I call this resulting, and intentional ambiguity the ‘Unified Intention of Symbol,’ since one of its implications is that the contradiction between the interpretation of real war and that of naturally recurring catastrophe is only an apparent contradiction.” 145
b. The Emergence of the Unified Intention of Symbol from the Analogical Method
One may easily see how this unified intentionality of the complex and interrelated layers of mythological symbolism might have arisen from the analogical habit of thinking of ancient cultures itself. Indeed, if that habit of thinking in turn arose out of the sophisticated physics of its paleoancient precursor Very High Civilization, then it is also relatively easy to see why the spiritual and physics components of those myths were blended almost from the start.
1. The Paleophysical Hermeneutic: Catastrophe Metaphor vs. Real War
With these thoughts in mind a comparison of catastrophism versus the “real war” hermeneutic (explanation) is in order.
Clearly, catastrophism and “real war” are both paleophysical interpretive paradigms, that is, they both attempt to make sense of ancient legends and stories by means of a comparison of the claims of those texts and the models of modern science. Here, however, catastrophism and “real war” diverge on a number of points.
For the “real war” hermeneutic, the texts only make consistent sense if taken more or less as asserting an underlying reality to the events described. In other words:
(1) the war was real;
(2) the people or “gods” who fought it were real;
(3) these people had real motivations for doing so, i.e., there is an underlying social order that was threatened by some perceived enemy, and a political agenda was at work;
(4) it was fought with real, and horrendously powerful weapons of mass destruction on a planetary scale, including, weather weapons; thus, the exploded planet hypothesis is used merely to explain certain texts as a limited event;
(5) there were real winners and losers;
(6) these people or “gods” in some cases prior to, in some cases during, and in some cases after the war, then initiated a contact with humanity and began to interfere in its affairs, to the point of siring and initiating human civilizations and their dynasties.
For the “catastrophist” explanation, however, especially as exemplified in the popular work of Alan Alford, the following interesting thing begins to happen:
(1) the exploded planet hypothesis is used to interpret references to “wars of the gods” as a metaphor for colliding planets;
(2) the exploded planet hypothesis is used to interpret references in texts to the unions or marriages of the gods as metaphors for colliding planets;
(3) the exploded planet hypothesis is used to interpret the children of such marriages as metaphors for the debris of those collisions;
(4) the exploded planet hypothesis is used to interpret references of mixed heavenly and earthly origins of people(e.g. Adam, or the Nephilim in the Old Testament) as meaning this debris fell to earth - in yet more planetary collisions and impacts - and seeded life on earth.
In other words, the catastrophist use of the exploded planet hypothesis - especially in the hands of an Alan Alford, becomes a way to view almost every textual theme in such legends as a metaphor of what he calls “the exploded planet cult.” This is as true of Plato in his allegory of Atlantis, to the Hebrew priests who compiled the Old Testament, to the Sanskrit scribes who composed the Hindu epics.
The tendency “to see through everything” in the texts in catastrophism is a real one, for by seeing through everything, one is in real danger of seeing nothing at all to paraphrase C.S. Lewis once again. If there is no opacity to the texts, there is nothing to see. On Alford’s approach, one would have to understand even comic books such as Superman to nothing but “cleverly disguised propaganda” for the exploded planet cult. One might view coffee with cream and sugar as a “mixture,” as a “chimera”, and thus as a symbol of “meteorites” and exploded planets. One might view the current genetic chimeras of biologists and genetic engineers as a vast new program of symbols for the exploded planet, and so on and so forth. In the face of modern technologies that recapture the images recounted, Alford’s catastrophism reduces to ridiculousness, for his interpretive paradigm must explain them on the very same basis, as nothing more than manifestations of the exploded planet religion.
As interpretive approaches to paleophysics, then, no two schools could be farther apart than the catastrophist school and the “real war” school for a very obvious methodological reason. In the former, one particular modern physics model, the exploded planet hypothesis itself, is used to interpret most if not all textual themes as metaphors for that one thing. In the latter, however, different modern physics models, from “scalar physics” to the “exploded planet hypothesis” to “plasma cosmology” are used to find correspondences between specific textual references and the modern model with a view to testing the accuracy of those texts and their various assertions. Moreover, other areas of science are employed to make sense of other portions of the textual traditions, as, for example, in the use of genetic engineering to explain the occurrence of chimeras in those texts.
While both paleophysical approaches certainly challenge standard models of science and history, one may safely maintain that the catastrophist model exemplified in the works of Alford, the most popular and careful of the catastrophists, leads everywhere and nowhere all at once. It is difficult to conceive what sort of predictions it makes, other then to make predictions that more such metaphors can be found, and found almost anywhere. It ends by being nothing more than a well-footnoted compendium of the various types of metaphors for the one and only model it is willing to consider: the exploded planet hypothesis itself.
The “real war” model, in contradistinction from this, does not run quite so roughshod over the texts it considers, and moreover is able to make a prediction, namely, that artificial artifacts of the civilization that fought that war might be found and conclusively documented. And, as we shall discover in part two, there is yet another variable in the formula:
Mountains ≈ planets ≈ gods ≈ “X”.
