An Introduction To The Wildman Cultural Archetype

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting.

This post is a brief introduction into what has become one of my personal favorite areas of cryptozoology - the wildman cultural archetype. It’s a bit informally written, apologies if the run-on sentences are a little much.

It’d be best to start by defining “wildman cultural archetype”. Wildmen are hirsute human-like figures which are reclusive and culturally inept (either lacking culture or having very little culture), separated from humans proper in local cosmologies. Oftentimes wildmen possess uncanny strength, exaggerated genitals, and backwards feet. You’re all familiar with wildmen - Sasquatch, Orang Pendek, Almasti, Wodewose; wildmen are universal and constant. A cultural archetype is a bit of a nebulous term but generally it’s invoked as a broad, informal category for broadly similar kinds of beliefs. A good example would be “mermaid” - many cultures have semi-aquatic “people” though they’re not all the perfect European half-fish half-woman, there are otter people of the Pacific Northwest and vampire manatees in the Congo, but for our sake they’re all mermaids. Cultural archetypes are useful academically for cross-cultural comparisons but otherwise don’t reflect a shared origin or anything of the sort - the universality of a concept also doesn’t mean it is true. 

Wildmen are outgroups, often subhuman. In some cases they are groups of people which have reverted to an animalistic state by living in the woods, in others they are simply less than human because they aren’t as intelligent. This is a constant in wildman stories, and extends to recent advents such as wildmen which are said to be the descendants or spirits of European colonists who've gotten lost and have been driven mad. Furthermore, wildmen display many local social taboos - they’re hypersexual, often kidnapping women to be brides or children to be servants, they eat raw meat, they live in areas forbidden or unexplored, they don't follow religion. These traits are evident in even the modernmost expressions of the archetype - Ostman was kidnapped by a family of Bigfoot, Seraphine Long claimed to have a child with a Sasquatch. Wildmen still “existed” well into the 70s, as evidenced by coverage from the New York Times and other major newspapers. 

This is further an example of a key point - despite modern cryptozoology’s tendency to assume that wildmen are unknown primates, many wildmen throughout folklore and history are just people. Zana is the clearest example, a woman suffering from hypertrichosis. Many tales of wildmen living in villages or being captured probably represent humans in unfortunate circumstances who have since become folklore. Some wildman “cryptids”, such as the chuchunya, are genuinely just the name for ethnic groups of people. Many newspaper reports in the United States of “wildmen” resolve with the capture of the wildman and a confirmation of identity - they’re just a normal person.

Wildman folklore evolves consistently thanks to new impressions - the Mongolian almas are demons, sex pest spirits which became wildmen after a variety of interactions and incidents, discussions with Russian hominologists being key among them. Odette Tchernine's books include statements from many local groups emphatic that their local "wildmen" were supernatural, only to be dismissed by hominologists or have this narrative countered by younger generations. As with Zana, there are many examples where wildmen became wildmen due to interactions with people. 

The back-and-forth between human wildmen and escaped gorillas in early news media is another example of folkloric evolution - early widespread imagery of great apes, including those kept in zoos or sideshows, depicted them as cane-using ogre-like bipeds. In some cases human wildmen were exaggerated into escaped gorillas, while others were made up to sell papers, such as the infamous Jacko hoax. It’s been suggested that some early Dutch accounts of Orang Pendek were orangutans, but as the apes were so different from media depictions and common knowledge, they were regarded as something different. Similar things have happened even in recent memory - Burns’ Sasquatch was a tribe of mountain-living, Douglas dialect-speaking Indigenous Americans only about six feet tall. Bigfoot appeared in the 1950s, taking on a much more apelike appearance thanks to Roe and Ostman. The two were regarded as separate beings by many early cryptozoologists well into the 1970s.

To summarize - wildmen are not what they are often portrayed as, and form a clear cultural role. Wildmen demarcate taboos and ostracize those perceived as breaking them. Wildmen are often human, or often distinctly not an animal at all. Through new influences, these folkloric figures have evolved into their modern apeman forms. This is to say, wildmen are not all reports of undiscovered primates. They are cultural images first and foremost. And they’re evolving before our eyes.

