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Giants: Fact or Fiction?
Posted on Thursday, May 04, 2006 (CDT) by Thoth
 The autobiography of the Tibetan lama Chagdud Tulku (Lord of the Dance, California: Padma Press, 1992, pp. 110–111) contains a fascinating reference to a Tibetan mountain giant and how a seeker of mystical relics was able to come across its remains.
While on their way to the monastery of Chudo Gompa in the mountains to witness dancing and ceremonial pageantry, the lama and his retinue came across a stupa marking the site where the legendary hero Gesar had entombed a slain giantess in ages past.
A few months prior to Chagdud Tulku’s arrival, he writes, a seeker of treasure and holy relics known as a terton had stopped by the monastery to challenge the assertion that any unknown entity had been buried at that spot long ago. He had it on good authority, as the terton professed to be the incarnation of Shanpa, the hero Gesar’s companion.
“I was here
when we put her under a big rock by the river,” he challenged the
monks, urging them to prove him false by digging at the indicated spot.
His challenge was taken up
and hasty excavations soon began at a location marked by the terton
with a 25-foot circle. The digging took days, but a massive stone disk
was found at the bottom; excitedly, the monks summoned the treasure
finder to show him the results of their efforts.
“He supervised as they
wedged poles under the rock to pry it up and support it,” writes
Chagdud Tulku, and the monks and their gang of laborers were able to
remove the massive remains, “the bones of a giantess whose upper arm
had been more than five feet long.” The author adds that these mountain
ogres had at once been endemic to the region and feasted on hapless
humans until eliminated by the legendary hero. Because this was not an
archaeological dig but an effort to ascertain the powers of the
treasure hunter, the massive bones were returned to the site of their
entombment and the stone disk placed over them once more.
At this point we can only
wonder if those remains, so carefully buried in a distant age and
concealed under a seemingly man-made stone disk, belonged to some
extinct animal of the Pleistocene megafauna. Perhaps they were indeed
the remains of one of the giants that has haunted human imagination
since the dawn of time in every continent and every culture.
Who Can Withstand the Sons of Anak?
Giants and
larger-than-human beings have played a major role in the development of
many cultures, harkening back to the Biblical Anakim who occupied
certain locations of the land of Canaan, according to the Pentateuch,
where the Israelites complain to Moses of their inability to take on
the colossal dwellers of the new land, namely Ahiman, Seshai, and
Talmai, descendants of the mighty Anak.
“The country we explored,
they said, will swallow up any who go to live in it. All the people we
saw there are men of gigantic size. When we set sight on [the Anakim]
we felt no bigger than grasshoppers…” (Numbers 13:32–33). The sense of
hopelessness that Moses’s scouting party must have felt at the prospect
of fighting these giants is repeated once more: “Our kinsmen have
discouraged us by their report of a people bigger and taller than we
are, and of great cities with fortifications towering to the sky. And
they told us they saw there the descendants of the Anakim” (Deuteronomy
1:28). “Who can withstand the sons of Anak?” they ask despairingly at
one point.
As if the Anakim weren’t
enough, the Israelites had to face Og of Bashan, “the sole survivor of
the Rephaim.” The Scriptures tell us that this gargantuan monarch was
buried in a basalt sarcophagus measuring 14 feet long by 6 feet wide.
But a “devouring fire” (generated perhaps by the Ark of the Covenant?)
destroyed the giant Anakim throughout Judah and Israel, leaving
isolated survivors in the coastal cities of Gaza, Askalon, and Gath,
this latter site perhaps best known as the birthplace of the
nine-foot-tall armored giant Goliath who faced the young David. Yet the
legendary defeat of this towering presence did not appear to bring an
end to the giants in the holy land. The Book of Samuel gives us the
names of other colossi, such as Benob and Saph “who died in the battle
of Gob,” and an unnamed giant suffering from polydactylism (II Samuel
21:20).
