Giants: fact or fancy?

An investigation of the mythological, historical and archaeological evidence for the presence of giant human beings on earth

Introduction

The Bible tells us "There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown (Genesis 6:4). This is not the only reference to giants in the Bible. In Numbers 13:33 we may read: "And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight." Deuteronomy 3:11 even gives the dimensions of these giant human beings. "For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man."

The Biblical cubit (which is based on the ancient Egyptian cubit) is generally thought to have been between 17 to 20 inches in length. Based on the size of his bed, King Og would probably have stood between 12 and 15 feet tall. This is very close to the size of some of the skeletons of giants which have been excavated throughout the world during the past 200 years, as we discuss in our afterword. In all, there are no less than 11 references to giants in the Bible. Are these accounts the result of fancy, or historical facts? Many would have us believe they are mythological, a word which has now become a synonym for all that is unreal, untrue and fanciful. But as we have pointed out in our articles on Symbolism and the Mystery Language, Myth was not a means of falsifying history in that way, but the earliest method of communicating certain facts in nature, occult laws or truths in a symbolic manner. Not that this will convince the average sceptic or the average scientist, who know about as much about symbolism as a monkey knows about algebra, unless it is the symbol for pounds or dollars—these they understand very well!

If you should doubt us, we invite you to turn to that fountainhead of scientific rectitude and political correctness—Wikipedia—to see what it has to say about giants. Almost the whole article consists of nothing more than a lengthy résumé of the folklore and mythology surrounding giants. Only at the very end are we favoured with a paragraph of just eight lines on the 'alleged' (sic) fossil evidence for giants! Well, well, well. . .But if we peek behind the scenes and look at the 'Talk' page associated with this article we find a lone voice raised in protest against this travesty of so-called 'unbiased' information! We quote: "This entire page refers to all giants as being 'mythological creatures', which is dishonest. There is far too much archaeological evidence as well as recorded eyewitness accounts to call it a 'myth." This comment was contributed on 5th August 2018. It was answered the same day with the characteristic smugness of scientific orthodoxy: "then you won't have any problems finding academic sources for the archaeological evidence. Can we please see some?"

By 'academic' sources, this pundit no doubt meant the general scientific consensus that giants never walked the earth and that all evidence to the contrary has either been fabricated by a whole regiment of malicious busybodies hell bent on pulling the legs of the clever scientists, or is mythological, meaning fairy tales fit only for foolish children. We shall see who is right as we develop our theme, but before we do so, it is worth drawing the reader's attention to a particularly large and inconvenient elephant in the hallowed halls of academia. This is the overwhelming amount of archaeological and fossil evidence for the existence of giants in the distant past, a tiny fraction of which we review in our afterword. Clearly, the editors of Wikipedia must be unaware of this. That at least would be the charitable view.

Giants—then and now

Science denies that man has ever been much larger than the average of the tall and powerful specimens of humanity one meets with occasionally today. Ancient buildings are often cited as evidence that our earliest ancestors were not much larger than we are, the doors being no higher then than they are now. The tallest man known to us from recorded history was the Roman Emperor Maximus, who is said to have been only seven and a half feet tall. Nevertheless, in modern times there have been many men much taller than this. Robert Wadlow, dubbed the 'Alton Giant' was nearly 9 feet tall at his death in 1922. Ukrainian Leonid Stepanovych Stadnyk, who died as recently as 2014, was 8 feet five inches tall. Neil Fingleton (1980-2017), was an English actor and basketball player who was over 7 feet five inches tall. The writer of this article is six feet tall and has met with men and women who are a good head taller than he is. Those who agree with Charles Darwin's statement that "the species of animals which result from cross breeding always betray a tendency to revert to the original type," ought to apply the same law to mankind. In short, had there been no giants in ancient times, there would be none now.

