Part 9 Magicians of the Gods ...Written in The Stars

Magicians of the Gods

By Graham Hancock

Chapter 16 

Written in The Stars 

In Chapters Eight to Eleven we explored the secret tradition of the Sages, maintained in Egypt for thousands of years, perpetuating itself through recruitment and initiation down the ages. And we considered the possibility that these “mystery teachers of heaven,” these “Followers of Horus”—these “Magicians of the Gods”—played a key role, not once but many times, at crucial moments in Egyptian history, in moving that remarkable culture forward. 

In Chapter Twelve we looked into the connection between the incredible megalithic site of Baalbek and an enigmatic group of colonists from ancient Canaan who settled near Egypt’s Giza plateau, where they made regular devotional offerings to the Great Sphinx, named by them variously as Hauron or Hurna after a Canaanite falcon deity. 

In Chapter Fourteen we saw that another group, known as the Sabians and renowned as “star worshippers,” came from even further away as pilgrims to the Pyramids of Giza. Their home city was Harran, located near Göbekli Tepe in what is now southeastern Turkey. There is no record of when these pilgrimages began but Harran had already been settled for thousands of years 1 when the earliest surviving written reference to it appears in an inscription dated to around 2000 BC. 2 What is remarkable is that Sabian pilgrimages to Giza were still taking place as late as AD 1228 when the Arab geographer Yakut el-Hamawi mentioned them in his Mo’gam-el-Buldan (“Dictionary of Countries”). As Egyptologist Selim Hassan notes in the passage quoted in Chapter Fourteen, Hamawi’s account shows that the Sabians “fully recognized the Pyramids of Khufu and Khafre as being monuments connected with the stellar cult.” 3 

This may seem like a small point, and “experts” on the Sabians have ignored it, but it proves the continuation of a hidden tradition. Ancient Egyptian religion and Ancient Egyptian culture ceased to exist hundreds of years before AD 1228 (the last known inscription in sacred hieroglyphs dates to AD 394), while Egyptologists did not rediscover the evidence of the stellar nature of the Pyramid “cult” until the early 1900s. 4 There is, therefore, no way other than a hidden tradition that the Sabian “star worshippers” could have known the Pyramids were connected to the stars or could have been motivated to make them objects of pilgrimage. 

Ah but Harran … Harran—the fabled city of the Sabians. What a lowly mess it is today. Fashioned from mud-brick, a few of the traditional beehive-shaped houses still survive, grouped together into a center retailing trinkets for the amusement of tourists. The ramshackle modern town is located in the midst of a vast, desolate plain with the ridges of the Taurus mountains, blue and hazy, looming 25 miles (40 kilometers) to the north. Göbekli Tepe stands on one of those ridges, and indeed the two sites are theoretically intervisible 5—in other words, if your eyes were good enough, you could see Göbekli Tepe from Harran, and vice versa. 

What would have made such a sighting easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here—a temple dedicated to Su-En (usually contracted to Sin), the Moon God of the Sabians. 6 After telling us that there were “powerful images in this temple,” the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314–394), describes the tower, noting that “from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran.” 7 

The Temple of the Moon God was already remotely ancient in the first millenium BC, when we know from inscriptions that several restorations were required. For example, repairs were carried out on it by the Assyrian King Shalamensar III (859–824 BC), and by Ashurbanipal (685–627 BC). Later, Nabonidus, who ruled the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 556–539 BC, rebuilt the temple. 8 Like Thutmosis IV of Egypt, who restored the Great Sphinx of Giza (see Chapter Ten), Nabonidus was inspired by a dream to undertake this work. 9 

It is a remarkable thing that the “pagan” religion of Harran survived for several hundred years into the Islamic era. This owed much to the acceptance of the Sabians as a “people of the book” (the reader will recall from Chapter Fourteen that they successfully claimed Hermes as their prophet and offered a compilation of the Hermetic texts as their Scriptures). Thus when the Arab general Ibn Ghanam conquered Harran in the seventh century AD, he co-opted the site where stood the Temple of the Moon God, with its fabulous tower, for the construction of a Grand Mosque. It seems that the temple was destroyed to make way for the mosque, but that Ghanam offered the Sabians an alternative site in the city where they were permitted to build a new temple. 10 They continued to practice their “star-worship” there, without significant disruption, until the eleventh century AD, when either in 1032, or in 1081—accounts are conflicting—a new generation of Muslim rulers turned against them, suppressed their faith and destroyed their last temple. 11 

Two centuries later the Mongol invasions began and Harran was frequently the scene of fierce conflicts. In a succession of episodes in 1259, 1262 and 1271, the city’s Islamic places of worship were destroyed. 12 The Grand Mosque still lies in ruins today, but when we remember that the Temple of the Moon God once stood here under a lofty tower, it’s curious that the one almost intact architectural remnant, with a square base measuring only 4 meters (13 feet) on each side, stands more than 50 meters (164 feet) tall and overlooks the Harran plain, just as its Sabian predecessor did. No doubt it is merely a surviving minaret of Ibn Ghanam’s Grand Mosque—the architecture is definitely Islamic. Still it is thought-provoking, to say the least, that local people refer to it to this day as the “Astronomical Tower,” as though preserving an ancient memory of the time when their Sabian ancestors climbed the long-vanished spire of the Temple of the Moon God to observe the heavens. 

The few archaeological expeditions mounted in Harran from the 1950s onward, while finding a number of inscriptions relating to the Moon God, have as yet revealed no physical traces of the pre-Islamic temples. 13 A team from the Chicago Oriental Institute was about to start a major dig around the ruins of the Grand Mosque in 1986, but it seems that the Turkish authorities insisted on such restrictive practices that the project had to be abandoned. 14 Current excavations by Harran University and the ŞanlIurfa Museum Directorate show little interest in recovery of substantive remains from the city’s pre-Islamic period. 15 

Thus far, based on the minimal archaeology done, datable artifacts from Harran itself go back to around 5000 BC, 16 though there is every possibility that older remains will be found with further excavations. At a settlement mound called Asagi Yarimca, a few kilometers northwest of the city, characteristic Halaf monochrome wares dating to 6000 BC have been collected. 17 And six kilometers south of Harran, excavations since 2006 by Turkish archaeologist Nurettin Yardimci have established the existence of an even older permanent settlement dated to 8000 BC. 18 

