CW: Discussion of medieval antisemitism

Floch speaking of Erwin in Chapter 84. Perhaps also, inadvertently, referencing the powers of Ymir.

Ever since we got our first glimpse into Grisha’s notebooks I’ve had this suspicion in the back of my mind, but in the wake of Chapter 90 it’s crystalized for me. Isayama clearly draws inspiration from a wide range of mythological and religious sources, but there’s one family of apocalyptic legends that I think is particularly intrinsic to his world-building, based on the most recent chapters. That is the stories of the people of Gog and Magog and Alexander’s Gate.

A depiction of the Gog and Magog cannibals from a 14th century manuscript of Roman de toute chevalrie

There are many stories of Gog and Magog, and these stories adapt over time to suit the political ends of the people writing them. I’ll try to give the briefest possible overview that I can, and I will direct you to the Wikipedia page for the legends, since it is actually quite good. In general Gog and Magog are often people, possibly giants and cannibals (we’ll get to that), who have been sealed away by Alexander the Great in the Caspian Mountains. During the apocalypse, these people will be unleased and will have to choose a side in the final struggle of good and evil. In many versions of the legend they are the agents of Satan and the Antichrist.

The earliest mention of Gog and Magog appears in the Hebrew Bible, specifically the book of Ezekiel. Look familiar? Zeke is a standard shortened version of the name Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 38-39, Gog is the prince of a land called Magog. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy to Gog:

“Therefore, mortal, prophesy, and say to Gog: Thus says the Lord God: On that day when my people Israel are living securely, you will rouse yourself and come from your place out of the remotest parts of the north, you and many peoples with you, all them riding on horses, a great horde, a mighty army; you will come up against my people Israel, like a cloud covering the earth” (Form Ezekiel 38:14-16, The New Oxford Annotated Bible).

Here, Gog from Magog is an enemy whom God later tells Ezekiel He will crush. He is occupying a remote territory but will eventually launch an attack. It’s this idea of a dormant nemesis that becomes crucial to many of the later stories.

Over the following centuries, Gog from Magog shifts to Gog and Magog, both groups of people, but the apocalyptic element of the story remains. In the early Christian text of Revelations 19:11-21:8, for example, Satan rallies the peoples of Gog and Magog into a final battle with Christ.

Eventually these accounts of Gog and Magog merge with legends of Alexander the Great sealing a group of people in the Caspian Mountains (perhaps the Caucasus Mountains) with a great gate: sometimes Gog and Magog even becomes a name for the place, rather than the people trapped inside it. One of the earliest mentions of this tale comes from the first century Jewish writer Josephus, but it becomes important to many of the cultures around the Mediterranean. Both the Quran and the seventh-century Syriac The Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius elaborate that Alexander’s Gate is sealed by two mountains coming together, a detail that is quite prominent in the (much later) medieval Alexander Romances.

In many early accounts of Gog and Magog, the people sealed within the gate are construed as monstrous in some form. For instance, In Roman de toute chevalerie, the twelfth-century work of Anglo-Norman writer Thomas de Kent, Gog and Magog are cave-dwelling cannibals. They are also sometimes conflated with the British (as in Welsh) giant Gogmagog. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”), Gogmagog is the leader of the giants who attacks the Trojan settlers of Britain (don’t ask; many early western medieval civilizations like to claim Trojan descent). The Trojans eventually slaughter them all except for Gogmagog, who is kept alive to wrestle with the Trojan hero Corineus. Gogmagog loses. There are versions of this particular story where Gogmagog gets separated into Gog and Magog, leading to some confusion and overlap between the two initially disparate narrative strains.

You may be able to see a pattern here: Gog and Magog are almost always representatives of a lurking existential and possibly monstrous threat to civilization. Over the course of history they have been identified with many specific peoples for various fear-mongering purposes. Perhaps one of the more well-known and virulent versions of the Gog and Magog story is related in Sir John Mandeville’s fourteenth-century The Book of Marvels and Travels, where he claims (and he is by no means the first person to do so) that the people locked in Gog and Magog are the ten Lost Tribes of Israel: Alexander prayed to God for a miracle to seal them away, and God responded by locking together the mountains (104-105 in the Oxford World Classics version, if you’re interested). Mandeville’s antisemitism is staggering: he asserts that these people will serve the Antichrist once released from their imprisonment at the time of the Apocalypse—a fox will burrow beneath the mountains and lead them out—and that Jews living among Christians in Europe continue to learn Hebrew so that they can speak with these tribes upon their return. He writes, “These Jews say that they know through their prophecies that the Jews who are within these Caspian Mountains will emerge and Christians will be subject to them as they have been subject to Christians” (105). This “prophecy”, to Mandeville’s mind, justifies keeping Jewish populations cordoned off and oppressed within medieval “Christendom.”

Sound familiar? It’s similar to the attitude of the Marleyans towards the Eldians in Attack on Titan. They keep them in containment zones and justify their cruelties by claiming that “Subjects of Ymir” are devils who are seeking the destruction of humankind. For the Marleyans, an apocalyptic threat hangs over the island of Paradis. If they didn’t need Eldians to make more mindless titans, they would perhaps wipe them out (although, they sometimes tell Eldians that their mercy is a sign of innate Marleyan superiority).

Gross saying horrible things in chapter 87. His reference to Grisha and the Restorationists being “rats” for trying to contact Paradis puts me in mind of Mandeville’s story about a fox. This speech also smacks of modern antisemitic rhetoric. Gross is just the worst, isn’t he? :(

Given all of this evidence, it seems to me that Attack on Titan has taken some of the elements of the Gog and Magog legends and refocalized them through the lens of the people within the Walls. The Eldians in Paradis have the capability of turning into titans, which are cannibal giants, but this is much more of a curse upon them than a boon. Their exile, while still miraculous and seemingly absolute, is self-imposed for reasons that are still unclear. The outside world hates and mistrusts them, fearing the power of the titans locked with the Walls, but the people on the inside are ignorant of their history; in fact, much like the stories of Gog and Magog, the transmission of history in Attack on Titan is a muddied process where pieces get removed, added, or altered as time wears on. There are lots of discussions of devils (from Bertolt calling the Eldians within the Walls “children of the devil” to more innocuous references like Jean’s comment “The 104th has the devil’s luck” when they return to Wall Rose with Eren in tow), but the people within the Walls are always our first point of sympathy. What would it be like, Attack on Titan asks, to be the people locked away and wake up to discover the rest of the world despises you, associates you with the apocalypse, and seeks your destruction? Terrifying, to put it mildly.

Hange ruminating on the state of the world in chapter 89.

I can’t offer any real predictions on where this story will go from here based on this source analysis. In most of the legends, as stated above, Gog and Magog are defeated by God at the apocalypse. Considering how Isayama has crafted the story so that we are sympathetic to the plight of the people of the Walls, I cannot imagine such an ending could be deemed “justice,” at least for the reader (the First King might be a different matter … ).

I think Isayama takes inspiration from a wide range of places, but this is one that I hadn’t seen discussed before and had not really occurred to me until the full breadth of the outside world was revealed in the most recent chapters, so I thought I would put it out there :) I am by no means an expert on the Gog and Magog stories and this has pretty much exhausted my personal knowledge on the subject, so if anyone would like to add or correct something, please do so!

