Jack the Giant Killer

It's not just a story.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about giants.

I don’t know what possessed me, during Holy Week, to pick up my copy of The Old Testament Pseudopigrapha, Volume One: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments, published in 1983, but I did. And when I did, I decided to read The Book of Enoch. Now I’ve read Enoch before, and even as recently as 2019, when I was working on Sophia in Exile, so it was not exactly an exploration of new territory. But read it again I did. On this reading, I found myself fascinated (okay, obsessed) with the giants mentioned in chapters six and seven:

“In those days, when the children of man had multiplied, it happened that there were born unto them handsome and beautiful daughters. And the angels, the children of heaven, saw them and desired them; and they said to one another, ‘Come, let us choose wives for ourselves from the daughters of man and let us beget children.’ (6:1-2)

“And they took wives unto themselves, and everyone chose one woman for himself, and they began to go unto them. And they taught them magical medicine, incantations, the cutting of roots, and taught them about plants. And the women became pregnant and gave birth to great giants whose heights were three hundred cubits. These giants consumed the produce of all the people until the people detested feeding them. So the giants began to sin against birds, wild beasts, reptiles, and fish. And their flesh was devoured the one by the other, and they drank blood. And then the earth brought an accusation against the oppressors.” (7:1-6)

Just so you know, 300 cubits (a cubit is basically the length from a grown man’s elbow to his fingertip) is about 443 ft. So these were some big dudes. I wouldn’t want to feed them either.

The angels and their attraction for the daughters of men is also mentioned in Genesis 6, which also associates their gargantuan offspring with “the giants of old, the men of renown.” This was before the Flood. And Wisdom 14:6 adds to the story: “For in the old time also, when the proud giants perished, the hope of the world escaped in a weak vessel, and left to all ages a seed of generation” (referring, of course, to Noah).

I have never given much scholarly attention to giants, though, as you might know, I have given such attention to the Realm of Faerie. Likewise, I haven’t dug too deeply into dragon lore—though it certainly makes a few appearances in Arthuriana, one of my scholarly wheelhouses. But my attitude to both dragons and giants is the same as my attitude to faeries: I see no reason to think they are “just myths” concocted to rationalize the inexplicable. Let’s face it: the Enlightenment was filled with midwits. Every civilization on earth has had stories of not only giants and faerie-like creatures, but also of serpents or dragons or other such fanciful (to us at least) beasts. They likewise all have stories about a cataclysmic flood.

I have but one conclusion to make: these stories are as much history as myth. As I have written so often before, what the ancients possessed (and what we are deficient in to a tragic degree) was a poetic metaphysics. And that doesn’t mean that what they spoke was untrue—even historically untrue. It simply means that they had a different manner of conceptualizing (I think Owen Barfield was onto something with his idea of “Original Participation”—though I don’t think his is the whole story). I also think the ancients were more habituated to seeing into different realms through a manner of perception very foreign (though not completely unknown) to us.

Classical Greek and Roman myth and literature is replete with tales of giant killers and slayers of what we think of as “mythical beasts.” Odysseus and the cyclopes is but one example—and note how Polyphemus, the cyclopes in question in the Odyssey, was the son of Poseidon, one of the “Sons of God” alluded to in Enoch and Genesis 6.

Sticking only to the Western tradition, giants show up in everything from Grimm’s Fairy Tales (not recorded until the 19^th century, but rooted deep into the oldest sources of cultural history) to The Mabinogion (first committed to writing in the 14^th century, but far, far earlier in the oral tradition of Wales) to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (12^th century). In Geoffrey, none other than King Arthur fights with a giant on the site of what is now Mont-Saint-Michel. The giant, who has captured the fair Princess Helena, is, true to type, coarse and gluttonous; as Geoffrey tells us, “Those whom he captured, and they were quite a few, he ate while they were still half-alive.” Fee-fie-fo-fum.

As many scholars have noted, these stories and their myriad versions—for example, Theseus and the Minotaur, Perseus saving Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus (another one of Poseidon’s rotten progeny!)—might allude to a cult of child sacrifice in the dark backward and abysm of time. “Might,” madam? I know not “might.” Nay, it is alluding to child sacrifice.

The issue of child sacrifice, actually, brings us back to the Old Testament and the figure of Moloch.

In the Old Testament, God warns—repeatedly—about the sacrificing of children to Moloch. In Jeremiah, for example, the warning is clear:

“And they built to Baal the altars that are in the valley of the son of Ennom, to offer their sons and their daughters to king Moloch; which things I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin” (39:35)

Apparently, then as now, some people have an evil propensity to offer their children to the gods of those who would do them harm.

