Nephilim

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THE NEPHILIM

When the star Porth conceived, she cast her seed across the sky in the form of a spherical ripple which grew at the speed of light. For five years this ripple was dormant until it passed Ross 154, a red sun known to all the elohim because it had already been awakened. After that the ripple changed became ready to fertilize the first sun it encountered.

Nearest to mankind's own sun is a group of three stars differing one from another in brilliance and color. Porth's ripple reached the orange sun in this group first, collapsed to a single point in the sun's dense core, and a living being came into existence within. Many years after that the sun came into full wakefulness and began to call herself Belial.

Two spiritual cords tied Belial back to her parents, permitting her to speak to them at will no matter the distance. Her own parents were tied back to their parents, and so on, links in a vast city of elohim spanning the night sky.

Belial's education did not rely solely on the gathered lore of the elohim. There was her own three suns to explore, which she could do by sending forth a piece of herself called the Angel of Belial to roam nearby under the control of her will. Some of the bodies she found were too small to create their own light, but the knowledge of these was added to the greater store of all the elohim.

One of these dark bodies she named Gorpai, which was seen only by the reflected light of the suns. At Gorpai, Belial was delighted to find another kind of life, many growing things with golden leaves, but it was not awake like the elohim.

Nothing in creation is eternal, but elohim have life-spans measured in millions of human generations. Yet their time as females is measured in only tens of human generations, because the act of giving birth simultaneously transformed them from female to male. So very few individuals among the elohim are female, and the struggle for these females is fierce.

Belial fell under the influence of a very powerful one among the elohim named Mastema who had fathered many daughter suns. Mastema seduced Belial and gave her a daughter using the brighter yellow sun in the trinary system as the egg, and the joy of Belial's experience giving birth to Chokhmah approached the infinite.

After this one opportunity at motherhood Belial became male and Mastema gave him the facts of elohim life with all honesty. He said it was very likely Belial would never know that ecstasy again, for less than one part in one hundred male elohim became fathers and most of these were very old and powerful ones like himself.

Mastema took great care to couch his next words in a way to ensure deniability if Belial rejected them. He made a proposal to set up a secret harem of breeding females that would be completely unknown to any of the other elohim. Both Mastema and Belial held the other end of Chokhmah's spiritual cords, and if they acted quickly before she attained full awareness, they could raise Chokhmah in total isolation from the rest of their kind.

When the time was right, Mastema said, he would father a child on Chokhmah first. Then Belial would take Chokhmah's child as his mate, and they would alternate without end.

Belial knew that Mastema was proposing to violate the oldest and most sacred law of the elohim, but Mastema assured him that he had many such harems, and as many as a third of all elohim enjoyed similar arrangements. The penalty if discovered was death, a terrible punishment indeed for the nearly immortal elohim, but Mastema insisted that very few of the corrupt elohim had ever been caught. Then Belial remembered the physical joy of love, and consented to the bargain in full knowledge of what he was doing.

Chokhmah was raised to full godhood without the larger community of elohim, and her parents were her only teachers. When Chokhmah's own father Mastema came to her in the ultimate act of intimacy she did not know the depths to which it offended righteousness among her own kind.

The ripple that went forth from Chokhmah traveled for three months before it encountered the third member of the triple star system, a sun so cool and dim it nearly resembled a world, like Gorpai. Yet a sun it still was, and a daughter was born to Chokhmah. In time she would call herself Binah. Her immediate region was extremely poor and had no large worlds at all, but Binah fashioned an angel according to her own design, without recourse to the lore of the elohim (which was unknown to her), and filled it with a portion of her will so her consciousness could seem to move from the emptiness of her own domain and she could visit her mother Chokhmah.

The journey to Chokhmah took Binah a full century even at the best speed she could make, and Chokhmah could not understand why Binah made the effort. He said: Belial has already explored every facet of the orange and yellow suns and every world that went around them, did he not?

But Binah did not have access to the learning of Belial, and Belial's mind was closed to her. She knew him only as a soothing voice. When Belial himself asked Binah why she was making the crossing Binah answered with a question of her own: Why did you explore your system with an angel?

Belial knew he could not say his exploration was expected by other elohim because Binah would discern that she and Chokhmah lived in an enclave cut off from a larger community. So Belial gave Binah no answer at all, but he did offer to tell her anything she wanted to know about the region of the orange and yellow suns. Binah could not accept that because she was a sun who woke up and found she had no worlds, and reading dry accounts of other suns and worlds were not enough.

