The Irin were an advanced
people of Middle Eastern legend, a tall, pale-skinned and fair or red-haired
people who settled in the area among the local inhabitants who were of typical
Middle-Eastern appearance. Researcher Andrew Collins suggests they may have
been of the Denisovan race, who evolved in the far north near Siberia and whose
DNA is found in the modern human genome.
The Irin were also known
as the Watchers, and are described in Biblical texts as angels or the ‘sons of
God’. This suggests a memory of a people whose skills and technology were far
beyond what the storytellers’ descendants could grasp. They had advanced skills
such as agriculture, medicine, the use of bracelets and ornaments, perhaps
magical and shamanic skills, and the arts of astronomy and reading the skies.
The Biblical Book of Enoch describes how they studied and monitored the skies,
and researcher Andrew Collins suggests their name comes not from watching
humans for any moral digression, as is often suggested, but from watching the
movement of the stars and planets and cycles of time. An obsession with
monitoring the skies for any disorder was common in cultures worldwide into
historical times, and could well have its origin in the devastation caused by
the falling stars which remained very strong in folk memory.
The Watchers’ story takes
a sinister turn when a few of them left their mountainous homeland and taught
their gifts to humankind. While the humans didn’t seem to dislike the contact, the
other ‘angels’ who remained aloof in their mountainous home were opposed to
this education. They especially abhorred the fact that ‘daughters were born to
men on Earth, and the sons of God saw that they were fair and took wives of
them all that they chose’ (Genesis, Ch6.)
They may have had a valid
point. Europeans over several hundred years have discovered people across the
world and forced agriculture, alcohol, firearms, designer clothes, MacDonalds,
Christian doctrine and a hundred other things on them in the guise of improving
their lot. The damage to their culture can never be repaired. 
The children fathered by
the sons of God were known as the Nephilim, the ‘fallen ones’, sometimes
translated as ‘giants’, as they inherited the stature of their fathers, and it
seems both angels and humans saw them as unnatural. The rebel Watchers,
sometimes called the rebel angels, were imprisoned in the underworld after a
lengthy war and all the children born of the undesirable unions were rounded up
and slaughtered.
But their bloodlines
survived to some extent, for the patriarch Enoch’s own grandson Lamech had a
son whose skin was white and his hair and eyes shone bright, and Lamech
commented fearfully that ‘he is not like an ordinary human being, but he looks
like the children of the angels of heaven.’
The Book of Enoch
describes in detail the patriarch’s visit to Eden, which as I have said before
is another name for the land of Dilmun. No mortal human had been here before or
since, and while there, Enoch saw a terrible place where crazed prisoners were
tortured by angels with savage weapons, and later he saw the punishment of the
two hundred Watchers who revealed forbidden the arts to humankind and took
wives among them.
My ideas as to what Enoch
witnessed, and what really happened to the Nephilim, will become clear in the
story.
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