Zikaron - remembrance.

  My memories of the Valley are couched in the timelessness of childhood, summers that stretch into the edge of eternity, where time almost stands still and sunlit nature is the backdrop to childish games: playing until sundown with sticks; building shelters of mud and ferns; lying in the grass watching animals and faces appear and disappear in the clouds. I would fall asleep feeling safe and warm, to the sound of adult voices, laughter and song. The simple food, fresh and seasonal that tasted so good; running through the fields before harvest; skimming stones on the river; sitting around campfires and gazing at the moon. The Sethite people were great storytellers, and they loved to play music, sing and dance.

  My earliest memories are not from the Valley but framed by the grand architecture of my father’s house, the giant doors, pillars and lofty halls that were built to accommodate his nephiliym visitors; the luxurious carpets and silks, the rich food and exotic perfumes. My father’s house was so very different. Maybe my memories have been clouded by what happened there later on, memory plays tricks on you does it not? Now I feel that it is more like a circle, or a coil, that you revisit in your daydreams, that surprises you at odd moments, triggered by a sound or a smell. What I remember most about the House of Lemech of the line of Qeyin, was a pervading feeling of fear, anger, envy, and a deep sorrow that was masked by an almost ritualistic dance of decorum and civility.

  In what I believe to be my very earliest memory, I may have been two or three, or four. I am lying on the cool, marble floor with one of our hunting hounds. My mother and her sister Adah are talking about my father, I cannot recall exactly what they say, but I remember the mocking tone, the triumphant laughter, and the sly smirk on my mother’s face. Then a bondservant announces my father, and they assume a posture of charm and supplication. I did not have the vocabulary for it then, but I sensed the hypocrisy and subterfuge. The two most important women in my life were both manipulators; to my father’s face he was their husband and their Adonai, behind his back he was scorned as a fool. They flattered him to his face and plotted behind his back. What were they plotting? How to rule through him most likely, how to convince him that it was his own idea to embrace the religion of Qeyin and the Watchers, so that they could benefit from the worldly advantages, the comforts it would give the extended family. They lusted after power and influence, but happiness eluded them. I never felt the joy or the peace that I felt in the Valley.

  Coming to the Valley I lived and experienced the Sethite way. All the men, women and children worked hard in the gardens and fields, tending flocks of sheep and moving cattle from pasture to pasture. The women spun and wove wool and flax, preserved food, pickled, salted and dried, baked breads and collected water. The men dug, planted, pruned and harvested according the phases of the moon. They worked hard physically, yet moved easily with strength, health and grace. The sun darkened their skin and the wind reddened their cheeks. Every Shabbat they rested, not because they were exhausted or overwhelmed, but so they could stop and appreciate their labour, so they could express gratitude and thanksgiving. The Sethites had a healthy glow that I never saw in any of the cities of Qeyin and the nephilim.

  My mother basked in luxury, bathing in goats’ milk, anointing her hair and body with expensive, scented oils. Her skin had a pallor and softness that the nephilim deemed beautiful. They relished indolence, they worshipped gold and quicksilver, they coveted precious gems, they dined on rich foods and rare fruits. They were greedy, always wanting more, always wanting to affirm their superiority, but they were never, never satisfied.

  The Sethites taught that we humans were made in the image of God, Yahuah: in partnership, in creativity, in work and stewardship of the creation. The Sethites worshipped the God who set His own hands to work, Bara. He spoke, formed, named and organised. He placed his image bearer in a garden and set A’dam to cultivate it. Our God is a worker, and we are partners in His creation. Work is a divine and dignified attribute, not a curse; it is work that builds our character and strips of us the hollow longing for ease, the idolatry of dwelling with lesser gods who can only reflect our desires back to us, like a dark hall of mirrors without spirit or wisdom.

  My father’s house became a site for the new religion of Qeyin, which was later formalised by the Sumerians, and after The Flood, the Babylonians; the creation myths devised by the Fallen ones so that they might be worshipped as gods. It was Lilith who first told me those tales, both as a small child and when I returned as a widow. I distinctly recall my first meeting with Lilith, grand matriarch of the Mothers of Darkness. Even then she was very old but had the appearance and vigour of a young woman. Some say she was a wayward daughter of Chuah, others that she was the offspring of the first satan. She taught my mother Tsillah and my aunt Adah how to grow their hair into a luxuriant mane with fermented grain rinses, to oil it weekly and wash it with a soap made from coconut flesh. She encouraged them to sleep on silk pillows and rub an elixir into their tresses to give a brilliant sheen that caught the light at every move.

