Danel the Fallen

Danel's fall has no scene of its own: it has everyone's scene. After the oath on the summit of Hermon, the two hundred descend and do exactly what they had agreed. «And they took unto themselves wives, and each chose for himself one, and they began to go in unto them and to defile themselves with them», says 1 Enoch 7:1. From the same verse come the arts: they taught them charms and enchantments, and the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants. What follows is disaster. The women conceive and bear giants of three thousand ells, and those sons consume all that men produce until men can no longer sustain them; then the giants turn against men, and afterwards against one another, and at last against birds, beasts, reptiles and fish, devouring their flesh and drinking their blood. The earth, says the text, lays accusation against the lawless ones. That is the file of Danel the Fallen, and it is literally the same file as the other hundred and ninety-nine. Not one line of 1 Enoch gives him a named wife, a named son, a particular art or a separate scene. His fall consists in having been there, and the text grants him no less than that and no more.

The punishment arrives by direct order and with a named executor. In 1 Enoch 10:11-12 the Lord commands Michael: «go, bind Semyaza and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement and of their consummation, till the judgement that is for ever and ever is consummated». The next verse shuts the door: «in those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire, and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined for ever». Danel is inside that plural, and that is the whole of his sentence and the whole of his present. The geography of the penalty appears later in the book. In 1 Enoch 14:5 they are expressly denied what they would most want: «ye shall not ascend into heaven unto all eternity, and it has been decreed that ye shall be bound in the earth for all the days of the world». In 21:1-10 Enoch visits the place and describes it as chaotic and terrible, with burning fire and a yawning abyss, and his guide explains that it is «the prison of the angels, and here they will be held for ever». And 19:1 adds the cruellest side effect of the sentence: the spirits of their giant sons remain loose in the world, corrupting men and making them sacrifice to demons, until the day of the great judgement. The sentence, then, has not ended. In the text's own terms, Danel the Fallen is still bound, waiting out a term counted in generations.

A Watcher with no deed of his own leaves a gap, and gaps get filled. It is worth stating what has been put inside Danel the Fallen, because almost none of it survives a check. It circulates that his heavenly name was Daneliel and that he had eleven wings of fire; that he forged a Crown of Stellar Thorns granting visions in exchange for sanity; that he sired «stellar Nephilim»; that he was the personal rival of the archangel Uriel in a Battle of the Broken Wings. None of that is in 1 Enoch, nor in the Book of Jubilees, nor in any ancient text: they are recent inventions, of the kind content generators produce, and their trademark is that they sound like mythology without being it. The most instructive case is the inverted pentagram that usually accompanies his iconography, because that one does have a history, only it is not his. The five-pointed star is a very old and widely spread symbol, but the reading by which pointing downwards means evil is modern and can be dated: Éliphas Lévi, in his Dogma and Ritual of High Magic (1854-1856), contrasts the pentagram with one point up, which makes the spirit ascend, with the one with two points up, in which he sees the figure of the goat of the Sabbath. Stanislas de Guaita, in The Key of Black Magic (1897), draws the goat's head inscribed in the inverted star, and from there the Church of Satan took it in 1966 for its sigil. That is: a symbol of nineteenth-century French occultism applied, eighteen hundred years later, to an angel of a Jewish apocalypse written in Aramaic around the third century BC. Giving it to Danel as his own emblem is not tradition, it is anachronism. Hence this entry prefers to fall short and say what there is: a name on a list, an oath on a summit, monstrous sons who killed one another, and a chain in a valley which, according to the text, has not yet been opened.