How different are we today to the time before the Great Flood of ancient legends when people lived oblivious to the coming threat and living licentiously without reverence? (Genesis chapter 6.) If you include the knowledge preserved for us in the Book of Enoch alongside Genesis you have a richer resource to answer it. What stands out in my mind from the years of study of Enoch and Genesis and Sumerian texts from after the Flood? Sorcery was a key factor. Powerful individuals invoked powerful responses from angels. They were able to summon angelic changes in the nature of metals, using this to create alloys we are unable to produce today even with all our Science and Metallurgy. Such sorcerers competed with each other (a major translated text from 2200 BC tells of one such contest) and did amazing things in the sight of people such as parting a lake (reflected in biblical counterparts which tell us that God competed with such sorcerers too and won hands down, as Exodus records in relation to Moses and Pharaoh a thousand years later). The sorcerers ran things rather like the Druids ran them in the leadup to the Roman conquest of Britain. The sorcerers terrorised and terrified people and many of these sorcerers were descended from angels, adding to their mystique and power. It was a reign of terror everywhere in the Fertile Crescent and in Sumer (biblical Canaan and Shinar as Genesis records the place names). Kings were not all bad at the time. There were some religious ones who taught strongly and influentially against violence and promoted merciful giving and avoidance of magic arts. Yet mostly people went with the magic and the pagan practices of using cosmetics to entice men into fornication, developing weapons with the help of magic (we would call it Science today, mainly the difference being the open use of angelic invocations at that time), drugs use, and the like. These are all things practiced today. If anything, the apparent elimination of some more overt aspects of sorcery such as invocation of angels makes us think we can just carry on as in times of Genesis but with church sanction. The feeling of impunity this adds to the culture makes us more rampant in our use of the same technologies but with a downplaying of the supernatural side of things, yet still people swear and curse and seek inner inspiration irrespective of its source, mixing this with the pursuit of the Science. Have a look at the use of fear today in how Science rolls out its answers to the world. Times are not much different. Perhaps globalisation makes it even more sinister.
