When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.
The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.
Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw that the earth was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth. And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth.1
In these days few of the nephilim practised divination, and so they had no more fore-notice than their human counter-parts. Still, some few communities found time, as the flood waters rose, to pool their powers in an attempt to preserve themselves.
One community, whose powers were predominately from the Dominions, transmuted themselves, giving themselves the fins and gills of fish to survive an aquatic environment. They fully expected this to be a temporary measure, but being strongly gifted, expected the effects of their spells to be sufficient to let them sleep at night. They could then swim to the surface as the spell faded in the morning to re-cast it for the next day. The Virtues loyal to the Lord looked down on this rebellion with great wrath, for it angered them that these abominations made by the fallen should thwart the Will of the Most High. In their anger they smote these nephilim, binding them to their fishy forms, so that their spells would not fade, and stripping from them the ability to ever again transmute their own form intentionally. This is the origin of the merpeople - selkies, sirens, and merrows.
The sirens are the oldest race of merpeople, and from them the others descend. Many of them refused to accept their punishment, and in their jealousy of those who can still walk on two legs, they developed a mix of music and magic that could compel the minds of those who heard it without having to focus on each individual in turn. Even after the Statute of Secrecy would eventually be passed, humans would have some memory of this in their mythology.
Another community lived in the mountains and made their living mining the earth. Being strongly gifted from the Virtues, but little gifted from the Dominions, they took a different approach. As the flood waters rose, they fled into their mines and sealed them behind them. They used their gifts to purify the air and produce underground gardens to grow their food. Those loyal to the Lord were similarly incensed, and determined to ensure that the planned purification of the Earth’s surface was accomplished despite them. They confused the thoughts of this community of nephilim, such that they forgot that the surface world existed at all. Thus it would be many thousands of years before this community, which time and inbreeding had twisted into dwarfs, again found the surface and began to interact with human history.
Gen 6:1-8,10-13 NRSVCE↩︎