“ ‘Giants’ keep cropping up in all parts of the globe: in the mythology of East and West, in the sagas of Tiahuanaco and the epics of the Eskimos. ‘Giants’ haunt the pages of almost all ancient books. So they must have existed.”
—Erich von Däniken, Chariots of the Gods
“There aren’t any such things as giants, are there? … But there are such things as grownups, and they’re like giants.”
—Five-year-old boy commenting on “Jack and the Beanstalk,” quoted by Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment
“A woman patient told me a dream in which all the people were especially big. ‘That means,’ she went on, ‘that the dream must be to do with events in my early childhood, for at that time, of course, all grown-up people seemed to me enormously big.’”
—Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
So who are you going to believe, a best-selling author like von Däniken or some five-year-old kid?
For this post—a footnote to the good-natured debate I had with Erich von Däniken a few weeks ago, on Gene Steinberg’s “The Paracast” radio program—I’d have liked to include a fourth epigraph. This is the back-and-forth in the original 1947 version of “Miracle on 34th Street,” between precocious six-year-old Susan (played by a very young Natalie Wood) and her mother’s lovestruck admirer Fred (John Payne). I don’t own the DVD, however, and I’ll have to quote it from memory.
Susan, watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade near the beginning of the film, is quite certain there are no such things as giants. “Maybe not now, Susan,” Fred tells her, “but in olden days there were. What about the giant that Jack killed?”
Susan: “Who’s Jack?”
Unlike von Däniken, Fred presumably hadn’t read the Bible. If he had, he wouldn’t have had to resort to fairy tales, which Susan’s mother had already taught her to distrust. He could have pointed, as von Däniken does, to Genesis 6:4: “The giants were on the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came to human women and they bore them children. These were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.”
True: the Hebrew doesn’t say “giants.” It speaks of “Nephilim,” from the root meaning “to fall”—“the fallen ones,” maybe? It was the old Greek translation of the Bible, followed by the Latin, that rendered this as gigantes, “giants.” Yet the Nephilim turn up again in Numbers 13:33, where they really do seem to be giants, compared to whom people seem tiny as locusts. Other Biblical passages as well hint at the one-time existence of races of giants, some of their offspring surviving into historical times. Do you doubt? Then go to the city that’s now called Amman and see for yourself the physical evidence: an iron bed, more than 13 feet long and 6 feet wide (Deuteronomy 3:11). Who but a giant could have slept there?
And therefore, says von Däniken, “they must have existed.”
Most of us will resist this conclusion. Von Däniken has been criticized, sometimes quite bitterly, for selling our ancestors short in terms of their engineering know-how. (And, we should add, ignoring that the great monuments of antiquity were built by slave societies where human beings were expendable. If a few slaves were crushed beneath the massive rocks, who would mourn their loss?) It would be at least as fair to criticize him for selling short the human imagination.
If myths and legends speak of “chariots of the gods” sailing through the skies, does it follow that sky-borne vehicles must have been part of people’s experience? An earthly king will surround himself with chariotry to protect his realm and crush his enemies; why shouldn’t a heavenly king do the same? The “host of heaven,” from whom the “Lord of hosts” takes His name, are the countless stars. Surely they ride in countless chariots, which can’t be seen with the physical eye but it’s no great strain for the mind’s eye to make up for that.
No one with the smallest imagination can fail to visualize the “chariotry of God” that Psalm 68:18 declares to be “two myriads, thousands of shin’an.” We really don’t know what shin’an are, yet the overall picture is clear enough. “The Lord is among them, Sinai in holiness.”
And when one of these chariots detaches itself from the rest to carry Elijah up to heaven (2 Kings 2:11), there to celebrate with the rest of the “morning stars” who are the “sons of God” (Job 38:7)—that’s no UFO. Chariots that fly with the whirlwind are “identified flying objects,” scientifically recognized entities, fitting comfortably into the framework of the universe as the ancients understood it.
And giants?
Von Däniken is right. They existed, had to exist. But a giant is gigantic only by comparison with something else. We were all tiny; giants surrounded us all, hopefully benign and protecting, too often fearsome and abusive. We know this is true because we’ve lived it. The memory traces are inside us, ineradicable, un-debunkable even by little Susan’s mother.
Like Quixote, or David or Odysseus—or, yes, the Jack who climbed the beanstalk—we need to fight those giants. It’s a prerequisite to our growing up to be giants like them. (Though we won’t know that’s happened, once it’s happened. We’ll think ourselves just as ordinary as we always were, and a “giant” as something preternatural.) We need to kill them—in story, not in reality—though we know full well they’ll spring back to life. They live inside us. They can’t die until we do.
Who’s Jack?
He’s you, Susan, and he’s me. That’s why, once you hear his story, you’ll never forget it. It’s true, in the way that only fairy tales—and holy Scriptures, from time to time—can be the truth.
Did von Däniken write one more fairy tale, when he wrote Chariots of the Gods? I can’t think of higher praise.
by David Halperin
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