The tail is a symbol of the animal nature. Stories of tailed humans are
found all over the world. They signify a belief that certain races of
men are descended from the apes, or that the apes are descended from
certain races of men. Both beliefs have been stressed in the modern
debate on evolution; yet neither is new. They are almost the oldest of
the philosophical myths. They trace back to primitive animism--to the
notion that animals are endowed with human intelligence, can understand
the speech of men, and may well be propitiated with worship. Early
man accepted them as cousins. He could change natures with them, and
sometimes it seemed to him he did. Père Lafitau said of his American
flock, “These men are living in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”
Sometimes men were content enough with this kinship, erecting it into
totemism, wearing the tail of the buffalo or horse as an emblem of
power. Sometimes they were ashamed of it. They plucked off all hair
from their bodies, because animals were hairy, and resented it when
their women bore them twins, because the young of animals came in
litters instead of singly. Constantly they confused brute and human
nature, using identical terms of neighbor folk, whether these were
apes or men. The confusion was carried over into literature. One
African tribe was said to have an ape king. There are passages in which
travelers seem to themselves to be speaking of men while to their
readers it is evident they are speaking of monkeys. There are other
passages in which they set out to describe monkeys, yet draw pictures
of men like themselves, but of more primitive cast. The creatures
called satyrs embody this confusion and the sense of kinship behind it.
According to Isidore, the satyrs have done something to make their own
nature clear. One of them, he says, appearing to St. Anthony in the
desert, explained, “I am mortal, one of the inhabitants of the waste,
whom the heathen, misled by error, worship as the Fauns and Satyrs.”
He pictures them as manikins with upturned noses, horns on their
foreheads, and goat feet.
The heathen world, however, never was quite sure what it meant by
the satyrs. If it be true that the fable began with ritual mummers
who donned the nature of fertility dæmons when they put on the heads
of asses, horses, or goats, and danced in them--as men still do--the
memory of this was forgotten. The satyrs were supposed to be spirits,
half human, half bestial, that haunted woodland and mountain side
and fellowshipped with Pan and Dionysus. They had bristly hair, flat
noses, and pointed ears, with two small horns, and a tail like that of
a horse or goat. Earlier Greek art represented them as ugly, withered,
and ape-like. But Attic sculpture in the time of Praxiteles shows them
with the beast nature well-nigh submerged--graceful figures instinct
with poetry. They took over the attributes of the kindred sileni, and
as Roman influence grew they were confounded with the fauns and were
depicted as half men and half goats. In Scripture they are the “hairy
ones” of Hebrew folklore, a sort of demon of waste places. So is the
word intended in the prophecy of Isaiah as to Babylon: “Wild beasts of
the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful
creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.”
Satyrs, as the ancients conceived them, were a wanton, music-loving,
merry-hearted and yet timid folk, their symbol the hare. They roved
about, drinking, dancing to the pipe and cymbal, pursuing the nymphs,
killing the cattle of men and making love to their women. Men feared
them, as embodying the loneliness of waste places, feared them with the
sudden panic fear, which the apparition of their leader, the leering
goat-god, always excited. Equally, the shy creatures feared men, but
not women. Gradually these timid spirits moved out of mythology into
geography. There were satyr isles, and there were satyr tribes in
distant mountains and deserts, alike in Africa, India, and the spaces
of the sea. Always they were described as avoiding contact with men,
screening themselves in the thickets and seen only from afar. The
satyrs of western Africa, says Pliny, “beyond their figure have
nothing in common with the manners of the human race.” Ælian speaks of
Indian satyrs that have human features, that go sometimes on four feet
and sometimes on two and are too swift to be caught.
[Illustration: A SATYR _By_ Jacob Jordaens]
Thus the classic conception of this creature passes from spirits of
the waste to tailed men, to apes, retracing the path which Greek art
followed from simian beings to spirits of the waste. These were the
wild men and wild women whom Herodotus locates in western Africa.
