 Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us once again. Oh, sorry about that. Technical difficulties, everyone. I forgot to take a loop off. That's my bad. But anyways, thank you, everyone, for joining us. This is a... Sorry. Can we just appreciate the live for a second? I just want to appreciate this moment. Anyways, okay. So welcome, everyone, to another episode of We Are Being Transformed. This is a very special live episode. This is a discussion with two great content creators that I admire greatly. If you are new to We Are Being Transformed, this is a show where we explore the liminal spaces and contours of reality, the myriad of ways people interact with their world through the vehicles of ritual, cult, and lore. And before we bring on the scholar of the hour, the alchemical governor himself, Dr. Justin Sledge, I am going to bring on my co-host for this very special episode. She is the host of Rejected Religion, a podcast that I greatly enjoy, fantastic interviews with scholars, and contemporary occult issues. And everybody should check that out. So joining me is the one, the only. Stephanie Shea, how are you? Thank you. Thank you for such a wonderful introduction. I'm very, very happy to be here today. Welcome. Yeah, I apologize for the loop. I always try to turn that off, but unfortunately, no, it's really funny because Stephanie, I worked really hard to make sure all the technical issues were taken care of before. And somehow I, I'm the one who messed that up. So a mea culpa of my bed. Stephanie. Okay. Okay. We, we work it out, you know, right? Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for being on the show. I really love your show. Just the interviews you have are super top notch. You've interviewed everybody from, you know, Voucher, Hanaraf to Dylan Burns to Korshi Dosu. And some of my personal favorites, but with Brennan Katel on Lilith as we were talking about. So Stephanie, you say that your show covers a culture. So I didn't know if you could just explain briefly what your show is about and what you mean by a culture. Okay, sure. I'll try to do this. Sometimes it's, I find it sometimes difficult to explain what it is that I actually do to people because it's such a broad, broad thing, but a culture is a word. It's actually a combination of two words that called the poor month of a cult and culture. And I believe if I'm not mistaken, the term was coined by Genesis, Genesis, Peorage, and then kind of taken over by scholar Christopher Partridge, I believe his first name is Christopher, if I'm not mistaken. And the idea behind a culture is that they're basically a culture is everywhere. The occult is everywhere in culture. Everywhere you look, you will find it. And sometimes we don't recognize it on first glance. If we don't know what it is that we're looking at, but once we become more and more familiar with occult symbols, occult themes, motives, et cetera, et cetera, then you'll start to realize, yeah, it is basically everywhere that you look. Yeah, absolutely. It's a big reason why I got into religious studies, New Testament studies, things like that. I was a big fan when I was a teenage edgelord of bands like The Mission and the Sisters of Mercy. And I was filled to the Nephilim, the Nephilim we're talking about today. And I was like, Wayne from The Mission has a lot of really religious tinged lyrics. So I was always into that Dungeons and Dragons and deification stuff he was kind of doing with this music. And it kind of got me into, like, I'm like, oh, New Testament and all this stuff, all this flowery language. It's like poetry, but people take it much more seriously. But Stephanie, you also have a website. Tell us a little bit about the website and your social media, where can people find you? Right. It's the website is www.rejectedreligion.com. And that basically is the platform, all of my social media is also rejected religion. Basically, the platform functions as kind of like the little hub where all the information is put out about stuff that I'm doing, interviews that I'm going to be giving or holding, I guess I should say, and other projects that I'm working on other, just other things that are happening within the community. If there are things happening, then I'll, you know, post links to exhibitions, et cetera. I also work in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, the Faculty of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents in their communications, the kind of, you know, media team. So anything that's happening, lectures at the university or outside of the university and other areas, I try to also share that type of information as well. And also just for fun, sometimes I just, you know, curate things that I find and I think that might be interesting. So yeah, it's more of a trying to keep in touch with people in the community. And I also have a blog post, a blog that I sometimes post on. I'm not really the best posting longer blogs, but I am working on trying to get a little bit better in posting blogs. So hopefully those will be coming soon. Excellent. Well, everybody check those out. If you're watching now, if you're watching later, in fact, unsubscribe for me and go subscribe to Rejected Religion. No, Stephanie, I just really want to emphasize that I really do appreciate the work that you do. People like you, like Justin, like Earl at the Schwepp, without the roadmaps that you provide. It really is a service. So thank you very much. Well, thank you. Thank you for your interest. And this is something that I really enjoy doing. My intention was to try to act as a bridge between the academic sphere and the mainstream media or mainstream public and, you know, that everything that's out there. I know that there are a lot of other people doing the same thing. And I think every, you know, every one of us are, you know, doing our own little, our own little, you know, put our own little twist on things. And I think it's, I think it's great that there is such a really, you know, fabulous community of people who are trying to help educate and, yeah, just share, share things and just have fun. Yeah, indeed. Indeed. So whether you're a dude on a couch like me or Stephanie and Justin educators, you know, just feel free to get involved. Everybody's voice is important. That's what dynamic cultural exchange is about. Right. Exactly. So Stephanie, we're talking. Watchers, Nephilim, all that really fun stuff today. Yes. Yes. We have a guest who probably needs no introduction, but if you'd like to introduce him, please feel free. Well, our, our next, the next person we're bringing up, I'm not really, I'm really bad at live shows. I'm finding out right at this moment. It's part of the fun. It's part of the fun. Right. It's part of the fun. Okay. I'm going to try to do my best. We have Dr. Justin Sledge of the esoteric channel. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you, Jason. And thank you, Stephanie, for the work that you do. I really admire the work you do as well, both of you. So yeah, it's great to be in this ecosystem, right? That we, Exactly. Yeah. It's just a really fantastic. Me on to talk about the, the pernially interesting Nephilim. I don't, I, of all the things that, that seems to fire people's imagination. The Nephilim and to a lesser extent, the Rafaim really seem to inspire people for whatever reason from video games to, you know, to a culture to, to conspiracy theory. So it's a really, it's a really interesting thing. You'd be surprised how many comments I get about, about, you know, the Nephilim and how, you know, someone found a giant skeleton in Turkey. What do you think about that? Yes. Yes. That didn't happen. That's interesting. But I do appreciate the fact, Jason, that you are the perfect host wearing the boy harsher shirt. Between your boy harsher shirt and my collar shirt. Yeah. I wanted to mention that. I didn't see that before. We get those extra points. I was, I was trying to decide what shirt to wear. So I really, I like, like, I like to rep my scholars. I like to rep my bands. So I was like, should I wear Justin's shirt? Maybe. But then I remember we, I did that where we recorded a video with Justin one time. And I'm like, I don't know. You shouldn't really wear the shirt of like a band and you're not wearing the shirt. It's the metal etiquette thing, right? Do you wear the shirt of the band of the show you're going to see? This is an interesting philosophical question. I really, you know, this is a kind of a steady question that I would, I would spend a lot of time on that I shouldn't, but I think it is an interesting kind of thing. But yeah, I'm really glad to be on and to talk about the, the, the, the huge amount of literature. I mean, people forget that the Nephilim, as far as mythological entities, I would say, maybe I wouldn't totally double down on this, but in terms of geographical distribution in the ancient world, I would argue that the Nephilim are the most widely distributed mythological unit in the, in the, in the ancient world. That is to say you could read about, if you were in 400 of the common era, you could read about the Nephilim in Spain and you could also read about them in central China. That is really interesting. I don't think hardly any other creatures have that kind of geographical distribution in the ancient world. More people in terms of geographical spread would have known about the Nephilim than would have known about Yahweh or our Jesus perhaps or, or, you know, angels and demons. It's amazing how, how far, you know, how far they traveled. It's really weird to see the word Nephilim, a Hebrew word written in Chinese characters. That's a really interesting, that's a