1. The Age and War of the Giants and Monsters
The tradition of
monsters, giants, and of a “war with the giants” is mirrored in the
unlikely place of Native American Indian traditions and legends. As
with the traditions of giants and gigantomachy in the eastern
Mediterranean, Mayor notes that it is necessary, when viewing these
Indian legends and traditions, to “keep in mind that in many Native
traditions, ‘giants’ of ancient eras were often understood to be
primeval beings that were neither animal nor human.”402 That said, this
indigenous Native American tradition is very rich and
diverse.
Like the early
colonial Christians in North America who sought to interpret fossil
evidence within the context of biblical stories of creation, the
Nephilim, and the Flood,403 Native American
Indians, when encountering such bones and other evidence, “turned
to mythic traditions about giants and monsters to account for
them...”404 The uniformity of
this tradition of ancient giants and monsters across different
tribes even called forth a comment from the famous Puritan Cotton
Mather.405 As for their
Puritan counterparts, the Indians, like the Greeks, interpreted such fossil evidence within the context of
their already-existing tribal traditions about human
prehistory. The method in both cases is
identical.
There are but two
logical ways in which to view such traditions, be they biblical,
Sumerian, or Native American, and they are that (1) either the
myths were created by those cultures to
explain such fossil evidence; or (2)
the myths were handed down to such
cultures and contained some kernel of actual historical truth, or
to put it somewhat more provocatively, the
myths pre-existed both the evidence which was to be encountered and
interpreted, and the cultures that would encounter and interpret
it. This is a phenomenon we have already encountered with
the Greeks, and to a certain extent, it is true of all cultures of ancient times and their attempts to
understand and interpret such evidence.
Needless to say, the
first alternative is that favored by academia and may be designated
“the standard view.” As we proceed with our survey of Native
American traditions, however, we shall see that there are a number
of things that suggest that the second alternative, for all its
radical nature, is the more rational alternative, and one deserving
of a detailed exploration.
Just as for the
Greeks across the Atlantic, the nature of the giants was not a
settled matter for Native Americans. In some traditions, the giants
were said to be made of stone and lived almost 1300 years before
the arrival of Columbus, according to the Iroquois scholar David
Cusick;406 in others, the
giants were “humanoid” creatures,407 and there were
debates within, and differences between, traditions over whether or
not the giants were even hostile or indifferent to humans.408
There is an amazing
consistency of Native American traditions regarding the “age of the
giants and monsters” and in some traditions, the war that was
fought against them. Again, according to the Iroquois scholar David
Cusick, the “northern giants, called Ronnongwetowanea, had harassed the early Iroquois
in the past, but the giants all died out about twenty-five hundred
winters before Columbus discovered America.”409 Running
these numbers (1492 - 2500 = 1008 B.C.) places the Native American
account of the extinction of the giants and the end of the “age of
giants” at very roughly the same period
of time as biblical accounts of the Hebrew conquest of Canaan, in
which giants were a specific target for extinction.410 Other Iroquois
tribes placed the death of the last giant at eight to ten
generations prior to 1705,411 again, in a time
frame roughly consistent with other Native American traditions and
broadly consistent with similar legends from the Middle
East.
One of the most
intriguing, and as we shall discover, most important, features of
Native American traditions and legends concerning the giants and
monsters is the fact that many of these traditions taught the idea
that various “past ages (were) distinguished
by different kinds of creatures,” a belief that was
“a long-standing concept in many Native
American traditions, and discoveries of unusual vertebrate
fossils would certainly reinforce the idea.”412
Among the Aztecs in
Mexico, this idea found further expansion, and in the expansion, an
eerie parallel with the Mesopotamian and Middle Eastern accounts
suggestive of an engineered humanity:
In Aztec mythology, there were four previous ages of the world, each destroyed by a different cataclysm: flood, earthquake, hurricane, and fire. The first age was dominated by the earth-giants, followed by three ears of primitive humans. The Aztecs believed that inhabitants of the later worlds sometimes encountered terrifying giants who were relict survivors of the great flood and earthquakes that had destroyed the past worlds. To re-create life in the present, fifth age, the Feathered Serpent god Quetzalcoatl retrieved the scattered and broken bones of the human ancestors destroyed in the fourth age. He ground the bones to powder in a jade mortar. Mixed with blood donated by the gods, these bones produced today’s humans.413
There are a number of
very important points to note here.
Firstly, the Aztec
tradition is broadly consistent with North American Native American
traditions of different ages distinguished by different creatures,
which suggests three possibilities for the resemblance: (1) either
both traditions stem from a common and earlier source; or (2) all
Native American cultures were in much closer contact with each
other than the Isolationist school championed by the Smithsonian
and “official archaeology and anthropology” would have it; or (3)
some combination of (1) and (2) was true. It should be noted that
if the Isolationist interpretation were true, then option (1) would
be a way to explain it, but this would present academia’s “standard
view” with the problem of having to explain why so many disparate
tribal traditions maintained the concept with such consistency over
a wide area and prolonged period, and “independently” of one
another. Conversely, if the disparate traditions did not spring from a common source, then how would one
account for the amazing similarity of “the mythological
imagination” over such a wide area — a similarity, moreover, that
bears amazing resemblances to modern evolutionary theory? In other
words, the consistency of the concept itself strongly suggests a
scientific basis from which the various
mythologies arose, and thus suggests a time and culture antedating
the Meso- and North American Native traditions and stemming from
very high antiquity.