All this applies only to the historic period we have some knowledge of. If the skeletons of the prehistoric ages we discuss in our afterword have so far failed to prove to the satisfaction of science that giants once existed on earth, the day must come when further evidence makes their position untenable. Moreover, the giants of Atlantis and Lemuria are all buried under the oceans, and hundreds of thousands of years of constant friction by water would reduce to dust and pulverize a brazen, far more a human skeleton. What we do have is the testimony of well-known classical writers, of philosophers and men who had no reason for trying to pull the wool over the eyes of future generations. Let us also bear in mind that as little as 200 years ago almost nothing was known of the remains of men preserved in fossils, for archaeology complacently ignored their existence.

The Church Father, Tertullian, assures us that in his day a number of giants were found at Carthage. The second century Greek sophist Philostratus, mentions a giant skeleton twenty-two cubits long, as well as of another of twelve cubits, seen by his own eyes. In volume VII of his Natural History, Pliny speaks of a giant in whom he thought he recognised Orion. Plutarch declares that Sertorius saw the tomb of Antaeus, the giant; and Pausanias vouches for the actual existence of the tombs of Asterius and of Geryon, or Hillus, son of Hercules—all giants, Titans and mighty men. Finally, the Abbé Pegues, in his Le j Volcans de Grèce (The Volcanoes of Greece), says that in the neighbourhood of the volcanoes of the isle of Thera (modern Santorini), in the Aegean, giants with enormous skulls were found laid out under colossal stones, the erection of which must have required enormous labour.

In the same work the good Abbé wonders why in the Bible the Gibborim, (the Giants, or mighty ones) the Rephaim (the spectres or phantoms), the Nephilim (the fallen ones) are all indiscriminately lumped together as "mighty men which were of old, men of renown." Only Occult Science can unravel and explain the mystery. These names, which belong by right only to the four preceding Root Races of Man and the earliest beginning of the Fifth, allude very clearly to the first two Phantom (astral) Races; to the fallen one—the Third; and to the race of the Atlantean Giants—the Fourth—after which men began to decrease in stature to their present size.

The Seven Root Races of Man

We do not have the time to go deeply into the complex subject of Root Races in this investigation, which, you will recall, is about giants, not the origins and history of man. However, a few words may not be out of place at this point for the benefit of those readers who know little or nothing about them. Those who wish for a fuller explanation should consult The Secret Doctrine. Here is a very condensed summary of the subject.

The first thing we wish to say is that the Seven Root Races of Occult Science have nothing whatsoever to do with the mad racial theories of Hitler and his deluded followers. As we mentioned in our article about the calumnies heaped upon H. P. Blavatsky during and after her lifetime, our present Aryan Fifth Root Race evolved from the fifth sub-race of the Fourth (Atlantean) Root Race, known as the Semitic. Hence, Hitler's 'blue-eyed', blond 'übermenschen' were the direct descendants of Semites, or JEWS if you prefer! Unfortunately, those who insist on reading racist ideologies into the occult scientific scheme of the Root Races which Blavatsky first revealed to the West in The Secret Doctrine, have never read her books, or if they have, prefer to interpret what she wrote in their own ignorant fashion.

The second thing we wish to say is that each of the Seven Root Races lasts for untold millions of millions years, and each overlaps the other. With the exception of the first Root Race, which had no physical bodies, and the second, whose bodies were more astral than physical, the subsequent Root Races contained white, black, yellow and red peoples among their sub-divisions. For each Root Race branches out into seven sub-races, which in turn produce countless family races, and it is from these that the various present peoples and nations of the earth are descended. H. P. Blavatsky likened the Root Races to a cactus 'tree' of seven main stems, each of which is a Root Race. Each stem has seven shoots—its sub-races, while the family races of each sub-race constitute the countless spines of the tree. So you see that the subject bristles with complexity, as we said earlier! Moreover, when we tell you that each sub-race—such as our present 'European' group of nations and peoples—endures for roughly 250,000 years, you will gain some idea of the immense time periods covered by each of the Root Races, and how each overlaps the next, eventually merging and mingling with it.