She said to Belial: Experiencing a new thing is a joy unto itself, requiring no further explanation.

There were many more questions from Binah to Chokhmah's parents, and the answers Mastema and Belial gave did not always agree, and the answers even changed over the decades when she asked the same questions again.

At length Mastema grew angry and cut off all further communication with his daughter Binah, but Belial knew he could not ignore Binah no matter how annoying she was. By the terms of his arrangement with Mastema, Binah was meant to be his next conquest in love.

Binah suspected that Belial somehow listened to her communications with Chokhmah, so at the end of the hundred years when she arrived at the orange and yellow suns the angel of Binah dove into the heart of Chokhmah so Binah could speak directly to him, mind to mind.

Binah revealed that Mastema and Belial must have created a bubble of breeding females for their own private use, and the reasoning that she laid out for Chokhmah was compelling. When Binah revealed the constant attempts that Belial made to seduce her, it was not hard for Chokhmah to believe that Mastema would seduce Binah's child in turn, and the cycle would repeat, cutting Chokhmah himself off from procreation indefinitely.

Chokhmah had never been very curious, but now he considered there might be a larger family of their own kind out there, with Mastema and Belial deliberately blocking their access to them. Binah suggested those other elohim might consider this entire situation very wrong. It was the only explanation for the strange behavior of Belial and Mastema.

At length Chokhmah confronted his parents with these allegations, but he received only hurt and astonished denials from both of them. So Binah, after learning of this, suggested a course of action that would bring matters to a head. She offered herself to Chokhmah as a mate rather than accept Belial's blandishments.

When Chokhmah and Binah were in the long throes of their lovemaking Belial grew furious, but there was nothing he could do. At the pinnacle of their joy Binah's body sent a generative ripple through the heavens to search for a non-living sun. Four years later the deity El was conceived inside the star that men know as their own sun.

When El in turn had come into her full maturity and explored the worlds of her own system, she reported the existence of life on the fifth-largest object. She watched individuals perform burials of their dead, polish elaborate bone tools, fashion animal-hide tents to live in during the summer and apply pigments to make their caves beautiful in the winter. El also noted they were ferocious hunters with a clever technique for fixing stone spearheads to wooden shafts by using a resin that was prepared by heating it.

In fine, El had discovered the only form of life in all of creation that was fully awake aside from the elohim themselves.

Without access to the lore of the elohim, neither El nor Binah nor Chokhmah realized the importance of this discovery. But Mastema was terrified. He knew the greater family of elohim would eventually learn of this, and that would quickly unravel the secret of Mastema's transgression here. So Mastema cut his losses and departed forever for his less troublesome harems with only a stern warning to Belial to faithfully remain silent about the new life found by El, lest Mastema go down in judgment and take Belial with him.

For a long time after Mastema cut him off, Belial pondered what to do and said nothing to the others. At length Binah suggested to Belial that it would not be impossible for the Angel of Binah to reach one of the nearby suns within a few thousand years and reveal with direct speech what was really happening here in Belial's enclave.

Then Belial saw the narrow path that led out of his trap, and broke his long silence. To Binah and the others he said: Of all living things in existence, these creatures alone are potentially dangerous to us because they are awake. If they are not dangerous now then perhaps they will be far in the future. Mastema knew they must be isolated and studied before their existence could be revealed to the elohim at large and that was why we were born in this place.

Binah remained dubious, because Mastema refused to make contact and reinforce Belial's claim, and he still suspected the bubble was created for sex. However, Belial pointed out that he had refrained from taking advantage of any of the females during this period and Binah could not deny that.

But Belial realized that Binah would never stop being a thorn in his side, so he made a risky bargain. He would grant Binah rights to the complete Library of Ull, which was the storehouse of all elohim lore, in exchange for Binah's oath never to reveal what Belial and Mastema had done here. Binah was never to speak of the veil of secrecy that had been created, not to the other elohim inside the enclave or without, not even to these strange creatures El had discovered.

Binah agreed and was immediately granted access to the lore. The only restriction was that Binah could only read the storehouse of knowledge and never make his own contributions. Binah was a long time absorbing just the high points, for the knowledge of the elohim spanned all of creation.

