anyone heard of this before???

http://www.stevequayle.com/Giants/N.Am/hid...giant.race.html
. One of the latest accounts of a race of giants that occupied Europe comes from the middle ages and involves a surprising figure: Saint Christopher. While modern stories of St. Christopher simply make him out as an ordinary man, or perhaps a somewhat homely man, those who actually saw him had a different story. According to his peers, he was a giant, belonging to a tribe of dog-headed, cannibalistic giants. Jacques de Voragine in The Golden Legend wrote of St. Christopher:"He was of gigantic stature, had a terrifying mien, was twelve coudees tall.”

21. A coudee is an antique measurement equal to or larger than the English linear measurement of a foot. According to this ancient account, St. Christopher stood from 12 to 18 feet tall (a fact that has become hidden in or even erased from church history).

22. While Western icons don't picture St. Christopher as contemporary accounts described him, those of the Eastern churches do. Often the suggestion is seen in historic accounts that St. Christopher was the product of a tryst between a human being and an Anubis (a demon-like creature based on the Greek Anoubis, which came from the Egyptians jackal-headed god who was believed to lead the dead to judgment)


The legend of Saint Christopher quite clearly states that he was a giant. Not just a tall man, but a genuine giant. As the story goes, it was his size that enabled him to easily transport the Christ child across a river and thereby secured his place as patron saint of travelers - that is, until the Church decided that the evidence for Christopher's very existence was entirely legendary and decanonized him. Nonetheless, Christopher remains a popular though unofficial saint, and his image is fixed in our cultural psyche.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Christopher



http://www.geocities.com/age_of_giants/anc...hristopher.html


Tradition relates that Saint Christopher came from a country of cannibals and that his face was doglike. "He was of gigantic stature, had a terrifying mien, was twelve coudees tall.” - Jacques de Voragine, in The Golden Legend [A coudee is slightly larger than an English foot. So as per this ancient account, St. Christopher stood from 12 to 18 feet tall, a facet of the Christopher Legend forgotten or erased from church history.

The dog-headed Christopher myth originates in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian [c 243-316 CE] A man named Reprobus ["Wicked" in Latin] was captured in battle against tribes in North Africa, and was assigned to the "numerus Marmaritarum" or "Unit of the Marmaritae". He was reported to be of tremendous size, with a dogs head instead of a human one, by some accounts this was characteristic of the Marmaritae people, but highly unlikely.

Early translations did not always render an accurate translation of the Greek term kunokephalos ("dog-headed" ), and at times translated it as canineus ("dog-like"). This progressively morphed to read "Canaanite" (Cananeus) since it seemed apparent that a Saint could not really have been "dog-like".
So Christopher the "Canaanite" (Cananeus) was actually Christopher the Canineus ("dog-like") . Some believe that the description of Christopher as hailing from the land of the dog-headed derives from the Egyptian cult of the jackal-headed god Anubis. Others believe that the civilized intellectuals of the Greco-Roman world were accustomed to describing those who lived on the outskirts of civilization as cannibals and dog-headed savages. So that when the original author of the account of St. Christopher described his origin from the land of cannibals and dog-headed peoples he was merely signifying that he came from the edge of the civilized world, a cultural metaphor .

It has been speculated that St. Christopher could be the same man known as the Coptic Saint Menas for whom a 4th century burial site is known . Doubts about the historical existence of Christopher, long the patron saint of travelers, prompted the Catholic Church to remove his name from the calendar of saints in 1969.

http://www.primitivism.com/hellhounds.htm

ellhounds, Werewolves and the Germanic Underworld

Alby Stone

There is a curious connection between dogs and travel to the realm of the dead. It can be found particularly in Indo-European mythologies, although it also occurs in Egypt, Siberia, and north America. According to the Vedic mythology of ancient India, for instance, the deceased must pass by the four-eyed dogs of Yama, king of the dead; and Greek mythology tells of the dog Kerberos, popularly endowed with three heads, who watches the entrance to Hades. Mention must also be made of the white, red-eared hounds of Celtic myth. But the idea of the underworld watchdog appears to have reached its fullest, and most complex expression among the Germanic peoples.

