SOURCE: White, Hayden. “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea.” In The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, pp. 3-38. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.

[In the following essay, White examines the history of the Wild Man image throughout history, concluding that the image of the Wild Man as viewed in literature is a criticism of the security and peace-of-mind brought by civilization.]

The subject of these essays is the Wild Man during his age of triumph, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he was viewed as “the Noble Savage” and served as a model of all that was admirable and uncorrupted in human nature. My task in this introductory essay is to say something about this Wild Man's pedigree, to reconstruct the genealogy of the Wild Man myth, and to indicate the function of the notion of wildness in premodern thought. In order to provide the background required, I shall have to divide the cultural history of Western civilization into rather large, and perhaps indigestible, chunks, arrange them in clusters of possible significance, and serve them up in such a crude form as to obscure completely the great variety of opinions concerning the notion of wildness which is to be found in ancient and medieval literature. What I shall finally offer, therefore, will look more like an archaeologist's cabinet of artifacts than the flowing narrative of the historian; and we shall probably come to rest with a sense of structural stasis rather than with a sense of the developmental process by which various ideas came together and coalesced to produce the “Noble Savage” of the eighteenth century. Other essays in this collection will, however, provide the materials for a history of the idea of the Wild Man during his period of triumph. In this introductory chapter I can provide little more than the historian's equivalent of a field archaeologist's notes, reflections on a search for archetypal forms rather than an account of their variations, combinations, and permutations during the late medieval and early modern ages.

The notion of “wildness” (or in its Latinate form, “savagery”) belongs to a set of culturally self-authenticating devices which includes, among many others, the ideas of “madness” and “heresy” as well. These terms are used not merely to designate a specific condition or state of being but also to confirm the value of their dialectical antitheses: “civilization,” “sanity,” and “orthodoxy” respectively. Thus, they do not so much refer to a specific thing, place, or condition as dictate a particular attitude governing a relationship between a lived reality and some area of problematical existence that cannot be accommodated easily to conventional conceptions of the normal or familiar. For example, the apostle Paul opposes heresy to orthodoxy (or division to unity) as the undesirable to the desirable condition of the Christian community, but in such a way as to make the undesirable condition subserve the needs of the desirable one. Thus he writes: “There must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you” (1 Cor. 11:19). And Augustine, in the passage from The City of God which serves as the epigraph of this essay, distinguishes between those subjects in his history which are significant for themselves and those which have no significance but exist merely as counterexamples or illuminative counterinstances of the operations of grace in the midst of sin.¹ Just as in his own Confessions, Augustine found it necessary to dwell upon the phenomena of sin in order to disclose the noumenal workings of grace, so too in his “prophetic history” of mankind he was compelled to focus on the sinful, heretical, insane, and damned in order to limn the area of virtue occupied by the pure, the orthodox, the sane, and the elect. Like the Puritans who came after him, Augustine found that one way of establishing the “meaning” of his own life was to deny meaning to anything radically different from it, except as antitype or negative instance.

The philosopher W. B. Gallie has characterized such notions as “democracy,” “art,” and the “Christian way of life” as “essentially contested concepts,” because their definition involves not merely the clarity but also the self-esteem of the groups that use them in cultural polemics.² The terms “civilization” and “humanity” might be similarly characterized. They lend themselves to definition by stipulation rather than by empirical observation and induction. And the same can be said of their conceptual antitheses, “wildness” and “animality.” In times of socio-cultural stress, when the need for positive self-definition asserts itself but no compelling criterion of self-identification appears, it is always possible to say something like: “I may not know the precise content of my own felt humanity, but I am most certainly not like that,” and simply point to something in the landscape that is manifestly different from oneself. This might be called the technique of ostensive self-definition by negation, and it is certainly much more generally practiced in cultural polemic than any other form of definition, except perhaps a priori stipulations. It appears as a kind of reflex action in conflicts between nations, classes, and political parties, and is not unknown among scholars and intellectuals seeking to establish their claims to elite status against the vulgus mobile. It is a technique that is especially useful for groups whose dissatisfactions are easier to recognize than their programs are to justify, as when the dis-affected elements in our own society use the term “pig” to signal a specific attitude with respect to the symbols of conventional authority. If we do not know what we think “civilization” is, we can always find an example of what it is not. If we are unsure of what sanity is, we can at least identify madness when we see it. Similarly, in the past, when men were uncertain as to the precise quality of their sensed humanity, they appealed to the concept of wildness to designate an area of subhumanity that was characterized by everything they hoped they were not.

So much for the general cultural function of those concepts that arise out of the need for men to dignify their specific mode of existence by contrasting it with those of other men, real or imagined, who merely differed from themselves. There is another point that should be registered here before proceeding. It has to do with the historical career of such concepts as wildness, savagery, madness, heresy, and the like, in Western thought and literature. When in the thought and literature of ancient higher civilizations these concepts make their appearance in a culturally significant way, they function as signs that point to or refer to putative essences incarnated in specific human groups. They are treated neither as provisional designators, that is, hypotheses for directing further inquiry into specific areas of human experience, nor as fictions with limited heuristic utility for generating possible ways of conceiving the human world. They are, rather, complexes of symbols, the referents of which shift and change in response to the changing patterns of human behavior which they are meant to sustain.

Thus, for example, as Michel Foucault has shown in his study of the idea of madness during the age of reason, the term “insanity” has been filled with a religious content during periods of religious enthusiasm, with a political content during times of intensive political integration, and with an economic content during ages of economic stress or expansion.³ More importantly, Foucault has shown that, whatever the specifically medical definition of insanity, the way societies treat those designated as insane and the place and nature of their confinement and treatment vary in accordance with the more general forms of social praxis in the public sphere. This is especially true of those forms of insanity which medical science is unable to analyze adequately. The case of schizophrenia in our own age comes to mind. R. D. Laing has argued that although it passes for a medical term, in reality the concept schizophrenia is used in a political way; in spite of medical science's ambiguities about the nature and causes of schizophrenia, the idea is still used to deprive people presumed to be suffering from it of their civil and even human rights in courts of law.⁴

All this points to the fact that societies feel the need to fill areas of consciousness not yet colonized by scientific knowledge with conceptual designators affirmative of their own existentially contrived values and norms. No cultural endowment is totally adequate to the solution of all the problems with which it might be faced; yet the vitality of any culture hinges upon its power to convince the majority of its devotees that it is the sole possible way to satisfy their needs and to realize their aspirations. A given culture is only as strong as its power to convince its least dedicated member that its fictions are truths. When myths are revealed for the fictions they are, then, as Hegel says, they become “a shape of life grown old.” First nature, then God, and finally man himself have been subjected to the demythologizing scrutiny of science. The result has been that those concepts which in an earlier time functioned as components of sustaining cultural myths and as parts of the game of civilizational identification by negative definition, have one by one passed into the category of the fictitious; they are identified as manifestations of cultural neurosis, and often relegated to the status of mere prejudices, the consequences of which have as often been destructive as they have been beneficial. The unmasking of such myths as the Wild Man has not always been followed by the banishment of their component concepts, but rather by their interiorization. For the dissolution by scientific knowledge of the ignorance which led earlier men to locate their imagined wild men in specific times and places does not necessarily touch the levels of psychic anxiety where such images have their origins.

In part, the gradual demythologization of concepts like “wildness,” “savagery,” and “barbarism” has been due to the extension of knowledge into those parts of the world which, though known about (but not actually known), had originally served as the physical stages onto which the “civilized” imagination could project its fantasis and anxieties. From biblical times to the present, the notion of the Wild Man was associated with the idea of the wilderness—the desert, forest, jungle, and mountains—those parts of the physical world that had not yet been domesticated or marked out for domestication in any significant way. As one after another of these wildernesses was brought under control, the idea of the Wild Man was progressively despatialized. This despatialization was attended by a compensatory process of psychic interiorization. And the result has been that modern cultural anthropology has conceptualized the idea of wildness as the repressed content of both civilized and primitive humanity. So that, instead of the relatively comforting thought that the Wild Man may exist out there and can be contained by some kind of physical action, it is now thought (except by those contemporary ideologues on both sides of the iron curtain who think they can save “civilization” if only they can succeed in destroying enough “wild” human beings) that the Wild Man is lurking within every man, is clamoring for release within us all, and will be denied only at the cost of life itself.

The Freudian model of the psyche, conceived as an ego occupying a fortress under siege by a double enemy, the superego and the id, both of which represent the pressures of mechanisms with ultimately aggressive motor forces, is perhaps the best-known pseudoscientific example of this process of remythification.⁵ But it is not the only one. The theories of C. G. Jung and many post-Freudians, including Melanie Klein and her American disciple, Norman O. Brown, represent the same process, as do those other contemporary culture critics who, like Lévi-Strauss, lament the triumph of technology over civilized man and dream of the release of the lost child or the Noble Savage within us.

