On The Nephilim

An Analysis of the Giants in The Book of Enoch. The Spirit of The Giants haunts this world.

In our previous analysis of The Book of Enoch, we saw how the worldview of this book organically mixes monotheism, polytheism, and animism. The abundant presence of nature spirits in The Book of Enoch demonstrates that revering the entities that inhabit the natural world was once a part of The Abrahamic Tradition, as it is still in Dharmic or Pagan religious expressions. In this article, we will summarize the epic story of the giants (also called Nephillim¹) in The Book of Enoch and analyze it along the way as we promised in last week’s article. We will see throughout that this fascinating narrative works more within a Dharmic cosmology than it does within the mainstream Abrahamic one, which is further evidence that the Abrahamic worldview was once more similar to a Dharmic worldview.

The Book of Enoch begins with a dramatic prophecy about The Day of Judgment, and only in the sixth chapter do we arrive at the story of the giants which is the reason most people are drawn to this fascinating book. This section of The Book of Enoch fleshes out the mysterious passages in Genesis Chapter 6. There are beautiful women born among the antediluvian races of mankind, so stunning that even some of The Angels cannot resist their allure. The leader of these Angels who desire human women is named Semjaza, who makes this gang of lustful Angels swear an oath that they will carry out the deed of taking human wives for themselves². The passage in Enoch 6:3-4 is interesting because Semjaza acknowledges that what they are about to do is a great sin. This is characteristic of people who have become enslaved to their passions: they know what they are doing is wrong, but they do it anyway. Yes, it is the destiny of all those enslaved to their passions to have a fatal moment of clarity where they can no longer rationalize that what they desire to do isn’t wrong, so they freely choose evil - and indeed what we choose, we become. In this text, that even Angels can fall by having their faithfulness to God compromised by their passions is the first startling implication for what The Book of Enoch suggests about the nature of The Angels. They are more like us than we might think despite being far greater than us in intelligence and power. 

A quick side note, people often say that The Book of Enoch offers a different version of The Fall of Satan or Lucifer than The Bible does. Those who say this will say that Semjaza and Satan are the same entity. This reading, widespread on the internet, is wrong, and those who say this have not read the text closely enough. In the 53rd chapter of Enoch, The Angels that reproduced with human women are chastised for having “become subject to Satan”³, which of course would imply that Semjaza and Satan are two entirely different entities. It also implies that Semjaza’s band of lustful Angels becoming evil spirits is a different event from Satan’s fall since Satan is never mentioned as being a member of Semjaza’s band at any point in the text though plenty of other rebellious Angels are named as being a part of that band. Though we get illuminating details on the fall of the Angels under Semjaza’s leadership, The Book of Enoch says nothing about Satan’s fall. But given that all demons are fallen Angels, Satan must have fallen at some point, but you couldn’t figure out how from this particular text.  

The women that these Angels mate with are themselves interesting characters. The Angels led by Semjaza are called The Watchers because their duty is to observe humankind on God’s behalf, but it seems that they got a bit carried away in their observing, to put it mildly. Beautiful women causing problems due to their observers behaving irrationally upon seeing them is a perennial theme in all religions and all literature. Mother Eve was, I am sure, the most stunning woman to ever grace The Earth with her footsteps, and this no doubt played a large part in why Father Adam couldn’t resist violating the commandment not to consume the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil when she offers it to him. Here, in The Book of Enoch, we see that carnal desire makes even Angels fall. It’s not that beautiful women are inherently bad, of course, just that the passions they elicit in men can be dangerous. But of course, as Nietzsche says, real men love both danger and play, which is why they love women, who are dangerous playthings. 

The drama in The Book of Enoch continues thusly: The Angels, also called The Watchers in this text, defile themselves with women and teach them forbidden knowledge, things man was not yet ready to know, and then the women become impregnated by these Angels and bare children who are giants. These giants are very interesting beings. Half-human and half-Angel, they tyrannize mankind who can do nothing to resist them due to their great size and strength. They consume all the resources meant for man, and when there aren’t enough resources anymore, they devour man.⁴ 

