On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma

Indian men who have reversed feet with eight toes on each foot, or men with a dog’s head who bark instead of speak. Or consider the umbrella-footed race of creatures reported by Ctesias (and repeated by Pliny), who have only one leg and hop at astonishing speed and who also lie on their back and raise their large foot to act as an umbrella against inclement weather. In his chapter “Man” Pliny tells us of satyrs living in the eastern mountains of India who “are very fast moving animals, sometimes running on all fours, sometimes upright like humans.” 22 The satyrs may have been monkeys in reality, but many ancients knew little about nonhuman primates and tended to interpret reports of them as exotic pseudo-human races. 23 The dog-headed men, for example, may have beenan embellishment based on travelers’ reports of Old World yellow baboons (
Papio cynocephalus
) from eastern Africa.
    These humanoid oddities are bordering on human because of some morphological and cultural similarities with “normal” humans, but properly speaking they are
lusus naturae
, “freaks of nature.” More than the occasional individual monster (such as Medusa), whole classes of unclassifiable creatures were admitted by the ancients into the category
human
. These monstrous races will become increasingly important in the medieval imagination, as Christians begin to contemplate their spiritual status: Can these races be redeemed by the gospel?
    For the most part, in the ancient world the bigotries about other peoples were not theological in nature. It is true that the Bible carves up races into the descendants of Noah’s children, but Greek and Roman ideas about species and race were somewhat more naturalistic. Homer and Hesiod describe a variety of human origins; in addition to the predictable “created by gods” story, we are also born of water, and sometimes born of earth (in the case of autochthones). There was no single orthodox belief on the question of origins. More important, the philosophers all pushed a variety of pseudo-scientific explanations, favoring a kind of spontaneous generation of human beings. Xenophanes, Parmenides, Democritus, and Epicurus all believed that mankind was born of slime. 24 Slime is, indeed, a humble and somewhat egalitarian beginning. For the most part, then, the ancients were ethnocentric for cultural rather than metaphysical reasons. 25
    The Far East was a land of romantic and fearful projections for ancient Westerners. Foreign people, such as Persians, Indians, and Chinese, were often linked with the strange and alien creatures of bogus natural history and mythology. Sometimes the stereotyping was mild or innocuous, as when Pliny says, “The Chinese are mild in character, but resemble wild animals in that they shun the company of the rest of their fellow men and wait for traders to come to them.” 26 But sometimes the stereotyping was more pernicious. Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus all demonized the Persians as autocratic and alien, in contrast to Greeks, who apparently loved freedom and rationality. 27 Dehumanizing one’s enemy is nothing new, nor is it a purely Western hobby of mind. The Indian epics
Mahabharata
and
Ramayana
describe foreign tribes (presumably Westerners) as
karnapravarana
, giant-eared races, with ears so large that one could wrap up in them to sleep. 28
    Imagining a group of people as monstrous can serve political agendas quite well. The literary theorist Edward Said has famously called this form of political stereotyping “orientalism,” a term that refers to the way Occidental writers, artists, and politicians invent a negative category of culturalqualities for Asian and African people in order to better justify Western imperial interests. 29 Scholars like Said, who believe that all knowledge is a kind of power, would certainly see the early anthropology of the ancients as a thinly veiled attempt to create an “us versus them” political dynamic. Maybe this is true;