really interesting for me. That is like a moment you're like, whoa. And, and so that's, yeah, that's a mind blowing to my mind as a person who's interested in this stuff. Yeah, Justin. It's, it's really incredible. I'll admit that I'm not the most well versed in this. So when I saw Stephanie wanted to talk about the book of Giants and Manichaeism in the same discussion, I was like, okay, I need to do some more research. So, but what I found was very interesting. You have, like I said, this very ubiquitous myth of the Nephilim, the watchers, these giants, and the NRS view it's translated as like hero. These are like heroes of old, right? It's in the book of Giants, one of the Giants is named Gilgamesh, right? It's really interesting. So like, in both the Qumran Fragments and in the Manichaean Fragments, Gilgamesh is listed. In fact, I think it's one of the last attestations of Lilith in literature. The last place Gilgamesh appears in the written, in the written, the last place he occurs as a mythological character is, is in the, in the book of Giants. I think, I think that's right. So fascinating. And I just want to preface this, everyone, by stating that I'm not an expert in either of these subjects, but I am drawing most of what I took my notes on from the indispensable work of Jason Badun on Manichaean in his book, The Manichaean Body, and I am also taking it from Matthew Goff's incredible work on the book of Giants. So check those out as well. John Reed's work on the book of Giants that they get some of the best. I think his may be the definitive, some of the definitive studies on the book of Giants is, is John Reeves' book, which is surprisingly inexpensive, considering academic, academic publishing. It's a great, a great, great text. I'll add that to the bibliography. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. And also I'll add that to the big bibliography at the end. But yeah, it's like we have, so we have the book of Giants, which is dependent on the book of Watchers, which is found in first Enoch, right? So they're all dependent on each other. These were very popular texts. So Justin, I didn't know if you could kind of talk a little bit about this basic myth, what's kind of going on in them. Why do you think they're so endearing to people at this period of time? So there's, there's sort of, so the main thing to say, right, is that this whole literature is stemming out of a, out of the verses in Genesis six. They're, you know, three or four, basically throwaway verses in Genesis six, which I do love when that happens, when they're throwaway verses where they just like drop a bomb on you and move on as if nothing happened. This happens in the sagas too. Sometimes they'll be like, and we went over here and then we did this and we went over here and I borrowed a cow and then there were some trolls we fought with. And they're like, hold on. Trolls. And they just, they just move on as if that's completely within the wheelhouse of what's acceptable things that happened in the world. And I guess perhaps it was. So Ditto with the book of, the book of Enoch, right? We have this whole, whole throwaway verse in Genesis six, where it seems like some, some creatures from the divine council seem to come down and mate with human women, spawn some kind of beings. And these beings existed, you know, and there's a kind of continual reference back through the Hebrew Bible that, that the Anakim or the other kinds of giant creatures, the refaim are sort of melded with them, which are earlier Bronze age beings. So, so that's the core of the myth. That's basically the core of the core of the myth. Yeah. The heroes of old warriors are renowned. And so, what gets built out of that is really, really impressive. And there's a way of, there's a way of understating it and there's a way of overstating it. And I'm going to overstate it to make a point. And the overstate it to make a point is that it seems as if there were two parallel kinds of Jewish theology operating sometime in the early period of the second temple. There's a kind of a deuteronomistic theology. Right. This is the idea that God has made a vassal contract. You always made a vassal contract with the Israelites and their job is to mediate basically with with God through the temple sacrifices. Right. And so that's the classic deuteronomistic theology. I'll give you stuff. You'll give me stuff. There seems to have been a parallel Enochic theology. And this Enochic theology has much more to do with apocalypticism. Has much more to do with the origins of evil. Has much more to do with visionary things. It's less interested in the temple. In fact, they even use a different set of calendrical system. Famously, the Enochian calendrical system found there in the book of Enoch toward the back is a solar calendar as opposed to the lunar solar calendar that we find in. And what's interesting about this is that it seems to this is really was appealing to people. For instance, the book of Jude famously quotes from the book of Enoch. So we have it. We have the New Testament quoting from the book of Enoch. But also people sometimes forget there are more copies of the book of Enoch in the book of the Watchers recovered from Qumran from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then there are copies of Leviticus. Like, right? There are more copies of that than like, you know, than books of the Torah. That community was and they follow the solar calendar as well. So they were out of sync with the rest of the Jewish world in terms of the exerbates of holidays. So they were very much interested in this kind of apocalyptic Enochic kind of interpretation of theology, Judaism, one of the many Judaism. And so this Enochic theology, which explains why evil exists in the world. It's the responsibility of these Watchers, although it's interesting that in the Manichean version, it's women who seduce the Watchers as opposed to Watchers seducing the women. That's a pretty important difference in the Manichean mythology. But it what's important to note is that the Enochian literature is being taken up by Christians, early Jesus movement people. It's like I said, it's in the book of Jude. It's clearly being used by Jews, but it's also being adopted by Manny in the third century. And of course, Manny not only adopts it, it becomes one of the six canonical texts of Manicheanism. And again, as I mentioned earlier, Manicheanism in terms of its geographical distribution is absolutely shocking. All the way for again. And again, we have more, if you think about languages and which the New Testament is translated into in the first couple of hundred years, right? Little bit of, you know, it's getting translated in from, you know, some of maybe some early stuff was in Aramaic into Greek and then maybe into some Coptic. If you look at the text of Manny, like the book of Giants, we have at least six different languages from Middle Persian to Sogdian to Chinese Coptic that the book of Giants is being translated into and insofar as translation is an index of popularity, the book of Giants, I would say, was probably the most widely read scripture of that time period. It's at some level, right? In terms of geographic distribution and in terms of religious adherence, everybody was reading it. And this is, again, this is sort of how history is very strange that, you know, thank God that the Ethiopians not preserved it, we would have basically nothing of it. But this attest to the incredible popularity of this book. So again, like what's really popular now? Of course, hardly we have any hope. The book of Giants, the book of the Giants. But in the third century, it would have been more commonplace, I think, than the book of Revelation. More commonplace than the Mishnah. And that's really saying something. Because we take the Mishnah, it is to be foundational over biblical Judaism, take the book of Revelation to be foundational at some level to Christianity. But the book of Giants would have been would have been ubiquitously known across the religious spectrum of the ancient world. And that really finds its way across these worlds. And like you said, just going back to Manicheism in general, I really like this quote that Jason Badun had in his book on the Manichean body. He stressed, and I quote, the Manicheans themselves practice the form of doctrinal translation that diversified their discourse, all equally accommodating to local cultural norms. So like you said, like, Abmani really saw his religion as a other religions or a small body of water, right? They're a stream leading through tributaries into the vast ocean that is his final religion, final revelation. So very interesting that this goes from things like you said in Second Temple Judaism, you have these Jubilee, these watcher and giant traditions and Jubilees, Epistle of Enoch, Daniel 4, things like that. And then it gets transferred over to the Manicheism in the third century, and that travels everywhere and just by virtue of how Manicheism is so kind of like Neopladenism in a way. Neopladenism is very adaptable to taking things and putting it into its own kind of spin, and Manicheism kind of does that the same way. So it's very interesting. I think my final historical question, then Stephanie, I'll let you take the questions here, is Dr. Sledge, many people may not be too familiar with Manicheism in general, just in terms of like their cultural milieu and what they believed. I know they have a concept of ascetic ritual to liberate light from the darkness. It's encased in, but there's a very complex cosmogony and cosmology and along with that, I didn't know if you could just briefly touch upon that before we move on. Yeah, and