When we hear the word “Giant” we think of someone who looks like a human but has grown up to monstrous proportions, which can certainly be quite scary just in itself. Any normal man is powerless before a man who is the size of a mountain and who has the attitude of a total brute savage.  But The Book of Enoch’s man-eating Giants are more mysterious than that. If you’ve read The Bible, you know that Angels only sometimes assume an anthropomorphic appearance for our benefit and that their true appearance often looks decidedly odd to us humans: Chimeric cherubims with the heads of bulls, lions, humans, and eagles simultaneously or ethereal entities composed of wheels upon wheels of fire covered in eyes and other yet stranger beings. What kind of horrors can result from creatures who look like this mating with human women? The Giants of The Book of Enoch surely did not merely resemble giant versions of people as most assume. “Giant” is no doubt an apt descriptor of these man-eating monsters, but it’s the only description we are given of what they look like. I believe that Enoch, out of modesty, does not describe their terrifying appearance with precision for our sakes, and possibly because the visionary scribe is afraid of them himself. If Angels are non-anthropomorphic and they unnaturally mate with women then the children resultant must not be fully anthropomorphic at all. They must, in truth, resemble eldricth, even Lovecraftian, creatures. What even is a creature that is one-half-woman, one half-chimeric Cherubim, and the size of a mountain? Or one-half woman, one-half..Wheel covered in eyes…and at that size? These man-eating giants are abominations before God. There is never even the slightest suggestion that there is a chance of redemption for them in the entire book. They are unnatural beings whose very presence in the world is a violation of the divine natural order, as Angels were never meant to mate with humans. They devour all the resources of The Earth that Man was meant to harness to be fruitful and multiply. Then they prey on mankind, eating Man as though he were just any other common beast of prey and not the very Image of God that The Supreme Lord had intended to have dominion over The Earth upon which the giants stomp. In the presence of these abominable Giants, Man cannot possibly fulfill God’s mandate to have dominion over The Earth. The Imagers of God have their mandate usurped by the abominations born of demons. They’re like a living glitch in the programming of reality, a walking and breathing violation of Natural Law, so God Himself must intervene. 

After siring the abominable antediluvian titans, the lecherous Angels led by Semjaza proceeded to teach humankind things that they did not know before: how to make weapons for war, jewelry, beautifying cosmetics for women, astrology, fornication, and all kinds of sins, various occult practices, and witchcraft. In essence, these lustful Angels teach mankind technology and occultism. The world now becomes a violent place as these humans use technological and occultic power to wage devastating wars against each other to control what few resources are left on the planet after the giants consumed them all and began to prey on mankind.

Why would malevolent spiritual entities want to teach humans technology and occult knowledge? This is a rich question that we will only touch on briefly today. When mankind is ruled by their passions, they have more opportunities to sin against each other and themselves if they are given more ability to manipulate the material world, which is ultimately what technology and occult power give. Notice also the equivocation with technology and the occult in The Book of Enoch, a consistent theme throughout the book and indeed in human history. The scientist was regarded as a kind of magician in antiquity, and the line between alchemy and chemistry was quite thin. Many early prominent scientists like Isaac Newton were obsessed with the occult and saw no fundamental difference between their pursuit of natural and supernatural sciences. In The Book of Enoch, technology and the occult are both about power: They increase the power of fallen humans to exploit The Earth and each other. They allow humans to have a greater ability to gratify their sinful desires, and when sinful desires are gratified they grow ever more intense and thus harder to control, such that humans become controlled by their desires. When humans are controlled by their desires instead of by Reason which has been enlightened by Faith, it is easier for demons to control them through temptation. So human beings empowered by demons with technology and the occult are ultimately enslaved by those very same demons. When we give into sinful desires we become more demonic, more like the demons who are tempting us at all times, and the increase in the potential to gratify ourselves that technology and the occult gives makes it harder for us to deny ourselves and easier for us to give into temptation. To put it another way, the demons control humans through their sinful desires, and increasing the power of humans over the world and each other through technological and occultic knowledge makes humans far more likely to give into their sinful desires, thus more likely to be controlled by the demons. 

As people who are aware of the spiritual phenomena in this world, we have to ask ourselves some questions about this scene in The Book of Enoch and how it relates to the modern world. If malevolent spirits in rebellion against God did teach technologies pre-flood, what’s stopping them from doing it post-flood? Anyone who has done battle with the demons knows that they only have so many tricks, and humans fall for them again and again and again because humans are so foolish. I can say in my own spiritual life that I have fallen for the same demonic tricks and temptations multiple times. If malevolent spirits were responsible for metalworking and cosmetics in pre-flood times, could this have happened again with the industrial revolution, computers, cellphones, surveillance technology, microplastics, and soy in everything? Surely the net result of all of those forms of technology is that humankind has become more fallen than ever before, more sinful, more easy to exploit through sinful passion, and thus more enslaved to the demons. If the net result of these technologies is that Man is more distant from God and more enslaved to demons, how can we hesitate to attribute the ultimate origins of these things to The Dark Powers? Many West Coast techie people are involved with the occult and make no secret about it, and any conspiracy theorist will tell you that our oligarchical elites are in communion with demons. 

