“You’ve chosen my favorite,” Dr. Seraphina said, as if my choice confirmed her faith in my judgment. “I saw this same Bible as a girl, when I first announced to the council that I would be an angelologist. It was at their famous conference of 1919, after Europe had been ravaged by the war. I had an instinctual attraction to the profession. There hadn’t been an angelologist in my family before, which is rather strange—angelology runs in families. Yet at sixteen years old, I knew exactly what I would be and was not in the least shy about it!” Dr. Seraphina paused, collected herself, and said, “Now, come closer. I have something to show you.”
She placed the Bible on the table and opened the pages slowly, carefully. “Here is Genesis 6. Read it.”
We read the passage, taken from the 1297 translation of Guyart des Moulins:
And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born to them beautiful and fair daughters. And the angels, the sons of heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: “Come, let us choose wives from among the children of men and have children with them.”
“I read that this afternoon,” Gabriella said.
“No,” Dr. Seraphina corrected. “This is not Enoch. Although there is a very similar version in
The Book of Enoch,
this is different. It is from Genesis and is the single point where the accepted version of events—those that contemporary religious scholars accept as true—meets the apocryphal. Of course, the apocryphal works are the richest source of angelic history. Once Enoch was studied extensively, but as is often the case with a dogmatic institution like the church, they found it threatening and began to remove Enoch from the canon.”
Gabriella seemed distressed. “But why?” she asked. “This material could be so helpful, especially to scholars.”
“Helpful? I don’t see how. It was only natural that the church would suppress such information,” Dr. Seraphina responded brusquely.
“The
Book
of
Enoch was dangerous to their version of history. This version,” she said, uncapping the cylinder and tapping out another scroll, “was written after many years of oral legend. It does in fact come from the same source. The author wrote it at the time of many of the texts in the Old Testament of the Bible—in other words, at the time the Talmudic texts were composed.”
“But that doesn’t explain the church’s reason for suppressing it,” Gabriella said.
“Their reason is obvious. Enoch’s version of the story is laced with all sorts of ecstatic language—religious and visionary extremes that conservative scholars thought to be exaggerations, or worse: madness. Enoch’s personal reflections about what he calls ‘the elect’ were particularly disturbing. There are many passages of Enoch’s personal conversations with God. As you can imagine, most theologians found the work blasphemous. To be frank, Enoch was considered controversial throughout the earliest years of Christianity. Nonetheless,
The Book of Enoch
is the most significant angelological text we have. It is the only record of the true origin of evil on earth that was written by a man and passed among men.”
My envy of Gabriella disappeared, replaced by an intense curiosity about what Dr. Seraphina would tell us.
“When religious scholars became interested in restoring
The Book of Enoch,
a Scottish explorer named James Bruce found a version of this text in Ethiopia. Another copy was found in Belgrade. As you can imagine, these discoveries were at cross purposes to the church’s attempt to wipe out the text completely. But it may surprise you to know that we have helped them along the way, taking copies of Enoch out of circulation and storing them in our library. The Vatican’s desire to pretend that Nephilim and angelologists do not exist is equal to our desire to remain hidden. It all works out quite well, I suppose, our mutual agreement to pretend the other does not exist.”
“It is surprising that we don’t work together,” I said.
“Not at all,” Dr. Seraphina replied. “Once angelology was the center of attention in religious circles, one of the most revered branches of theology. That quickly changed. After the Crusades and the outrages of the Inquisition, we knew that it was time to distance ourselves from the church. Even before this, however, we had moved the majority of our efforts underground, hunting the Famous Ones alone. We have always been a force of resistance—a partisan group, if you will—fighting them from a safe distance. The less visible we became, the better, especially because the Nephilim themselves had contrived to create an almost perfect secrecy. The Vatican is aware of our activities, of course, but has chosen to leave us in peace, at least for the time being. The advancements the Nephilim made under the cover of businesses and government operations made them anonymous. Their greatest achievement in the past three hundred years has been hiding themselves in plain sight. They have put us under constant surveillance, emerging only to attack us, to benefit from wars or shady business dealings, and then they quietly disappear. Of course, they have also done a marvelous job separating the intellectuals from the religious. They have made sure that humanity will not have another Newton or Copernicus, thinkers who revere both Science and God. Atheism was their greatest invention. Darwin’s work, despite the man’s extreme dependence upon religion, was twisted and propagated by them. The Nephilim have succeeded in making people believe that humanity is self-generated, self-sufficient, free of the divine, sui generis. It is an illusion that makes our work much more difficult and their detection nearly impossible.”
