Infinitum

Watchers

The Watchers (from Greek egrḗgoroi (ἐγρήγοροι)) or Grigori are a group of fallen angels told of in Biblical apocrypha who mated with mortal women, giving rise to a race of hybrids known as the Nephilim, who are also mentioned in Genesis 6:4. The Watchers appear in Biblical apocrypha, in the first and second books of Enoch and Jubilees. The word “Grigori” derives from the Slavonic Second Book of Enoch.

According to the Book of Enoch, the Watchers numbered a total of 200 but only their leaders are named:

And they were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And these are the names of their leaders: Sêmîazâz, their leader, Arâkîba, Râmêêl, Kôkabîêl, Tâmîêl, Râmîêl, Dânêl, Êzêqêêl, Barâqîjâl, Asâêl, Armârôs, Batârêl, Anânêl, Zaqîêl, Samsâpêêl, Satarêl, Tûrêl, Jômjâêl, Sariêl. These are their chiefs of tens. (Enoch 6)

A different idea of the Watchers appears in some traditions of Italian witchcraft where they are said to come from ancient stellar lore: “In the Italian system, these ancient Beings are called the Grigori. They are the Guardians of the “doorways” between the physical plane and that which is beyond. In Italian witchlore, the stars were thought to be the campfires of the legions of the Watchers…”

Book of Enoch

In the Book of Enoch, the “watchers” are angels apparently dispatched to Earth simply to watch over the people.

They soon begin to lust for the human women they see, and at the prodding of their leader Samyaza, they defect en masse to illicitly instruct and procreate among humanity. The children produced by these relationships are the Nephilim, savage giants who pillage the earth and endanger humanity. Samyaza and associates further taught their human charges arts and technologies such as weaponry, cosmetics, mirrors, sorcery, and other techniques which were intended to be discovered gradually over time by humans, not foisted upon them all at once. The Greek mythology about Prometheus revealing fire-making to humans without Zeus’s permission is likely a variant of the same ancient legend, and it is possible also that ancient legends among many cultures about cannibalistic giants and pervasive implementation of magical powers (such as in the tale Jack and the Beanstalk) arise from the same ancient mythology that came to inspire the Books of Enoch. Eventually God allows a Great Flood to rid the earth of the Nephilim, but first sends Uriel to warn Noah so as not to eradicate the human race. Genesis says Nephilim remained “on the earth” even after the Great Flood, but Jude says the Watchers themselves are bound “in the valleys of the Earth” until Judgment Day. (See Genesis 6:4 and Jude 1:6, respectively)

The “watchers” story in Enoch from the sixth chapter Genesis where it describes the “Origin of the Nephilim” and mentions the “Sons of God” who beget them:

When men began to multiply on earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of man were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose. Then the Lord said: “My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is but flesh. His days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years.” At that time the Nephilim appeared on earth (as well as later), after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of man, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown. (Genesis 6:1-4)

Here, the “sons of God” are given no specific name or function; they could represent fallen angels, heavenly beings that mate with women. The Book of Enoch regards these as the same angels who are referred to as the Benei Ha-Elohim (Eng. Sons of God) in the Book of Genesis. According to this belief their sins filled the Earth with violence and the world was destroyed as a result of their intervention. Later theologians believed the “sons of God” to refer to the descendants of Seth and the “daughters of man” to refer to the descendants of Cain.

Other References to the Watchers

The Book of Jubilees adds further details about the “watchers”.

In the Book of Daniel an Aramaic term used to denote angels is “watchers” (`îrîn). The term “watcher” probably derives from the verb “to be awake” or “to be vigilant,” so that the implication of calling the angels “watchers” is that they are constantly on watch as sentinels for Yahweh.

Angels were fairly popular in Jewish folklore, which often describes them as looking like large human beings that never sleep and remain forever silent. While there are good and bad “watchers”, most stories revolve around the evil ones that fell from grace when they took “the daughters of man” as their mates.