I'll be the first to admit I'm not an expert in Manicheism. It's not a religion I can claim any ex-martisan, but basically we have a it's a super complex religion that we don't have a lot of literature from, unfortunately. You'd be surprised to learn that some of the texts that have survived are literally this big. The text recovered from Meded at Mani is just micrograms. Manicheism is a dualistic religion. It fundamentally believed the world was divided into a spirit, to a good and evil, and that Mani had come on a long line of prophets, including the Buddha, by the way. Buddhism and Jesus were accommodated. Mani himself originates in a Persian milieu. I think and so he's coming out of that. He comes from a aristocratic family and basically he teaches the gospel of how to liberate yourself from the world of evil. In that way, it tracks very closely to what we call Gnosticism, whatever that is. They tend to parallel each other and this was a heavily proselytizing religion, the most famous person who believed in it for quite some time, of course, was Augustine. Augustine was a Manichaean for many years before he became a Christian. In a nutshell, it's basically that the cosmology is incredibly complex in terms of the Book of Watchers we're talking about here which is really important about what Mani does with the Book of Watchers is that he's going to very particularly look at in his cosmology where these angels are going to come from in his cosmology where they come down to earth to eventually mate with human women. Basically what he does is he takes and again it's sort of a game of telephone and we have the line in Genesis 6 that gets built out into the Inokian literature in Enoch 1 in Jubilees to a Lester degree and then that's built out even more when Mani sort of acculturates it to his unique cosmology. What's difficult about all this is that if you look at the amount of literature that we have from the Book of Watchers the Manichaean Book of Watchers we have basically two pages worth of text that have survived. It's all very fragmentary and so and again it's spread to Asagdian and Middle Persian and Coptic there are chunks of it in the Kephaliah the teacher which is another important Manichaean text but basically that's how it gets well worked in. Mani is sort of a vacuum cleaner of prophets. He hoovers over all of the things and again I think the part of the reason why he hoovers over the Book of Watchers is because of its popularity. I think that it was a popular book among Jews and Christians and I think that part of the reason why he brings it into his system and accommodates it to his system is precisely because of its popularity at the time which again is interesting considering that it was basically unknown until outside of the Ethiopian world the Amharic Orthodox Church but it was basically unknown until a few centuries ago. Well said. Thank you for that answer. Yeah, it's very interesting. Jason Badoon points out that Mani came from an Elkasite community in Mesopotamia so Jewish apocalyptic communities so another prime example of like dynamic cultural exchange and like you said Mani was very much like the the vacuum cleaner of prophets. He was the ultimate ultimate perennialist. I'm not sure if that's the correct word in putting it towards Mani but Mani definitely thought that he was taking the best of the best and kind of creating like Homer would be the ultimate car in a way, so very interesting. Although otherwise Mani's religion was a little bit better than Homer's car. True. But yeah, I mean he's again he's one of the great systematizers in the history of world religion and it's a pity that less survived because we tell a story as if Maniki isn't as a footnote in history and most people know it as such. But the truth of the matter is that Manikiism could have gone the other way and you know we'd all been in Maniki in hegemony Absolutely. There's no reason why it couldn't have gone the other way. When I was learning about Manikinism because I also am not an expert in this in this area at all because I'm my area is not antiquity at all. So when I was learning about this I thought it's really modern in a way because of the syncretic nature. It just, yeah to me it didn't really seem like an antique type of religion because it does incorporate Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Taoism you know all these different belief systems and religions that yeah to me it seemed very very fresh as something that people today would probably feel you know keen to learn more about and it is a shame that there isn't really much more material, you know, textual material left over from it but I don't know if the materials that I was reading would agree with what you were talking about Justin but the core myth I guess you could say of Manicheanism is that this dualistic idea of there that it was like three stages if I recall correctly that there were the first creation stage that you had spirit and matter or light and dark or good and evil however you want to call it but there was these two separate principles and then there was a second creation where these two principles were mingled and out of that mingling came human beings came the world everything that we know so our history and even our current day or our current times because we're still in the second creation and then there's this third creation that that's like the I guess the end where the dualistic principles are separated again and it goes back to the way it had been originally and I don't know if that if that coincides with how you understand from your texts I think that's a general read I think that's a general read yeah and so it is funny that you mentioned that it would be popular today because of its degree of syncretizing I think everyone likes Gnosticism until they get to the dualism like dualism they're like oh yeah your body is evil and the physical world is bad and you do escape it I think most people are like I don't really like that part I like the other parts but yeah it's the pretty strong dualism I think is what turns off most people and I think one of the reasons why these dualistic religions don't really make it even Zoroastrianism which has some elements of dualism is ultimately monist it's apocalyptic monism things are going to get solved in the past and in the future monikism is a bit like that in that way so another thing that I thought was interesting in this system is that you have the world of light and the world of darkness as they call it in at least in the texts that I was reading and it's in the second creation period it's the world of darkness that's actually producing Adam and Eve the angel the fallen the angels that fall you know all of the Nephilim all of these characters that we're going that we're discussing today this comes out of the world of darkness and I found that also very interesting and intriguing that yeah that we're placed in this we as human beings are placed in this in this dimension I guess you could say and yeah I don't know if there is then what I would still clear to me is at the end in this third creation what happens to human beings then because it says that it's going to go back to a dualistic nature where you have light and dark or however you want to call it spirit and matter what happens to humans in this process does the I think that again everything is so fragmentary but I think the idea is that basically the followers of money will undergo these purifications that will allow them to their true self to become ultimately separated off as spirits and they'll survive in the spiritual world and that the physical will basically be you know it's a it's a it's a pus to be left behind and so we don't know a lot about the Manichean rituals so much but there were ascetic practices of some sort that are detailed in the Manichean body that basically ensure that you end up in the world of light and the world of the good so again so some coterminous stuff with texts like the apocryphal of John or even the gospel of Mary Magdalene that there's a real core self that isn't physical and that that real core self that isn't physical will persist after death assuming you sufficiently separate yourself off through various kinds of purifications or initiation everybody has their own flavor and on their own road up the mountain I was just covering the books of you last week which has I think the most complicated and complex system of that that exists in ancient literature so one just gets a sense that the third century was crappy everybody was just trying to get out of town that it kind of was in some ways like you know you do get some elements about the third century that aren't so great but you just get there's this this turn beginning in you know second century third century fourth century to the last degree where I mean things weren't that bad then actually I mean sixth century many ways far worse but maybe you know arguments have made it's the worst century ever but you just get to sense it the zeitgeist of the time was getting the hell out of dodge that you know bodies are bad and let's get out of here so that seems to have been the thing and you had lots of flavors for including Christianity right Christianity also a glorified body that will be that will be very unlike Paul talks about sort of a body of a body a spiritual body that will come after this one so even Christianity is sort of on that train the Hermeticists are on that train I think the only people really not or like rabbinical Judaism I think they're one of the weird holdouts who are just like no the body is okay that's interesting that you mentioned that because in my discussion with Walter Honechraff about his new book