Strange, terrible, mystical and wonderful creatures inhabited the world of medieval man. Eerie inhabitants of medieval bestiaries. Ugly figures sitting on the cornices of cathedrals. Ominous shadows lurking in the depths of the church choirs. Werewolves, werewolves, amphisbens, basilisks, chimeras, manticores and unicorns.
In medieval literature of various genres, bestiaries, encyclopedias, in the notes of travelers and missionaries, exotic humanoid and zoomorphic creatures are very often described. They are reproduced in iconography, sculptures of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, book miniatures of that time.
And today many fiction and even scientific books have been written about them, and many nerve-tickling films have been shot. Meanwhile, the facts from the stories described as true testify to the incidents before which many of the horror films look like children's fairy tales told before bedtime. On the pages of chronicles that have tarnished from time to time, you can sometimes find references to many things that seem miraculous, impossible and inexplicable.
In the depiction of all sorts of mysterious and strange creatures, an essential feature of the way of thinking of the Middle Ages manifested itself: his love for the miraculous and the fantastic. Monsters inhabited distant and unexplored territories by the medieval imagination. The geography of the chimerical was concentrated in the East. Inhabited, in fact, all over the world, the monsters clearly preferred India and Ethiopia (merged almost together in the imagination of a medieval man). India in general since the time of Alexander the Great has been portrayed as a wonderland. However, the tradition itself is not limited to the medieval period - its origins should be sought earlier. The Middle Ages inherited their monsters mainly from antiquity. Versions can be seen in the Arab East (stories about Sinbad the sailor), in late medieval painting (canvases by Bosch and Brueghel).
Already the ancient Greeks sublimated many instinctive fears in the images of mythological monsters - griffins, sirens, etc., but also rationalized them outside the religious sphere: ancient writers invented races of monstrous people and animals with which they settled in the distant East. Herodotus in his "Histories" talked about satyrs and centaurs, about gigantic red ants-gold diggers, about snakes with bat wings, etc. In the IV century BC. e. the Greek writer Ctesias of Cnidus described the fabulous monsters of India.
Around 300 BC e. another Greek - Megasthenes - collected information about monsters known to his time in a treatise about India. In these works, for the first time, descriptions of outlandish peoples and creatures appear, which will then excite the imagination of people of the European Middle Ages for so long. There are mouthless creatures living in the East, feeding on the smell of fried fish and flower aroma (leumans), and people with long ears and one eye, and people with the head of a dog, from whose mouths instead of human speech, dog barking (cinocephalic) escapes.
Medieval man not only did not think of himself in isolation from his monsters - he even recognized his kinship with them. It was known that the fauns are the direct descendants of the ancient shepherds, and the cinocephals are our brothers in spirit. Discussing with Elder Rimbert the burning question of whether it is worth baptizing the dog-heads, the monk Ratramn comes to the conclusion that, of course, it is: after all, they have a thinking soul and ideas about morality by all signs.
For almost one and a half millennia, the information of these writers was the only source of knowledge about India and other Asian countries. They were borrowed in the 1st century by Strabo and Pliny the Elder as the basis of geographical descriptions, and in the 3rd century the writer Julius Solin compiled a compilation of all such works - "Collection of Memorable Things". In the Middle Ages, works of a special genre were devoted to descriptions of monsters, the so-called bestiaries, telling about animals - fictional and real. These stories of monsters were accompanied by interpretations in the spirit of Christian symbolism. The traditions of ancient "chimerical" hybridization in them sometimes overlap with Christian dogma.
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For example, three of the four evangelists were associated with animals: John - the eagle, Luke - the bull and Mark - the lion (the angel was the symbol of Matthew). Note that among all real animals, the lion was most popular in the Gothic bestiaries. The image of this creature once served as a metaphor for the praise of the Assyrian and Persian kings. The Christian Church inherited this tradition, identifying the lion with Christ - "the king of the Jews." Theologians compared the lion, which supposedly covered its tracks with its tail, with the Savior, who wanders invisibly among people.
It was believed that if a lioness gives birth to dead lion cubs, then in three days the lion father will come to them and revive them. Another common belief was that a sick lion could be healed by eating a monkey (the personification of evil in early Christian symbolism). And finally, people believed that the lion always sleeps with open eyes, representing a model of vigilance and caution, which is why lion statues guarded monuments, graves and church entrances, and also held door knobs in their teeth.
