Whether or not we believe in giants, our words for the landscape often
imply that it was made by a giant or that an enormous body is located there.
We see giants in rock formations, in the patterns of the clouds. We refer
to the mouth of a river, the fingers of a lake, the elbow of a stream, a
headland jutting into the sea, the foothills of a mountain chain or the
heartland of a nation. Place names reflect this. The summit of Mont Blanc
is known as the Giants Tooth. There are basaltic rocks in the Irish Sea
called the Giants Causeway. Legend says they were made when a giant in Ireland
attempted to reach his lover in Scotland. The native name for an unusual
round landform in New Mexico is Giants Head. The islands of Marthas Vineyard,
Nantucket and the Elizabeth Islands are said in Indian legend to have been
made by the good giantess Quant and her husband Maushop.
And there are many large chasms around the world known as the Giantss Leap,
Ditch or Canyon.
The Graeco-Latin word gigans derives from the Sanskrit g-jan, meaning earth
and giant. Gigans meant a mighty being, one capable of giving birth. One
group of giants in Greek myth were called the Gegenes which means the Earthborn.
Ge or gi, from which we get geo, means the earth.
The French and the older form of the English word for giant is geante which
literally means earth before. Ante refers to the first or before.
Ante forms the root of the word Atlantis, one of the mythical antediluvian
worlds wherein dwelt the giants.
In Greek and Hittite myth this was the time of the first mother of all,
Ge, Gaea or Gaia. In Hindu myth she is Gaya. She is the Great Goddess from
whose dance the earth was born. She is great because she gave birth to the
world, the mountains, the oceans, the creatures, the giants and encompassed
them all. A being of Gaia is a Gaian or a Giant. They are creators in the
time of the first earth or the earth before this time. In Chinese myth a
primordial being called Pan Ku was the giant from whose body the earth was
formed. His flesh was the earth, his sweat the rain, his tears the rivers,
his breath was the wind and his voice was thunder. He named creation. On
dying, the body of Pan Ku formed the five holy mountains and his eyes became
the sun and moon. Likewise, around the world there are myths which tell
of creation being made from the body of a giant. Gayomart was a huge light-giving
figure at the time of the creation of the Persian cosmos. Ymir was the giant
whose dismembered body formed the Scandinavian cosmos. The head of the Hindu
giant Purusha formed the heavens, the navel became the atmosphere and the
feet the earth.
All cultures have giants in their ancient past. We have giants in story,
such as David and Goliath, Jack and the Beanstalk, or St. Christopher who
carried Christ across the river in flood. We have giants in myth, such as
Gogmagog and Ysbadadden, the leaders of their ancient British race, or the
Giants and Titans who challenged Zeus for Olympus. We have the signs that
giants left behind such as the rocky islands in the English Channel made
by their passing from Europe to Britain. We are told of their helping humanity
such as in the construction of walls of cities and the building of megalithic
sites like Stonehenge. We are told of their gifts to humanity, such as the
Titan Prometheus bringing fire, or the giant figure of Sakarakaamche who
spread himself over the land to give medicinal plants to the Yavapai of
Arizona.
On the other hand we have stories of giants as hostile and violent beings.
On earth, human heroes are often pitted against giants. The cruel giant
Ricca or Retho made himself a cloak from the beards of those he had slain.
He was defeated by King Arthur and banished below Mt. Arvaius, which is
now Snowdon in north Wales. In the Anglo-Saxon saga Beowulf the hero slays
the giant Grendel and his terrible mother. They are monstrous man-eating
ogres.
The reason for the Flood in the Old Testament is said to be partly because
of the need to rid the earth of evil giants. In the heavens, the gods fought
viciously to control the giants and curb their powers. Often banished from
heavenly realms to those below the earth, giants could cause mischief by
drying up rivers, destroying crops, flocks and mountains. The giant Enceladus,
buried by Zeus beneath the island of Sicily, causes Mt. Etna to erupt when
he turns in his grave. Since the Greek gods were immortal, it is puzzling
why they so fiercely contested the giants, who were neither mortal nor immortal.
What is at issue here? Why was there a war between the giants and the gods?
In Classical mythology it is said that the Titans were the children of Gaia.