Hanno, the Carthaginian explorer, had been before him. His narrative
tells of finding an island full of wild people on the west coast of
Africa: “For the greater proportion were women, whose bodies were
covered with hair, and whom our interpreters called Gorillæ. Though we
pursued the men, we could not catch any of them, since all fled from
us, escaping over the precipices and defending themselves with stones.
However, we took three women, but they attacked their conductors with
their hands and teeth, and could not be prevailed on to accompany us.
We therefore killed and flayed them and brought their skins with us to
Carthage,” where they were hung up in the temple of Juno.
This narrative betrays the ancient confusion as to the satyrs’ real
nature. They are described as wild men and women, and it would even
seem that the Carthaginians undertook to reason with their captives;
but their captors killed and skinned them, as they certainly would not
have done to creatures they deemed to be of their species. The terms
gorilla and orang-utan both mean men-of-the-woods. They are borne by
large apes, but when the Malays speak of the orang-utan they mean a
savage and not a simian.
The Hindu term for man-of-the-woods is bunmanus, and here is a Hindu
sketch of him. “The bunmanus is an animal of the monkey kind. His face
has a near resemblance to the human; he has no tail and walks erect.
The skin of his body is black, and slightly covered with hair.” Then
the account proceeds to enumerate the dialects of the peninsula and
includes among them “the jargon of the bunmanus.” These animals of the
monkey kind are really the dark-skinned, non-Aryan aborigines.
A Portuguese manuscript cited by Tylor tells of an Indian tribe in
Brazil called the Cuatas. “This populous nation,” it says, “dwells
east of the Juruena, in the neighborhood of the rivers San Joao and
San Thome. It is a very remarkable fact that the Indians composing it
walk naturally like the quadrupeds, with their hands on the ground;
they have the belly, breast, arms, and legs covered with hair, and are
of small stature; they are fierce, and use their teeth as weapons;
they sleep on the ground, or among the branches of trees; they have no
industry, nor agriculture, and live only on fruits, wild roots, and
fish.” The author of this account seemed not to know that the coata he
was describing was an ape and not a man.
Customs of speech and sometimes motives of self-interest have shaded
the differences between the two species. The belief is widely held,
both in Africa and in South America, that apes know how to talk, but
hold their peace lest they be put to work, as it seems they were put
to work in gathering the fig harvest in ancient Egypt and perhaps in
ceremonial processions as torch-bearers. On the other hand, sailors,
pioneer colonists, and slave dealers betray a tendency to rate the
savages among whom they are thrown, and whom they may wish to exploit,
as little, if any, above the brutes.
It has become almost a principle of ethnology, wherever a story of
a neighboring race of tailed men is current, to look for a tribe of
aborigines who have been dispossessed by men of a higher culture. Thus
the conqueror asserts his contempt, and justifies his treatment, of the
conquered. The latter may accept it in good part and admit a monkey
descent. The Marawars of South India trace their lineage back to Rama’s
monkeys, and the Kathkuri avow an ape ancestry. Even the Jaitwas of
Rajputana, although classed as Rajputs, derive, they say, from the
monkey-god, Hanuman, and allege that their princes have still a vestige
of tails. There are tribes in Tibet and in the mountains of the Malay
peninsula whose traditions tell of ape progenitors.
By a sort of poetic justice, savages sometimes tell a like story about
civilized men. Why should these wear so much clothing if there were
not something they wanted to conceal? In the Land of Lamary, says
Maundeville, men and women go all naked, “and they scorn when they see
any strange Folk going clothed,” hinting that these are not formed
as are other men. Captain Cook was not the only explorer to tell of
natives demanding that the white men strip so that it might be seen if
they were everywhere of the human kind. Buchanan gives this account in
his Indian travels:
“When I passed through among the gardens near houses, I have observed
the women squatting down behind the mud walls, in order to satisfy
their curiosity by viewing a stranger. When they thought that I
observed them, they ran away in a fright. This does not arise from the
rules of caste in Malabar requiring the Hindu women to be confined,
for that is by no means the case; but in the interior parts of North
Malabar the Nairs, being at enmity with Europeans, have persuaded the
women that we are a kind of hobgoblins who have long tails, in order to
conceal which we wear breeches. The women and children are therefore
afraid of Europeans.”
