Episode 029
Jequon comes clean. Nephilim history in a nutshell.
SHOW NOTES:
- Short episode, short intro. I apologize. I attended a writing workshop Friday-Sunday lead by Tom Spanbauer, teacher to Chuck Palahniuk (the author of FIGHT CLUB), and was very short on time with all the extra writing assignments that were involved.
- I've been informed the iTunes feed may not be updating properly.
I'm still looking into this, (FIXED—but I had to remove the full-text from the feed due to size limitations imposed by feedburner…iTunes should update now, but it may take several hours / a couple days) and will post a solution in Episode 030 if at all possible. In the meantime, subscribe to the "feedburner" feed if the latest episodes are not being loaded into your podcatcher of choice.Thanks to Laura in NY who pointed this out. - Don't miss the promo before the episode: "The Prophet of Panamindorah" by Abbie Hilton—www.panamindorah.com
Our fathers, bored of heaven, hallowed be thy game. Think: ‘archangel' with a sense of humor and a libido. Divvying up the perfect tens from around the globe, an oath was sworn and spirit became flesh; two-hundred matches made in heaven, consummated on Earth. Behold: the Brangelinas of their day.
God was not amused. Nobody asked Him.
Nine months later: babies of renown. All boys. Cursed from the moment of conception. Mother's milk from one breast we chased with blood from her other. How they kept their only-child's cravings a secret, I'm not sure. Teething must've been a real bitch. But as we learned to walk and talk, we also learned to hide our ‘blessings' from others. And because our supplemental feedings came from adults, we aged normally.
God must've been very disappointed. In those days, infants born with deformities were either buried alive, sacrificed, or eaten—their fate dictated by local custom and how long it'd been since the last rain. Short a couple hundred cherubs, He sent Gabriel to make our fathers disappear; not of the Earth, they were fair game.
Age twelve and we're bastards.
I'd learned the angelic tongue by then, but not how Dad was bringing home the blood; mom slit her throat in grief before she had a chance to show me. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: my first two reasons to hate the Most High, of many more to come. Dark days, those…
At first, my tribe rallied around me. When the king dies, the son takes the throne and all that—which I forgot to mention: our fathers were made the rulers of their respective clans; I mean, no one descends from heaven as a janitor, right?
Bleed that as I may, puberty hits, and it turns out, mom could not have shown me the best way to tap a vein.
Horny, handsome, and half-human, it was only a matter a time before the natives grew restless—before we were old enough to discover that sixteen will indeed get you twenty—twenty more years of youth, that is, which in time would be our undoing. Childhood friends marveled at our immortality through cataracts; beat us with canes when their daughters returned from our tents, light-headed and liable to bite someone.
Three strikes and you're outcast.
All around the world, once favorite sons exiled to die the lone wolf in the wilderness. And that's where our story would have ended: God basking in His patient wrath; the villagers safe; the virgins pure…
But our fathers, they must've known this was coming. Soon after their sabbatical of sin, sensing God's displeasure, they'd tried begging for forgiveness, even asking the prophet Enoch to intercede on their behalf. Request denied apparently, because along with our language lessons, they always made sure we knew what to do and where to go if our people ever turned on us. And so, one by one—never having met another like us—we each trekked to Mount Hermon, trusting in the wisdom our fathers had the foresight to instill.
Some required months to make the journey; those separated by oceans or ice bridges took years to convene. We waited for the stragglers, knowing they possessed the same strength that brought us here, learning with each new arrival just how unfathomably vast the earth was back then. To pass the time we recounted eerily similar stories of our lives thus far, bonding over the commonalities which transcended the cultures of our upbringing. Becoming family.
By the time the last Naphil arrived at the mount, we'd each been alive a hundred years, and no one looked a day over forty (obviously, I managed to replenish my supply of red a tad more frequently than most). There were a couple gray hairs. A few wrinkles. The blood is the life, and evidently, there's very little of it in the middle of the Sahara—just ask Zavebe… My point being, we'd been around long enough to spawn a legend or two. Memories muttered on the deathbed of a generation; myths in the making.
Before we knew it, every tribe within a thousand mile radius of our ad hoc community feared the ‘flesh-eating giants living in the mountains'—exaggerations based on mere droplets of truth—but hey, where there's smoke there's fire, and where there's fear it's an inferno. There were rumors of war. And though we were strong, we were vastly outnumbered—not to mention unorganized, which turned out to be the bigger problem.
