#cynocephali

Redraw of a carving of Saint Christopher on a 7th century stele.

Maybe pawpaw is the weird cynocephali that lives in abandoned church in the mountains.

Carl is a cynocephali from Germany that immigrated to the US in the mid 1700s & went from New York, to Pennsylvania then Ohio then settled in western Virginia & lived long enough to see it become West Virginia.

Alright!

First of all, all the creatures you see in bestiaries? Nobody was going out there and seeing things and coming back with stories. These were all the result of faithfully copying the inerrant truth of Greek and Roman authors. This led to snowballing errors and details accumulating. So no medieval explorers being racist here, just later authors copying previous works. We'll get back to that.

For that matter, cynocephali wouldn't have been something that the average medieval person would have heard of. They originated not in folk belief, but in Classical literature.

(Pictured: a cynocephalus from Schedel's Das Buch der Croniken und Geschichten).

One last thing is that myth/legend/folklore does not operate by Monster Manual rules. The same name could be applied to very different creatures, and could have different meanings, as we shall soon find out. That said, there is no evidence that cynocephali were ever assumed to be shapeshifters in any way.

No matter what Wikipedia might tell you, a lot of references to a cynocephalus (kynokephalos, kunokephalos) are unquestionably descriptions of baboons. When Aristotle says that the cynocephalus is bigger than a pithekos and has more dog-like teeth, that's a baboon. Aelian points out that they hunt gazelles, cannot speak but squeal instead, have beards like those of dragons, and have hairy bodies. Pliny says that the Menismini live on the milk of cynocephali; elsewhere we are told that they are the most aggressive types of monkeys. The Egyptians were said to venerate cynocephali, and indeed the baboon does feature in Egyptian mythology.

(Pictured: a unicorn-horned (???) cynocephalus from the Liber de Natura Rerum).

But then there are versions of the story where the cynocephali seem to be almost human, like Ctesias' account which is actually older than the previous ones (I have a lot to say about Ctesias but this is not the time). Ctesias mentions that there are dog-headed men who wear animal skins and live in the Indian mountains, in a tribe of 120,000. They are considered to be very just (Ctesias had a thing for Indians being just) and can communicate with the Indians by a combination of barks and sign language. They eat raw meat. They raise animals, use bows and arrows, and trade the fruit they harvest. Here we have what seems to be an account of a human population, but it's hard to say whether this is racism on Ctesias' part, racism on his informants' part, honest confusion, or just the effect of the telephone game at work. For all we know it was inspired by art of dog-headed people (see also griffins). For all we know this could have been a description of baboons too, greatly embellished and distorted with the retelling.

Either way, it is this intelligent portrayal that became a fixture of the "bizarre exotic races" of later authors.

References

Ctesias, McCrindle, J. W. trans. (1882) Ancient India as described by Ktesias the Knidian. Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta; B. E. S. Press, Bombay; Trubner and Co., London.

Kitchell, K. F. (2014) Animals in the Ancient World from A to Z. Routledge, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon.

WOLVES IN THE TRENCHES