Further giant-slaying
appears in I Chronicles 20:4–8 when discussing the prowess of King
David and his victories against all adversaries: “…Sibecai slew Sipai,
of the descendants of the giants…and Elhanan son of Jair slew Lahmi,
brother of Goliath, whose spear was as big as a weaver’s beam…these
were the descendants of the giants in Gath.”
The Monstrous Quinametzin
As the bloodthirsty Nuño de
Guzmán pushed his way into northern Mexico to establish the province
known as Nueva Galicia, he arrived at the site of modern Guadalajara
and was startled to see a number of deserted cities of large size. His
interpreters told him that these ruins were the foundations of the
population centers occupied by the giant Quinametzin. Who were these
unknown entities?
Obras Históricas, a
treatise written by an early chronicler of Mexican history, Fernando
Ixtilxochitl, discusses the belief among the Chichimec people of north
central Mexico that the earliest arrivals in Mesoamerica had to
displace a race of giants who occupied the land, echoing the exploits
of Joshua on the other side of the world. Strife between the
Quinametzin and ordinary humans appears to have been widespread, and
memories of this war with another species were not confined to a given
region. The Tlaxcalans who allied themselves with Mexico’s European
conquerors told as much to Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who mentions it in
his Crónica de la Nueva España: “…their ancestors had shared the land
with men and women of very tall bodies and large bones, and since they
were very wicked and ill mannered, [the ancestors] slew them in combat,
and what remained of them died out. In order that we might see how
large these men were, they brought us one of their leg bones, which was
rough and as long as the height of a normal-sized man. We were stunned
upon seeing those bones and believed that there must have been giants
in that country. Our captain Cortés said that it would be proper to
send this bone back to Castille, so that His Majesty might see it. We
therefore sent it, entrusting it to the first of our agents to go
there…”
This belief was apparently
borne out by the unearthing of giant remains while the Spaniards built
their new civilization over the ruins of the Aztec Empire. The
Franciscan Diego Durán reportedly saw with his own eyes the remains of
giants, while another monk, Gerónimo de Mendieta, confirmed the claim
that the ancestors of the conquered Mexicans had found it necessary to
fight against giants.
Coexistence with this other
species, therefore, was seemingly impossible. The Quinametzin, or more
properly said, quinametzin hueytlacame (“great deformed men”) were
eventually forced out of Mexico proper on a southward migration along
the Pacific Coast, although others headed north. Fray J. Mariano Rothea
summed up this belief: “…in very ancient times there came men and women
of extraordinary height, seemingly in flight from the North. Some of
them went along the coast of the Southern Sea, while others took to the
rough mountainsides…”
Fray Andrés de Olmos,
writing in the 16th century, mentions a curious detail: the Mexican
giants nourished themselves on oak acorns and a variety of weeds. This
detail contained in the codices enables us to contemplate a strange
possibility: could the Quinametzin have survived into our present age
under the guise of the tall, hirsute simian beings known as Bigfoot,
Yeti, Sasquatch, and myriad other denominations? Those interviewed by
the Colonial-era chroniclers explained that tradition held that those
giants who were not exterminated by normal-sized humans were chased
into the wilderness, where remnants of their race still endure.
A Southward Migration?
Pedro Cieza de Leon, a
chaplain who accompanied the handful of Spaniards who managed to
overthrow the powerful Inca Empire in the 1500s, collected a curious
and highly significant piece of information concerning giants: the
natives had been astonished and terrified to see a reed raft arrive on
their shores bearing a shipload of beings “so tall that from the knee
down they were as big as the full length of an ordinary fair-sized
man…” There was nothing gentle about these giants: Cieza’s informants
described them as having a hideous appearance, clad in animal skins or
naked, and bent on raping and murdering.
Could this band of
pillagers have formed part of the southward migration of giants
described in the Mexican chronicles compiled by the Jesuit Rothea?
