Quinametzin Giants

Aztec mythology makes it clear that  giants  inhabited the earth in a bygone era.  During the time of the First Sun, the Jaguar Sun, giants inhabited the land but were destroyed by the god Tezcatlipoca when he sent jaguars down to devour them.  

Long before Hernán Cortés landed on the shores of the New World, before Spanish chroniclers recorded the feats of the giant Otomi warrior  Tzilacatzin, those mighty men of old—men of renown—were active in Central America in the ancient past. The giants were evil and were hated by both the gods and mankind. Terrible wars were waged against them but the people were never quite able to completely free themselves from the ruthless monsters . The gods became tired of the conflict and unleashed a mighty flood on both the giants and  the people of the earth.   

Of course,  it  should be  easy to see the parallels with the account of the Great Flood in the book of Genesis. Here, too, a flood was sent to wipe out both humanity and the giants who were running amok all over the  globe. The similarities do not end there. In the Aztec story, not only did it rain, but underground rivers were said to burst up from the ground.  Compare that to Genesis 7:11:  

In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

The fountains of the great deep are subterranean lakes and rivers. The New International Version’s translation of the text calls the fountains “springs of the great deep.”

As the Aztec deluge myth continues,  those  who were not drowned in the flood were turned into  fish. The gods had rid themselves of the giants—but not entirely.  Xelhua, called the Architect, escaped the deluge along with six other giants. The cunning Xelhua  and  his comrades  managed to elude the flood waters by climbing  the mountain of Tlaloc, the rain god, and hiding themselves in caverns. The mighty men sealed the cave entrances with massive boulders and waited there until the waters receded.  

Having escaped the watery wrath of the gods, Xelhua  was determined to create a safe haven to protect himself against  future  floods  should the deities become angry  again. Thus, he commissioned  the construction of the largest pyramid on Earth—the Great Pyramid of Cholula.   

In one version of the tale, Xelhua  created a race of men to be his servants when he emerged from the cavern after the flood. In another version, by the time  Xelhua  and the giants left their refuge, the god Quetzalcoatl had created humans to populate the earth. At any rate, these would become Xelhua’s  servents; he ordered bricks to be made for the construction of the massive edifice. He then assembled thousands of workers in a line running from the brickyard to the construction site; bricks were passed by hand from man to man in such a way that a constant flow of materials streamed in to the builders.  

As the pyramid increased in  height, the gods became enraged; they  hurled fire down onto the massive structure, destroying the upper portions  and killing many of the laborers. Sometime afterward, the pyramid was dedicated to Quetzalcoatl and served as an important religious center.  

For anyone who attended Sunday school as a child or has even the slightest knowledge of Bible stories, the parallels between the Great Pyramid of Cholula and the Tower of Babel is easy to see.  

3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.  

—Genesis 11:3–8 (KJV)  

Though it is not explicitly stated in the Bible,  according to some  Hebrew  traditions,  Nimrod, a grandson of Noah, was responsible for the construction of the Tower of Babel.  The tower was most assuredly a ziggurat—a step pyramid—common in ancient Sumer and, of course, in the New World.  It seems Nimrod and Xelhua, both men of renown, shared many of the same building techniques along with a desire  to reach the  heavens  with their work. Though there is no clear reference given in scripture, there are those who believe Nimrod may have also been a giant.  

The giant race that lived during the First Sun and  the giants  Xelhua  and  his band of flood-survivors are not the only giants found in Aztec lore. In a nod to Greek mythology, the Aztecs had their own variation of the Atlas story. After the world had been destroyed at the end of the Fourth Sun, the sky had fallen. Like the tale of the Greek titan who was forced to bear the weight of the heavens on his mighty shoulders, the Aztec  gods created four giants to raise the sky and hold it in place.

The story of the Quinametzin Giants is covered in detail in a book in my summer 2020 book, Giants: Men of Renown. I hope you'll give it a read.

The first chapter of my book Wild & Wonderful (and Paranormal) West Virginia discusses the history of giants in the Mountain State. Check it out!


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