In the Old Testament (Daniel 4:13-17) there is reference made to the Irin, or “watchers”, which appear to be an order of angels. In early Hebrew lore the Irin were a high order of angels that sat on the supreme Judgment Council of the Heavenly Court.

Richard Cavendish, in his book The Powers of Evil, suggests that the Giants mentioned in Genesis 6:4 were the Giants or Titans of Greek Mythology. He also lists the “watchers” as the fallen angels which magicians call forth in ceremonial magic. Cavendish mentions that the “watchers” were so named because they were stars, the “eyes of night.”

16th Century French theologian Sinistrari referred to the Watchers as beings existing between Humans and Angels. He called them demons and associated them with the Elemental natures of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Clement of Alexandria, influenced by Hellenistic cosmology, attributed the movement of the Stars and the control of the four elements to angelic beings. Sinistrari attributed bodies of fire, air, earth, and water to these Beings, and concluded that the “watchers” were made of fire and air. Cardinal Newman, writing in the mid 1800s, proposed that certain angels existed who were neither totally good nor evil, and had only “partially fallen” from the Heavens.

Partial List of Watchers

• Araqiel (also Arakiel, Araqael, Araciel, Arqael, Sarquael, Arkiel, Arkas) taught humans the signs of the earth. However, in the Sibylline Oracles, Araqiel is referred to not as a fallen angel, or Watcher, but as one of the 5 angels who lead the souls of men to judgement, the other 4 being Ramiel, Uriel, Samiel, and Azazel.
• Armaros (also Amaros) in Enoch I taught men the resolving of enchantments.
• Azazel taught men to make knives, swords, shields, and how to devise ornaments and cosmetics.
  • Gadriel taught the art of cosmetics.
• Baraqel (Baraqiel) taught men astrology
• Bezaliel mentioned in Enoch I, left out of most translations due to damaged manuscripts and problematic transmission of the text.
• Chazaqiel (sometimes Ezeqeel) taught men the signs of the clouds (meteorology).
• Kokabiel (also Kakabel, Kochbiel, Kokbiel, Kabaiel, and Kochab), is a high-ranking, holy angel but, in general apocryphal lore and also in Enoch I, he is a fallen Watcher, resident of nether realms, and commands 365,000 surrogate spirits to do his bidding. Among other duties, he instructs his fellows in astrology.
• Penemue “taught mankind the art of writing with ink and paper,” and taught “the children of men the bitter and the sweet and the secrets of wisdom.”
• Sariel (also Suriel) taught mankind about the courses of the moon (at one time regarded as forbidden knowledge).
• Samyaza (also Shemyazaz, Shamazya, Semiaza, Shemhazi, Semyaza and Amezyarak) is one of the leaders of the fall from heaven.
• Shamsiel, once a guardian of Eden, served as one of the 2 chief aides to the archangel Uriel (the other aide being Hasdiel) when Uriel bore his standard into battle, and is the head of 365 legions of angels and also crowns prayers, accompanying them to the 5th heaven. He is referred to as one of the Watchers. He is a fallen angel who teaches the signs of the sun.

Tags: nephilim, watchers

Out of place artifacts

1. In 1967, at a depth of 400 feet underground in the Rocky Point Mine in Gulman, Colorado, human bones and a four-inch-long copper arrowhead were found embedded in a silver vein. According to geologists, the rock deposit was several million years old, so neither bone nor arrowhead belongs there. Because there was no way to fit this into conventional theories like evolution, the find made a few headlines, and then was conveniently forgotten.

2. The June 1851 issue of Scientific American reported that an explosive charge blew a metal vase out of solid rock in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The story said, “On putting the two parts together it formed a bell-shaped vessel, 4 1/2 inches high, 6 1/2 inches at the base, 2 1/2 inches at the top and about an eighth of an inch in thickness. The body of this vessel resembles zinc in color, or a composition metal in which there is a considerable portion of silver. On the sides there are six figures of a flower, a bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel, a vine, or wreath, inlaid also with silver. The chasing, carving and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some cunning craftsman. This curious and unknown vessel was blown out of solid pudding stone, fifteen feet below the surface.”