Zecharia Sitchin’s The Lost Realms (Avon, 1990) echoes this account in
the chronicles collected by Fernando Montesinos, a Spanish visitor to
Peru who mentioned an old Inca tradition describing the colonization of
the Peruvian coastal plain by “men of great stature” equipped with
metal tools. The depredations of these giants ended when a “heavenly
fire” consumed them all.
Could descendants of these
Quinametzin have wound up in distant Argentina, at the very end of the
Americas? Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled Ferdinand Magellan’s
circumnavigation of the world, described an encounter with giant
natives in Bahía San Julián in the year 1520. Standing two meters tall,
according to the chronicler, these imposing presences covered their
feet in animal skins, making them look even larger (hence the
description patagones or bigfeet being applied to them, and later
extended to the landmass as Patagonia).
“One day,” writes
Pigafetta, “when the first traces of southern spring became visible, we
witnessed the arrival of a native, the first our eyes had beheld. He
was a giant, and his feet seemed so large that one of our men dubbed
him Patagón. We were able to soothe him little by little and his
distrust vanished to the point that he presented the rest of his tribe
to us, who were as large as he and just as voracious.”
The chronicler also notes
the booming voices of these giants. Two of them were apparently brought
aboard Magellan’s flagship but died during their crossing; whether
their remains were thrown overboard is not known.
Apparently Francis Drake
caught them on a bad day when he pulled into Bahía San Julián in 1578:
his forces skirmished with the “large men” who lived there, and the
British sea-dog lost two of his sailors to them. Fifteen years later,
Anthony Knyvet passed through the Straits of Magellan and confirmed
sightings of the Patagones, reporting that some of them stood a
towering 12 feet tall.
In the fall of 1962, some
strange human remains were found in the vicinity of the Torres del
Paine mountain peaks: they were those of a man who had stood between
two and a half and three meters tall, and dated to an antiquity of 500
years. Proof that the Patagonian giants were not merely traveler’s
tales?
A Museum Conspiracy
In a 1995 interview with
Alfonso Serra, Catalonian mystery writer Miguel Aracil mentioned that
an article of his had caused an uproar among Spain’s intellectual
community when he leveled the accusation that some of that country’s
museums held in their collections bones that proved the existence of
giant humans. The maverick writer had been aided in this effort by a
physician, Ana Capella, and a cartographer, Fernando Ledesma.
Aracil’s work suggests that
the entire region of the Pyrenées—the mountain range separating Spain
from France—was the home of true giants who may still endure to this
day, becoming the source of numerous Bigfoot accounts. A considerable
number of giant skeletons, he argues, have been unearthed beside the
megalithic dolmen of Oren in the Cerdanya region. They were in the
custody of a man in the village of Prullans until they were turned over
to the Barcelona Museum of Archaeology, where they vanished altogether
or were perhaps even destroyed.
The remains of a
three-meter-tall giant were found at Garós (Pirineo de Lleida)
according to another Catalonian researcher, Joan Obiols. The town
priest was among those who studied the impressive bones, which have
since vanished, causing some to believe that these remains were
absconded with in order to preserve the anthropological and
paleonthological status quo.
“Both archaeology and
history are giants with feet of clay,” writes Miguel Aracil in one of
his magazine articles. “Whenever it rains, so to speak, and new
archaeological finds take place, their feet weaken further.”
Conclusion
What would the lore of all
human cultures be like without the presence of giants? They are a
fixture of folk tales and myth from Europe and the Americas to the
farthest reaches of Asia. They are mentioned with equal ease in holy
books and in fairy tales. Giants fill us with wonder and not
inconsiderable envy as we marvel at their strength and feats. Those
dwelling in the Middle Ages, caught in the turbulence of their troubled
times, ascribed the engineering achievements of the Roman Empire to the
work of giants. Giants may have been relegated to the realms of fable
and sword-and-sorcery novels, but there is considerable evidence that
beings of great size shared our world in primeval times.
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