However, the Gothic lion could also mean something negative. So, if a lion's head decorated door sills or held a lamb in its teeth, such a “king of beasts” was the embodiment of wild malice (in certain cases, pride, one of the deadly sins). Other symbolic animals from the Gothic bestiary are the ram (the shepherd leading the flock), the dog (loyalty), the fox (cunning, skill, less often death), monkeys (the fall of man), the goat (omniscience) and the goat (carnal sin).
Descriptions of animals were drawn mainly from the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. Another source of these borrowings is the Physiologist, which arose in Alexandria in the 2nd century, containing 49 stories about exotic animals, trees, stones, etc. In particular, these works were widely used by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies. In the XII-XIII centuries, descriptions of monsters become an integral part of encyclopedic) treatises (called "The Image of the World" or "Mirror").
The purpose of such writings is to recreate the natural historian of the world from the day of creation. They included special sections from distant countries, in particular about India, with corresponding descriptions of monsters. So, for example, the sections "On monsters" or "0 (India and its wonders" can be found in Raban Maurus, Honors of Augustodun, Vincent of Beauvais, Albert the Great, Gervasu of Tilbury, Bartholomew of England, Brunetto Latini, etc. In the era of the Crusades, the chronicler Fulcherius of Chartres and the writer Jacques Vitriysky were carried away by the description of fabulous animals, which the crusaders were not slow to discover in the Holy Land.
In the literature of that time, you can familiarize yourself with the genealogy of monsters, their physiology and anatomy, the characteristics of feeding and reproduction behavior. Practical advice is also given: how to hunt monsters correctly (the helka must be caught when he is sleeping, you can kill only by chopping off his head) and how to use various parts of their bodies (where a tuft of fur of a tiny elephant will never appear dragon, and the ash of onos, mixed with his own blood, is an effective remedy for insanity and stones in the bladder).
For example, Borges in his “Book of Fictional Creatures” wrote: “In its diversity, the world of fantastic creatures should have surpassed the real one, because a fantastic monster is just a combination of elements found in living beings, and the number of such combinations is almost infinite. We could have produced countless creatures made from fish, birds and reptiles. We would be limited by only two feelings - satiety and disgust. The total number of monsters is large, but very few can affect the imagination. The fauna of human fantasy is much poorer than the fauna of God's world."
The consciousness of medieval man was inhabited by numerous images of various mystical creatures, supposedly existing absolutely in reality. What is, for example, a ghoul - a terrible creature with a disgusting appearance and smell, a grave digger and a devourer of decomposing remains, who, however, did not disdain some fresh meat, say, wanderers from a merchant caravan that wandered into areas visited by ghouls (necropolises and cemeteries, ruins, dungeons, labyrinths).
In especially large numbers, ghouls can allegedly be found at the sites of fights, recent massacres. The female form of the ghoul is capable of taking on the appearance of a charming girl in order to finish off the unwary without unnecessary trouble. "Adorable" are also engravings with bone ridges on the skull, powerful teeth with which they crush bones, and a long thin tongue to lick out the decomposed brain and fat.
But for special connoisseurs of exoticism - scoffin, or cockatrixia, ornitoreptilia, that is, not a reptile, but not a bird either. He has the body of a lizard, the wings of a bat, and the face and legs are like a rooster. Below the long neck he has leathery beads, huge, twice the size of a turkey. The wings spread out over four feet on average. When attacking, it attacks in a jump, exposing its claws, snapping its beak, and also uses a long whip-like tail, knocking it down and finishing off the victim with its eagle beak. Outlandish living creatures in abundance inhabited land and sea, air and fire, the surface of the earth and the underworld.
For a medieval man, however, the salamanders and harpies were no more fictional than the crocodiles and hippos, with which they coexist on the pages of the treatises of that time. People, "black in body, just like Ethiopians", of course, amazed the imagination, but, in general, they were a phenomenon of the same order as panotias (owners of huge ears like a blanket), skyopods and okras (with mouth and eyes on their chest), not to mention the long-known cinocephalic-pesiegolovtsy - that is, something completely natural: living, as the monk Ratramn said, "in fact, not contrary to the laws of nature, but fulfilling their purpose, for the laws of nature are established by the Lord."
Belief in monsters remained extremely persistent throughout the Middle Ages, as there was great respect for the wisdom of the ancients. But from the point of view of Christianity, the monsters were a mystery. The medieval image of the world had a strictly ordered hierarchical character - the world was thought of as God's creation, where all creatures are located in a symbolic hierarchy. Monsters occupy a completely incomprehensible place in this universal world order, being outside the ordered world.