This will also demonstrate the utter stupidity of the modern obsession with 'colour', for whether an individual is white, black, brown, yellow, red, or sky-blue pink is no indication of their physical, mental or spiritual superiority. There are just as many feckless, ignorant, bigoted and thoroughly un-civilized white people as there are black or yellow, to name just three colours out of the five which currently exist today. Having said this, the various sub- and family races vary in their physical, mental and spiritual characteristics and capabilities, just as the individual members of a family do, though born of the same parents. In this context, as in so many others, the Hermetic axiom "as above—so below" applies. Let us also jettison the fashionable modern idea of 'equality'. The Root and sub-races are as unequal in their physical, mental and spiritual characteristics and capabilities as individual human beings are. Please do not confuse equality of opportunity with equality of soul, mind and body. They are not the same thing. We shall not repeat these important qualifications!

The First Root Race was the so-called Adamic or Astral Race of Man. They were huge and indefinite of form; spiritual within and ethereal without. The Second Root Race was called the Hyperborean. It had the same appearance as the First Root Race, but it was psycho-spiritual mentally, and ethero-physical bodily. It is impossible to locate the spot on our earth where First Root Race lived, but in Occult terminology it is called the 'Sacred Imperishable Land'. The Second Root Race lived in the Hyperborean continent, after which it is named, part of which was situated in what is now known as Northern Asia. The Second Root Race evolved the Third, or Lemurian Race, which lived in the vanished Lemurian continent which stretched from the Indian Ocean to Australia, of which New Zealand is a remnant. It lived an inner life in which the psycho-spiritual element was interfered with in no way by the hardly nascent physiological senses. Its two front eyes looked before them without seeing either past or future; but the third eye embraced Eternity.

Gigantic in size, the Lemurians were androgynes or hermaphrodites during the earlier parts of their evolution, but later on they differentiated into distinctly male or female forms. Some remnants of the Third Root Race still exist in the forms of the aborigines of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, and other primitive peoples. The Third Root Race gave birth to the next, which were the Atlanteans, though all the Races overlap in time as we said earlier. The Chinese and Japanese are descendants of the Fourth Root Race. The Seven Sub-Races of the Fourth Root Race, of which the Toltecs were the most important, were: The Rmoahal, the Tlavatli, the Toltec, the Turanian, the Semitic, the Akhadian and the Mongolian sub-races. There is no definite information about the sub-races of the previous three Root Races.

The Fifth Root Race, as we said earlier, is the Aryan. Its progenitors were taken from the fifth Atlantean sub-race, the Semitic. Once established, it migrated to the plains of Northern India some 850,000 years ago, warring against the indigenous people, the Titans, Daityas and the Rakshasas, as recorded in the Hindu sacred books. Five of the seven sub-races of the Fifth Root Race have already appeared on Earth and run their course, these are:

The Indo-Aryan
The Aryo-Semitic
The Iranian
The Keltic
The Teutonic or European

The sixth Sub-race, called by some occultists, the 'American-Australian', 'Euro-American', etc., is in the process of being formed in America, Europe and Australia, and will succeed to the present fifth sub-race in about another 250,000 years.

Atlantean giants

"Ye shall be as gods," says the serpent of Genesis to Eve. This has led some scholars to regard the 'original sin' of our 'parents' as the cause of subsequent universal idolatry which laid the first germ of the worship of false divinities, or the cult and adoration of images, of anthropomorphized or human figures. It is only in the Fourth Atlantean Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to worshipping their own bodies. Till then, they had been truly gods, as pure and as divine as their progenitors. The allegorical serpent which 'tempted' Eve, does not refer to the physiological fall of men, but to the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil, which knowledge came to them prior to their so-called 'fall'.

