ink upon paper, and the related arts of the inscribed charm.
• The cutting and harvesting of roots (the older botanical pharmacopoeia that operates outside the order of medicine).
• Enchantments and the technical resolution of enchantments.
• The courses of the stars, the moon, the sun (astrology read as predictive determinism rather than as cosmology).
• The cutting of the womb (the knowledge that operates against generation rather than for it).
• The reading of dreams as oracle rather than as discernment.

This is the most uncomfortable section of 1 Enoch, and the most useful. Look at the syllabus again. Writing is not evil. Astronomy is not evil. The painted face is not evil. Every art on the list is now buried so deep in human civilisation that we cannot picture a world without it, and the high tradition — Augustine, Aquinas, the scholastics after them — spent centuries redeeming each one back into Christian use. But the older record will not let the question go. It does not ask whether the arts are evil. It asks who taught them, in what order, and to what end. For all of them the answer is the same: the teachers were the fallen, and the end was the unmaking of the order that had been given. The arts were redeemed. The record of where they came from was kept.

The Giants conceived

Then the women began to give birth, and what they bore were not children. 1 Enoch 7:2 reaches for a number and lands on one that cannot be true: Giants whose height was three thousand ells. Not inches — ells. Something close to four kilometres. The number is impossible on purpose. It is the text telling you that what came out of these unions did not belong to the order of nature, and that no honest measure would ever hold it.

And they were hungry. The Giants ate the harvest of the whole earth first. When the harvest was gone they ate the herds; when the herds were gone they turned on the people; and when the people could no longer feed them, they began at last to eat one another. 1 Enoch 7:6 says the earth itself cried out — not the people on it, the earth — and laid its charge against the lawless before heaven. Heaven heard it. The four great archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, looked down and saw what had been done to the world below. It is the founding scene of their standing in the whole tradition: the four are named, where the rest of the holy order is not, because they are the four who saw it and did not look away.

The petition and the sentence

The four carried the case the whole way up — to God Himself. The sentence comes down in 1 Enoch 10, and it is not one sentence but several: a separate judgement handed to each name.

• Azazel is bound hand and foot and cast into the darkness of the desert of Dudael, with sharp stones piled over him until the day of the great judgement, at which time he is to be cast into the fire. The site notes that the Day of Atonement scapegoat ritual in Leviticus 16 sends the goat “to Azazel,” and the older tradition reads this as the ritual remembrance of the bound Watcher.
• Semjaza and his companions are bound for seventy generations beneath the hills, until the day of judgement, when they will be cast into the fiery abyss for ever.
• The Giants are sentenced to destroy each other in mutual war, and the surviving population is wiped from the earth by the Flood.

Then the Flood finished what the sentence began. The Giants’ bodies went under the water. The two hundred — the fallen, not the holy order they came from — were chained in the dark places of the earth to wait for the judgement. And it would be a clean ending, except for the one thing the water could not reach. The arts had already been taught. The weapons were forged, the charms were written, the painted face and the cut root and the read star were already in human hands. You cannot drown a thing that has become a skill. The Watchers were bound. What they taught was not. The Operations That Survived →

Why this matters for the present hour

So the chiefs are bound, and the chiefs are not retired. Both are true. Their bodies wait in the desert and under the hills for the judgement that has not yet come. Their offices never stopped working a single day. Penemue taught writing — and Penemue’s writing is the writing of the feed. Kasdeja taught the unseen smiting, and you have felt it yourself in the comment that knew something it had no way to know. Gadreel taught the weapon and the strike; the weapon now is the one nobody draws and everybody feels. Tamiel taught the courses of marked time, and marked time is the algorithm that chose the hour your phone lit up. If any of that landed, you are already reading the present hour in the older grammar. The rest of this site is the defence.

What the Watchers fathered has its own record. The offspring were named — Ohyah, Hahyah, Mahaway and the rest, preserved in the Aramaic fragments buried at Qumran — and they were not the mindless monsters the word giant brings to mind. They knew what was coming for them. Two of them dreamed it, in detail, before the rain. The Named Giants →  ·  The Dreams of Ohyah and Hahyah →