Many Church Fathers puzzled over this riddle. Already Augustine argued that monsters are an integral part of the created world and were not created by the Creator by mistake. But Bernard of Clairvaux refused to reflect on this problem, believing that the creation of God is so great that the mind of man cannot contain it. Leaving aside the burning question of whether God or the devil created monsters, medieval authors made a lot of efforts to give them a Christian flavor and moral and religious interpretation.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the attitude of the church towards monsters was ambiguous, it fluctuated between the recognition of their creations of God (some, for example, cinocephalus, even appear in liturgical dramas) and condemnation of faith in them as a pagan prejudice. Ancient chimeras had the right to lead a completely chaotic existence in their paganism, but the life of the monsters of the Christian world was very meaningful: each symbolized something.
In an effort to fit monsters into the Christian concept, they were viewed as religious and moral symbols: giants were interpreted as the embodiment of pride, pygmies - humility, leumans - monks, cinocephals - quarrels; huge monsters were a symbol of abundance, and so on. Noseless people meant "fools without a nose of discernment", and six-armed people of India - "diligent who work to gain eternal life." And even bearded women with “flat, flattened heads” did not offend the gaze, but, on the contrary, symbolized “respectable people, who cannot be seduced by either love or hatred from the direct path of church prescriptions”.
In the list of the most often mentioned monsters by medieval writers - the unicorn, a fierce and wild animal, which, according to Ctesias of Cnidus, can only be tamed by a virgin (therefore, the unicorn was considered as a symbol of purity and even a symbol of Christ). Ctesias, and after him the medieval authors, reported that in India vessels were made from the horn of this animal, which broke when poison was poured into them. That is why the signors were eager to get hold of the unicorn horn.
However, some monsters remained only a sign of the exotic world, such as the manticore - an animal with the head of a woman, the body of a lion and the tail of a scorpion; she has blue eyes, three rows of long teeth, and a red, sharp tongue used as a sting. The sciapod belongs to the same world of pure exoticism - a creature of enormous size, hiding in the desert from the heat in the shade of its own single leg: during a pouring rain or under the scorching rays of the sun, it lies down on the ground and lifts up its leg, which serves as an umbrella for it. With the help of its leg, the scientist can also move quickly.
The list of exotic animals was supplemented by the list of monstrous peoples: macrobes (people of gigantic size, growing from 10 to 12 feet, characterized by extraordinary longevity), ichthyophages (inhabitants of Central Asia who feed exclusively on fish), arimasps (humanoid creatures with feet turned inward, having 8 or 16 toes on each foot), leukokrots (creatures that surpass everyone else in speed of movement, having the body of a donkey, a lion's chest and a huge mouth to the ears, and imitating a person with a voice), hippopods (creatures with a horse's leg, which also have the ability to move very quickly) etc.
Descriptions of these monsters were partly borrowed from ancient tradition, partly arose in the bosom of medieval culture. Gradually, in the Middle Ages, a tradition was formed to believe that all creatures were created in the image and likeness of God, and everything that moves away from the divine image is monstrous. It was believed that the monstrous appearance of macrobes, ichthyophages is a reflection of their souls, which, apparently, were not touched by the word of God, and therefore they rather belong to the kingdom of evil. This stereotype easily worked in the minds of travelers who met unknown peoples. People who visited Central Asia had only to note such a feature of the Asian peoples as the habit of eating snakes or turtles in order to perceive them as monsters. This is how the images of monstrous peoples appear in the treatises of travelers and missionaries.
Over time, images of monsters also penetrate the iconographic tradition. European church architecture of the 12th-15th centuries gave birth to many strange creatures, the appearance of which speaks of the unhealthy, but, undoubtedly, rich imagination of the ancient architects. These stone, metal and wooden monsters are the few representatives of the medieval menagerie of non-existent monsters that can rightfully be called Gothic. Already in the X-XIII centuries they are depicted on the capitals and portals of Romanesque cathedrals. They can be seen in the sculptural decoration of French churches at Wesel and On.
