Blemmyae
Without doubt the weirdest map monsters were the Blemmyae. The Blemmyae were headless men who had their faces in their chests. The image may be derived from statues of Molus, a decapitated rapist depicted with his eyes in his chest. So old is the headless-men tradition that there is no certain etymology of the term ‘Blemmyae’, though it may come from the Hebrew for ‘without brains’. Herodotus, in the 5th century BC, tells us that in Libya live ‘headless men that have their eyes in their chests’, but they are first called Blemmyae by Strabo about 500 years later.
Blemmyae continued to be popular throughout the middle ages, and are described in Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, an account of his journey through India and China. He does not name them Blemmyae, but the description he gives is unmistakeable (as you might expect): ‘folk of foul stature and of cursed kind have no heads. And their eyes be in their shoulders’. ‘Sir John Mandeville’ probably never existed, and the book is likely to be entirely fantasy, sadly, but one Blemmyae-reporter who certainly did exist (and, by his period of history, surely should have known better) was Sir Walter Raleigh.
‘[They] are called Ewaipanoma; they are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, and that a long chain of hair groweth backward behind the shoulders’, notes Raleigh, who locates the creatures in Guiana, South America. But what is the point of the Blemmyae, if monsters are supposed to tell us something? With no obvious allegorical overtones, it is likely that Blemmyae represent a somewhat jingoistic fear of foreigners. The West knew little of the peoples who lived in uncharted areas, and apparently feared the worst of what they were like.