Do Roman Catholics KnOw How Columbus Discovered

7/28/2019 Do Roman Catholics KnOw How Columbus Discovered...

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Do Roman Cathol icsKnOw

Woodcut of a fur-coated man with the head of a dog: a Cynocephalus, or Doghead

how Columbus discovered cannibals in the New World?


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Associated to Place: New Worlds > articles -- by * Dionysia Xanthippos (137 Articles), Historical Article 1

Featured November 30 , 2008

The story of how Columbus became so entranced by ancient tales of the Dogheads and

other monstrous races of the East that he believed the Carib Indians of the New World to

be dog-faced cannibals, thereby justifying their enslavement by the Spanish. (Formerlytit led, " Chr istopher Columbus and the Monstrous Races" )

In 1492, while Christopher Columbus was sailing West to get to the East, back in Nuremberg,

Germany, Hartmann Schedel was preparing his famous Chronicle of the History of the World.

Next to his Map of the World would appear, above six other equally odd creatures, this woodcut

of a fur-coated man with the head of a dog: a Cynocephalus, or Doghead (shown above).

Peering through his telescope as his ships approached the New World in 1492, Christopher

Columbus hoped to see, along with other monstrous races of the East, a Doghead. The

Dogheads, he knew, were just one of many strange peoples that peopled India and the East.

This was what the chroniclers had predicted in their chronicles and the mapmakers had depicted

on their maps of the world. So Columbus knew that if he could find just one of those monsters he

could prove that he had, as he'd planned, circumnavigated the globe and reached India and the

East.

For centuries everyone believed that to see such wonders you had to travel East, in the direction

of the Wonders. As Marco Polo had done, for example. And before him, ...

The Crusaders. As they travelled east to the Holy Land, many carried with them littleguidebooks with crude drawings of the marvels they would see, including members of the

Monstrous Races. When Crusaders and pilgrims travelling south from Germany and France met

Crusaders and pilgrims coming north from Spain at the crossroads town of Vzelay, they would

see carved above a portal on the 12th-century Abbey Church of La Madeleine (Mary Magdalene)

a figure of Christ the Redeemer surrounded by figures of the Saved, including members of the

Monstrous Races. Just as Christian theologians today debate whether the Good News of

Christ's Salvation extends to extraterrestrials (ET's), so did their medieval counterparts

when hearing of strange creatures elsewhere in the world that were like, but also quite

unlike, themselves. It is easy to see how the monks of Vzelay answered that question.


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THE DOGHEADS

A dogheaded couple on the tympanum of Christ the Redeemer over an inner portal in the Benedictine Abbey Church

of St. Mary Magdalene, Vzelay.

(A mob defaced the figures over the outside portals during the French Revolution.). The "man,"

or dog-man, leads his dog-lady (we can't say "bitch," here, though she LOOKS a bit dominating) on the road to salvation. Perhaps so

crusading knights might identify with him as friend rather than foe, the sculptor shows him

carrying a sword instead of the usual knobby club from a tree limb.


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THE PYGMIES

Here a pygmy climbs onto his horse on the tympanum of Christ the Redeemer in the church of La Madelaine,

Vzelay. Though this is a pigmy horse, a mere pony, the pygmy still needs a ladder to get up to it.

The artist may also have intended a parallel to the Christian steps to salvation, commonly depicted as climbing a

ladder to Heaven. (Recall the refrain of the old spiritual, "We are climbing Jacob's Ladder, Soldiers of the Cross.")

At the top of the Ladder is Christ; so, by analogy, Christ is the Horse that carries the saved person up to Heaven?

Just as in the Classical world an apotheosized hero may ride up to Olympus on a winged horse or in a golden

chariot drawn by winged horses? Note how the pygmy's cloak flies out behind him like a pair of wings. Behind the

pygmy and his horse can be seen what looks like another sort of monster: a Scorpion-man.

The Vzelay monsters show it's wrong to demonize these strange creatures or think of them as

evil or horrible in the way we now call wicked people or frightful movie aliens "monsters." The

ancients and then the medieval Christians called these freaks of Nature "monstrous" for the same

reason they called them "marvelous" and "wonderful." They spoke of them, in the same breath,

as "signs and wonders." And "signs" they were.

The word " monster"itself was directly related to the word " demonstrate,"meaning to

" show."Just as the priest held up the Host in a gold or silver " monstrance"to show the miracle of

bread being changed into the body of Christ, so God created " monsters"to show us the

power and glory of Creation, and thus the power and glory of the Creator.

