EPISODE 14: We Have to Talk About the Giants...

So it's 1966 or 1967 and I'm five or six years old. And the destination of choice is a place called King's Castle Land in Whitman, Massachusetts. My mother would pile us into the car and bring us to this amazing place established by a man named Mr. King back in 1946. And this was a few acres behind his toyshop, I think, where he had built these structures that were scenes of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. And this was the most dazzling, amazing place to my five year old imagination. And what I loved about it then and what I love remembering about it now is that I absolutely saw through it. You would go into the home of the the third little pig. You'd go into the brick cottage of the third little pig, and you would see the wolf in the pot boiling the pot on the wall in front of you. 

And I was absolutely sold by this. I mean, you went in that door. You were in that house. This was a real, actual place. But at the same time, you could totally see, like the chicken wire and the plaster and the really bad painting of the wolf. And both things existed in my mind. Absolutely. Simultaneously. This was absolutely real and it was absolutely fake. And I just adored it. 

And I don't know - my long suffering mother -  I feel like we went there a hundred times and you could see the pumpkin where Peter Peter kept his wife. And you go inside this pumpkin with this very thick. Right. Was very many aspects of it were very thought out. I just love the idea that Mr. King put the time and energy and effort into creating these amazing spaces. None of this was pre-fab. It was all very much homemade. 

But on the farthest extreme of the castle land was the giant. And the giant for me was where reality let go. This giant was enormous. Enormous. It was probably nine feet tall, I have no idea. But it had two dragons next to it, one of which actually breathed fire. And yes, you could sort of see the propane canister in one dragon's mouth that was shooting out the flames. But again, it didn't matter. But I was in awe and terror of this of this giant. And then later, I think probably when I was around maybe eight or nine and too old for King's Castle land, but there was a hurricane and the giant toppled over and they did a brilliant thing. They left it there. They left the giant embedded in the earth. And I've since learned that the only part that they repaired was his nose, because his head was sort of lying flat in the ground and you could you could stand on him. You could go and you could climb on this toppled fallen giant. 

And I will confess that even at eight years old, standing on this toppled fallen giant, I had some bizarre sense of overcoming some infantile fear in my life. 

So, hello, I’m Tom Lee and this is “The Odyssey Odyssey,” the podcast that retells the story of the Odyssey and all of the stories that surround the Odyssey leading up to and away from the story and sort of lurking behind the great story of The Odyssey. And that's where we are today. This is the 14th episode of this podcast, and we have arrived at Book seven of The Odyssey. If you're tuning in for the first time, I can never make sense. When I look at the data, I think people sort of start in the middle and work their way backwards and forwards. I have no idea. But if you're just tuning in for the first time, this is episode 14. You might want to go back to the beginning or maybe not. It's all very non-linear here.

The story that I want to share with you today hangs in the background of this book, Seven of The Odyssey. In our last episode, our hero Odysseus has washed ashore, completely naked, onto the island of Scheria, and he has been taken under the wing of the princess of this island, Nausicaa. And he's given a bath and he's given fresh, clean clothes. And she very prudently leaves him in a grove and says, “Wait here until I get home to my father and mother, and then follow me and ask my parents for help.” She promises him that the king and queen of this island will send him home. And one of the last things she says to him is it's easy to find the palace. Any child could tell you where it is. Just ask. And sure enough, along comes a young child. I think of Groucho Marx saying, “This is so easy, a ten year old child could do it.  Now, run out and get me a ten year old child...” 

But this ten year old child is, of course, Athena in disguise. Another disguise for Athena. You really have the sense that she's having so much fun helping Odysseus in his miserable sorrow and suffering and she appears to him in pigtails as a beautiful little image that the different translators translate differently. Several people talk about just that. She has beautiful hair and others specifically say that this little child is in pigtails. “The awesome one in pigtails.” I love this image of this goddess in the form of a child and this very self-possessed young girl carrying her pitcher of water strikes up a conversation with Odysseus and tells him everything that he needs to know about this island where he has landed. And we learn as well just where he is. The island is called Scheria, but the people who live on the island are called the Phaeacians and they have moved to this island. Their leader evacuated their earlier home Vecchia because it was too close to the Cyclopes. And we're sort of being pulled in this gravitational pull towards this great story of the Cyclops that's sort of in the center of the Odyssey. But the background is sort of murky and and a little weird. Athena, in the guise of the child, tells Odysseus to go into the palace and and be very bold. They're all going to be sitting down having dinner, but walk right in. And the first person you're going to see is the queen. Ignore the king out King Louis completely and go directly to the queen. Queen a pretty and throw yourself at her feet. Wrap your arms around her knees. 