The tympanum of the cathedral in Wesel shows a monster with huge ears; under the image is the New Testament maxim: “Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature” (Mark 16, 15). The famous Bernard of Clairvaux spoke with condemnation of such images: "What does this ridiculous ugliness mean?.. these wicked monkeys … monstrous centaurs playing donkeys on the harp … a creature with several bodies and one head … or a creature with several heads and one body … here is a four-legged a creature with a snake's tail … is there a fish with a four-legged tail?.. ". Criticism and obvious interest - apparently, such an ambivalent attitude towards the depiction of all sorts of strange beasts is characteristic of the medieval church tradition as a whole.
Who was portrayed most often?
The most popular Gothic monsters are gargoyles (French gargouille, English gargoyle - from Late Latin gargulio - throat) and chimeras. They are often confused with the term chimeras of gargoyles and vice versa. The distinction between them is rather arbitrary, but it hides in itself some very curious secrets of the origin of these classic representatives of the Gothic bestiary.
The chimera of medieval bestiaries is not a legendary monster from ancient Greek mythology, but rather a well-known principle of creating fantastic creatures by combining body parts of any dissimilar animals into one whole.
The most famous mention of the Chimera is found in the sixth canto of the Iliad. It describes a fire-breathing creature - the daughter of Echidna and Typhon, who had the body of a goat, the tail of a snake, and the front part, like that of a lion.
The Chimera is mentioned in the seventh canto of Virgil's Aeneid. Commentator Servius Honorat put forward a hypothesis, according to which "chimera" is a metaphor for the eponymous volcano in Lycia: snakes live at its base, goats graze on the slopes, and "a fire is burning above and, probably, there is a den of lions.
Gothic chimeras are completely different from their many-sided ancient Greek prototype. They have gained worldwide fame for the statues depicting human-shaped figures with bat wings, goat's horns or snake heads, swan necks or eagle mines, installed at the foot of the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral. The ancient Greeks believed that the Chimera caused storms, all kinds of dangers on land and at sea. Medieval architects departed from the chthonic essence of this monster, using the chimera as 4 allegorical embodiment of human sins (fallen souls who were forbidden to enter the church and who were turned to stone for all their earthly sins). The word "chimera" is also used in many European languages to denote a false idea, empty fiction, as well as some fantastic hybrid creature.
A gothic chimera is no different from a gargoyle - it is the same ugly creature with the body of a monkey (or hunchback man), goat horns, bat wings, etc. The difference was that the gargoyle was a special element of architectural design designed to perform not only artistic, but also quite everyday functions. Gargoyles cover the elongated gutters of the Gothic cathedral (or they themselves act as such, removing sedimentary moisture from the mouth - remember the Latin etymology of the word "gargoyle"), thanks to which rainwater pours onto the ground at a certain distance from the foundation of the building and does not wash it away. In other words, gargoyles are a drainage, designed in the form of some grotesque figure.
Despite the fact that gargoyles are typical Gothic monsters, their own origin goes back centuries - to Ancient Greece and Egypt. The civilization of Ancient Egypt knew a record number of zoomorphic gods for those times, and the Egyptians were among the first peoples who began to actively use the images of such creatures in painting and architecture. Greek mythology also actively exploited stories about various hybrid creatures (which, unlike the characters of Egyptian beliefs, did not have the status of higher deities). It was said about the Chimera above, it will also be appropriate here to recall harpies, centaurs and griffins (vultures). The statues of the latter adorned the roofs of Greek vaults and even simple houses - after all, it was believedthat vultures guard the legendary gold of Zeus in Scythia (the territory of the northern Black Sea coast) from the Arimaspians - lively one-eyed people who constantly tried to steal it.
Gutters as an element of the construction of houses in Ancient Greece were rare, however, if they did not go out at the corners of the roof, but under it (in the middle of the wall), then the drain was made in the form of a stone lion's head with an open mouth (later the lion became one of the components of the gargoyle image). This symbolized the power of Greece, I protect the inhabitants of the house from enemies and scared away evil spirits.
With a fair amount of confidence, we can assume that the first gargoyles (in their textbook version) appeared by the beginning of the 12th century.
There is not a single gargoyle in the world that would be similar to another - after all, sculptors enjoyed complete freedom in choosing zoological prototypes for the sculpture of another monster. Throughout the entire Gothic period of the history of European culture, the appearance of gargoyles was quite diverse. Initially, they were of very modest size, and animal features dominated in their appearance. By the 13th century, gargoyles had become larger (up to one meter in length) and more humanoid. And the XIV century was marked for them by an increase in the number of small details - the gargoyles became more elegant and lighter, but the proportion of grotesque and caricature in such sculptures has increased markedly. In the 15th century, gargoyles lost some of their demonism, compensating for this loss with the general expressiveness of facial expressions and a wide variety of poses. The evolution of the Gothic style in art has led to the factthat gargoyles gradually went beyond the framework of religious themes and by the 16th century had turned into ordinary stone monsters - repulsive, but almost not scary for the layman.