In the Stanzas of Dzyan, reproduced in The Secret Doctrine, we are told that: "They (the Atlanteans) built great images, nine yatis high (27 feet)—the size of their bodies. Lunar fires had destroyed the land of their fathers (the Lemurians). Water threatened the Fourth (Race)." Should the reader regard this as 'mythological' in the modern meaning of the word discussed earlier, it is worth pointing out that most of the gigantic statues discovered on Easter Island by Captain Cook are all between 20 and 33 feet high. Almost all measure 27 feet in height, and eight feet across the shoulders. We are well aware that modern archaeologists believe these stone statues, now called 'Moai', are no more than 500 to 800 years old. Their deduction is based on radiocarbon dating of wood, bone, and shell found buried in and around the statues and the quarry from which the stone to construct them was taken. This presupposes that the statues are coeval with their environment and ignores the very real possibility that the material which has been dated may very well have been placed there long after the statues had been carved. Moreover, carbon 14 has been shown to decay at very variable rates, as we discussed in our article on The Mystery of Stonehenge. So we may safely dismiss these speculative dates as another example of the arbitrary decisions of modern scientists.

Not that we blame the scientists for their scepticism. The Stanzas of Dzyan are generally regarded as a work of fiction at best, and forgery at worst. So when these ancient writings speak of a race of giants nine yatis, or 27 feet high, it is not surprising that the scientists should demand, as the editor of Wikipedia referred to earlier, did, "where are your proofs?" History and tradition Occult Science answers. Stories and tales about giants occur in almost all ancient cultures and civilisations. We can find them in the mythologies of the ancient world, in Greek, Norse, Germanic, Indian, and Indo-European legend and history, as well as in the new world in the traditions of the Maya, Aztecs and Incas; but most importantly in almost all the sacred books of antiquity.

Giants in mythology and ancient tradition

Traditions about a race of giants in days of old are universal and exist in oral and written lore. India had her Danavas and Daityas; Ceylon had her Rakshasas; Greece, her Titans; Egypt, her colossal Heroes; Chaldea, her Izdubars (Nimrod); and the Jews their Emims of the land of Moab, with the famous giants, the sons of Anak mentioned in Numbers 13:33. Moses speaks of Og, the king of Bashan, who was nine cubits tall (15 ft. 4 in.) and four wide (Deuteronomy 3:11), and we are told that Goliath was six cubits and a span in height (1 Samuel 17:4) or 10 feet 7 inches. The only difference between the references to giants in the Bible and the evidence furnished to us by Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Homer, Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus and other ancient writers is that while the pagans mention only the skeletons of giants, dead untold ages before, relics that some of them had personally seen, the Bible interpreters unblushingly demand that geology and archaeology should believe that several countries were inhabited by such giants in Moses' time and still existed in the days of Joshua and David. Unfortunately their own chronology is at odds with the archaeological evidence. Both cannot be true; either the Biblical chronology or the giants have to be ditched. There are no prizes for guessing which we favour; our readers must reach their own conclusions!

In his Histories Herodotus describes how the Spartans uncovered in Tegea the body of Orestes which was seven cubits long (10 feet), whilst Plutarch tells us in The Comparison of Romulus with Theseus how the Athenians uncovered the body of Theseus, which was of more than ordinary size. The Greek geographer Pausanias, who flourished in the second century, wrote that Ajax, the hero of the Trojan War, was around 14 feet tall. In his work On Heroes, published around 230 A.D., the sophist Philostratus affirms the general belief current in his times that the ancient heroes all averaged more than 10 cubits in height, equivalent to more than 12 feet. Philostratus also mentions the discovery of enormous bones in the places where the heroes' tombs were traditionally assumed to lie. According to Homer, Achilles—the greatest warrior of the Trojan War—was 33 feet tall. And so we could go on, citing one ancient source after another, all of whom affirm the existence of giant human beings in the distant past.

