Transcript
A (0:00)
This episode is sponsored by Grey Toad Tallow, pure and natural nourishment for all skin types. Tonight we use more racially insensitive accents and we explore the connection between isolation and men becoming like unto the beasts. There is the story of Italy. Rome in all her triumphs. The mother wolf stretched out in the green grotto of Mars. Twin boys at her dogs, who hung their frisky suckling without a fear, as she, with her lithe neck bent back, stroking in each turn, licked her wolf pups into shape with a mother's tongue. Virgil's Aeneid Book 8, lines 742. 747. If you haven't heard the story of Rome's founding myth, let me enlighten you. The story goes that Mars, the God of war, visited one of the virgin attendants of his temple, whose name was Rhea Silvia. The two conceived and Rhea bore twin boys whom she named Romulus and Remus. They were born in Alba Longa under the reign of the ancient king Numitor. This king, seeing their divine parentage, was threatened by the boys and ordered they be exposed on the banks of the river Tiber. This was done, and Rhea resigned herself to their deaths. But the boys did not die. Instead, a she wolf found the twins and moved to pity, nursed them until they were fully weaned. Born of the God of war, raised by a wolf in the wild and brought through adolescence by a shepherd outside the city walls. Romulus and Remus, but especially Romulus, went on to settle the seven hills of Rome. Their legendary story is immortalized in innumerable carvings and statues which depict the twin infants suckling at the wolf's breast. Mythic, indeed. Or is it?
B (2:19)
Maybe not?
A (2:21)
What if I told you that stories like this, stories purporting to be true stories show up elsewhere in the str tale of mankind's battle with the wilds. Welcome to this episode of Haunted Cosmos. It's going to be a. Let's just say, strange one. In the 1300s, the German region of Hesse was troubled by strange tidings from its forested hills. In 1304, a farmer was walking the perimeter of his field early in the morning, well before dawn. In the dim blue light, he was slow to notice a pack of wolves resting in the woods nearby. By chance, he stepped on a dry branch that cracked sharply beneath his weight, startling the wolves awake. With startled yelps, they burst from COVID scattering across the field's edge. Yet among them, the farmer saw something that struck him with horror and awe. At first, he thought it was a mangy, bald wolf. But as the creature bounded into the open, his eyes adjusted and certainty replaced doubt. It was no wolf at all, but a boy running with the pack. A human child. He told his neighbors of this bizarre sight, and soon the whole village was set on watch. Only days later, a hunting party discovered the boy in a cave, sheltered by the wolves as though he were one of their own. When the men drew near, the animals closed ranks around him, snarling in his defense. The boy himself shrank back in fear of his would be rescuers. But when torches were lit, the wolves retreated. The child tried to escape with them, yet he was slower than his companions and was quickly caught. The hunters handled him gently, taking pains to keep him calm. They offered food, which he refused. They tried to mount him on a horse, but he couldn't ride, choosing instead to trot on all fours beside them. Only water would he accept, and that gratefully speech, of course, was totally beyond him. He was taken to the bishop and taught to live as a man, though the process was agonizingly slow. His lifelong habit was to walk and run like a dog. Though clumsy as a wolf, he still outran many grown men and could leap remarkable distances in a single bound. His manners were doglike as well. He groomed himself as canines do, and loathed clothing, refusing it for many months. With time, however, he learned. Painful leg stints forced him upright, and though they tormented him for years, they trained him to stand and walk. He learned to speak and eventually grew into a relatively well adjusted man of the region. As an adult, he often recounted his life with the wolves. He remembered nothing before then, believing his family had abandoned him young, his earliest memories were of she wolves warming him through cold nights, and of males sharing their kills, from which he learned to feed. He spoke of a pit dug in the Pax burrow where he rested when they traveled. Though he lived as a man, he confessed he often missed his wolf family and sometimes longed to run back to them. Yet fear restrained him. Fear that they would not know him, and the grim knowledge that his pack was almost assuredly long dead. The folklorist J.H. hutton records a similar tale from 1341. In this account, a boy between 7 and 12 years old was found by the Kingsguard in the company of wolves. Like the earlier child, he was brought before the landgrave, Prince Heinrich, and set to tutoring that he might relearn humanity. Yet this effort fared poorly. He hid beneath benches, snarled and snapped at his caretakers, and refused all food. Again and again he attempted desperate escapes, once leaping clear over the estate's wall in a single bound. At last he seemed to relent and tried common food, but his body rejected it. Within months he grew ill and died. In a final turn of lupine strangeness, a third boy, already 12 years old, was found in 1344 by noblemen on holiday. He was discovered in a wolf's den, though little else is known of his state being found or of his adjustment afterward. What is known, however, is