SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part nine

Wildmen, ABSMs, Yeti, Sasquatch et al

There are surely plenty of reasons to see the issues surrounding "Wildmen" as analogous to those involved with the water cryptids. So, maybe, "Bunk", misinterpretation, biology, and faery are the categories of choice.

Well, you know my view of the "bunk theory" BS. There is no way that the vast numbers of reports on this subject by all manner of witnesses can be hoaxers or con artists or fish story tellers. So, to hell with that category and on to the others. 

 Misinterpretations? Sure. Some incidents could be people not realizing how big some rare humans are, and encountering them just at the wrong moment and the wrong environment. And that's saying nothing about the more likely brush with an adult bear. But many interactions are way too close for this.

A more serious alternative hypothesis would involve the genetic abnormalities causing extreme hair growth. If you put this sort of gene into a very tall person, and have that person banned from society after his condition manifested. Like the famous "boys raised by wolves", such a (admittedly rare) combination would make a VERY good Wildman of the Mountains.

 It seems just possible that such a situation could lead to a cultural legend. Thinking WAY outside the box, if the genetic issue was dominant genetically, and not an early killer, a small tribe of hyper hairy humans could multiply. Other genetic clustering has been known to occur
(ex. the large numbers of albinos in a native Panamanian culture in the Darien Province.) 

But this scenario shouldn't also selectively produce giganticism, so we really should look elsewhere. Because of the numbers and the quality of at least some of the reports, the core alternative theories should reduce to "Bio" vs "Paranormal." 

 All people here know that I hold the Ivan Sanderson archives, and that Ivan was, perhaps, the most intensely interested biologist in all things ABSM.  Ivan ALWAYS wanted a biological  answer to these things, NOT a paranormal one. It was he who wrote the classic ABSM book, covering both the Americas and the Asian areas. He gave the paranormal idea essentially no space. 

He covered all the classic evidence (such as the Shipton Yeti print above.) He mapped everything he could. He theorized on the "standard" shapes and structures of the dozens of reports that he had in his files. He chased The Minnesota Iceman hoax all around the country hoping that it was a true carcass.  (That's what Ivan is staring at in the picture two up.) Until Grover Krantz showed up, Ivan was about as scientific about this possibility of these critters being biological as anyone in the world. 

 When I began to get a little serious about looking at ABSM mysteries, Grover Krantz, PhD anthropologist from Washington State University was really getting rolling in terms of analyses of west coast cases. I sat enthralled by his approach (and fired off a few photos like the above when I thought it wouldn't bother anyone listening.) He was offering a rational hypothesis which involved mapping human populations and bigfoot hotspots, structural analysis of certain footprints which showed (he said) things that a footprint hoaxer would not know, and (as he is holding up above) a reconstructed skull of the extinct anthropoid Gigantopithecus, a possible biological candidate for Sasquatch. Krantz' complexity had so many angles going for it, that I took a long step back from my skeptical first impression, and said to myself: this just maybe could be true. 

The first parts of my own forays looked promising. There were plenty of PNW Native American references to such a creature, and some could easily be interpreted as biological.

Irrationally, just shifting the name in my head from Bigfoot to Sasquatch made me feel more seriously about the creature. Dr. Krantz added to the enthusiasm by kindly sending me several cast copies of key cases that he had in his labs.

I would have had a better BBall career if I'd have had that kind of handsize. The hand cast was sort of fun, but the Bossburg Cripple cast was the one that Krantz claimed had structural odd aspects which for him eliminated the hoax hypothesis. What was even more intriguing to me was the casting which was done from such fine particle sand that the cast showed clear signs of "dermoglyphs" (what you and I call fingerprints, or toeprints in this case.) Dermoglyphs on a faked footprint seemed VERY hard to imagine to me. 

I began mapping the classic resources' cases vs the population densities of the northern Rockies and coast. It sort of worked and sort of didn't. At this point things were promising enough to do the work of diving into the Asian versions of the ABSMs. 

 This too seemed good. Above are "A"a page from a very old Chinese "encyclopedia" showing the Hairy Wildman; "B" the famous Shipton ape-like "Yeti" print; and my photo of an alleged hunk of Snowman chest hair handed around to us at a cryptozoology meeting. The persons controlling that sample promised a fairly quick scientific analysis. IF that hair proved unmatchable with known animal hair, we'd be pretty close to certain that Yeti was not only real but textbook biology. 

Things then began to go both right and wrong. 

