Evangelical Pastor Claims Stonehenge Built by Giants on Orders from the Devil

It’s my birthday today, and as a result I’ve now entered a new marketing demographic. Although I don’t feel any different, suddenly I’m no longer of interest to advertisers. Yesterday, I was in the 18-34 age bracket. Now I’m in the 35-54 age bracket, and if there is any benefit to it, maybe I’ll get fewer spam texts, calls, and emails. But somehow I doubt it. In fact I just received a scam call pretending to be Dell computer tech support.

So what did I get for my birthday? I received a lot of notices that liberal political websites are laughing hysterically at claims made recently on the Rev. Jim Bakker’s show. Honestly, I didn’t know that Jim Bakker, the disgraced ex-husband of the late Tammy Faye Bakker, was still preaching, but apparently in the infinite forgiveness of Christ, a sex scandal, divorce, fraud conviction, and imprisonment are only disqualifying in a moral leader if he is a liberal. Bakker, who owes the United States around six million dollars in back taxes, is now an apocalyptic End Times preacher with a line of doomsday prepping merchandise.
 
The above might have seemed like an irrelevant attack on Bakker except that his transition from sunny televangelist to doomsday prophet fed directly into the claims for which his show was mocked this past week. Since fear sells prepping supplies better than hope, Bakker had on Dr. Dennis Lindsay, a Nephilim theorist, in anticipation of this week’s week-long series “Fallen Angels, Giants, and the Nephilim,” a panel discussion with Tom Horn and Bakker. The panel discussion, which originally was to have featured Steve Quayle, was taped March 24.
 
Horn is the author of Nephilim Stargates: The Year 2012 and Return of the Watchers. Lindsay serves as president of Christ for the Nations Institute and wrote Giants, Fallen Angels and the Return of the Nephilim. 

On last Wednesday’s Jim Bakker Show, Lindsay promoted a two-book and DVD Nephilim collection for $65 plus shipping and handling, and offered his explanation of the Giants. Lindsay believes that Satan is the author of the Nephilim, having encouraged the angels to fall and procreate with human women, in order to contaminate the human race with demon genes so that Jesus couldn’t save us because we are impure. He also believes that Satan uses the Nephilim to try to undermine Israel. It sounds, too, like he’s saying that the Islamic Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is a Satanic structure:

He (Satan) built his little squatter’s hut up there on the Temple Mount, you know that temple, because he knows what the Bible says about that place. So this is what I did: I weaved through why and what is the evidence for giant beings on this earth. We all know about Stonehenge, right? And that’s just one of hundreds and hundreds of gigantic places around the world that testify that some sort of supernatural power or giants were involved in its construction, and I document it in this book.

Liberal opinion sites had a field day making fun of Lindsay for saying giants built Stonehenge, but surprisingly Lindsay is only repeating well-trod folklore about the ancient monument dating back more than a thousand years. Geoffrey of Monmouth, for example, in his History of the Kings of Britain (8.11) wrote that Stonehenge, then called the Giants’ Dance, had been raised by the “giants of old” in Ireland from stones brought from Africa, and that Merlin flew them to Salisbury Plain. A later version of the story, believed to date from the fifteenth century, places the Devil in the lead role, superseding Merlin, and attributes to him the raising of the stones. This story is a bit of a conflation, deriving from an apparently earlier folktale that the Devil threw Stonehenge’s Friar’s Heel stone at a friar. This was backformed, scholars have suggested, from the stone’s older name, Ffreya sul, referring to the goddess Freya and the Sun, and thus associating the stone with paganism, the faith of the Devil.
 
Fun fact: Ebenezer Brewer, whose dictionaries and compendia contributed to so many fringe history falsehoods due to his slipshod research, messed this one up, too, attributing the Devil version to Geoffrey of Monmouth because he (or a later writer he consulted) misunderstood where a translation of Geoffrey left off and editorial commentary began in an old book about Stonehenge that collected primary sources. I’ve found versions dating back to John Wood’s Choir Gaure in 1747, who attributes it to a “recent” translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, suggesting that this might have been the translator’s addition or note.
 
I can’t say that Lindsay had any of this in mind—I’ve never read his book—and Lindsay’s claims are quite similar to those made for large sites the world over. Everything from the Pyramids of Giza to Baalbek to Mycenae to Teotihuacan has been attributed to giants, part of the human tendency to underestimate the capacity of their ancestors. But such stories are just that: stories. Indeed, we can find clear evidence of how such tales grew up in the face of factual evidence. At Baalbek, for example, the attribution to giants occurred in the Middle Ages, due to the localization of the Nimrod myth at the site and the (wrong) assumption that the site once housed the Tower of Babel. In southern Germany, a Roman palisade and wall (part of the limes Germanicus) became known as the Devil’s Wall in the Middle Ages. We know who built it and when, and it wasn’t the devil.