Was There a Trans-Dimensional Race of Hybrid Beings?

In his interview with Skeptiko host Alex Tsakris last week, Ancient Aliens Debunked filmmaker Chris White discussed his beliefs about Noah’s ark, the Great Flood, and the beings that lived before the Flood, whom he considers to be supernatural beings from another dimension that interbred with humans and gave rise to a hybrid race, which the Flood destroyed. These are the Nephilim of Genesis 6, the “sons of God” (literally: sons of the gods) and their children, the “mighty me of old, the men of renown.” Here’s part of what he told Tsakris:

…I think when you go back into anthropology you see a consistent profile of these beings. They’re summoned the same way; they’re consistently referred to as evil, deceptive, very, very intelligent, have an agenda of sorts, seek and accept worship. But I think the deceptive thing is really what comes so clear from Sumerians forward. These things will tell you what you want to hear.

They are often referred to in the texts as “watchers,” people that are observing you. They know what books you’re reading. They know what to say when you have the Ayahuasca trip and they know how to stroke just exactly what you’ve been reading on the plane trip to Peru. They have an agenda and unless we realize their agenda—and you’re saying, “Oh, you’re talking Christian theology right now.” We’re talking just truth right now.

If we can accept some of the basic premises that I just said, that there are beings and that people all across the world know how to summon them from time immemorial without Christian biases and are saying the same stuff, deceptive, super-intelligent, able to interact and give thoughts to and possess and are seeking possession. Possession is not a concept unique to Christianity and it’s always negative.

White also explained that myths and legends support his views about the universal nature of these beings since their description does not vary across time or cultures, though only Christian myth preserves the complete story. He explained that skeptics have failed to challenge the existence of such myths:

Now, that’s the philosophical situation that we’re in and until somebody starts to stop saying that they don’t exist and admit that they do, then we can start having a rational discussion with skeptics and everybody else. But at this point we’re at really the Dark Ages of people owning up to it. Nobody’s challenged me on this. They’ve only said, “All you’ve cited on this were Christian Apologist sites and I can’t look into that because it’s a Christian Apologist site.”

Well, okay, maybe it’s a Christian Apologist site but they are citing evidence there that they’re pointing you to the different mythologies in all the different places. You can go look at those mythologies and you can report back and say, “Well, I looked at them and they don’t exist.” But that’s not what you’re going to find. Anybody that actually does this work and is in deep in the mythologies is going to come up with it.

All right, I’ll take the bait. I will say that there is no consistent myth of super-intelligent evil beings who lie and deceive for personal gain. Nor is possession “always negative.” T. K. Oesterreich—a German philosophy professor and believer in the reality of possession and psychic powers—compiled a massive study of possession in 1921, Possession: Demoniacal and Other (English trans. 1930), which details in excruciating detail the many and varied forms of possession experienced by peoples across time and space, which differ greatly in their details. Oesterreich, however, saw possession as being remarkably consistent across time and space, agreeing fundamentally with the account given in Mark 5:2-10 (parallel to Matthew 8:28-34 and Luke 8:26-39). The evidence he marshaled, though, belies the fact that possession is not typically the thrashing, violent usurpation of the soul typified by The Exorcist. (Exorcist author William Peter Blatty used Oesterreich’s book in writing his novel.)

In truth, leaving aside whether such possessions have objective reality outside the mind, these possessions are rarely “negative” but are frequently welcomed by the possessed and play an important social role in the cultures that experience them. To take but the most famous example: The Greek Oracle of Delphi experienced possession by the god Apollo, and this was considered a very good thing. It is primarily in the Christian tradition that possession is considered negative, because monotheistic faiths by definition view interactions with beings other than the singular god as threatening to that deity’s supremacy. In traditional cultures, possessions can be positive, negative, or neutral. Christians are welcome to view the oracles as negative and manipulative, but those who created, employed, and experienced them did not.

But this isn’t really getting at the heart of the matter, is it? White’s primary claim is that the beings described in Genesis 6, the “sons of God” and their children, the “men of renown,” were real trans-dimensional beings and their hybrid children. Here is the relevant passage from Genesis (6:1-4), the entire of the Biblical narrative of them:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

Non-literalist scholars read this as the Biblical authors’ acknowledgement of a hero mythos among the Jews parallel to that of the Babylonians and other Near Eastern peoples, including the Greeks. I’ve written about these before. The typical story is that the gods bore children to humans, who became semi-divine supermen. Obvious examples include Gilgamesh, Perseus, and Heracles. As I noted before, explications of this biblical passage by later Jewish authors, as in the Book of Giants, make explicit the parallel, counting Gilgamesh among the “hybrid” giants

But it is primarily among the history-minded peoples of the Near East that a (relatively) clear distinction exists between the gods, the semi-divine heroes, and mortal men. (It is not perfectly clear: Heracles became a god, the hero Jason was fully human, and Dionysus was all sorts of ambiguity.) Outside of this tradition, the lines are blurred still further. Some heroes are human, some are the children of gods, and others are autochthonous creations that spring up from the earth, the trees, or other natural features. In the case of Native American myths, many heroes are animals. As a general rule (though no means universal), societies on the lower end of the development spectrum tell stories about gods and animals; higher-order civilizations humanize the stories into tales of heroes, first semi-divine, then fully human.

