MUFON – the “oldest and largest civilian UFO-investigative organization in the United States” – kindly gave me permission to include these great 1977-‘79 flyer designs in my art book Worlds Beyond Time.
My favorite is the 1978 flyer, because it elegantly illustrates the four different kinds of close encounter: Visual sighting, physical evidence, encountering an entity, and abduction. Just very cool design!
had the same nightmare again. the one where im a grape and im being bottled up, with all my other grape brothers. left for months to ferment. becoming cheap wine. drank by charlatans. cork taint, bottle rot, you name it.
the worst part, and the part i understand the least- is when im finally unbottled, im red. but im being served with dishes that demand a white wine. fish, protein heavy salads, you name it. its driving me insane. i dont want to be cheap wine.
i’ve never heard of them before and i don’t remember seeing anything like that, but i’ll keep an eye out for them. i’m not an expert though. maybe some professional art historians/medievalists etc know more?
for context (from the wikipedia article on iranian folklore): “Himantopodes (davālpā): an evil creature that uses its flexible, leather-like legs as tentacles to grip and capture human beings. The captives will be enslaved and forced to carry the creature until they die of fatigue.”
Thanks! Weird, they go all the way back to Pliny, who mentions them along with satyrs and blemmyes, so it’s odd that they never caught on.
The Himantopodes are people with feet like leather thongs, whose nature it is to crawl instead of walking.
I guess that’s just not as photogenic?
They did catch on but only in Middle Eastern writing where they became the davalpa or dawal-bay, best remembered today as the Old Man of the Sea encountered by Sinbad. Here’s what they look like in an edition of al-Qazwini.
At least one source claims they’re a misremembered, monsterized memory of a type of Persian soldier.
This is driving me crazy because i’m 100% sure i saw a European image of one of these guys — but it was not nearly as interesting, it just looked like a person whose feet were shaped like snakes.
I do think that’s why they didn’t catch on in medieval Europe, though: i’ve never seen the “they use their feet like tentacles & grab people” aspect before. That’s what makes them engaging.
The version from Pliny quoted above, which to my knowledge never got significantly expanded on in the European tradition, doesn’t exactly fire the imagination. Especially since there are two ways to interpret it — or, at least, I’ve seen it translated in two different ways. Either:
The feet operate like snakes, so they “crawl” in that sense.
Or:
The feet don’t work properly at all, so they have to crawl instead of walk.
The first is at least a nifty image, though there’s not much else to do with it. The second… that’s just a guy with a disability. Nothing interesting or “exotic” there; why would you get excited about a dude whose feet don’t work? There’s a guy whose feet don’t work in the next fief over, and we’re not putting him in the bestiary.
The latter reading seems to have stuck. The only image of a Himantopod I was able to find on short notice is this one. (Sorry for quality; I’m taking a photo of a book page because I can’t find a better version of the image.)
Picture is from John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Note that the Himantopod has fairly typical-looking feet. The only way they’ve been visually identified is by giving them a cane. (Maybe the long hair is part of it? Not sure.)
So yeah, I think this is why the Himantopodes ended up being popular in the Middle Eastern tradition but not the European one: the former came up with a cool innovation that made them interesting, while the latter just kind of went, “these people have messed-up feet? sad! well, there’s other monstrous races.”
I think I heard they showed up in the Alexander Romance, but I’ve spent enough time on this post. Maybe I’ll look into that later.
They are mentioned in the Alexander Romance apparently, and also seem to be on the Hereford Mappa Mundi??
GOTTEM
The Syriac Alexander Romance mentions:
I lay down to sleep there and in the night saw red scorpions, horned snakes, lions, rhinoceroses, wild boars, wolves, leopards, panthers, beasts with scorpions’ tails, elephants, and men with twisted legs and teeth like dogs and faces like women.
And we departed thence and arrived at the country of the people whose feet are twisted ; and when they saw us, they began to throw stones, and they threw accurately and aimed at us. When I saw that they slew some of my troops, I ran at them alone with my sword drawn, and by great good luck I stabbed the chief of those people with twisted feet. The rest were afraid, and ran away, and hid themselves under the rocks in various places ; and there were some among them with asses’ legs.
Himantopods – exerting fluid [movement] of the legs – crawl rather than walk [upright], and aim to move forward making use of gliding rather than stepping.
@cuties-in-codices @maniculum
Update: Found the source of the image I shared earlier – it’s from a bestiary, specifically MS Ludwig XV 4 at the Getty Museum. (Friedman cited it as “Sion College bestiary”, which is maybe its previous home?) The original has a caption that’s pretty much identical to the first half of the bit from the Hereford mappa mundi quoted above.
This is part of a grid of four images of various “monstrous races” – the others are a dog-headed man (erroneously labelled “cinomologi” rather than “cynocephali”; a “cinnamolgus” is a type of legendary bird also mentioned in Pliny, and a scribe probably got the words confused), a cannibal (or “anthropophagus”), and then the fellow on the bottom right who struck me as looking a lot like the Himantopode from the Hereford map. However, he is labeled “Artabatite”.
Incidentally, googling “Artabatite” just gets you this picture. I checked Friedman, mentioned in my previous post, to see if he had a different spelling – he used “Artibatirae”. Googling that just gets you Friedman (and Castlevania, for some reason). This spelling issue meant it took me nearly half an hour to find the relevant passage in Pliny:
…the Artabatitæ, who have four feet, and wander about after the manner of will beasts…
I’m assuming this is a typo on the part of the transcriber and it is meant to say “wild” beasts.
Anyway, I suspect these two got mixed together by the Hereford mapper, as they’re pretty similar in concept: people who do not walk bipedally. The Himantopodes do so because their feet don’t work properly, whereas the Artabatitae either just kind of… do, as implied in the image, or they literally have a second set of feet instead of hands, if you go with Pliny’s text.
Still can’t find the image of a Himantopod I could have sworn I saw a while back. Seriously, if anyone else can turn it up, it’s driving me up a wall.
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