Two-hundred kings, one mountain.
A shared physiology, but no agreed upon philosophy for dealing with it:
Suck ‘em dry vs. save some for later.
Nephilim as nomads vs. form a new nation.
Hunt and gather vs. farm.
And what to do about the growing number of Veingels? those transformed by our bite?
No one wanted to say it, so of course I was the one who did: we needed to come together and agree on some form of government. Otherwise the coming war would be civil. We gathered at the peak to debate our future. After seven days of deadlock, we nominated twenty Naphil to share legislative privilege, plus one to break ties. Another week, and a constitution of sorts emerged. On the condition these laws would be reviewed every ten years by an elected council and amended as necessary, we swore our allegiance to the first revision of the Codes of Nephilim Conduct.
The first rule of Bite Club is, you do not talk about Bite Club…secrecy became our modus operandi; to this day, the only Code never altered. Math, ecology, and human nature inspired the rest: Restrictions on feeding frequency, non-O-neg allowances, taking responsibility for Veingels-those sorts of things.
And with the Codes, a new found clarity concerning our current situation; i.e. enough with the sausage fest.
It was time to disperse, to return to the respective lands of our childhood. When our unflagging youth attracted suspicion, we were to move on and create a new, anonymous identity far enough away we wouldn't be recognized—easier said than done before the advent of agriculture allowed for cities. In my childhood stomping grounds of Central and South America, I quickly tired of uprooting myself every five-to-ten years, and got around being a travelin' man through boldness: posing as the appropriate God returned to rule, fulfilling the prophesies recorded in the myths of the region. When that got old, or my current civilization of residence was on the decline, I went back to living like a nomad. At any rate, those halcyon days of state sponsored human sacrifice pretty much ended with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs…But I'm getting way ahead of myself even with this ancient history.
Because although the Codes served us quite well, we'd underestimated two things before we left Mount Hermon: 1) God's unwillingness to shrug off a ‘mistake.' 2) the appeal of a good story.
Some of us had lived on the mountain upwards of fifty years before the first meeting of the Council; I'd put the average at around twenty. Feeding at least once every three months to stay spry: four times a year, times two-hundred Nephilim, times twenty years…you could say we made our bite mark on the region-a region which just so happened to contain the progeny of God's chosen people. When stories existed only as tales told ‘round the fire, we were more infamous than snipes. From God's perspective, human knowledge of our existence weakened His claim to omnipotence-His authority to insist He alone be worshipped above other Gods. Given God's God-complex, I guess we'd left him no choice…
The forty days of rain was nothing. The simultaneous tsunamis, sudden thaws of snowmelts, glacial melting…and for all I know, meteorites striking the oceans-I wouldn't put it past Him-those caused the most pain. Despite what you may have heard in Sunday school, though, the waters did not cover the entire surface of the planet. God wanted to solve a potential gene-pool problem, not start from scratch.. While Noah's neighbors poked fun, we caught wind of the yacht designed by Yahweh and hoofed it to high ground. We knew what He was capable of. And so we survived. Even so, God still saved face by wiping out every man, woman, and child who knew anything about us, sparing only His loyal servants safe on the ark…
And the O-Negs we took with us to the mountaintops to tide us over.
Oops.
Hey, even the Lord has roaches. He had to accept that no act of God could rid the Earth of us without bringing an end also to the race He created in His image. And since he'd made covenants with mankind to never again unleash such a calamity, He had to change His approach. The new strategy: spread propaganda via the prophets, and outsource His dirty work to devotees.
"Now, fast-forward several thousand years, or we'll never get to sleep… The descendents of these ‘holy' hit-men, they call themselves the ‘Sons of Jared,' and they're the ones who ambushed me at the Del, the ones who kidnapped Cindy-only they're outsourcing now, too, in a big way. We're probably dealing with private contractors, or small teams of government agency types, working strictly off-the-books…
"Anyway, it's a lot to take in, and those are just the Cliff's Notes. But now at least, if you still want my help, I'll know it's not on a whim."
Author: Jeremy James
Shelved In: Episodes
Main Topic: Mt. Hermon
Keywords: archangel • CHAPTER 29 • Gabriel • God • Naphil • Nephilim •
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...Hope you can understand where I’m coming from. You deserve my best.