  The Shining Ones and their heroic offspring are enamoured with a human woman’s hair,

  She declared once, smiling and winking at me as though letting me into a great secret. She instructed the women how to veil their hair and then provocatively let it fall to reveal their “crowning glory”. She taught them how to tantalise and seduce by applying kohl to enhance their eyes, and make a blush of rose-pigmented creams to give their cheeks the appearance of the flush of lustful excitement. She was fun, then, as I recall.

  It was she who espoused the mythology that later became expressed in the “Enuma Elis, When on High”, the Babylonian dream that Nimrod resurrected in the postdiluvian world with all the relish of the hungry ghosts he worshipped. Lilith told me the stories of Marduk or Enlil, Apsu and Tiamet. To her the Annunaki were the high gods, (To the Sethites they are the fallen Watchers) who dwelt in their flamboyant sky palaces drinking fine wine, ambrosia and other delicacies. The lesser gods, the Igigi were forced to work in the universe of endless toil: maintaining the cosmos, keeping the stars moving across the skies, forming mountains, and sending the rivers on their way. I surmise that the Igigi were the romanticised nephiliym, who could not join their supernatural parents in their spiritual domain in the second heaven. The Igigi deemed their partial divinity to be a burden, carrying the crushing yoke of creation, holding back the forces of chaos from day to day. One day, after a few thousand years of toil, they destroyed their tools and marched to the palace of the Annunaki and their leader Enlil (later the Babylonians called him Marduk), pleading exhaustion and demanding to live like the high gods. The high council of gods panicked and decried the lesser gods for suggesting that they might share their work; work was beneath their dignity, work was a curse. It was the supreme god Enlil/Marduk who proposed a new creation, a beast of burden,

  Let us create a savage – man shall be his name. He shall be charged with the service of the gods; that they might be at ease.

  Lemech my father, my mother and Qeyin before them fell for the oldest lie,

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  Ye shall be as gods.

  Unlike Chuah and A’dam they did not repent of their foolishness. They walked away from the dignity of our human design in the image of God, and collaborated with the Watchers and the nephiliym. They became a royal priesthood for the false religion. They exchanged their unique souls and true wisdom for the forbidden, premature knowledge of the Fallen Ones. They summoned the power, the cheap imitations of real power, from those who were banished from the heavens with their stolen technology. Those who could only copy and twist the truth with their charms, enchantments, their potent roots, their weapons of metal, their mirrors and vanity. They offered seeming shortcuts to power and corrupted knowledge, without morality, creative struggle or character.

  Of course I could not see that then as a small child. I knew nothing else, until the Valley. Ultimately I would come to see how that service to the lesser gods ends, always, in destruction. When you summon a power you cannot control you always end up like a spoilt pet, fed the wrong food that makes you ill, not as the master. You don’t find rest or the promised ease; you lose your soul. You saw it in Babylon Emzara, how Nimrod followed this path and made himself a god to his own slave caste of drudges, consulted oracles who reflected back his base desires, built the ziggurat to sequester the knowledge of the nephiliym to serve his own ends, but which eventually possessed him and became his master.

  Even when I was a small child I recall more than once, Lilith focused her piercing eyes on me, tilting my chin and face up toward her,

  This one will be a jewel in the Mothers of Darkness’ plans. There are still Shining Ones who will take a human wife. She will be useful. She will be honoured and glorified to carry the seed of Qeyin.

  Looking into her ancient eyes, it was as if she was calculating and plotting moves far into the future. Her eyes that often had a strange golden hue with tiny pupils would turn black. I was afraid that first time I witnessed her eyes transform into black holes, especially when I sensed the alarm that flashed across my mothers face, that she quickly replaced with a brilliant smile as Lilith turned towards her. When Lilith left, my mother and Adah whispered earnestly as they looked in my direction. As a child Emzara, I was not like you, bold and forthright. I was watchful and reserved, even then sensing the intrigues and dangers of the adult world. I kept my mouth shut and watched: the words that did not match their actions, the brittle smiles that vanished when certain people left the room, the charm and deceit.

  There is just one more story I want to tell you from that time. When I met the nephiliym who had taught my dead brother Tubal-Qeyin to forge both weapons and jewellery: El Mat’ehat, Velchanos the ugly demi-god, the nephiliym whose spirit was resurrected after the flood, and who after the destruction of the tower, spread across the world assuming many names: Vulcan, Mulciber, Hephaestus or Agni. There is nothing new under the sun Emzara. The gods never left, they just reinvent themselves with each generation, and spin their lies to trick us all over and over, again and again.