Stories of man’s descent to the ape match stories of the ape’s ascent
into man. One of these is recited in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, where
for their treachery Jove degrades the Cercopes. A Moslem legend tells
of Solomon passing through the Valley of Apes, between Jerusalem and
Mareb, and finding monkeys dwelling in the houses, wearing the clothes,
and using the speech of men. The river which flowed by their city
had been full of fish, they said, and these showed themselves freely
on the Sabbath day, trusting to the Jewish fishermen to keep the
Commandments. The temptation proved too strong, and for their offense
of Sabbath-breaking Jehovah turned all the citizens into apes.
There is a Zulu story of a lazy tribe of negroes who would not dig the
soil. Their chief led them into the wilderness, where the pick handles
which had hung useless at their backs became tails, and they themselves
baboons.
In both hemispheres there are legends of cross-breeding between the
human and the simian species. The Quoyas Morrov, or wood-man of Angola,
which was sent to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, was supposed by
his age to have an ape father or an ape mother. The First People of
Central American myth were manikins who became monkeys, and Count
Castelnau repeats a story by Father Ribeiro, a Carmelite missionary,
of a tribe of tailed Indians in the Amazonian region, whose descent
was from both apes and men. In British Central Africa, says Sir Harry
H. Johnston, the negro women profess to go in terror of the large male
baboons, and it is a fact that these animals will descend upon parties
of unarmed women, but only if they are carrying well-filled market
baskets.
The forests of South America are haunted by two legendary creatures of
related natures, in whom the myths of tailed men return to their Greek
originals. One of these is the salvaje, or hairy man-of-the-woods,
of whom Humboldt first heard among the cataracts of the Amazon. This
creature, the natives, planters, and missionaries were agreed, carried
off women, constructed huts, and sometimes ate human flesh. For five
years, everywhere the explorer traveled in the Americas, the story
followed him, and he was censured for doubting it. He surmises that the
legend is decked out with features taken from African ape-lore, but
adds that it may be that the man-of-the-woods, if not some rare ape, is
one of the large bears, the footsteps of which resemble a man’s, and
which are believed in every country to attack women.
“Father Gili,” says Humboldt, “gravely relates the history of a lady
in the Llanos of Venezuela, who so much praised the gentle character
and attentions of the man-of-the-woods. She is stated to have lived
several years with one in great domestic harmony, and only requested
some hunters to take her back because she and her children (a little
hairy, also) were weary of living far from the church and sacraments.”
A Spanish author wonders, however, if the fable of the man-of-the-woods
has not sprung from the artifice of Indian women who pretended to have
been carried off in default of a better excuse for long absences from
their husbands.
The other legendary creature is the Curupira, or Diable Boiteux. Among
the noises of the Brazilian forest that used to startle Bates was “a
sound like the clang of an iron bar against a hard, hollow tree, or a
piercing cry.” This was never repeated, and the silence that followed
tended to deepen the unpleasant impression. With the natives it was
always the Curupira, the wild man or spirit of the forest, that made
these inexplicable sounds. “Sometimes,” says Bates, “he is described as
a kind of orang-otang, covered with long, shaggy hair, and living in
trees. At others he is said to have cloven feet and a bright red face.
He has a wife and children, and sometimes comes down to the rocas to
steal the mandioca.”
All accounts agree that the Curupira is not footed like normal men. He
is lame, with one foot larger than the other, or his feet turn backward
so that his trail deceives. He is bald and dwarfish, with hairy person,
huge ears, and blue-green teeth, and he rides a deer, a rabbit, or a
pig. The spirit of the wood, the guardian of all wild things, he is
beneficent or mischievous, as occasion or mood offers. He insists that
game shall be killed, not maimed, merely, and for a gift of tobacco he
will return lost cattle. Where the forest is darkest, sometimes he will
appear in friendly but treacherous human guise, luring hunters from the
path and at last vanishing in mocking laughter. When the hunter sees
footprints of unequal size on the woodland trail ahead, if he is well
advised he will hasten back, and avoid the forest for weeks afterward.