The Bamian 'Buddhas'

If we now turn to the east—to Afghanistan—and the ancient city of Bamian (also spelled Bamiyan), we find some of the tallest and most colossal statues of human beings ever constructed. No one knows who cut them out of the solid limestone, or when. Most archaeologists see representations of Gautama Buddha in the largest of these statues, but they are mistaken as we shall see. Writing in The Secret Doctrine more than 130 years ago, H. P. Blavatsky described Bamian as "a small, miserable, half-ruined town in Central Asia, half-way between Cabul and Balkh, at the foot of Kobhibaba, a huge mountain of the Paropamisian (or Hindu-Kush) chain, some 8,500 feet above the level of the sea. The whole valley is hemmed in by colossal rocks, which are full of partially natural and partially artificial caves and grottoes, once the dwellings of Buddhist monks who had established in them their viharas."

Bamian is even more 'miserable' today, thanks to the depredations of the Taliban who overran the area in 2001 and used the caves once inhabited by pious monks to store their weapons and ammunition. During their occupation of the valley they destroyed the largest of the statues with a gleeful ferocity unmatched in recent history. After failing to destroy the work of the ancient craftsmen which had stood for thousands of years with anti-aircraft and tank fire, the Taliban brought a lorry load of dynamite from Kabul, and blew them up. Fortunately, we have Blavatsky's eyewitness account of what she saw when she visited Bamian in the 1860's, so can gain some idea of what these majestic ruins looked like before the Taliban effaced them forever; we quote:

"The largest statue is 173 feet high, or seventy feet higher than the Statue of Liberty. The famous Colossus of Rhodes itself, between whose limbs passed easily the largest vessels of those days, measured only 120 to 130 feet in height. The second statue, cut out in the rock like the first one, is only 120 feet. The third statue is only 60 feet high—the two others still smaller, the last one being only a little larger than the average tall man of our present race. The first and largest of the Colossi represents a man draped in a kind of toga." It is the general appearance of the figure, the physiognomy of the head, the drapery, and especially the large drooping ears, which led the first archaeologists who saw it to conclude that it represented the Buddha. This remains the prevailing view today. But let Madame Blavatsky continue.

"Notwithstanding the fact that most of the now existing figures of the Buddha, represented in the posture of Samadhi, have large drooping ears, this is a later innovation and an afterthought. The primitive idea was due to esoteric allegory. The unnaturally large ears symbolize the omniscience of wisdom, and were meant as a reminder of the power of Him who knows and hears all, and whose benevolent love and attention for all creatures nothing can escape. Gautama Buddha was an Aryan Hindu, and an approach to such ears is found only among the Mongolian Burmese and Siamese, who, as in Cochin, distort them artificially. The Buddhist monks, who turned the grottos of the Miaotse into Viharas (monasteries) and cells, came into Central Asia about or in the first century of the Christian era."

A Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, who visited Bamian in the seventh century, wrote: "the shining of the gold ornamentation that overlaid the colossal statue dazzled one's eyes." But no trace of this gilding remained in modern times before the Taliban destroyed the statue in 2001. The drapery, in contrast to the figure itself, which was cut out in the standing rock, was made of plaster and modelled over the stone image. Captain Milo Talbot, who made a detailed survey of the statues of Bamian for the British Army in 1885, concluded that the drapery belonged to a far later epoch. So who carved these colossal figures out of the solid rock and what do they represent, if not the Buddha? Madame Blavatsky tells us in The Secret Doctrine that tradition, corroborated by written records, answers the question and explains the mystery. The explanations in square parenthesis are ours.

"The Buddhist Arhats and Ascetics found the five statues, and many more, now crumbled down to dust, and as the three were found by them in colossal niches at the entrance of their future abode, they covered the figures with plaster, and, over the old, modelled new statues made to represent Lord Tathagata [Gautama Buddha]. The interior walls of the niches are covered to this day [this refers to the 1880's] with bright paintings of human figures, and the sacred image of Buddha is repeated in every group. These frescoes and ornaments—which remind one of the Byzantine style of painting—are all due to the piety of the monk-ascetics, like some other minor figures and rock-cut ornamentations. But the five statues belong to the handiwork of the Initiates of the Fourth Race, who sought refuge, after the submersion of their continent [Atlantis], in the fastnesses and on the summits of the Central Asian mountain chains. Moreover, the five statues are an imperishable record of the esoteric teaching about the gradual evolution of the races.