I call this interiorization of the wilderness and of its traditional occupant, the Wild Man, a remythification, because it functions in precisely the same way that the myth of the Wild Man did in ancient cultures, that is, as a projection of repressed desires and anxieties, as an example of a mode of thought in which the distinction between the physical and the mental worlds has been dissolved and in which fictions (such as wildness, barbarism, savagery) are treated, not as conceptual instruments for designating an area of inquiry or for constructing a catalog of human possibilities, or as symbols representing a relationship between two areas of experience, but as signs designating the existence of things or entities whose attributes bear just those qualities that the imagination, for whatever reasons, insists they must bear. What I am suggesting is that in the history of Western thought the idea of the Wild Man describes a transition from myth to fiction to myth again, with the modern form of the myth assuming a pseudoscientific aspect in the various theories of the psyche currently clamoring for our attention. I shall elaborate on this process of remythification at the end of this essay. For the moment I want to explain what I mean by the process of the original demythification of the Wild Man myth, its translation into, and use as, a fiction, in modern times, as a prelude to my characterization of its history in the Middle Ages.

Fictive, or provisional, characterization of radical differences between what is only a superficially diverse humanity appears to be alien to what Paul Tillich has conveniently called the “theonomic” civilizations.⁶ Without the secularization or humanization of culture itself, without a profound feeling that whatever sense we make out of the world, it is the human mind that is at work in the business of sense-giving, and not some transcendental power or Deity that makes sense for us, the distinction between fiction and myth would be literally unthinkable. In the theonomic thought of ancient Egypt, for example, as in the thought world of most primitive tribes, the sensed difference between the “we” and the “they” is translated into a difference between an achieved and an imperfect humanity. Insofar as a unified humanity is imaginable, it is conceived to be the possession of a single group.

Among the ancient Hebrews, of course, ethical monotheism and the doctrine of the single creation tended to force thought to the consideration of the potential reunification of a humanity that had become fractured and fragmented in time, as a result of human actions and as part of the Deity's purpose in first creating mankind whole and then letting it fall apart into contending factions. And in medieval Christian theology, especially in its dominant Augustinian variety, by virtue of its Neoplatonic inclinations, the idea of a vertical unification of the whole of creation in a comprehensive chain of being, which embraced not only the Creator himself but the whole of his creation, was combined with the notion of a potential horizontal movement in time toward a final unification at the end of time, when the saved would be returned to the direct communion with God which Adam had surrendered in the Fall.⁷ But even here the idea of a historical division of mankind prevails as a cultural force. The Hebrews experience a division of humanity into Jew and Gentile even though they are forced to imagine, by virtue of their conception of God's power and justice, a humanity that is finally integrated through the Hebraization of the world. Similarly, medieval Christians experienced a division of humanity, and indeed of the cosmos itself, into hierarchies of grace, which translated into a division between the saved and the damned, even though their conception of the power of divine love forced them constantly to the contemplation of a time when historical division would dissolve in the blinding fire of the final unification of man with himself, with his fellowman, and with God. As long as men appeared different from one another, their division into higher and lower forms of humanity had to be admitted; for, in a theonomic world, variation—class or generic—had to be taken as evidence of species corruption. For if there was one, all-powerful, and just God ordering the whole, how could the differences between men be explained, save by some principle which postulated a more perfect and a less perfect approximation to the ideal form of humanity contained in the mind of God as the paradigm of the species? Similarly, in a universe that was thought to be ordered in its essential relations by moral norms rather than by immanent physical causal forces, how could radical differences between men be accounted for, save by the assumption that the different was in some sense inferior to what passed for the normal, that is to say, the characteristics of the group from which the perception of differentness was made?

This is not to say that the conception of a divided humanity, and a humanity in which differentness was conceived to reflect a qualitative rather than merely a quantitative variation, was absent in those sectors of classical pagan civilization where a genuine secularism and an attendant humanistic pluralism in thought had been achieved. The “humanistic” Greek writers and thinkers, no less than their modern, secularized counterparts, found it easy to divide the world into their own equivalents for the Christian “saved” and “damned.” But just as the Greeks tended to diversify their gods on the basis of external attributes, functions, and powers, so too they tended toward a conception of an internally diversified humanity. Even in Roman law, which begins with a rigid distinction between Roman and non-Roman—and even within the Roman community itself between partrician and plebeian—in such a way as to suggest a distinction between a whole and a partial man, the general tendency, in response no doubt to the exigencies of empire, inclined toward inclusion in the community of the elect rather than exclusion from it.

There is, therefore, an important difference between the form that the total humanity is imagined to have by Greek and Roman thinkers and that which it is imagined to have by Hebrew and Christian thinkers. To put it crudely, in the former, humanity is experienced as diversified in fact though unifiable in principle. In the latter, humanity is experienced as unifiable in principle though radically divided in fact. This means that perceived differences between men had less significance for Greeks and Romans than they had for Hebrews and Christians. For the former, differentness was perceived as physical and cultural; for the latter, as moral and metaphysical. Therefore, the ideas of differentness in the two cultural traditions define the two archetypes that flow into medieval Western civilization to form the myth of the Wild Man. To anticipate my final judgment on the matter, let me say that the two traditions in general reflect the emotional concerns of cultural patterns that can conveniently be called—following Ruth Benedict—“shame oriented” and “guilt oriented,” respectively.⁸ The result is that the image of the Wild Man sent down by the Middle Ages into the early modern period tends to make him the incarnation of “desire” on the one side and of “anxiety” on the other.

These represent the general (and I believe dominant) aspects of the myth of the Wild Man before its identification as a myth and its translation into a fiction in the early modern period. To be sure, just as there is a “guilt” strain in classical paganism, so too there is a “shame” strain in Judeo-Christian culture. And later on I shall refer to the idea of the “barbarian” as a concept in which these two strains converge in a single image at times of cultural stress and decline, as in the late Hellenic and late Roman epochs. For the time being, however, I am merely trying to block out the grounds on which the different conceptions of wildness which Richard Bernheimer, in his excellent book Wild Men in the Middle Ages,⁹ has discovered in medieval fable, folklore, and art. It is on these grounds that the different archetypes of wildness met with in medieval Western culture take root. It is the dissolution of these grounds through modern scientific and humanistic study that permits us to distinguish between wildness as a myth and as a fiction, as an ontological state and as a historical stage of human development, as a moral condition and as an analytical category of cultural anthropology, and, finally, to recognize in the notion of the Wild Man an instrument of cultural projection that is as anomalous in conception as it is vicious in application.

I

I shall now turn to some examples of the concept of wildness as they appear in Hebrew, Greek, and early Christian thought. These examples are not exhaustive even of the types of wildness that the premodern imagination conceived. Moreover, I do not intend to try to characterize the complex differences between the various kinds of submen presumed to exist within each of the traditions dealt with. My purpose is rather to stress the components of wildness conceived to exist by the Hebrew, Greek, and early Christian imaginations that contrast with one another as distinctive cultural artifacts. I am quite aware, for example, that those images of the Wild Man which appear in Hebrew thought as incarnations of accursedness have their counterpart in Greek thought as projections of the fear of demonic possession, and that the descriptions of the mental attributes of wild men, conceived as what we would call mad or insane or depraved, are quite similar in the two cultures. I want, however, to identify the ontological bases which underlie the designations of men as wild in Hebrew, Greek, and early Christian thought respectively, in order to illuminate the differing moral attitudes with which men so designated were regarded in the different cultures. Only by distinguishing among the moral postures with which Jew, Greek, and Christian confronted the image of wildness can we gain a hold on how the idea of wildness was used in cultural polemic in the late Middle Ages and achieve some understanding of how the myth of wildness got translated into a fiction in the early modern period.

To begin with, it should be noted that the difference between Hebrew and Greek conceptions of wildness reflects dissimilar tendencies in the anthropological presuppositions underlying their respective traditions of social commentary. This difference may have had its origin in a tendency of Hebrew thought to dissolve physical into moral states in contrast to the Greek tendency to do the reverse. Greek anthropological theory tends to objectify, or physicalize, what we would call internal, spiritual, or psychological states. Hebrew thought consistently inclines toward the reduction of external attributes to the status of manifestations of a spiritual condition. The literary and anthropological implications of these crucial differences and the dynamics of their fusion in later Western thought and literature are fully explored in Erich Auerbach's book Mimesis, especially in its deservedly famous first chapter.¹⁰ The cultural-historical bases of these different tendencies are analyzed in two works to which I am especially indebted: E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, and Johannes Pedersen's magisterial Israel, especially the brilliant chapter on the soul in ancient Hebrew thought.¹¹ The important point is that, although the distinction between an internal spiritual or psychological state and an external or physical condition was a very difficult distinction to arrive at in both Greek and Hebrew thought, the descriptive syntax used to represent human states in general tended to subordinate what we would recognize as internal to external factors in Greek thought, whereas the reverse was the case in Hebrew thought. This accounts in part for the different roles played by the images of the Wild Man deriving from the Bible on the one side and from classical paganism on the other.

The problematical nature of a wild humanity arises in Hebrew thought in large part as a function of the unique Hebrew conception of God. In the Hebrew creation myth, an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly just Deity creates the natural world and populates it with the various species of the physical, plant, and animal kingdoms—each perfect of its kind; and He then sets man, in the full perfection of his kind, at the world's moral center, to rule over it. In the Edenic state, the universe is conceived to be perfectly ordered and harmonious in its parts. Confusion and sin are introduced into this state by Adam's sin, and man is expelled from Eden and sent out into a world that suddenly appears hostile and hard. Nature assumes the aspect of a chaotic and violent enemy against which man must struggle to win back his proper humanity or godlike nature.

