The Giants

You have likely encountered the Nephilim in a different register: in the documentaries that promise ancient astronauts, in the YouTube prophecies that read the Flood backward from the present hour, in the conspiracy literatures the algorithms have already presented to you. The site approaches the Giants in the older grammar — as the offspring of the fallen Watchers whose names are recorded in 1 Enoch and the Book of Giants, whose canonical traces remain in Genesis 6 and Numbers 13, and whose dispersed spirits, according to 1 Enoch 15 and the Book of Jubilees 10, became the demonological tradition that the rest of this site documents.

The Giants were the children of the union recorded in 1 Enoch 6–11: two hundred Watchers descending on Mount Hermon, the oath sworn between them, the taking of human women, the offspring of an unnatural conception. The Watchers taught humanity what they should not have taught — the smiths’ arts, the cosmetic arts, the writing of charms, the courses of the stars, the harvesting of roots, the cutting and reading of names. Their offspring grew to immense size and demanded the produce of the entire earth. When the earth could no longer feed them, they began to consume each other and then the human beings around them. The Flood was the cosmic correction.

The Giants died in the deluge. Their fathers, the Watchers, were imprisoned in the depths until the great judgement. But the operations the Watchers introduced did not die. According to 1 Enoch 15 and the Book of Jubilees 10, the dispersed spirits of the dead Giants became the demons that afflict humanity from the Flood until the final reckoning. This is the explicit theological mechanism by which the older books account for the existence of demons at all. The Goetia catalogue of the Lesser Key, the seventy-two named in the Testament of Solomon, the spirits cast out in the Gospels, the spirits the Catholic exorcists meet in the present hour — the older tradition reads them as the same population, in continuous and recorded operation.

The pages in this section

How to read this section

Read the hub here first, then The Watchers’ Fall for the origin narrative. Then any of the named-figure pages (The Named Giants, The Dreams, Mahaway’s Embassy) for the body of the narrative. Then The Nephilim in Scripture to see how the canonical biblical record preserves what the wider tradition recorded. End with The Operations That Survived for the editorial throughline that connects the Giants to the demonological catalogue of the rest of the site.

Where this meets the rest of the site

The Giants pages is the third member of the site’s heavenly-and-fallen triangulation: The Watchers (the archangels who stand), The Fallen (the named demons of the Goetia), and the Giants here (the offspring of the fall whose dispersed spirits became the demonological population). Read together, the three sections constitute the site’s full theological architecture. The pillar essay on the Watchers situates the whole tradition in the present hour; the Sources page establishes the primary-source library that underwrites every claim below.