Farther north one finds again the tracks of this strange old man,
or of beings like him. The Maidu Indians of California tell of the
Chamlakhu, a bearded ancient with clawlike hands and feet who lived
in trees; running on the ground, his gait was shambling and his arms
fanned the air like wings. The Indians of Costa Rica tell of a king of
the tapirs, a man of stately bearing, who rebukes hunters that kill
out of wantonness. Among the Indians of Guatemala there are stories
of a forest sovereign and protector of game whom the ladinos call the
Sombreron, from the enormous hat which he wears. Short and sturdy of
figure, he rides his domain astride a deer. He has a rustic stronghold,
and a hunter following a wounded deer once came upon it. The Sombreron
was swinging in a hammock in the courtyard. He led the hunter to an
inclosure in which were many deer. Pointing out the wounded animal, he
said, “Kill it, but another time shoot better and do not torture my
subjects.”
This creature is Arcadian Pan, master of the satyrs, generative dæmon
of the flocks and herds, somehow an emigrant to the New World. The
Filipinos call him the Tig-balang, picture him with long ears, legs of
grasshopper slenderness, and goat hoofs, and know him for a treacherous
jungle guide. The Russians call him the Lesiy. He guards their forests,
misleads wanderers, removes boundary stones and sign-posts. It is he
that makes the echo. Shouting and whistling in his domain he cannot
abide. A bearded, shaggy, green-eyed old man, he yet entices girls into
his thickets, whence after a long time they may escape, but with honor
forfeited; and he substitutes his stupid changelings for the children
of men. The same or a like figure is Tapio, “the golden king of the
forest” in Finnish magic songs. Wild animals are his flocks and herds,
his queen is the charcoal wife, the bear is his bastard son, and he
lives in Brushwood Town.
Satyr geography covers a good many countries and centuries and
specifically includes at least one civilized race. It was long the
vulgar belief upon the Continent that Englishmen had tails. This was
first the story that the people of one shire told about another, and
its birthplace was Kent. Kentishmen, according to their neighbors,
were tailed, as a punishment for one or the other of two acts of
sacrilege. Their first offense was committed, says Bailey, when they
were still pagans. They abused “Austin the monk and his associates, by
beating them and opprobriously tying fish tails to their backsides; in
revenge of which such appendants grew to the hind parts of all that
generation.” The second offense was against Thomas À Becket when it was
noised abroad that he was out of favor with Henry II. The inhabitants
of Strood cut off the tail of his horse, and by the will of God, says
Polydore Vergil, “all their offspring were born with tails like brute
animals”; not until their race was extinct did tailed men pass from
Kent.
Pliny numbers among the nations of India “men born with long hairy
tails, and of remarkable swiftness of foot. In Indo-China, southwest
of Yunnan, were the Tailed Pu mentioned in the _Sung Geography_. Ma
Tuan-Lin allows them tails from three to four inches long and classes
them among anthropophagi who eat their aged relatives. The Yao, a
subtribe of the Miaotze, have tails like monkeys, their neighbors say.
They live in leaf lodges or caves in the Lipo district south of the
Nanling range, and access to their habitations is by bamboo ladders.
Yet they are skillful weavers and musicians.
[Illustration: _Men Feared Them, as Embodying the Loneliness of Waste
Places_]
There are numerous reports of tailed tribes in the large islands of
the East. Marco Polo speaks of “a kind of wild men” in Sumatra, in
the kingdom of Lambri, with hairless tails a palm in length. The
_Merveilles de L’Inde_ tells of tailed cannibals on the west coast
of Sumatra, and Galvano has an account of Sumatrans with tails like a
sheep’s. The fifteenth century _History of the Ming Dynasty_ pictures
the Borneo village of Wu-lung-li-tan and its tailed citizens. When
they see other men approaching they flee with their hands over their
faces. The resemblance of the name to orang-utan, or “wild men,” will
not escape notice. Colonel Yule tells of a trader who had examined the
tails of a tribe on the northeast coast of Borneo. These appendages
were long and so stiff that the natives had to use perforated seats;
Arab, Malay, and native travelers report having seen them squatting
on these little stools. John Struys, a Dutch traveler in Formosa, saw
there in 1677 a man with a tail “more than a foot long, covered with
red hair, and very like a cow’s.” The man said the tail was the effect
of climate and all the natives on the southern side of the island had
them.