Carefully, Dr. Seraphina rolled the scroll and slid it into the copper cylinder. Turning to the woven basket containing our lunch, she opened it and placed a baguette and cheese before us, encouraging us to eat. I was famished. The bread was warm and soft in my hands, leaving the slightest slick of butter on my fingers as I tore off a piece.
“Father Bogomil, one of our founding fathers, compiled our first independent angelology in the tenth century as a pedagogical tool. Later angelologies included taxonomies of the Nephilim. As the majority of our people resided in monasteries throughout Europe, the angelologies were copied by hand and guarded by the monastic community, usually within the monastery itself. It was a fruitful period in our history. Outside the exclusive group of angelologists, whose mission was narrowly focused upon our enemies, scholarship on the general properties, powers, and purposes of angels flourished. For the angelologist the Middle Ages were a time of great advances. Awareness of angelic powers, both good and evil, rose to its prime. Shrines, statues, and paintings gave pervasive awareness of the basic principles of angelic presence to the masses of people. A sense of beauty and hope became a part of everyday life, in spite of the illnesses that ravaged the population. Although there were magicians and Gnostics and Cathars—various sects that exalted or distorted angelic reality—we were able to defend ourselves from the machinations of the hybrid creatures, or Giants, as we often refer to them. The church, for all the harm it was capable of doing, protected civilization under the aegis of belief. Frankly, although my husband would say otherwise, this was the last time we had the upper hand against the Nephilim.”
Dr. Seraphina paused to watch me finish my lunch, perhaps concluding that my studies had left me starved, although Gabriella—who had not eaten a thing—seemed to have lost her appetite completely. Embarrassed by my lack of manners, I wiped my hands on the linen napkin in my lap.
“How did the Nephilim attain this?” I asked.
“Their dominance?” Dr. Seraphina asked. “It is very simple. After the Middle Ages, the balance of power changed. The Nephilim began to recover lost pagan texts—the work of Greek philosophers, Sumerian mythologies, Persian scientific and medical texts—and circulate them through the intellectual centers of Europe. The result, of course, was a disaster for the church. And this was only the beginning. The Nephilim made certain that materialism became fashionable among the elite families. The Hapsburgs were just one example of how the Giants infiltrated and overwhelmed a family, the Tudors another. Although we agree with the principles of the Enlightenment, it was a major victory for the Nephilim. The French Revolution—where the separation of church and state and the illusion that humans should rely upon rationalism in lieu of the spiritual world—was another. As time passed, the Nephilistic program unfolded on earth. They promoted atheism, secular humanism, Darwinism, and the extremes of materialism. They engineered the idea of progress. They created a new religion for the masses: science.
“By the twentieth century, our geniuses were atheists and our artists relativists. The faithful had fractured into a thousand bickering denominations. Divided, we have been easy to manipulate. Unfortunately, our enemies have fully integrated into human society, developing networks of influence in government, industry, the newspapers. For hundreds of years, they have simply fed off the labor of humanity, giving nothing back, taking and taking and building their empire. Their greatest victory, however, has been to hide their presence from us. They have made us believe we are free.”
“And we are not?” I asked.
“Look around you, Celestine,” Dr. Seraphina said, growing irritated by my naive questions. “Our entire academy is being disbanded and forced underground. We are utterly helpless in the face of their advances. The Nephilim seek out human weaknesses, latching on to the most power-hungry and ambitious; then they advance their causes through these figures. Luckily, the Nephilim are limited in their power. They can be outsmarted.”
“How are you so certain?” Gabriella asked. “Perhaps it is humanity who will be outsmarted.”