The creatures that did not perform the functions of decorating gutters were called chimeras.
The assumptions according to which the gargoyles, in accordance with their ancient Greek origin, performed the duties of protecting the house from evil spirits, seem to be quite reasonable. This may explain their rare ugliness - stone idols either scared off the forces of darkness, or, perhaps, made them think that this building was already occupied by other hellish creatures.
In addition, Francis Bly Bond, an English historian of architecture, suggested that the cathedral gargoyles could be a kind of "servants" of the church - devilish creatures who saw the power of the Lord and went over to his side.
There is an interesting legend about the origin of the gargoyles, the plot basis for which was the practice of using these monsters in Gothic architecture. Around AD 600 A dragon named La Gargole settled near the Seine River. He swallowed whole ships, burned the forest with his fiery breath and spews so much water that the nearest villages perished from the floods. In the end, the people of Rouen decided to propitiate the dragon with annual sacrifices. Although La Gargoyle, like any other dragon, preferred beautiful virgins, the cunning French contrived to speak to him and slip the criminals.
This went on for many years, until one day the priest Romanus came to Rouen. Having learned about the insatiable dragon, the priest made a deal with the Rouen: for getting rid of La Gargoyle they would have to convert to Christianity and build a church in the village. The battle of Romanus with the dragon ended quite successfully - with the help of the holy cross, the priest threw this beast to the ground, and the locals surrounded the dragon's body with brushwood and burned it. However, La Gargole's neck and head did not succumb to the flame - after all, they were tempered by his fiery breath. After a while, the unburned remains of the monster were displayed on the roof of the built church in memory of the glorious feat of Romanus
At the end of the 12th century, the image of monsters became a favorite motif in book miniatures. In the XII-XIII centuries, monstrous peoples and monsters become the object of images on medieval maps. The most famous is the so-called Hereford map of the last quarter of the XIII century. Drawn in multi-colored ink on parchment, it reproduced the entire ecumene in the form of symbolic figures inscribed in each other - a pentagon of a quadrangle, a triangle and a circle. Inside these figures were depicted the then famous countries, cities, seas, as well as seven wonders of the world and fantastic peoples. In strict accordance with the information of ancient and medieval authors, pygmies and giants, leumans, manticores and unicorns were depicted in India; in Ethiopia - satyrs and fauns, gold digging ants, sphinxes and other monsters inhabiting the outskirts of the Christian ecumene,were carefully depicted on the famous Ebstorf map.
The travels and missions of Franciscan and Dominican monks to Central Asia and the Far East (Guillaume Rubruck, Plano Carpini, Marco Polo, etc.) opened a new page in the history of ideas about monsters. For the first time, medieval people establish direct contacts with the East - a land of wonders, where no Europeans have been since the time of Alexander the Great. In the writings of travelers and missionaries, genuine perceptions of India and other countries of the East were mixed with fantasies and stories about monsters and exotic peoples known from books. In 1413, the Burgundian duke Jean the Fearless ordered to collect the most popular treatises of these travelers (Marco Polo and others) and illustrations to them into a single collection to present to his uncle, the Duke of Berry. The collection was named "The Book of Miracles".
The tradition of depicting monsters was preserved during the late Middle Ages in the so-called cosmography, descriptions of the world, similar to the "Mirrors" and "Images of the World" of the classical Middle Ages. For example, the "Epistle on cinocephalus" from the monk Ratramna to presbyter Rimbert (8th century), "The Book of Beasts and Monsters" by an unknown author, the earliest copies of which date back to the 9th century; the fundamental work "On the Nature of Things" by the Flemish Dominican Thomas of Cantimpre, the anonymous treatise "On the Wonders of the World" (XIII century); as well as "The Message of the Indian King Farasman to the Emperor Hadrian", created at the dawn of the Middle Ages and overgrown with bizarre distortions of several generations of scribes; Encyclopedia of Honorius of Augustodon "Image of the World" (XII century).
Among the books of the late Middle Ages, the most famous are the "Book of Nature" by Konrad Megenberg (15th century), the work of Andre Teve "Attractions of Antarctic France", "Cosmography" by Sebastian Münster (16th century). All this is accompanied by rich excursions into the cultural history of the chimerical fauna.