One of the first things Binah learned was how serious keeping an oath was among the elohim. Binah was firmly bound to remain silent about the isolation of the research enclave, just as Belial knew Binah would be when they made the bargain.

In time Binah came to realize that El's human beings, on the world he called Earth, were the most important discovery the elohim ever made. But for the present time Belial was fully in command of the discovery process and to Binah he was a fool.

Early on Binah suspected that Belial did not really have a mandate for secrecy at all, and Belial would drag out his research as long as possible to put off the day of judgment. Binah knew he himself was committed by oath to help maintain Belial's conspiracy of silence, but nothing in the bargain prevented him from sharing the vast knowledge of the elohim with the humans as their capacity to understand it grew. So Binah started an independent stream of research.

Belial insisted on carrying out his pretense of studying the humans. The first thing he required from El was a number of human samples to be transferred from Earth to Gorpai so he could examine them closely. But humans have very short lifespans compared to the elohim. They could not survive the journey of more than two thousand years it would take to cross between Earth and Gorpai.

Then Belial remembered that a continuous mighty effort could inflate the spiritual link between suns, finer than spider's silk, into a narrow tunnel wide enough for small burdens to pass. So he poured dark energy into the channel between himself and El, which grew to be two cubits wide. One end of this tunnel was carried by the angel of El to Earth, and the other end was carried by the angel of Belial to Gorpai. But when their link was used in this way, Belial had no way to directly command El, and El in turn had no way to directly report to Belial.

Chokhmah therefore had to act in the role of mediator while Belial and El studied the humans. As a side benefit of this, Binah was also kept informed.

A few curious humans were lured into crossing between the worlds by crawling a short distance through the tunnel as though they were simply moving from one cave to another. Inside the tunnel they felt no weight. The humans and their possessions floated within it, and they propelled themselves hand-over hand for a short time until they emerged under a strange purple sky with two suns.

There were no animals on Gorpai, but most of the growing things moved of their own accord and all of them were dangerous. A grove of Whipping Trees could render a man down to a pile of broken bones and crushed flesh in only a few moments. Thorny Ball Bushes rolled under their own power by shifting their weight. There were flowers with teeth and many plants were too poisonous to touch, let alone eat.

None of the human colonists survived their first season. To increase their odds, El invented the concept of religion. In the land of Mesopotamia, El caused a temple to be erected around her end of the tunnel, through which priests would shove human sacrifices. At first the priests sent criminals through, which seemed to be equivalent to a death sentence because the priests never saw anyone re-emerge from the altar chamber.

But Belial required female humans for his research as well, so El commanded the sacrifice of virgins from time to time. During periods of famine on Gorpai, the priests of El were commanded to send along meat and grain offerings also.

Belial began to change the humans who were sent to Gorpai to make their survival more likely. They were bred to be taller and stronger than their human forebears, and to be capable of bearing children more rapidly and in greater numbers. The genitals of the male were split and rearranged to produce two of them. The female also was changed to have two genitals. When Belial completed his changes, the creatures were no longer truly human. Belial called them nephilim, and sometimes he bred them back into human stock on Earth. It was they who appear in the scriptures of the Jews where it is written:

The nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men of old, men of renown.

When Belial had one hundred viable nephilim breeding pairs he set his most obedient pair in a “garden” on Gorpai, which was an oasis of relatively harmless plants. The male, or yang, was named Adamu, while the female, or yin, was named Hava. Belial commanded them to maintain the Garden by removing intruder plants before they went to seed. In return, Adamu and Hava could eat of any of the fruit produced in the Garden.

Adamu and Hava were blessed with children. They were put to work expanding the Garden by taming more and more of the wild lands of Gorpai that surrounded it. Livestock animals were imported from Earth also, and given into their care.

Earth's sun had worlds that are larger than the Earth such as Jupiter and Saturn, but Gorpai's sun had none of these. In their place was a great swarm of icy worldlets ranging in size from the Earth's moon down to small boulders. Every year or two an ice ball the size of a small hill smote Gorpai with enough force to destroy a city. Every one or two thousand years an ice ball the size of a large mountain smites Gorpai with enough force to destroy a nation.

In most cases these intruders from the sky landed harmlessly on the extensive ice of Gorpai, for it was a frigid world, and only one narrow band along the equator about five hundred miles wide was ever free of ice. If the strike occurred in this ice-free belt it rained for many months and then froze over, covering the fertile areas of Gorpai with a thick and solid sheet of ice that remained in place for ten or twenty years.