Of course, Adam's fall does not play the same role in Hebrew that it does in Christian thought. For the ancient Hebrews, the myth of the Fall had an essentially etiological function: it explained how men had arrived at their current general condition in the world and why, although some were chosen and some were not, even the chosen still had to labor to win their reward. The Fall was not, as it subsequently became for the apostle Paul, the cause of a kind of species taint that is transmitted from Adam to all humanity and that prevents all men from living according to God's law without the aid afforded by a special grace. The Fall is merely that event which explains the human condition in spite of the fact that man was created by a perfectly just and all-powerful God; it does not create an ontological flaw at the heart of humanity. And the Hebrew people—the descendants of Adam through Abraham—viewed themselves as a strain of humanity which, even in its natural condition, could, by adhering to the terms of the covenant, flourish before God, win the blessing (B^erâkâh), and achieve a kind of peace and security on earth not too dissimilar to that enjoyed by Adam and Eve in Eden. Thus, the Old Testament does not present all men as having been made “wild” by Adam's fall, not even all Gentiles. In fact, the Gentiles actually serve as a paradigm of “natural” humanity, just as the Hebrews, the people of the covenant, serve as a paradigm of a morally redeemable humanity, a kind of potential superhumanity. Over against both the natural man and the superman, however, there is set a third alternative, the “wild man,” the man from whom no blessing flows because God has withdrawn the blessing from him. When God withdraws the blessing from a man, an animal, a people, or the land in general, the result is a fall into a state of degeneracy below that of “nature” itself, a peculiarly horrible state in which the possibility of redemption is all but completely precluded.

Let me be more specific. The distinction between man and animal, though fundamental to Hebrew thinking, is less significant than the distinction between those things which enjoy the blessing and those which do not. Animal nature is not in itself “wild,” it is merely not human. Wildness is a peculiarly moral condition, a manifestation of a specific relationship to God, a cause and at the same time a consequence of being under God's curse. But it is also—or rather it is indiscriminately—a place; that is to say, it is not only the what of a sin, but the where as well. For example, the biblical concordances tell us that the Hebrew word for “wilderness” (sh^emâmâh), used in the sense of “desolation,” appears in 2 Sam. 13:20 to characterize the condition of the violated woman Tamar; but the place of the curse (the desert, the void, the wasteland) is also described as a wilderness. So too the place of the dead (sh^eôl) is described in Job 17:14 as a place of corruption and decay. These states and places of corruption or violation are distinguished from the “void” (bôhûw)¹² which exists before God creates the heavens and the earth and which is the only morally neutral state mentioned in the Bible. All other states are either states of blessedness or of accursedness. In short, it appears quite difficult to distinguish between a moral condition, a relationship, a place, and a thing in all those instances in the Bible where words that might be translated as wild or wilderness appear.¹³

This conflation of a physical with a moral condition is one of the sources of the prophets' power. It lies at the heart of the terror conveyed by Job in his lament, when in his characterization of his affliction, he refers to God's dissolution of his “substance,” and (in Job 30:26-31) says:

When I looked for good, then evil came unto me: and when I waited for light, there came darkness. My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction prevented me. I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, and I cried in the congregation. I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat. My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice of them that weep.

Job in his suffering has descended to the condition to which he originally (Job 30:3) consigned his enemies (“they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former times desolate and waste”). The wilderness is the chaos lying at the heart of darkness, a void into which the soul is sent in its degradation, a barren place from which few if any return.

To be sure, the withdrawal of the prophet into the countryside is a common theme in the Old Testament. The prophet is sometimes pictured as coming out of the countryside, like Amos, or withdrawing to it in preference to concourse with a sinful Israel, like Jeremiah. But the countryside is one thing; the wilderness is quite another. The countryside is still the place of the blessing; the wilderness stands at the opposite side of being, as the place where God's destructive power manifests itself most dramatically. This is why wilderness can appear in the very heart of a human being, as insanity, sin, evil—any condition that reflects a falling away of man from God.

Those conditions which we would designate by the terms wildness, insanity, or savagery were all conceived by the ancient Hebrews to be aspects of the same evil moral condition. The relation between the condition of blessedness and that of wildness is therefore perfectly symmetrical: the blessed prosper and their blessedness is reflected in their wealth and health, the number of their sons, their longevity, and their ability to make things grow. The accursed wither and wander aimlessly on the earth—fearful, ugly, violent; and their fearfulness, ugliness, and violence are evidence of their accursedness.

The archetypal wild men of the Old Testament are the great rebels against the Lord, the God-challengers, the antiprophets, giants, nomads—men like Cain, Ham, and Ishmael, the very kinds of “heroes” who, in Greek mythology and legend, might have enjoyed a place of honor beside Prometheus, Odysseus, and Oedipus. Like the angels who rebelled against the Lord and were hurled down from heaven, these human rebels against the Lord continue—compulsively, we would say—to commit Adam's sin. And even though they often sin out of ignorance, their punishment is not less severe for it. They are depicted as wild men inhabiting a wild land, above all as hunters, sowers of confusion, damned, and generative of races that live in irredeemable ignorance or outright violation of the laws that God has laid down for the governance of the cosmos. Their offspring are the children of Babel, of Sodom and Gomorrah, a progeny that is known by its pollution. They are men who have fallen below the condition of animality itself; every man's face is turned against them, and in general (Cain is a notable exception) they can be slain with impunity.

Now, the form that the wildness of this degraded breed takes is described in terms of species corruption. Since at the Creation God fashioned the world and placed in it the various species, each perfect of its kind, the ideal natural order would therefore be characterized by a perfect species purity. Natural disorder, by contrast, has its extreme form in species corruption, the mixing of the kinds (mýn)—the joining together of what God in his wisdom had, at the beginning, decreed should remain asunder. The mixing of the kinds is, therefore, much worse than any struggle, even to the death, between or among them. The struggle is natural; the mixing is unnatural and destructive of a condition of species isolation that is a moral as well as natural necessity. To mix the kinds is taboo. Thus men who had copulated with animals had to be exiled from the community, just as animals of different kinds which had been sexually joined had to be slaughtered (Lev. 18:23-30). The horror of species pollution is carried to such extreme lengths in the Deuteronomic Code that it is there forbidden, not only to yoke different animals to the same plow (Deut. 22:10), but even to sow different kinds of seeds in the same field (Lev. 19:19).¹⁴

One example of a humanity gone wild by species mixture is provided in the book of Genesis, in that famous but ambiguous passage which records the effects of the mating of “the sons of God” with “the daughters of men” (ch. 6). This instance of species mixture brought forth a breed of men possessing an almost universally credited attribute of wildness: gigantism. The nature of these giants is even less clear than their ancestry. Biblical philologists link the word for giant (n^ephîyl or n^ephîl), which connotes the ideas of bully and tyrant, with the root for the verb nâphal, which means to fall, to be cast down, but which has secondary associations with the notions of dying, division, failure, being judged, perishing, rotting, and being slain. The appearance of these giants is offered as the immediate cause of God's decision to destroy the world in the Flood, except of course for Noah, his family, and two each of the kinds of animals.

After the Flood, however, evil and (therefore) wildness returned to the world, especially in the descendants of Noah's youngest son, Ham, who was cursed for revealing his father's nakedness. From Ham was descended, later biblical genealogists decided, that breed of “wild men” who combined Cain's rebelliousness with the size of the primal giants. They must also have been black, since, through etymological conflation, the Hebrews ran together word roots used to indicate the color black, the land of Egypt (i.e., of bondage), the land of Canaan (i.e., of pagan idolatry), the condition of accursedness (and, ironically, apparently the notion of fertility), with the proper name of Ham and its adjectival variations. Later on, Christian biblical commentators insisted that Nimrod, the son of Cush, must have been descended from Ham, which would have meant that he was not only black, but that he shared the attributes of the primal giants: grossness and rebelliousness.

In The City of God, for example, Augustine insists on reading the passage which describes Nimrod as “a mighty hunter before the Lord” as “a mighty hunter against the Lord.”¹⁵ And he goes on to identify Nimrod as the founder of the city of Babel, whose people had tried to raise a tower against the heavens and brought down upon mankind the confusion of tongues which has afflicted it ever since. In the linkage of Nimrod with Babel (or Babylon) and the further linkage of these with the account of how the different races were formed and the different language families constituted, we have almost completed our catalog of the main components of the Wild Man myth as it comes down from the Bible into medieval thought. Cursedness, or wildness, is identified with the wandering life of the hunter (as against the stable life of the shepherd and farmer), the desert (which is the Wild Man's habitat), linguistic confusion (which is the Wild Man's as well as the barbarian's principal attribute), sin, and physical abberation in both color (blackness) and size. As Augustine says: “And what is meant by the term ‘hunter’ but deceiver, oppressor, and destroyer of the animals of the earth?”¹⁶ As for the Wild Man's inability to speak, which is part of the Wild Man myth wherever we meet it throughout the Middle Ages, Augustine says, “As the tongue is the instrument of domination, in it pride was punished.”¹⁷ The equation is all but complete: in a morally ordered world, to be wild is to be incoherent or mute, deceptive, oppressive, and destructive; sinful and accursed; and, finally, a monster, one whose physical attributes are in themselves evidence of one's evil nature.

