Friends,
On Saturday I came across a bit of amazing and tantalizing information in the novel Flights by the Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk. In the book, the protagonist makes reference to a certain race of people called Blemij (also known as “Blemmyes”), who look like humans in every way except that they don’t have heads. Instead, they have faces on their chests.
This, of course, sounds fantastic (in the old sense of the word, meaning “imaginary”), and I would have dismissed the idea without much further thought except for this: Tolarczuk’s character suggests that the existence of the Blemij was affirmed both by Pliny the Elder and, a few centuries later, by St. Augustine, who in a sermon claimed to have visited the cephalically-challenged community in Ethiopia. Setting aside the book and picking up my computer, I checked to see if the novel’s information about Pliny and Augustine’s attestation to the existence of the Blemij was rooted in the author’s imagination or in historical fact. It is rooted in fact. Not only did Pliny and Augustine write about the Blemij but so also did a host of ancient and medieval writers, from the historian Heroditus to Isidore of Seville, who is the patron saint of encyclopedias. All this presents me with a marvelous possibility: maybe there’s more to the world than I know about or that modern thinking can comprehend.
Pliny
the Elder and St. Augustine are not known to be liars, fabricators of the
improbable, or tolerant of misinformation. Pliny’s Natural History was the first known encyclopedia; in particular,
it’s record of plants, animals, and human populations remains a reliable source
for those interested in understanding how people in the Roman Empire lived,
ate, farmed, and thought about the world. Saint Augustine is one of the doctors
of the church and one of western Civilization’s most respected minds. It is
hard to imagine that he would lie about having seen the Blemij.
Of course it is even harder for me, as a modern person, to imagine the Blemij
ever existed. Their existence does not comply with post-enlightenment ideas
about what—or who—possibly could be real, yet I confess I hope the Blemij did
once walk the earth. I want to live in a world of wonders, where surprising
things emerge out of the mists of the unknown. I want to be caught off guard by
what I learn and, from time to time, I want ancient knowledge to best
contemporary thinking in the contest to describe the world around us.
In the end, I imagine I’ll probably have to admit that the Blemij never did exist—or
if they did, I’m sure there is some entirely rational explanation involving
genetic variations and birth defects. But for the time being I will keep open
the possibility that a wonderful and mysterious thing happened a long time ago
and that modern knowledge has been so busy looking to the future that it has
forgotten to learn from the past.
I like to believe God delights in surprising us, and that the Holy One can be glimpsed dancing in the mysteries that help us question what we know.
God’s Peace,
Ben