Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 36

What Bob saw that night I believe to have been the same type of creature, the same kind of hulking man-beast that has always lurked in the shadows and seems always to have been with us. Over 25,000 years ago, the Franco-Cambrian artists may have been expressing their awareness of such creatures in the portraits of two-legged entities with the heads of animals that they painted on the walls of their caves.

Perhaps the earliest written record of a man-beast appears on a Babylonian fragment circa 2000 B.C.E. which tells the story of King Gilgamesh and his wolf-like friend, Enkidu. The Epic of Gilgamesh remains to date the oldest known literary work in the world.

Pieced together from 30,000 fragments discovered in the library at Ninevah in 1853, the story tells of Gilgamesh, the legendary Sumerian king of Uruk, and his quest for immortality. Deciding at first that he will be guaranteed a kind of physical immortality by fathering as many children as possible, Gilgamesh becomes such a sexual predator from whose advances no woman in his kingdom was safe. The goddess Aruru, troubled by the situation, forms the beastman Enkidu from clay and her spittle in order to create an opponent powerful enough to challenge Gilgamesh.

Bigfoot greets visitors to the Cryptozoological Museum in Portland, Maine (photo by International Cryptozoology Museum/Loren Coleman/Jessica Meuse).

Gilgamesh soon learns of this powerful, hairy wild man, and he begins to have uncomfortable dreams of wrestling with a strong opponent whom he could not defeat. When Enkidu eventually arrives in the city, the two giants engage in fierce hand-to-hand combat. The king manages to throw the beast man, but instead of killing him, the two become fast friends, combining their strength to battle formidable giants. It is the jealous goddess Ishtar who causes the fatal illness that leads to Enkidu’s death.

The hero finally abandons his search for immortality when the goddess Siduri Sabitu, dispenser of the Wine of Immortality to the gods, confides in him that his quest will forever be in vain—the cruel gods have decreed that all mortals shall die. Although the life of each human must end, the memory of the man-beast with whom our species struggles has never been extinguished.

There are many possible interpretations of the epic of Gilgamesh. Perhaps the saga lives in our collective consciousness as the memory of ancient struggles with Neanderthals and with other hominid species not yet discovered, species that were seemingly part human and part beast?

In 840 C.E., Agobard, the Archbishop of Lyons, declared the “giant people of the forest and mountains,” as demons. He recorded that the wild men were stoned to death after being displayed in chains for several days. In his Chronicles, Abbot Ralph of Coggeshall Abbey, Essex, England, wrote of the discovery of the corpse of a “strange monster” whose charred body had been found after a lightning storm on the night of St. John the Baptist in June 1205. He stated that a terrible stench came from the beast with “monstrous limbs.”

Villagers of the Caucasus Mountains have legends of a “wild man” that goes back for centuries. The Tibetans living on the slopes of Mt. Everest and the Native American tribes inhabiting the northwestern United States have their own stories of a giant man-beast. The Gilyaks, a remote tribe of Siberian native people, claim that there are creatures that are half-man, half-beasts that inhabit the frozen forests of Siberia and who have human feelings and travel in family units.

Do the appearances of the man-like beasts in our wilderness provoke our awareness that there are creatures essentially human in appearance that have survived for thousands of years and remain as our hidden cousins or even our ancestors?