about this spiritual Hermeticism he's very adamant that the Hermetic texts are not this dualistic type of matter is evil, spirit is good and that we need to try to separate this that we can achieve this spiritual gnosis and enlightenment in the body so I would you know learning what he was talking about I would say that that might be one of the what do you call it the exceptions to the rule of the others that were going along but but Hermeticism was also highly persecuted at that time too and a lot of people were to death if they found out the Roman Empire and the state found out that they were practicing so maybe these people weren't really going around telling other people about how they practiced and even that idea with the Hermeticist is still sort of a you're not going to get a resurrected body in the hermetica you can practice reverence in this life and then you can purify your soul of the daemonis in your death you'll go back to the one but it's still an idea that ultimately you're not this this is gnosis in this vehicle but this vehicle is something you will leave behind that's very different from the rabbinical Judaism that makes it a tentative faith that you have to believe that you'll be physically resurrected that the physical body is not a thing that is bad and then in fact rabbinical Judaism makes a big pushed about you know you have to be physically buried in a proper way because your physical body is going to come back Christianity certainly leans on that as well but I think with even the hermetica I think ultimately you're the ultimate goals to get out of town is to get out of this and get back to the monad and you do that through the purification of your soul of all the evil stuff the daemonis the planetary daemonis do yeah that's a good point that you make about the body not being eternal get into this later on about how the viewpoints are now kind of shifting within new age ideas that there might be this possibility of having this immortal state that you don't even die so there's kind of shifts in the way people are approaching the idea of yeah the spiritual purification in that regard and what is constitutive of death that was also a thing right New Testament says that you will not taste death and so when people started actually dying they had to pivot like crap like you know so what does death mean it means something else yeah so never let the facts get in the way of the truth whether it's New Testament or whatever don't ever let that happen but yeah in the new age bring these ideas of nephilim and stuff like that into modern culture it's amazing how in the same way they are incredibly popular in the ancient world they have also become incredibly popular now and I think I said this behind in the studio before we went on is that you would be impressed doctor surprised how often I get comments on the channel about the nephilim people are always interesting asking me questions I got one the other day about do I think the nephilim built anything before they were destroyed by the flood I'm like I don't think the nephilim are real I think it's a myth like Prometheus well hey maybe Prometheus is real too so it's amazing how pernially interesting again if you watch the history channel these stories are pernially interesting and I think it's because people forget that apocalypticism is often less concerned about the impending doom that's coming in the future apocalypticism is much more concerned about the primordial past now that's definitely true of ancient jewish apocalypticism it's much more interested in the primordial past and I think that that's sort of a weird way that you get this sort of closed loop that by learning about the primordial past with the watchers and the nephilim somehow you learn something about what's about to happen in the future so perhaps that's why these entities remain pernially interesting and also why I've never made an episode about the nephilim just because I don't want to feed into the fire of this stuff but I have done one on the refame which are tangentially related well can you talk a little bit more about that I mean you don't have to go into great depth but what are the differences there so there's a whole host of beings that eventually get built out of this system so we have what are called the sons of god at least in the new testament or the old testament in the book of genesis they're probably originally literally sons of L if we track it back to the old bronze age mythology L had 70 sons and we see that exact stuff repeated in other places in the Hebrew bible so that's probably just a holdover from old indigenous bronze age canaanite and they come to earth they fall, they clearly come from the sky the word na'fal in Hebrew literally means to fall and so they are literally the fallen ones and they mate with human women and again as we mentioned the manikin version has the women seducing the sons of god as opposed to the other way around they're led by an angel named Sim Yaza whose name has lots of different forms in Hebrew his name literally means the one that sees the name there's a great midrash about him where the first woman they come to to attempt to seduce she tricks them she says hey you know the divine name tell me the divine name and you can have sex with me and he's like okay he's not very smart clearly and he tells her the divine name and so she says it out loud and she immediately is transformed into the Pleiades and so she escapes being sexually subjected to these fallen angels so and also by the way this is an alternative theory of the origin of evil remember that christianity will pioneer the the satanic rebellion theory the satanic rebellion theory is a later theory about the origin of evil compared to the inokian theory which is all about how these fallen angels taught human beings all kinds of bad stuff other than the inokian version they teach them good stuff which is interesting to some degree as well but you get that you get an all spring of a lot of these creatures you get watchers which are someone like the nephilim you get giants giborim the strong ones you also when these sexes get translated into greek you get creatures like the greek gory which are something like giants as well and so you have a whole species and subsets of these these also get mixed up with the creatures called the refaim which the hebrew bible tends to take so the rapeuma as they were known originally in ugaritik these are just basically deified dead kings they were kings in the afterlife who had basically become deified and what it seems like happens is that the israelites make them into and the israelites can't quite make their mind about what they are but they tend to make them into giants and mostly as a whipping boy for the israelites so the israelites can show how badass they are the abraham beats up the refaim and then eventually other people beat up the refaim to show how the israelites are so so dominant but they're also giants the famous line of calib and the spies that we are but grasshoppers before them which is very adoptative okay so then the story of david and goliath also fall into this category yeah so goliath is just described as an anakim which are another one of these descendants of the refaim okay which is interesting because the bible also can't make its mind about who kills goliath the earlier version probably has elkana doing it but eventually the myth is transposed and the credit is given to david for killing goliath but yeah he becomes one of the descendants of the anakim and then you get all kinds of problems right because if the giants if the watchers and the giants and the nephilim are around in king david's time or if they're around in calib's time when the time of the spies well how did they survive the flood because that was the whole point that's the question because the whole point was at least in the book of enok the story you get basically is that the giants got so big and they were just eating everything that god wanted to wipe them out and the only clue we get in the bible is that it says the world was full of hamas which means violence and that it's not clear what hamas is in this case and so what the book of enok does and the book of jubilees does it flushes out what exactly the hamas was and the hamas was all these giants have to eat and so they just eat everything they're just massacring and eating everything just sowing whole sheeps in their mouth or whatever and the god doesn't like the idea they're doing this and so he's like I want to wipe them out and that's why the flood but then the question is if that was the point of the flood then how did they survive and you get all kinds of great stories like aga bashan who's famously known for his heith is said in the midrashim literature to have in one version he's holding on to the side of the ark to survive the flood and in the other version he's standing on top of it so always imagine like surfing on top of Noah's ark for 40 days and 40 nights to survive the flood because if you do the math aga bashan he seems to have predated the he seems to have been born before the flood and survived it so this is what's interesting these people are very close readers of this text they notice weird mathematical discrepancies or historical or narrative discrepancies and they feel the gap and what do they feel it with when it is out nephaline did it I think that's why it fires the imagination now because we're all raised in some kind of christian adjacent bible adjacent world and it fires the imagination because we know so little about them but now we have the book of enok at least fragments of the book of the watchers the book of jubilees and stuff like that that fills