When we look at the world today, what we see is a broken world. We know this. This planet has drifted far from the paradisical splendor it knew in its Edenic days, to put it mildly. But the antediluvian world was broken too, just in a different way from the modern world. Colossal abominations roamed The Earth, devouring all the natural resources of the planet, thus turning it into a desolate place. They are remembered, with varying degrees of accuracy, in literally every mythology all over the world. These half-angelical, half-woman titans prowled the planet to devour mankind, thus reducing man to a terrified creature, nothing at all like the Image of God having dominion over The Earth that God intended for him to be, the image of God reduced to mere prey. In addition to this, the demons who spawned these giants spread their influence by teaching occult and technological knowledge to man, who then waged savage wars against each other equipped with technological and magickal power. I think it’s clear that the Book of Enoch suggests that the mating of women with fallen Angels was not a one-time event, but it happened over and over again, thus resulting in many polluted women and, I imagine, many lonely men. Yes, the antediluvian world had many “incel” men because they had been cucked by demons. Many wicked women made it their life’s aim to seduce a demonic mate with which to bear horrific man-eating giants. 

The setting described above is far more fantastical than even the most imaginative fantasy worlds found in fiction or sci-fi, and pious men have reason to believe that it is all literally real. I bring this up because the idea that reality is boring is a demonic lie that ensnares many. The effect of believing in the post-modern materialist scientism liberal cult is that the world seems permeated with a grey miasma of slothfulness, and this malaise, this boredom, hypnotizes even godly people into thinking that it is all that is real, all that has ever been real, all that ever could be real. I have experienced this, where I will tell people about some exciting adventure I had or about some spiritual vision that had occurred to me in my meditations, and they will tell me “That didn’t happen!!!” in complete incredulity not because they care even an iota about the actual content of what I said, but because they think anything that isn’t boring couldn’t happen. Yes, they have made boredom the determinant of reality. This idolatrous boredom is a disease you must excise from your spirit by having a living and fiery faith. Boredom is an illusion. The truth is, reality is far more exciting than any fictional setting and is indeed precisely more exciting insofar as it is correctly understood. You are, in every second of reality, directly engaged in an epic spiritual war that has been waged across aeons in multiple planes of existence and this is always so whether you even wish it to be or not. Angelical and diabolical forces wage war for your eternal spirit, such is your importance, and no less a being than the very Creator of the Universe cares so deeply about you that He would die for you. The Dark Powers ceaselessly work to make you forget this! They want you to drown in an endless fantasy. Many fools are deceived by the demonic lie that this reality is boring, so they become more invested in fantasy worlds in movies, fiction, tv shows, etc. than they are in real life and thus they lose their souls. But the wise escape from Modernity’s illusion of boredom by chasing beautiful eternal truths beyond the mere appearances of our time. For the wise, their solitude and reading and aesthetic activity is not a flight of escapism but a flight into reality, away from the illusions of our age.

Continuing on with The Book of Enoch’s narrative, The Arch-Angels who are faithful to God see that The Earth has become a horrible place to live and that the humans on Earth cry out to Heaven. In this text, The Earth itself cries out to Heaven, because in the Enochian cosmology, The Earth itself is a sentient being, as we discussed before. They bring their concerns to God, who then tells them to instruct a human named Noah to prepare because He will soon bring about the end of the age with a flood, and Noah’s seed will be preserved on The Earth. God instructs the Arch-Angels to bind the lustful Angels led by Semjaza in Hell, to heal The Earth, and to influence the giants in such a way that they will destroy each other in battle⁵. 

The titular prophet Enoch is then properly introduced in the story, as the Angels tell him to go to the gang of lustful Angels led by Semjaza and denounce them. The Prophet Enoch’s divine mission is to go to the rebellious Angels and chastise them on God’s behalf. He is to tell them that their children, the giants, will be destroyed, that the rebellious Angels will mourn over them for the rest of eternity, that they will suffer for having taught humanity sinful things, and that they will find no mercy. Enoch goes to the Angels and after he has declared this message to them, the rebellious Angels all mourn that God has decreed doom for them, then they ask Enoch to intercede on their behalf by asking God to give them forgiveness⁶. 

Given that the rebellious lusty Watchers have ruined human life itself to such an extent that God has to cause a flood to give everyone a fresh start, it’s a real testament to Enoch’s forgiving nature that he takes them up on their request to intercede for them before God. Enoch lived in a world devastated by the wars and the giants which found their ultimate origin in these Angels. He must have known many people, personally, who had died from these rebellious Angel’s wicked deeds. But he still finds it in himself to try and seek forgiveness on their behalf. Truly, God’s Grace dwells with forgiving hearts. Such a forgiving man becomes exalted in God’s service. 

