Myths of the Dog-Man.

• Author: Lorenzen, David N.

David Gordon White's study of the myths of the dog-man is entertaining and has a serious purpose. The methodology he employs is a modern adaptation of the encyclopedic comparison associated with Sir James Frazer, as White explicitly acknowledges (p. 16). White's overarching theme is the nature of Otherness, as Wendy Doniger notes in her short introductory forward. According to White, there is a virtually universal human tendency to describe the otherness of the "barbarians" beyond the geographical pale of the known universe through the prism of the monstrous. The barbarians of mysterious and faraway regions become, willy-nilly, semi-human monsters whose otherness helps to define the identity of "civilized" humanity.

The more specific problem that White attempts to answer is why three major civilizations - the Chinese, the European, and the Indian - so often identified this barbarian other with a cynocephalic dog-man. He finds a tentative answer in the historical existence of various peoples of Central Asia who traced their ancestry from a mythic mating of a male dog and a female human. This central argument serves as a hook on which to hang lively discussions of a multitude of recondite topics such as, "Abominable Meets the Apostles," "Christopher the Cynocephalic Saint," "Cynocephalic at the World's Confines." "Visvamitra and the Dog-Cookers," "Chinese Historiography of Central Asian Peoples," "The Hou Han Shu Myth of P'an-Hu," Confucian and Taoist concepts of chaos, and the...