Did Da Vinci’s Demons Take Another Enochian Turn?

I considered writing about the season finale of Vikings, which was fantastic for those who didn’t see it. But there’s scant time for blogging this week, so I decided to focus on the little glimpse we received in last Saturday’s Da Vinci’s Demons about the mysterious Book of Leaves and its potential Enochian origin.

This was the episode where Leonardo and Count Riario enter the Vault of Heaven, the hiding place of the Book of Leaves, and we finally get to see what those twin keys open. The Vault of Heaven presented a series of puzzles and traps that would warm the heart of any Indiana Jones fan, but for reasons I will not spoil, we never get to see the mysterious book in all of its glory (though there are three episodes left this season, and the show has been renewed for a third season in 2015, so I expect this mystery will linger).

In any event, deep within the Vault, Leonardo and Count Riario come across paintings on a cave wall that depict human-like beings with elongated heads (or helmets of some type) and strange haloes or circles behind them. When Riario sees them, he begins to quote from the book of Genesis:

“There were giants on the earth in those days. Perhaps these were the Nephilim, the offspring of the Sons of God and the daughters of men, and they created this Vault.”

Remember that in an earlier episode, Riario suspected the Book of Leaves had an Atlantean origin. The evil Pope Sixtus was the one proposing an Enochian origin, believing the book was written by the Nephilim. So might Count Riario be coming around to the evil pope’s view? Given the elongated heads of the beings painted on the cave wall, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if the show went in more of an extraterrestrial direction, sort of like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (which, incidentally, also took place in South America).

Of course, even if this were to prove true, it would not necessarily break with Enochian mythology, since some theorize that the Watchers—the angels who come to earth to mate with human women according to the apocryphal Book of Enoch—were actually ancient astronauts, extraterrestrial beings who visited earth when the world was young. But we’ll just have to wait and see, and as an author and fan of Enochian fiction, I’m looking forward to the ride!

* Image courtesy of Starz.com