There were two archipelagoes known as the Satyr Islands. Ptolemy
mentions one of them, and Gerini identifies it with the Northern
Anambas lying off the Indo-Chinese mainland. Hsi-tung, supposed to
be a transcript of Syatan, was their name of old; the resemblance of
Syatan to the Greek Satyron may have led Levantine sailors to make this
jest at the expense of ill-favored little people living then in the
Anamba group. To reach the other archipelago one must steer through
the Pillars of Hercules in company with a Carian sailor of the second
century. Him Pausanias asked what he knew about the satyrs. The Carian
replied that in a voyage to Italy he was driven from his course to
a distant sea whither people no longer sail. Here were many islands
which the crew did not care to touch, and these they called the Satyr
Islands. Their inhabitants were red-haired and had tails not much
smaller than a horse’s.
Many African tribes wore animal tails for ornament, and explorers were
sometimes misled by the custom. The Duir of the northeast attached two
antelope tails to their girdles. The Wa-Kavorondo, east of the Nyanza,
go naked or wear only a waist-cloth, and the women attach to it a tail
of bark. In the same quarter of Africa the Bongo women, with their
large hips and lubricious gait, have had a share in propagating fable,
for they, too, ornament themselves with tails; and as they stride along
they swing these about in conscious emulation of the flocks and herds.
Schweinfurth likens them to “dancing baboons.”
Other African satyr stories do not yield their secret so easily.
The Ba-Kwambas of the northwest, report said, had tails which they
inserted in holes in the ground when they sat down. In his _Travels and
Adventures_ (1861) Doctor Wolf asserted that in Abyssinia were men and
women “with tails like dogs and horses,” some of these so large that
they were able to knock down a horse with them. About the Niam-Niams, a
cannibal people with filed teeth that live in French Equatorial Africa,
legends have multiplied, and these Baring Gould has assembled.
Horneman was the first to describe them as tailed anthropophagi. In
1849 M. Descouret reported that this was the common belief among the
Arabs. In 1851 M. de Castelnau told of a Houssa expedition in which
a band of Niam-Niams was slaughtered to a man. All, including the
women, had hairless tails about fifteen inches long. These people were
otherwise a handsome race, of a deep black, using clubs and javelins
in war, and in peace cultivating rice, maize, and other grains. An
Abyssinian priest, seemingly speaking of the same tribe, told M.
d’Abbadie in 1852 that only the men had tails, and these were covered
with hair and the length of a palm. Doctor Hubsch, physician to the
hospitals of Constantinople, examined in 1852 a tailed negress of the
Niam-Niams who was offered for sale in the slave market. She was black
as ebony, with frizzled hair, bloodshot eyes, large white teeth, and a
smooth, hairless, pointed tail two inches long. Her clothes fidgeted
her, she ate meat raw, and was an avowed cannibal. The slave dealer
said all her tribe was as herself.
In Cuba Columbus heard of a province called Mangou, lying farther west,
and it sounded like Mangi, the rich maritime province of the Grand
Khan. Its inhabitants had tails, and wore garments to conceal them.
Columbus recalled the Maundeville story, related above, of the scorn of
certain naked Asiatics for clothing, and their belief that garments hid
bodily defects. So he pressed onward in the thought that Mangi and the
robed peoples of Tartary lay just below the horizon.
Despite witness from Asia, Africa, and the eastern and western
Indies, there are no tailed races of men. But there have been tailed
individuals. Hottentot women come nearest meeting the requirements of
legend. Without a tail, they yet have a development of the posteriors
that amounts to a natural shelf, on which, as on a pillion, their
infants may ride. The mandril and certain other monkeys living in the
same latitudes show a like enlargement.