All of this suggests the ways in which the conception of wildness found in the Old Testament gets transformed in the wake of the progressive spiritualization of the Hebrew conception of God through the work of the prophets and through the simultaneous physicalization of nature as the result of the union of Greek thought with Judaic thought in late biblical times. In ancient Hebrew thought, when a man or a woman or place or group lost the blessing and fell into a condition of accursedness, that spiritual condition was manifested in the form and attributes of wildness. At that point the relationship of the community to the accursed thing was unambiguous: it was to be exiled, isolated, and avoided at all costs, at least until such time as the curse was removed and the state of blessedness was restored.¹⁸ But only God could remove the curse that he had placed on a thing. And since, at least in the more archaic part of the Old Testament, it was God's righteousness rather than his mercy that was stressed in thought about him, the tendency was to regard accursedness (and therefore wildness or desolation) as an all but insuperable condition, once it had been fallen into.

The Christian doctrine of redemption through grace, and of grace as a medicina that could be dispensed through the ministration of the Sacraments by the Church, encouraged a much more charitable attitude among the faithful toward the sinner who had fallen from grace into a state of wildness than the originally puritanical conception of the Deity in the Old Testament permitted. At least, such was the theory. Actually, Christian universalism was not notably less egocentric, in a confessional sense, than its ancient Hebrew prototype. Universalistic in principle, the Church was communally inclusive in practice only of those who accepted membership on its own terms. This meant that although anyone could be admitted to the Church on principle, the potential member of the Church had to be willing to put off the old man and put on the new. And although it was granted that lapses from grace might be forgiven, the lapsed sinner seeking readmission to the community of the faithful had to display evidence of his intention to accept the Church's authority and discipline in the future, and not seek to import alien doctrines and practices into the community from the state of sin into which, in his pride, he had fallen. All this had been involved in the struggles with the heresies of Donatus on the one side and of Pelagius on the other, during the fourth and fifth centuries.¹⁹

Still, Christian thinkers insisted that a man might sin and not lapse into a condition from which there was no redemption at all. After the Incarnation all men were salvageable in principle, and this meant that whatever the state of physical degeneracy into which a man fell, the soul remained in a state of potential grace. Sin, Augustine insists, is less a positive condition than a negation of an original goodness, a condition of removal from communion with God, which is at once the cause and the consequence of pride.²⁰ And it may or may not be attended by signs of physical degradation. Since only God himself knows precisely who belongs and who does not belong to his city, it remains for the faithful to work for the inclusion of everyone within the community of the Church. This meant that even the most repugnant of men—barbarian, heathen, pagan, and heretic—had to be regarded as objects of Christian proselytization, to be seen as possible converts rather than as enemies or sources of corruption, to be exiled, isolated, and destroyed. In the final analysis, Augustine says, even the most monstrous of men were still men, and even those races of wild men reported by ancient and contemporary travelers had to be regarded as potentially capable of partaking of that grace which bestowed membership in the City of God.

Commenting on the different kinds of monstrous races reported by ancient travelers—races of men with one eye in the middle of the forehead, feet turned backward, a double sex, men without mouths, pygmies, headless men with eyes in their shoulders, and doglike men who bark rather than speak—all of which, incidentally, appear in medieval iconography as representations of wild men—Augustine insists that these should not be denied possession of an essential humanity. They must all be conceived to have sprung from “the one protoplast,” he says; and he argues that “it ought not to seem absurd to us, that as in individual races there are monstrous births, so in the whole race there are monstrous races.”²¹ To be sure, he believes that these monstrous races must have descended from Ham and Japheth, Noah's sons, the former regarded by medieval theologians as the archetypal heretic, and the latter as the archetypal Gentile, as against Shem, who was believed to be the archetypal Hebrew, the ancestor of Abraham, and of Christ himself. Their descent from the archetypal sinner—as against the Gentile races' descent from the archetypal heretic—accounts for these monstrous races' inability to speak (since confusion of language is regarded as a reflection of a confusion of thought) and for their devotion to monstrous gods. Nonetheless, Augustine insists, they are potentially salvageable, as salvageable as any Christian child that may have been born with four rather than five fingers on a hand. The difference between these monsters and the normal Christian or the normal variant (pagan) humanity is one of degree rather than of kind, of physical appearance alone rather than of moral substance manifested in physical appearance.

The superaddition of Greek, and especially of Neoplatonic, concepts to Judaic ideas in Christianity tended to encourage the distinction between essences and attributes rather than their conflation. Medieval theologians discussed the problem of the Wild Man not in terms of physical characteristics conceived as manifestations of spiritual degradation but in terms of the possibility of God's endowing a man with the soul of an animal, or an animal with the soul of a man. It was difficult to envisage the notion of a Wild Man because it suggested either a misfire of God's creative powers or a kind of malevolence for man on the part of God that the doctrine of Christian charity expressly denied. It made sense to speak of a degraded nature, a nature fallen into corruption and decay. And one could speak of a fallen humanity, the state from which Christ had come to release those enthralled by Adam's sin. But to speak of a Wild Man was to speak of a man with the soul of an animal, a man so degraded that he could not be saved even by God's grace itself.

Thomas Aquinas discusses at length the differences between the animal soul and the human soul. The animal soul, he says, is pure desire undisciplined by reason; it desires, but knows not that it desires. The animal soul made living a ceaseless quest, a life of lust without satisfaction, of will without direction, a wandering that ended only with death. It was because animals possessed such a soul that they had been consigned to the service of man and to his governance. And because they possessed such a soul, man could do with animals what he would: domesticate them and use them, or, if necessary, destroy them without sin.²² If such was the fate of animals, then wild men, men possessed of animal souls, had to be treated by normal men in similar ways. But this ran counter to the message of the Gospels, which offered salvation to anyone possessed of a human soul, whatever his physical condition. It was because man possessed a human soul that he was able to rise above the aimless desire that characterized the merely animal state, and to realize that his sole purpose in life was to seek reunion with his Maker, and to work for it, with God's help and the Church's, throughout all his days. The state of wildness into which the popular legend insisted that a man might fall expressed a deep anxiety, less about the way of salvation than about the possibility that one might regress to a condition in which the very chance of salvation might be lost. Medieval Christian thought did not permit the contemplation of that contingency. In The Divine Comedy Dante places the closest thing to the possessors of an animal soul that he can imagine, carnal sinners, those who “submit reason to lust,” in the second circle of hell. Their punishment is to be eternally buffeted by a dark, tempestuous wind.²³ If these sinners had been wild men, lacking a human soul, they would not have been punished in hell, but like the pagan monsters in Dante's poem, set up as guardians of hell or torturers of the sinners consigned to hell.

The Wild Man's supposed dumbness reminds us that for many Greek thinkers a barbaros (a term whose English derivative, barbarian, we are inclined to use to indicate wildness) was anyone who did not speak Greek, one who babbled, and who therefore lacked the one power by which the political life could be achieved and a true humanity realized. It is not surprising that the images of the barbarian and the Wild Man become confused with each other in many medieval, as in many ancient, writers. Especially in times of war or revolution, ancient writers tended to attribute wildness and barbarism to anyone holding views different from their own. But in general, just as the Hebrews distinguished between Jews, Gentiles, and wild men, so too did the Greeks and Romans distinguish between civilized men, barbarians, and wild men.

The distinction, in both cases, hinged upon the difference between those men who lived under some law (even a false law) and those who lived under no law at all. Although Aristotle, in a famous passage in the Politics, characterized barbarians as “natural outcasts,” as being “tribeless, lawless, heartless,” and agreed with Homer that “it is right that Greeks should rule over barbarians,”²⁴ most classical writers recognized that because barbarian tribes at least honored the institution of the family, they must live under some kind of law, and therefore were capable of some kind of order. This recognition is probably a way of signaling awareness of the uncomfortable fact that the barbarian tribes were able to organize themselves, at least temporarily, into groups large enough to constitute a threat to “civilization” itself. Medieval, like ancient Roman, thinkers conceived barbarians and wild men to be enslaved to nature, to be, like animals, slaves to desire and unable to control their passions; as mobile, shifting, confused, chaotic; as incapable of sedentary existence, of self-discipline, and of sustained labor; as passionate, bewildered, and hostile to “normal” humanity—all of which are suggested in the Latin words for wild and wildness.²⁵ Although both barbarians and wild men were supposed to share these qualities, one important difference remained unresolved between them: the Wild Man always lived alone, or at the most with a mate. According to the myth that takes shape in the Middle Ages, the Wild Man is incapable of assuming the responsibilities of a father; and if his mate has children, she drops them where they are born, to survive or perish as they will.²⁶

This meant that the Wild Man and the barbarian represented different kinds of threats to “normal” men. Whereas the barbarian represented a threat to society in general, to civilization, to racial purity, to moral excellence, whatever the ingroup's pride happened to be vested in, the Wild Man represented a threat to the individual, both as nemesis and as a possible destiny, both as enemy and as representative of a condition into which an individual man, having fallen out of grace or having been driven from his city, might degenerate. Accordingly, the temporal and spatial relationship of the Wild Man to normal humanity differs from that of the barbarian to the civilized man. The home of the barbarian is conventionally conceived to lie far away in space, and the time of his coming onto the confines of civilization is conceived to be fraught with apocalyptical possibilities for the whole of civilized humanity. When the barbarian hordes appear, the foundations of the world appear to be cracking, and prophets announce the death of the old and the advent of the new age.²⁷

By contrast, the Wild Man is conventionally represented as being always present, inhabiting the immediate confines of the community. He is just out of sight, over the horizon, in the nearby forest, desert, mountains, or hills. He sleeps in crevices, under great trees, or in the caves of wild animals, to which he carries off helpless children, or women, there to do unspeakable things to them. And he is also sly: he steals the sheep from the fold, the chicken from the coop, tricks the shepherd, and befuddles the gamekeeper. In medieval myth especially, the Wild Man is conceived to be covered with hair and to be black and deformed. He may be a giant or a dwarf, or he may be merely horribly disfigured, rather like Charles Laughton in the American movie version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But in whatever way he is envisaged, the Wild Man almost always represents the image of the man released from social control, the man in whom the libidinal impulses have gained full ascendancy.