Since 8000 BC—10,000 years ago—marks the approximate epoch in which Göbekli Tepe was abandoned and the last of its stone circles deliberately buried, I was intrigued to learn that the site of Yardimci excavations has been known since time immemorial as Tell Idris—i.e. “the settlement mound of Idris.” This is interesting, because Idris, in the Koran, is the name of the Biblical prophet Enoch, the seventh of the ten patriarchs who lived in the times before the Flood. 19 To be specific, Enoch is the son of Jared, the father of Methuselah, the grandfather of Lamech, and the great grandfather of Noah himself. 20 Moreover, Muslim traditions associate Idris/Enoch with Hermes. 21 

The Persian Islamic philosopher Abu Mashar (AD 787–886) expresses the matter as follows: 

The name Hermes is a title. Its first bearer, who lived before the Flood, was … he whom the Hebrews call Enoch, whose name in Arabic is Idris. The Harranians declare his prophethood. 22 

This antediluvian Enoch/Idris/Hermes was a master of the sciences, “especially astronomy.” In addition: 

He wrote many books, whose wisdom he preserved on the walls of Egyptian temples lest it be lost. It was he who constructed the pyramids. 23 

Abu Mashar’s comments contain strong echoes of the Edfu Building Texts, also supposedly derived from lost antediluvian books and inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Horus to ensure that their message would not be lost. And the sense here that the pyramids are remotely ancient and were built by Hermes—that “master of astronomy,” the Egyptian Thoth, as the reader will recall—finds resonance with the tradition of the “number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth,” reported in Chapter Eleven, which, in historic times, the Pharaoh Khufu wished to consult and copy in his own construction works at Giza. 

Once again, confronted by such material, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that we may have stumbled across the traces of a project, set in motion by the survivors of a global flood cataclysm, to bring about “the resurrection of the former world of the gods.” Wherever this project took root, it seems to me, its essence was a tradition, passed down from generation to generation by initiated masters and thus theoretically capable of implementation in any place, and in any epoch, when the time was right. 

With their ability to blend in and survive changing circumstances, with their knowledge of the astronomical qualities of the pyramids preserved until as least as late as the thirteenth century AD, and with their very name, as Selim Hassan rightly recognized, derived from Sba, the Ancient Egyptian word for “star,” 24 the Sabians of Harran have all the hallmarks of carriers of the secret tradition. 

Mystery of the Watchers 

Apart from his genealogy in the line of patriarchs before Noah, and the enigmatic statements that he “walked with God” and was mysteriously “taken up” by God without experiencing death, 25 the canonical Bible has nothing else to tell us about Enoch. Happily much more information is available in several ancient non-canonical works—i.e. works that Biblical redactors for one reason or another chose not to include within the officially sanctioned scriptures. Of these the most famous by far is the Book of Enoch. Prior to the eighteenth century, scholars had believed it to be irretrievably lost. Composed long before the birth of Christ, 26 and considered to be one of the most important pieces of Jewish mystical literature, it was only known from fragments and from references to it in other texts. All this changed, however, after polymath adventurer James Bruce of Kinnaird visited Ethiopia in the years 1770–72. Among other remarkable achievements there, 27 he procured and brought back to Britain several copies of the Book of Enoch that, in antiquity, had been translated into Ge’ez, the Ethiopic sacred language. These were the first complete copies ever to be seen in Europe.28  

I note in passing that the Book of Enoch has always been of great significance to Freemasonry. Indeed, certain Masonic rituals—in curious resonance with Islamic traditions—identify Enoch with the Ancient Egyptian wisdom god Thoth and also with his Greek avatar Hermes. 29 An entry in The Royal Masonic Cyclopedia, first published in 1877, tells us that Enoch was the inventor of writing, that “he taught men the art of building,” and that, before the Flood, he “feared that the real secrets would be lost—to prevent which he concealed the Grand Secret, engraven on a white oriental porphyry stone, in the bowels of the earth.” 30 The Cyclopedia contains its own hint of a secret tradition transmitted down the ages, when it further suggests that Enoch was himself a Freemason and that at the end of his days on earth “he delivered up the Grand Master’s office to Lamech.” 31 

The Book of Enoch is a very strange document, purporting, among many other elements, to be a vision of the future cataclysm of the Flood, and why it is to be unleashed upon the world. In a series of dreams, 32 Enoch receives advance notice of the warning that God will give to his descendant Noah that “a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth, and destroy all that is on it.” 33 This, of course, is familiar ground—merely a précis, or restatement, of what we can read in Genesis. So, too, is the passage that follows in which Enoch is given to understand that arrangements will be made for Noah to escape so that “his seed may be preserved for all the generations of the world.” 34 

What comes next is intriguing. Regardless of the fact that the express purpose of God’s Deluge is to kill off most of mankind—apart, of course, from Noah and his descendants—there is talk of the need to: 

heal the earth which the angels have corrupted … that all the children of men may not perish through all the secret things which the Watchers have disclosed and have taught their sons. 35 

This is only the second mention of these mysterious “Watchers” in the Book of Enoch. The first, a few pages earlier, tells us nothing about them except that they “shall quake” at the prospect of the coming events. 36 So far we have no real clue as to who or what they are except that they have transgressed some divine law by teaching “secret things”—apparently dangerous things—to humanity, and that they (and most of the human race through the agency of the Deluge) are to be punished grievously because of this. 

Certain names of the Watchers, or at any rate the leadership of the Watchers, are given—Azazel, Semjaza, Armen, Rumjal, Turel, Armaros, Danjal, Kokabel and about a dozen more. 37 More specifically, we’re told about the nature of the “secret things” that they taught to mankind: 

And Azazel taught men to make swords and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth, and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all coloring tinctures. And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways. Semjaza taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armaros the resolving of enchantments, Baraqijal taught astrology, Kokabel the constellations, Ezequiel the knowledge of the clouds, Araqiel the signs of the earth, Shamsiel the signs of the sun, and Sariel the course of the moon …38 

Next we begin to understand that the Watchers are divided into two mutually opposed groups, because we read that the leaders of one group summon Enoch—remember this is all happening to him while he is in a dreamlike, visionary state—to deliver a message to the leaders of the other group, named as “the Watchers of the heaven.” 39 It seems these “Watchers of the heaven” (sometimes also referred to as “the heavenly Watchers” 40 ) have “defiled themselves with women, and have done as the children of the earth do, and have taken unto themselves wives.” 41 They have also “wrought great destruction upon the earth.” 42 For this they are going to be punished in various deeply unpleasant and terrifying ways. 43 

Obedient and dutiful, Enoch sets off, bearing his heavy message of murder and mayhem from the Watchers to … the Watchers. 

