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.