Nobody ever figured out who made the vessel, though an attempt to date the rock it came from gave a figure of several million years. The vase circulated between museums for a while before it disappeared; presumably it is lying forgotten in some curator’s basement.

3. In 1891 Mrs. S. W. Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois was shoveling coal into her stove when a piece of coal broke in two, revealing a gold chain that held the two pieces together. Nobody could explain how the gold chain got into the coal, since most coal is supposedly 300 million years old. A similar discovery was made in Oklahoma in 1912, when an iron pot resembling Aladdin’s lamp was found embedded in coal. Unlike most the other ooparts, the whereabouts of this one are apparently known, because I recently saw a photograph of it in a book.

4. While we’re talking about coal, Ed Conrad, a reporter from eastern Pennsylvania, recently announced that he had found human bone fragments in the coal deposits of his home state. He reminds us that if coal comes from the Carboniferous period, as evolutionists assert, then even dinosaur bones found in it will cause paleontologists serious problems. And that’s not all; he has pictures of a human skull, a long piece of tooled wood resembling an axe handle, and even some soft body parts (he identified a brown loaf-shaped object as a petrified human lung). Skeptics immediately said they were nothing more than rocks, so in May 1997 Conrad posted his pictures on the Internet, ensuring that scientists won’t conveniently forget this discovery. His conclusion? Our methods for dating rocks and fossils are FUBAR (an army term meaning “fouled-up beyond all recognition”).

5. In 1851 a businessman named Hiram de Witt dropped a fist-sized piece of quartz he had found in California; it broke in two to reveal an iron sixpenny nail in almost perfect condition! Six years earlier another nail was found embedded in a granite block from the Kindgoodie Quarry in northern Britain. A two-inch metal screw was discovered in a piece of feldspar from the Abbey Mine in Treasure City, Nevada, in 1865. The rocks containing these nails and screws are supposedly millions of years old–unless our techniques for dating rocks are more out of whack than geologists will admit.

There are also ooparts which come from civilizations we already know about, which show a technology far ahead of what we credit those people with. Many of them were cited in Von Daniken’s books, so you may have heard of some of these:

6. Several two-thousand-year-old clay pots have been found near Baghdad, each containing a cylinder of copper and a rod of iron; the tops were sealed with asphalt. Both cylinders and rods showed signs of acid corrosion. When copper sulfate, acetic acid or citric acid (all were known to chemists in classical times) was poured inside, the iron rods gave off an electrical charge of 1 1/2 volts, the same as today’s Eveready batteries! Yet in encyclopedias you will read that Alessandro Volta invented the battery, around the year 1800.

It is thought that the Baghdad batteries were used to electroplate gold onto jewelry, a technique modern man developed in the nineteenth century. Yet gold items thin enough to have been electroplated have turned up at archaeological sites in Egypt and Iraq, some of them in deposits as old as 2000 B.C.

7. Various Peruvian artifacts made of platinum have turned up at pre-Inca (before 1200 A.D.) sites. Platinum, however, requires a temperature of 1,755 C. before it melts. How the ancient South American jewelers produced such high temperatures in their forges and furnaces has not been explained.

8. When the Chinese excavated the tomb of Zhou Zhu, a general who lived from 265 to 316 A.D., they found an ornate metal belt-fastener. Analysis of the metal in the fastener showed it to be an alloy of 5 percent manganese, 10 percent copper–and 85 percent aluminum. When I studied chemistry in school, I was taught that aluminum was discovered in 1803, and the processes involving in smelting it consume so much energy that aluminum could not be used on a large scale until the 1940s. How did the ancient Chinese work this metal?