In the Christian Middle Ages, then, the Wild Man is the distillation of the specific anxieties underlying the three securities supposedly provided by the specifically Christian institutions of civilized life: the securities of sex (as organized by the institution of the family), sustenance (as provided by the political, social, and economic institutions), and salvation (as provided by the Church). The Wild Man enjoys none of the advantages of civilized sex, regularized social existence, or institutionalized grace. But, it must be stressed, neither does he—in the imagination of medieval man—suffer any of the restraints imposed by membership in these institutions. He is desire incarnate, possessing the strength, wit, and cunning to give full expression to all his lusts. His life is correspondingly unstable in character. He is a glutton, eating to satiety one day and starving the next; he is lascivious and promiscuous, without even consciousness of sin or perversion (and therefore of course deprived of the pleasures of the more sophisticated vices). And his physical power and agility are conceived to increase in direct ratio to the diminution of his conscience.

In most accounts of the Wild Man in the Middle Ages, he is as strong as Hercules, fast as the wind, cunning as the wolf, and devious as the fox. In some stories this cunning is transmuted into a kind of natural wisdom which makes him into a magician or at least a master of disguise.²⁸ This was especially true of the wild woman of medieval legend: she was supposed to be surpassingly ugly, covered with hair except for her gross pendant breasts which she threw over her shoulders when she ran. This wild woman, however, was supposed to be obsessed by a desire for ordinary men. In order to seduce the unwary knight or shepherd, she could appear as the most enticing of women, revealing her abiding ugliness only during sexual intercourse.²⁹

Here of course the idea of the wild woman as seductress, like that of the Wild Man as magician, begins to merge with medieval notions of the demon, the devil, and the witch. But again formal thought distinguishes between the Wild Man and the demon. The Wild Man (or woman) was generally believed to be an instance of human regression to an animal state; the demon, devil, and witch are evil spirits or human beings endowed with evil spiritual powers, servants of Satan, with capacities for evil that the Wild Man could never match. Since the Wild Man had no rational faculties, he could not self-consciously perform an evil action. Therefore, he could be conceived to be free of all feelings of guilt or conscience. Wildness is what a normal human being takes on as a result of losing his humanity, not something possessed as a positive force, as the power of the devil was.

The incapacity of official thought to conceive of a wild humanity did not, of course, destroy the power the conception exercised over the popular imagination. But it may have tempered it somewhat. For if, during the Middle Ages, the Wild Man was an object of disgust and loathing, of fear and religious anxiety, the quintessence of possible human degradation, he was not conceived in general to be an example of spiritual corruption. This position was reserved for Satan and the fallen angels. After all, the Wild Man was one who had lost his reason, and who, in his madness, sinned ceaselessly against God. Unlike the rebel angels, the Wild Man did not know that he lived in a state of sin, or even that he sinned, or even what a “sin” might be. This meant that he possessed, along with his degradation, a kind of innocence—not the moral neutrality of the beast, to be sure, but a position rather “beyond good and evil.” Sin he might, but he sinned through ignorance rather than design. This gave to his expressions of lust, violence, perversion, and deceit a kind of freedom that might be envied by normal men, men caught in the web of repression and sublimation that made up the basis of ordinary life. It is not strange, then, that, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the social bonds of medieval culture began to disintegrate, the Wild Man became gradually transformed from an object of loathing and fear (and only secret envy) into an object of open envy and even admiration. It is not surprising that, in an age of general cultural revolution, the popular antitype of the officially defined “normal” humanity, the Wild Man, should be transformed into the ideal or model of a free humanity, his presumed attributes made the essence of a lost humanity, and his idealized image used as justification for rebellion against civilization itself.

This redemption of the image of the Wild Man began simultaneously with the recovery of classical culture, the revival of humanist values, and the improvisation of a new conception of nature more classical than Judeo-Christian in inspiration. Classical ideas about nature and pagan nature legends survived throughout the Middle Ages. But, until the twelfth century, they had lived a kind of underground existence among intellectuals on the one side and the incompletely Christianized peasantry of the countryside on the other. According to Bernheimer, during the twelfth century wild men began to appear in folklore as protectors of animals and forests and as teachers of a wisdom that was more useful to the peasant than the “magic” of the Christian priest.³⁰ This conception of the Wild Man may reflect a more bucolic view of nature, itself in part a reflection of a new experience of the countryside. By the twelfth century new agricultural tools and techniques were bringing vast areas of Europe under cultivation, as forests were cleared and broken, and the back country turned into sheep runs. Or it may reflect a kind of pagan peasant resistance to Christian missionaries who were once more taking up the task of Christianizing Europe, started in earlier times but interrupted by the Viking invasions, Muslim assaults, and feudal warfare. Whatever the reason, the appearance of the beneficent Wild Man, the protector and teacher of peasants, is attended by his identification with the satyrs, fauns, nymphs, and sileni of ancient times. And this identification complements, on a popular level, the vindication of nature by intellectuals through the revival of classical thought, and especially of Aristotelianism, that was occurring at the same time.

II

I have already noted that classical thinkers regarded the Wild Man in a way different from that of their Hebrew counterparts. And I have pointed out that this was not because Greeks or Romans were less afraid of the wilderness than the Hebrews were. Like the Jews, the Greeks set the life of men who lived under some law over against that of men without the law, the order (cosmos) of the city over against the turbulence (chaos) of the countryside. Those who were capable of living outside the city, beyond the rule of law, Aristotle insisted, had to be either animals or gods. In short, for him, as for most Greek thinkers, humanity was conceived primarily as designating a special kind of relationship that might exist between men; not as an essence or a substance that might definitely distinguish men from gods on the one side and from animals on the other—at least such is Aristotle's opinion in his discussions of social and cultural, as against metaphysical, questions.

Thus, although the Greeks divided humanity into the civilized and the barbarous, they did not obsessively defend the notion of a rigid distinction between animal and human nature. In part, this was because most Greeks subscribed to the notion of a simple, universal substance from which all things were made, or to the notion of a universal principle of which all things were manifestations.³¹ The “normal” man was merely one who had been fortunate enough to be born into a city-state; “normal” man, Aristotle says, is “zoon politikon,” a political animal. Only those men who had attained to the condition of politicality could hope to realize a full humanity. Not all within the city could hope to become fully human: women, slaves, and businessmen are specifically denied that possibility by Aristotle in his Ethics.³² But no one outside the city had the slightest chance at all of fully realizing his humanity: the conditions of a life unregulated by law precluded it. Anyone who lived outside the human world might become an object of curiosity or a subject of study, but he could never serve as a model of what men ought to strive to be. Thus, what a Greek would have understood by our notion of a Wild Man would have appeared to be almost as much a contradiction in terms as it would be, later on, for Christian theologians.

Actually, the Greeks had no need of the concept of a Wild Man as a projective image of their fantasy life. Their imagination populated the entire universe with a host of species mixtures, products of sexual unions of gods with men, men with animals, animals with gods, and so on.³³ If species pollution was a fear among the early Greeks as strong in its own way as anything felt about it by the Hebrews, the Greek imagination still took a certain delight in the contemplation of the possible consequences of such pollution. Thus, over against, and balancing, the lives of gods and heroes, who differed from ordinary men only by the magnitude of their power or talent, there stood such creatures as satyrs, fauns, nymphs, and sileni; beneficent monsters such as the centaurs, and malignant ones such as the Minotaur, born of a union of a woman, Pasiphaë, and a bull. These creatures played much the same role for the classical imagination that the Wild Man did for the medieval Christian. Above all, they served as imagistic representations of those libidinal impulses which, for social more than for purely religious reasons, could not be expressed or released directly. Some of these creatures—fauns, satyrs, and sileni—are pure pleasure-seekers; the object of their desire is physical pleasure itself; and they are little more than ambulatory genitalia. Sensual, lascivious, promiscuous, the main activity of these creatures can be adequately characterized only by recourse to the vernacular. Endowed like rams, bulls, stallions, or possessing the fulsome breasts and buttocks of the eternal feminine, or, as in the case of Hermaphrodite, possessing both sets of sexual attributes, these creatures lived for little else than sexual intercourse—without conscience, self-consciousness, or remorse.

Characteristically these erotic creatures do not inhabit the desert or wilderness; they are usually represented as inhabiting the relatively more peaceful mountain meadows or pools. They are as undisciplined as the accursed ones of Hebrew lore, but they seek out any place in which to satisfy their (generally enviable) erotic capacities. It is the monsters born of a union of a human with an animal who inhabit the desert places, or, as in the case of the Minotaur, occupy an artificial environment, the Labyrinth, which, it has been suggested, is the archetypal representation of a savage or a wild city.³⁴ These monsters represent the dark side of the classical pagan imagination, the thanatotic, as against the erotic, fantasies of pagan man. Here wildness in its malignant aspect appeared as the counterpart of the Hebrew fear of the loss of the blessing from God.

