The Writing of Liber Nephilim

Originally posted on Frater Barrabbas’s blog December 10, 2023. The original article is available here.

Many years ago, back in 1990, I started on a magical journey that led me to evoke the four chiefs of a body of fallen angels named the Nephilim by some, but who were also known as the Beni Elohim, or Sons of God. They were a part of the angelic host known as the Watchers. How did that journey start out? Where did I get the idea that these angels even existed and were an important part of the occult and magical lore from antiquity through the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, Dr. John Dee, Enochian magic, and to the twentieth-century Golden Dawn, Thelema, and the present century? There was no documented evidence to even support such an imagined connection and lineage. Did I make all of this up, and perhaps is this why many magicians, occultists, and the scholars of the Enochian system of magic found my claims to be unsupportable and possibly irrelevant?

How it started was when I was in college studying Classical Hebrew, and someone turned me on to Genesis, chapter 6. I had not been much of a Bible scholar prior to my studies of the Hebrew Tenach, so I was unfamiliar with this odd chapter and what it signified. This was also the time when I was a member of the Alexandrian coven from hell in Milwaukee, and what I was studying in college was both inspired and echoed in the coven. That’s because this coven was a particularly high-magic group, which was engaged in developing the Golden Dawn material and scant grimoire magic that was available at the time. I found in the college library a copy of A Dictionary of Angels by Gustav Davidson, and that book gave me a list of the Nephilim angelic chiefs and pointed me to the apocryphal “Book of Enoch” where I began to study whatever had been written about these

fallen angels. At the time, I had not yet determined either how to access them or if that was possible or even desired. They were a curiosity because I did not find these fallen angelic spirits listed in any of the grimoires that I had access to.

Some years later, I was studying the Enochian system of magic and had gotten a copy of Meric Causabon’s book that reproduced a number of John Dee’s diaries. While I had studied all of what was available on Enochian Magic at the time, most notably the books by Crowley and Mather’s Golden Dawn, there was little else available except the raw diaries themselves, which I now was able to study. One item that caught my attention was when Dee stated that he was seeking the wisdom of Enoch when engaging with Edward Kelly in their famous scrying sessions. This is why the system of magic that they uncovered in these sessions was called the Enochian system of magic.

However, since the Book of Enoch that I had studied linked that patriarch with the Nephilim, and that Enoch had acted as an intercessor between Yahweh and the Nephilim, I felt that there must be a connection of some kind between the Enochian system of magic and these fallen angels. While Dee never made such a connection, I saw it as a striking possibility. I also found where the whole process of the revelation of the Enochian system of magic was begun. It started in the early scrying sessions where Dee and Kelly conferred with same the four Archangels who were reputed to have imprisoned and sealed away the angels of the Nephilim, according to the Book of Enoch. That was an odd coincidence, and I sensed that if I invoked and approached these same four Archangels who had sealed the mysteries and magic of the Nephilim, perhaps they would allow me to access them and begin to retrieve what I believed was additional Enochian magical material.

Now many of those occultists and ceremonial magicians who were working the Enochian system of magic believed that the cannon of lore began and ended with Dee’s diaries. While Dee did engage in additional scrying sessions after the defection of Kelly, these sessions were a pale imitation of what had previously been produced. Thus, the period when Dee and Kelly were engaged in these scrying sessions represents the whole universe of Enochian lore. What occultists and magicians were doing was refining and perfecting what was already developed and written down by Dee, but not inventing or producing anything new. This fact was surprising to me, since one would think that getting back in touch with the spirits that Dee had communicated with centuries ago would be something that anyone who sought to work this system would have done once they sufficiently knew the lore to perform an invocation.

So, my supposition was to embark on a whole new trajectory and therefore identify the Nephilim as the source of the Enochian system of magic, if indeed there was a connection. For some reason, I emotionally felt that this was an undeniable fact, and acting on it, I began a series of magical workings and ordeals starting in 1990 to seek that link between the Enochian system of magic and the Nephilim. Instead of researching the materials that existed or any other that might be in some unknown collection, library or museum, I decided to perform rituals invocations to get the information that I sought straight from the source. It does surprise me that no else has thought of doing this kind of operation, at least none that I have heard about. Since Dee and Kelly got their information from the spirits, why not invoke those same spirits and get them to reveal yet more new lore? Anyway, I suspect that my approach was quite unorthodox, since we must assume that no one can replicate when Dee and Kelly accomplished, or can we?

If you ask the spirits a pointed question, in most case they will give you an answer. However, if you don’t ask them a question, such as “who were the Nephilim” and “how can I get in touch with them today,” then I believe that the spirits will not give out that information voluntarily. It is part of the multiple layered mysteries surrounding some spirits, particularly those angels who fell to earth because of their love of mortal women and, by extension, humanity. I had to pointedly ask the question, and when I did, only then was the mythic-based truth revealed to me. I got the four seals (to access the Nephilim) and the blessings of the four archangels that I invoked. They informed me that the angels known as the Nephilim were sequestered by their own will, and that the archangels only assisted them. That was intriguing to me, so when I specifically went through a process of evoking four of the chiefs of the Nephilim, what I discovered completely surprised me and also inundated me with new lore. They told me in their own words that not only were they the secret authors of the Enochian system of magic, but there was far more material available that hadn’t been revealed to Dee and Kelly.

That’s not all that was revealed to me during those workings. I also discovered that the supposed mortal women that they fell to earth to mate with were actually the daughters of Lilith, who had their own powers and magical lore, and became the witches and demon queens of infamous Jewish folklore renown. What I had inadvertently stumbled across was a massive store of various kinds of metaphysical, magical, occult, and witchcraft lore that was, for all extents and purposes, completely untapped. It was waiting for someone or some group of people to explore, develop and disseminate it to the world. The volume of lore was too great for me to independently derive and develop, but because I was so isolated in my pursuit and what I was working with was outside of the boundaries of known and expected lore, there were few to none for me to share this lore and the connections that they implied. I was the only one who actually worked with these spirits over the following decades, even though I made this lore and the associated rituals available to my brothers and sisters in the Order of the Gnostic Star. The chiefs of the Nephilim begged me to publish this ritual lore and the background mythology to the public in a book, but I did not have the time nor the skills required to effectively take on such a writing project.

Now, after writing and publishing nine other books, and having the time, I assembled the relevant material that I had collected over the years and selected what I thought would be best to include in a book that contained both an introduction to my ideas, the mythology, rituals, and experiences based on my diaries from the time. This new book that I will be publishing and should be out in October 2024 will likely become a major contribution to the practice and development of the Enochian system, or it may produce a whole new tradition based wholly on new material. Will those who purchase it build the rituals and perform the working to experience what I experienced over thirty years ago? Only time will tell how this book is received and what effect it will have. Can it be used to change the foundation for working with the Enochian system magic? Should this new lore even be called Enochian anymore? This might be the inauguration of a new magical tradition, to be named after the Nephilim instead of Enoch.

I encourage my readers to purchase this book when it is released, read it over to discover what I experienced years ago, and then decide what to do with this ritual lore. How shall you proceed? Do you take the sanctioned path or the unsanctioned path? Should you evoke the chiefs of the Nephilim and find out what they know to see if it matches what I have said it does regarding potential new magical and occult lore? That, of course, is the way to test my hypothesis, and I wait for the time when there are other magicians out there who have experienced what I experienced and who want to talk about the future of this path. I look forward to that day.