I recently edited a one-volume edition of Edwin Sidney Hartland’s Legend of Perseus, which contains more than 500 pages of worldwide variations on the theme of the Perseus hero myth. I defy anyone to read that and find any sort of consistency in the depiction of this most archetypical of heroes: The same character is sometimes a god, sometimes a demigod, sometimes a human; his “divine” birth ranges from miraculous to mundane. Worldwide, parallel stories feature even broader differences.

Cover of my edition of "The Legend of Perseus," which records hundreds of mutually contradictory legends on various aspects of the Perseus theme.

Insofar as hybridization goes, there is again no consistency across cultures. Julius Caesar claimed Venus as his divine ancestor, while Native groups across the Americas speak of talking animals as their ancestors. Where gods are invoked as ancestral beings, they are the ancestors of still living groups and therefore the “hybrids” are what we would call “humans.” Among the Greeks, the Great Flood killed off people who were the offspring of the men Prometheus made from clay and the woman Hephaestus fashioned, Pandora. The age of the “hybrid” heroes was much later, and the ancient Greeks counted those “hybrids” among their direct ancestors. Sure, you could argue they got things in the wrong order, but then you’re rewriting myths to conform to a preconceived narrative. You might also try to squeeze the first man and Pandora into the “hybrid” mold, but to do so would condemn Adam and Eve to the same fate, since Adam was also made from clay and Eve fashioned later by (a) God/god(s).

Among the Maya, the Flood killed off most of the men of wood—not hybrid god-creatures—and modern humans arose later. But even these wooden men still exist, as New World monkeys, and I doubt anyone would try to explain that monkeys are hybrids from another dimension.

As for the claim that traces of the “Watchers” from the Book of Enoch can be found in world myths, I confess that I am at a loss. The Greeks had no evil “Watchers” on the order of those of the Book of Enoch, unless you count the Fates, who “watch” what people are doing but are not evil. The closest I can come are the Titans, the former race of gods who were condemned to Tartarus; their leader, Kronos, served as an oracle of the dead. (This was the view of occultist Richard Cavendish.) But this hardly seems the same, and at any rate the story is derived from Near Eastern models which also influenced the Enochian account, so they are not completely independent.

Nor do the Norse have Watchers, though Odin had two ravens who told him everything that occurred on earth each day. I don’t think that the ravens were quite what White had in mind.

Really, the only way to stretch the concept of Watchers to cover most mythologies is to adopt the idea of the early Church Fathers that pagan gods are themselves demons, so therefore all pagan mythologies are really demonologies of various Watchers and other infernal cliques. On the authority of St. Peter (Ephesians 2:2 with 6:12), Christians identify Satan with “the air” (in the KJV; “the unseen world” in other translations) and therefore demons with the air and other natural elements; from this, they see Watchers in pagan nature spirits, but I am at a loss to find any who answer to the Watchers of Enoch. The best I can do is suggest that White is referring to the widespread Near Eastern myth of the succession of the gods, in which an older race of gods is dispossessed by the younger and banished; but this is no means universal outside the Near East.

Where there are similarities in otherwise unrelated myths, it is on the structural level, and these similarities need no demons or Watchers to explain them. White mentions ayahuasca, the hallucinogen that South Americans use to access the spirit world. As I have repeatedly discussed, David Lewis-Williams (in The Mind in the Cave and Inside the Neolithic Mind) has carefully examined how altered states of consciousness, acting on specific neurological pathways in the brain, produce identical “visions” across time and space, which are then filtered through the cultural expectations of the people seeing them. If you wish, like Graham Hancock (see his Supernatural), to believe that the brain is channeling another dimension, that is your business, but it doesn’t imply the flesh-and-blood existence of beings capable of hybridizing with human females.

More than 200 years ago, Jacob Bryant tried to explain that all world myths were merely corruptions of the Book of Genesis, the great original of all literature. To do so, he had to start with a conclusion and work backward to the evidence, faking some of it. But the evidence he relied upon fell away from under him. George Smith, upon discovering the Babylonian creation and Gilgamesh myths, imagined he found independent proof of the Bible’s truth and published it as The Chaldean Account of Genesis in 1875; within twenty years scholars realized that the Babylonian (and still earlier Sumerian) versions of the stories predated the Bible by a thousand years.

Valiant efforts have been made to explain why Noah was the original occupant of the ark, but the fact of the matter is that the stories that came down to us in Genesis are relatively late adaptations of earlier stories, a mere fraction of a Near Eastern mythology that was once very different from the one familiar from the Biblical text. Genesis 6:1-4 is in all likelihood a reminiscence of this lost mythology, an acknowledgement that the polytheistic populace once had a set of hero myths about the sons of the Semitic pantheon, just like all their neighbors. That they seem menacing and evil is not because demons are real but because monotheism simply did not allow for rivals to Yahweh, so they had to be diabolized.

Cover of my edition of "The Chaldean Account of Genesis," the first book to discuss the remarkable Babylonian tablets that recorded myths that predated the Bible.