Nations of the Rephaim

Lucite.org has created a versioned map of the ancient tribes of the Nephilim. This extraordinary rendition is a baseline for a chronological series of maps that will show the inexorable extension of an evil empire through the Near East. Of course, I mean that of the spooky Rephaim. You may also notice that this is a work in progress.

Immortal, Inbred, and Promiscuous

The genealogies of the fallen Watchers are now available in GEDCOM 5.5 format for browsing in any current family tree software. The GEDCOM .ged file includes greater detail and annotation than the Visio diagram. The GEDCOM .pdf diagram is machine-generated from the .ged file and informs less than the Visio diagram, but may be a step ahead of the Visio diagram in terms of accuracy.

Since these fellows were immortal, inbred, and promiscuous, the GEDCOM file is a nice way to test the normalization of your favorite family tree software. The file was created with Family Tree Maker 2006, which appears to present convoluted relationships fairly well. It is unable to deal with dates prior to 100 CE, however, and these are included as notes when available.

Opening of the Gate

My grandfather, Wayne Robbins, used to say: "A man can't do much when his brain is afire with agony, when his blind eyes are dangling down onto his cheeks, dripping blood and optic humor..."

He and his brother, Dane Gregory nee Ormond Robbins, wrote pulp horror and detective fiction in the 30s and 40s under a handful of noms de plume, before the wartime morality spike spiked a market for spicy stories that had carried the family rather well through lean times.

Lucite.org is in the process of rescuing the work of these two brothers from the ravages of acidic paper, cover art collectors, and even their perceived literary value. As time allows, I will offer some of these old, ignored pulp stories for your entertainment, plus several unpublished stories from the detective and shudder genres.

For now, Lucite.org presents "The Thing in Search of a Body," a charming tale of a rough-hewn hammer murderess. A list of the two brothers works are also available, as well as some of Wayne's correspondence in the Lucite.org archive.

If you are a pulp collector and think you might be able to help recover some of these stories or trade some doubles, please let me know.

The Generations of the Bene ha-Elohim

These are the generations of the infamous Watchers, the Sons of God from Genesis 6 who took to wife the daughters of Cain and thereby begat a race of monsters and heroes. These genealogies are culled from Tanakh, Canaanite mythology, Jewish pseudepigrapha, the Kabbalah, the Quran, and other tales of the Djinn and mankind.

Relationships were originally set down from 1985-1990, and must be worked through again to add notes on nomeclature and cite references. This material looks forward to a comprehensive opus called Sepher Abdiel. There are liable to be a number of errors at the moment, yet work progresses.

The chart is already really fricking big, though, and that is what is most important. Use your Acrobat Reader to zoom to 200%, then move around with the "hand" tool and see if you can find Paris Hilton in there.

Smoking Out the Tenebrists: What Are Shadow and Light?

Shadow is the absence of light and only arises from the oppositions of dense bodies, when opposed to luminous rays. Shadow is of the nature of darkness and illumination is of the nature of light. The one conceals and the other reveals. They are always joined together in company on bodies, and shadow is of greater power than light, because it banishes and completely deprives bodies of light, and light can never wholly chase away the shadows of bodies, that is to say of dense bodies.

Shadow derives from two things that are dissimilar to each other, because one is corporeal and the other immaterial. The corporeal one is the opaque body and the immaterial is the light. Thus light and body are the causes of shadow.

Shadow is a mixture of darkness with light and it will be of greater or lesser depth according to whether the light that is mixed with it is of greater or lesser strength.

--Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo on Painting, Ed. Martin Kemp)