A puzzling (to me) wrong thing was that the hair sample was either not analyzed or the results never published. I'm sure that not only I but also the entirety of the International Society for Cryptozoology were watching eagerly. ... but silence. 

What went right was the Ivan Sanderson library. In that library was an amazing and very rare resource.

 
I hadn't paid any attention to these things; they were in Russian afterall. Five monographs. I got interested when, buried in the SITU files, there emerged translations of almost all of these --- Ivan couldn't read Russian either, so he had people do this service for him. I didn't know it at the time, but later someone told me that he knew of only three copies. 

They were commentaries and diaries of joint Russian military and scientific explorations across Asia from the Black Sea area to the China borders looking for evidence of the Hairy Wildman. As needs no mention: Quite interesting.

Asian Wildman reports clustered in several areas, but once again, no carcasses. (I can't remember where, but during this same time I read an explorer who had gotten into a closer relationship with a High Lama than other authors that I've read, and this writer-explorer was told a more frank comment. The Yeti, it was said, surely existed, but not as a mere biological beast, but as a spirit which appeared as a sign of spiritual and practical needs. I found this interesting at that moment but was more on the trail of biology at the time.) 

There even seemed to be support (in the Russian volumes) for an "Almas" site/region and maybe supportive of the relict primitive human/neanderthal theory prior to Myra Shackley who more fully expostulated that idea. But hidden in these pages were all manner of references to Wildmen which sounded much more paranormal than biological. I hadn't gotten into that much as yet, but there was a definite tug that way. 

The biological argument requires you to quit just humming a happy tune about single good cases, but to think like a biologist. This Bigfoot you think that you see cannot be a stand-alone Bigfoot. There must be a reproducing population. That means not only "two-by-two" or even "seven-by-seven" as Noah would demand, but probably 60-100 to keep things genetically right. 

.... and if you're looking for "80" huge hairy apes wandering about in your close vicinity, and you're not seeing them nor their remains, it occurred to me that I needed to check my enthusiasm. 

Ultimately people who had a lot more energy and stamina than I, produced all sorts of maps as this. Sasquatch sightings in Washington State. I would have hoped for a lot more clustering. There is some of that, but the map does begin to look as if these wandering biologicals might show up just anywhere. And then there were the "other" sightings.

Hmmmm ..... reproducing populations of gigantic humanoids everywhere in the country which has any water at all? AND a major concentration around Cleveland!!! Well, I jest.... Somewhat. 

I don't have to buy into all those reports which made up that map, and in fact my instinct is to throw 99% away, but even then --- responsible witness reports of something like this occurring practically anywhere? "Biology" ain't in it.

I basically was in a give-it-up mood for several years. Leave it to the experts. The study of Faery has pointed towards another view, but my beginning-to-sway moment began from an unexpected source. There was a guy who was working on my house on a regular basis. I got to know him well. He was a roughneck and always had been. While working one day in the basement near the archives he noticed all the books on the "odd subjects." He wasn't much interested in UFOs, but he picked books on Bigfoot off the shelf. 

He wanted to read some of this, but what he really wanted to do was tell me about his younger life in Oregon. He had grown up in the area of Sweet Home Oregon (I don't know if his father was employed by the lumber companies but that's likely.) They used to take hiking and camping trips into the mountain woods. When my worker was grown and on his own, he and his brother continued this. The brother's main interest was in sampling his illegal pot plantings up there, and my worker admitted that he wasn't objecting at all to that at first. As time went on, my worker decided that the time in the mountains was wasted if all he was doing was smoking marijuana and zoning out, so when they went, his brother would go one way (towards the pot) and he'd go another. 

As these outings proceeded, he felt that there were regular signs of the presence of Bigfoot, and that he had even seen one at a distance. Then came the close encounter. He had prepared the camp in an honorary way with a recumbent dream-catcher at the campground table, plus left a portion of food behind. When he returned, the food was gone (no real mystery) but there in its place was an eagle feather. (Native American cultures consider the Eagle feather a sign of honoring the recipient as a person due respect. My worker didn't know that, but he wondered if the gift-giver was thanking him for respecting the woods.) 

Suddenly there not far away was the Creature Himself. A classic Bigfoot. 

He thought that he was being communicated to somehow, and the respect was mutual. Still, even with this, my worker, a tough-guy male, still held onto the idea that this was some kind of human-like biological creature. 

So I asked him: how did this meeting end? He replied that the creature just turned away and vanished. I asked: Vanished? Or just walked away? He said: well, he just seemed to vanish. 

