Kokabiel

Kokabiel (from the Hebrew kôkab, «star», and ’el, «God») first appears in the Book of the Watchers, the oldest part of the Book of Enoch. He is not the leader of the rebellion there, although he is almost always presented as such: the list in 1 Enoch 6:7 names him fourth, behind Semyaza, Arakiel and Rameel, among the so-called chiefs of ten, each of whom commanded ten of the two hundred angels who descended. The leader was Semyaza. Kokabiel commanded ten.

The text places the descent in the days of Jared and on the summit of Mount Hermon. Before going down, the two hundred bound one another by mutual imprecations not to turn back, and the reason the book gives is very concrete: Semyaza feared that, when punishment came, the others would leave him to bear the blame alone. The oath was not a solemn rite but an insurance policy among accomplices, and Kokabiel is one of those who swore it.

What he taught is stated precisely in 1 Enoch 8:3, and it repays slow reading, because it is almost always misquoted. The verse distributes the forbidden knowledge among several Watchers: astrology falls to Baraqel, the signs of the earth to Arakiel, the course of the moon to Sariel, the knowledge of the clouds to Ezeqeel. To Kokabiel fall the constellations. Teaching men to read the figures of the night sky is not the same as teaching them to divine destiny in it, and the text keeps the two apart by naming two different angels.

The Book of Enoch does not describe Kokabiel. It gives no height, no colour of wings, no weapon: the Watchers enter the text through what they swear, teach and suffer, never through their looks. Any portrait of him, including the one on this page, is later iconography, and it is worth knowing that before looking at it.

What does exist, and is a good deal more interesting than a suit of armour, is a description of his office. The Third Book of Enoch, the Hebrew treatise of the celestial palaces, goes one by one through the princes who govern the visible heaven and, on reaching Kokbiel, says that he is appointed over all the wandering stars and that under his command are three hundred and sixty-five thousand myriads of ministering angels, whose task is to move them from one region of the firmament to another (3 Enoch 17:7).

This is not an image of war but of administration: a very senior official who keeps the accounts of the sky and has at his orders a bureaucracy beyond imagining whose only job is to push the planets along their roads. That is the figure the sources support, and it is far stranger than a winged warrior. The picture of a gigantic angel in armour of starlight, carrying a spear forged from a dead star, comes from neither book of Enoch: it is a recent invention, and it is given its date on the page for Kokabiel the Fallen.

The same name carries two incompatible figures, and neither is a copyist's error. In the apocalyptic tradition that begins with the Book of the Watchers, Kokabiel is a rebel: he swears the oath on Hermon, descends, teaches what he should not have taught, and shares the sentence that falls on the two hundred. In the later Hebrew mystical tradition, that of the Third Book of Enoch, the same Kokbiel remains at his post, holy, governing the planets with his myriads of servants. There is no scene of a fall there: he simply never fell. The two texts do not harmonise, and no ancient attempt to reconcile them has come down to us.

Bestiarypedia keeps the two halves of the apocalyptic figure on separate pages. This one tells the Watcher while he still is one: the prince of the planets, the fourth of the chiefs, the angel who swears on the summit. What happened afterwards (the sentence, Michael's chains and the term of seventy generations) is told on the page for Kokabiel the Fallen.

There remains a historical reason why this name survives only in apocrypha and esoteric literature. In the year 745 a council gathered at Rome under Pope Zachary condemned the invocation of angels by names foreign to Scripture and restricted veneration to the three the Bible names: Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. From then on, the celestial princes with names of their own fell outside Christian worship. Kokabiel is one of them, and that is why his trail is followed through copied manuscripts rather than through the liturgy.