Goghgobon and the Hermetic History of Giants

Longtime readers will remember that back in 2018, I struggled my way through the Old Castilian of Alfonso X’s General Estoria—learning the language in order to read it—so that I could explore the Hermetic history of the Giants contained in it. As you may recall, this passage relates the story of Asclepius’s encounter with Goghgobon, the last surviving Giant, who tells him about the accomplishments of the Giants before the Flood and translates for him their book of star wisdom written in a forgotten alphabet. Very few scholars have analyzed this passage in any significant detail, likely because it had never been translated into English before I did so, and even the modern Spanish translation is very recent. 

​You can read my 2018 analysis of the story here and review my translation here.
 
The only scholarly accounts I had been aware of when I wrote about this in 2018 were Charles F. Fraker’s analysis in 2007 (postulating that the Kyranides was the source) and Kevin Van Bladel’s 2009 discussion in The Arabic Hermes (postulating Abū Maʿshar’s Book of Thousands as a source via a lost intermediary). (There are also a few Spanish-language mentions, but they are in scholarly sources I do not have access to.) But now we can add another.

Juan Udaondo Alegre of Penn State University recently published The Spanish Hermes and Wisdom Traditions in Medieval Iberia: Alfonso X’s General Estoria (Durham University Imems Press, 2024), in which he devotes a lengthy section to discussing the Goghgobon passage. I was pleased to see that, overall, he almost entirely agrees with the conclusions I drew in 2018, tying the discussion in Alfonso with the Enochian tradition, as mediated through Arabic sources. I, however, knew of a passage in the Akhbār al-zamān in which an Arabic author described the giants as doing exactly the same feats and wonders that Alfonso describes (see here).
 
Alegre wasn’t looking there for a parallel because he, correctly, notes that Alfonso did not have access to the surviving sections of Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh’s History of Egypt (Great Book of Marvels), which many scholars identify as identical with the Akhbār al-zamān. Alfonso only had the (presumably) second half (under the name Alguazif—cf. ibn Waṣīf Shāh’s older name variant, Al-Waṣīfi), which treated the history of Egypt from Moses to Alexander. However, Alegre, citing Inés Fernández-Ordóñez’s work on the Arabic sources of the General Estoria, tends to take the Akhbār and ibn Wasif Shah’s books as interchangeable. However, as I have noted, the two texts are not actually the same. When we compare the preserved passages of ibn Waṣīf Shāh from al-Maqrizi’s history of Egypt with the parallel passages in the Akhbār, there are key differences: Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh’s text is slightly corrupt and he systematically removed references to Giants and Hermeticism. Therefore, Ibrāhīm ibn Waṣīf Shāh isn’t the source of any section on Hermetic Giants.
 
But Alegre is undoubtedly correct that Alfonso’s text represents a reworked Arabic or Manichaean text that in turn was reworking Enochian literature. Alegre traces the material back to 1 Enoch via something akin to Mani’s Book of Giants, which reworked material from the Enochian corpus. (Alfonso cites an unknown book called the Book of the Lineage of the Giants and Other Gentiles, which many take to be identical with Mani’s book, known as the Book of the Enterprise of the Giants in  some medieval and early modern circles.) However, as I previously pointed out, Alfonso’s positive view of the Giants is more similar to medieval Jewish texts like the Josippon and the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, which preserve stories originally found in 1 Enoch, but have recast them in more sympathetic terms. This might derive from Mani’s text, though not enough survives to get a full read on his antediluvian ideas.
 
Alegre also offers a novel suggestion for the origin of Goghgbogon’s name in the General Estoria (abbreviated below as GE2), though I am somewhat doubtful about his suggested derivation:

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Goghgobón, the giant woman with whom Asclepius consults, also appears in different GE2 manuscripts as Godgobon, Yothbon, Yocbon, Yoglibon, Zogbon, Goachgobon, Gochbongobon, Eggobon, Hochgobon, Oghgobon, Othgobon, and Agotgobon. I suggest that some of these variants could be related to the Hebrew word Gibborim or the Greek Egrḗgoroi, perhaps through some intermediary transliteration into other languages. Van Bladel connects the Arabic versions of the “watchers” and their Persian intermediaries, where the Flood is an important element, with Abū Maʿshar’s story of the three Hermeses—also closely connected with this section of GE2, as we saw in Chapter Four. Van Bladel also suggests that Abū Maʿshar took the Enochian tradition’s stories about giants and “watchers” from Greek chronographers and then spread them throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

​Being neither a linguist nor a philologist, I can’t really offer a full counterargument other than to say that “Goghgobon” doesn’t look or sound like either of those words except for the “g” sound, at least no more than it does the name of British giant Gogmagog (or Goëmagot) from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1.16) a century before Alfonso X. Gogmagog was, like Goghgobon, the last of the ancient Giants. Her name seems, though, to have the ring of a one from the East, similar to place names like Adarbaigan and the names of the giants such as Mahawai, Virogdad, Hobabis (i.e. Humbaba), etc. found in the surviving fragments of the Manichean Book of Giants. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a corruption of a name from Mani, mediated through one or more later sources.