Why do Bigfoot see people of different cultures

Since the 15th century, and possibly earlier, there have been reports of the observation of hairy, naked and incredibly strong people living in remote parts of the Caucasus. They are called " diamonds ". They are often shot down, sometimes domesticated, and in one case even the marriage took place. In the sunny Eurasian steppes and on the tops of the Himalayas, there is a yeti, a terrible snowman with white fur, the hero of alpinist stories. Ten thousand kilometers from there in the swamps of Florida, crossed by shopping centers, hides a skunk monkey, drinking chlorinated water from the elite housing basins of Miami-Dade County. On the backs of mysterious Australia live yovi. In Indonesia, there lives a small, talkative, orange ecu-gogo (literally - “voracious granny”). And, of course, in the misty sequoia forests of the North Pacific region of the United States, there is a sasquoche, also known as bigfoot.



I treat the scientific reality of Bigfoot as an agnostic, although the existence of a skunk band hiding among the suburbs of Miami seems unlikely to me. Most primatologists do not consider possible the existence of the North American Great Ape, as well as the remnants of the populations of Australopithecus or Neanderthals. I have nothing to say to them. But whether sasquatch is real or not, it seems that people often want to believe in it. Why are Bigfoot and its kindred, "wild people", so often want to see? Why do we continue to see saskucha where there is none?



Enkidu, the hero of the ancient Sumerian epos of Gilgamesh, probably marks the beginning of the genealogy of the "feral". At the same time, “both man and beast,” he is a prototype of a man, a threshold beast-man, not quite wild, and not entirely tame (until goddess Shamkhat didn’t draw him with the help of sex and beer — like many of us). Enkidu fights in a losing battle with Gilgamesh, and after this brawl they are tied by "bonds of friendship." Enkidu represents our original roots from nature, hinting at the animal origin of humans. The battle of Gilgamesh and Enkidu serves as an illustration of the attempts of civilization to rise from the wild nature, and at the same time a reminder of the superficiality of this difference. Their friendship points to the animal origin of humanity.

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Imagine how powerful this message could have been at the dawn of civilization, when most people lived like hunter-gatherers, and the cultural memory of the previous state was not so far away. Other allegories followed the first allegory about wild people. The Bible mentions Esau, "redhead all over his body, as if in a red robe," which his younger brother Jacob later supersedes. There the giant Nephilim was described and the humiliation of Nebuchadnezzar reduced to the animal state was brought. Wild people appear in classical works as fauns and satires, and the animalistic Pan can be regarded as one of the sasquoche, although he is closer to the goat than to the monkey. In medieval Europe, there are also their own wild, in Middle English, called "vodvos" (wodewose) or "woodhouse". There are elves and fairies, Green people - all examples of intermediate states between culture and animal origin.



One of the variants of a wild man in contrast will help explain sasquoche: the noble savage. The idea is that the “noble savage”, especially beloved by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is humanity in pure, uncorrupted, natural perfection. It represents the virginal innocence of the origin of our species. The noble savage is a natural inhabitant of Eden, just like sasquoche. Both refer to the time before the fall, to the simplicity of life before civilization has spoiled us, to the era before governments, laws, industry, commerce and wars. The difference is that if a noble savage has a remarkable innocence, then sasquoche is an eerie, horribly distorted reflection of our original nature. The historian of science Brian Regal [Brian Regal] wrote in “Quest for sasquat” (2011) about these “ape-like” monsters that “unpleasantly remind us” and “walked through dark paths of human psychology, like through the woods, for thousands of years”.



The wild man plays a role in the idea, which I ironically call “pastoral sasquoche”. Pastoralism is associated with Virgil's Eclogs, Horace’s Epods, with Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s Renaissance Poetry, Spencer and Marlowe, things that, at first glance, are far from comedies like Harry and Hendersons . The Princeton Poetry Handbook explains that pastoral literature is defined by “an interest in the relationship between people and nature,” and allows you to have “deviations in a rural theme.” Is the appeal of sasquocha related to this definition? Pastoral sasquatch is a wild, bestial reversal of classical views, something of a supernatural Arcadia.



Perhaps the best example of pastoral sasquatch is the character Caliban from William Shakespeare's tragicomedy The Tempest. He combines the wild nature of the beast with the disturbing ability to talk to people (what Prospero taught him). Trinculo says: "If I were in England now ... There this monster would bring me to people. There, every strange animal takes someone to people." Caliban is also unpleasantly associated with European ideas about Aboriginal people, who seemed to be ignoble savages, who were not entirely deprived of their attractiveness.



In The Village and the City (1974), Raymond Williams [The Country and the City (1975), Raymond Williams] described the pastoral as "a myth that works as a memory." Sasquatch, the evolutionary gap between man’s past and the present, is a type of pseudoscientific myth understood in the language of memory. The attraction of saschwach is that by presenting himself in his place, as the science historian Joshua Blu Buhs wrote in [Bigfoot: The Life of a Legend ”(2009) [Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend] - people“ could contact with their own souls, with their repressed and forbidden desires. " We could visualize our origins. In short, pastoral sasquatch is a phenomenon in which our desires and fears associated with the animal nature of humanity are projected onto obscure figures, to the manifestation of our awareness of the complex biological reality of human existence.



Bigfoot can run, and maybe not run through the primitive forests of the North Pacific region, watching us and avoiding us, recalling our deep animal past. But regardless of the existence of a real animal, the archetypal sasquatch is real in its own way.