Sometimes one had to travel great distances to see them. The Irish monk St. Brendan said that

God had sent him on long travels about the world to punish his disbelief in the wonders of


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Creation. St.Augustine saw the monstrous races of the East as demonstrations of both

God's power and his desire to awaken our yearning for the marvellous.

woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle of1493:the heavens appear both a rain of blood and a rainbow of hope,

and on earth Siamese twins and four-armed, four-legged children are born

In the late Middle Ages, however, as the world neared another millenium (in those days, a mid-

millenium did just as well),many of the oddities and freaks of Nature were seen, like Noah's

Flood, as "omens," as warnings of doom and disaster to be visited on mankind by an angry God.

One can see the tension of the times between good and bad omens in this woodcut from the

Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, where in the heavens appear both a rain of blood and a rainbow

of hope, while on earth Siamese twins and four-armed, four-legged children are born. But these

two are genuine "freaks" - one-of-a-kind accidents of nature, not created species, not monstrous

"races" that can reproduce. So Columbus, in searching for the monstrous races of the East,should expect them to be created good, and only some to be, like demons, "fallen," terrible

and sterile. But how would he know which were which? At any rate Columbus never lost

faith in his pursuit of a New World, a new Christian Millenium. In a letter to Ferdinand and

Isabella that he wrote in the Diary or daily log of his fourth and last voyage, he pledged to use

its gold to build a New Jerusalem to replace the Old . And in one of his last books, a "Book of


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Prophecies," he predicted his discoveries would usher in that Millenium, with its center the New

Jerusalem, and its Emperor the King of Spain.

THE CLASSICAL SOURCES

To feed their fascination for exotic monsters, the Middle Ages relied on classical authors. They

knew about pygmies from the Iliad, where Homer describes the Trojans as a swarm of cranes or

storks flying north over the sea to battle pygmy farmers in order to devour their crops.

Scene on a famous Greek vase and on a woodcut from the equally famous Nuremberg Chronicle from"Pygmies

Fighting Cranes on the Francois Vase".

But Homer has little or nothing to say of other exotic races. Neither does Herodotus, oddly,

though he is known not only as the Father of History but also as the Father of Lies. Yet I suspect

his account of the dog-headed Egyptian god Anubis and the priests and chief embalmers

who wore masks in his image, may be one source of tales about the Dogheads. However,

medieval writers relied mainly on Pliny the Elders "Natural History" of 77 AD. And Pliny in

turn took most of his material from two earlier Greek writers, Ctesias and Megasthenes. Ctesias

of Knidos was a doctor at the Persian court of Artaxerxes in the late 5th century BC. After the

death of Alexander the Great, Megasthenes was sent in 303 BC by Seleucus I as an ambassador
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to the Indian court of King Chandragupta in Patna, and he became a gold mine of stories about

the Monstrous Races of India. So Megasthenes, along with Pliny, was mined extensively by

medieval authors.

THE MEDIEVAL SOURCES OF COLUMBUS' VIEW OF THE WORLD

Dogheads buying and selling nuts and fruits - an early 15th c illustration fr om Marco Polo's" Les Merveill es."

While the dogheads are not shown here as cannibals, this[e] men in the illustration [below]are shown as cannibals,

as well as animal worshipers

When Columbus sailed for the New World, hoping to reach India and China, he took along his

own heavily annotated copy of"The Travels of Marco Polo."First published around 1300 as

"Description of the World,"it was later translated into Italian as "Il Milione" - the title Columbus

would have known it by.


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In it he read, in Polo's account of a certain island in the Indies, this:

" Now let me tell you of a race of men well worth describing in thi s book. You may take it f or a

fact that al l the men of th is island have heads l ike dogs, and teeth and eyes li ke dogs; f or I

assure you that the whole aspect of their faces is that of big mastif fs. They are a very cruel

race: whenever they can get hold of a man who is not one of their kind, they devour h im."

Though this and other"wonders"Polo described raised eyebrows, even outright disbelief,

Columbus believed it. So he probably believed Polo's report that the great Khan of China had

black magicians at his feasts who could make golden cups on the table rise into the air and fly

about. Perhaps he drew the line at Polo's report of the ruch, a giant bird that carries off elephants,then drops them to smash on the rocks before swooping down and eating them. That tale was

embroidered on later by Antonio Pigafetta, one of Magellan's companions, in his account of how

they sailed around the globe in 1522. It also wound up as one of Sinbad the Sailor's adventures in

the "Tales of the Arabian Nights."Small wonder that in the early 1400's Polo's "Description:"

was translated into French as "Livre des Merveilles du Monde"("Book of the World's Marvels").

