The most famous Blemmy of all - The Dolph Lundgrenophagus, both terrifying and strangely alluring

The Blemmys, or Blemmyae, were a genuine historical Nubian tribe, who may gradually have become demonised and fictionalised. Successive writers metaphorically removed their heads and shifted their faces to their chests, until they became fantastic headless humanoids, most often seen in medieval bestiaries and fantasies.

Blemmyae brought to the global stage

Blemmyae found resurgent fame in early English colonialism. Sir Walter Raleigh flounced back to civilisation from his travels among the uncouth and savage Amazonian residents describing them to his peers as having “their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts”.

We would assume that anyone hearing those reports must have questioned their veracity, as they would have been familiar with these traditionally fictitious and quasi-human forms. Today’s equivalent would be astronauts returning from Mars reporting a series of uber-mensch wearing tight shiny clothing with red capes and their underpants on the outside. Why not throw in the facts that they carry a mortal fear of green crystal and they all go around sporting heavily greased quiffs? We simply would not believe it.

A Blemmy featured in The Nuremburg Chronicle

Nonetheless, William Shakespeare lapped up this stuff, and cogged it in Othello, and thereby muddied the mythological waters:
“And of the Canniabals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.”

Unsurprisingly, Shakepeare’s writing confused many at the time, and since. The mythic cannibalistic race, the Anthropophagi have consistently been confused with, and as a result interchangeable with Blemmyae; ie they have eaten people and had their heads submerged into their chests.

At least there is some consensus – Shakespeare is indeed inexact and confusing, and not just for students.

The Anthropophagi were earlier referred to by Herodotus and he did so in an equally interchangeable manner with the Blemmyae. The former were reported to be cannibals who wore their victims’ scalps bound to their chests. This may have been the genesis for the idea of beings with heads on their chests.

Approximately 500 years later in 75CE, Pliny cleared the air in his Naturalis Historiae, if inventing mythical beasts can be said to be clearing up anything, “It is said that the Blemmyae have no heads and that their mouth and eyes are put in their chests.”

So Walter Raleigh’s claims of headless humanoids, to be fair to him, did not come from nowhere. There was a certain traceable lineage of Blemmyae appearing in literature, particularly travellers’ tales and natural histories.

Most recently Umberto Eco had a fantastic image of a Blemmy in his book, Baudolino, “Then Baudolino offered him a large piece of cheese. The blemmy put it to his mouth, which suddenly became the same size as the cheese, which vanished into that hole.”

Bibliography
Baudolino
Naturalis Historiae by Pliny
Blemmyes – the factual, historical, bona fide tribe
Blemmyes – the factual, historical, bona fide mythical creatures
Baudolino, Umberto Eco, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002
Anthropophagi
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville fantstic tales of a fictional traveller
The City of Z, David Grann, Simon & Schuster, 2009

Original content created by: The Inquisition

The Hohlenstein-Stadel Lion Man

Therianthrope

The Ulmer Lion Man is a therianthrope that was found in 1939 and dated by carbon14 to approximately 32 thousand years ago. It is one of the oldest pieces of sculpture known. It was carved from ivory using flint and left for millennia in the Swabian Alps in Germany where it resurfaced just to prior to the outbreak of war. Its form follows the curve of a mammoth’s tooth.

The figure is not conclusively definable as male or female. The cave lions it is thought to depict did have manes. The reconstructed figure has been assembled from scattered pieces and stands just less than 30cm tall. It is classified as belonging to the Aurignacian period. The find happened in two stages. The pieces were discovered by Otto Völzing and Prof. Robert Wetzel, but were not brought together in a coherent form until 1969 by Prof. Dr. Joachim Hahn.

(N)everchanging humanity

When faced with this figure, and its age, we must admit how little humankind has changed over time.

Even the oldest art expresses what it is to be human. Today we can immediately identify with the thinking behind this wonderful little carving. We are directly connected with its creator through our very humanity. It expresses exactly the difference between us and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Paradoxically in this regard, it is the joining of human and animal that emphasises this concept of our remove from nature. The idea of one of our kind possessing the qualities of, and surpassing, other animals that is eternally fascinating. Our dominance, and our distance from the natural world, is constant in our consciousness from early times. Expressed through the art of the neolithic, it seems people of the time felt the border between human and animal was fluid and could be crossed easily. Yet, even today, we remian transfixed by the transfer of qualities, the merger of human intelligence with animal strengths and instincts.

Zoomorphia, historically

Throughout history we seen animal human hybrid images, we have given human characteristics to animals and vice versa and all manner of crossovers in between. There have been lion-headed gods in Ancient Egypt and India (right up to modern Hinduism). As in this Assyrian sculpture the zoomorphic/anthropomorphic cartoons have had animal bodies with human heads or the other way around (lion-o). We have seen little red riding hooded girls eaten by talking wolves. We have in Animal Farm a zoomorphic dystopia. We have animated fishes that travel the seas in search of their family, zoo animals that hijack boats and go back to the wild of East African islands. Not to mention a couple of hundred tawdry superheroes.

The Thundercats - anthropomorphic action

Of course it is just possible that the figure is an accurate representation. It may describe a proto-shamanic ritual where an animal’s skull is worn to not just symbolically but also physically take on the powers of the animal. It may report a ritual, the type of thing that continues today within tribal societies.

Lastly, it is also a very fine piece technically. It has many aesthetic properties that still hold true today and suggest a deep rooted, shared perspective. It is elegantly carved, pleasing in its proportions, broadly speaking symmetrical and regular. All of which are qualities still prized in fine sculpture. It is paradigmatic.

The Lion man can be seen in the “Ulmer Museum” in Ulm, Germany.

Bibliography
Ristorante Mystica’s take on the Lion Man figurine
The Lion Man appears in the timeline of the History of Information
The Lion Man appears in a very thorough piece which places the figure within the greater context of cave art
Wikipedia’s entry for the cave excavation which led to the discovery
Cave Art, Jean Clottes, Phaidon, 2008

The Mind in the Cave, David Lewis Williams, Thames and Hudson, 2004
Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, Julian Bell, Thames & Hudson, 2007

Original content created by: The Inquisition