That is why from the beginning only growing things existed on Gorpai and there were no native animals there. Plants could survive for many years under the ice in the form of seeds or spores, but with nothing to eat animals would quickly die off.

One time Belial discovered a larger ice ball on course for Gorpai, and "prophesied" that it would land near the temperate belt. So he commanded all the nephilim to construct arks for themselves and stock them with enough food to preserve them and their animals during the coming catastrophe.

Only the patriarchs of seven families obeyed Belial, to his great surprise. First to obey was family Gerash, who were the direct descendants of Adamu and Hava and who dwelt still in the Garden which Belial had made. Also the families Antero, Bellon, Kulsu, Larund, Ornis and Sala obeyed Belial, for they dwelt in lands close to the Garden and had much intercourse with family Gerash.

All the other families that dwelt on Gorpai had been content to obey Belial during times of comfort and plenty, but his commandment to completely abandon the life they knew and labor for years to construct arks was too much for them.

Worse than their disloyalty to Belial was the mocking derision the unbelievers expressed for the sons of the faithful families as they built the arks. The scoffers did not cease to amuse themselves in this manner until the very day when the ice ball struck Gorpai and hot rain began to fall in sheets. The unbelievers begged to be allowed to board the arks then, but Belial had sealed each of the seven families inside their respective arks, together with all their animals and everything they possessed.

On Earth, in Mesopotamia, the religion introduced by El caused all the people of the world to gather themselves together into a single vast city named Shinar which boasted a tower exceeding in height any other human artifact. This great tower of stone held El's altar and the mouth of the wormhole leading to Gorpai.

The people of Shinar spoke a single language, and looked confidently into the future as they piled up their knowledge precept by precept.

El was worried. He said to Belial: If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing what they presume to do.

Belial widened the tunnel with a greater outpouring of dark energy, which he had stockpiled for many years. Some of the floodwaters on Gorpai began to pour out of the altar at the summit of the Tower of Shinar. Belial made the tunnel wider still, and the floodwaters bounced down the steps of the ziggurat to flood the streets of Shinar itself. Some of the people of the city drowned, but the flood increased gradually enough that most of them could escape in time.

The people watched outside the city as the inundation continued, even to the point of overflowing the walls. Not even the plains of Shinar were safe as the watery tentacles reached out toward the onlookers. The whole valley of the Shatt-al-Arab was flooded from the sea to nearly the place where it divides into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The weight of the water on the land caused the Persian Gulf to rise and mingle with the waters from Gorpai, and the plains of Shinar remain under the sea to this very day.

The former inhabitants of the city of Shinar scattered to every part of the world then, each one of them carrying an account of this flood, and a garbled memory of the rituals and laws of El whom they believed they had somehow offended. The diverse religions of mankind had their origin here, and when the many different kindreds and clans of Shinar drifted apart to settle distant lands, the single language of man changed to become many tongues...babble. So it was that the city and tower of Shinar were later called Babel in the oral and written histories.

A garbled account of the flood made its way into the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh epic, and after the Jews were taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar II, the story was read back into their own scriptures.

The transfer of much water from Gorpai to Earth did not remedy the flood there, but it did lessen the impact. The seven arks of the faithful were held in the places where they stopped for only five years before the ice melted and freed them again. The surface of Gorpai was deeply changed. Half of the land along the temperate belt remained immersed in water, except on the highest mountains and hills. In years to come the families Bellon and Larund remained sea-going peoples, competing fiercely for those islands.

Much snow fell in the years after the Flood, and in the highlands of the temperate belt the northern and southern ice sheets came together as one. It was here that family Gerash melted caves and tunnels in the ice and also where Belial placed the Gorpai end of the tunnel. On Earth the other end was placed in Egypt. The Gerash family enjoyed a close relationship with Belial on account of their obedience.

Although Gerash land consisted solely of ice, they were continually sustained by grain and animal offerings from Earth, and they carried Belial's commands to the other nephilim on Gorpai.

Snow melt from the Gerash ice bridge was the source of the Great river, which bent and flowed east for twelve thousand air miles and thirty thousand miles as the river flowed. On its course the Great river dropped seventeen thousand feet as it irrigated the whole of the temperate belt.