In Scandinavia, hounds are associated with Niflheimr, the mortuary land ruled by the grim queen Hel. The Eddic poem Baldrs draumar (Balder's Dreams) tells how Odin rides to Niflheimr to ascertain the meaning of the dreams that have been troubling his son. On the way,

He met a hound that came from Hel.
That one had blood upon his breast,
and long did he bark at Baldrs father.
Onward rode Odin - the earth-way roared -
till he came to the high hall of Hel. [1]

Also in the Poetic Edda, in the Fjolsvinnsmal section of the poem Svipdagsmal, two dogs guard Lyfjaberg ('Mount of Healing') the otherworld dwelling of the maiden Mengloth, which is surrounded by a wall of fire, and a clay wall called Gastropnir. H.R. Ellis Davidson [2] has convincingly identified Mengloth with the goddess Hel, on the grounds that there are enough significant parallels between Niflheimr and Lyfjaberg to suggest that the rulers of the two places were also probably meant to be one and the same. The two dogs are worth a closer look:

One is called Gifr, Geri is the other,
if you wish to know:
they are strong watchdogs, and they keep watch until the doom of the gods. [3]


.........


Grendel and his mother are both haunters and guardians of a burial mound in marshland, and are given an aquatic aspect to match - brimwylf, for instance, means 'water-wolf'. This brings to mind the bodies of water - usually rivers, but sometimes a lake or sea - that are invariably supposed to surround the Indo-European underworld, and those of some non-Indo-European cultures. This brings us, strange as it may seem, to St Christopher.

In Christian popular tradition, St Christopher was a giant who carried travellers across a river. The story is well known, and does not need to be repeated here. But Old English traditions of the saint are rather unusual. According to the Old English Passion of St Christopher, se w s healf hundisces mancynnes, 'he was of the race of mankind who are half hound'. The Old English Martyrology elaborates upon this: he was thaere theode thaer men habbath hunda heafod & of thaere eorthan on theare aeton men hi selfe, 'from the nation where men have the head of a dog and from the country where men devour each other'; furthermore, he haefde hundes haefod, & his loccas waeron ofer gemet side, & his eagan scinon swa leohte swa morgensteorra, & his teth waeron swa scearpe swa eofores texas, 'he had the head of a hound, and his locks were extremely long, and his eyes shone as bright as the morning star, and his teeth were as sharp as a boar's tusks' [6].

It is plain that this is not quite the patron saint of travellers that we are told about at Sunday School. It is a peculiarly Old English view of St Christopher. He resembles the monstrous Healfhundingas, a race mentioned in two Old English texts: The Wonders of the East and The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle. More to the point, he resembles the lupine monsters of Beowulf. Like most other Indo-European traditions, the Germans seem to have conceived of an otherworldly ferryman who conducted the dead to the underworld; indeed, Odin was so pictured during the Viking Age. It seems reasonable to suppose that St Christopher's occupation and location struck a traditional chord familiar to Anglo-Saxon ears, and that the legend was consequently coloured by Germanic underworld motifs.

Next time your in NYC go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and go to the armory. The German armor was HUGE. I mean HUUUUGGGEEE. Helmets with a good 20in. diameter atleast. Breast plates close to a yard across. The Italian armor, however, was tiny. Helmets that would fit pre-teen girls and breast plates to match. There have been skeletons unearthed on the bank of the mississippi river that stood 9ft. 5'9" has not always been the average height. But I know nothing about Catholic saints.

http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/bdogs.htm


"In north African countries the dog is less prevalent as scavenger than the jackal. In ancient Egypt the dog- or jackal-headed Anubis is both psychopomp and divine embalmer. His cult is older than that of Osiris, and can be traced to the Sumerian goddess Bau who was also dog-headed. Her name may well be onomatopoeic, little removed from 'bow-wow'. Anubis himself, written in early heiroglyphs as 'An-pu', may be a direct continuation of Bau's father, the Sumerian god An.