it out now what's fascinating to me about that is how people today um I get a comment I have an episode on my channel on the third book of enok and one of the more common comments that I get which is very strange is that the first book of enok is great that one really is scripture that was lost but the second and third ones are from the devil I'm like how did you make this decision um like how did you by what canonical system are you deciding that first enok is kosher second and third enok is not especially considering that first enok is at least five books stitched together that don't often have much to do with each other when you get down to the textual reception of them they're distinct books really but yeah if folks ever get a chance you can go to the Israeli antiquities authority website and you can look at the fragments of the books of enok and the book of the watchers and it is really amazing how little survives just like when I say fragments it just looks like the romans went in there and tore it up which I think is what happened I actually thought a lot of those texts I think that they're in that state because the romans um the romans went in those caves looking for treasure and they were like crap stupid books who wants books yeah i'm a roman I can imagine um but yeah I think that's why some of those texts are in such bad shape especially cave four although again the books of enok are distributed there are 12 different fragments of the book of enok maybe more but they're distributed through all the caves it's not like we find a bunch of cave four a bunch of cave nine they're distributed pretty evenly through the caves yeah in my research I was blown away by how many fragments there were just distributed throughout all these caves it was really eye-opening and I think I have a solution for how if you watch Darren Arnovsky's Noah they help Russell Crowe build the ark so maybe they made a deal with him behind the scenes who knows part of what's really great about that movie and having a Jewish guy basically write it is that he did his homework he really read the midrashim and a lot of the stuff that goes into that movie is actually from rabbinical literature so he did a great job he made the Christians very angry because he was like he's adding things that aren't in the bible yeah but he's putting things that are in Jewish lore which ironically is what this text comes from yeah I love that movie I don't know how anybody could hate that movie but then again Last Temptation is one of my favorite movies too so I guess I'm not the authority for blasphemy or what's not blasphemy but interesting though in the movie Noah the Watchers is it the Watchers of the Nephilim that are rock monsters or something and that I felt was when looking at all the other representations of Nephilim in pop culture that was like one of the very few that I saw of that type of expression it was interesting because you get the sense that they their spiritual being sort of made a fire that plunged the earth and when they plunged the earth they sort of like it's like they were magma and the magma cooled around them and they were like rock on the outside but spiritual being on the inside which I think is a neat kind of dualism like you kind of get some like dualist vibes from that like oh yeah they're not physical the way we are but they can take on physicality because of having been plunged to earth in that way so yeah I thought that was a neat a neat way of handling them although clearly in the book of Enoch they're people like I mean the the Nephilim are not the giants they give birth to the giants but they clearly they couldn't they couldn't be giants because they have sex with human women and so there must be relatively human humanoid at some level I do like in the book of Enoch though that Sim Yaza when he he's trying to pitch this idea to the rest of the fallen angels he's like he's like yeah like let's go down there and have sex with you know the first girls are easy let's go down there and have sex with all the the human women and the other angels are like you go first I don't want to get in trouble and they were like all right let's buy they basically have like a pact they make with each other so that they all have to go down together so it's like a prisoner's dilemma problem yeah I was just pulling that up I found that very amusing he was like I fear that perhaps you will not consent that this deed should be done I alone will become responsible for this great sin but they all responded to him let us swear to oath and bind everyone among us yeah it was very I love that phrase it's like the crappiest translation but it's a really great turn to phrase mutual execrations it should be a band name we'll buy each other by mutual execrations to go down and do this but again as a theory of evil I think this is a you know it's one of these fabulous things about sort of what to do with you know one of the things about the apocalyptic is the origin of evil and the Enochic theory of the origin of evil that is to say that this was the result of angels coming here to have sex with women and then they taught us a bunch of bad stuff like how to make cosmetics and weapons of war you know or pharmacology or whatever that it's just an interesting counter theory to the one we always think of which is the the angelic insurrection and the angelic insurrection theory is a much later Christian one and I do like the fact that even in Christianity they still can't quite work out their theory of evil what exactly is how exactly evil got into the world which is interesting if we stay with Enoch and then talking about the bad watchers or Nephilim and what they were doing with the human women I found this an interesting aspect that it says that they taught the women their secrets and these secrets were not supposed to be taught to human beings that was considered grossly immoral for human beings to know about all these things such as astrology sorcery and magic cosmetics divination with the use of mirrors how to interpret clouds and the phases of the moon and the signs of the sun and all these things that nowadays you know you kind of you see how this has all been how this has all played out throughout history and how women have always been put in that kind of position of the witch the wise the wise woman but also in the pejorative sense the woman who knows things that she's not supposed to know so I find that to be an interesting as you said this whole idea of the problem of evil where does that come from and that does seem to kind of in a way kind of fits with this in the biblical idea of the sin of the woman being tempted by the serpent which also I find interesting in the text that I was reading about who that actually was that was in the text that I material that I read it was a watcher called Samuel and he was supposed to be watching over the human beings but he was actually tempting Eve he put the this is the story I don't know if this is true or not because there's always so many different interpretations but the the story that I read is that he put the tree of knowledge in the garden and was punished and cursed by God for doing so then came back as the serpent to tempt Eve to get her to finally eat the fruit of that tree and then that's when everything went went to hell then he stuck around and slept with Eve and he's the father of Cain so these are I mean incredible stories that nowadays you see so many references to in all of these different popular culture outlets and media all forms of media and entertainment that these are such pervasive ideas they just stay they stay with us yeah then the whole business of Eve is really interesting because again we think about sort of we live in a Christian adjacent world that the first sin really is the sin of of Eve and that sin has passed down from generation to generation and that's part of the mythology of Christianity is that Jesus comes to fix that but it's actually it's interesting that at the time that Enoch is being composed that's not their theory of evil and clearly in the book of Ezekiel there's no sense of inherited evil and Ezekiel rejects that idea that there could be anything like inherited evil and what's interesting is that they're trying to get the theory of evil off the ground and they're like alright let's do it with Samuel and he makes Cain and that makes murder and that's how murder comes into the world in later Kabbalistic versions Lilith will be involved in seducing Adam and that's how you get a bunch of demons from that as well but it's interesting that if it is the case that Eve generates sin into the world then the Enoch story becomes redundant and that's an interesting kind of the logic of evil that they're still I always say that theology is always kind of you're always building the ship at sea and that the book of Enoch is clearly an example where they're not quite sure where evil comes from and of course you can blame a woman that's just the way dudes do and in this case it's the one that learned all this stuff from the Nephilim and the Watchers I do like the fact that they teach them cosmetics which means that they must have been wearing them you never think of the Nephilim as like maybe it's maybe it's you maybe it's the maybe it's the Nephilim I imagine they were going around like Motley Crue or something yeah it's like a glam metal but it is interesting that in order to know something about cosmetics they must have been fabulous so but yeah this is the kind of things that go with this metallurgy also is in the list of things that they teach them so but yeah I think that this is part of what makes the books of Enoch eternally interesting is that we live in a