“It is entirely possible,” Dr. Seraphina said, studying Gabriella. “But Raphael and I will do everything in our power to prevent it from happening. The First Angelological Expedition marked the beginning of the effort. Father Clematis, the erudite and brave man who led the expedition, dictated his account of his efforts to find the lyre. The account of this journey was lost for many centuries. Raphael, as you surely know, recovered it. We will use it to find the location of the gorge.”
The momentous discovery of the account of Clematis’s expedition was legendary among those students who adored the Valkos. Dr. Raphael Valko had recovered Father Clematis’s journal in 1919, in a village in northern Greece, where it had been buried among papers for many centuries. He’d been a young scholar at the time, with no distinction. The discovery catapulted him to the highest levels of angelological circles. The text was a valuable account of the expedition, but, most important, it offered the hope that the Valkos might reenact Clematis’s journey. If the precise coordinates of the cavern could have been discerned in the text, the Valkos would certainly have embarked upon their own expedition years ago.
“I thought Raphael’s translation fell out of favor,” Gabriella said, an observation that, no matter how true, struck me as insolent. Dr. Seraphina, however, appeared unfazed.
“The society has studied this text extensively, trying to understand exactly what happened during the expedition. But you are right, Gabriella. Ultimately, we have found Clematis’s account to be barren.”
“Why?” I asked, astonished that such a significant text could be disregarded.
“Because it is an imprecise document. The most important portion of the account was taken down during the final hours of Clematis’s life, when he was half mad from the travails of his journey to the cave. Father Deopus, the man who transcribed Clematis’s account, could not have captured every detail accurately. He did not draw a map, and the original that brought Clematis to the gorge was not found with his papers. After many attempts we have accepted the sad truth that the map must have been lost in the cave itself.”
“What I do not understand,” Gabriella said, “is how Clematis could fail to create a copy. It is the most basic procedure in any expedition.”
“Clearly something went terribly wrong,” Dr. Seraphina said. “Father Clematis returned to Greece in a state of distress and fell into severe confusion for the remaining weeks of his life. His entire expedition party had perished, his supplies were gone, even the donkeys had been lost or stolen. According to the accounts of contemporaries, particularly Father Deopus, Clematis seemed like a man awoken from a dream. He ranted and prayed in a most horrible fashion, as if touched by madness. So, to answer your question, Gabriella, we understand that something happened, but we are not sure exactly what.”
“But you have a theory?” Gabriella asked.
“Of course,” Dr. Seraphina said, smiling. “It is all there in his account, dictated at his deathbed. My husband took great pains to translate the text precisely. I believe Clematis found exactly what he was looking for in the cavern. It was Clematis’s discovery of the angels in their prison that drove the poor man mad.”
I could not say why Dr. Seraphina’s words caused me such agitation. I had read many secondary sources surrounding the First Angelological Expedition, and yet I was utterly terrified by the image of Clematis trapped in the depths of the earth, surrounded by otherworldly creatures.
Dr. Seraphina continued, “Some say that the First Angelological Expedition was foolhardy and unnecessary. I, as you both know, believe that the expedition was essential. It was our duty to verify that the legends surrounding the Watchers and the generation of the Nephilim were, in fact, true. The First Expedition was primarily a mission to discern the truth: Were the Watchers imprisoned in the cave of Orpheus, and, if so, were they still in possession of the lyre?”
“It is confounding that they were imprisoned for simple disobedience,” Gabriella said.
“There is nothing simple about disobedience,” Dr. Seraphina said sharply. “Remember that Satan was once one of the most majestic of the angels—a noble seraph until he disobeyed God’s command. Not only did the Watchers disobey their orders, they brought divine technologies to earth, teaching the art of warfare to their children, who in turn imparted it to humanity. The Greek legend of Prometheus illustrates the ancient perception of this transgression. This was thought to be the most damnable of sins, as such knowledge upset the balance of postlapsarian human society. Since we have
The Book of Enoch
before us, let me read what they did to poor Azazel. It was quite awful.”