So what’s going on here? 

A more careful scan of the pages reveals the backstory: 

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 us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.” And Semjaza, who was their leader, said unto 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 swear 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 …44 

Now things are becoming clearer. “Watchers” is a general term referring to angels. Among them are bad angels. They want to have sex and make babies with beautiful human women and while they’re at it, as we can gather from passages quoted earlier, they’re going to teach mankind a thing or two about metals, and the constellations and the course of the sun and the moon (or the ecliptic as this “course”—this “path”—is known to astronomers today). As the first step in implementing their plan these bad Watchers descend upon Mount Hermon, which happens to be in ancient Canaan, now Lebanon, and only 45 miles (73 kilometers) from Baalbek. 

Meanwhile there are good angels, “the Holy Angels who watch” 45—among them Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraquel, Gabriel and Remiel. 46 And it’s these good Watcher angels who appear to Enoch in a dream and give him that message of death and destruction to take to the bad Watcher angels on Mount Hermon. He tells us specifically where he received this dream: 

I went off and sat down at the waters of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon … I fell asleep and behold a dream came to me and visions fell down upon me and I saw visions of chastisement and a voice came bidding me to tell it to the sons of heaven and reprimand them. And when I awakened I came unto them …47 

As I read these passages, set before the Flood, when the people of Lebanon and ancient Turkey were still at the hunter-gatherer stage of development, it seems more and more obvious to me that Enoch is a shamanic figure. And like all shamans, everywhere, in all times and places, he sets great store by visions—which in his case come in the form of dreams received “in sleep.” What’s interesting, however, is that when he wakes up from this visionary state, he’s able to go to a real physical place on Mount Hermon where the bad Watchers are and talk to them face to face: 

And I recounted before them all the visions which I had seen in sleep, and I began to speak the words of righteousness, and to reprimand the heavenly Watchers. 48 

Does this not suggest, rather strongly, that the bad Watchers are physical beings? I don’t know what the good Watchers are, because they only appear to Enoch in his dreams. Quite possibly they are real at some level. Readers of my book Supernatural, which is about shamanism, will know my view that in altered states of consciousness (including dream states) the “receiver wavelength” of the brain may be retuned allowing us to make contact with other dimensions of reality. 49 But in Enoch’s story the bad Watchers must be real—real on the earthly plane of physical existence—because when he wakes up he’s able to climb Mount Hermon and reprimand them. 

We must also entertain the possibility that the bad Watchers—whoever or whatever they are—may not in fact be bad. All we can say is that they are judged to be bad and portrayed as bad in Enoch’s dream-visions. One possibility that we should keep in mind, alongside the alternative possibility that the “Book of Enoch” is just an ancient work of fantasy fiction, is that Enoch’s encounters with the “bad” Watchers really did happen and that he hated and resented them for changes they were seeking to introduce to the hunter-gatherer way of life of his people. In that case the reprimands he delivers to them, mediated through his subconscious as coming from the good Watchers, may simply express his own deeply entrenched views, the views of a bigoted old shaman who feels threatened by change—even though he himself will later be transformed by his contacts with the Watchers. 

There isn’t space here to review the entire, bizarre, impenetrable, wildly suggestive text of the Book of Enoch. What I’m interested in is the much more specific possibility that the two hundred Watchers who “descended” on Mount Hermon were indeed real beings, not phantasms. I’d like to understand more about what kind of beings they could have been. And I want to look at the picture Enoch paints of them, laden with hatred and resentment though it is, as bringing skills and sciences to our ancestors—skills and sciences which, ultimately, will also be revealed to him by the good Watchers, and with which his own name will come to be associated in legend and tradition. 50 

Mystery of the Nephilim 

The Watchers begin their development project in quite small ways, teaching “charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots” to humans, and making them “acquainted with plants.” 51 This sounds fairly harmless; apart from a bit of “enchantment,” it’s not really above and beyond basic hunter-gatherer level skills. But pretty soon, as we saw earlier, our ancestors are being initiated into the secrets of metals, and how to make swords and knives, and how to study the heavens—and also how to beautify themselves with eye-makeup and jewelry. 

In return (a bit like the GIs who allegedly bought favors from British women with gifts of nylon stockings, cigarettes and chewing gum during World War II), 52 the Watchers are getting sex—lots of sex!—and it seems this is what annoys Enoch the most. He speaks reprovingly, again and again, of the “fornication” of the Watchers, 53 of their “lust” for “beautiful and comely” human women 54 who they “sleep with,” 55 “go into” 56 and “defile themselves” with, 57 and to whom they reveal “all kinds of sins.” 58 

From such admonishments we may reasonably deduce a number of things about the Watchers, most particularly that they must be about the right size and shape, and equipped, moreover, with the necessary organs and impulses to want, to have and to enjoy sex with human women. To me, the obvious conclusion from this is the Watchers are in fact human, or at any rate extremely closely related at the genetic level to anatomically modern human beings—close enough, indeed, to make human women pregnant and to have “children of fornication” 59 with them. These offspring are not sickly as one might expect from an even slightly mismatched genetic makeup. On the contrary, they thrive so vigorously that Enoch, or the “good” angels speaking through him, want not only to destroy the Watchers but also to “destroy the children of the Watchers.” 60 

But there is something very odd about the hybrid offspring, at least if we take Enoch’s word for it, because he tells us that when human women “became pregnant” by the Watchers they gave birth to: 

great giants whose height was three thousand ells, who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. 61 

Three thousand ells is equivalent to 4,500 feet or 1,371 meters. Whatever the truth behind this account may be, therefore, it’s obvious the angry old shaman is embellishing it fantastically here in his bid to discredit the Watchers. The prospect of human women giving birth to babies who would grow to more than a kilometer in height is patently absurd. Nonetheless, it brings us back to familiar Biblical territory again—indeed to one of the more notorious passages in the Book of Genesis which reads: 

