The Monsters Under the Bed
Monsters, the human race has been fascinated by them for as long as we can remember. Ancient myths are full of terrible creatures from the other side; ghosts, orcs & goblins, gnomes & pixies, gorgans & gargoyles...
We terrify our children with stories of bogiemen and boglins under the bed, monsters in the closet...why?
Why do we have creatures all around our house that need to be placated or minor chaos will ensue?
The Chronicles seized this folklore with eager hands once the Nephilim started to develop.
We realised that we could use something like them, a race of sort of human creatures who possess an extra strand of DNA gifted to them by their angelic forebears. Now, angels, remember, are the precursor, purely spiritual beings with an obviously physical component somewhere that allows them to create a fully working human body around their astral one. That an angel would have DNA (twelve-stranded, no less) might sound counter-intuitive to some but, to us it is both logical and necessary. In order to pass on the kind of traits and problems experienced by the early Nephilim, there must be a genetic component.
Why only one extra strand is passed on is just one of those things I am not going to explain, it just seems like the right number.
As I said, the angels are the first form of 'life' in our universe (that we know of) and existed before our universe, technically, existed. It is therefore reasonable to assume that they were created with the same potential that other life came to inherit. When angels encarnated and took on flesh, their spiritual bodies expressed differences and these differences were passed onto the children they later 'fathered' with mortal women. It is safe also to assume that the DNA of the angels somehow 'learned' from earlier disasters and refined their zygotes so that they contained only three strands because all 12 meeting human DNA was not beneficial to the offspring's survival. This idea of DNA learning by itself is real and cutting edge science and, though it is far from being proven, this is a work of fiction isn't it?
Monsters in the Dark
So; this human need to have some horrible creature with lots of teeth, claws, and an ugly aspect concealed either under their bed or where they hang their clothes...why?
The psychology is simple really, it's easier than explaining what is actually going on, especially when we don't actually know what that truly is. Also it might be part of a terrible and traumatising parenting practise which seems to be dying out;
"Eat your dinner/go to sleep/tidy your room or the monster will get you!"
Humans are, for the most part, quite an imaginative species. If we cannot explain something, then we'll invent something that can. We have Santa Claus to blame for the children not getting the presents they wanted for Christmas and for ensuring they behave in the run up to said festival. We also have monsters to explain other phenomena we are unable to explain.
Also, children are very imaginative, creating iamginary friends and so forth as they learn at a terrifying rate and try to place all of this information in their very limited frame of reference. They love stories so the loving parents make them up for them as they try to add valuable lessons into them. They add witches, monsters, and so forth because nobody minds if something inhuman perishes to teach the dangers of not following the lesson.
This is something we call the "Stormtrooper Accuracy Dilemma" which I am sure Star Wars fans will appreciate. One can easily be heroic and mow down dozens of seemingly faceless drones but intentionally ending the life of someone whose face you can see, whose eyes you can see the light fade from is quite a different challenge.
Also, it's easier to blame unseen beings for your misfortunes than your own possible laxness, isn't it?
Plagues were due to witches, Pestilence himself, and so forth.
Rare genetic conditions such as haemophilia, serious albinism, hypertrichosis, porphyria, etc. probably gave birth to the werewolf and vampire myths. A love for drama or the inability to recognise common species may have contributed to others.
Michael Critchton presented a great idea in his lesser know work called The Eaters of The Dead, his version of Beowulf. It claimed to be the historical origin of that story, based upon the recently re-discovered manuscript of an Arab traveller's diary of his journeys with Nordic traders and his adventures in their homeland. It was rather good and well done. It posited that the 'evil' Grendel of Beowulf were an isolated Neanderthal tribe who has somehow survived into what we would call 'Modern' times. When one considers there were still Mammoth in Europe while the pyramids were being built, it is a possibility. They could also explain orcs and goblins, perhaps.
Encounters between black and while men, members of the the pictish and aryan tribes, so on and so forth could explain many other stories. It wasn't racism back then, it was unfamiliarity and, though no acceptable, one can understand demonising one's competitors for resources.
Fear and unfamiliarity, as well as competition, can breed monsters too. Look at the witches and how they were demonised in England, Europe, and Massachussetts, for example.
The Nephilim
Of course, one cannot write a story based upon the fact that stories cannot be relied upon. That would be, in essence, self-defeating from the onset. We have, therefore, a more dramatic and fictional explanation in The Chronicles of Enoch.
We have, as previously mentioned, the Nephilim.
Now would be an excellent time, we feel, to familiarise yourselves with the of Nephilim section of our website, it is quite extensive and contains a lot of information we will skip over here.
We decided to conduct quite an extensive study of monsters, cryptids, myths and strange beasts across the world and throughout history and try to fit them into our universe as confortably as possible. below are a few examples, the website gives others.
Werecreatures and shapeshifters. There are various of the Nephilim genetypes that could help here; polymorphic or 'shifter' Nephilim can take on much of the responsibility for all manner of myth and monster; from lycanthropes to aliens and cryptids. It seems that the Golden Helix (angelic DNA strand combined with regular human) adds a certain plasticity of form to the Nephilim which makes them useful. The Jeepies, or General Purpose Nephilim shifter can change their physical form at will and appear as pretty much anything they have been shown and or can imagine as long as it is organic.
Aliens and cryptids. As we've already mentioned, Jeepies and similar Nephilim shifters have masqueraded as aliens and some of the more exotic kinds of humaoid cryptid in the past for reasons known only to their masters. Asmodeus is rumoured to be the mastermind of this particular enterprise.
Vampires. This is almost exclusely the realm of the Strigoi variety of shifter. As we have seen, Striga such as Lorasta are afflicted with a genetic disorder that makes them both partially mortal and able to access abilities that involve feeding from a human victim's soul. They do not drink blood and cannot eat or drink anything much at all, being pure energy feeders. They are, however, unable to control their physical form and fury when feeding and, therefore, tend to spill an awful lot of blood in the process.
Zombies. This is a difficult one. There is an extremely rare class of Nephilim, deemed mythical by most of them, known as Isochronals. These extremely rare and powerful creatures can recover from any injury or wound, including almost complete distruction of their physical form. Their body can regenerate from scraps of tissue and, the only change they experience when recovered is a change of face. It is as if their surviving DNA reboots upon regenerating them. A certain fictional time-travelling alien medical professional is said to have been based on an Isochronal encounter.
Conclusion
So, humans adore invention and imagination, it's common and obvious, their history is replete with examples. Most of the mosters their history is filled with can easily be explained by misunderstanding, trying to explain unknown species or myopic inspection thereof. Others simply embody our fears or are due to rare genetic disorders.
Taking all this into account, one would think that today, in this age of Science, where so many of these things have been explained and Reason is more common, that there would be no monsters left.
That is not, however, even close to being the case. Nort only to be have the more ethnic and mythic monsters now but we have cryptids, the local monster or beast of x-town or geographical feature, BigFoot, and so many others. We appear to believe in more monsters than we did before and even think there are conspiracies to hide their presences from us....
It appears that our stories have not been disproven, they story has simply changed or been made more complicated.