By herself (parthenogenesis) Gaia created the Sky which was called Ouranos,
the Mountains called Ourea, and the Sea called Pontus. She then took the
Sky as her lover. Out of their union the Titans were born. These included
Oceanus, Cronos, Hyperion, Themis and Phoebe. The Gigantes, the giants,
were then born from Gaia when she was impregnated by the blood of her mutilated
lover Ouranos. Ouranus had been forcing Gaia, out of jealousy, to hold her
children within her body. Gaia, in pain, urged her son, the Titan Cronos
or Time, to castrate Ouranos. Cronos did the deed and from the drops of
blood falling upon the earth Gaia gave birth to the Giants. They included
Enceladus, Porphyrion, Pallas and Alcyoneus. They had the heads of men and
bodies ending in serpents. (Hesiod, Theogony, 116-187, 616-23.) However,
some of Gaias children from her original union with Ouranos were also called
giants. They were the hundred-handed giants: Briareus, Gyges and Cottus.
Then there were the giant one-eyed Cyclopes.
In the Odyssey the hero Odysseus visits the island where the race of one-eyed
giant shepherds, the Cyclopes, live. They are an independent, self-sufficient
race, who have no need to cultivate the soil. Polyphemos, the most formidable
of the giant Cyclopes, imprisons Odysseus and his companions after they
have entered his cave and helped themselves to the food there. He begins
to devour them two at a time. The wily Odysseus plots their escape. First,
they introduce the Cyclops to wine. Then they drive a sharpened stake into
his one eye while he sleeps. When the other giants come to his aid and ask
who did this to him, Polyphemos replies Nobody, the name Odysseus had told
him was his. The other Cyclopes leave. Every night the flock of sheep belonging
to the remaining Cyclops came into the cave and left for pasture the next
morning. Odysseus observed that the now-blind Polyphemos merely ran his
finger along the back of the sheep as they departed. One morning Odysseus
had his men hang onto the thick fleece on the underside of the departing
sheep to avoid detection. In this manner they made their escape. (Homer,
Odyessy, 9. 105-542.)
In this classic story about giants, the intent is to show the cunning of
humans against a rather stupid but powerful and dangerous foe. However the
story contains some points which show our hero poorly and the giants in
a rather better light. The first point is that the Cyclopes are devoted
to their sheep. They are the archetypal good shepherds living close to nature.
Polyphemos knows each sheep by name and handles them gently. There is no
suggestion of their being eaten. This is in contrast to the hostility he
directs at the humans, whom he did not invite into his cave. They provoke
his anger with their arrogance, and they literally have no name. Cannibalism
seems almost an addition to the story to justify the aggressive actions
of Odysseus. In the north of Europe there is a race of beings similar to
the Cyclopes. They are the Gruagachs, hairy giants, or club-carrying Wild
Herdsmen. In Scotland, where they are called Fachans, they are shown with
one eye, one leg and one arm. They are the protectors of cattle with a close
affinity to the trees. They are devoted to the land, but are held in awe
or dread.
The second point is that the other giants come the moment one of their number
is in distress. They are concerned for the well-being of Polyphemos. They
only depart after he insists several times that Nobody did this to him.
While Odysseus was cleverly avoiding blame by the Nobody ploy, the giants
were revealing their more honorable trait of solidarity. Although the poem
wants to paint the Cyclopes as unsocial savages, their only crime seems
to be that they do not live in cities or plough the soil. The sense from
the poem is that they live an idyllic life and wish only to be left in peace.
The third point is that the Cyclopes live in caves. They are at home with
earth and stone. The name Cyclopean is given to massive and well-joined
masonry such as the walls in the early Greek cities of Mycenae and Tiryns.
In the Aeneid the Cyclopes build the wall around Elysium. In Scandinavian
myth the giants build the wall around Asgard. In Britain the giants are
responsible for colossal earthworks which divide the land. The implication
is that only a race of giants could have the strength and skill to achieve
such monumental feats in earth and stone. The giants are raw nature, wild
and men-devouring. Yet at the same time they are city building and culture
creating. They cross the divide at the beginning of time between wild and
civilized, between subhuman and more-than-human.
We see this crossing over in Greek mythology. The Pantheon - all the deities
of the Greek people - was larger in early tradition than it was after the
war in heaven. At first it included the primordial mother goddesses: Euronyme,
the cosmic mother of all, Gaia, the earth goddess, Rhea, the mother of Zeus,
and the Giants and Titans. One of the wisest of the Titans was Prometheus,
Forethought. He helped set the first people on earth during the paradise
known as the Golden Age and helped them with many gifts. Their offspring
included the major Olympian gods who, led by Zeus, overthrew the Titans
to win the war in heaven.