world that's rife with evil and we want to know where it comes from and the books of Enoch give us a pretty detailed story as to where it comes from but yeah I think that's why and also there's this the allure of secret knowledge that Genesis hints but Enoch tells so we're very lucky that this survived among the Ethiopians again I think it's really important to name that they preserved it it's interesting who thought this text was canonical even in the early Christian world Tertullian did many people early on in Christianity felt that the books of Enoch that the first book of Enoch at least was to some degree authoritative that's really to me that's really interesting what what becomes canon and what doesn't clear the writer of the pistol of Jude they quote it once and so so does that make it canon like there's that one line canon I've always wondered if this is for yeah who decides on this yeah I mean my favorite folks I've seen those bumper stickers right where it has like the bible verse like John 316 it's just like the bible verse reference and a bumper sticker I've always wanted to get one that's like 2nd Peter and it's whatever the verse it says hey I left a coat there and don't trust Alexandria the coppersmith I'm like don't trust that dude can you imagine being that coppersmith for 2,000 years the only thing we know about him is that Paul thought he was shady and that becomes really rich and I left my coat there I want to come get my coat the makers of the chosen really do need to do a spin-off about that guy the little miniseries yeah his little story of redemption but again the fact of all the books that Manny had at his disposal the book of Enoch is the one that makes it in it's not the gospels it's not any of the books he had a wide range of books he could by the 3rd century he had a huge library of things that he could have tapped in the matrix of that world and of all the books that he chooses to tap that's the one interesting there must have been something about the story with the Nephilim that he disliked that a lot it's just one of those things like I said I find fascinating that all of this that this was so popular then and it's still so popular now and that you know I'm so surprised that Justin that you get so many questions about this because I guess people think that you would know something about it and that it's also kind of keeping you from actually talking about it because you're like I don't really want to go there I find that all very very interesting but how the ideas are adapted and assimilated and appropriated this is what's fascinating to me that the creativity that people have nowadays and if we're looking at the contemporary reception of these ideas for example Kane we were just talking about Kane in 1996 I'm going to refer to my notes here because I need to know what the date is in 1996 White Wolf publishing brought out a tabletop role playing game called Vampire the Dark Ages I have not played this myself but I've read about it where the figure of Kane is as we were talking about the first murderer cursed by God to be a vampire and yes and this whole idea of the blood drinking of the Nephilim you know there are accounts that they were cannibalistic blood drinkers very violent and this the way that the vampire myth is then interlaced into this narrative so Kane was then also temporarily linked with Lilith they were lovers for a period of time in this game and if we follow the narrative of the Midrash I think you were talking about the Midrash where I think you were mentioning it when I was understanding from you there was a Midrash where I was talking about Samael being a watcher certainly certainly in the by the rise of the Kabbalah he becomes so if that if we're kind of looking at the technicalities of things then Kane would Kane be a Nephilim then if he was fathered by Samael this is where things get where the text becomes very muddy because if we follow the if we assume the historiography of the Hebrew Bible then the Nephilim occur centuries after Kane and Abel because it's in Genesis 6 that we get the Nephilim and so you get you know you get a huge it's clear that they're fulfilling the story without much attention to what came who's on first because if it's a case that the Nephilim occur at the time of the flood right it's the time of Noah I mean Noah's father was or Noah's father was I think Methuselah who lived 969 years we're talking about huge swaths of time in Biblical fault way back going back and you know I think Adam lives for 900 years and I can't keep track of these people although they do like the the Bible says that Methuselah is the most sad person in the entire history of the world because the Bible says that he lived for 969 years and he died that he didn't do anything of worth despite the fact nothing worth mentioning for 969 years the only thing we know is that Methuselah lived for 969 years and he died he's like he's the most tragic character in all of history because he had the most time and did nothing with it nothing worth recording but the historiography gets really mucky because if it's the case that the Nephilim come down in Genesis 6 then what in the hell Samuel doing back in Genesis 1 what is he doing back there and the Kabbalah gives us a story as to what he's doing back there but of course that's centuries later well the beautiful thing about fiction is that they can do whatever they want and so so this story this story says Jane was with Lilith and it's very complex of course I can't tell you the whole story here but this White Wolf publishing company they also had many series in there I think what they called it they're actually they call it the world the world of darkness series that's interesting exactly yeah I'm having we should be asking the guy with the boy harsher shirt if anyone is going to know I did play vampire I did play vampire the masquerade when I was in high school I will admit I think you have to wear a boy harsher shirt and not play vampire the masquerade you get a fine all I could tell you is yeah in White Wolf lore so to speak in that world Kane is the first vampire and strangely enough he does found a city called Enoch after this wasn't there a king Enoch wasn't he the king I don't know I remember in the watchers he has a really interesting situation where in the book of the giants it's interesting because the giants begin to have dreams about their impending doom and they actually go to Enoch to interpret their dreams and Enoch tells them you need to get your life together because otherwise God is going to kill you all basically the watchers in the Aramaic version which we don't have the ending of we just know that the watchers is like whatever we do what we want we can do whatever we like and then God kills them all because Enoch is like I told you this was going to happen but in the in the Manichean version we have the fuller ending and then we have them also not doing what they're supposed to be doing and then the angels the four archangels the fourth one is a unique one to the Manichean text whose name is slipping my mind now but ultimately they begin the process of wiping out the giants in preparation for the for the flood so the Manichean text is very different than the the Manichean text is we have a more complete ending than the Aramaic that survives although I will say this then this is getting into a little bit of speculative territory one of the major scholars of the dead sea scrolls who toward the end of his life became a little bit of a disrepute because of some alcohol problems anti-Semitism problems which was unfortunate on both accounts but he alleged that during the first Gulf War he saw a microfilm of the entire Book of Enoch in Aramaic that had been stolen from the Dead Sea Scrolls and that basically a Kuwaiti I think this is how the story goes that a Kuwaiti who had basically gone over to Saddam and once the Americans were coming through obviously this Kuwaiti who had gone over to Saddam his life is not going to go well once the Kuwaitis take back control he was basically trying to use the copy of Enoch to get himself out of Kuwait and I would look his name up it's Sturgeon I think but he's like a really reputable he was one of the first guys working on the Dead Sea Scrolls and he says he saw a complete Aramaic copy of Enoch 1 in the 90s I've talked to some other Dead Sea Scrolls people and they're like some of them are like nah but some of them are like this is a weird story to make up and I kind of tend to believe that it might be you know the amount of stuff that Kataris and the Kuwaitis buy that if they had if there were a complete book of Enoch out there in Aramaic I could easily imagine it being in a lockbox in Kuwait but allegedly he saw the microfilm just a microfilm of it which would be just amazing if he could anyway speculation but intriguing intriguing possibilities about what still might be out there let me find his name I'm sure nobody's keeping that Aramaic Enoch in a freezer hopefully there's crazy people who care of it who was it yeah it was John Strugnell who died in 2007 he said he saw it in 1990 and again Strugnell I mean he's not it's just there was a tendency among some Dead Sea Scroll scholars to go off the deep end it just happened to Allegro happened Strugnell there's something about the Dead Sea Scrolls that kind of makes people make some people wacky yeah they kind of become Ahab don't they after a while something I think it's just like if you see pictures of what they were doing I mean can you imagine spending 25 years looking at fragments that somehow have two letters on them trying to piece I think it makes you crazy that's hard to know how that affects you I