Steve Quayle, the Nephilim, and Homosexuality

Today I’d like to call your attention to Andy White’s blog post from yesterday about Steve Quayle and the reactionary agenda he masks behind his tales of giants. White noticed something in Quayle’s recent interview on The Rundown Live that I missed, probably because Quayle talks a mile a minute and I found it hard to keep up with his largely incoherent ramblings while also trying to take notes. White noticed that Quayle blamed homosexuality on the Nephilim. In Quayle’s words, as White transcribed them:

Let me share this with you: there's so much sanitation of the truth, or there's just downright corruption . . . and to corrupt means to literally destroy, you know, and to ultimately take apart or cause to go to pieces, so to speak . . . the thing is, it's just like moral corruption. It's fascinating to me as scientific corruption takes even higher precedent in the headlines that moral corruption comes along like it.  And I'll explain something to everybody: Diodorus - look him up - is one of the most interesting ancient historians talking about the Celtic giants declared that, even though they had comely women giants, meaning they were good-looking giant women, that they preferred the sexual accompaniment of each other.  So, that's interesting that most people don't understand but that was introduced to humanity. They weren't born with that: that's what the giants taught them.

Note that very carefully: The Nephilim-Giants taught men to be gay. (Presumably, since only the male giants were involved, Quayle is indifferent to lesbians, like many conservatives whose obsession with homosexuality is largely limited to males.)

I also want to praise White for doing the legwork of looking up Diodorus to demonstrate that Quayle has once again twisted an ancient text to his purposes. Quayle seems to be referring to 5.28.1 and 5.32.2, where the Gauls (sometimes translated as the more generalized Celts, larger subject of the overall passage), male and female alike, are described as exceptionally tall and blond (or sometimes translated as red-haired), though not as giants; and 5.32.7, where the Gaulish men are said to “rage with lust, in outlandish fashion, for the embraces of males” despite their comely wives and consider an offer of sodomy to be a polite form of greeting (trans. Oldfeather). Not that this is the point, but this opinion was hardly confined to Diodorus: Athenaeus, writing about 250 years later about Greek and other forms of pederasty in the Deipnosophistae 13.603A confirms the account, though giving more of a role to the Celtic wives: “And the Celts, too, although they have the most beautiful women of all the barbarians, still make great favourites of boys; so that some of them often go to rest with two lovers on their beds of hide” (trans. C. D. Yonge).

But as White notes, there is no indication that the tall Celts were viewed as giants of Biblical proportions. Why would Quayle think otherwise? He could simply be lying for the sake of twisting the text, but I think he’s probably conflating the “tall” Celts of Diodorus with what is apparently a now-standard Nephilim theorist claim that the Celts were giant Nephilim. According to Christian conspiracy theorist Chris Relitz, writing in Antichrist Osiris (self-published in 2012), all of the wild peoples north of the Roman Empire were Nephilim-giants, and he specifically cites Diodorus at 5.28.1 as offering proof that the Celts, being “tall,” were therefore Bible giants; this he supports with references to Caesar’s Gallic Wars 6.19 that he says allege great height in the thirty (!) battles Caesar fought against giants, though I can find no reference to height in the cited passages. I believe he means to cite 2.30.4, where Caesar laments that “our shortness of stature, in comparison to the great size of their bodies, is generally a subject of much contempt to the men of Gaul” (trans. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn). Reading that in conjunction with 6.19 would suggest that if the Germans had “greater prowess” than the Gauls, then gigantologists would see the Germans as taller still. He cites, too, the Late Antique author Vegetius, in Epitoma rei militaris 1.1: “How could small stature have ventured to confront German tallness?” (translated by N. P. Milner). We are again left with the question of what, precisely, is the height of a giant? But for gigantologists, the Celts are prima facie giants if they, and their German neighbors, were once recognized as taller than the Romans.

To this we must add the warrant for the whole equation of the Nephilim with homosexuality, Jude 1:6-7, a passage widely believed to draw upon 1 Enoch’s account of the Watchers:

And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day. In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.

By comparing the Watchers to the people of Sodom, the writer of Jude meant to imply that the Watchers’ sin was mating with human women; however, Christian Nephilim theorists read this as implying that the Fallen Angels had the “sin of Sodom,” which they feel is homosexuality, although Genesis says nothing about gay sex being Sodom’s sin. Since Jude describes this sin as “sexual,” they link this to Paul’s letter to the Romans, where at 1:24-27 Paul identifies homosexuality as God’s punishment for the ancients worshiping idols—even, he notes, extending, almost as an afterthought, to the women and not just the men. The pagan gods of these idols, in turn, are by Christian tradition demons (1 Corinthians 10:20; Augustine, City of God 7.33; etc.), which means that they are therefore also the angels who fell with Satan and thus, again, the Watchers. Therefore, God punishes those who worship the Nephilim-Watchers with homosexuality.

This logic is prevalent among a small but vocal minority of Christian extremists, such as the pseudonymous M. C. Hizedek, who wrote in the misogynistic A Woman’s Nation or Satan’s Deceit (self-published in 2012), citing Romans 1:26, that the pre-Flood people were so envious of the Nephilim that they lusted after them:

And because of the great power of the Nephilim the descendants of Cain were envious of the power and stature of the Nephilim and sought out these partners to have sexual intercourse and even bear children. Therefore they were taught homosexuality by the Nephilim Antediluvians and indeed homosexuality ran rampant…

According to Hizedek, those who “have clearly greater physical attributes” are the descendants of the Nephilim and the bearers of the taint of evil.

Thus we can see how Quayle’s inference forms: If the Celts were taller than the Romans, then they must have Nephilim DNA; if the Celts were flagrant sodomites and the Nephilim are homosexuals; therefore, the Celts and Nephilim must be the same.

But Quayle is more disturbing than the other writers because he calls for the extermination of the Nephilim. If Christian extremists believe that the Nephilim must die and that homosexuality is a marker of contact with the Nephilim, are we to conclude that Quayle thinks that at least some gay people (tall ones?) are Nephilim and therefore must be killed?