Sunday surprise — a memorandum
[ by Charles Cameron — on the angelic and poetical differences between Azaz’el, Azaz’iel and Azaz’il ]
.
Beginning ignorant, and with failing memory besides, I find it difficult to keep these distinctions straight in my unaided mind. Grateful thanks, therefore, to Bartelby and Brewer, who provide me with these assists:
Now that the matter has been clarified, my own affectionate preference goes to Azaz’iel, to be sure.
May 30th, 2016 at 1:08 am
Christian Neo-Platonists interpreted the “sons of God” in
Genesis 6:4 as the fallen angels, who mated with the “daughters of man”, and had mutant children, the Nephilim, “mighty men” of “renown”.
Enoch described the fallen as members of the Egregore or the “Watchers”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watcher_(angel)
.
So I suppose the moral of the story is don’t watch things to closely? Unless you want giant children?
June 1st, 2016 at 4:26 pm
I know next to nothing about the Nephilim, except that they seem to feature in assorted conspiracist texts. Angels sleeping with women has an incubus feel to it, which I suppose arouses prurient interest, and the texts (Enoch, for instance) are obscure enough that they were pretty much ignored in my less thyan stellar experience of the Theology faculty at Oxford. But then my tutor, a man I revered, brushed off Kabbalah when I once asked him about it, as unreliable, insufficiently documented, an aberrant tradition.