The dog-headed monster figure traveled from ancient Asia myth to Columbus’s New World

Evidence

Even the fantasy of Muslim dog-men was transmogrified onto new foreign bodies, people described as cannibalistic monsters, among other things. … The typical image of the cannibal-monsters was that of the cynocephalus. The first references to fantastic dog-headed peoples living in Asia date from the pre-Socratic period. They then come to inspire the medieval imagination. Marco Polo discovers, on an island, anthropophagi with dog’s heads. Columbus is the first to mention the presence of man-eaters in the New World, whom he claims have dog’s heads. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 580

Categorization

• DEFINE: Cynocephalus is introduced and traced from pre-Socratic sources through Polo to Columbus.
• SEED: The dog-headed monster genealogy — from pre-Socratic Asia to Columbus’s New World — is a ready-made throughline for an essay on how monster imagery transmits across cultures.
• QUESTION: Why dog heads specifically? What does the canine attach to in the European imagination of the monstrous?