BPAL - Nephilim

Again, months old. But again, my opinions remain the same.

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Got a bunch of new BPALs recently! It's the first transaction I've actually set up myself... the previous ones have all been Beth saying "I think I'm going to order these, and they're also offering these ones you might be interested in." But I finally decided to go through the entire General Catalogue and write down the names of the ones that sounded interesting. I noticed an utterly predictable trend: if it was named after a man or had a particularly dark or rugged concept behind it, I wanted it. A few exceptions for and against, of course, but that was the general pattern.

So I took this list and started looking for sales that had bunches of matches for low prices, and lo and behold: I made two orders. One of them, a batch of 21, is currently on a slow boat from Shanghai, because the world is, unfortunately, a little large. But I'm in no hurry, because the other shipment is already here: 16 imps and decants from rayvn1, plus a few thoughtful extra samples and imps she sent. It would seem she tracked down Beth's wish list as well and sent an imp of Liz, which is hard to find, which places her firmly on my "awesome people" list. That, and the fact that she's a big fan of Monkey Island.

The BPAL I chose today is... Nephilim! In case the title didn't give it away.

The Nephilim are an interesting topic for me... my personal religious background stems from evangelical Protestant Christianity with a fairly literalist take on the Bible. To those not versed in those terms, it's pretty stereotypical American Christianity, with a belief that anything written in the (Protestant) Bible overrides science and history alike, although some inconvenient things go ignored. I have kept Christianity, however I've since moved on to my own biblical interpretations. Anyway, that's my background, and it's why I found it bizarre that I hadn't heard of the Nephilim until after high school.

The Nephilim are... well, that depends on who you ask. They're from Jewish mythology, the offspring of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men," as Genesis puts it. The latter part is pretty much always "women." Not much room for interpretation there. But the "sons of God" can mean descendants of Seth or Cain, or angels, or fallen angels (who are considered demons). Or the blood of Orion, but that one doesn't get much credence. Neither does the "aliens" interpretation, generally.

Anyway, it seems, from my previous conversations with people, that the commonly accepted interpretation of this within American evangelicalism is either angels or fallen angels (or angels which subsequently become fallen angels). The Nephilim, then, are half-angels... which means that they're either giants or have superpowers. Or both.

There's more to say about them, of course, but the point is... they're kind of fascinating from my personal religious perspective. Within Protestant Christianity, there is so much Jewish mythology that gets left out, and the stuff that survives (i.e., in my opinion, the entire book of Genesis) is tailored to be coherent without necessarily relying on the full mythology behind it, and to be effectively woven together. Kind of like how the King Arthur and Merlin we remember come mainly from Le Morte D'Arthur rather than all the many detailed individual legends it was compiled from.

But the Nephilim... that's the thing. They don't weave together quite so neatly... they're mentioned once in Genesis as becoming the "heroes of old," and then they're not mentioned again until their descendants are slain for having the nerve to live in a nice place.

...Which, strangely enough, is after the Great Flood, which supposedly killed off everything that lived on land, minus a certain family and collection of animals in a boat. The first mention of them is apparently long before this. Biblical literalists will, of course, say that there must have been more Nephilim created after the flood, but that sounds like a cop-out to me. But if we just sit down and think about it, the truth becomes apparent. There's a reason they survived the flood, you see.

Prepare yourselves for the dark secret of the Nephilim:

---they're actually mermaids!---

Makes sense now, don't it? Those crazy Manatees with seashell undergarments that sexually deprived sailors have been hallucinating for centuries? Nephilim.

Now with both of those ancient mysteries explained beyond a reasonable doubt, onto the actual scent:

Dark children conceived from the union of Fallen Angels and the Daughters of Men. According to lore, the angel Shemhazai led a group of his angels to earth to instruct mankind in the ways of piety and righteousness. After a time, the angels became prey to earthly desires and began to lust after the daughters of man, and thus they fell. They instructed their mortal mates in the arts of conjuration, summoning, necromancy and other magickal arts. The fruits of their union are the Nephilim: possessed of superhuman strength, cunning, and infinite capacity, and hunger for, sin. Venerated as heroes by some, vilified by most, the Nephilim eventually annihilated one another in a cataclysmic civil war instigated by the angel Gabriel as punishment for their transgressions. Holy frankincense and hyssop in union with earthy fig, defiled by black patchouli and vetiver, with a chaotic infusion of lavender, cardamom, tamarind, rosemary, oakmoss and cypress.

Tsch. I should really remember to read the descriptions first.

For the record, I think the lore is at least partially incorrect. The chances of an entire race completely annihilating itself is pretty slim, because someone, somewhere, is bound to come out of it alive without any mortal wounds, even if Gabriel schemed it. And even that aside, I'm sure there were a handful of pacifist Nephilim who chose to be conscientious objectors.

And those who did survive? They became mermaids. End of story.

In the bottle, it smelled very reminiscent of Beth's personal favorite BPAL, Phoenix in Autumn... which is to say warm and earthy in a way that's hard to place. It smells like a fairly dark brown. That's not entirely helpful, I know, but it didn't really turn out the same as Phoenix in Autumn, so further comparison would be unprudent.

When I first put this on, I said "dates or fig." The description clearly leaned toward the latter, so fig it is. And it's a lot of fig! Slightly sweet, but not in a way that makes it compromising to my perceived masculinity. No complaints there!

There's something else along with it though that kind of gives the fig a sort of messed-up feel. Or, as the description puts it more eloquently, "defiled" and/or "chaotic." Wish I could figure out what was mixing with the fig... I don't actually know what the other smells should be like. But there's something that both mixes with the fig and serves as an undertone. I want to call it "smokey," but it doesn't smell like either dust or smoke. It's earthy, and it somehow makes me picture a kind of haze.

Also, I noticed the smell was warm. That might be the frankincense, but that's not a very educated guess.

As it dries, the undertone develops into something a bit more... desert-like? Less haze, more wasteland. Not in a bad way, either.

Wish I had more to comment about with the actual scent, but I find it hard to describe. It's fig, warm, and earthy... with a touch of hazy chaos. The last one of which isn't even remotely olfactory, but I've found that the BPAL artisans have an extraordinary talent for breaking the rules of smell. One of the more interesting scents I've tried.

Only downside is that, at least for me, it dies in about two hours, even when I'm inside and not sweating it off in the summer heat. Beth's going to try it, so I'll have to see if it lasts any longer on her. Also, seeing as the Nephilim are mermaids, it should really have some more aquatic notes. Still a great scent regardless.

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Update: Beth checked up on this and apparently there really are people who think the Nephilim became mermaids. Or that the mermaids are some sort of aquatic version of the Nephilim, or that they were some sort of fish/human chimera experiment the Nephilim performed.

I'm not actually sure if the people making these arguments were serious or not, but it seemed to me that at least some of them were. Hard to tell, though, since when someone becomes eccentric enough to firmly support a connection between Nephilim and mermaids with any amount of conviction, they're probably quite difficult to understand.