  Velchanos was said to be the offspring of the watcher Azazel, whom the Sumerians called Utu Shamash or Anu. The stories about him are many, and the truth? Who knows? The Watchers like to create bombastic stories about their deeds, and glorify their misdeeds, but I have pieced together what I understand from what was told to me by Lilith and my nurse Ayla on several different occasions,

  Velchanos was born to the Queen of Heaven, a human woman elevated by the gods, or possibly a grigori who assumed or possessed the body of a woman, or women, on earth. She goes by many names now, in many cultures across the plane of the earth, but in Sumeria they came to call her Inanna, and in Babylon her spirit was revived as Ishtar. Semiramis and Nimrod painted themselves in that tradition also you may remember? Anyway as a child of Utu and Ianna, Velchanos should’ve been beautiful, but Velchanos was ugly, terrifyingly ugly. Like most of the second wave Nephilim he was smaller than the first wave who were titanic ogres, yet he was huge none the less at fifteen feet, broader than even the most muscled human warrior, unfortunately he had a limp due to a severely damaged leg. He was a cripple. How could a god be so inflicted you may ask? Let me just say that not all their foul creations were things of beauty but enough to make you heave and retch in fear and revulsion.

  Utu and Inanna fought and bickered constantly with infidelities, jealousies and power struggles. Even though Inanna was mostly embodied as a woman, a queen, she liked to play at being a man. The Sumerian poet Enheduanna composed poems about her androgynous nature,

  Oh Inninsagurra, great-hearted mistress you turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man.

  You stalk the heavens like a wild bull.

  They called her lu-ki-sikil or “male maiden” in that she supposedly held all gender possibilities within herself. She was never motherly, nurturing or gentle; she was a warrior with a voracious sexual appetite. Of course to the Sethites she was an abomination, a hallucination created by the Fallen Ones to deceive and recruit the Qeyinites and the Shishim into their perverted priesthood of privilege and depravity.

  Velchanos was a mama’s boy, or so terrified of the capricious goddess he called mother, that he sided with her, to such an extent, that it caused Utu in a rage to throw him out of the sky palace of the gods, down onto the earth, despite his well-known skills in forging weapons and creating wondrous jewellery and trinkets. As he fell from the heavens he appeared to the people below as a flaming meteor, landing with such force that he caused a mighty earthquake. They say his fall and the resulting fires caused the destruction a city of great renown: Catalhoyuk? Or was it one of Jericho’s many incarnations?

  The other gods were furious at this particular pet project being decimated, and furthermore they had no love for the ugly nephilim who reminded them of their failures. Velchanos suffered burns and trauma to his face, so that it looked as if one side had melted into his neck. His spine, compensated for the congealed flesh with a twisted hump, a lop-sided gait, whilst his arms hung down, one below his knees, one shorter and twisted like a gnarly tree branch at his waist. He was grotesque, inclined to foul moods of self-pity and paranoia. Luckily he had a soft spot for my mother and Adah, and by extension to me. He was also devastated at my brother Tubal-Qeyin’s death; the price exacted by all grigori initiates, the blood sacrifice of the first-born.

  I was not afraid of Velchanos. I observed the flurry of activity when his approach to our compound was announced, servants running to and fro, oiling the giant door to the meeting hall, polishing the thrones and dusting the family idols in the prayer room. The kitchens were in a panic preparing breads, sweetmeats and a big pot of his favourite food – lentil stew with bitter greens. Funny the details you remember. I can still see him slurping on the stew that looked like pond slime as we entered the room.

  After being received by father and other dignitaries, Velchanos requested that the women and the new “baby”, as he called me, be brought to him to receive his gifts. I remember my mother and Adah put on their mourning attire, though the brother I never met had been dead many a year. I walked in with my mother and Adah tightly gripping my little hands, other children from the nursery toddled in behind us. Some started to cry at the sight of the ugly nephiliym. I did not. You see Emzara where you have been gifted with visions, I have been protected by a voice that whispers, in my ear, inside my head, my voice but not, and it clearly instructs me in times of danger. At this time it said,

  Do not be afraid, smile and curtsey. Notice the creature he has in his lap.

  I did so and exclaimed with delight at the strange monkey-like creature with enormous eyes that clung to his large frame. I ran forward to stroke its fur. Velchanos was delighted at my lack of fear, and as I looked straight into his enormous face I saw his eyes water, he was touched by my innocence. I also noticed his physical discomfort, his pain that could flare into irritation and a consuming rage.

  That was the first time I met a nephiliym, but it was not the last. They don’t know what love is Emzara. I did not know it then, but their compassion, their kindness or seeming affection is fleeting and conditional. They infected my people with arrogance and entitlement. They do not know the true God of mercy. They care only for themselves and they are exceedingly cruel.

  But that is all, all I remember from those days. My happiest memories are from the Valley not my father’s house.