mean imagine trying to solve a puzzle that you have no that has no edges and it must have I mean I can imagine it being crazy making yeah indeed but yeah these are fascinating text and I think that and again like you said the amount of like metal bands that are now named Samael and and Nephilim and video games that the Nephilim show up in yeah they've just become part of the common currency of the mythology of of sort of Abrahamic mythology in a broader way yeah it's just amazing how much how much of an impact it's had right well I mentioned White Wolf but there are also other video games out there there's one called Devil May Cry and this I thought found interesting Dante and Virgil are brothers and they're Nephilim in this video game the Diablo the whole Diablo series Nephilim are also in that along with Lilith and so you know it's just ever returning the music as you said fields of Nephilim later the Nephilim one of my favorites I mean I listen to I mean I just want to make a point about fields like when I was growing up fields are directly responsible for me getting into Gilgamesh and all that Samarian stuff when I was just like dicking around and call it community college like and I'm like I'll take a western class you know because I need a course you know because my dad will get off my back but then like I'm like oh this is weird I just listen to Elysium and they're talking about all this stuff in history and it's just really weird how it affects everything that way I love the Nephilim and yeah like Carl McCoy just really got into ceremonial magic towards the end they're really hard I mean he still does it like pretty every fields every field show is really much very much like a ritual very interesting interesting I will check it out but yeah I thought of course you know you have bands with names like that other bands use Nephilim and their titles you have Mastodon uses it Bayamoth uses it so a lot of the metal bands as you said Justin if you know in films and TV I mean we've already talked about Noah but there's Kevin Smith's Dogma that's you know kind of a classic movie about the watchers I think Ben Affleck's character was supposed to be a watcher the the X-Files had them in the supernatural series supernatural the prophecy movies the mortal instruments books and series the series Lucifer there's it just it's everywhere and I just saw somebody's comment in the in the chat room they're like there's like 10,000 videos on YouTube about the Nephilim it's just everywhere so which is funny to me because and again this is like if you and I guess I have a paradox reading of them that there tends to be something about like how metal they are because we tend to conflate the fallen we tend to conflate the romantic vision of Satan as a fallen angel with the Nephilim because their name literally means the fallen ones but if you read the texts of Genesis and you read the text of Jubilees and Enoch they come across as horny teenagers they don't come across they don't come across as like fearsome scary angels they just come across as like angels who like want to get laid and I guess I've never gotten the romantic aspect of them because when I read when I'm a text guy when I read these stories I'm like they're just like 17 year olds they're angelic 17 year olds who really want to you know have sex with a woman for the first time and they're just like I love the way the rabbinical literature actually makes them bumbling that they get tricked by the first woman that they don't know even when they try to have sex they don't know what to do because they're sort of like bumbling 15 year olds for me it's always struck me as interesting that these characters become sort of fiery, scary blah blah blah blah but at least in most literature preserved they're just kind of horny teenagers I think that again like how we read these texts and through which lens that in the Christian world because they become associated with Satan they become edge core cool goth angels or whatever but in the Jewish world they're like they're just sort of like these horny teenagers like they're not to be feared they're just like in the same way that you know imagine if like a 15 year old was trying to teach his girlfriend how to I don't know from the anarchist cookbook build a pipe bomb or something they're just dangerous kids and so I think that's a much for me you know and when I read the rabbinical literature that's the read that I take of them and that they're not metal at all they're just like cringy goth kids with like pipe bombs and you're like I look at it almost as like it's like the third century BCE version of super bad it's like these really like silly dudes like who want to be really edgy but they're really bad at it yeah that might actually maybe that speaks to the edgelord in all of us the nephilim are edgelord selves I don't know and again it's just how they get taken up into this Christian this Christian adjacent world this Christian hegemonic world the devil because he's kind of gone through this Satan has gone through this romantic transformation beginning the 19th century but the nephilim are sort of become Satan adjacent and they benefit from that romantic that romanticizing you know Satan becoming sort of the anti-hero but but yeah when you read the texts actually read the texts they don't come across as anti-heroes they come across as like you know kind of bumbling kids it's interesting that you say that about them being you know kind of you know sex-starved creatures out out there because when I was doing a little search on just online to see you know what kind of stuff is out there in pop culture I did find a paranormal romance novel where the nephilim are erotic male characters that possess other people and go around and have sex with women and have children with women so this is completely you think that they're popping up in romance novels now but it's not sex of course everywhere and it's sex it's sex hell of course but again it's funny that they've become seductive vampire-like Dracula-like characters but again even that scene where they're first you knock where they're like arguing who goes first like oh we're gonna have to buy each other mutual excretions cause I don't want to get in trouble if I don't send me out I don't want to be called dead red handy with this it looks like kids that's the kind of thing kids do you jump first no you jump first the text the other thing I go to is that one of the things that we rob ancient text of is humor if you read for instance the story of Genesis the Garden of Eden story and you read it in Hebrew the Hebrew has puns the Hebrew has word plays the Hebrew has all kinds of things and if you read it on the face of it and just block off John Milton for one second right where it's all supposed to be cosmically bad or whatever just get John Milton out of your head and you read it it's about a boy child and a woman child girl child basically being tricked by a talking snake to eat it's funny and you see the word play right you hear word plays like the snake is Arum is clever and the Adam and Eve they're Arumim they're naked typically when we see puns like that it typically in most cultures that's flashing to us that this is meant to be funny yeah and we rob these texts of their humor by making them oh it's about a fall from grace and it's becomes everything becomes John Miltonized and when I read Enoch what I see is the humor that these texts were meant to be funny and that the Nephilim were not meant to be scary creatures they weren't meant to be sort of like you know terrifying we're making fun of them because they came to earth to have sex with women and got themselves killed it's a cautionary tale about like don't let your you know your vibes undo you so again I think that we should part of what I went in again I think this is not unique to us Monty clearly thought it took it very seriously as well but I think another reading is just let's not leave these texts bereft of the humor which I think was actually there to begin with that's also interesting because if you'll allow me I have two other examples of things that I found that I thought were very very interesting and if we look at books there's lots of books out there with Nephilim but one series that I thought was really creative look at my nose again it's the Victor Renquist series by Mick Farron where Nephilim are an ancient alien race of course we have to have aliens in the story somewhere they created a proto vampire race and they also created another race called the Urshu which were a race of watchers and one of these watchers was Cthulhu and I thought that was hilarious because Farron is really mixing it up here with all of the different go hard or go home just I thought that was great another one was called Sigma Force by James Rollins and he portrays the watchers as a hybrid species of early humans and Neanderthals so there's no angels or anything in there but they created Atlantis so the creativity is just off the charts here I just think as far as looking at it in a lighthearted way kind of the humorous way I think that you see that a lot we have a deck of myth mythological things in western civilization and what you do is you shuffle the deck and you're like Atlantis, Nephilim, aliens done now it's a young adult novel series yeah but that's where it's going I mean, that's what you see a lot of times I mean there are all these other series I didn't even mention but yeah, there are a lot of young people that are either themselves Nephilim, they have to redeem themselves or they have to protect humans or there's just all these other storylines that are coming out in all of these fictional stories of course and