For now it is best to leave that “X” factor unstated. But once discovered and articulated, we shall see that it spells the death knell for Alford’s convenient reductionism.
In any case, such artifacts might be structures in the desert, to structures on other planetary bodies that evidence some type of machining or intelligent origin, to residual evidences within earthly DNA that indicate some prior manipulation, or the remains of some strange humanoid creature that is anomalous in some way, from its appearance to its size. To this last subject, giants, we now turn.
4.
TIAMAT’S GIANTS AND EARTH’S SKELETONS
“... there is also reason to think that some of those bones of giants, which did survive to be discovered, have been hidden from public view. That is to say, these proofs that giants exists have been collected.... The question then is why would museums choose to hide giants away behind closed doors and in locked cabinets to be seen only by a very select few? Could there be a conspiracy?”
Stephen Quayle.146
The previous chapters have suggested that the missing exploded planet may have been a large water-and-life bearing planet, of Saturn-sized mass. They have also suggested, if it was home to intelligent human-like life, that this exploded planet - “Tiamat” - may have required such life to have relatively larger physiognomies due to its higher gravity. In short, its “men” may have been giants. Such a “literal” confirmation of ancient myths with their numerous references to chimerical giants would likewise contraindicate the catastrophist interpretation of Alford.
The myths state that this giant race, or its precursor, “came down from heaven,” literally, and interacted with mankind, a thesis that, if true, would seem to predict a very odd kind of corroboration: there should exist both remains of such creatures, as well as testimon
y to their existence.
Fortunately there is a wealth of testimony, and some very suggestive evidence in the form of remains, concerning the existence, and strange features, of these giants.
A. Ancient Testimony to the Existence of Giants
1. The Christian Church Fathers
No less than that dour exponent of divine predestination and the most important church father for the Latin Mediaeval Catholicism of the Western Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo Regius, wrote an entire treatise devoted to the subject of giants entitled “Concerning the Long life of Men before the Flood, and the Greater Size of Their Bodies.” The title is indicative of its contents, for it seems to reflect one strand of an ancient tradition within Christianity, going back to its Jewish roots, that mankind was once not only much longer-lived, but also of much larger physical stature. Augustine observes that
...some indeed do not believe that men’s bodies were formerly much greater than now.... But concerning the magnitude of their bodies, the graves laid bare by age or the force of rivers and various accidents especially convict the incredulous, where they have come to light, or where bones of the dead of incredible magnitude have fallen, as I have seen, and not I alone, on the shore by Utica, so huge a molar tooth of a man, that were it cut up into small models of teeth like ours, it would seem enough to make a hundred of them. But this I should think had belonged to some giant; for beside that the bodies of all men were much larger than ours, the giants again far exceeded the rest.147
Note that Augustine is maintaining two things: (1) that graves of such giants had been uncovered through various accidents of nature, a point to which we shall repeatedly return, and (2) that he has seen the tooth of one such giant.
Stephen Quayle, a researcher into the subject of giants, observes that Augustine believed that mankind was “once both enormously larger and longer-lived than he is now, and that his stature has diminished in the course of ages to its present dimensions.”148 He also notes that it is an Islamic tradition that Adam was as tall as a palm-tree. 149
But the situation is made even stranger by what the Church Fathers and other early Christian ecclesiastical writers themselves maintained, for far from dismissing the pagan myths outright as fanciful tales, they in fact appeared willing to seek some underlying prosaic explanation for their actual occurrence. As Celtic antiquities scholar Paul Pezron puts it:
All the ancient fathers, who in their writings have taken upon them to controvert the divinity of these imaginary gods, have spoken of them much after the same manner as Tertullian:150 They made no scruple to own that Saturn and Jupiter were warlike and powerful men, that ruled over nations: and any one may read what Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Minutius Felix, Arnobius, Lactantius, Augustine, and others, say upon this account.151
This citation is intriguing for a different reason, for its source, Paul Pezron, a scholar of antiquities of the Celts, maintained that the legendary War of the Titans in Greek mythology had a basis in reality.
Pezron maintained that there was an original stock of giants, a “giant race” that migrated in two tribal groupings, one into Europe, and the other into Asia Minor.152 The Asia Minor group, the Gomarians tribe of the Sacae, had followed its leader Acmon there, and established a city on the coast of the Black Sea called Themicyra, to honor his granddaughter Themis.
But the history takes a strange turn when these gigantic settlers in northern Anatolia began to call themselves “Titans.” So, to quote giant investigator Stephen Quayle, “here’s the interesting twist (and one that most modern historians miss). The Gomarian giants actually can be traced into Greek mythology and, as such, were actual individuals who were giants and who were treated as gods. Thus, far from being simply myths, it is possible to trace some of the Greek gods to actual historical figures.”153
But how is this possible?
Because Acmon’s son, Uranus, who succeeded him in ruling their new conquests, was himself worshipped by his subjects as “a Man of Heaven.”154 As Pezron goes on to note, the ancient author Simias of Rhodes gave Uranus the name “Acmonides,” or “son of Acmon,” an opinion that Hesychius shared.155 In other words, “from this single family of giant Gomarian princes came ‘those who have passed for the greatest and ancientest (sic) gods of the heathen world.”’156 So it would appear that the opinions of some Church fathers and other early ecclesiastical writers is not without its classical antecedents.