Meanwhile, between 1357 and 1371 there had appeared in England a book in French with a

similar title: "Les Merveilles du Monde,"later published in English as "The Travels of Sir John

Mandeville."Columbus seems to have possessed a translation of this book, too, and was heavily

influenced by it, even though it was a ragbag of wonders that lifted travelogues from dozens of

its predecessors. Sifting through this ragbag, however, we find chapter 20, whose title promises

to show "... how the earth and the sea be of round form and shape, by proof of the star that is

clept [called] Antarctic, that is fixed in the south."Surprisingly, in a rather rambling but quite

reasonable argument, our fictive knight "Sir John" delivers: Because no one in northern lands

and seas can see that single fixed star below their southern horizon, and just as no one in

southern lands and seas can see our North Star, the earth and sea must be curved in each

direction. "And those two stars never move, and by them turneth all the firmament right as doth a

wheel that turneth by his axle-tree." "And so "the land and the sea be of round shape,"The

whole world is "round."


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Strange indeed

Finally, Columbus was impressed by the "Imago Mundi,"a manuscript written in 1410 by the

French inquisitor Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly, but not printed as a book until 1480. D'Ailly not

only showed, like Mandeville, that the world was round. He predicted that Asia could be reached

by sailing west across the Atlantic. Columbus had his own copy of the "Imago Mundi," read it

repeatedly, and filled its margins with nearly 900 notes. Here's one he wrote: There are savages

who eat human flesh; they have vile and horrible faces.

Remember that one.

THE NUREMBERG CHRONICLE, 1493

While Columbus was searching the New World for these monsters of the East, back in the Old

World Hartmann Schedel was getting ready to publish woodcuts of them in his famous

Nuremberg Chronicle.

.

.

.


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The images of these monsters are cut from separate blocks of wood so that, like the book's wooden letters, they can

be rearranged in different ways. In the arrangement shown below the Monoculus or Cyclops and the Blemnye

appear again atop a group of 6 along with a Panotis ("All-ears"); a man with a huge stretched lip; a Sciapod or

"Shade-foot" whose single leg has a foot so big he uses it as an umbrella to shade him from the sun; and a goat-man

or satyr.


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Headed again by the Cynocephalus or Doghead, the Monoculus and Blemnye reappear in a

group of seven at the left of the Nuremberg Chronicle's famous "Map of the World."


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(Now back to Columbus):

COLUMBUS AND THE DOG-FACED CANNIBALS OF THE CARIBBEAN

After a year in the New World, Columbus' hope of finding monstrous races that could be saved,

to the greater glory of Spain, seemed to fade. In a letter he wrote in 1493 to Queen Isabella and

King Ferdinand, he reports: In these islands I have so far found no human monstrosities, as

many expected...

But wait.... In his log of Sunday, November 4, 1492, as he began sailing back to Spain,

Columbus wrote that within a few weeks after he'd first sighted land, he had met some Indians

and shown them some gold and pearls, whereupon they told him that an infinite amount of gold

could be had by going to the southeast to a place called Bohio (Cap Hatien, in modern Haiti),

where gold could be found lying on the ground all over the place. But be careful, he was told, for

beware the terrible people that live there, those people-eating Caribs.

Here, in his first mention of them, Columbus writes:

"I also understand that, a long distance from here, there are men with one eye and others with

dogs' snouts who eat men. On taking a man they behead him, drink his blood and cut off his

genitals."


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In this handsome woodcut from around 1505, the Carib Indians have lost their doggy faces and seem almost

European, except in two ways. Though they wear head-dresses, cache-sexes, skirts and anklets made of leaves, like

Adam and Eve after the Fall, they are otherwise happily naked. And they remain cannibals, obviously fond of dining

on human flesh. They seem unaware of the Spanish ships approaching their island paradise, about to save and

civilize these "savages" by converting them to Christianity, or failing that, killing them and forcing them into

slavery.

When Columbus captured some of them and exhibited them before Queen Isabella, she was

so impressed that she freed them from slavery. But before she died she had second thoughts

and permitted the enslavement of "cannibals," opening the door to the enslavement of any

"savages" the Spanish could lay their hands on. Right away these idle fellows were worked

to death in the mines, digging futily to find that infinity of gold which Columbus had been

told was just lying around on the surface of their land.

References:

Mar 5, 2006 - 15:18 , Last Edited: Jan 29, 2012 - 22:12 by Ancient Worlds

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Do Roman Catholics KnOw How Columbus Discovered