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, “My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. 62 

That’s the King James Version (I’ve added the emphasis in the final lines), but other translations give the original word Nephilim, that the KJV translates as “giants,” and we read: 

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans, and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. 63 

So now further clarity begins to emerge. A group of bad angels, “Watchers of the heaven,” have come to earth—“descended,” specifically, on Mount Hermon in Lebanon—transferred some technology, mated with human females, and produced offspring who are in some way gigantic and are called Nephilim. Here’s what we’re told in the very next verses: 

The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. 64 

An amazing amount of credulous nonsense has proliferated around these verses in recent years on the internet, much of it deriving from the late Zecharia Sitchin’s science-fiction novels, notably the Earth Chronicles series, which he successfully passed off to the public as serious factual studies. I’ve already touched in Chapter Thirteen on Sitchin’s misrepresentation of Baalbek and while I’m not saying that everything he wrote was fiction—he did throw in some quite valuable and interesting facts —his overall body of work is marred by enough blatant fabrications and fantasy to call for caution, rather than immediate, trusting acceptance, on the part of his readers. 

His treatment of the subject of the Nephilim (he spells the word Nefilim, but this is not important) is a case in point. Claiming to be an expert in Biblical languages he asks: 

What then does the term Nefilim mean? Stemming from the Semitic root NFL (“to be cast down”), it means exactly what it says. It means those who were cast down upon earth! 65 

The problem, however, as Michael S. Heiser, a genuine Biblical scholar and ancient Semitic languages expert, has conclusively demonstrated, is that:

Sitchin assumes “nephilim” comes from the Hebrew word “naphal” which usually means “to fall.” He then forces the meaning “to come down” onto the word, creating his “to come down from above” translation. In the form we find it in the Hebrew Bible, if the word nephilim came from Hebrew naphal, it would not be spelled as we find it. The form nephilim cannot mean “fallen ones” (the spelling would then be nephulim). Likewise nephilim does not mean “those who fall” or “those who fall away” (that would be nophelim). The only way in Hebrew to get nephilim from naphal by the rules of Hebrew morphology (word formation) would be to presume a noun spelled naphil and then pluralise it. I say “presume” since this noun does not exist in biblical Hebrew—unless one counts Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, the two occurrences of nephilim—but that would then be assuming what one is trying to prove! However, in Aramaic the noun naphil(a) does exist. It means “giant,” making it easy to see why the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) translated nephilim as gigantes (“giant”). 66 

Heiser is plainly right about this because, as he points out, there is a later passage in the Old Testament, in Numbers 13, where the word Nephilim appears again. This is thousands of years after the Deluge, indeed in the historical period, surely not later than 1200 BC, when the Israelites first entered Canaan after the Exodus from Egypt. Advance scouts report to Moses: 

All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there … We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them. 67 

The context leaves no room for doubt that the Nephilim are people of “great size,” the references to them as “giants” in the King James and other versions of the Bible therefore make complete sense, and the “translation” that Sitchin gives is obviously bogus. Did he know it was bogus even as he retailed it in his books? There can be no certainty because, as Heiser goes on to prove, Sitchin’s grasp of Biblical languages was so weak that he was unable to distinguish Aramaic from Hebrew. 68 The notion that the Nephilim were beings who were “cast down from heaven,” or who “came down from heaven,” was deployed by Sitchin, Heiser believes, simply because it served his argument and allowed him to “make the nephilim sound like ancient astronauts.” 69 

Again the criticism is justified because Sitchin goes beyond what could be an innocent error to give further “translations” of the word Nephilim that are even more self-serving and phoney. For example, he makes them “Gods of Heaven upon Earth,” 70 and, worse still, “the People of the Rocket Ships” 71—an interpretation for which there is no possible justification in any ancient text but that allows him to speak, among other egregious and deceptive fictions, of “the Aeronautics and Space Administration of the Nefilim.” 72 

It is also important, while reviewing this material which has had such an impact on public perceptions of the past, to be clear that the Watchers, who are never mentioned at all in the Bible, but are said in the Book of Enoch to have descended from heaven, are quite distinct from the Nephilim. There is nothing in the Book of Enoch that says the Nephilim fell or were cast down or came down from heaven in any way. The most we may gather from the Book of Enoch is that the Nephilim are the progeny of the mating of Watchers and human women, but even this is complicated. 

An authoritative English translation of the Ethiopic text brought back by Bruce was made by the Reverend R.H. Charles and first published in 1917. 73 It contains no mention of the Nephilim and describes the Watcher-human offspring simply as “giants.” 74 Likewise the word Nephilim does not appear in the 1979 translation of Professor Michael A. Knibb which, as well as the Ethiopic text, takes account of newly discovered Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls. 75 However, a more recent translation, by George W. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam, published in 2012, draws on further fragments not considered by Knibb and here, in Chapter 7, Verse 2, the word Nephilim appears twice, as follows: 

And they [human women] conceived from them [the Watchers] and bore to them great giants. And the giants begot Nephilim, and to the Nephilim were born Elioud. And they were growing in accordance with their greatness. 76 

The Nephilim do not appear again in the Nickelsburg and VanderKam translation. Nonetheless, the verse quoted above leaves no room for doubt: they are not to be considered as “fallen” or “cast down” or any such thing but as the progeny of Watcher-human mating. Nor is it the first generation, the “great giants,” who are named as Nephilim. It is the second generation, i.e. the offspring of the giants, who are the Nephilim, and they in turn will produce offspring of their own—the “Elioud.” 

If nothing else these “Elioud,” about whom very little is known outside Jewish mystical traditions, are further evidence of the close genetic relationship between Watchers and humans—so close that they must really be classified as the same species. Generally when two different species breed, even when they are close enough to produce offspring—such as horses and donkeys for example—those offspring are themselves sterile. But unlike the sterile mules that result from horse-donkey matings, the Nephilim are clearly not sterile, since they themselves are able to go on to produce offspring, i.e. the Elioud. 