I looked at him silently for a few seconds. "Vanished? Does that sound like anything biological to you?" He got silent for a moment. It was as if, just then, he realized that he had no "simple" explanation for his experiences. 

... and I realized that I didn't either. 

Maybe we have some unlucky human freaks here and there. Maybe we have the occasional fantasy-prone bad witness. Maybe Myra Shackley is right and there is a relict population of neanderthals in central Asia. 

But what of all the others? What of the unfindables? What off the vanishers? Who do we know that acts like that? Either the mass of this is some huge social phenomenon or ... you know what. 

I'm really trying to finish this folks. But there's still a little left to do. Then we can all go on to the rest of our normal lives.

A Dark Side to the Disappearance of the Asian Wildman??

Once upon a time in Tibet....

sometime in the 17th century, a Tibetan lama was painting a large wall-hanging Tamka/Tangka [spell it as it pleases you; I've seen it several ways] for meditation within a temple space. Its central figure was probably Padmasambhava, and arrayed about the edges were squares within which other deity-like figures were represented. One, our revered lady above, was Green Tara.

Something happened to that temple. It may have been destroyed or abandoned during the 20th century encroachment of the Chinese, or it may have ceased to exist earlier. The wall-hanging meditation paintings made their way into Nepal. There, the caretakers of the paintings decided that they had no further use for them, and sold them to a westerner. For whatever reason, he simply stored them away ... badly.

After the Viet Nam war, two dishonorably-discharged survivors of that war hung on in south Asia, migrating into Nepal. They turned into "modern-style" Buddhists --- with the shallow mantras of the new agers layered over what were basically good hearts. Desperate to "make a living", the Wisconsin native returned to the USA to set up an Oriental Curio shop, while the friend stayed in Nepal as the acquirer.

There he discovered the 17th century paintings rotting away unseen for many years. Mostly they were tragically unsalvageable. Sometimes along the edges, vignettes were just still "alive". So our Green Tara was cut from the remainder of the decay, and sent on. She was damaged, but unbowed.

Then one day in the 1970s, a young man from Milwaukee and a young man from Kalamazoo decided to meet halfway in Chicago to exchange money for treasure. The ex-Catholic Buddhist and the Irish-Catholic boy from Michigan both thought it somewhat of a hoot that the meeting was in the lower level of St. Patrick's Cathedral. They were sure that the Spiritual World was smiling.

The Milwaukeean brought a dorje, a phorba, a butter-burnt skullcap, a thighbone trumpet, and other wonders in his sack. In his hand was the rolled cloth of Green Tara. ... and so she came to Michigan.

... and what does this have to do with the Central Asian Wildmen? For me at least it had a lot to do with the issue, and this is withering away now that I'm reading the Russian documents. Tara, for me, personified the sort of Buddhist insight that I felt was Buddhism greatest contribution to world culture: the holding sacred of life in all its forms, and all its relationships. Tara is the life-protecter, the healer, the enlightener of Nature. She imprinted upon my mind the idea that in this Buddhist world, advanced living things would not be deliberately killed. Thus, it seemed to me, any almas, yeti, gul-biavan would stand an exceptional chance at remaining.

The Russian documents tell me that this is nearly completely wrong.

I was reading along in monograph #3 of the Russian Committee, generally enjoying the text although its evidence wasn't inspiring at the moment, when I ran into a depressing run of pages. The content focussed on Tibetan Medicine.

I'd heard about Tibetan Medicine, of course, and how it was split between two "schools" of medical knowledge: healing medicine and killing or "political" medicine. For some reason I had never put this together with my view of the peaceful, life-affirming higher Buddhist ideals. I guess it was because, try as one might, it DOESN'T fit well together. In these pages of the Committee materials, it became obvious that not only was "political" medicine disjunctive with Green Tara's higher ideals [though one can always rationalize War as a sort of re-harmonizing], but even curative medicine was no innocent lamb. In short, the pages talked of using the Wildman as fodder for a certain medical recipe of great monetary worth. ... oh great.

The Text talked of the production of "Mumen" or Moomuyam", and it's necessary ingredient: the boiling down of a "Red Man", or an Akvan.

Well, naive me. I've regularly cursed traditional oriental medicine for aiding in the extinction of many of the Lord's finest creations in Asia, but to extend this to the Central Asian Wildmen still took me by surprise.