The miniatures of these treatises give an idea of the exotic peoples and monsters with which the Middle Ages inhabited an unknown part of the oecumene. These images gave even greater stability to the existing stereotypes.
How fictional are these mythical creatures? Is there any more or less real basis for finding a place for them in history? As the Strugatsky brothers wrote: "A myth is a description of a real event seen through the eyes of a fool and which has come down to us in the poet's treatment." Indeed, it is quite possible that part of this incredible zoo has a completely natural scientific pedigree, but refracted through the imagination of a person of that time, prone to mysticism and exaggeration.
For example, stories about werewolves are likely to have a very real foundation. Dozens of written testimonies tell of individual cases of attacks that took place in the 18th-19th centuries, when the wolves established a real terror, ceasing to hunt livestock and taking up people. But none of them can compare in cruelty to the story of a giant wolf, which took more than sixty human lives in more than two years. "The monster from Zhivodan", or "Hellish forest dog" - this is how the inhabitants of the surrounding villages christened him, and he fully deserved his nickname.
Most of the people who had not seen this wolf attributed the attacks to a very cunning werewolf; others thought it was some other fierce animal. Old rumors and legends about supernatural beings that have long lived in local folklore began to revive. Residents were afraid to appear on the street alone, and with the onset of darkness, the villages turned into besieged fortresses.
Whatever the reason, during this period, more than sixty people died in a terrible death and more than two dozen residents were crippled or badly wounded. In the end, the beast was killed2 and people stopped dying. But something in this story remained unclear. For example, were the attacks carried out by one animal or were there several? Where did this beast get such an incredible cunning, if he was the only one to blame for everything, and how did he manage to avoid all the traps, to escape from the round-ups carried out in large areas by famous and experienced wolf hunters? Why, or rather even WHY, did he attack people, although there was a lot of game in the forest? And was this predator REALLY just a wolf?
According to the medieval tradition, quite real biological and medical anomalies were also considered monsters. These "monsters" were viewed as punishments for sins, introduced into theological and political context. The birth of children with congenital anomalies, of course, was associated by contemporaries with wars and natural disasters - both as an omen and as a consequence.
Medieval alchemists, physicians, and generally "men of science" tried to find a connection between monstrous appearance and monstrous behavior. This problem became the subject of study by the famous French surgeon Ambroise Paré. His pen belongs to the tractor
tat on congenital deformities, which the historian of surgery J.-F. Malgen calls one of the most curious books of the French Renaissance. In the treatise On Monsters, Paré made an attempt to bring together information about all natural anomalies known to him. The main part of it is made up of information about congenital pathologies, which, as a doctor, were primarily interested in Par. But this is not only about human pathologies: the most diverse phenomena fall into the category of monsters in Paré - from Siamese twins to a chameleon, natural phenomena such as comets, volcanoes, earthquakes, etc., fall into the category of miracles. All the collected material is linked into several blocks: human deformities; medical incidents; pretense and simulation; bestiary; meteorological phenomena; demonology. The treatise is divided into four parts (human and animal monsters, both physical,and moral; flying, terrestrial, celestial). But the main place in the treatise is occupied by the phenomenon of congenital pathologies.
Calling monsters signs of future misfortunes, Paré does not focus on this, he is not interested. Nor is it intended to give a strict definition of a monster. He shows genuine interest in the reasons for their appearance. Paré names such reasons 13: the glory of the Lord; the wrath of the Lord; excessive amount of semen; too little seed; imagination; large or small size of the uterus; pregnant posture; blows to the stomach of a pregnant woman; hereditary diseases; spoilage or rot (seed); seed mixing; actions of evil beggars; demons or devils. Each described factor corresponds to a certain type of congenital pathology.
The emergence of images of various strange creatures, monsters, mythical creatures and other anomalous phenomena in the ancient and medieval tradition is undoubtedly explained by the psychological need of a person to embody his fears in specific images in order to get rid of these fears. The idea of monsters is closely related to the idea of space, and to the irrational fears of a person before the unfamiliar and inaccessible. The farther from the familiar world, the more terrible and fantastic the monsters look.
1 "Epistle about cinocephalus" from the monk Ratramna to the presbyter Rimbert (VIII century).
2 Fragments of human bones were found in the stomach of a huge wolf, so it really was a man-eating beast.
Author: M. P. Zgurskaya