"The largest is made to represent the First Race of mankind, its ethereal body being commemorated in hard, everlasting stone, for the instruction of future generations, as its remembrance would otherwise never have survived the Atlantean Deluge. The second—120 feet high—represents the sweat-born [early Third Root Race]; and the third—measuring 60 feet—immortalises the race that fell [the Fourth, or Atlantean Root Race], and thereby inaugurated the first physical race, born of father and mother, the last descendants of which are represented in the statues found on Easter Isle; but they were only from 20 to 25 feet in stature at the epoch when Lemuria was submerged, after it had been nearly destroyed by volcanic fires. The Fourth Race was still smaller, though gigantic in comparison with our present Fifth Race, and the series culminated finally in the latter."

These are the 'giants' of antiquity, the ante- and post-diluvian Gibborim mentioned in the Bible. Blavatsky goes on to tell us that "they lived and flourished one million rather than between three and four thousand years ago. The Anakim of Joshua, whose hosts were as 'grasshoppers' in comparison with them, are thus a piece of Israelite fancy, unless indeed the people of Israel claim for Joshua an antiquity and origin in the Eocene [56-34 million years ago], or at any rate in the Miocene age [23-5 million years ago], and change the millenniums of their chronology into millions of years." These figures, though approximate, give us some idea of the immense time periods that have elapsed since the largest giants walked the earth.

Conclusion

Here we must regretfully conclude our brief survey of the history and mythology of giants. Whilst we ourselves have no doubts whatsoever of the truth of the facts we have put before you in this investigation, we leave our readers to consider this and the wealth of evidence discussed in our afterword and so reach their own conclusions.

Search our website

The evidence

In our afterword, we examine the scientific evidence for the existence of giants in the past.

The extreme reluctance on the part of science to even consider the wealth of archaeological and fossil evidence in favour of the existence of giant races of man in the distant past has not been helped by the efforts of some conspiracy theorists. These often well-meaning but misguided individuals have done much to discourage and undermine serious research into this subject. A particularly glaring example of this is a 'news report' that began circulating around the Web in 2015 which quickly gained traction and was even reproduced by some mainstream newspapers.

The report claimed that a US Supreme Court ruling had forced the Smithsonian Institution to release classified papers dating from the early 1900's which showed that it had suppressed evidence that human remains of giants had been uncovered across America to bolster the mainstream chronology of human evolution. On the face of it, this story, which was published in December 2014 by World News Daily Report (WNDR), seems quite plausible, especially given the opposition of most scientists to the very idea of 'giants' in pre-history.

And while it is true that the Smithsonian Institution has always toed the orthodox line so far as digging up the remains of giants is concerned, it has never deliberately set out to bury them either, if you will forgive the pun. Nor has the US Supreme Court ever made such a ruling against the organisation. The story is fiction, and, moreover, WNDR is a satirical publication which it states quite openly on its website. "WNDR assumes however all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content."

The fact of the matter is, as John Temple explains in his article on the equally fictitious 'illuminati', conspiracies are not needed in order to stifle honest enquiry and scientific facts. All this requires is a willing consensus of those, who for various reasons, have nothing to gain from promoting the truth, and everything to lose, generally their careers, reputation and livelihoods. No conspiracies are needed or wanted. Any prominent academic or scientist who testified publicly to the existence of giants in the distant past on the basis of the archaeological and fossil evidence would be ridiculed at best and out of a job at worst.

And this is the simple reason why Wikipedia and all similar sources of information on giants have nothing to say about the physical evidence for their existence. Heads would roll, even skulls might crack were such an inconvenient skeleton to be allowed out of the closet! So the mainstream media and science keeps mum and will continue to do so until such time as the evidence is so overwhelming and so compelling that the elephant in the room has to be acknowledged. We're not holding our breath!

