Thinking ahead to Halloween 2020, I offer you you, dear reader, a suggestion, and one which is unlikely to be duplicated by your neighbors. Folks in Western Europe in the Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern periods would have been much likelier to identify this creature, because it was a type of monster that many believed actually existed: the Blemmyes.
The Blemmeys were headless men with eyes on their chest or shoulders, and mouths at their navels. Their legends can be traced as far back as the Ancient Greek writer Hesiod, but folks in the Middle Ages wrote many accounts of them. They appear in the same manuscript as the _Beowulf_ poem; authors wrote fictionalized stories of Alexander the Great encountering them; and cartographers frequented the Blemmeys on their maps, like the 16th-century picture shown here.
A constant in the stories of these Blemmeys is that they were always thought to be from far away. Early accounts fixed their lands in northern Africa, but later they were thought to be from places as disparate as sub-Saharan Africa, east Asia, and India. These imaginary exotic aliens tell us much about the ancient imagination.
