Semyaza the Fallen

Come down on Hermon, the two hundred took wives, each the one he had chosen, and began to teach them. The Book of Enoch distributes those teachings with the precision of an inventory, and Semyaza's is concrete and modest compared with what posterity ascribed to him: enchantments and root-cuttings. That is, charms and herb-lore: the magic of saying and that of gathering. Swords, breastplates and cosmetics were Azazel's doing, astrology Baraqel's and the constellations Kokabel's.

From those unions the Nephilim were born. The text describes them growing without measure until they consumed all that men produced, and when there was nothing left to feed them they turned on men, and then on one another. That is the catastrophe that sets everything else in motion: not the lust itself, but the children.

It is worth fixing what Semyaza is here and what he is not. He is the one who organised the descent and answered for it, and in that sense tradition is right to call him the first. He is not, however, a rebel raising an army against heaven: the pact of Hermon bound the Watchers to each other, not against anyone. The difference matters because on it depends how his punishment is read.

There was no war. That is the first thing to say, because almost every modern version invents one. In the ninth chapter, Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel look down from heaven, see the blood shed upon the earth and carry the cry of men before the throne. They fight no one: they report. The orders come afterwards, one by one, and each archangel receives his own.

And here is the error most often repeated about Semyaza. Raphael is ordered to bind Azazel hand and foot, to open a hole in the desert of Dudael and cast him therein under rough rocks, covered with darkness so that he may not see the light. That punishment is Azazel's and no one else's. Semyaza is bound by Michael, and his sentence is different: he and his own are held fast beneath the hills of the earth for seventy generations, until the day of judgment, and only then are they led to the abyss of fire. To confuse the two sentences is to take from each what is his.

The Watchers tried to appeal. They asked Enoch to write a petition and present it for them, and Enoch wrote it and took it; the answer he brings back is that there shall be no peace for them and that the petition will not be granted. It is a detail usually skipped over, and it gives the exact measure of the punishment: it is not that they did not ask forgiveness, it is that they asked and were refused.

Later Jewish tradition gives him an ending that is not in the Book of Enoch and that is the best thing he has. The Midrash of Shemhazai and Azael, preserved in the Yalkut Shimoni and in Bereshit Rabbati and translated into English by Moses Gaster within the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, tells that Shemhazai saw what he had done, found no excuse to offer, and repented.

His penance is a posture. He hanged himself between heaven and earth, head down and feet up, and there he still hangs, repenting. Tradition went one step further and put him on the map of the sky: that figure suspended upside down in the south is the constellation the Greeks called Orion. It does not matter that the identification is late; what matters is what it does to the character, who passes from convict to permanent and visible sign.

And the same text marks the difference that orders the most often named pair of Watchers: Azael did not repent. He carried on with his business, put in charge of the paints and dyes by which women lead men into sin, and there he continues. One hangs and the other persists. That is why Semyaza is not exactly a demon: he is a convict who acknowledged the sentence, and that is a figure later demonology did not know where to place, so it hung on him grimoire titles that are not his.