When the war in heaven was over, Mount Olympus was established as the home
of the gods and goddesses. Zeus was at the top of a hierarchy, with his
brother Poseidon ruling the sea. The goddesses were demoted from being creators
and were consigned to minor roles as wives and protectors. The Titans and
Giants were relegated to the time before Time. They were condemned like
Prometheus to eternal punishment, or like Atlas to be forever carrying the
weight of the world upon their shoulders. They were made to suffer the assaults
of whirlwind and ice in deserted, dark and barren lands. They became the
Ge-antes, the beings of the earth before.
This pattern of early presence in the Cosmos, beneficial cooperation with
humans, then conflict with gods or heroes and banishment to elemental realms
appears in many of the world traditions concerning giants. How can we resolve
the ambivalence which surrounds giants? How can we resolve the conflict
between their ancient role as benefactors and their subsequent role as terrible
beings?
The answer to this question lies in the historical process of the growing
divide in the Western mind between the concept of nature and the concept
of culture. Originally, the human experience was closely tied to the land.
There was no separation between nature and how humans lived. Self-identity
came from the reciprocal relationships of life. The external world was perceived
in terms of human experience and human experience was perceived in terms
of the external world. The world was not objectified. Henri Frankfort characterized
this as an I-Thou relationship. Ernst Cassirer wrote of it as sympathetic
identification. The anthropologist Levy-Bruhl called it participation mystique.
The experience of self or mind extended beyond the individual body to the
tribe, even into animals and the whole of nature.
Perception was a function of the whole person with no division between mind
and body. The self or the body-mind confronted the world as a living presence,
as a constant revelation, in which everything was infused with spirit. In
this world, storms had a reason for coming, trees a reason for falling,
the sun a reason for rising, rivers a reason for flooding, animals a reason
for giving themselves to the hunter. All things - the sun, animals, trees,
rivers and mountains - had a spirit.
In such a world the key to good fortune, fertility and abundance lay in
actively and purposefully participating in the central drama of creation.
This is described in each cultures creation myth. To the extent that this
drama is enacted, dreamt, danced, sung, ritualized and realized in sacred
forms, so the people are in harmony with the Cosmos. The act of the sun
rising and singing the sun rise are synonymous. One reciprocated the other.
The act of creating a ritual dance mask of a nature spirit is not to represent
the spirit, it is the actual face of the deity.
The original deity was the undifferentiated Great Goddess. She contained
all things, both male and female. Her body, Nature, was the primordial giant.
In her body, the people found relationship, connectedness, meaning and identity.
From her came the giant forces of creation, constantly unfolding and emerging
in an eternal now. The central image of the primordial goddess is the womb.
Her cycle is birth, change and death. Her power was often represented as
a serpent, dragon or lightning flash. Giant forms manifested and were created
in the living landscape to invoke and encourage the participation in the
great drama of the cycle of life.
With settlement and the development of villages and then towns and cities,
attitudes toward the world underwent a transformative process. The people
became increasingly separated from nature. Awareness of the individual self
became more important. I came to mean the historical self existing in linear
time with fixed memories, thoughts and cultural goals. The local spirits
of place became separated from the unified body of human experience - Us
- and became increasingly differentiated - the Other. As language developed
and became more of a tool for abstract thought, new concepts about life
evolved. Language and ideas became widely divergent from the natural world.
Writing meant that language no longer needed an active thinker.
Concepts acheived an illusory objectivity. Complex cultural practices were
created through language and writing. These included laws, sacraments, philosophies
and religions.
The natural world was still there, however, and humans still needed to cooperate
with it. The ancient spirits of place became projections of the urban-cultures
worldview. They became less natural and more like individual humans with
distinct characteristics. They became the giants, ogres, fairies, cyclopes,
undines, dryads, gnomes and the now distinct male and female deities of
place in the local traditions. Eventually these latter became the gods and
goddesses. When people lived in nature, they took the elements as they came.
Their cultural practices expressed this. The spirits of the living earth
were subtle, diverse, huge, reaching into every dimension of life. They
were mind and matter, without distinction. But once people moved to villages
and towns removed from nature, in which self or mind meant Us, they needed
to make the world a safe place to live in. At that point the ancient spirits
of the rivers, the weather, the animals, the forests, the Other, were perceived
as potentially hostile and had to be tamed.
