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Difference between revisions of "Cynocephaly"

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[[Image:Cynocephali.jpg|thumb|A cynocephalus. From the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).]]
[[Image:Cynocephali.jpg|thumb|A cynocephalus. From the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).]]
The Cynocephali are dog-headed bipedal creatures in the mythologies of Europe, India and China.
The '''Cynocephali''' are dog-headed bipedal creatures in the mythologies of Europe, India and China.





Revision as of 20:48, 2 October 2010

A cynocephalus. From the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).

The Cynocephali are dog-headed bipedal creatures in the mythologies of Europe, India and China.


Etymology

The word is taken from Latin cynocephalus dog-head, which derives from Greek: κῠνοκέφᾰλοι. In Anglo-Saxon England, the Old English word wulfes heafod (wolf’s head) was a technical term for an outlaw, who could be killed as if he were a wolf.


Description

The Cynocephali were described as shapeshifters who could change from human to dog, but who always retained some animal features when they became human again.


Place

The legends in the Chinese culture originally said that the Cynocephali resided somewhere in the wild lands west of Tibet and north of Persia (modern-day Iran).


Ancient Greece and Egypt

Cynocephaly was familiar to the Ancient Greeks from representations of the Egyptian god Hapi, the son of Horus, and Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, always shown with the head of a jackal.

Reports of dog-headed races can also be traced back to Greek antiquity. In the fifth century BC, the Greek physician Ctesias wrote a detailed report on the existence of cynocephali in India.

Similarly, the Greek traveller Megasthenes claimed to know about dog-headed people in India who lived in the mountains, communicated through barking, wore the skins of wild animals and lived by hunting.


Myths

Medieval East

Cynocephali also figure in Christian world-views. A legend that placed St. Andrew and St. Bartholomew among the Parthians presented the case of "Abominable", the citizen of the "city of cannibals... whose face was like unto that of a dog." After receiving baptism, however, he was released from his doggish aspect.

Saint Christopher In the Eastern Orthodox Church, certain icons covertly identify Saint Christopher with the head of a dog. The background to the dog-headed Christopher is laid in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, when a man named Reprebus, Rebrebus or Reprobus (the "reprobate" or "scoundrel") was captured in combat against tribes dwelling to the west of Egypt in Cyrenaica. To the unit of soldiers, according to the hagiographic narrative, was assigned the name numerus Marmaritarum or Unit of the Marmaritae, which suggests an otherwise-unidentified Marmaritae"(perhaps the same as the Marmaricae Berber tribe of Cyrenaica). He was reported to be of enormous size, with the head of a dog instead of a man, apparently a characteristic of the Marmaritae.

File:Cynocephalus St. Christophe.jpg
Cynocephalus St. Christophe

The German bishop and poet Walter of Speyer portrayed St. Christopher as a giant of a cynocephalic species in the land of the Chananeans (the "canines" of Canaan in the New Testament) who ate human flesh and barked. Eventually, Christopher met the Christ child, regretted his former behavior, and received baptism. He, too, was rewarded with a human appearance, whereupon he devoted his life to Christian service and became an athlete of God, one of the soldier-saints.


Late Antiquity

The "cynocephali" offered such an evocative image of the magic and brutality deemed characteristic of bizarre people of distant places, that it kept returning in medieval literature. A number of late antique and medieval scholars reported on the Cynocephalae, sometimes with the aplomb of anthropologists like St. Augustine and Isidore of Seville.


Medieval West

Paul the Deacon mentions cynocephali in his Historia gentis Langobardorum: "They pretend that they have in their camps Cynocephali, that is, men with dogs' heads. They spread the rumor among the enemy that these men wage war obstinately, drink human blood and quaff their own gore if they cannot reach the foe."

The ninth-century Frankish theologian Ratramnus wrote a letter, the Epistola de Cynocephalis, on whether the Cynocephali should be considered human. Quoting St. Jerome, Thomas of Cantimpré corroborated the existence of Cynocephali in his Liber de Monstruosis Hominibus Orientis, xiv, ("Book of Monstrous men of the Orient").

The thirteenth-century encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais acquainted his patron Saint Louis IX of France with "an animal with the head of the dog but with all other members of human appearance… Though he behaves like a man… and, when peaceful, he is tender like a man, when furious, he becomes cruel and retaliates on humankind" (Speculum naturale, 31:126).

The so-called Leges Edwardi Confessori, written around 1140, however, offered a somewhat literal interpretation: “[6.2a] For from the day of his outlawry he bears a wolf’s head, which is called wluesheued by the English. And this sentence is the same for all outlaws.”

Cynocephali appear in the Old Welsh poem Pa Gur as cinbin (dogheads). Here they are enemies of King Arthur's retinue; Arthur's men fight them in the mountains of Eidyn (Edinburgh), and hundreds of them fall at the hand of Arthur's warrior Bedwyr (later known as Bedivere). The next lines of the poem also mention a fight with a character named Garwlwyd (Rough-Gray); a Gwrgi Garwlwyd (Man-Dog Rough-Gray) appears in one of the Welsh Triads, where he is described in such a way that scholars have discussed him as a werewolf.


High and late medieval travel literature

Medieval travellers Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Marco Polo both mention cynocephali. Giovanni writes of the armies of Ogedei Khan who encounter a race of dogheads who live north of the Dalai-Nor (Northern Ocean), or Lake Baikal. Polo's Travels mentions the dog-headed barbarians on the island of Angamanain, or the Andaman Islands. For Polo, although these people grow spices, they are nonetheless cruel and "are all just like big mastiff dogs".

According to Henri Cordier, the source of all the fables of the dog-headed barbarians, whether European, Arabic, or Chinese, can be found in the Alexander Romance.


China

Additionally, in the Chinese record History of the Liang Dynasty (Liang Shu), the Buddhist missionary Hui-Sheng describes an island of dog-headed men to the east of Fusang, a nation he visited variously identified as Japan or the Americas. The History of Northern Dynasties of Li Yanshou, a T'Ang Dynasty historian, also mentions the 'dog kingdom'.