Wild Man - Origins

Origins

Figures similar to the European wild man occur worldwide from very early times. The earliest recorded example of the type is the character Enkidu in the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.

The portrayal of Nebuchadnezzar II in the Book of Daniel (2nd century BC) greatly influenced the medieval European concepts. Daniel 4 depicts God humbling the Babylonian king for his boastfulness; stricken mad and ejected from human society, he grows hair on his body and lives like a beast. This image was popular in medieval depictions of Nebuchadnezzar. Similarly, late medieval legends of Saint John Chrysostom (died 407) portray the saint's asceticism as making him so isolated and feral that hunters who capture him cannot tell if he is man or beast.

The medieval wild-man concept also drew on lore about similar beings from the Classical world such as the Roman faun and Silvanus. Several folk traditions about the wild man correspond with ancient practices and beliefs. Notably, peasants in the Grisons tried to capture the wild man by getting him drunk and tying him up in hopes that he would give them his wisdom in exchange for freedom. This suggests a connection to an ancient tradition - recorded as early as Xenophon (died 354 BC) and appearing in the works of Ovid, Pausanias, and Claudius Aelianus - in which shepherds caught a forest being, here called Silenus or Faunus, in the same fashion and for the same purpose.

On top of mythological influences, medieval wild man lore also drew on the learned writings of ancient historians, though likely to a lesser degree. These ancient wild men are naked and sometimes covered in hair, though importantly the texts generally localize them in some faraway land, distinguishing them from the medieval wild man who was thought to exist just at the boundaries of civilization. The first historian to describe such beings, Herodotus (c. 484 BC – c. 425 BC), places them in western Libya alongside the men with no heads and with eyes in their chests and dog-faced creatures. After the appearance of the former Persian court physician Ctesias's writings on India, which recorded Persian beliefs about the subcontinent, and the conquests of Alexander the Great, India became the primary home of fantastic creatures in the Western imagination, and wild men were frequently described as living there. Megasthenes, Seleucus I Nicator's ambassador to Chandragupta Maurya, wrote of two kinds of men to be found in India whom he explicitly describes as wild: first a creature brought to court whose toes faced backwards; second a tribe of forest people who had no mouths and who sustained themselves with smells. Both Quintus Curtius Rufus and Arrian refer to Alexander himself meeting with a tribe of fish-eating savages while on his Indian campaign.