The section that follows is my very favourite part of the book. Enoch receives a mystical vision after asking God to forgive the gang of rebellious Angels led by Semjaza. In his vision, Enoch is told by God Himself to declare to the Angels: “You should intercede for men, and not men for you.”⁷ The way that God opens this speech strikes to the beating heart of the issue as to why what Semjaza’s Angels did was so wrong, namely, that they violated the primordial Hierarchy of Being. All of the eternal spirits in the universe are arranged in a hierarchy and they glorify God by fulfilling the responsibilities that their position entails. Spiritually evolving results from doing as well as we can with our position in the hierarchy, which results in us ascending the hierarchy, taking on greater power as well as greater responsibilities. God, who is Self-Existent, occupies the topmost position in the Hierarchy of Being from endless eternities unto endless eternities. This theology of spiritual evolution that I have discussed numerous times on my substack is admittedly not laid out explicitly or in full within The Book of Enoch, but it is very heavily implied. For instance, In Enoch 16:3, God tells Enoch to relay the following message to Semjaza’s Angels: “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 the women, and through these mysteries women and men work much evil on Earth.” This is interesting because of the word “yet” - Semjaza’s rebel Angels had not yet had the greatest mysteries revealed to them, implying that through service to God all things would be progressively revealed to them. Indeed, the infinite ecstasies of the fullness of all knowledge shall be yours and mine, my dear reader, if only we are faithful to God in these dark Modern times. This also should influence how we think about the technology question in Enoch, as it would imply that technological and occultic power are not bad in and of themselves, but only when given to those who are not yet ready for that type of knowledge.   

Semjaza’s Angels were holy and living the immortal spiritual life, so they were not meant to have children as Men do who must have children to replenish the species. Angels are not appointed to have wives but to dwell in the holy heavens and praise God. Some are appointed to have wives, and some are appointed for spiritual celibacy, and whoever does not do what they are appointed to do by God sins gravely. Yes, if you are meant for celibacy but choose marriage this could be fatal, like if you are meant for marriage but choose celibacy.

But at its core, what makes the Angel’s deed so unnatural is the mixing of two different types of beings at very different places in the cosmic hierarchy of beings with different roles. Forgive me for not having a less crass way of stating this, my dear reader, but an Angel engaging in sex with a human is like a human having sex with a dog. It is precisely like that. A higher entity must not have sex with a being so far lower on the hierarchy of beings than themselves. A human is higher on the hierarchy than a dog, with greater responsibilities. The difference in intellect, power, and responsibility between a human and an Angel is vaster than the difference between a human and a dog. What Semjaza did was akin to bestiality. Another grave sin that Semjaza’s deed was akin to was miscegenation. We see throughout history that whenever higher races like The Aryans mate with lower races the results are devastating for the higher races, and the resultant children are confused monstrosities. But as the difference between Angel and human is even greater than the difference between Aryan and Nigger, the resultant children are even more monstrous, even more unnatural.  

The Dark Powers, in our own time, promote miscegenation through the media, the education system, etc. and this is a grave violation of the natural order that God made. The higher races are meant to preserve the rare spiritual and physical traits that make them higher by segregating themselves from the other races. As humans are the most precious of the creatures God made in His Sight, so are the higher races of humans the most precious of all, and He made each higher race for higher purposes that only they can fulfill. The one who promotes miscegenation effaces God’s creation, and destroys it, and the demons know this so they promote it relentlessly. The demons know that higher races are fundamentally more of a threat to their rule than the lower races who are easier to control. 

God tells Enoch to say to the Rebel Angels under Semjaza that their request for forgiveness is thoroughly denied, that their pleas for Mercy will never be accepted, and that they will suffer forevermore. Having once been Sons of God in Heaven, they are now forbidden from ever returning to Heaven but are instead chained to The Earth until judgment day when they will be cast into the fires of Hell. They will mourn the death of their children, the giants, forevermore. How harsh is God’s retribution! Semjaza’s transient pleasure in satisfying himself with human women is not worth it in the end, to say the least. Indeed, higher beings mixing with lower beings is one of the worst things that can happen in the universe and is met with the harshest of punishments by God, whether it is bestiality (humans with animals), miscegenation (higher humans with lower humans), or Semjaza’s sin (Angels with humans). 