In Isis Unveiled, published in 1877, H. P. Blavatsky tells us: "as we write, there appears in an American paper, The Kansas City Times, an account of important discoveries of the remains of a prehistoric race of giants, which corroborates the statements of the Kabbalists and the Bible allegories at the same time. It is worth preserving: 'In his researches among the forests of Western Missouri, Judge E. P. West has discovered a number of conical-shaped mounds, similar in construction to those found in Ohio and Kentucky.

"These mounds are found upon the high bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, the largest and more prominent being found in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Until about three weeks ago it was not suspected that the mound builders had made this region their home in the prehistoric days; but now it is discovered that this strange and extinct race once occupied this land, and have left an extensive graveyard in a number of high mounds upon the Clay County bluffs."

The report continues: "As yet, only one of these mounds has been opened. Judge West discovered a skeleton about two weeks ago, and made a report to other members of the society. They accompanied him to the mound, and not far from the surface excavated and took out the remains of two skeletons. The bones are very large—so large, in fact, when compared with an ordinary skeleton of modern date, they appear to have formed part of a giant. The head bones, such as have not rotted away, are monstrous in size. The lower jaw of one skeleton is in a state of preservation, and is double the size of the jaw of a civilised person.

"The teeth in this jawbone are large, and appear to have been ground down and worn away by contact with roots and carnivorous food. The jaw-bone indicates immense muscular strength. The thigh-bone, when compared with that of an ordinary modern skeleton, looks like that of a horse. The length, thickness, and muscular development are remarkable. But the most peculiar part about the skeleton is the frontal bone. It is very low, and differs radically from any ever seen in this section before. It forms one thick ridge of bone about one inch wide, extending across the eyes. It is a narrow but rather heavy ridge of bone which, instead of extending upward, as it does now in these days of civilisation, receded back from the eyebrows, forming a flat head, and thus indicates a very low order of mankind.

"It is the opinion of the scientific gentlemen who are making these discoveries that these bones are the remains of a prehistoric race of men. They do not resemble the present existing race of Indians, nor are the mounds constructed upon any pattern or model known to have been in use by any race of men now in existence in America. The bodies are discovered in a sitting posture in the mounds, and among the bones are found stone weapons, such as flint knives, flint scrapers, and all of them different in shape to the arrow-heads, war-hatchets, and other stone tools and weapons known to have been in use by the aboriginal Indians of this land when discovered by the whites.

"The gentlemen who have these curious bones in charge have deposited them with Dr. Foe, on Main Street. It is their intention to make further and closer researches in the mounds on the bluffs opposite this city. They will make a report of their labours at the next meeting of the Academy of Science, by which time they expect to be able to make some definite report as to their opinions. It is pretty definitely settled, however, that the skeletons are those of a race of men not now in existence."

Some years later, on 10 August 1891, the New York Times reported that scientists from the Smithsonian Institution had discovered several large 'pyramidal monuments' on Lake Mills, near Madison, Wisconsin. The report went on to say: "Madison was in ancient days the centre of a teeming population numbering not less than 200,000. The celebrated mounds of Ohio and Indiana can bear no comparison, either in size, design or the skill displayed in their construction with these gigantic and mysterious monuments of earth—erected we know not by whom, and for what purpose we can only conjecture."

Similar reports continued to be published throughout the last quarter of the 19th century. In 1870 the Wisconsin Decatur Republican reported that two well-preserved giant skeletons of an unknown race had been discovered near Potosi. In 1897, the New York Times described large burial mounds found in Maple Creek, Wisconsin. "In it was found the skeleton of a man of gigantic size. The bones measured from head to foot over nine feet and were in a fair state of preservation. The skull was as large as a half bushel measure. Some finely tempered rods of copper and other relics were lying near the bones." The list of such discoveries in the United States goes on and on. Giant skeletal remains have been found in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and New York.