In the early stages of Egyptian religion, at least, Anubis was linked with the star Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, known in most mythologies throughout the world as the 'Dog Star' and the central consideration of the Egyptian calendar - although Sirius was later most closely linked with Isis, of course. Incidentally, this is where our expression 'dog days' originated: the hot, parched season that followed the heliacal rising of Sirius coinciding with the Nile's annual inundation of the valley. [4]

When Anubis mythology travelled to pre-Classical Greece, where there are no jackals, the wolf fitted the role just as well. A wolf-headed man, the prototype of the werewolves of subsequent folk belief, was begot. I can do no more here than draw attention to Nigel Jackson's treatment of this theme in a recent issue of The ley hunter [5] and to Angela Carter's treatment of this perennial Gothik horror in her short story which was transformed into the film Company of wolves [6]. Temples to Lycian Apollo, that is 'wolfish Apollo', were not rare in Classical Greece. Indeed, Aristotle's famous school was in the grounds of the Lycian Apollo's temple in Athens. Our word 'Lyceum' has its origins, therefore, with this lupine god. More academically, Apollo bore the epithet 'Lykegenes', meaning 'born from the she-wolf' and it was said that his mother Leto had been escorted from the Hyperboreans (that is, a distinctly Otherworldy race) by wolves at the time of her labour. It was as a wolf that Apollo abducted the maiden Cyrene, although a further epithet was 'Lykoktones', meaning 'one who slew the wolf'. Undoubtedly, the wolf was Apollo's special animal and a fitting sacrificial victim in his worship [7].

Dogs were closely linked with the Greek goddess Hecate (along with lions and horses). Indeed, at times she was depicted as dog-headed and was certainly linked to the Dog Star, Sirius. Her pet was the dog Cerberus (or Kerberos) who is the watchdog at the entrance to Hades. Usually depicted as triple-headed (a common trait to denote especial importance) he was originally fifty-headed, a topic which I shall return to. The Dorian Greeks explicitly associated Cerebos with Anubis in his role as psychopomp and Robert Graves (The Greek myths) writes that Cerebos '. . . seems to have been originally the Death-goddess Hecate . . .'

A dog as companion on the road to the Otherworld occurs explicitly in one of the tales in that vast hindu epic the Mahabharata. Yudhishthira, the King of Pandavas, with his five brothers, their joint wife and a dog set off on a rambling journey which took them to the sacred 'omphalos' of the hindus, Mount Meru. The companions die one-by-one of exhaustion but Yudhishthira survives and 'enters heaven in his mortal body, not having tasted death' [8]. The dog too comes with him, and is revealed to be Dharma (the Law) in disguise. "

Given the less-than-reliable tales of early Christendom, the outrageous nature of the particular claims surrounding him, and the fact the Catholic church downgraded his status*, it's best to take a healthy dose of skepticism before asserting he was a literal giant.

--Jaylemurph


*You may want to present an argument that agrees with itself: at one point you say:

"The legend of Saint Christopher quite clearly states that he was a giant. Not just a tall man, but a genuine giant. As the story goes, it was his size that enabled him to easily transport the Christ child across a river and thereby secured his place as patron saint of travelers - that is, until the Church decided that the evidence for Christopher's very existence was entirely legendary and decanonized him. Nonetheless, Christopher remains a popular though unofficial saint, and his image is fixed in our cultural psyche."

But then you cite a source that clearly says: "Christopher's feast day was downgraded by the Vatican to a purely local commemoration in 1969 based on a lack of specific historical evidence regarding the details of his life. Contrary to popular belief, he was not "de-canonized" or declared not to be a saint. He is still considered to be a saint in the Catholic Church."

LOL there's contradictory info on St Christopher's status....

http://www.mirabilis.ca/archives/001972.html

Didn't the Roman Catholic Church strip Christopher of his sainthood a long time ago?

Haven't scholars concluded that he never really existed, except in the fertile minds of medieval monks who spun fatuous tales of his carrying the Christ child across a swiftly flowing river?

Well, not exactly.

To begin with, the church never de-sanctified Christopher, whose annual feast day was July 25. Rather, it busted him, in the military sense, relegating him to a lower rank on the liturgical calendar, in large part because of his wobbly historical status.

The church's "universal calendar" designates certain saints to be honored on certain days by Catholics around the world. In the 1960s, the reformist Vatican Council II undertook to tidy things up and make the overloaded calendar leaner and more relevant to the far-flung peoples in the modern church. Along with many other saints, Christopher was kicked off the universal calendar in 1969, although individual parishes or localities were still free to celebrate his feast day.

In removing him, church officials termed the stories of his life "legendary," but stopped short of asserting that he never existed or was never martyred in the early 4th century.

"I think a lot of people drew the incorrect conclusion that because someone was removed from the universal calendar, that they were declared nonpersons," said Msgr. William B. Smith, academic dean of St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., who has written about Christopher's status change.

