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Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas
Next to take the stage was Chris Knight and Bob Lomas, both of whom
are Masonic historians as well as the authors of such books as THE HIRAM
KEY, THE SECOND MESSIAH and the recently published URIEL'S MACHINE.
It was material from the last of these books which was presented during
their lecture.
Following in the footsteps of Christian O'Brien's GENIUS OF THE FEW
and THE MEGALITHIC ODYSSEY and my own FROM THE ASHES OF ANGELS, Knight
and Lomas cited evidence for the human existence of the Watchers and
Nephilim of Enochian tradition. In their opinion this ancient race witnessed
a worldwide cometary impact in c. 7545 BC and a later similar catastrophe,
centred on the Mediterranean, dated to 3100 BC (after the work of Clube
and Napier, Duncan Steele, etc.). In their opinion, this second event
led to the dispersal of the Watchers westwards into Europe and eastwards
into Persia and China. As the Groove Ware Peoples of Britain they went
on to found megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge, Newgrange and the
Ring of Brodgar in the Orkneys. Knight and Lomas also explained how
they used a unique interpretation of the Book of Enoch to construct
a calendar site, christened Uriel's Machine, on a lonely Yorkshire hilltop.
It was a fascinating lecture Knight and Lomas presented at the Questing
Conference. However, afterwards I had to take them to task on certain
points. Firstly, when they wrote URIEL'S MACHINE they would seem to
have been unaware of the work already carried out on the human origins
of the Watchers by Christian O'Brien and myself. Furthermore, O'Brien's
work THE MEGALITHIC ODYSSEY proposes that the Watchers were behind the
construction of a whole network of megalithic sites in Britain during
the Bronze Age. The orientation and arrangement of these sites show
astronomical alignments on a grand scale, similar to those Knight and
Lomas propose for Groove Ware People sites in Ireland, Anglesey and
the Orkneys.
The greater omission of not recognising earlier scholarly work on the
origins of the Watchers and Nephilim featured in my own books FROM THE
ASHES OF ANGELS (1996) and GODS OF EDEN (1998) is, in my opinion, a
major mistake on their parts, particularly as they actually had a copy
of the later work. My books propose that the Watchers and Nephilim were
the ruling elite of the earliest proto-neolithic and neolithic communities
of the Near East, and went on to become the founders of civilisations
such as Akkad, Sumer and Elam. In these they established `divine' kings
and initiated the so-called `sacred marriage' in which the daughters
of the ruling family would mate with a `god', or Annanage, in order
to keep pure the bloodline of the Watchers. This ensured that they continued
to have a role in the development and evolution of civilisation through
until the third millennium BC. Yet then it seems the mortal kings began
to realise that they could rule without the council of the Watchers
and their hybrid offspring the Nephilim, and so rebelled against them.
The result was a series of wars in which the kings of Sumer and Akkad
fought against Nephilim-led armies of feather-clad `demons', which were
finally defeated. The remaining Watchers and Nephilim were then forced
to leave the Middle East, some moving westwards into Europe and others
journeying east into Persia, India and China.
As fantastic as they might seem, the findings on offer in FROM THE ASHES
OF ANGELS have been endorsed by scholars and writers of ancient history,
including Mehrdad Izady, the Professor of Near East studies at New York
University and Emilio Spedicato, a professor of Operations Research
and a leading figure of ancient history at Bergamo University.
URIEL'S MACHINE gives the impression of having discovered the human
origins of the Watchers and Nephilim for the first time. This could
not be further from the truth. Moreover, similar to ASHES, Knight and
Lomas quote passages from the little known Book of Giants, a companion
volume to the Book of Enoch, which features the story of the Nephilim
and how they were caught up in a major catastrophe involving a conflagration
and flood. Moreover, they conclude that a statue of an upside down angel,
tied and bound, in Rosslyn Chapel - an unfinished fifteenth-century
collegiate chapel south of Edinburgh - is a representation of Shemyaza,
the leader of the Watchers. According to Hebrew myth, for the part he
played in the fall of the Watchers, those `angels' still loyal to heaven
bound and cast Shemyaza to forever hang upside down in the constellation
of Orion. What Knight and Lomas fail to have noticed is that I wrote
an entire article arguing this exact same theory some years ago. It
appeared under the title `Rosslyn's Fallen Angel' as an appendix in
Tim Wallace-Murphy book THE TEMPLAR LEGACY, published by the Friends
of Rosslyn in 1994. I also discussed the same subject in FROM THE ASHES
OF ANGELS, which includes a plate showing the statue. I pointed out
all of this to Bob Lomas at the conference and he explained that he
had learned the identity of Rosslyn's fallen angel since it was `part
of Masonic tradition', and that he had failed to notice my article in
THE TEMPLAR LEGACY, even though he owned a copy of this work. If nothing
else, this seems poor scholarship, particularly as they are considered
to be experts on the history of Rosslyn Chapel.
URIEL'S MACHINE claims that the Book of Giants tells us that the Nephilim
were witness to a cometary impact that involved the fragmentation of
a comet nucleus which broke into seven pieces and careered into seven
oceans of the world around 7545 BC. These simultaneous events caused
global super-tsunamis which led to the devastation of whole landmasses
as well as the lingering memory of a universal flood, such as the story
of Noah's Ark.