Now, medieval man had no need to revive the dark side, the Cyclops or Minotaur side, of the classical conception of wildness; this side was already present in the very conception of the Wild Man held up as the ultimate monstrosity to the believing Christian. What he did need, when the time was ripe, was the other, erotic representation of the pleasure-seeking but conscienceless libido. And so when the impulses that led men to ventilate their minds by exposure to classical thought began to quicken in the twelfth century, Western man subliminally began to liberate his emotions as well. This at least may be one significance of the attribution to the Wild Man of the characteristics of satyrs, fauns, nymphs, and certain of the good monsters, such as the centaur teachers. This association of the Wild Man with pagan images of libidinal, and especially of erotic, freedom created the imaginative reserves necessary for the cultivation of a socially revolutionary primitivism in the early modern era.

Let me pause here to draw a distinction between primitivism and archaism to help clarify the relationship between the image of the Wild Man and social radicalism in modern culture. Primitivism seeks to idealize any group as yet unbroken to civilizational discipline; archaism, by contrast, tends toward the idealization of real or legendary remote ancestors, either wild or civilized. Both kinds of idealization appear to be eternal moments in human culture, representing a desire felt from time to time by all of us to escape the obligations laid upon us by involvement in current social enterprises. However, archaism appears to be the more constant, since it can be appealed to in ways that are socially reinforcing as well as ways that are socially disruptive. The notion that “once upon a time” man was uncorrupted by greed, egotism, envy, and the like—a condition from which the current generation has fallen—can serve conservative as well as radical social forces. It can be used to justify conventional values as well as to justify departure from conventional behavior. Archaism produces enabling myths which may serve to inspire pride in group membership (as in Virgil's Aeneid or Livy's History of Rome), or may be used in traditional society to help present a revolution (such as Luther's) as a revival or reformation rather than as an innovation. Among the Greeks, Hesiod used the myth of a golden age in the remote past, when men lived in harmony with nature and one another, as an antithesis of his own current age, the age of iron, when force alone prevailed, possibly in the hope of inspiring men to undertake social reform. But—as in the case of Hesiod—archaism usually contains within it a recognition that the men of the idealized early age were inherently superior to the men of the present, that they were made of finer stuff.³⁵ And thus the appeal to a golden age in the past can serve just as often to reconcile men to the hardships of the present as to inspire revolt in the interest of a better future.

It is quite otherwise with primitivism. Although used as an instrument of social criticism in much the same way as archaism, primitivism is quintessentially a radical doctrine. For basic to it is the conviction that men are really the same throughout all time and space but have been made evil in certain times and places by the imposition of social restraints upon them. Primitivists set the savage, both past and present, over against civilized man as a model and ideal; but instead of stressing the qualitative differences between them, they make of these differences a purely quantitative matter, a difference in degree of corruption rather than in kind. The result is that in primitivist thought reform is envisaged rather as a throwing off a burden that has become too ponderous than as a reconstitution or reconstruction of an original, but subsequently lost, human perfection. Primitivism simply invites men to be themselves, to give vent to their original, natural, but subsequently repressed, desires; to throw off the restraints of civilization and thereby enter into a kingdom that is naturally theirs. Like archaism, then, primitivism holds up a vision of a lost world; but unlike archaism, it insists that this lost world is still latently present in modern, corrupt, and civilized man—and is there for the taking.

One more point on this difference: archaists usually differ from primitivists in the way they conceive of that nature-in-general which serves as the background for their imagined heroes' exertions or as the antagonist against which their heroes act to construct a precious human endowment. The archaist's image of nature is shot through with violence and turbulence; it is the nature of the jungle, animal nature, nature “red in tooth and claw,” of conflict and struggle, where only the strongest survive. It is the “dark wood” of Lucretius, of Machiavelli, of Hobbes, and of Vico, the horrible formless forest which serves Dante as the base line of his Christian pilgrim's journey. It is the nature of the hunt, as portrayed by Piero di Cosimo, or of the mystery, as in Leonardo da Vinci.³⁶

The primitivists' nature is, by contrast, Arcadian, peaceful, a place where the lion lies down with the lamb, where shepherdesses lie down with shepherds, innocently and frivolously; it is the world of the enclosed garden, where the virgin tames the unicorn—the world of the picnic. Only in this second kind of nature can the Wild Man take on the aspect of the Noble Savage—the gentle savage of Spenser's Faerie Queen and of Hans Sachs's Lament of the Wild Men about the Unfaithful World.³⁷

In Sachs's poem, written in the sixteenth century, the Wild Man lives in a state of Edenic purity, without any taint of original sin, as an antitype of the corrupt world of the court and the city. Bernheimer dates the appearance of the Wild Man as Noble Savage and renewed interest in a presumed lost golden age in western Europe from the fourteenth century; and he links both developments to the phenomena of cultural crisis. During times of cultural breakdown, he says, men feel the need to return to simpler ways of life, holier times, a need to start the fashioning of humanity over again. Following Huizinga, whose great book on the breakdown of medieval civilization appears to have inspired his study, Bernheimer attributes the flowering during this age of what I have called primitivism (to distinguish it from the archaism that appears simultaneously with it) to the fact that official culture, both secular and religious, had become excessively oppressive, while the available forms of sublimation had been preempted by a superannuated and psychotic chivalric nobility.³⁸ Writers and artists began to survey history, myth, and legend for figures that would at once express their innermost desires for liberation and still give expression to their respect for tradition, the old, and the familiar. Thus the appeal of the primeval nature of Piero di Cosimo, the oneiric landscapes of Leonardo, the simple Romans of Machiavelli, the plain apostles of Luther, Erasmus's fools, and Rabelais's vulgar and high living giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel. In an age of universal rejection of the conventional image of “normal” humanity, a notion of humanity shot through with contradictions between its ideal and its reality, radicalism lay in the adoption of any antitype to that image that would show its schizoid dedication to mutually exclusive concepts of man's nature to be the sickness that it was. And, as Bernheimer says, “Nothing could have been more radical than the attitude of sympathizing or identifying oneself with the Wild Man, whose way of life was the repudiation of all the accumulated values of civilization.”³⁹

III

Thus, by the end of the Middle Ages, the Wild Man has become endowed with two distinct personalities, each consonant with one of the possible attitudes men might assume with respect to society and nature. If one looked upon nature as a horrible world of struggle, as animal nature; and society as a condition which, for all its shortcomings, was still preferable to the natural state, then he would continue to view the Wild Man as the antitype of the desirable humanity, as a warning of what men would fall into if they definitively rejected society and its norms. If, on the other hand, one took his vision of nature from the cultivated countryside, from what might be called herbal nature, and saw society, with all its struggle, as a fall away from natural perfection, then he might be inclined to populate that nature with wild men whose function was to serve as antitypes of social existence. The former attitude prevails in a tradition of thought which extends from Machiavelli through Hobbes and Vico down to Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre. The latter attitude is represented by Locke and Spenser, Montesquieu and Rousseau, and has recent champions in Albert Camus and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Significantly, during the transitional period between the medieval and the modern ages, many thinkers took a more ambivalent position, on both the desirability of idealizing the Wild Man and the possibility of escaping civilization. In his famous essay on cannibalism, Montaigne uses reports of primitive peoples in Brazil in much the same way that the Roman historian Tacitus used reports of the German tribes: to bring the provincialism and ethnocentrism of his own people under attack, to undermine conventions thoughtlessly honored by his own generation, to explode prejudice, and to ridicule the barbarities of his own age.⁴⁰ But even in his most depressed moments, Montaigne does not suggest that his readers ought to release the beast or cannibal within themselves.⁴¹

Similarly, Shakespeare, even in what is regarded as his most pessimistic play, The Tempest, remains ambiguous as to the relative value of the natural and the social world. Thus Shakespeare sets Caliban, the incarnation of libido and possessed of an unquenchable desire for freedom, over against Prospero the magician, the quintessence of civilized man, all ego and superego, learned and powerful, but jaded and captive of his own sophistication. And the contest between them is resolved in a way definitively advantageous to neither ideal. Each gets what he wants in the end, but only by giving up something of what, at the beginning of the play, he had valued most highly, and taking on some of the attributes of his enemy. Caliban is restored to rule over his island, but only at the cost of his savage innocence. Prospero throws away his magic stuff, leaves the island, and resolves to live as a man among men, without super-human advantage but also without illusion, which may be a higher kind of innocence.⁴²

Shakespeare, like most of his contemporaries, is still the poet of order and civilization, whatever his insights into the repressive and oppressive natures of both. It is only that, like Montaigne, whom he admired, he was reluctant to see in the forces that opposed order and civilization the workings of a distinctively inhuman power.

And of course other factors were at work in the rehabilitation of the Wild Man. Reports of travelers and explorers about the nature of the savages they encountered in remote places could be read in whatever way the reader at home desired. In any event, the Wild Man was being distanced, put off in places sufficiently obscure to allow him to appear as whatever thinkers wanted to make out of him, while still locating him in some place beyond the confines of civilization.

