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This video is dedicated to my Bro Chris.
The Jewish and Christian traditions believe that fallen angels were originally just as holy as any of the other angels, but fell when the most beautiful of them all — Lucifer — decided to rebel and enticed others to go with him. The rebellion and their loss to Michael and his angelic army turned them evil and a lot of them.
In Hindu traditions, it's a little different. They believe that the creator god, Brahma, actually made some angelic beings good and some evil from the very beginning. Why? Because it's meant to illustrate the natural order of things, and balance in the universe.
And fallen angels don't exist in Islam, where traditions say that all angels are good — including the ones tasked with overseeing those whose evil souls have landed them in hell. They're lording over hell, yes, but they're still doing divine work. There's another explanation for Satan there, too, and it basically says he's not an angel, he's a jinn: a creature made from fire and free will.
A lot of our knowledge of fallen angels comes from the non-canonical Book of Enoch, which was written about 350 B.C. and was found with the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's pretty heavy stuff, too, according to the Biblical Archaeology Society Library. The texts claim to be the revelations of Enoch, who was taken up to heaven and told the universe's deepest secrets, then shown just what would happen during mankind's ultimate judgment.
Enoch shows up in other texts, and according to the Gnostic Society Library, there are a ton of stories about him. He lived to be 365 years old, eventually telling his tales to his son, Methuselah, who achieved an impressive 969 years on Earth. Strangely, even though the stories of Enoch were influenced by the mythology of places like Babylon and, in turn, influenced Judaism and Christianity, the only place that all 100 chapters of the book survived was Ethiopia. Among those chapters was a fascinating explanation of fallen angels.
One of the most widely told tales of fallen angels says it was Lucifer who rebelled against God and brought a bunch of angels down with him, but the story told in the Book of Enoch is very, very different.
According to the Gnostic Society Library, the Book of Enoch tells the tale of angels who are destroyed. Before the Great Flood, angels and humans met and mingled pretty commonly, and the inevitable happened: children. Those children were the sons and daughters of 200 angels, and they were a race of 450-foot-tall giants. The angels started teaching their giant offspring evil ways, and God not only imprisoned them but subjected them to judgment and sent the flood to hit the reset button on his creations.
Enoch, the story says, tried to speak on behalf of the angels and their giant children, but sadly, a lot of the texts are missing.
We do know that Enoch was the one God selected to act as an intermediary to the fallen angels, instructing him to tell them what their punishment would be for their transgressions.
They were to be condemned to the ends of the earth, and punishment was definitely going to be a big part of their version of eternity.
According to Les Enluminures, Enoch was considered a prophet to early Jewish writers. When Christianity started to adopt his teachings, he largely fell out of favor with Judaism. Christian writers took the Book of Enoch with them when they converted the rather isolated areas of Ethiopia in the fourth and fifth centuries, preserving the text there, where it stayed before being brought to Europe in 1773. Meanwhile, Christian scholars and writers were doing some serious interpreting of the version of the Bible approved by the church, and the thing is, it's never said that Satan is a fallen angel.
According to the Book of Enoch, each one of the first of the fallen angels was responsible for teaching mankind something that led them to sin. Take Asbeel. He's the one who gave the evilest of counsel to the "holy sons of God," and introduced them to the wonders — and basest evils — that came with hooking up with women.
Kasdeja was the one who brought mankind knowledge about spirits and demons, and who showed them "the smitings of the embryo in the womb" and "the smitings which befall through the noontide heat."
The creation of a race of giants (half-angels, half-human) was said to have been the work of one angel in particular: the leader of the fallen, Shernihaza.
Perhaps the strangest of all was Penemue, the fallen angel credited with giving mankind something that led to all kinds of evil: the written language. With writing came the knowledge of destruction, and writing was supposedly responsible for widespread death and descent into darkness.
Lord Jesus Christ is The Way, The Truth, and The Life!
By Marinodelfino
London, December 2020.