that's, I think that is what it's intended for it's intended to be entertainment, it's intended to be lighthearted and just an interesting tale but there are people who take this very seriously and I did find a lot of things I did find a few things that would you know, indicate that people aren't just thinking this is all this fun and fiction I mean, the Bible is still fundamental to read the Bible literally as they're Nephilim and for example, I found an article from a website called BibleStudyTools.com I don't know exactly what kind of denomination or what this is related to but they're talking about the Nephilim in this article asking if they still own the earth today I mean, they're not being sarcastic here, they're not being satirical and they unequivocally state in this article that the Nephilim did exist they were real and that they are now bound and chained in hell until the judgment so these you know, there are people that think that these beings were real that they're still real there's someplace else right now and they're going to come back on the flip side I found another blog post from someone who invoked Samael and goes into a description of how he did this, this person gives a bit of background about Samael and then very you know, very I would say you know, sober academic type of fashion trying to explain the history of Samael you know, giving a general outline about his invocation ritual talking about the grimoires that he referenced you know, he studied and referenced how we altered the work the rituals to work for him which kind of suggests to me that we might be talking about chaos magic here but I don't want to make any claims because he didn't specifically say and he edited the blog post later like several years later to kind of correct mistakes that he had made before so he's taking this very seriously discussions that he has in his comment section also are quite serious about you know, how are we interacting with these grimoires, how are we practicing, how are we referring how do we communicate with these with these beings and it's not considered a game at all No, no, no, people summon I mean, trust me, I get people asking me basically every week I get questions on how to summon angels to get their ex-wife back or punish their ex-wife really? Oh yeah, people are deathly serious about this stuff which is funny with Samuel is that at least in Jewish lore, Samuel's thought of as castrated he's a castrated being whose penis doesn't work and that's why he's so angry is that he and Lilith were forged together and that Lilith Samuel and they're sort of counter Adam and Eve but whereas Adam and Eve can procreate Lilith is barren, Samuel's impotent and castrated and that's what makes him so angry is that and so I often see guys, you know, like, yeah, summon Samuel, he's like a fierce warlord he's real angry he's so fierce because he needs like angel Viagra he's just really sexually frustrated He's a very frustrated guy and so again it's just funny what legends survive and which ones don't and, you know, we want Samuel to, you know, be like this and like that but, you know, the lore and the legends really go all over the place in terms of what this guy is, this entity is like and it's interesting what people pick and choose, right? Like, we want to represent the Nephilim typically as pretty scary fierce creatures whereas I think an argument can be made that they're in fact the opposite deal with Samuel and again how these creatures get revalorized how Lilith becomes goes from basically a succubus who is responsible for crib death to becoming a feminist icon myths myths or protein that's why they they work because they are able to adapt and change and again the book of the Watchers, right? It goes it originates in a Jewish milieu and in Palestine, you know, third century BCE and it's taken up into a third century CE Persian milieu and it spoke to people. That's bizarre and it spoke to people from here to China so that's to me like it's unsupported if that can happen in the third century with the slow rate of communication there and it's completely unsurprising that the Nephilim show up in rom-coms or whatever in the 21st century we should be utterly unsurprised by utterly unsurprised by that and further I think part of the popularity is it's Christian adjacent it's we live in a dominant Christian culture the language we speak is a language of of Christianity of Bible it's our it's one of our western civilization literary touchstones it's obviously a religious one and insofar as people can sort of keep one pinky finger holding on to the Bible right and then go do something completely weird over here it allows them to maintain a kind of touchstone to a text that they take to be at some level canonical but then they kind of run wild with it from there which is not unusual the book of Mormon does that the rabbinical literature does that this is not we should not be surprised by it because it's fundamentally not new the book of watchers was that it was them taking a line from Genesis and then building a whole fanfiction around it and we're still fighting fanfiction today and I think we should it should be utterly unsurprising that that continues to go on when Harry Potter hang out with the Nephilim or whatever agree exactly we yeah I think that we should never down we should never discount the fecundity of these myths and if you want evidence for it just look back to the third century and what money were they able to do with it well said well said and we are running a little bit low on time I know Dr. Sledge you have to leave soon Stephanie did you have any other questions for Dr. Sledge before we go no I didn't I just wanted to thank him so much for sharing all of this information because I I did a little bit of reading myself to prepare for this but as I I don't as I said I'm not this is not my area so I learned a lot today I really appreciate that so thank you and again I admire your work greatly and so thank you keep with the stuff you put out some amazing and wonderful and Jason you as well I'm sad to hear that's coming down to the end of the first season of your of your show but I just want to an educator to another thank both of you for for again doing the I think a uniquely difficult job and I know it from experience of being an outward facing scholar who engages the public that means we have to do the scholarship on the back end but also make it engaging on the front end that's a really difficult job and again my admiration for for both of you for for electing to do that thank you thank you and I the same I can say for you for what you're doing you're really helping people understand really complex concepts ideas and texts etc I think you're doing a great job too thank you yes thank you both Justin thank you Stephanie Justin you never know when season June might be around the corner sure so you know we'll see I have some stuff but I can't really talk about it yet but I am working on season two so I will see that stuff right yes sir but yeah thank you both I am like I said huge huge admirers of both of your work and it was an honor Stephanie having you join us and Justin it's always a pleasure and I always learn something new whenever you come on now on I will always think of the Nephilim as the the incels of the the beavers and butthead the beavers and butthead of the angels I mean I'm really not joking I really think of them let's go have second goals yeah you do it first oh my goodness yeah it really reminds me almost of like in the Nag Hammadi texts like origin of the world or reality of the rulers like we think of these like fallen characters these fallen entities is super badass but like they're like huffing and puffing and they can't get Adam to stand up and they're like arguing amongst themselves like yeah they're really made to look like bumbling idiots like in a Faddy Arbuckle story or Faddy Arbuckle movie or something and if you get names for them right like we're like Sacklasts, Blind, Stupid, Fool I mean you get these Archons get like that they don't get fierce names Samael is pretty cool like Poison of God but they're typically like Sacklasts, Blind I mean so that you know they're not I never think of them as terribly fearsome absolutely well Stephanie did you want to plug your shows and your social media one more time before we go than just Dr. Schlescher yes thank you it's www.rejectedreligion.com on social media it's Rejected Religion YouTube is also Rejected Religion I'm going to be uploading a new interview with Sue Terry on my YouTube channel she is the former director of the Magical Women Conference and she started her own platform now called Owl House Seminars had a great discussion with her and that interview is going to be coming soon so hopefully you'll be able to have a look awesome awesome and Dr. Sledge we know you have some new merchandise the Patreon is popping right now yeah yeah the channel is doing well but yeah you can find me at Esoterica on YouTube but aside from that social media scares the devil out of me the Nephilim hold nothing to the power of the algorithm I'd rather deal with the Nephilim than deal with Facebook well thank you guys so much thank everyone for joining us who's watching who made comments I really do enjoy the spontaneity of these lives sorry for the snafu at the beginning again no problem Stephanie, Justin, until next time I really hope you will both join us again this has been an absolute pleasure this has been so much fun and everyone watching we will see you for Daniel Ogden at the end of April Edward Watts got some good lives coming up so hope to see you there and we will see you then until then take care bye have a good day