2. Classical Sources
But there is more to this story, for “while the minute (and often erroneous) stories of Nero and his fiddle and Julius Caesar and Brutus continue to be told, something as amazing as the fact that Roman legions on occasion battled giant soldiers has been covered up.”157 Indeed, no less than the famous Roman historian and man of letters Pliny the Elder reported that the bones of one such giant, who had been observed by the Romans while he was alive, had been “brought by Marcus Scaurus from Joppa in Judea... The monster was over 40 feet long, and the height of its ribs was greater than that of Indian elephants, while its spine was 1 ½ feet thick.”158
In fact, ever since Rome cast its imperial eyes in the form of Julius Caesar on the conquest of Gaul, the disciplined Roman legions seem to have been dogged by encounters with the Northern branch of the Gomarians, that branch that migrated into Europe. Here, the legions ran into the stock of a new and formidable enemy: the Celts, and their cousins, the Teutons, or Germans.
This new enemy was something different than Rome had ever faced, and Rome had faced quite a bit, from Hannibal’s Carthaginian armies with its war elephants, to all manner of intrigue and scheming.
Not a lot is known about the people who would become known as the Celts. It is known that they migrated across Asia Minor, through northern Europe and into what have become the Celtic countries of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Most accounts of them include references to the giants that were often found among them. The ancient Greek historian, Pausainias, called them “the world’s tallest people.” Modern historians now believe that, in fact, the giants among the Celts were a ruling class that held control over the indigenous population that formed the majority of Celtic tribes.
(The) modern historian, Gerhard Herm, agrees that the Celts were “blond giants” who struck terror in the hearts of every foe, even in the mightiest of mighty Rome. As such, the Celts fought several ferocious wars with Rome and captured, sacked, and burnt many Roman outposts to the ground. Although the Romans would eventually devise methods of defeating these giant warriors, attacking long legs that couldn’t be guarded by the massive shields these creatures carried, the blue-eyed, blond giants inspired terror among those facing them in battle for the first time.159
The unusual size reported for the Celts was not a feature noted merely by Roman historians in the wake of the conquest of Gaul. The Greek historians Arrian and Diodorus also comment on their unusually large size, Arrian mentioning them in connection with Alexander the Great’s encounter with them after he had burned down one of their cities on the Danube in 335 BC.160 Moreover, when Alexander queried the Celts as to what their worst fear was, they gave him the strangely intriguing answer that their worst fear was “that the sky might fall on their heads.”161 The Celts, it seems, preserved in their beliefs and legends, along with other ancient peoples, that there had been a time long ago when the sky had done just that.
But beyond Gaul, east of the Rhine, the Roman legions faced an even fiercer foe, indeed, the only foe ever to best the vaunted legions of Rome, the foe that closed out forever any Roman conquests in central Europe — in what today would be modern Germany — and that foe was the Teutons, or the Cimbri....the Germans. The classical historian Strabo notes of these tribes that they were even “wilder, taller, and having yellower hair.”162 Indeed, when Caesar’s men at Besancon asked some Gauls, “who were themselves of great stature” about the Germans, Caesar wrote the following about the Gauls’ reply:
They described the Germans mentioning their enormous physique, their unbe
lievable valor, and extraordinary military training. The Gauls said that often when they had encountered the Germans they had not been able to endure even the expression on their faces or the glare of their eyes.163
Indeed, at the famous Battle of the Teutobergerwald, the Germans would so utterly decimate four Roman armies in the brutal fighting that Rome would maintain a more or less defensive posture with respect to the Germans until the Western Empire’s final collapse. The Gallic-Celtic giants were one thing, but their even taller cousins across the Rhine were quite another.
Eventually, however, some of these Germans were captured by the Romans, and one of them, a particularly troublesome King by the name of Teutobokh, was paraded in Rome in the customary triumph. The Roman historian Floras reports that this king was so tall that when his captor returned to Rome, “Teutobokh could be ‘seen above all the trophies or spoils of the enemies, which were carried upon the tops of spears.’ This suggests that Teutobokh was easily nine feet tall and perhaps considerably taller.”164
3. Giant Remains and Other Testimonies
The story of giants becomes even more intriguing once Europeans established (or perhaps, re-established) contact with the Americas during the great age of exploration, for many of the early explorers, from Vespucci, Sir Francis Drake, De Soto, to the great Coronado, report their encounters with giants. Pedro de Castaeda, for example, a member of Coronado’s expedition, stated that some of the Cocopa Indians were giants “who could carry logs that six of the Spaniards couldn’t budge.”165 Even more fantastically, one of Magellan’s crew reported that when Magellan’s fleet had anchored at Port San Julian “they were greeted by... a native giant” who was so tall “that our heads scarcely came up to his waist, and his voice was like that of a bull.“166 The place seemed a veritable haven of giants and remains of giants:
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