Here follows selected extracts form David Gordon White's 'Myths of the
Dog Man' (University of Chicago Press), which is an attempt to locate
the origin of cynocephalism myths (Dog headed or Dog faced races). What
follows in his hypothesis is a contention that myths of the Amazons and
the Cynocephali derive from the same source - and furthermore relates
this race to 'caste-mixing'. It is noteworthy that he even designates a
geographical location to these peoples.
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'Following Adam of Bremen, the theme of male Cyncophali cohabiting with
Amazon women would become a constant in the medieval geography and
cartography of northern Europeans [...] Adam's amazing account, which
brings together nearly all of the Western lore of the Cynocephali into a
single confused mass, is innovative inasmuch as it suggests that the
male offspring of the gynecocratic Amazons were the Cynocephali'. P61
'The myths of the Visvamitra cycle constitute one explanation for the
origins and existence of the fallen or exiled races of Dog-Cookers on
the periphery of society and the borderline of human categories. There
is, however, an alternative explanation, one that is found in both the
didactic epic and the lawbooks of the beginning of the Common Era. This
is the ideology of damnation through miscegenation, or more properly,
through the mixing of castes (varnasamkara), the blurring of categories
in its most extreme form. [...]"From the sudra spring, in the inverse
order, three low-born sons: the Ayogava, the Ksattr, and the Candala,
the lowest of men...One born from a Ksattr man and an Ugra woman is
called a Svapaka(Dog-cooker or Suckled by Dogs). [...] The Mahabharata
also offers various alternative cycles of rebirths into which high-caste
persons may fall through evil acts. If the individual falls into an
animal level of existence, the dog is generally his last sub-human
incarnation, or the Svapaca his first human incarnation.' P87
'Tibet and Afghanistan are precisely the two regions in which medieval
Indian sources located their Dog-Men and Kingdoms of Women, both of
which seem to identify, as we will show, with the Hunas, the Ephalite
Huns. These two "Indian" locations are, moreover, seconded by both
Wsteern and Chinese sources. Varahamihira is the most systematic Indian
source on this subject: in Brhat Samhita 14.21-27, he locates the
Kingdom of Women (Strirajya) to the west, the Parathas and Sakas to the
Northwest, and the Hunas and Svamukhas to the north of India. This last
people, whose name means the "Dog-Faces" or "Dog-Heads", is one of the
rare Indian references to a race of cynocephalic men [...] It is
intriguing to find in t he Indian material - as we have in the European
context - a textual (if not geographical) juxtaposition of Dog-Headed
Men with both a Kingdom of Women (called the Amazons in the West) and
with the Parthians, Indo-Scythians, and Huns [...] furthermore, all five
were brought together in the lists of inclusi that continued the
traditions of Psuedo-Callisthenes and Pseudo-Methodius. In these
sources, these peoples are walled outside of the oikoumene because of
their cannibalism, abominable eating habits, and unspeakable impurity.
This last element has a foreign ring to it in the Western texts; yet it
fits very well with the Indian ideology of the outcaste or foreigner as
impure pariah.' 119
'Here, we would do well to review such identification, one we introduced
provisionally in chapter 6, that central Asia was the point of
intersection of Western, Indian, and Chinese accounts of Dog-Men, Amazon
women, and other barbarian races. We intimated a connection between the
works of Pseudo-Methodious and other Western sources, which posited a
fare eastern location of their Amazons, Cynocephali and other inclusi;
of Indian accounts of northern Dog-faces, the Kingdom of Women, and the
polyandrous Ephthalite Huns; and of Chinese reports of Amazons and
Dog-Men beyond its western borders. A closer look at these accounts
however reveals that many of these correspondences are the fruit of
creative geography on the part of our ancient and medieval sources, of
attempts to force a variety of geographical locations into a single
Asain mold.' 183
'This would correspond to a location somewhere in the region of the
Hindu Kush, the central Asian region where Alexander's historians,
Arrian and Quintius Curtius Rufus, tell us that Alexander turned his
back in his conquest of the world. It was here that, in the high peaks
on the eastern edge of the world, his men refused to advance any
further. This would correspond, approximately to Indian locations of the
Svamukhas, the Kingdom of Women, and the Hunas. Furthermore, it is in
this broad region of "Southern Turkestan" that we find the greatest
number of Turko-Mongol peoples with a dog ancestry myth.' 184
'It is only by accepting such geographical tampering - which, when the
Caspian is made to be a great arm of the northern sea, would reduce the
Asian land mass by half - that it is possible to maintain our contention
that central Asia was the vortex of all myths of cynocephali. Here, we
are perhaps better served by the term "Turkestan", as employed by
McGovern, for the world region in which Dog-Men, Amazons, and their
barbarian, cannibalistic brethren would have been located. In doing so,
however, we give up any claims we may have made in pinpointing the
original locus of traditions of cynocephali: Turkestan, the lands of the
nomadic Turk-Mongols, covers most of Asia north of 30 degrees latitude
and east of 40 degrees longitude, from Turkey to Siberia, and from the
Baltic Sea to Western China!' 185