Before the Norman knights arrived in Sicily, before the first Di Luna woman pressed her palm to stone and made her pact, there was a Watcher who fell — not for pride, but for the moon. Sariel's story is older than most traditions care to remember, and it runs beneath the entire Luna Strega saga like an underground river.
Who Were the Watchers?
The Watchers — the Irin, in Aramaic — appear in the Book of Enoch, a text excluded from the canonical Bible but preserved in Ethiopian Orthodox scripture and among the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were a rank of angels assigned to observe humanity. Two hundred of them, according to Enoch, descended to Mount Hermon and chose to remain among the daughters of men. Their leader was Shemyaza. But they were not a single mind. Each Watcher carried a specific domain of forbidden knowledge, and it was that knowledge — not simply desire — that made their fall so dangerous to the divine order.
The sin of the Watchers was instruction. They taught humanity things it was not meant to possess: metallurgy, the cutting of roots, enchantments, astrology, the reading of omens. The Book of Enoch is precise about this. It names names. It assigns each transgression to a specific angel. That specificity is what makes the text so unusual — and so useful to anyone trying to understand where Sariel fits.
Sariel and the Secrets of the Moon
Sariel — also rendered Suriel, Saraqael, or Saraquel depending on the tradition — is identified in 1 Enoch as the angel who taught humanity the course of the moon. That phrase is worth sitting with. Not simply the moon's appearance. Its course. Its cycles. The hidden logic governing its pull on the tides, on the blood, on the timing of certain acts that should not be performed in daylight.
In the context of the ancient Near East, lunar knowledge was priestly knowledge. The sacred calendar ran on the moon. The planting cycles, the festival days, the moments when the veil between worlds was considered thin — all of it was governed by lunar reckoning. When Sariel passed this knowledge to human hands, he was not simply teaching astronomy. He was dismantling a monopoly. He gave ordinary people the ability to read the sky for themselves, to understand the rhythms of power without an intermediary.
That is the transgression. Not darkness for its own sake. Democratized knowledge — and the specific knowledge of how the moon moves.
Lilith, Sariel, and the Lupa
The Luna Strega mythology does not simply borrow Sariel from the Book of Enoch — it asks what happened to him after the other Watchers were bound and imprisoned. The answer the saga proposes is rooted in the oldest layer of Sicilian landscape: Mount Etna, called Mongibello in the Sicilian tongue, a living volcano that has never fully gone quiet.
Within the world of the Di Luna bloodline, Sariel did not fall toward destruction. He fell toward Lilith — the first woman in Kabbalistic tradition, the one who refused submission and became something the divine order could not easily categorize. Their union produced the Lupa: not a wolf in the literal sense, but an ancient supernatural entity that carries both the lunar intelligence Sariel taught and the untamed refusal Lilith embodied. The Lupa sleeps inside Mongibello. She does not wake for most people. She woke for Serafina Di Luna in 1099, when Serafina came to her in blood and need, in the years immediately after the Norman conquest of Sicily had reordered every human structure the island had known.
The crescent burned into Serafina's skin — and passed through the female line ever after — is not decorative. It is the mark of Sariel's original gift: the course of the moon, carried in the body.
Why Sicily? The Convergence of Traditions
Sicily is not an arbitrary setting for a mythology this layered. The island sat at the crossroads of every major Mediterranean civilization. Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman, Byzantine — each left not just architecture and language but religious practice, magical tradition, and a particular relationship to the unseen world. By the time the Normans arrived in the eleventh century, Sicilian folk practice was already a palimpsest: older writing showing through newer writing, none of it fully erased.
Arab astrology had reinforced the importance of lunar timing in magic and medicine. Greek tradition had already mapped the moon onto feminine power — Hecate, Selene, Artemis, each a facet of the same force. The Sicilian strega tradition that developed over centuries drew from all of these wells without necessarily naming them. A woman who knew when to gather herbs, when to speak a curse, when to perform a binding — she was practicing Sariel's original knowledge, whether she knew his name or not.
This is what authentic stregoneria preserves: not a single unbroken lineage of doctrine, but a living familiarity with the timing and texture of unseen forces. The moon is not a symbol in this tradition. It is a mechanism.
The Forbidden Knowledge in Practice
Across the centuries of Di Luna history — from Norman Sicily to mid-century America, where Loretta, Joann, and Linda carry the mark into a world of La Cosa Nostra and assimilation — the lunar knowledge Sariel passed to humanity manifests in specific, grounded ways. The gift does not look the same on every woman who carries it. Loretta's silver mark is visible. Linda's burns crimson. Joann carries something less legible, which does not make it weaker.
The passing of the gift happens on La Vigilia — Christmas Eve — which is itself a lunar-adjacent moment, a threshold night that Italian folk tradition has long treated as a time when the ordinary rules of transmission and protection shift. The Cimaruta charm, hung in Di Luna households, is a sprig of rue worked in silver: it carries within its form a crescent moon, a serpent, a key, a hand. Each element corresponds to a layer of protection and a layer of invitation. The charm is not passive decoration. It is a statement of alliance with forces that predate the Church's calendar, even when the Church's calendar is what marks the night.
Sariel's forbidden gift, in other words, did not vanish when the Watchers were punished. It went underground. It passed through women who understood the moon's course without necessarily having a theology to explain it. It survived because it was useful — and because some knowledge, once given, cannot be taken back.
What the Saga Does With This Material
Nico Pesce built the Di Luna bloodline on a specific theological premise: that the fall of the Watchers was not purely catastrophe. That Sariel's transmission of lunar knowledge was an act with consequences that radiate forward through time, finding purchase in a Sicilian woman who stood at the foot of Mongibello in 1099 and asked for something the angel's descendant — the Lupa — had been holding in trust. The pact Serafina makes is not with evil in any simple sense. It is with a force that carries both divine origin and absolute refusal of divine authority. That tension is what makes the Di Luna gift so double-edged across every generation that inherits it.
For readers who want to understand where the series sits theologically and historically, the Book of Enoch is worth reading alongside the novels. It is a short text, and it is specific in ways that illuminate exactly what the Luna Strega mythology is doing. The Watchers are not background decoration. They are the architecture.
The Di Luna bloodline begins with a fallen angel's knowledge, a first woman's refusal, and a sleeping entity inside a volcano that has been waiting for someone worth waking for. That is the foundation beneath everything that follows — across a thousand years of daughters, marks, and the particular danger of women who know the course of the moon.
That foundation is laid in 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon — the first book in the Luna Strega Trilogy, set in Norman-conquered Sicily at the exact moment Serafina Di Luna makes the pact that will define every daughter who comes after her. For more on the folk magic, the history, and the mythology behind the series, visit the Luna Strega blog, or find the full collection at the Luna Strega store.