This spatialization of the Wild Man myth was being attended by his temporalization in the most sophisticated historical thought of the time. Vico, the Neapolitan philosopher who spans the gap between Baroque and Enlightenment civilization, insisted that savagery was both the original and the necessary stage of every form of achieved humanity. In his New Science, originally published in 1725, Vico portrayed the savage as a natural poet, as the source of the imaginative faculties still present in modern, civilized man, as possessor of an aesthetic or form-giving capacity in which civilization had its origins—at least among the pagans.⁴³ It was primitive man's ability to poetize his existence, to impose a form upon it out of aesthetic rather than moral impulses, that allowed the pagan peoples to construct a uniquely human world of society against their own most deeply felt animal instincts. For Vico, the savage was one who naturally felt and thought poetically, the ancestor of modern man who had begun by living poetry and ended by becoming all prose. Vico maintained that the original barbarism of the savage state was less inhuman than the sophisticated barbarism of technically advanced but morally corrupt civilizations in their late stages. Moreover, he maintained that perhaps the only cure for civilizations that had entered into decline lay in a return to a condition of barbarism, a revival of the poetic powers of the savage—not the Noble Savage of the philosophe (the savage as custodian of untainted natural reason and common sense), but the possessor of pure will that would later be held up as an alternative to civilized man by the Romantics. However, the transformation of the Noble Savage into the poetic beast in the late eighteenth century will be dealt with by other contributors to this volume. I merely note it here for purposes of orientation. More important to us at the moment is the process of fictionalization of the Wild Man myth which preceded the transformation of the Wild Man into the Noble Savage sometime during the late seventeenth century.

IV

Whatever else a myth may be—a verbal equivalent of a ritual, a poetic account of origins, a projection of possible last things—it is also, as Northrop Frye tells us, an example of thought working at the extremities of human possibility, a projection of a vision of human fulfillment and of the obstacles that stand in the way of that fulfillment.⁴⁴ Accordingly, myths are oriented with respect to the ideal of perfect freedom, or redemption, on the one side, and the possibility of complete oppression, or damnation, on the other. Since men are indentured to live their lives somewhere between perfect order and total disorder, between freedom and necessity, life and death, pleasure and pain, the two extreme situations in which these conditions might be imagined to have triumphed are a source of constant speculation in all cultures, archaic as well as modern: whence the universal fascination of utopian speculations of both the apocalyptic and the demonic sort, the dream of satiated desire on the one side and the nightmare of complete frustration on the other. Myths provide imaginative justifications of our desires and at the same time hold up before us images of the cosmic forces that preclude the possibility of any perfect gratification of them.

The myth of the Wild Man served a twofold function in the late Middle Ages. As Bernheimer has shown, in the Middle Ages the notion of wildness is consistently projected in images of desire released from the trammels of all convention and at the same time images of the punishment which submission to desire brings down upon us.⁴⁵ The Wild Man myth is what the medieval imagination conceives life would be like if men gave direct expression to libidinal impulses, both in terms of the pleasures that such a liberation might afford and in terms of the pain that might result from it.

Bernheimer speaks in the Freudian language of repression and sublimation, and he is no doubt justified in doing so.⁴⁶ But the tensions reflected in medieval conceptions of the Wild Man are understandable as a distinctively medieval phenomenon for the reason that the two images of wildness—the one as desire, the other as punishment—derive from different, and essentially incompatible, cultural traditions. Bernheimer himself traces the benign imagery of wildness back to classical archetypes and the malignant imagery back to biblical ones.⁴⁷ The two sets of images apparently became fused (and confused) during the High Middle Ages, thereby creating that anomalous conception of the state of wildness that we find in the iconography of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, of a Wild Man that is both good and evil, both envied and feared, both admired and calumniated. Formal Christian thought sought to dispel the anomalous conception of wildness by appeal to the Christian philosophy of nature contained in Scholasticism. The effort was wasted on the peasantry, if Bernheimer's evidence of the survival of medieval Wild Man motifs in contemporary folklore can be taken at face value. But it did succeed in the sphere of high culture, where the idea of nature was progressively purged of all theoretical imputations of evil. As a result of this theoretical redemption of nature, as well as of more general cultural factors, sometime during the fifteenth century the benign conception of the Wild Man was disengaged from the malignant one, and writers and thinkers began to recognize the fruitful uses in culture criticism to which a demythologized version of the benign imagery could be put. In short, sometime in the early modern period, no doubt as part of a general movement of secularization and as a function of humanism, the image of wildness was “fictionalized,” that is, separated from an imagined “essence” of wildness and turned to limited use as an instrument of intracultural criticism.

Let me illustrate what I mean by the translation of the myth of wildness into a fiction by reference to Montaigne, who here, as in so many other matters, gives us a clear indication of the way that a distinctively modern attitude will develop. In his essay “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne observes that “each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.” Then, after commenting on some of the more shocking practices of primitive peoples as reported in the accounts of ancient and modern travelers, he goes on to note that we ought to call such peoples “wild” only in the way that “we call wild the fruits that Nature has produced by herself and in her normal course.” Actually, he says, “it is those that we have changed artificially and led astray from the common order, that we should rather call wild.” For whereas we might legitimately call savage peoples barbarian “in respect to the rules of reason,” we are not justified in so calling them “in respect of ourselves,” and this because we “surpass them in every kind of barbarity.”⁴⁸

Here Montaigne plays with the notion of wildness in order to draw attention to a distinction that lies at the heart of his scepticism, the distinction that turns, not on the divine-natural antithesis, as in Christian theology, but on that of natural-artificial. For him the natural is not necessarily the good, but it is certainly preferable to the artificial, especially inasmuch as artificially induced barbarity is much more reprehensible in his eyes than its natural counterpart among savages. Montaigne wants his readers to identify the artificiality in themselves, to recognize the extent to which their superficial “civilization” masks a deeper “barbarism,” thereby preparing them for the release, not of their souls to heaven, but of their bodies and minds to nature. By his use of the concept of wildness as a fiction, Montaigne “brackets” the myth of “civilization” that anchors it to a debilitating parochialism. His purpose is not to turn all men into savages or to destroy civilization, but to give them critical distance on their artificiality, which both prohibits the attainment of true civilization and frustrates the expression of their legitimate natural impulses.

Montaigne's fictive use of the notion of wildness is a characteristically ironical tactic. In Roman times the historian Tacitus used the concept of the barbarian, in his Germania, in precisely the same way, consciously stressing the presumed virtues of the savage tribes to the north so as to force his readers to contemplate the vices of the civilized Romans in the south. The same tactic appears in much of the work of the modern cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on primitive peoples and “the savage mind.” Lévi-Strauss suggests that what civilized men conventionally call “the savage mind” is a repository of a particularly powerful imaginative faculty that has all but disappeared from its “civilized” counterpart under the impact of modernization. The savage mind, he maintains, is the product of a unique kind of relation to the cosmos that we exterminate at the peril of our own humanity.

Tacitus, Montaigne, and Lévi-Strauss are linked by the “fictive” uses they make of the concepts of “barbarism,” “wildness,” and “savagery.” In their works they telegraph their awareness that the antithesis they have set up between a “natural” humanity on the one side and an “artificial” humanity on the other are not to be taken literally, but used only as the conceptual limits necessary for gaining critical focus on the conditions of our own civilized existence. By joining them in acting as if we believed mankind could be so radically differentiated, put into two mutually exclusive classes, the “natural” and the “artificial,” we are drawn, by the dialectic of thought itself, toward the center of our own complex existence as members of civilized communities. By playing with the extremes, we are forced to the mean; by torturing one concept with its antithesis, we are driven to closer attention to our own perceptions; by manipulating the fictions of artificiality and naturalness, we gradually approximate a truth about a world that is as complex and changing as our possible ways of comprehending that world.

The lack of this fictive capability, the inability to “play” with images and ideas as instruments for investigating the world of appearances, characterizes the unsophisticated mind wherever it shows itself, whether in the superstitious peasant, the convention-bound bourgeois, or the nature-dominated primitive. It is certainly a distinguishing characteristic of mythical thinking, which, whatever else it may be, is always inclined to take signs and symbols for the things they represent, to take metaphors literally, and to let the fluid world indicated by the use of analogy and simile slip its grasp. When a fiction, such as a novel or a poem, is taken literally, as a report of reality rather than as a verbal structure with more or less direct reference to the world of experience, it becomes mythologized. Yet what Frank Kermode calls the degeneration of fictions into myths⁴⁹ is discernible only from the vantage point of a culture whose characteristic critical operation is to expose the myth lying at the heart of every fiction. During the Christian Middle Ages a similar critical tactic was used to distinguish “false” from “true” religious doctrines. But with this difference from modern criticism: there thought remained locked within the confines of the root metaphor that referred the true meaning of everything to its transcendental origin and goal—the metaphor that literally equated human life with a quest for transcendental redemption. Within the limits of such an enabling mythological strategy, the concept of the Wild Man had very little chance of being exposed as the useful fiction that is has since become in the hands of sceptics and radicals from Montaigne and Rousseau to Marx and Lévi-Strauss. For although Christian thinkers and writers excelled in exposing the “mythological” character of every pagan, non-Christian, or heretical idea, the fact remained that, for them, thought was intended to help men escape from time and history rather than to understand them and turn them to earthly uses. As long as the ideal remained a kind of holy superman, in which none of the flaws of actual humanity was present, then the ultimate horror, the condition that had to be avoided at all costs, had to remain that subman which the imagination constructed out of its own repressed desires and to which thought had given, in classical and in Old Testament times, the designation of “wild.”

