american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 169pher and others, those who were incapable of being converted-must beconsidered beyond the most charitable definition of personhood.Gradually, during the later Middle Ages, interest in the great variety ofmonstrous races that Pliny and others laboriously had described began tofade. Concern increasingly focused on a single example of the type-thesylvestres homines, or wild man. As Richard Bernheimer, in the classicstudy of the subject, describes the wild man, it is a hairy creaturecuriously compounded of human and animal traits, without, however, sinkingto the level of an ape. It exhibits upon its naked human anatomy agrowth of fur, leaving bare only its face, feet, and hands, at times its kneesand elbows, or the breasts of the female of the species. Frequently the creatureis shown wielding a heavy club or mace, or the trunk of a tree; and,since its body is usually naked except for a shaggy covering, it may hide itsnudity under a strand of twisted foliage worn around the loins. 63Hidden or not, however, the loins of the wild man and his female companionwere of abiding interest to Christian Europeans. For, in direct oppositionto ascetic Christian ideals, wild people were seen as voraciouslysexual creatures, some of them, in Hayden White's phrase, "little morethan ambulatory genitalia." Adds historian Jeffrey Russell: "The wild man,both brutal and erotic, was a perfect projection of the repressed libidinousimpulses of medieval man. His counterpart, the wild woman, who was amurderess, child-eater, bloodsucker and occasionally a sex nymph, was aprototype of the witch." 64Wild men, like the other representatives of the earth's monstrous races,had inhabited the Near 'Eastern and Western imaginations for millennia.So too had the wild man's adversary, the heroic human adventurer. Andfrom at least the time of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, with its numerousparallels in Old Testament ideas, one recurring characteristic of the wildman's brave antagonist was his avoidance of, and even flight from, sexualityand the world of women. In the Gilgamesh legend, for examplewhichwas composed in about 2000 B.C. from tales that are older stillthefirst wild man encountered is Enkidu. Possessed of "titanic strength,"Enkidu's "whole body is covered with hair; the hair of his head is longlike that of a woman. . . . With the game of the field he ranges at largeover the steppe, eats grass and drinks water from the dripking-places ofthe open country, and delights in the company of animals." 65 In time Enkiduacknowledges Gilgamesh, the story's hero, as his superior, but onlyafter Gilgamesh has had Enkidu brought down by the wiles and seductionsof a courtesan.With Enkidu now in tow-indeed, having almost merged into a secondself-Gilgamesh next encounters another wild man, a terrifying, forest-