The only reasonable conclusion, as I have already indicated, is that the Watchers must have been human beings—no doubt surrounded by some aura or glamor to do with their mastery of technology and the sciences, but no more and no less human than the women they mated with—and that therefore their offspring were human too. Quite possibly they were of large stature. Quite possibly the epithet of “giants” attached to them may also have had something to do with their intellectual abilities, which might have been seen to be superior. But they were human nonetheless and I see no good reason to conclude otherwise. 

Meanwhile, because this is a subject around which much confusion swirls, it is necessary to reiterate that there is no suggestion either in Genesis or in Numbers—the only places they are mentioned in the Bible—that the Nephilim had “fallen,” even in the metaphorical sense of having sinned. On the contrary, far from being censured, they are described as “mighty men of old,” “heroes,” “men of renown.” Genesis is unequivocal, as the reader can confirm from the passages cited earlier, that it is human wickedness, and the evil in human hearts, that causes God to send the Flood—a cataclysm that is survived not only by Noah’s descendants, but by the Nephilim themselves who were still in Canaan, and still of great stature as the Book of Numbers attests, when the Israelites came to take possession of the Promised Land. 

Emissaries 

After this brief excursion into the foundations of the Sitchin Nephilim cult, let us return to the Watchers, and who and what they might be. 

Enoch’s condemnation of them for “fornicating” with human women finds its counterpart in Genesis where, though not named, they are clearly “the sons of God” who “saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.” Thereafter the story of exactly what happened is only preserved in Enoch, where we’re led to understand that the Watchers: 

taught all unrighteousness on earth and revealed the eternal secrets which were preserved in heaven, which men were striving to learn. 77 

Turning now to another of the non-canonical scriptures, the Book of Jubilees, which purports to be a revelation given by God to Moses, we read of the Watchers again and in a context that brings us back to the Sabians and Harran. According both to the Islamic historian Al-Masudi, and the Christian chronicler Gregory Bar Hebraeus, Harran was originally founded by Cainan, 78 the great-grandson of Noah. 79 By definition, therefore, though early, Harran is a post-diluvian city. Cainan (sometimes the name is spelled Kainam) was the son of Arpachsad: 

And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city. And he found a writing, which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it, for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun, moon and stars in all the signs of heaven. 80 

Here, then, is the origin of the star worship of the Sabians traced all the way back to the mysterious Watchers—whoever they were, whatever they were—who settled in the Near East in antediluvian times, taught our ancestors forbidden knowledge, broke some fundamental commandment by mating with human women and, as a result, were remembered as being responsible for the great global cataclysm of the Deluge. 

Were these Watchers the emissaries of a lost civilization of the Ice Age? Perhaps a civilization as far ahead of the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, who made up the majority of the population of the world at that time, as our own civilization is ahead of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon rainforest today? When I say “ahead” I am, of course, not speaking of moral or spiritual values but simply of technology, skills and knowledge. Since such discrepancies still exist in the twenty-first century I see no reason in principle why they should not have existed in the remote epoch before the great cataclysms of the Younger Dryas set in between 10,800 BC and 9600 BC. 

To continue with this line of speculation, could it be that there was some sort of outreach before those cataclysms? 

A very careful, considered, structured outreach program, to observe, to study—in other words to watch—hunter-gatherer populations, but not to intermingle with them, not to enter into the complicated entanglements of sexual and family relationships with them, and above all not to transfer any technology to them? 

One could imagine that a group of anthropologists and scientists sent off to study a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe today might be bound by similar strictures. But suppose some of them disagreed? Suppose some of them “went native”—as used to be said of colonialists in the days of the British Empire who allowed themselves to get too close to indigenous populations they interacted with. 

Is that perhaps what happened to the troop of two hundred “Watchers” on Mount Hermon? Somewhere around 10,900 BC, did they break the commandments of their own culture and “go native” among the hunter-gatherers of the Near East? And were the first chance encounters with the fragments of a giant comet a century later in 10,800 BC—encounters that devastated the world—somehow blamed upon their moral lapse? 

And some final thoughts. Did their civilization survive, albeit in truncated, damaged, reduced form through the rigors of the Younger Dryas, until the second fateful encounter with the comet’s debris stream in 9600 BC that ended the “long fatal winter,” but also led to the final sinking and destruction of “the Homeland of the Primeval Ones?” 

That “island” realm, far-off in the ocean, that bears such striking resemblances to Plato’s description of Atlantis. 

Was it then that the last survivors of the once advanced and prosperous civilization set out to wander the world in ships to initiate their great design intended ultimately, perhaps after thousands of years, to bring about the resurrection of the former world of the gods? 

And were Egypt, Baalbek, and Göbekli Tepe among the places these “Magicians of the Gods” chose to settle in order to set their plan in motion—perhaps precisely because there had been outreach in these areas before the cataclysms and therefore their potential and the character of their inhabitants were known? 

Was Harran part of the second stage of this plan, when the work of the last initiates at Göbekli Tepe was done and the time-capsule they had created there was buried to be rediscovered in a future age? 

Buried in the bowels of the earth like that “white porphyry stone” spoken of in the Masonic tradition cited earlier? 

Or like the “writing carved on rock” containing the teachings of the Watchers which Cainan found and transcribed at the time he established Harran, bringing into his city knowledge of the omens of the sun, moon and stars and “all the signs in heaven?” 

Knowledge of exactly the type that would be central to the mysterious star religion of the Sabians in the millennia to come … 

Astronomy and earth measuring 

Archaeoastronomer James Q. Jacobs has noticed something rather odd about Harran. The city’s latitude, 36.87 degrees north of the equator, appears to be non-random, since the figure is the same as that for the acute angle of a 3:4:5 right triangle 81—i.e. a triangle which contains one 90 degree right angle and whose side lengths are in the ratio 3:4:5. In all such triangles—which form the basis for trigonometry and are thus fundamental to astronomy and geodesy—the other two angles are, with rounding, 53.13 degrees and 36.87 degrees. 