The speech by God in Enoch’s visionary journey which he relays to the gang of Angels under Semjaza has within it what I have always personally found the most interesting aspect of the unique cosmology of the Enochian worldview. God tells Enoch that the spirits of the giants will be bound to Earth forevermore after they are slain and that they will haunt The Earth to “afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on The Earth, and cause trouble: they take no food, but nevertheless, hunger and thirst, and cause offenses, and these spirits shall rise up against the children of men and against the women, because they have proceeded from them.”⁸ They are permitted to afflict humankind in this manner until the end of History when God will decisively destroy them. In other words, before the flood the giants torment humankind physically so then God destroys them physically and then after the flood, the giants torment humankind spiritually so then God destroys them spiritually at the right time, at the end of history, judgment day. This is extremely interesting because it shows that Enochian Angelology is decisively different from the mainstream Abrahamic angelology.  In the Christian version, all demons come from just one event, the fall of Satan. The oversimplified version of that story is that Satan was once the most beautiful Angel, but he leads a rebellion against God after convincing some Angels to join him, and then they are all cast out and become demons. Satan is the serpent that deceives Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, and he is the leader of the demons who tempt humankind. In most mainstream Christian angelology, the Angels have only one chance to rebel against God before permanently becoming demonic either because they know God on such intimate terms or because they are not “divided in their wills” and thus when they make any choice at all they make it with such a fullness of will that there is nothing in them that can be salvaged if they choose to rebel. The Enochian angelology could include all of those ideas except that the fall of The Angels is a one-time event. There are clearly multiple falls of Angels in the Enochian worldview because as we mentioned earlier the text says that by rebelling with Semjaza the Angels under his command fell “under Satan’s subjection” but there is no narrative about the fall of Satan in the text. But then, in addition to that, there are not only multiple falls of Angels but also multiple origins of demons. The Enochian worldview shows potentially any sentient being could become a demon.

In Dharmic worldviews, any sentient entity can degrade to the status of demon after doing severely wicked deeds, and the demon they become is related to the evil deed they did, and the motivation of all demons who are permitted to do anything than just suffer in Hell as unwilling captives for what they did is to drag other beings down to their level. God permits the demons to tempt us for a time so that we might grow in virtue by resisting the specific types of vices that they drag us down to. Yes, all beings in the universe serve God, the only question is whether they do it willingly or unwillingly. The demons are His unwitting and unwilling servants. The Dark Powers, in their ignorance, do not understand that all of their evil will always be thoroughly subverted by The Omnipotent God who uses their evil as a means to bring about more good, so much good in fact that it more than makes up for whatever evil they were able to bring about. The Dark Powers actually think they can actually challenge the authority of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being who is self-existent. What madness! But all people who do any evil, as we all have done at some point in our lives, are akin to them in varying degrees. No one ever gets away with it, the only question is whether they are forgiven or damned. God’s justice is a terrible thing, and the sufferings of Hell are so brutal that nothing about whatever it is that brought someone there could ever be worth it for them in the end. 

As you may recall from the other essay I wrote on Enoch, the Enochian cosmology involving natural spirits is closer to the Dharmic view than the mainstream Abrahamic one. So it is also with this text’s view of demons. This is made most clear in the 29th chapter, in one of Enoch’s cosmological journeys led by The Angels, he is told by Uriel the Arch-Angel that the women who mated with the rebellious Angels became sirens after they die⁹. So not only do Angels become demons not in a one-time event but potentially any time that they rebel severely enough, but human women also become demons who afflict humans too. We can discern that if the human women who mated with the watchers became sirens, then any sinful human could potentially become a demon. The function of a siren is to tempt men and it is appropriate for a woman who sinned through unnatural sexual expression to tempt men to unnatural sexual expression. So here we have, just from the Book of Enoch, a minimum of three categories of demons with very different origins: fallen Angels like Semjaza, sirens who were originally human women who mated with those fallen Angels, and then the spirits of the giants who were the result of offspring between fallen Angels and human women. 

The Book of Enoch posits that our very world is haunted by the spirits of giants. But how is it exactly that they afflict us? The entire existence of the giants is uncharacterized by out-of-control desire: their origin is found in the unnatural lust that some rebel Angels had for human women, and they devour all the resources on Earth before devouring mankind.

So it would make sense if they are responsible for tempting us into out-of-control desires. God specifically mentions that in spirit form, the ghostly giants eat not and drink not yet still hunger and thirst. So even after they are bereft of physical bodies, the giants are still characterized by desire. Without bodies, they have physical desires but they cannot fulfill them, and so they live a tortured existence.