Secondly, within the
Aztec tradition, explicit mention is made of different types of pre-existing humanity, a conception well
in keeping with modern evolutionary theory concerning the origins
of modern Homo sapiens sapiens, with
one very important exception, and that
is that modern mankind in the Aztec tradition, as in the
Mesopotamian, is an engineered
creature, and one moreover that is chimerical, i.e., composed of a
part from “the gods” and a part from the pre-existing and more
primitive “humans.” Even the details of mankind’s creation are
eerily parallel with the Kharsag tablets and the interpretation of
the O’Briens examined previously, for we have (1) a grinding of the
bones to a powder, paralleling the O’Briens’ creation of a culture,
and (2) the “donation” of the blood — meaning perhaps the semen
emissions — of the “gods” to the hybridized creature. Again,
the details of the Aztec creation myth
suggestively point to a technological basis and to an engineered,
and not to an evolved
humanity.
Finally, in yet
another odd parallel with the Middle East, the Aztecs believed that
some of the giants survived the Flood.
In this, there is also general alignment with the traditions of
more northern Native American nations which believed that the wars
with the giants were a post-flood event.
The tradition
extended beyond the Iroquois in North America or the Aztecs in
Mexico. For example, as Cortez and his men marched westward into
Mexico toward the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, they encountered the
tribe of the Tlaxcaltecs or Tlascala Indians, who recounted for
Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of Cortez’s captains, that
A very long time ago, their forefathers found the territory inhabited “by men and women of great size, people with huge bones.” The ancestors had fought and destroyed these “wicked and evil” beings — and “any of the giants who survived eventually died out.” This last detail reveals that the Tlaxcaltecas understood that even if a small number of relict creatures had escaped mass destruction, they would eventually face extinction.414
Again, the legend
compels the observation that the Tlaxcalteca account is remarkably
parallel with the biblical account of
the conquest of Canaan by the Hebrews, in that both peoples (1)
encounter giant humanoid occupants of the land, and (2) wage war
against them because these giants are “wicked and evil.” This
observation compels three further questions: Are we looking at a
“conquest” that occurred in more than one place but for the same
reasons? If so, then we are probably looking
at coordinated action and an agenda, namely, a genocidal war for
the extinction of a certain race or species of
“giants.”
Or alternatively, are
we looking at dim memories in either case of one underlying event
that occurred in the dim mists of “pre-history,” or are we looking
at some combination of both? If the latter two cases be true, then
this in turn would perhaps have a wide and profound impact on how
the editing of biblical and other Middle Eastern texts is
understood to have occurred, and might
even suggest possible reasons for why it was
undertaken.
Note also that the
tradition here is clear: the occupants that the Tlazcalteca
encountered were living human-like creatures
of large stature. They were not
merely fossilized bones that were interpreted in accordance with a
pre-existing myth. This will become an important point in a
moment.
The Aztecs added to
this “giant lore” when, during their migrations into lower Mexico,
they encountered ca. 1200 A.D. the abandoned city of Teotihuacan,
the famous giant pyramid complex outside of modern Mexico City.
Seeing these gigantic structures, they interpreted them as having
been built by the giants during the age of the giants.415 The Aztec prince
Fernando de Alba Ixtlilxochitl maintained that these giants were
“earth-giants,” in a manner recalling the far-distant Iroquois’
“stone giants,” and that they were somehow deformed.416
Even farther south in
Latin America, the Incas had similar traditions of giants,
monsters, and wars, and explained “colossal skeletons as the
vestiges of dangerous giants of antiquity.”417 Cieza de
Leon conducted interviews with local Manta Indians in Ecuador, and
they had traditions that “Had been received from their ancestors
from very remote times”418 that a race of
giants had arrived on the coast of such stature that ordinary men
came up only to the knees.419
Here again one
encounters a story with odd and out-of-place resemblances to yet
another biblical story, from an entirely different tradition an
ocean away. De Leon, in his recounting of the Native traditions,
insisted
that because of their vile sexual habits, the giants were “detested by the natives,” who made war against the invaders in vain. At last God intervened, and while the giants “were all together engaged in their accursed [words omitted], a fearsome and terrible fire came down from heaven with a great noise. At one blow, they were all killed, and the fire consumed them.”420
While one is left
guessing what the “vile sexual habits” might be, the resemblance to
the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is
quite strong, and this suggests a rather unique twist to the
latter, for if both traditions come from some common underlying
source and represent fragments of a once-unified story or legend,
then perhaps the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah has less to do
with the conventional religious and moral explanations and more to
do with the presence of giants, or conversely, perhaps the
destruction of the giants in the Americas had something to do with
the morality of Sodom and Gomorrah.