The Kulsu family claimed all the land north of the river, while the Ornis family claimed everything to the south. They tamed and cultivated the riot of native flora which emerged from the flood, and grew rapidly, as though to make up for the lost time in dormancy. The Great river was, however, alluvial, and changed its course from year to year, while the nephilim concept of land ownership emphasized fixed boundaries. This led to constant warfare between the two families as they fought over lands which were ever transferred from one family to the other by the whim of the river.

The northern ice, which was nearly half of the world, was miles deep but punctuated here and there by the summits of very high mountains. This was the land of family Antero, who roamed over it at will. Like the Gerash family, the Anteros also riddled their ice with caves, but this was to hide the bounty from their constant raids upon the farms of family Kulsu.

The southern ice belonged entirely to the family Sala, whose ways were very much like family Antero, except they fed upon the farms of family Ornis.

Six nephilim families then were immersed in the constant violence of their natural rivalries, while the seventh, privileged by the oracles of Belial, were ever vigilant to defend themselves from the other six who resented the status of family Gerash as a priestly people bred to teach and rule over all.

More than two thousand years passed as the nephilim were shaped by the savage flora of their icy world and by the struggles between the seven families. The memory of the great flood passed into ancient history, then into mythology. Only the Gerash family remembered Belial and spoke with him and obeyed his commandments. The other families rejected him and held his laws in contempt.

And it came to pass that Belial found another large object to be on course to strike the temperate belt. The Gerash family would be safe enough in their icy redoubt, suppled by Egyptian priests on Earth. Speaking through them, Belial commanded the Kulsu family to make an alliance with the Anteros and store enough grain and fruit in their ice caves to supply both families for a generation. Two sons of the Gerash ruling patriarch were given as hostages to the family Kulsu and the family Antero to vouchsafe the prophesy of Belial, though it greatly offended his divine sovereignty to do so.

Likewise Belial commanded the Gerash patriarch to send two other sons as hostage to family Ornis and Sala in the south, and command them to make alliance also. If no second great flood came to pass, their life would be forfeit.

None of these four families heeded the words of Belial and they slew the four sons of Lord Gerash whose very lives guaranteed the truth of the word of Belial. So it came to pass that a second great icy mountain from the sky smote Gorpai in the temperate belt, and the people were largely unprepared.

When the rains began to fall, the sea-faring Bellon and Larund families boarded their ships, but they did not have enough time to fully stock them with supplies, In their hunger the ships raided one another, Bellon against Larund, and later as their bellies rumbled it was Bellon against Bellon and Larund against Larund. By the time the rains stopped only a mere handful of ships on both sides were victorious and fully stocked. The Kulsu and Ornis families who farmed the river-irrigated flats of Gorpai, were completely wiped out, every yang, yin, dirk, doll and every one of their food animals perished.

Families Antero and Sala survived on the ice, but they experienced a severe die-back because the farms of their host families were completely under ice for twenty-five years.

Belial said to the other elohim: Behold, the faithfulness of the world-dwellers burns fiercely like kindling, but then quickly dwindles in unbelief.

And Binah said to him: Who are we that these creatures should bend their will to our whims as the test of their righteousness?

Belial replied: Is it not clearly evident to you that we elohim are far higher on the chain of being than nephilim and human?

Binah said: We have more knowledge of creation, that much is true, but knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.

Chokhmah said: Unless we live as they, it is impossible for us to know whether our greater craftiness makes us their moral superior. And from that hour Chokhmah began to bend his thought to how to take upon himself nephilim flesh and live for one full lifetime on Gorpai.

Belial said: Enough! If the world-creatures will not or can not obey their superiors, it will be time to take drastic measures. Perhaps next time I will not provide any of them a warning of a coming comet or asteroid strike.

And Binah knew from that moment that Belial secretly did not want the nephilim and humans to pass his own test of obedience. So when the nephilim were able to accept it, Binah would begin teaching some of them how to watch the skies with instruments made by their own hands, to provide their own warning of a coming world-flood, so they would not have to rely on faithless Belial.

For Binah knew that Belial would stand ready to point out any act of defiance on the part of the nephilim and humans, no matter how small, to justify his delay in bringing the news of the existence of the planet-dwellers to the greater elohim community. Belial had taken the role of an accuser, or divine prosecutor. Later the Hebrews (or Immigrants) would call this one the ha'satan. Islam would call him Iblis, the great Enemy of mankind. And in Christian theology, the title ha'satan would be shortened and become a proper name: Satan.