This is the classic gesture of supplication throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's almost a gesture that you can't refuse - if you throw yourself on the ground and beg for your life or beg for help, well, they would be almost inhuman if they were to deny you when you're in that position. And in fact, Achilles does deny several people who are throwing their arms around his knees, which shows us how far he has moved from his own humanity. But that's another story for another day. 

And then the classic sort of set style of these epics, we have to hear the whole lineage of Queen Arete and King Alcinous – Alcinous has married his niece, his brother's daughter. But much more interesting is Eurymedon, his great grandfather. He was a giant. 

And this little genealogy that Athena provides Odysseus is a really good example of why this podcast exists. It's just one line in the whole poem, but it opens up several fascinating stories. And the premise of “The Odyssey Odyssey” is always that there are stories connected to stories connected to stories. 

So Athena starts with the current king, whose name is Alconoius, and she works backwards. His father was named Nausithous. And you're here on the island of Scheria there are lots of people with this same first syllable in their name, “Naus”, which as in “nautical.” Everything about these people is connected to the ocean, to the sea, and to boats. So Nausithous is the son of Poseidon. Now, isn't this interesting that Odysseus has landed safely on this island, but looming in the background of this island is his arch enemy, Poseidon. Poseidon is the grandfather of the current King Alcinous. And one of the reasons, by the way, that Athena doesn't just appear to Odysseus, the reason she's in disguise is that she doesn't want to anger Poseidon. She's helping Poseidon's enemy, Odysseus, and she needs to be extremely tactful. 

So Poseidon “married” (again that's speaking in middle school-ese.) He “married” a nymph named Periboea. And if you remember, back to one of the earliest episodes of this podcast, they talked about the hundreds and hundreds of ocean nymphs who come in extremely handy when you need to extend someone's genealogy. And this is what Periboea does. But Periboea’s Father, Athena tells us, was Eurymedon - and he was the leader of the Giants. In fact, it was his foolish behavior that caused the downfall of the Giants and there, my friends, is a story. 

And I really hope that some of you are saying “What, now? Giants?” and yes, gentle listener, there are Giants in the background of the Odyssey. This is this weird, wonderful, shadowy sort of story of the Giantomachy Whenever you have a story of a battle, you get that suffix “omachy”, which is why Telemachus, Odysseus, the son, he is battling from afar. Telemachus, Telemachus and the giantpmachy is a story that goes right back to the creation of the universe. 

And the story that any fifth grader can tell you is that Earth and Sky gave birth to the first cycle of gods and goddesses, the Titans. And this included Cronus and Rhea. But then Earth gave birth again, and this time she didn't give birth to gods and goddesses. She gave birth to monsters. She gave birth to hundred-handed monsters who were so horrifying to her husband, to the God, Uranus, to the sky, God, that he hurled them out of creation. He hurled them even past Hades into a place called Tartarus and Gaia or “Ge,” Mother Earth, was so angry at Uranus that she created a weapon, a sort of new weapon made of atonement, which is a kind of diamond, you know, coming out of the earth. 

And this is the weapon that she gave to her son, Cronus, to “destroy,” as we say in middle school, to destroy his own father, Uranus. What he actually did was he cut off his father's genitals, which landed in the ocean and foamed up and created…… for two points……. Aphrodite, the goddess of love from the foam that emerged from her father's genitals. So the Titans were in charge. And then Cronus and Rhea, children of the Earth and Sky, they gave birth to children of their own. And Cronus thought this was a very bad idea because he knew that sons, at least he destroyed his own father's power and he was very much afraid his children would do the same to him. This is the birth of probably the most prominent idea throughout all of Greek mythology that your children will be more powerful than the gods themselves. This is terrifying. 

So he ate his own children. Cronus devoured his own children until the youngest, Zeus, was saved from this fate and caused his father to vomit. And all his brothers and sisters were re-born and then began the great battle between the Titans and the Olympians and Zuse and his brothers and sisters, with the help of the hundred handlers that they took out of Tartarus. They overcame the administration of Cronus and Rhea, and this is called the Titan nomics. And this is sort of bedrock to our understanding of Greek myth and the roles of these gods and goddesses. 

But then there's another story that we learn where Gaia is so furious at what has happened to her children, the Titans, that she creates another race of beings. And these are the Giants, the Gigantes. And this episode doesn't get a lot of play in the most famous books that we sort of draw our mythology from. But it is detailed in a source called The Library, the “Bibliotheke” of Apollodoris.

 Apollodoris, as far as anybody knows, was writing around 100 A.D. and what he was doing in 100 A.D. was what people have been doing for about 2000 years. Since is writing a book to try to make sense of all these different gods and goddesses and heroes and mortals and marriages and destructions and battles and sort of putting this all into one book. And his style, as he does this in is very sort of matter of fact, it's not poetry. It's not written in beautiful prose. He's just trying to include as many details as he can to keep everything straight. And he tries to keep the genealogies of all of these gods and goddesses straight. And I just love this as a storyteller. I love his sort of telegraphic style. Here's the facts you need to know to relate this story. 