This entire theory of a seven-fold cometary impact in c. 7545 BC is
derived from the work of Austrian geologists Alexander and Edith Tollmann
of Vienna University's Geological Institute. By combining evidence from
various disciplines (including the global distribution of tektites and
a study of worldwide myths and legends), the Tollmanns proposed that
a comet approached the earth from the south-east and fragmented into
seven pieces which fell subsequently into the oceans causing mass destruction
on all continents. One piece is believed to have landed in the North
Atlantic, while another is considered to have fallen into 'the Central
Atlantic south of the Azores' creating a direct hit on `Atlantis'. More
than this, they have concluded that these cometary impacts resulted
in the Great Flood.
Although the evidence presented by the Tollmanns seems conclusive, my
own investigations into this subject using primary scientific papers
suggest a completely different picture. Evidence from deep-sea core
samples, climatic shifts, pollen spectra, ice meltwater analysis, geological
data and cometary craters, all strongly suggest that a major catastrophe
occurred much earlier than the Tollmanns propose - plausibly around
8600-8500 BC using raw carbon-14 data. Recent recalibration of these
dates using dendrochronology (tree-ring analysis) pushes these dates
back by another 1200 years, providing a time-frame for the events in
around 9800-9700 BC. However, I do not accept the reliability of dendrochronology
at this time, so will stick with the original dates.
To support the link between the Nephilim and Tollmanns' proposed seven-fold
cometary impact, Knight and Lomas cite an extract from the Book of Giants,
which refers to Nephilim watching as seven stars shift their positions,
leading to the earth being bombarded by fiery debris. Once again this
argument might sound conclusive. However, we must recall that the Book
of Giants dates only to c. 170 BC at the earliest, and that it was based
on fragments of a now lost text known as the Book of Noah. As you will
read in GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS, there is a far more logical explanation
for the seven-fold symbolism connected with the cometary impact event
in question - one that relates not to the number of pieces into which
the nucleus fragmented but the direction from which this extraterrestrial
visitor was thought to have come. Indeed, there is every reason to believe
that the nucleus broke into not seven pieces, but countless millions
of fragments, which devastated large parts of the western hemisphere.
I have no problem with Knight and Lomas' suggestion that the Watchers
were perhaps the Groove Ware Peoples of Britain. I applaud their knowledge
of, and insights into, this subject. I also accept that the Book of
Enoch does contain celestial and astronomical information, which could
well be translated in terms of a calendar site. Indeed, GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS
cites firm evidence for the migration of Nephilim, as the Titans, from
the Levant coast of Syria and Lebanon to, first, south-west Spain and
then Britain.
What I do find difficult to accept is Knight and Lomas' reasoning for
bringing the Watchers to Britain. This is deduced from a personal interpretation
of the specific breakdown of the hours of day and night recorded in
the Book of Enoch, following a `flight' by Enoch to various locations
in the ancient world. In simple terms, the author, or authors, of Enoch
divided the time periods of a single day into 18 parts, or segments.
Enoch then speaks of being in a place where the longest day consists
of 12 parts; the equivalent of 16 hours in a 24-hour clock. Obviously,
a longest day of this length does not occur in Israel, where the scribes
of the Dead Sea community at Qumrân first compiled the book. This
meant that those responsible for the book's contents were alluding to
a location which experienced a longest day of this length. Knight and
Lomas defined this maximum north-south latitude as the `Enoch Zone'.
Yet having worked this out they then conclude that Enoch himself had
visited Ireland. Here he had been confronted by the vast crystal-covered
passage grave of Newgrange, which reminded them of the house of God,
with a wall built of `crystals' visited by Enoch in the Seventh Heaven,
described in Chapter 14 of the Book of Enoch.
Yet in my opinion there is a far more logical solution to the location
of the place visited by Enoch with a longest day of 16 hours, and it
is one that was determined as early as 1821 by Richard Laurence, the
very first translator of the Book of Enoch. He concluded in his commentary
and introduction that the author of the text was referring to a country:
`not lower than forty-five degrees north latitude, where the longest
day is fifteen hours and a half, nor higher perhaps than forty-nine
degrees, where the longest day is precisely sixteen hours. This will
bring the country where he wrote, as high up at least as the northern
districts of the Caspian and Euxine [or Black] Seas; probably it was
situated somewhere between the upper parts of both these seas'.
Since I have shown in great detail that the Watchers' homeland of Eden
was situated in what is today political Kurdistan, the traditional cradle
of civilisation, which embraces part of Armenia and the Caucasus, I
see no reason to conclude that the place of origin of the core material
for the Book of Enoch came from anywhere other than this region. There
is no need to locate Enoch in Ireland, despite the fact that the area
around Newgrange once bore, according to Knight and Lomas, a place-name
phonetically similar to `Uriel', one of the Watchers of heaven. You
can find Enoch place-names in Cornwall, but this does not mean necessarily
that Enoch visited these locations (indeed, they derive from anack,
a Cornish word that might well link with Anak, or Anakim, the descendants
in biblical tradition of the Watchers and Nephilim).
Obviously, I have taken Knight and Lomas to task on a number of matters
related to the Watchers and Nephilim simply because I have studied this
subject and am very familiar with much of the material they utilised
to create URIEL'S MACHINE. This is not to undermine the good work they
have done into this subject. Indeed, I should be humbled that they have
confirmed much of the findings I made originally in FROM THE ASHES OF
ANGELS. I just feel they could have made their arguments much stronger
if they had been aware that other scholarly authors had written extensively
on the subject beforehand.
Read Andrew's reports on the next lecture or choose from below:
Yuri Stoyanov
Christopher Knight and
Robert Lomas
Robert Bauval
John Lash
David Rohl
Michael Baigent
Colin Wilson
Andrew Collins
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