Note - Research on Enoch, Grigori

...can be a pain in the butt. I wanted to check up on my basis for Jocelyn, who we might actually meet if I ever make it to the writing part of my day. In my notes from '07, I have listed Johnalyn, female, being the prettiest of all the angels.

All over the internet, all I can find is this SAME SENTENCE copied over and over on a dozen pages:
"According to the Book of Enoch, Johnalyn was known as the prettiest of God’s angels that did not betray Him. She became most well known for the inspiration of Eve. As God made Adam in his own image God made Eve in the image of Johnalyn."

It's almost always in a paragraph on Lust, part of a few pages worth of text that has been copied over and over again on different websites. Not only is this kind of non-credited plagiarism irritating and angering, but... where the $#^*(Q)# are people getting this from?? I just ran a search through my pdf of Enoch, and there is NO mention of a Johnalyn. The only mention of Eve is that she was led astray by Gâdreêl.

...when November is over, I will sit down and actually read all through The Book of Enoch (The Book of the Watchers, anyway - I'm not sure reading through the more mystical allegorical bits will do me much good).

It's just making me all kinds of crazy, that I cannot find a source for this information. Not that it should actually matter - my rational: if Johnalyn didn't fall, then obviously Jocelyn borrowed the name, to bolster her own reputation as beautiful. All works quite nicely actually.

Still.. I hauled out my copy of A Dictionary of Angels, to skim over the descriptions of my characters again. Not that they all wound up following the attributes granted them in Enoch and elsewhere - and I realize now that many of the names were pulled from lists of fallen angels, not the grigori.. buuut, things get muddled in time. There are only twenty grigori listed, and there were 200 or so more who fell along with them. Even among the twenty names, at least two of them might be different variations of the same name.

But my Luce is prideful, and Azal likes his eyeliner, so all is well. And maybe I'll find a way to work in Penemue - he taught mankind how to write, which I love, but I wasn't able to find a way to make his name pretty enough to use, back in '07. ;p

Research Notes

I've done a lot of research in the past few years of the origins of the Bible and Christianity and things. A handful of Teaching Company lecture series, some Wikipedia, the Book of Enoch, assorted other things. (I blame Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash for starting this, with all of its ancient Mesopotamian mythos.)

Originally, I started out this morning by going over some Wiki entries on labyrinths and yew trees that I'd looked at yesterday, thinking those would be the topics of conversation. Buuuut that didn't really last, Mark went a little more into his studies than I'd planned. (This happens eeeevery time he talks. Convenient character flaw.) I did some double-checking before I wrote these passages out; a lot of this information lives in fragmented form in my head. I know the flood story variant is in Gilgamesh, but it had slipped my mind that even that description was borrowed from an earlier source. I knew the opening of Genesis paralleled the Enûma Eliš, but, having learned this from an audio lecture, I had NO frickin' clue how to spell it. (Ay-noo-mah AY-leesh.) So, this chapter brought to you by Wikipedia, Professor Amy-Jill Levine's course on the Old Testament, my mom who gave me a copy of Gilgamesh (and Star Trek TNG for causing this), aaand a little more Wikipedia.