And one other little detail I want to share is that we know about this book because of a man named Photios, who lived in Byzantium in 858, and he was a great scholar. He became a leader of the of the church, the Christian church. But he was a great scholar of ancient religion. And he writes that he read a little book by Apollodoris, and he says it's “quite useful for people who think it worthwhile to remember the ancient world.”

And I just love the idea that this Byzantine Photius is 1200 years before us. He's reading a book that was written 700 years before him, and it's recounting what people were describing and believing 800 years before that. This transfer of knowledge and how we're reliant on things that get written down and then don't rot or get burned or lost in floods. This one text had to be copied and then that copy had to be copied in order for this to survive. From the time of Apollo Dora's to the time of Fotis until now, we can get it at Barnes Noble. 

When I was in college, I had the great good fortune to be in a production of “Twelfth Night” that was directed by Moris Karnofsky. Morris Karnofsky was born in 1897, and he was one of the great American Shakespearean actors of the mid-century. And the moment that struck me forever was when he very casually handed me his personal paperback copy of “Twelfth Night,” and it was a copy that had been printed in about 1940, and it was old and brown and crumbling and I handled it very delicately. But what struck me so vividly in that instant was this idea that Maurice, who was 80 at the time, had acquired this book when it was new and he was 40, and I had not yet been born. And between the time when he bought it and put it in my hand, the book had aged, it had faded and begun to crumble. And this is the essence of classical literature. Everything that we know from an ancient text is based on a book that is long gone. If a book is written on paper or papyrus or even vellum, in a sense, as soon as that book is created, it begins to decay. Hundreds of years, thousands of years may go by and the book will rot away. And if it isn't copied, and if that copy isn't copied and passed on to us, those stories, those myths, those plays, those poems are gone forever. 

So the story of the Giantomachy as told by Apollodoris, tells us that the Giants were absolutely enormous. There had never been any creatures as large as they, and their power was sort of inconceivable. They had no legs. They had enormous serpent coils on the bottoms of their bodies and they were immortal. They were the children of Earth and Sky, and they were immortal as long as they stayed in the land where they were born, which we're told is a place called Pallene. So even the gods and goddesses can't kill these giants. The only creature that could kill a giant would be a human. 

And if you're a fan of Hindu mythology, you now want to pull the cord and stop the train. Because this is the story of the “Ramayana.” This is the story of the great demon Ravana, who has been granted immortality and cannot be killed by any of the gods and goddesses, which is why Vishnu assumes the form of a human and is born as Prince Rama to ultimately destroy the immortal, otherwise immortal demon, Ravana 

And I love this. It's it's the same story!

So if you are an immortal God, Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo or Hera, and your grandmother has created a race of serpent body giants to destroy you, “who ya  gonna call?” And the answer is obvious. Heracles to the rescue - again, we have this strange idea of Heracles kind of floating around in this past time, and he comes to the aid of the gods and they sort of tag team in their battle against the Giants. Apollo will shoot one of the giants in the eye. It won't die. But then Heracles comes in and finishes the job, and Athena throws a mountain on one of the giants. And then Heracles shoots him with an arrow. So the gods use their power, but through his own mortality, because Heracles is mortal. And we all know that's one of the things that Walt Disney gets so terribly wrong in that movie. He can destroy these giants. And there's one moment where he's fighting the King of the Giants.  And he throws him to the earth. And every time he throws him to the earth, the giant becomes stronger and stronger. And Heracles picks him up and throws him down. And of course, because the Earth is his mother, she gives her child strength. And Athena comes to Heracles as aid and says, The only way you're going to kill this giant is by dragging him out of the place where he was born. So Hercules physically drags the giant out of Pallene and is able to kill him there because the earth of that place is not the earth that bore him. So round one to the gods. 

But it gets better. 

This is this is, to me, a sort of Marvel franchise moment when we still have 45 minutes left in the movie and we've kind of gotten rid of the the enemy and we just have to do it again and we have to make it bigger. And now we have time, fun. And. Typhon Is this wild that no one has ever been bigger than Typhon? Gaia The Earth has children again, but this time she goes to Tartarus, Apollo. Dora says that she goes to Tata us and we think of Tartarus as a place. But there's also sort of this manifestation of Tartarus. And Gaia has sex with Tartarus, and that's how Typhon is born. And he is the biggest and he is the baddest. His right hand and his left hand reach the east and the west horizon. His body is covered with heads and his body is covered with feathers and hair. And he just rises up. Horrifying, horrible. He throws mountains, flaming mountains. He throws trees at the heavens. 

