Giants (esotericism)

Lore & Background

The concept of giants was discussed by the theosophist and occult author Blavatsky, who wrote about their existence in her book The Secret Doctrine, connecting them to her theory of root races and claiming they correspond with the Hindu cycle of the universe. According to theosophists, giants were the third root race who lived on the continent of Lemuria, and theosophists also linked giants to the Atlantean race.

The German occultist Guido von List was influenced by Blavatsky's writings on giants and mixed together paganism, mythology, and theosophy, creating a basis for the belief in giants living in different realms based on the first four rounds of the root race theory. R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, an Egyptologist and traditionalist, believed that giants had roamed the earth, and that after the fall of Adam, humanity fell into a state of degeneration.

Reader's Guide

Giants in esotericism represent a recurring theme bridging theosophy, occultism, and later the earth mysteries movement. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine established giants as the third root race on Lemuria, linking them to Hindu cosmology and Atlantis. This idea influenced German occultist Guido von List, who synthesized paganism and theosophy into a belief system about giants in different realms. Writers such as Lewis Spence and William Comyns Beaumont, though critical of theosophy or occultism, accepted giants based on folklore, mythology, and archaeology; Beaumont even claimed Britain was Atlantis occupied by a giant race of Aryans. In the 1970s, the British earth mysteries movement revived interest: John Michell wrote about giants in The View over Atlantis, and Anthony Roberts in Sowers of Thunder claimed giants were original inhabitants of the British Isles, linking them to Alfred Watkins' ley lines. The persistence of giant lore across these disparate movements shows its adaptability as a symbol of primordial origins and lost civilizations.

Did You Know?

• Blavatsky connected giants to her theory of root races and the Hindu cycle of the universe.
• Lewis Spence researched English folklore depicting giants such as Magog and the British giant Albion.

Etymology and the Shifting Literary Image

The term giant traces back to the Ancient Greek word gigas, and its earliest known appearance in English dates to 1297, when Robert of Gloucester included it in his chronicle. The word itself descends from the Gigantes of Greek mythology, those titanic figures who clashed with the Olympian gods. For centuries, popular storytelling cemented a particular image: giants as brutish, dimwitted ogres who devoured humans and livestock, a characterization solidified by tales like Jack the Giant Killer. Yet this monolithic portrayal never held absolute sway. Writers such as Jonathan Swift and Roald Dahl introduced giants who possessed intelligence and even warmth, complicating the simple villain archetype. This evolution mirrors a broader cultural negotiation—how societies project their fears of physical power onto a single figure, then gradually grant that figure nuance, humor, or moral complexity. The giant, in literary terms, became a canvas onto which each era painted its own anxieties and aspirations about strength, wisdom, and the boundaries of the human form.

Symbolic Resonance and Regional Mythmaking

Giants function in folklore as the human body stretched to monstrous proportions, a device that triggers deep-seated terror while simultaneously underscoring bodily fragility and the inevitability of death. They are most often cast as antagonists or monsters, yet the tradition consistently carves out exceptions: giants who befriend humans, who marry into human families, and whose children are ordinary people known as half-giants. This duality allows cultures to explore the thin line between the familiar and the terrifying. Regional geomythologies give giants a landscape-shaping role. In Irish tradition, Fionn mac Cumhaill is credited with constructing the Giant's Causeway. In American folklore, Paul Bunyan—identified by a 1965 scholarly examination as a figure engineered by advertising professionals rather than organically born from folk imagination—was nonetheless embraced with such fervor that his blue ox Babe's hoofprints supposedly became the lake beds of the Northwest, and its drinking trough overflowed to form the Mississippi River. Even the Mahābhārata's epic battles, with their armies of gigantic heroes and war elephants, may echo the fossilized remains of ancient mammals found in India's Sivalik Hills.

Fossils, Fabrication, and the Giantological Pamphlet Wars

Claudine Cohen's 2002 study, The Fate of the Mammoth, argued that humanity's engagement with prehistoric megafauna fossils was profoundly shaped by preexisting giant lore. She traced proto-scientific giant studies across multiple eras: Herodotus reporting the discovery of Orestes' remains in Tegea; Pliny describing a giant's skeleton unearthed in Crete following an earthquake, seemingly invoking a process by which giants gradually shrank to human dimensions; and Saint Augustine referencing what is likely a fossilized molar of an ancient Elephantidae in his City of God, tying it to reflections on the Noahic flood. The academic preoccupation persisted well into later centuries. Boccaccio devoted a section of his Genealogies of the Pagan Gods to alleged Sicilian excavations he believed could substantiate the historicity of Polyphemus from The Odyssey. Rabelais, in his sixteenth-century Gargantua and Pantagruel, constructed an entirely invented giantology. In 1613, massive bones unearthed in France were first attributed to Teutobochus, and the competing medical examinations that followed ignited a full-blown pamphlet war among anatomists and surgeons. The so-called Claverack Giant, discovered in colonial New York, similarly drew the attention of early American intellectuals Cotton Mather and Edward Taylor.

Sacred Texts and the Giant Question

Across Abrahamic and related traditions, giants occupy a charged theological space. Genesis references the Nephilim both before and after the Flood, a term loosely rendered as giants in some translations and left untranslated in others. The Book of Numbers records the Israelite spies' dread upon encountering the Anakim in Canaan, describing themselves as grasshoppers in comparison. Joshua's narrative confirms these peoples' continued presence. The Philistine Goliath, though popularly remembered as a giant, presents a fascinating textual puzzle: the Masoretic Text places his height at six cubits and a span, roughly 313 to 372 centimeters, while the Septuagint, Flavius Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls give a considerably smaller four cubits and a span, roughly 216 to 258 centimeters. Josephus, writing around 93 CE in his Antiquities of the Jews, described the Amorites as a race of giants whose bones were still displayed in his time, suggesting that fossil remains may have been on public view. The Book of Enoch identifies giants as the offspring of the Watchers and human women. In Armenian tradition, Hayk, the legendary founder of the Armenian state, belonged to a race of giants who aided in building the Tower of Babel, and ancient historian Movses Khorenatsi singled him out as the bravest and most renowned among them.