THE RISE OF THE NEPHILIM IN THE WORLD
We owe a great debt to the earliest Nephilim, Jonathan, David, and Abigail (for Jonathan’s first task once Raziel had left was to nurse his friend and his sister back to health, and to have them drink water from the Mortal Cup to transform them, too, into Nephilim like himself). On their own, recruiting as they could from among locals and trusted associates, they laid the stones upon which all of Shadowhunter society was built.
Abigail Shadowhunter set the precedent for Shadowhunters comprising both men and women, a guiding principle that has continued to this day. With the intensity of a new Boadicea, she established that the female Shadowhunters were no less fierce and resolute than the men organized under Jonathan’s banner. When she grew older, and could no longer wage war against demonkind as she once had, she turned to the esoteric knowledge of the Gray Book and the beating angelic heart of adamas beneath Idris to become the first Iron Sister. Along with six other Nephilim she constructed the first adamas forge, and the earliest incarnation of the Adamant Citadel upon its volcanic plain.
David, by contrast, was never a warrior and always a scholar and medic. Early in his time among the Nephilim, he witnessed a ritual sacrifice performed by a Greater Demon in an anonymous cave in Idris, and the horror of what he saw caused him to take a permanent vow of silence. This sent him, too, to the farthest depths of the Gray Book, into deep research. Over time he and his followers grew away from the world, remaining Nephilim but sacrificing some of their humanity for more angelic power. David became the founder of the Silent Brothers, and with the help of the Iron Sisters, he exorcised the cave of his nightmares and created the beginnings of the Silent City.
Meanwhile, Jonathan and his followers went out into the world to recruit more worthy men and women to become Shadowhunters. When possible they recruited whole families, bringing them wholesale into the Nephilim and granting them new names, in the compound model of the Shadowhunters. There is, of course, scarce space in these pages to tell the stories of those early Shadowhunters, blazing their warrior’s trails across Earth, but we encourage the interested Shadowhunter to seek out some of the more interesting tales in the library of their local Institute:
• The tale of the first Institute on the British Isles, in Cornwall, where the first Nephilim arriving with the Cup were believed to be wielding the Holy Grail, and whose tales of bravery and vigor have become mixed up with the mundane folklore of the isles.
• The earliest European Nephilim to arrive in the New World, and their struggles to survive the harsh winters and totally unfamiliar demons. Many were slaughtered, and if not for the assistance of the first peoples of that continent and a small number of helpful warlocks among them, they would surely have perished.
• The massacres of the 1450s, when the Institute at Cluj in Transylvania changed from a small mountain backwater to the busiest and most treacherous Nephilim posting in the world.
• Patrick of Cumbria, who united faeries, Shadowhunters, and mundane earls across Ireland in 1199 to drive the demons out (and whose work was unfortunately undone by Henry VIII, who ended several hundred years of demonlessness in Ireland when he began to reassert English control over the kingdom of Ireland beginning in the 1530s).
• The great Scorpion-Riders of the Australian backcountry, in the mid-1600s.
• The doomed Dazzling Charge of 1732, when a crack squad of Nephilim warriors in central France discovered, to their horror, the ineffectiveness of firearms in fighting demons.
• The lost Ethiopian Nephilim, separated from the entire Clave and Idris for hundreds of years beginning in the 1300s, but who kept up the ways of the Shadowhunters, the knowledge of Marks, and the use of the seraph blades independently, until they rejoined the world body in the 1850s.
Oh, come on, these sound great. Codex gives fifty pages of demon history but not this interesting stuff?
So go find stuff in the library! That’s what it’s for.
Clary, I hereby order you to go read about Scorpion-Riders, whatever they are. Scorpion-Riders! They ride scorpions! I assume!
MUNDANE RELIGION AND THE NEPHILIM
In the earliest days of the Nephilim, their greatest worry was the possible negative response by the dominant religious-political powers in Europe at the time, the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox churches. Both churches were very watchful through the Middle Ages for what they would consider heretical positions, and while many of their interests were aligned with the Nephilim’s, we could not be said to in any way be in line with church orthodoxy. While local skirmishes sometimes broke out, the leadership of the churches and the Clave prevented any all-out battle.
It was, in fact, a difficult moment in history to recruit for a secret confraternity. There was a tremendous amount of competition, in the form of the various orders of religious knights that were appearing then in the world in the wake of the Crusades. The Knights Hospitaller were founded around the same time as the Nephilim; the Knights Templar in 1130; even the famed Assassins came about only in the 1090s. The Nephilim had to be very selective and chose to recruit only superlative candidates, “allowing” those they rejected to take vows in a military order. On the other hand, disappearing into the ranks of the Nephilim was not as difficult as it would be today, since such life-changing vows were fairly common.
In the course of the first several hundred years of the Nephilim, contacts were made between us and the more mystical orders of the world’s major religions. A very small but well-chosen collection of religious leaders signed secret treaties to provide havens and weapons for Shadowhunters in exchange for protection.
I bet the church excommunicated the heck out of Jonathan, though.
Nope, they’d have had to make a public statement, officially they’d never heard of JS.