that this boy survived into manhood and lived to the remarkable age of 80. Far from mere curiosities, mere tales that raise questions about how many feral people may be hidden in the wilderness of the world, these stories also press us toward more transcendent concerns. They compel us to ask what it means to be human, to belong to the fellowship of mankind, and whether the unseen essence of man might be lost through habitual neglect or disuse. On one side stand the enlightened and purely secular thinkers, men like Rousseau, men who argue for the noble savage, a vision of nature as unfallen, and who believe that, unmoored from the legalism of man, the world might yield an Edenic golden age of men like the beasts. From this vantage, the supposed rescuers in the Hessian stories were in truth, kidnappers, cruel tyrants who tore these boys from a life of ignorant bliss in the blessed entropy of nature, only to bind them with cursed chains like society, social norms, and moral law. Opposed to this, however, is the clear message of Scripture that the ground has been cursed with man, that his condition is one of discord and sin, no matter his upbringing, and that to be cut off from mankind, to live among beasts in the wild, is itself a curse to be avoided at all costs. Daniel 4:28:37. And yet the question what do we make of this phenomenon, however rare? What should we perceive when faced with a human who appears inhuman? What visible qualities mark a person as truly a person? You might say that one of them is community. Humans are made to dwell with other people. Before sin entered the world, God said, it is not good that the man should be alone. Of course he said this before instituting the first marriage. But isn't marriage the microcosm of all community? Without marriages and without the children they bring forth, humanity quickly withers away and dies. So what happens when life is marked by community's antithesis? Very little that is good. Isolation is as mysterious as it is pervasive. Whether it comes by accident, beyond one's control, or by deliberate choice, it always unfolds into Drama of some kind. Perhaps it is the melancholy man who drives others away until he no longer even recognizes himself. Perhaps it is the free spirited woman who ventures alone to find herself while hiking across Europe, only to discover truths in her heart she would rather not face. Perhaps it is the prisoner locked in solitary confinement. Guilty or innocent, Whatever the case, the result is nearly always the same. The isolated person is diminished. And so the word is, it is not good that a man should be alone. Why else would solitary confinement endure as punishment? But since we live in a world infected by sin, we must reckon with what I will call, for lack of a better phrase, exceptions to the rule. What if someone flees into loneliness to escape a threat? What if they are forced into isolation effectively against their will? As we shall see, even when the reasons for hiding may be pitiable or justified, the result remains. Isolation diminishes the one who suffers it. In other words, to withdraw from the world while still living in it, no matter the reasons, ought never to be the aspiration of the human heart. Isolation for its own sake is a fool's game. Isolation as a last resort is a victim's game. Isolation by abandonment or punishment is among the cruelest games of all. Yet even with this knowledge, the question persists. What are we to do about it? In late spring of 1920, a group of villagers in West Bengal, India, were scouring the jungle for felled trees. In time, they entered a section of forest far more open than what they had searched in the days before. There was no deadfall. A quick survey of the relatively clear ground made that obvious. But there was something else of interest to behold. Termite mounds. These structures, built from termite saliva and dung, can stretch nearly 100ft in diameter and rise to heights of 12 or even 15ft above ground. Now, the villagers of Bengal were no strangers to a mound or two. What made this patch of jungle remarkable were two things. First, the sheer number of mounds clustered together. And then second, the strange emptiness of them. Even upon close inspection, they confirmed it was no thriving termite community. It was more like a termite graveyard, or at the very least, a ghost town, abandoned by its tiny architects. As the men wandered among the earthen towers, one picked up a stone and hurled it at the base of a mound. The rock shattered part of the fragile structure, leaving a small hole. Curious, the man stepped closer to peer inside. But halfway there, he froze. Eyes were staring out at him. He faltered, stunned at how any animal, whatever it might be, had gotten inside. Stranger still, the eyes kept peeking back at him, appearing, retreating and Appearing again. And then he noticed something even more unsettling. The eyes looked alarmingly human. They could not possibly be human, and yet they looked that way. Just then, another villager called to him. Glancing over, he saw the others had moved on, continuing their hunt for timber. When he looked back at the mound, the eyes were gone. He hurried to rejoin the group, trying to shake off what he had seen. But later that day, he told the others, the image of those uncanny eyes gnawed away at him, and he insisted they must return to find out what lurked inside of that mound. But his comrades dismissed him at once. If he truly had seen eyes, they said, they must belong to some