Now that people had taken themselves out of the natural world, it began
to be seen as being full of malevolent forces. Urban-culture was easily
threatened. It required a high degree of planning, organization and control.
The dangers of urban living, systematically created by humans in their cultures,
were projected back onto the natural world as though the elemental forces
themselves had turned demonic. Respect and awe for the spirit of the Other
- formerly met in the immanent experience of the natural world - became
replaced by fear.
In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart reminds us that the human body is
our gauge for perceiving scale. The body of the Other, the giant, is the
antithesis. Human scale represents symmetry and balance. Gigantic scale
is made to be grotesque and disproportionate. Our human-scaled world is
interior, contained, domestic and cultural. The gigantic is exterior, uncontainable,
potentially hostile and overly natural. Our most fundamental relation to
the gigantic is articulated in our relation to landscape, our immediate
and lived relation to nature as it surrounds us... The gigantic becomes
an explanation for the environment. (Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives
of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, p. 347.) From this we can see that
the body becomes the central metaphor for describing and relating to the
environment. With the growing divide between nature and culture it is easy
to see how the gigantic forces of the world became the object of fear.
Forests became places to be feared, to be avoided, the haunt of ghosts and
witches. Wild animals became the metaphor for everything that was evil,
including the animal nature of the body. The Earth Goddess Gaia, Pan, the
Giants and beings from the Otherworld were relegated to dark chasms, mountains
and wildernesses. There they entered the category of evil, identified with
the Devil. In Greek mythology this was accomplished by the citified deities
of Olympus fighting and defeating those forces which were chthonic and wild
- the Giants and Titans.
A similar process is revealed in the cosmologies of the desert religions.
There the forces of heaven are pitted against the forces of the Devil, most
of whom are recognizable as the ancient chthonian deities of the Middle
East.
The Great Goddess herself had to disappear. Her complex changing nature
was identified with chaos as opposed to the ordered world of the cosmos
that the new urban cultures desired. The old temples echoing the organic
forms of earth were replaced by the square, abstract lines of temples constructed
in contrast to the earth.
The giants of the Old Testament are the actual historical opponents of Israel
writ large. Israels enemies were made exterior, huge and evil. When the
Hebrews arrived in Palestine the enemy Canaanites are described in the Bible
as giants. The greatest of the Canaanites, Goliath, was killed by the miniature
David. By this parable the Old Testament implies that the smallest of the
Israelites is more than a match for the largest of their enemies. Nimrod,
whose other name Gibbor means giant, was the builder of the Tower of Babel.
Moses killed the one giant, Og, who survived the flood.
Other Old Testament giants represent huge, ancient, established cultures
against which the small nomadic tribe of Israelites struggled.
Among the Greeks the first task of heroes who are the founders of cities
is to clear the land of malevolent beings which included the giants. An
example is Theseus the founder of Athens. He not only clears the immediate
vicinity of giants and other monsters but goes to Crete and kills the Minotaur
there.
The giants rapidly became the subdued forces of the natural world, or the
conquered forces from other cultures. It is ironic that the beings who became
the deities of the newly emerging urban-cultures had chthonian - earth arising
- origins and even giant origins. Both Zeus and Yahweh began life as the
giant Thunder Spirits of mountains and became enthroned huge men with beards.
Athena began as an owl and rock spirit from Anatolia and became the matronly
deity of the Athenian city state.
By this point in history, the division between natural forces and urban
dwellers had become thoroughly enshrined in language and in cosmology. This
found expression in books of law such as the Bible. The whole structure
of the cosmos now affirmed that divine law proclaimed the natural as evil
and the cultural as good. This worldview suited the patriarchal, monotheistic
practices of a struggling desert people. As a result, giants became everything
the Judaeo-Christian culture did not want to be, that is:
solitary, evil, violent, hostile, naked, cannibalistic and identified with
the natural world - the Other. The giants helped define culture by means
of clearly establishing the boundaries. They defined who was in and who
was out.
By the time mainstream European culture became thoroughly Christianized,
giants had become negative and evil. Christian theologians like Augustine
took the dim Old Testament view of giants. But there were places where the
ancient memory of good giants could still be found. Saint Christopher, Christ
carrier, was an extremely popular good giant in medieval Europe.
Effigies of him were paraded in many cities until his cult was banned by
the Church. Gog and Magog, ancient British giants, became adopted through
popular demand by the City of London for their defense of the land. Statues
of them were set up in the city Guildhall. In the folk traditions of Europe
the giants were inclined to be friendly if approached in the right way.
