Last of a five part Primer on Giants (which starts here).
The religious mysteries of the various cultures that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea basically start with some sky god knocking up the earth goddess. Some have a prologue of sorts where an unknown (and bored) creator diety brought all creation into being, and then that god – or his son, knocks up mother earth, and the action starts.
Invariably, though, He spills his seed upon the ground, and that makes a mess of paradise.
You know what this means, right? Yes. Aliens.
When I expand upon that notion (wholly unsupported with actual fact – so that we’re all clear) I think of Titans. First, because you can derive a narrative like this fairly cleanly from known mythology. Second, because I happen to know a good bit about that mythology and third because Titan is easy to spell and type.
Also, the Titans were big. Sources that agree on nothing else agree on this. Big horny giants from the sky. Aliens.
The Titans
Here’s how I have imagined it for my time-traveling superhero RPG Go Action Fun Time:
As the Old Galactic Empire fell apart, during what we call the late Pleistocene, a starship made its way out into the frontiers of the Galaxy, far beyond any working jump-gate, and took orbit around our small planet. The starship was crewed by refugees, or revolutionaries, or criminals, depending upon your perspective, but none disagree that they were no longer safe in known Imperial Space.
They set up operations on a small continent (Atlantis – as it would turn out), tectonically unstable, but rich in resources. The operation was to be brief – a rest stop to re-supply the Mother Ship – but something went Very Wrong in orbit, and the landing party found itself stranded in this primitive paradise. Or, alternately, depending on the source, the Mother Ship recalled them and when they refused to go, they were abandoned. Or, they were simply abandoned.
The Titans, like most advanced races, found it easier to adapt themselves to an environment rather than the other way around, and they assumed a form modeled on one of the most versatile species in extant in that biosystem at the time – namely hominids. Except they adopted a really astonishingly large version of it.
They possessed star-age technology, but little infrastructure to support it. For that they needed labor. The legendary Hectonchirie and Cyclops were gigantic automatons, but even these great things were insufficient. They began modifying the local fauna, creating giant chimeric monsters to serve as beasts of burden.
Even this proved unsatisfactory. The local hominids seemed puny, but they were relatively bright and versatile. What could we do with them to make them a little larger?
Among their wondrous artifacts, though, was a “wish machine”, a matter/energy converter that can be controlled by thought; the pinnacle of Titan technology, and almost certainly stolen by this particular group.
Sheltered by their isolation, and cushioned by their stolen technology, their passions ran unchecked by hardship for centuries, and the whole planet became their footstool. Their civilization was a long, destructive party that raged for thousands of years. But their slaves kept learning, and became more and more independent, running a shadow society around and in spite of the quarreling Gods, who took it all for granted until it was far too late.
Civil war, a slave insurrection, and tectonic instability finally caught up to them, and they were forced to abandon their civilization. Many abandoned the planet altogether, but a few remained: The Titans, the Aesir (who would inhabit North America until the end fo the Ice Age), the gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia and Greece. But they were too few to call a civilization, and the world, as it were, had passed to humans.
The Nephilim
Closely related to this are the Nephilim – mentioned in the Bible and consequently speculated upon by all manner of new age and fundamentalist Christian wackos to the point where it’s not even fun anymore.
For my money Nephilim = Titan. The outcome was the same.
SOURCES:
A nice clean summary:
Fantastical History 