In 1931, The San Antonio Press announced that an archaeological team digging in association with the University of Texas, discovered what at that time was called "the largest human skull found in the world." Photographs taken at the time show that this skull was twice the size of the skull of a normal modern man. These finds were taken to the University of Texas where they were examined by scientists from the Smithsonian Institution who concluded they were between 40,000 to 45,000 years old.

If we now turn south to Mexico, we find further evidence of giants in antiquity. Our first find comes from Nayarit, where a press clipping dated 14 May, 1926, states that Captains. D. W. Page and F. W. Devalda discovered the bones of a race of giants who averaged over ten feet in height. Local legends say the race of giants came from Ecuador. This is interesting, as Ecuador lies to the south-west of Mexico, on the Pacific coast of South America. Could these have been the remains of Lemurian colonists or immigrants rather than Atlanteans? This is possible.

Further discoveries were reported in the New York Herald Tribune on 21 June 1925, repeated a day later in The Washington Post. These tell us that a mining party found skeletons measuring 10 to 12 feet tall near Sisoguiche, in the municipality of Chihuahua, northern Mexico. The Los Angeles Times of 2 October 1927 reported that explorers in Mexico had located large human bones near Santiago Tapextla in the south-west of the country, indicating a race of "gigantic size." So far as we have been able to learn, nothing more has been heard of these discoveries, but that is not surprising, for, as we said earlier, there is nothing to be gained by science in investigating such remains, and everything to be lost, not least the prevailing view that giant human beings never walked the earth.

In 1976, a group of archaeologists found an underground gallery in Rosia Montana, western Transylvania, in Romania, which led to the discovery of the skeleton of a giant over 30 feet tall. Lacking the proper equipment necessary to analyse such a find, the skeleton was sent to Moscow. A number of archaeological discoveries have also been made in Giurgiu in southern Romania. Between the years 1940 and 1950 archaeologists unearthed 80 humanoid skeletons which appeared to be giants. The huge skeletons measured about four to five metres (13-16 feet) in height. Unfortunately, nothing further has been heard of these remarkable discoveries either.

Physical evidence of the pre-existence of giants in ancient times is also found in Africa. To cite just one example, stored in the vaults of the medical school at WITS University, Johannesburg, there is part of an upper leg bone with a hip-joint of a skeleton that would have been approximately 12 feet tall. These remains have been in storage in the university since the early 1960's, and were found by miners in Northern Namibia. They are thought to be at least 40,000 years old.

We cannot conclude this survey without mentioning two remarkable finds much closer to home. The first is the discovery of the skeletons of no less then nine giants found in the Cueva d'Anes near the 4,000 year old dolmens of Oren, located on a hill overlooking the town of Prullans in Catalonia, Spain in 1926. These giants were said to be 3 metres tall (10 feet) and have correspondingly large skulls and femurs.

Some 175 miles further south, three enormous human bone fragments were discovered at Castelnau-le-Lez, in France, by Georges Vacher de Lapouge in 1890 in the sediment used to cover a Bronze Age burial tumulus. From the size of the bones de Lapouge calculated that skeleton from which they came must have been more than 11 feet tall. His discovery was published in the French scientific journal La Nature, Vol. 18, Issue 888, in 1890, and widely reported in the French popular press at the time. The bones of the Castelnau giant were studied by professors of zoology and palaeontology at the University of Montpellier, in addition to other scientists, who concluded they represented a "very tall race."

Lest it be thought that no academics or scientists have ever put their reputations on the line in support of the existence of giant human beings in the past, we end this afterword with a brief list of some of these brave souls. Dr. Donald A. Cadzow of Cambridge University (found a 7 foot 5 inch skeleton in Pittsburgh); Dr. Byron Cummings, head of the archaeology department at the University of Arizona (found several skeletons over 8 feet tall); Thomas Wilson, Curator of Prehistoric Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution (verified an 8 foot tall skeleton with massive jawbone); W. J. Holland, curator of the Carnegie Museum (unearthed a skeleton over 8 feet tall in Pennsylvania as reported in many scientific journals including Scientific American).

occult mysteries