Is it a coincidence that a 3:4:5 right triangle with the same internal angles exists inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Egypt? The floor of this austere and uninscribed red granite room, in which no pharaoh was ever found entombed, forms a 2:1 rectangle, exactly 20 Egyptian royal cubits in length and 10 royal cubits in width (10.46 x 5.23 meters). The right triangle is formed with its shortest dimension (15 cubits) represented by the diagonal across the west wall from the lower southwest corner to the upper northwest corner; its median dimension (20 cubits) is drawn along the entire length of the floor on the south side of the chamber; its long dimension (25 cubits) is drawn from the upper northwest corner of the chamber to the lower southeast corner. 82 

These side lengths of 15 cubits, 20 cubits and 25 cubits can be expressed as the ratio 3:4:5 because if we allocate the value “3” to the length of 15 cubits then 20 cubits must naturally have a value of “4” and 25 cubits must have a value of “5.” All right-angled triangles with side lengths in this special 3:4:5 ratio are called “Pythagorean”—after Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician of the sixth century BC, who was supposedly the first to discover that they share a unique characteristic. This is that the square of the short side (3 units x 3 units = 9 units), added to the square of the median side (4 units x 4 units = 16 units), together result in a figure equal to the square of the long side (5 units x 5 units = 25 units, i.e. the sum of 9 plus 16). 83 The real “secret magic” of the triangle, however, as the Icelandic mathematician Einar Palsson has pointed out, is only revealed when the numbers are cubed. 84 Then we get: 

Figure 58: The 3:4:5 right triangle hidden within the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid. 

3 x 3 x 3 = 27 

4 x 4 x 4 = 64 

5 x 5 x 5 = 125 

The total of 27 plus 64 plus 125 is 216, and as the reader will recall from earlier chapters, 216 is one of the sequence of numbers identified by historians of science Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend as being derived from precise observations of the precession of the equinoxes, those long term changes in the sky that unfold at the rate of one degree every 72 years. Numbers derived from this processional sequence turn out to be encoded in ancient myths and monuments all around the world, tracing their origins back to what Santillana and von Dechend can only conclude was some “almost unbelievable” ancestor civilization of prehistoric antiquity that “first dared to understand the world as created according to number, measure and weight.” 85 

The heartbeat of the cycle, as we’ve seen, is 72—the number of years required for the unfolding of one degree of precessional change. In observational terms a one degree shift over 72 years—effectively an entire human lifetime—is barely perceptible, being roughly equivalent to the width of a forefinger held up toward the horizon. A 30 degree shift—through one entire zodiacal constellation, requiring 30 x 72 = 2,160 years to complete—is impossible to miss, but its progression could only be precisely recorded and noted by many generations of conscientious and accurate observers. A 60 degree shift, i.e. through two zodiacal constellations, takes 4,320 years (2,160 x 2 = 4,320), which is why a 360 degree shift (all 12 zodiacal constellations—“the Great Year”) requires a grand total of 25,920 years. 

Within the “precessional code” as Santillana and von Dechend showed conclusively, it is permissible to divide and multiply the “heartbeat number” of 72 (the number of years required for one degree of precessional change). This is done in myths and monuments all around the world (for example at Angkor, in Cambodia, as we saw in Chapter Twelve, and at Borobudur, in Indonesia, as we will see in Chapter Eighteen). Thus 216 is 3 x 72 (or 2,160 divided by 10). Its derivation from the 3:4:5 triangle inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid is therefore most unlikely to be an accident and the relationship of all this to astronomy and geodesy—earth-measuring—is clear. This is further confirmed by the external dimensions of the Great Pyramid which, as I showed in Fingerprints of the Gods, encode the dimensions of our planet on the precessional scale of 1:43,200. 86 

Essentially, if you measure the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by 43,200 you get the polar radius of the earth and if you measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply by 43,200 you get the equatorial circumference of the earth. The fact that 43,200 is one of the sequence of precessional numbers identified by Santillana and von Dechend further reduces the likelihood of coincidence, and requires us to take seriously the proposition that we are indeed looking at part of the intellectual legacy of some “almost unbelievable” ancestor civilization that had measured the earth and observed the changes in the stars with scientific accuracy, long before what we understand as “history” began. 

Figure 59: The Great Pyramid encodes the dimensions of our planet on the precessional scale of 1:43,200. The height of Great Pyramid multiplied by 43,200 gives us the polar radius of the earth and the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid multiplied by 43,200 give us the equatorial circumference of the earth with only minor errors in both cases. 

So, to return to Harran, James Q. Jacobs’ discovery certainly suggests that the founders of this city made a deliberate geodetic choice when they set it at latitude 36.87 degrees north. What adds to this impression is that Jacobs has also found a geodetic relationship between Harran and the fabled Mesopotamian city of Ur with which it was known to have enjoyed a close relationship in antiquity: 87 

The history/myth of Mesopotamia holds that Ur and Harran are two important, related Sumerian centers, both associated with the moon. I checked the [latitude of] the Ur ziggurat, at 30.963 degrees. At first I did not notice colatitude equals 5/3 arctangent (atan). Colatitude is the distance to the nearest pole, a geodetic reference point. Latitude references the equator, the mid-poles plane perpendicular to the rotation axis. The local level plane at Harran intersects the rotation axis at a 4/3 atan angle, forming a 3:4:5 right triangle, as does latitude in relation to the equator and geodetic center. Summarizing, colatitude at Harran equals 4/3 atan and at Ur 5/3 atan. Thus latitude at Harran equals 3/4 atan and at Ur 3/5 atan. Perhaps these “idolators” were doing astronomy? 88 

I would go further and say undoubtedly the Sabian “star-worshippers” of Harran were doing astronomy. And given the evidence we’ve reviewed in Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen for precise calculations of precession by the makers of Göbekli Tepe—so precise that they were able to create a symbolic picture of the winter solstice sky in our own epoch, 11,600 years in their future—I am not surprised by further evidence in this region of extremely ancient and extremely precise scientific astronomy and geodesy. This evidence goes far beyond the capabilities normally attributed to the historical civilization of Mesopotamia and because it draws back the veil, requiring us to look very deeply into prehistory, it again raises the specter of a lost civilization. 

Jacobs has noticed this and admits to being puzzled by it. His final discovery of relevance here concerns the geodetic relationship between Göbekli Tepe and Harran: 

The sites are apparently intervisible, just over 40 km apart. The difference in latitude from Harran to Göbekli Tepe equals precisely 1/1,000 of earth’s circumference. This is where we enter a twilight zone in ancient astronomy. Of course the opposite metaphor—“the dawn” of ancient astronomy—is the proper one regarding the implication. Göbekli Tepe features the oldest known room aligned north-south, evidence of astronomy in practice. 