9. In the courtyard of the Qutb Minar, the largest mosque of Delhi, India, stands an iron pillar confiscated from a demolished Hindu temple. Called the Ashoka Pillar, we know it to be at least 15 centuries old, because it contains an inscription from the Indian king Chandragupta II, who died in 413 A.D. It is more than 23 feet tall, sixteen inches wide, and weighs six tons, so casting it was a major task in itself. What is more amazing, although it has been outdoors, exposed to the monsoon climate of north India, for centuries, it shows only a few traces of rust, in a tropical environment that would have corroded any other piece of iron long ago. Apparently the ancients had metallurgical techniques that have been forgotten over the ages.

Professor Clifford Wilson got a first-hand look at an unusual metal artifact while working at the Australian Institute of Archaeology. One day the institute received from Israel a bronze statue of the ancient Canaanite god Baal. It had a leg missing, and they tried to replace it so it would look good in a museum display. When they hired metalworkers to make the new leg, they found the original bronze was harder than any they could make. Wilson concluded that the ancient bronze workers of the holy land used a technique similar to the one used when the Japanese made samurai swords: the metal used in the sword was cast in a block shape, hammered into a sheet, and then recast; this was done many times before they shaped it into the final blade. Every time they hammered the metal it became harder than it had been previously.

10. In 1900 sponge divers working off the Greek island of Antikytheros found a ship full of bronze statues and other artifacts, which sank between 80 and 50 B.C. One of the finds, a corroded lump of bronze and wood, was sent to the National Museum in Athens. Nobody could figure out what it was until 1958, when Dr. Derek J. De Solla Price of Cambridge University tried to rebuild the device. To his amazement, it turned out to be an intricate clock, used to tell not only the time of day, but also the risings, settings, and phases of the moon, and the positions of five planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), all with astonishing accuracy. The reconstructed machine was a small box containing more than twenty gears, intermeshed in a differential arrangement. A crank spindle set all of this into motion, and was turned by an unknown power source not preserved in the shipwreck. Here is a video showing the rebuilt gearbox in action:

Classical historians like to claim that the ancient Greeks were the smartest people who lived before us, and have written whole books on certain aspects of their intellectual accomplishments, like philosophy, art, and literature. The Greeks, however, were terribly impractical when it came to applying their knowledge. For example, around 200 B.C. a Greek named Hero invented a steam turbine, but he couldn’t think of a practical use for it! To him it was just a toy, and he ended up using it to open and close the doors of a temple in Alexandria, fooling the gullible into thinking the gods or some kind of magic opened those doors. It remained for the steam engine to be reinvented in England nearly 2,000 years later.(16) To the Greeks, anything involving manual labor was something true thinkers should avoid, so they never developed machinery, letting their whole civilization run on the strength of animals and slaves instead of steam power. This clock or computer which turned up in the Greek shipwreck would not have been built by somebody with a typical Greek mind set. Therefore it is more likely that the technology behind it came from an older, more advanced culture, perhaps even that of the pre-Flood world.

11. In 1898 a bird-shaped model made out of sycamore wood was found in an Egyptian tomb at Saqqara, dated to 200 B.C. It was labeled as a “bird object” and put in the Cairo Museum’s basement, where it lay in a box for the next 71 years. In 1969 Dr. Kalil Messiha found it while cleaning out part of the basement, and noticed an un-birdlike feature: the object has a bird’s head, but the tail of a modern airplane. After examination by several aerodynamic engineers and pilots, they concluded that it was not really a bird, but a model airplane; not only is it designed according to well-known aerodynamic features, but it glides a respectable distance with a slight toss from the hand! Since then thirteen more gliders have been identified from other Egyptian tombs, leading Dr. Messiha to wonder if a full-sized glider is lying under the sands of Egypt, waiting to be discovered.

