Page 268: What you humans commonly call a demon

"Noncanonical" is a great word that I didn't really know until a few years ago.

It first popped up for me in conjunction with the "gnostic gospel" mini-craze of a few years ago. The idea of gospels that had been expurgated from the bible was a difficult one to get my head around. Even in a religious context, there is a real tension between the concept of the "word of God" and the humans that have translated, edited, and canonized "the word" over the past couple of thousand years. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett poke fun at the controversy at the end of Good Omens. In Good Omens, the Metatron (the angelic voice of God) claims to speak the word of God but, because God's word is ineffable, even the Metatron himself can't be entirely sure he has it right. If the Metatron has that problem, think about being one of King James' translators!

Outside of the context of a religion, the issue is even more explosive. To a skeptic, does the existence of noncanonical sources undermine or even contradict the basic teachings of established religion itself? It's like a bigger, uglier version of the Climategate emails.

It was that exact flashpoint of controversy that Dan Brown touched upon with The Da Vinci Code. While ancient symbols are fun, the parts of the book that really make you tingle are the ones that suggest the western world may have misread its own history. The book Holy Blood, Holy Grail from which Brown got the idea for Da Vinci essentially suggests that our understanding of the gospel stories is based on a translational error and a two thousand year cover-up of convenience by male, very human, and effable religious leaders who wanted to write Mary Magdalene out of the Bible for their own reasons.

Luckily, Old Blood doesn't wade into those waters. However, angels and demons do come up. Angels and demons are all over writings from virtually every culture in the ancient world. And while they are given only bit parts in the modern Bible (usually as messengers), to people 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, they were much more important. In the Books of Enoch or the Book of Jubilees they have a starring role. They are also all over other parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The gnostic gospels are relative newbies compared to the ancient, noncanonical Jewish books mentioned above. So many ancient fragments of the Book of Jubilees exist even today that it is clear that it was a very important text in the millennium before the Christian era began. Likewise, the Book of Enoch is effectively quoted throughout the early books of the Bible -- usually stripped of its angel and/or demonology. In Joseph Lumpkin's analysis of the Books of Enoch, he lays the texts of Enoch up against our Genesis. The results are astounding -- it's as if someone just went through and erased most of the bits where the angels were the focus. They'd been edited out. Other elements of the Dead Sea Scrolls mix angels together with humans quite liberally as well. Having avoided the canonical cut, we get to see their role more clearly in the old texts.

To the ancients, angels and demons were everyday companions. While the modern canon has written them largely out of the story, the old texts reveal that they were in there originally. That may explain why they continue to exist so prevalently in our language. Once you start listening for the number of times angels are invoked, mentioned, or imagined you won't believe how often they come up. Billy is an "angel" while little Tommy is a "little devil". Angels and devils dance on your shoulders when you make a decision. Our "better angels" guide our hands while our "inner demons" drag us down. It's pervasive. Once you start listening, you feel like the kid who could see dead people: angels and demons are everywhere.

While the editors of the canon wanted to leave them on the cutting room floor, our vestigial memories (as reflected by our language and literature) keep the angels and demons in a starring role. The real question is why? Why are angels and demons so important to us? Of course, ahem, our modern reasoning tells us that it is their power as metaphors. But what if there's another, noncanonical, reason?

Page 29: Jentillaks

All around the world there are stories of ancient races of very tall, very smart beings that taught humans the secrets of agriculture or animal husbandry or the basics of science.

Among the most intriguing are the Basque Jentillaks, a race of tall, smart warriors who lived in the hills and not only taught the humans about agriculture, but also metallurgy and the secret of the saw. Most amazingly, the Jentillaks set the standing stones.

Now, anyone who has made it to the Author's Note in Old Blood knows that the standing stones -- be they at Stonehenge, the Orkney Islands, Turkey, the Basque region, or elsewhere -- are among the central mysteries of neolithic times. How did human beings who, mostly, ate only what they could find or catch, suddenly, in the 4th millennium BC, develop the engineering and scientific skills to not only heave from the earth gigantic, monolithic stones but also acquire the scientific knowledge required to place them in astronomically significant positions? It boggles the mind.

The modern mind jumps to aliens, but of course there's no real evidence of that. If only we could ask the ancients how they did it. But wait a minute... We can, in a way. The legends they told themselves -- at least in Basque country -- said that the Jentillaks did it for them.

The Jentillaks are associated with Mari, the Great Goddess of Basque mythology. Mari is linked to Astarte, Inanna, Aphrodite, and Ishtar, the great goddesses of other cultures. Astarte and Inanna were angels. We've seen that Ishtar, the queen of the night, is depicted as having wings. The great goddesses are seen to be angels in many cultures. So, could the Jentillaks have been angels, guardian angels, looking after the Basques and occasionally building a stone circle?

Hhhhhmmmmmm.....

The link below is a nice, enigmatic little guidebook entry about the Jentillaks. For more information, also see Mark Kurlansky's wonderful book The Basque History of the World.

http://books.google.com/books?id=10YpDcz8CnQC&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=jentillak&source=bl&ots=DqhxncZ5yR&sig=MEGZ3BsLEP5evZzF2U51tf9pGhE&hl=en&ei=qToNS5njC4yWtgfh8_XtAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CBYQ6AEwBDge#v=onepage&q=jentillak&f=false