Most people here have grown up with the most modern of these beliefs - Bigfoot as an animal that can be seen in the American forests. The label of “almasty” was used for Zana because she was unlike anything locals were familiar with, instead lining up (very loosely) with a folkloric figure. This is what is happening with Bigfoot. 

It’s first worth it to note that Bigfoot specifically has become the most naturalistic of the wildmen. I think part of this is due to tolerance. American people have become more understanding and tolerant in their rhetoric (in broad strokes, I mean), and in an inclusive society you have no need to violently ostracize a community by portraying them as subhuman. This still happens, of course, but is generally limited to the marginal, intolerant fringe of racist depictions, wartime propaganda, and so on. Culturally, there was a reason to shed the “man” part of the wildman. The transition from wildman to ape was natural thanks to discourses starting with the aforementioned newspaper back-and-forth between wildman and escaped gorilla. Ostman, Roe, and Patterson’s Bigfoot are clearly great apes. Ape Canyon is called Ape Canyon. Bigfoot entered our cultural catalogues of potential animals, and therefore became a plausible explanation for ambiguous stimuli. Remember that many eyewitness sightings are people using cultural knowledge to explain what they can't. Pareidolia, bipedal bears, humans when you least expect them, even something seemingly as recognizable as a deer become Bigfoot under the right circumstances. The cultural evolution of the figure is exactly why Bigfoot isn’t “real” in a zoological sense, but is very real in a socio-cultural sense.

The natural Bigfoot has been transplanted elsewhere - the spread of Patterson-Gimlin-type imagery has homogenized many depictions of wildman figures across the globe. The Yeti is an ape now when it was traditionally a spirit. The UMA boom in Japan in the 70s spurred the invention of the Hibagon. This even happens on a local level - “ebu gogo” has become a synonym for Homo floresiensis and more specifically the idea that H. floresiensis still persists, despite ebu gogo being extinct in the majority of local narratives. The wildman has become the apeman. 

Of course, the wildman becoming an animal means it exists and ought to be found. We haven’t found Bigfoot. This creates a problem, and one that needs to be explained for some people. Bigfoot has become an alien, an interdimensional being, a ghost, and much more. These conceptions date back to Ape Canyon itself, as shown by Fred Beck's book on the event. This is not a US-exclusive thing, Brian Sykes’ interviews with the last of the Russian hominologists revealed that they believe their wildmen are capable of turning invisible and have DNA that matches humans completely, but are still distinct, unknown, and to be found. Talk about copium…

It’s changes like these, and more broadly the complex origins of these figures which makes cross-cultural analysis so interesting. Although some have claimed so, wildmen are obviously not universal due to colonialism - these figures emerged independently all over and still actively do so. They are also no clearly folk memories of times spent alongside now-extinct human relatives, these narratives are far too recent and far too distant in context from anything of the sort - this idea was exposed as flawed many years ago when Russian hominologists supposed that wildmen were Neanderthals, only to have their notion of Neanderthals be debunked by modern research. 

Why a culture needs a wildman, what elements a wildman pulls from, and in some cases what events spurred a wildman to evolve folklorically are areas of research worth thorough investigation by cultural anthropologists. However, this area has been analyzed very little at all. Bigfoot is a controversial subject academically, leading to a lot of taboo and much hesitancy in terms of publishing on it. For example, I’m currently trying to track down a set of unpublished papers by an academic which weren’t published exactly for this reason. Gregory Forth has stated he hesitated publishing on wildmen until he felt he had established himself as a respected researcher, and encouraged others researchers, including myself, hoping to pursue the subject to wait until they have the academic foundation to do so. The taboo can be broken very easily with high-quality research, and many authors, including Brian Regal, have done exactly that - but the subject is so large there is much to still be done.

This post is a very brief, casual, and maybe inadequate introduction to the subject ideally to get a few people thinking. I do have a lot of literature, a lot more examples, and a lot more to say, and I’ll get around to sharing more in the near future. Feel free to ask any sort of question or for any sort of elaboration in the meantime.