V

I shall close by sketching out some aspects of the Wild Man's career after the eighteenth century and suggesting some of the implications of his career for our time. During the nineteenth century and in spite of Romanticism, primitive man came to be regarded less as an ideal than as an example of arrested humanity, as that part of the species which had failed to raise itself above dependency upon nature, as atavism, as that from which civilized man, thanks to science, industry, Christianity, and racial excellence, had finally (and definitively) raised himself. In the Victorian imagination primitive peoples were viewed with that mixture of fascination and loathing that Conrad examines in Heart of Darkness—as examples of what Western man might have been at one time and what he might become once more if he failed to cultivate the virtues that had allowed him to escape from nature.

During the late nineteenth century, to be sure, the new science of anthropology was already working to soften this harsh judgment; and in the twentieth century it has worked hard to destroy it, along with the racial prejudice that has invariably accompanied it. For most modern social scientists, primitive man is no longer either an ideal on which we ought to model ourselves or a reminder of what we might become if we betrayed our achieved humanity. Rather, primitive cultures are seen as different manifestations of man's power to respond differently to environmental challenges, as a control on inflated concepts of Western man's presumed cosmic election, and as a negation of various forms of cultural provincialism.

Accordingly, in modern times, the notion of a “wild man” has become almost exclusively a psychological category rather than an anthropological one, as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am speaking, of course, of popular psychological categories, not scientific ones. What was once thought of as representing a peculiar form of humanity, a presocial state or a supersocial state, as the case might be, has become a category designating those who, for psychological or purely physical reasons, are unable to participate in the life of any society, whether primitive or civilized. In modern times the concept of wildness, when applied to a human group or an individual human being, tends to be conflated with the popular notion of psychosis, to be seen therefore as a form of sickness and to reflect a personality malfunction in the individual's relation with society, rather than as a species variation or ontological differentiation.

Thus, in our time, the concept of “wildness” has suffered much the same fate as that suffered by the concept of “barbarism.” Just as there are no barbarians any more, except in a sociopsychological sense, as in the case of the Nazis, so too there are no wild men any more, except in the sociopsychological sense, as when we use the term to characterize street gangs, rioters, or the like. Wildness and barbarism are now used primarily to designate areas of the individual's psychological landscape, not whole cultures or species of humanity. Value-neutral terms, like “primitive,” which designate a particular technological stage or social structure, have taken their place. Wildness and barbarism are regarded, in general, as potentialities lurking in the heart of every individual, whether primitive or civilized, as his possible incapacity to come to terms with his socially provided world. They are not viewed as essences or substances peculiar to a particular portion of humanity out there in space or back there in time. At least, they ought not to be so regarded.

Earlier I said that thought about the Wild Man has always centered upon the three great and abiding human problems that society and civilization claim to solve: those of sustenance, sex, and salvation. I think it is no accident that the three most revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century—Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche—respectively take these themes as their special subject matter. Similarly, the radicalism of each is in part a function of a thoroughgoing atheism and, more specifically, hostility to Judeo-Christian religiosity. For each of these great radicals, the problem of salvation is a human problem, having its solution solely in a reexamination of the creative forms of human vitality. Each is therefore compelled to recur to primitive times as best he can in order to imagine what primal man, precivilized man, the Wild Man which existed before history—i.e., outside the social state—might have been like.

Like Rousseau, each of these thinkers interprets primitive man as the possessor of an enviable freedom, but unlike those followers of Rousseau who misread him and insisted on treating primitive man as an ideal, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche recognized, as Rousseau did, that primitive man's existence must have been inherently flawed. Each of them argues that man's “fall” into society was necessary, the result of a crucial scarcity (in goods, women, or power, as the case may have been). And although each sees the fall as producing a uniquely human form of oppression, they all see it as an ultimately providential contribution to the construction of that whole humanity which it is history's purpose to realize. In short, for them man had to transcend his inherent primitive wildness—which is both a relationship and a state—in order to win his kingdom. Marx's primitive food gatherers, Freud's primal horde, and Nietzsche's barbarians are seen as solving the problem of scarcity in essentially the same way: through the alienation and oppression of other men. And this process and alienation are seen by all of them to result in the creation of a false consciousness, or self-alienation, necessary to the myth that a fragment of mankind might incarnate the essence of all humanity.

All three viewed history as a struggle to liberate men from the oppression of a society originally created as a way of liberating man from nature. It was the oppressed, exploited, alienated, or repressed part of humanity that kept on reappearing in the imagination of Western man—as the Wild Man, as the monster, and as the devil—to haunt or entice him thereafter. Sometimes this oppressed or repressed humanity appeared as a threat and a nightmare, at other times as a goal and a dream; sometimes as an abyss into which mankind might fall, and again as a summit to be scaled; but always as a criticism of whatever security and peace of mind one group of men in society had purchased at the cost of the suffering of another.

Notes

1. Augustine, The City of God, in Works, trans. Marcus Dods (Edinburgh, 1934), II, 108.

2. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London, 1964), pp. 157-91.

3. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965).

4. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York, 1967), ch. 5.

5. I have in mind here specifically the famous map of the psyche drawn by Freud in The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (London, 1950), chs. 2, 3. For an account of the revision of this map, see J. A. C. Brown, Freud and the Post-Freudians (London, 1963), chs. 5, 6. See also Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), ch. 9; and Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York, 1966), ch. 2.

6. Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, trans. James Luther Adams (Chicago, 1948), ch. 4.

7. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), ch. 9.

8. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston, 1946).

9. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).

10. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953).

11. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951), chs. 2, 5; Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture (London, 1954), I, 182-212.

12. Another word which is translated into English as “void” (m^ebûwqâh) is used in apposition to “waste” (bâlaq) in Nahum 2:10 to characterize a devastated city, as when the prophet says of Nineveh: “She is empty, and void, and waste.”

13. Pedersen, Israel, II, 453-96.

14. Pedersen, Israel, II, 485-86.

15. Augustine, City of God, II, 112.

16. Augustine, City of God, pp. 112-13.

17. Augustine, City of God, p. 113.

18. Pedersen, Israel, II, 455.

19. See Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (London, 1957), pp. 206, 209, 452.

20. Augustine, Of True Religion, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, trans. J. H. S. Burleigh (London, 1953), pp. 235-39 (vi, 21-xv, 29).

21. Augustine, City of God, II, 118.

22. “The Summa Theologica,” in Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York, 1948), pp. 483-86 (quest. 6, arts. 2-4).

23. Dante, “The Inferno,” in The Divine Comedy, canto V.

24. Aristotle, Politics, bk. I, ch. 2.

25. The Latin word for “wildness” is ferus (which connotes that which grows in a field), but also silvester (inhabiting the woods), indomitus (untamed), rudis (raw), incultus (untilled), ferox (savage), immanis (huge, cruel), saevus (ferocious), insanus (mad), lascivus (playful); and etymologists suggest that ferus has the same root as ferrum (iron); see Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, ch. 1. Bernheimer's work is the source of most of the information offered in this paper on the lore of the Wild Man; it is an indispensable work for anyone seeking to correlate the official thought on the subject of wildness with its popular counterparts.

26. Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 45-46.

27. See Denis Sinor, “The Barbarians,” Diogenes, 18 (Summer, 1957), 47-60.

28. Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 38 f.

29. Bernheimer, Wild Men, p. 33.

30. Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 24-25.

31. See Harold Cherniss, “The Characteristics and Effects of Presocratic Philosophy,” JHI, 12 (1951), 319-45; and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1945), pp. 29 f.

32. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, bk. X, ch. 8; Politics, bk. I.

33. Bernheimer catalogs the types of submen found in classical literature and folklore, pp. 86-101.

34. See Northrop Frye, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, 1957), esp. pp. 190 f. For a history of the image of the labyrinth in modern art and literature, see Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manier und Manie in der europäischen Kunst (Hamburg, 1957).

35. For an example of the political ambivalence of archaism, see Sir Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (Oxford, 1939), pp. 459-75, which analyzes “The Organization of Opinion” following upon the triumph of Augustus over Marc Antony, and the contribution made to it by Virgil and Livy.

36. For a discussion of contending images of the natural world as manifested in early modern art, see Kenneth M. Clark, Landscape Into Art (London, 1949), chs. 1-4.

37. On the image of the Wild Man in Spenser and Sachs, see Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 113 f.

38. Compare Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 144 f., and Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries, trans. F. Hopman (London, 1967), chs. 17, 18.

39. Bernheimer, Wild Men, pp. 144-45. Italics added.

40. Tacitus, De Germania, p. 19.

41. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” in The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1958), p. 152.

42. See Jan Kott, “Prospero's Staff,” in Shakespeare: Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, N.Y., 1964), pp. 237-85.

43. See Edmund Leach, “Vico and Lévi-Strauss on the Origins of Humanity,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, eds. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden White (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 309-18.

44. See Frye, “Archetypal Criticism,” pp. 131-62, and “Varieties of Literary Utopias,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston, 1967), pp. 25-49.

45. Bernheimer, Wild Men, p. 2.

46. Bernheimer, Wild Men, p. 2.

47. Bernheimer, Wild Men, p. 120.

48. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” pp. 152-53.

49. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967), p. 39.