Even non-archaeos understand stratification and deposition basics—deeper is older. Göbekli Tepe is 12,000 years old. Harran is equated … with Ur of Sumeria, the “Civilized Land” and a “cradle of civilization.” That cradle and astronomy is presumed to be 4,000 to 5,000 years old, not 12,000. Harran is located at 3/4 atan latitude, a fixed parameter, and Göbekli Tepe is at a specific latitude difference north. Because the fixed parameter must come first, the conundrum, of course, is that this precise 1/1,000 of circumference latitude difference is either a coincidence, or ancient astronomy just took a leap back to 12,000 years ago. 89 

My understanding is that Jacobs is no fan of alternative history and he has commented forthrightly on the amount of “utterly unbelievable pseudo-science” that is presently in circulation on the internet and in the media concerning Göbekli Tepe. 90 Kudos to him, therefore, for going where the genuine science takes him and keeping an open mind to the possibility that ancient astronomy and precise earthmeasuring may indeed go back much further into the “twilight zone” than mainstream archaeology has hitherto supposed. 

The Magi of Harran 

As Harran was in its beginning—a center of the “exact sciences” as Jacobs proposes 91—so it continued to be throughout the millennia when the Sabians practiced their “star worship” here. As late as the ninth century AD, al-Battani, better known in the west as Albategnius, arguably the most distinguished astronomer and mathematician of the Middle Ages, was born in Harran and went on during a long and distinguished life 92 to record many remarkable scientific achievements. 

Of particular note, combining both exact astronomy and exact geodesy, was his calculation of the greatest distance of the moon from the earth (since the moon’s orbit is elliptical it has both a perigee, the point at which it is closest to the earth and an apogee, the point at which it is furthest away). AlBattani’s estimate of the moon’s distance at apogee was within 0.6 percent of the modern value. 93 He is also noted for his calculation of the length of the solar year at 365 days, 5 hours, 46 minutes and 24 seconds 94—an error of only 2 minutes 22 seconds when compared with the figure produced by modern astronomers with the benefit of advanced technology. 95 Al-Battani catalogued 489 stars, 96 produced more accurate measurements of the sun’s path than Copernicus would achieve 600 years later, 97 and gave important trigonometric formulae for right triangles, 98 a fact of the history of science that is perhaps noteworthy in view of the relationship of Harran’s latitude to right 3:4:5 triangles discussed above. 

Al-Battani’s full name, which includes a number of revealing epithets, was Abu Abdallah alBattani Ibn Jabir Ibn Sinan al-Raqqi al-Harrani al-Sabi. The origin of the epithet “al-Battani” itself is unknown, but is conjectured to refer to a street or district of Harran, his birth city—from whence “alHarrani” is of course also derived. “Al-Raqqi” refers to the city of al-Raqqa, on the Euphrates river in Syria, where al-Battani spent much of his working life. Most interesting, however, is the epithet “al-Sabi” which, according to the authoritative Dictionary of Scientific Biography, indicates that alBattani’s ancestors, if not he himself: 

had professed the religion of the Harranian Sabians in which a considerable amount of the ancient Mesopotamian astral theology and star lore appears to have been preserved and which, tolerated by the Muslim rulers, survived until the middle of the eleventh century. The fact that al-Battani’s elder contemporary, the great mathematician and astronomer Thabit ibn Qurra, hailed from the same region and still adhered to the Sabian religion, seems indicative of the keen interest in astronomy that characterized even this last phase of Mesopotamian star idolatry. 99 

Thabit ibn Qurra (AD 836–901, and also born in Harran), would have had little patience with loaded terms like “star idolatry” which seek to place the “paganism” of the Sabians on a lower level than the deadly, and often bigoted, narrow-minded and unscientific clerical monotheism of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Thabit was well aware that, underlying the ancient Sabian practices misunderstood by these young religions as “star idolatry,” were indeed exact sciences of great benefit to mankind, and thus he wrote: 

Who else have civilized the world, and built the cities, if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbors and rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, given oracles, and told about the future, if not the famous men among the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all this. They have discovered the art of healing the soul; they have also made known the art of healing the body. They have filled the earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable. 100 

To the above should be added that even this translation fails to do justice to what Thabit was attempting to convey here. The Syriac word hanputho that he used in his original text, and that is translated above as “paganism” in fact means “the pure religion.” 101 Its cognate in Arabic is the word hanif, which appears in the Koran referencing ancient pre-Islamic faiths that were regarded as pure and thus not to be persecuted. 102 Indeed the Sabians were accorded recognition by many leading thinkers in the early centuries of Islam as the archetypal hanifs 103 and this, together with their famous claim to be a “people of the book,” was among the reasons why they were left free for so long to practice the old ways. 

We’ve already seen how the Sabians were allowed to build a new Temple of the Moon God, and to continue their religious rites, after the Arab General Ibn Ghanam conquered Harran in the seventh century AD. This in itself is a sign of most unusual favor, since Islamic armies normally offered “pagans” the choice of either conversion or death. Even more interesting, however, is the Sabians’ encounter with the Abbasid Caliph Abu Jafar Abdullah al-Ma’mun, who passed through their city in AD 830 and reportedly quizzed them intensively on their religion. 104 

Remembering the Sabian pilgrimages to Giza, it is reasonable to wonder whether there is any connection with the fact that in AD 820, a decade before he visited Harran, it was Ma’mun who tunnelled into the Great Pyramid and opened its previously hidden passageways and chambers. Indeed, it is through “Ma’mun’s Hole” that visitors still enter the monument today. 105 Described by Gibbon as “a prince of rare learning,” 106 it seems Ma’mun’s investigation was prompted by information he’d received about the Great Pyramid, specifically that it contained: 

a secret chamber with maps and tables of the celestial and terrestrial spheres. Although they were said to have been made in the remote past, they were supposed to be of great accuracy. 107 

Like his father Harun al-Rashid of Arabian nights fame, Ma’mun belonged to a line of learned and open-minded Caliphs. By the eleventh century, however, when the last Temple of the Moon God in Harran was finally destroyed, a new, more fundamentalist and far less tolerant faction had seized the reins of Islam and the suppression of “the pure religion” of the Sabians began in earnest. We know they continued to make their pilgrimages to Giza until the thirteenth century, but after that they disappear from history and, while some scholars feel that elements of their faith survive among such sects as the Mandeans and the Yazidis of Iraq 108 (who themselves have been subjected to intense Islamic persecution in modern times), there seems to be no trace left of the Sabians today. 