dangerous beast. Or worse, to a malevolent spirit haunting the jungle, tempting him to his death. But the man couldn't let it go. He tried to put the matter aside, but his curiosity only grew sharper with each passing day. At last, after days of brooding, he raised the subject again. The initial response was the let sleeping dogs lie and don't upset the spirits. But this time, he really argued his case. Exactly what he said is lost to history, much like the man's name. But whatever his words, they eventually persuaded 16 of his neighbors to join him. It had taken hours of talk around the fire, for apart from the threat of predator or spirit, there was also the practical matter. No one wished to lose a day's work indulging in one man's obsession. Yet his persistence won out, and at dawn the next morning, 17 men returned to the abandoned mounds. The man pointed out the hole he had made days before, and together they set to work with shovels. None dared break in directly at the exposed base. What if something dangerous actually went was lying in wait? Instead, they spent hours digging around the mound's perimeter until at last, they were ready to break in its far underground edge. The man swung his shovel into the soil, breaking open a tunnel just wide enough for a youth to crawl through. But before the dust even settled, chaos erupted. Two wolves burst from the mound. The first, a male, bolted into the trees and vanished. He was never seen again. The second, a female, snarled fiercely, planting herself at the entrance to guard the home that they had violated. The men backed away. Shovels raised. Some urged retreat. Others, remembering the man's claim that the eyes were not dog's eyes, burned with curiosity themselves. So while several kept wary watch over the she wolf, a few sprinted back to the village for bows and arrows. When they return, they dispatched the wolf quickly and dragged her body aside. The way was now clear. The man widened the tunnel and Stooped to crawl inside. What he saw made his blood run cold. Huddled in the shadows of the mound were two small wolf pups and two human girls. One looked about eight years old, the other no more than two. These were the ghastly eyes that he had glimpsed days prior. The men took great care. They separated the pups from the girls, then released the animals into the jungle. The man who had first seen the eyes coaxed the children very gently out. He took them into his own home, though he soon discovered that that task was harder than he would imagine. At first he prepared a small pallet on his floor. It was simple but comfortable. Yet the girls, mute and skittish, refused to enter the house. Instead, they curled together, dog like, in a crude box beside the dwelling. Food was the next struggle. For days they refused all nourishment, save water. They weakened, trembling with hunger. Yet whenever the man drew near, they sprang away like frightened animals. He was torn between fear of driving them off to die and the dread of watching them starve under his own roof. Now, by this time, the British colonization of India had been underway for nearly a century. Missions and embassies dotted even remote regions, and West Bengal was no exception. Hoping for guidance, the man called upon Reverend Jal Singh, the Anglican missionary and parish bishop of Midnipur, who also oversaw an orphanage there. Singh came at once, eager to take the children into the church's care. Later, Singh described the girls and his account to the Statesman. He wrote that they were indeed feral, emaciated, covered with sores, barely clinging to life. Their eyes often rolled back like animals yawning or drinking. Their nails had grown long and curved like talons. Singh loaded them into his bullock cart for the multi day journey to the orphanage. And along the way he fed them milk soaked rags which they sucked and chewed on with difficulty. Once there, he discovered their craving for meat. But not cooked meat, raw flesh, chopped and bloody. They devoured that with startling ferocity, with their eyes rolling backward, with their jaws snapping. And they snarled at anyone who would approach them, thinking that they might steal their food away. They even bit at nurses who were tending to their sores. Soon the staff learned never to leave raw meat unattended, for the girls would find it and they would consume it in a frenzy. Singh recorded other behaviors as well. Their lack of language, their guttural grunts and clicks, their crouched four limbed posture, and their refusal of any human bedding. Instead, the elder would gather straw in her mouth and construct it into a rough nest which she would lay down on and Then, only then, the younger would climb on top of her and both would sleep peacefully. To shield them from ridicule, Singh kept the girls hidden from the townspeople and even from many in the orphanage. He hoped that over time they might be rehabilitated into ordinary womanhood. But the damage of wild living was deep. Their bodies were riddled with infections and parasites. Their immune systems were very fragile. Singh summoned the local doctor, whose treatments brought some improvement. But tragedy soon struck. After 18 months, the younger girl succumbed to her ailments. The older survived a little bit longer. Records last mention her in 1926, six years after her discovery. She was still alive then and improving. But beyond that, her fate is actually unknown. We can only hope that her remaining days brought her some kind of peace and some kind of joy.