“It falls to the primordial myth to preserve true history, the history of the human condition; it is in the myth that the principles and paradigms for all conduct must be sought and recovered.”
—Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane
From murder, the first city emerged. The City of Man is a glittering snare of those named Nephilim, “the fallen ones,” and the fruit of their garden is rebellion: woman against man, man against God, the abolition of fatherhood, Amazonian enormities, the blending of beasts, the acceleration of occult technologies. All these are but a revival of those techniques which the antediluvian goddess Naamah had contrived; as also the Cushim before had merely revived the magic of the Cainites.
The belief, universal among the ancients, that the men of the earliest ages vastly exceeded in stature those who followed them, that their lives were immensely longer, is widely attested. Among the Greeks, the notion of terrible size among primitive men was connected with the concept of autochthony. In this context, as in that of the giants who personified cosmic forces, the name ycyavze was considered as a synonym of yrjspse, "earth-born." Regions such as Arcadia, sometimes called Gigantis, and Lycia, named Gigantia from the supposed character of their primitive inhabitants, all recursions of those mighty men of renown.
As Milton recalled those “whom the fables name, of monstrous size, Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr'd on Jove, Briareus, or Typhon, whom the den By ancient Tarsus held,” memories of giants, born of the earth, are found in the southern parts of the island of Rhodes and at Cos. The causeway in Cyzicus is said to be their arcane masonry. In the Odyssey, Eurymedon, king of the giants, and references to the gigantic Lestrygons speak to these recollections. In the traditions of Attica, the Pallantides possess all the characteristics of the savage giants of the primordial generations.
Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain (1136), recounts that Merlin sourced the megaliths for Stonehenge from a circle in Ireland, the ‘Choream Gigantum’, or Giant’s Dance, which the Tuatha Dé Danann used in their water-rituals. The giant-magician as builder recurs in the Cyclopes, the Giants of Mont'e Prama, the Celtic Balor, the Rujm el-Hiri in the Golan Heights, the Neolithic builders of Ġgantija on the island of Gozo, yet even more have been forgotten or suppressed, such as the obscure account given by Mr. W. G. Palgrave of a structure very similar to Stonehenge, found in Arabia:
“…we saw before us several huge stones, like enormous boulders, placed endways perpendicularly on the soil, while some of them yet upheld similar masses laid transversely over their summit … The people of the country attribute their erection to Darim, by his own hands, too, seeing that he was a giant, also for some magical ceremony, since he was a magician; pointing towards Rass, our companions affirmed that a second and similar stone circle, also of gigantic dimensions, existed there; and, lastly, they mentioned a third towards the southwest.”
This liminal recollection, that the heroes of first days were monstrous in stature and nature, is a constant mytheme in classic poetry, myth and history, concretized by discoveries of great fossils described by Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Flavius Josephus, Plutarch, Philostratus, and Augustine, reported to be the bones of heroes seven, ten, eleven cubits high, or even taller. To be clear, some of these were not simply “large men”—
There were till then left the race of giants, who had bodies so large, and countenances so entirely different from other men, that they were surprising to the sight, and terrible to the hearing. The bones of these men are still shown to this very day, unlike to any credible relations of other men.
—Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews
That there were giants, and these monstrous men somehow catalyzed a world flood, is common to all peoples: whether it be that of Deucalion, that of Noah, the Norse Bergelmir, or the Aztec Atonatiuh, the flood is a cosmogonic truth that was, until the Humanist mass conversions of the mid-1800s, considered verified by science; in the most distant epoch of humanity, continents previously united were separated, with much of them vanishing under the great waters. The disappearance of Atlantis is not a “parable” created by Plato, but a geological event preserved by the hierophants of Egypt, an event which, epistemologically, cannot be prosecuted by the consensus forming rituals of post-humans.
In 1566, at the great teocalli called the ‘Mountain of unbaked bricks’ (tlalchihualtepec), Pedro de Los Rios, a Dominican monk, recorded all the hieroglyphical paintings extant at that time:
Before the great inundation which took place four thousand eight hundred years after the creation of the World, the country of Anahuac was inhabited by giants (tzocuillixeque). All those who did not perish were transformed into fishes, save seven, who fled into caverns. When the waters subsided, one of these giants, Xelhua, surnamed the architect, went to Cholula; where, as a memorial of the mountain Tlaloc, which had served for an asylum to himself and his six brethren, he built an artificial hill in form of a pyramid. He ordered bricks to be made in the province of Tlamanalco, at the foot of the Sierra of Cocotl, and to convey them to Cholula he placed a file of men, who passed them from hand to hand. The gods beheld with wrath this edifice, the top of which was to reach the clouds. Irritated at the daring attempt of Xelhua, they hurled fire on the pyramid. Numbers of the workmen perished; the work was discontinued, and the monument was afterwards dedicated to Quetzalcoatl, the god of the air."
Berossus, following the Chaldeo-Babylonian histories, depicted the first men as retaining a great stature during those first generations after the Deluge, saying “the first men (after the cataclysm), inordinately proud of their strength and their gigantic size, began to despise the gods and to fancy themselves superior to them.” Mar Abas Katina, chronicler of Chaldea, recounted the ancient giants of Mesopotamia and Armenia, their violence, and the war between the most terrible among them, Bel the Babylonian and Haigh the Armenian, "When mankind were scattered all over the face of the earth, giants of extraordinary strength lived among them, and being always possessed with fury, they drew their swords each one against his neighbor, and strove continually for the mastery."
In the Book of Baruch, the primeval giants were subhuman, lacking divine knowledge, but superhuman in savagery, and for this reason were destroyed: “There were the giants, those renowned men that were from the beginning of great stature, expert in war. The Lord chose not them, neither did they find the way of knowledge. Therefore did they perish. And because they had not wisdom, they perished through their folly.”