Rbezahl was a kind giant of Bohemia. The giant of Grabbist Hill in Britain
would help fishermen. The Gruagachs or Fachans, Wild Herdsmen, would protect
cattle if offerings were left to them. Some of the giants in literature
were also friendly, but this was usually because they had been tamed and
made Christian. Jonathan Swifts good giant, Gulliver, was very helpful and
moral. The good giants of Rabelais were all Christian and his bad giants
were definitely not.
On the whole, the idea of good giants in the literary, Christian line of
European thought is anti-traditional. Heracles or Hercules, who could be
construed as a good giant/culture hero, is denied giant status. He remains
in the category of Theseus, a human giant-killer. During the war in heaven
he killed many of the giants. But Hercules did appeal to local folk culture
as a good giant. His representation in the great hill figure at Cerne Abbas
in England was likely made by local people in the spirit of the original,
pre-Biblical, view of giants.
Ever since the process began which contorted nature to fit urban categories,
we have thought of giants in human terms. But in fact giants are the elemental
forces of the world and must be thought of in their terms. Giants are nature.
As such they are good to think. Until the war in heaven was fought, which
drove away the unifying cosmology of the Great Goddess and created the spirit/matter
distinction, people lived in harmony with giants in the elemental sense.
Wherever the ancient wisdom of human bodies with their complex senses and
intuition was valued, people moved in harmony with the giants. When the
river flooded, the giant was spreading its body, arching its back. When
the volcano exploded, the giant was troubled by dark dreams.
When the forests burned, the breath of the giant was cleansing the earth.
When hurricanes flattened coastlines and lightning flashed, the giants were
walking in the sky. When new green growth spread a mantle over the ground,
the giant was putting on new clothes. When the setting sun made patterns
in the clouds, the giants were at play. When the giants of nature began
their fertility rites so could the humans.
These direct experiences of life are the language of the giants. They could
be participated in, even increased, through sympathetic magic based on the
principle that like resonates with like. If a large result is desired, it
is created on a miniature scale. Through proportional equivalence something
small can effect its greater likeness - sympathy is achieved with the gigantic
forces of the cosmos. It is difficult for us today to think in these terms
as a result of the establishment of the scientific cosmology with its mind-matter
division and mechanical and linear notions of cause and effect. It would
be just as hard for a tribal person not to think in these terms. Their language
predisposes them toward synchronicity, communion of mind and matter, sympathetic
resonance and non-linear time and space.
Is it possible to find in the idea of giants a key for unlocking the ancient
secrets of the sacred way of life? Can they offer a way of relating to the
world around us which reunites earth and spirit as they were in our ancient
inheritance? Is the idea of giants a way of being with the world which allows
us to possess a culture with a body-wise, nature-based cosmology?
The clues to this ancient way of being may reside in the somatic memories
of our own bodies. Our bodies have a history upon the earth of such length
that the cosmologies of the past few thousand years are but a veneer. Clues
to the giants may lie in the huge forms which lay across the landscape:
the mountain ranges, rivers, plains, woods and forests. Clues to the language
of giants may lie in traditions where people interacted with natural forms
to produce myths and shrines, and cultures which enhanced the patterns and
powers in the landscape. In the landscape itself is written a language which
promises the restoration of a sacred world. Druidry as the wisdom of the
trees takes us on this path.
The contents of this article are excerpted from GIANTS OF GAIA by
Nicholas R. Mann and Marcia Sutton Ph.D. Published by Brotherhood
of Life, 110 Dartmouth, S.E., Albuquerque, NM 87106-2218. (Available for
$15.95 plus $3.75 UPS shipping.)
Nicholas R. Mann is a geomancer and author of: Glastonbury Tor:
A Guide to the History and Legends,
Triskele,1986. Keltic Power Symbols, Triskele, 1987.
Sedona - Sacred Earth, Zivah, 1989.
The Red and White Springs: The Mysteries of Britain at Glastonbury,
Triskele, 1993.
His Story: Masculinity in the Post-Patriarchal World, Llewellyn,1995.
Giants of Gaia, Brotherhood of Life, 1995. Isle of Avalon: Sacred Mysteries
of Arthur and Glastonbury Tor, Llewellyn, 1996.
In preparation: The Dark God, Llewellyn,1997, and The Secret Geometry
of Washington, DC.