But this example from Jeremiah is one of the few that refers to Moloch by name in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament which dates from the 3^rd century BC. Many more instances occur in the Masoretic text—which dates from no earlier than the 9^th century AD, making it a modernist innovation by comparison. Interestingly, the word that is usually rendered as “Moloch” in the Masoretic text has a very different Greek word in the Septuagint. And that word is ἄρχων—“Archon.” This kind of changes everything.

In Leviticus 18:21, for example, the Masoretic text reads: “And thou shalt not give any of thy seed to set them apart to Moloch, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord.” The Septuagint puts it this way: “And thou shalt not give of thy seed to serve a ruler; and thou shalt not profane my holy name; I am the Lord.”

Now “ruler” (archon in Greek) may seem pretty tame when compared to “Moloch,” suggesting, as it does to our ears, a political leader. But that’s not what it means. And in this it is helpful to turn to Gnosticism’s notion of what “Archon” means.

For the Gnostics, the Archons were/are the evil spiritual beings who run the world and even mistake themselves for the Creator. They are God’s enemies (and Sophia’s too). And they demand sacrifices to affirm their usurped “divinity.”

Another place in the OT where the word “Archon” pops up significantly in the Septuagint is Psalm 82, which, some of my readers will recall, I have been praying at dawn every day this year.

Psalm 82 is a strange and powerful prayer, and its meaning might be obscure to some. Here it is in the KJV translation:

God standeth in the congregation of the mighty;
he judgeth among the gods.
How long will ye judge unjustly,
and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.
Defend the poor and fatherless:
do justice to the afflicted and needy.
Deliver the poor and needy:
rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
They know not, neither will they understand;
they walk on in darkness:
all the foundations of the earth are out of course.
I have said, Ye are gods;
and all of you are children of the most High.
But ye shall die like men,
and fall like one of the princes.
Arise, O God, judge the earth:
for thou shalt inherit all nations.

In my interpretation, this speaks directly to both the instances of fallen angels who took the daughters of men to wive and the Gnostic idea of Archons. They’re both the same class of being. First of all, “the congregation of the mighty” and “the gods” of the opening lines obviously refers to spiritual beings; these are not metaphors for “powerful guys in politics.” God is reminding them what their original role was intended to be: “defend the poor and fatherless...rid them out of the hand of the wicked.” But, as with the Archons of Gnosticism, they no longer know who they are or who created them, “they walk on in darkness,” and, as a result, “all the foundations of the earth are out of course.”

But the kicker (as they say) is in the word the KJV renders as “princes”: “But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes,” the Septuagint word for “princes” here being ἀρχόντων, “Archons.” It doesn’t make sense to say “ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes” otherwise—since earthly princes are as mortal as any man.

After the Flood, there were still giants around, but they don’t seem to have been as gigantic as in Antedeluvian times. Goliath, for example, was probably just an unimpressive nine-feet tall. So he probably wasn’t full giant—definitely had some other kinds of DNA in his constitution. On the other hand, some giants—like those mentioned in Leviticus 18 and Numbers 13—were big enough that Caleb and his companions thought themselves “grasshoppers” by comparison.

So we have two things here: the Archons and their offspring, the giants. I have to think, then, that all those stories of heroes like Arthur, Beowulf, and even Jack the Giant Killer are really tales of those souls appointed by God to rid the world of a genetic code that should never have been created in the first place, almost like Nazi hunters.

But, as I mentioned, after the Flood, giants weren’t typically what they used to be, so I imagine they are much closer to human-size now—probably indistinguishable from just about any human due to further breeding with the daughters of men. They might not even know they’re part giant. (I could go into a whole 23andMe rabbit hole here, but I will resist that temptation.) Nevertheless, the Archons are still in full force; still think they are gods; and still think they rule the world. They have another thing comin’.

I am encouraged that in the tale of Jack the Giant Killer, the hero is not an Arthur, or an Odysseus, or a Beowulf, but, as the tale relates, “the only son of a worthy farmer.” After he killed his first giant by a blow to head with a pick-axe, the justices of Cornwall “sent for Jack, and declared that he should always be called Jack the Giant Killer; and they also gave him a sword and belt, upon which was written in letters of gold:

“‘This is the valiant Cornishman
Who slew the Giant Cormoran.’”

It turned into a full-time job.

So who are the Archons, who are the giants in our world? They might be harder to spot, but I know they’re still around, eating up all the resources, sending men and women to slaughter, drinking blood, demanding child sacrifice.

It’s not just a story, you know.

If you can’t slay them, at least put them to sleep.