In recent years, an Irish historian, after careful scrutiny of Roman Empire records and early church writings, has argued that the existence of St. Christopher "has a genuine historical core." David Woods, a professor of ancient classics at University College Cork, suggests that Christopher was really St. Menas, an early Egyptian marty






Here's what the Church says....

http://www.catholic-forum.com/SAINTS/golden234.htm


Christopher was of the lineage of the Canaanites, and he was of a right great stature, and had a terrible and fearful cheer and countenance. And he was twelve cubits of length, and as it is read in some histories that, when he served and dwelled with the king of Canaan, it came in his mind that he would seek the greatest prince that was in the world, and him would he serve and obey
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03728a.htm


but the other tales woven thru his name.. and parrallel legends of the dog/Anubis carrying people to the underworld etc are interesting....



any link with Cannanites and canines?

http://www.book-of-thoth.com/article_submi...ning-thoth.html

Here, here Crystal Sage. It's always worth it to have a discussion with you!

And your point about dogs and the underworld is interesting.

But (according to Wikipedia.... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaan)

"The name Canaan is of obscure origins, with one possibility being the non-Semitic Hurrian "Knaa" or Akkadian Kinahhu, meaning "blue cloth snails". The first known references appear in the 2nd millennium BC, possibly from Hurrian sources in the Mesopotamian city of Nuzi."

The word "canine" comes from the Latin word canis, canis a third declension noun.

There doesn't seem to be any immediate connection.


--Jaylemurph

http://www.geocities.com/soho/lofts/2938/histcult.html
Ahhh ..
http://www.bibletopics.com/biblestudy/14.htm
Ancient Dyes

In Biblical times, the distinction between colors was not as definite as it is today, when we can even choose between various shades of white for decorating our homes! The blue color that Moses described for the cloths that were to cover the Tabernacle furniture before it could be removed to a new site (Num. 4:6,7) was almost certainly what we would call violet, or bluish-purple, while the purple used for the embroidery would be a reddish-purple, and the scarlet a true bright red. These three basic colors as used for the priest's garments and the hangings of the Tabernacle were all extremely expensive, and were all obtained from small living creatures.

The blue was only obtained from the hypobranchial gland of a Murex marine snail that only lives in deep water in the Mediterranean. The purple was obtained from another variety of Murex snail that could be gathered in shallow coastal waters of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.


http://www.geocities.com/soho/lofts/2938/histcult.html
The History and Culture
of the Canaanites and Phoenicians

Here is a Brief History of the Purple People, The Canaanites and Phoenicians, who were famous for their purple dye and who sailed around the entire continent of Africa in 600 BCE!

http://www.shangrala.org/RELIGIONS/1Christ...sCovenants.html

The Canaanites
The Canaanite's were worshippers of the Serpent, both as the person of the fallen one but also worshipping the Kundalini, which is the life-force locked in the white fire core of the Mother in the base-of-the-spine chakra.

From this fallen religion came the phallic and fertility rites of primitive cultures. Their archetypes can be seen in the Ugarithic pantheon whose chief deity is Il or El. This syllable comes from El, the name of God and the power of Elohim, the God Creators, usurped by the fallen ones. This Il, or L, is the abbreviation for the name Lucifer, called the sky god. El is the supreme lord and ruler, the father of the gods in many cultures. Their councils gathered on the mountains in what is now North America and the Middle East. Among some of these fallen angels, who were feared by the descendants of Seth as there were giants in those days: Baal and his wife Asherah, along with Tammuz and Ishtar.

Genesis 18:16-19:29 tells the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities in Canaan where gangs and swarms attacked people for fun. This evil behaviour was later picked up by the tribe of Benjamin (Judges 18:9-21). It so incensed the rest of Israel they fought a war that almost wiped out the Benjaminites. Canaanite religion involved child sacrifice. It was a practice that increased the more their cities expanded. Unlike other ancient civilizations where such practices died out, the Canaanites perpetuated it.


The Watchers and the Daughters of Cain

"The Flood was the judgment decreed by the Word of the emissaries of the Lord God when the descendants of Seth did not cleave unto the Law and the Lawgiver. Not by conscience nor by the conscientious adherence to the teachings recorded by Adam and Eve, establishing the way of life for their children outside of Eden, did these descendants walk. Rather did they walk after the pride of the Watchers." *