12. The Columbian government has in its possession a number of gold objects found in the graves of the Sinu, a pre-Inca tribe that lived in northern Columbia between 500 and 800 A.D. After they made a tour of the United States, one of them, described as vaguely animal-like, caused a sensation when Ivan Sanderson got a cast made from it in 1969. Sanderson noticed several unusual features not found in animals, like delta wings located far back on the body and a tail like that of a modern aircraft. He and several aerodynamic engineers tested it in a wind tunnel and found it “flew” quite well. Their conclusion was that it did not represent any kind of winged animal (not a bird, bat, insect, flying fish, skate or ray), but it was a jet plane! As with the Saqqara glider, several more objects like it have been found, which are in museums today. Where did our ancestors learn to fly?

13. The western Chinese province of Qinghai is located on the Tibetan plateau, so most of it is a cold desert, with an average elevation nearly two miles above sea level. The province is so remote that it did not become part of China until 1723; for most of history Chinese settlement stopped–along with the Great Wall–in Gansu, the next province to the east. That explains why the outside world did not hear about the Baigong Pipes until 2002, when a group of US scientists, looking for dinosaur fossils in the Qinghai mountains, stumbled upon the site.

Twenty-five miles southeast of Delingha, a city in the heart of Qinghai, is a strange mountain, Mt. Baigong. On top of the mountain is what appears to be an eroded pyramid, 200 feet high. At the mountain’s base are three caves, two of which have collapsed over the ages. The cave that can be entered has a triangular opening, and a 16-inch pipe running along the ceiling. The end of a second pipe comes out of the cave floor, and dozens more such pipes stick out of the face of Mt. Baigong, above the cave. Still more pipe-like features have been spotted on the beach of a nearby lake. An analysis of the pipes by a local smeltery stated they were made mostly of iron, but also contained silicon dioxide, in amounts up to 30 percent–not a common alloy in manmade metals.

The local government is promoting Mt. Baigong as a tourist attraction, but so far a thorough investigation of the site has not yet been performed, by either Chinese or foreign scientists. As you might expect, in the meantime, UFO enthusiasts are promoting them as evidence that aliens once visited earth. Using the theme promoted in this section, I would instead suggest that this was an ancient manmade building; the last surviving base or bunker from a pre-Flood war, perhaps? Meanwhile, some geologists are calling everything at Mt. Baigong a natural formation, because similar hematite “pipes” have been found in the sandstone of Utah and neighboring states. If the Baigong Pipes turn out to have been formed by nature, kindly disregard this oopart.

Tags: pre-flood

Game Theory

Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences, most notably in economics, as well as in biology, engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, andphilosophy. Game theory attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which an individual’s success in making choices depends on the choices of others. While initially developed to analyze competitions in which one individual does better at another’s expense (zero sum games), it has been expanded to treat a wide class of interactions, which are classified according to several criteria. Today, “game theory is a sort of umbrella or ‘unified field’ theory for the rational side of social science, where ’social’ is interpreted broadly, to include human as well as non-human players (computers, animals, plants)” (Aumann 1987).

Traditional applications of game theory attempt to find equilibria in these games. In an equilibrium, each player of the game has adopted a strategy that they are unlikely to change. Many equilibrium concepts have been developed (most famously the Nash equilibrium) in an attempt to capture this idea. These equilibrium concepts are motivated differently depending on the field of application, although they often overlap or coincide. This methodology is not without criticism, and debates continue over the appropriateness of particular equilibrium concepts, the appropriateness of equilibria altogether, and the usefulness of mathematical models more generally.

Although some developments occurred before it, the field of game theory came into being with the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. This theory was developed extensively in the 1950s by many scholars. Game theory was later explicitly applied to biology in the 1970s, although similar developments go back at least as far as the 1930s. Game theory has been widely recognized as an important tool in many fields. Eight game theorists have won Nobel prizes in economics, and John Maynard Smith was awarded the Crafoord Prize for his application of game theory to biology.

Game theory, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Game_theory&oldid=314726971 (last visited Sept. 18, 2009).

Tags: Games