After a series of near-ridiculous folk stories about Wildmen, which they said were referred to as "Khivan" or "Akvan", the following quote appeared:

"The Hindu gypsies, Lule, used to be in close communication with the Snow Man, because of that famous medicine, Mume, which was in great demand in the center of Asia, and only Indian rajahs nabobs could afford the price of it. The gypsies, who before the revolution were wandering to the south of middle Asia, used to talk about the Snow Man, but, like the Kurgiis {Kirghiz?}, they don't consider him a supernatural creature."

Then after a few sentences about how some regions view the Snow Man as a spirit and others an animal [the name Khivan allegedly meant animal, but to me this might be a prejudice as there are people named Khivans in bordering areas --- Akvan however is universally a spirit demon], the text turned back to the "medicine".

"The neighborhood around Khakim on the river Karakahl in the Gap of the Duwakh Gara [the Russian transcriber of the original audiotapes was having a losing battle with the names therein], is pointed out as one where there are many Gevs [another name for wild men], and there is an abundance of material for the Mumer. "

That "testimony" ended to be followed by separate things retelling experiences of finding footprints on high mountain glacial snow. These were somewhat interesting even though direct contact was not involved --- I may get to them in a later post. It would have been nice if this was all there was about Mumer, as I wouldn't have even focussed on it at all. But more "testimony" came in from Uzbekistan and the town of Sergan.

In this a man spoke of his father who was very interested in the medicines of central Asia. About Mumer he said:

"This medicine was supposedly effective in all kinds of sicknesses and diseases. I might say that in 1912, one little grain of this mysterious potion was almost one ruble in gold, ... this was certainly a very expensive medicine. ...

"This Mumer was peddled around by the Luli or the Asiatic gypsies.  {He then listed several authorities on these claims}. There was a rumor that this potion was procured by the cooking or boiling of a live red man {an Orang-utan?}, but my father had obtained information that this was procured by boiling a red Khivan, or Akvan, otherwise a Snow Man.

[referring then to another book entitled "The Riddles and Demons of Tibet", he went on]:
" On page 344 there is mention of using the blood of Mi-Ge --- that is the Wild Man. By the way, the word Mumeneghe in Kajick [kazhjik] means 'wax from Mi-Ge' and out of this originated, of course, the word that was used before 'Mumer', because it is closer to the Turkoman or Oursbak, or Kirghiz languages. The hypothesis on the origin of Mumer from Mi-Ge throws a light on a whole series of circumstances."

The correspondent then went on to identify an iron-smelting region where once abundant "Akvan" lived. He hypothesized that these smelters produced Mumer on the side as "it was quite a profitable occupation, because each Akvan, when boiled down could produce enough material for some 5000 rubles profit."

Well...Yuk.

The above is a Persian area rendition of an Akvan, portrayed in Persian legend as a demon spiritual being of unfriendly type. Our Wild Man doesn't fit the behavior nor the appearance. But Mi-Ge DOES fit the general concept of an awesome mysterious being. The "Akvan" word could easily have been ported over into central Asia and assigned to Mi-Ge, Yeti, Gul-Biavan, Almas there in some areas.

So what's Mumen anyway? Modern western "Tibetan" medicine persons either feign ignorance or give an obviously wrong answer. The line that they take is that this was a medicine based upon minerals [sorry, that doesn't fit anything], and they base this on the fact that a word "mumen" is a word for {probably, even this isn't certain} Lapis Lazuli. They therefore tinker together several mineral powders including Lapis Lazuli and sell it to you as Mumer/Mumen, the all-curing medicine.

"Mumen" in modern Tibetan means at least two different things: Lapis Lazuli and a Tibetan rodent. Who knows what else it may mean. Tibetan medicine is, as it turns out, rife with the use of body parts of top-of-the-food-pyramid animals. Bears, big cats, yak, even elephant are a few. Using Mi-Ge as part of these potions would certainly fit the culture. I am intrigued by the name of one medicine: "Mig-sMan". It is a potion using Musk and Bear's Bile among other things. Mi-Ge and Mig-sMan ... just a vibe. It is for eye problems. Older thoughts said the Mumen was especially good for ailments of the stomach.

All of this is pretty disgusting to me. The possibility that we enlightened humans could have not merely pressed the Asian Wildman out of existence, but consciously hunted it down for potions, puts me in a bad space where Green Tara's soothing dharmic vibrations are particularly welcome. Along with the minimal research that I did, I found [further destroying my idealism] that although there are proscriptions against killing [especially] wild animals, IF the monasteries really feel that they need such substances for whatever use, there are means of obtaining them.

Literally, "is nothing sacred?"

Sorry to put us through that. Maybe it's important in understanding. Here are some of Mom's doodles of joyful birds to make us all happier.

Peace.