There's this fantastic, epic battle with this very strange episode where Typhon and Zeus are fighting and Zeus has the same sickle that Cronos has used to destroy Uranus's power. And he's fighting Typhon with the sickle. But Typhon wraps his coils around Zeus’s body grabs this sickle out of his hands and then cuts the sinews out of his body and drags him away to a cave and leaves him there. He takes Zeus's muscular sinews and hides them in a bearskin. So it's this incredibly strange image of Zeus not dead – immortal - but utterly powerless. He can't move, he can't stand, he can't walk because he has no sinews in his body and his legs and his hands. And he's in this cave. 

And Hermes, who in one of his most charming roles is the God of thieves. He steals the sinews away from the bearskin and puts them back into Zeus's body. And then Zeus rejoins the fight with Typhon, and he takes Mount Etna and throws it on top of him. And this great mountain lands on top of this monstrous Typhon and begins to smoke and flame. And that is why, to this day, gentle listeners, Mount Etna will smoke and flame because the demon Typhon still lies underneath it. And the fire that was shooting out of his eyes is now shooting out of the top of Mount Etna, all of which, of course, is fabulous. 

And it brings us back even further into the world of mythology. So hang on, because a thousand years here, a thousand miles there, pretty soon we're talking about real time. 

If you're like me and a lot of your books come from library sales and library discards, you might have a lot of books from the 1950s. And if you read books on Greek mythology from that period, people say, you know, it's kind of remarkable how similar many parts of Greek myth are to Assyrian mythology, Mesopotamian myths. And now if you buy a current analysis of Greek mythology, scholars say, well, there's no question at all that many of the origin stories of Greek myth were transported from Assyria and from Mesopotamia in general. And this is one of the greatest examples of that. The Mesopotamian story of the creation of the universe is exactly the same sort of sequence of battles with increasingly powerful gods and goddesses. 

And the mother goddess Tiamat, who is sort of the waters of the earth, she trends, forms herself at the climax of this battle. She's attempting to destroy her own children, and they rise up against her and against her more and more powerful until she transforms herself and she emerges out of the waters as this monster, as beast. And the children that she's given birth to now are these dragons whose blood is poison and the wild creatures that all go to attack her children. And one of the things that happens is one of the evil gods is overpowered by the gods, and they actually build a house on top of him. They can't kill him. He's immortal, but they build this house on top of him. 

So this image of the mother goddess creating monsters to destroy her own children, scholars are absolutely certain that this idea moved from Mesopotamia to ancient Greece. And there's actually there's this one weird little mention in Apollo Dorst, that the gods are so terrified of Typhon that they run to Egypt, where they disguised themselves as animals. And if you think of the Egyptian gods and goddesses with their baboon heads and their jackal heads, this is another sort of rolling together of all these traditions that would have been swirling around in human imagination at this time. I just love the way these things layer and layer onto each other. So that's the giant Tamaki in sort of a nutshell. But I want to tell you one more manifestation of this story, which is in the frescoes of Giulio Romano in the Palazzo Te in Mantua. 

The Palazzo Te was built around 1524 by Frederico II of Gonzaga, and he recruited a Giulio Romano, who was a student of Rafael. And Giulio Romano lived there for the rest of his life, but he spent ten years decorating every flat surface in this enormous palazzo in frescoes. There's just a room after room of gods and goddesses and horses. There's a sort of horse theme that goes through this place. 

But my one of my favorite things in the world is the Great Hall of the Giants, where you enter in and that the fresco is a sort of a trompe l’oeil. And it looks as if the entire building is collapsing on your head. The the pillars on the walls are painted to be crumbling and the ceiling is opening up and these enormous, hideous giants look like they've landed in your dining room out of the sky. It's absolutely fantastic. And I'm certainly going to share images of that on the website for the Odyssey. Odyssey. 

And every time I think about frescoes, I, I can't help think of a delightful woman that I worked with at the Metropolitan Museum who grew up in Venice. And I was asked, you know, what's that like? That must have been amazing. She grew up in an actual palazzo on a canal, and she said, “Oh, you know, it was it was nice. It was nice. You know how it is. People want to come in and look at your frescoes all the time. You know, it's so annoying.”  So, yeah, that's how it was when I was a kid, too. People always wanted to come in and look at our frescoes. 

So that's our episode. Next time we'll go in to the palace of Alcinous and Queen Arete, the grandchildren of the Giants. And we'll begin to send Odysseus on his way. 

Thank you for listening, as always. Drop me a note. Love to hear from listeners – www.tomleestoryteller.net.  Take a look at the images on the website connected to the web page Wherever you're listening and we'll see you next time.