Except for one tantalizing and intriguing thought. 

The sacred Book of the Sabians was the compilation of texts now known as the Hermetica, 109 a copy of which most mysteriously found its way into the hands of Leonardo de Pistoia, an agent of Cosimo de Medici, founder of the Medici political dynasty of Florence. It was 1460 and Pistoia was traveling in Macedonia at the time, but immediately returned to Florence with the treasure of ancient wisdom that he had acquired. With equal speed, Cosimo ordered his adopted son Marsilio Ficino to delay translation of the complete works of Plato, on which he had just begun, and to translate the Hermetica instead. 110 It was, as the late Dame Frances Yates, one of the world’s leading experts on the Renaissance, has observed, “an extraordinary situation.” 111 

Indeed so, particularly since there is much to suggest that it was this introduction of Hermetic ideas into fifteenth century Europe that kicked the Renaissance into high gear and gave birth to the modern world. 112 

Or was it, perhaps, not so much the birth of a new world as it was the rebirth—the “resurrection” in the language of the Edfu texts—of the former world of the gods? 

Signs of the hands 

As we have seen, the Edfu texts speak of the Seven Sages, bringers of wisdom to mankind, teachers of science and magic. The Mesopotamian texts also speak of Seven Sages—the Apkallus—whose functions are identical to those of their Egyptian counterparts. We have explored all this in earlier chapters and need not repeat ourselves here. What I was unaware of, however, until I began to investigate the traditions of the Watchers in the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees and elsewhere, is that scholars have discovered close links between the Watchers and the Apkallus. 

For example, “figurines of Apkallus were buried in boxes in the foundation deposits in Mesopotamian buildings in order to avert evil … The term massare, Watchers, is used of these sets.” 113 Likewise the Apkallus were said to have taught antediluvian sciences to humanity and so, too, were the Watchers. 114 As one scholar concludes, however: “The Jewish authors often inverted the Mesopotamian intellectual traditions with the intention of showing the superiority of their own cultural foundations. [Thus] … the antediluvian sages, the Mesopotamian Apkallus, were demonised as the ‘sons of God’ and … appear as the Watchers … illegitimate teachers of humankind before the flood.” 115 

All in all, what this body of research reveals is a series of links between the Watchers and the Apkallus so close that they might reasonably be supposed to be two different names, or titles, for the same beings. 116 There is neither space nor need here to explore this material with all its multiple interconnections in any further detail, but I find it tempting to imagine that it might be these very beings—these Watchers, these Sages—who are depicted on the tall megalithic pillars at Göbekli Tepe. 

Notwithstanding their resemblance to the symbols of Mesopotamian deities (see Chapter Fifteen), the presence of the bag-like objects on the upper register of Pillar 43 in Enclosure D that I first drew attention to in Chapter One continues to intrigue me, since these objects are also so similar to the bags held in the hands of the Apkallu figures in many ancient depictions. And that similarity, as the reader will recall, is not confined to the Near East. In a sculpture from the Olmec site of La Venta, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, a relief of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, the legendary bringer of civilization to the peoples of Central America, carries an identical bag. 

Before leaving Turkey in July 2014 we make one more trip back to Göbekli Tepe. I can hardly bear to see it under its horrible, heavy wooden roof, which plunges all four of the main enclosures into a looming sepulchral gloom. But there’s a particular reason why I want to take a final look at Enclosure D, not this time at Pillar 43, but at the two central pillars with their crooked arms and their hands with long fingers that almost meet over their stone bellies. 

When I’m satisfied I’ve seen enough we have our driver take us back in to ŞanlIurfa, to the main museum, where numerous artifacts from Göbekli Tepe, thought too precious to leave at the site, are on display. I’ve been here before, too, but there are a number of details I want to remind myself of. 

I spend a long time in front of a mesmerizing sculpture of a human figure. It wasn’t found at Göbekli Tepe, but was an accidental discovery made in the 1980s in ŞanlIurfa itself, in the heart of the old town where deep foundations were being dug for a car park. It has been dated to the Göbekli Tepe period—i.e. to around 9000 BC—and is “on its way,” Klaus Schmidt has written, “to become world famous as the oldest completely preserved life-sized statue of mankind.” 117 

Unlike the megalithic pillars at Göbekli Tepe where the “heads” are stylized—resembling the upper crossbar of the letter “T”—this figure has a fully formed human head and face with glittering black obsidian eyes, a pronounced chin that gives every impression of being bearded, a pectoral in the form of a large double “V” carved in high relief across its chest, and its arms crooked in the manner of the Göbekli Tepe figures with the fingers almost meeting across the front of the belly. 

I move on to the second piece I want to examine, the so-called “Totem Pole.” It’s even eerier than the first. Again it’s about normal human height but it is by no means entirely human. Instead it’s a complex hybrid with multiple different characteristics. The head is badly damaged, but the ears and eyes have been preserved and suggest a predator of some kind, perhaps a bear, or perhaps a lion or leopard. So it’s a therianthrope. Then large serpents wind up along the outside of its legs. They have oversized heads which project forward at about the level of the figure’s groin. 

There are two sets of arms and hands that seem to belong to the figure itself. In the case of the upper pair, the arms are crooked in the usual Göbekli Tepe manner and the hands are brought together, with the fingers almost touching across the chest. Then there’s a second pair of what seem to be forearms and hands only, with the fingers again coming together and almost touching across the belly roughly at the level of the navel. 

Moving down, at about the level of the genitals, a small head and two further arms protrude outward from the midline of the figure. Again there are those long-fingered hands almost meeting, but this time they appear to be playing a drum. Beside them, but just below them, there is the hint, much damaged, of a further pair of arms and hands. 

Much about all this is familiar to me. 

Very familiar. 

Not from Göbekli Tepe, though, as we’ll see in the next chapter, but from the far side of the world

next-264

Mountain

source and notes here

https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Graham%20Hancock%20-%20Magicians%20of%20the%20Gods%20-%20The%20Forgotten%20Wisdom%20of%20Earth%27s%20Lost%20Civilization.pdf

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