Within the pages of Genesis is the account of the Nephilim- strange and mysterious beings often overlooked or outright ignored, and often obsessed over by illiterates. They are to modern man a bane. Too mythical to be taken literally, and yet too literally described to be reduced to myth. What is the modern reader to come to when this chapter is reached? Only four from the start? The text seems a guardian for the closed minded, where they drop off and go no further.
The Nephilim were through the world in those days, and also afterward that, when the sons of God’s kin came into the daughters of Adam’s kin, and they begot children by them. They were the valiant of antiquity. Men with a name.
-Genesis 6:4
(You’ll forgive my more Anglesque translation.)
The simple minded will either attempt to reduce this to something without demon babies, or overblown as proof of ancient aliens or something worse. But both of these are too localized. Broader biblical writings such as Hebrews reveals the Sons of God were merely men of the faith, and thus these Daughters of Adam were those from Cain’s seed. Two civilizations who had for some time refused to mingle each other. One set out with a mark from Cain, the other set with a promise of a mark from a savior.
In simple terms, they were what modern parlance would describe as LARPers. Live Action Role Players for the boomers out there. Cain’s kin lacked the divine support and so larped as gods to compensate. Seth’s kin larped as the true god to bear his image.
Larping today has many negative connotations. When we meet neo-pagans trying to return to their ancestor’s beliefs, folks like myself often call them larpers as a quick dismissal. And yet, when I try to act like Christ, it’s also something of a larp as well. I’m not very good at it of course. But I am, in essence, larping.
The larpers of Genesis however, as the text says, did in time become known as Great men. Men with a name! Or at least, their children did. The Bible is not clear as to what the moral alignment of these named men were. Tradition would hold them to be great dictators. Indeed Nephilim itself literally translates as long necked, and is often mistranslated as giant into english. But here, the giant is not of flesh, but of spirit. A big personality, so to speak. One translation I’ve seen is “fuhrers”, which I rather like.
So is larping bad or good? When the Sons of Seth took women of Cain’s tribe to be their wives, they bore great men of old remembered in myth. For the blessed line of Seth who stayed by themselves, it made them saved and even in their lowly place in history, they always had hope to fight on. And yet, most people still cringe when they see a man in a pointed hat praising Odin for a fine day. Both are larping, but the Tom Bombadil outfit is clearly cringe. How shall we draw a line that separates the two?
When the neckbeard puts on his cloak and picks up his staff, he is emulating a dead thing of the conquered past. There was some mythological inspiration for Odin which he seeks to make flesh. Yet when the Nephilim became long necked, there were no myths yet to emulate. They were the myths, and what they did they knew would be the foundations of song and story for eons to come. Indeed, if you read extra-biblical texts on the topic, it seems as such. They were not pretending to be someone, they were establishing what someone could be. They were larping as gods, yes. But what gods? The songs and stories of those false gods had not yet been written. They were writing the myths down as they lived and did mighty deeds. So here you see the difference, I hope. A legitmate larp picks up the title of god and lives out the title to such an extent that his name is associated to the title. A cringe larp is when someone steals the name and begs you to respect the title the dead man earned with it. Disgusting…
…And yet, what can the Christian say? Don’t we kind of do that with Jesus?
What makes our larp glorious and their larp cringe?
I am not Catholic, but I think perhaps their understanding of the saints is the answer. When the neopagan asks Odin or Zeus for favor, he is asking a dead man who did mighty deeds to do something by his dead arm. Though they may give you copes that it’s merely a pathway to some inner logos of the cosmos, but their own words this logos is not sentient nor concerned with flesh because…well, reasons. Though they are never given. Contrarily, when the Christian consults a saint on how they did their deeds through Christ, they Christ is not an unconscious unconcerned Logos, but a sentient one that entered Flesh and taught the Saint - and can teach you too - how to do a great deed. We don’t have to deal with the inherent contradiction of Zeus grabbing hidden power from some Lovecraftian being beyond the threshold of consciousness that is uninterested in mere ants as we…or whatever made up scales of power they project onto an otherwise experienced universe. The Christian has a God who is conscious and does take interest in ants and will happily become an ant and experience its burdens too. And the Pagan doesn’t like that because….well, reasons. I suspect I know those reasons. They cannot comprehend an active and conscious logos that doesn’t end all horror and pain. But the Christian doesn’t need to worry about that. We have a God that actively sought out the horror and pain and instead of wishing it away, sought to make use of it so that nothing that is possible in the cosmos can be said to be of waste.
That is why the Christian larp is superior and legitimate to the pagan larp. We don’t need reasons to wish away some mythical “problem of evil”. We enter the evil and experience it to redeem it. And in so doing, we do not merely larp off a name like the pagan. We become a man with a name. A Saint. Remembered and sung songs of. There is no problem of evil for the Christian. Death is gain. The Resurrection returns all. Our Larp makes us a living column in the Temple of Christ, bearing the weight of the structure. The Pagan’s larp grants them an escape from pain to wither away into an Æther before a dead Æther they claim gives them wisdom for a few short decades of life. Such a fear of pain is not wisdom. Such a claim of wisdom from a dead man with a name is not your glory. You are a spiritual parasite, oh pagan. Desperate to escape pain by hiding in a dead man’s name. The Christian is a Spiritual Conqueror who earns a name by co-struggle with a God with a name: Jesus.