St. Christopher the Dog-headed

Icon, Мученик Христофор (Matryr Christopher) (20th c., Suzdal, Russia)

This summer in a monastery museum in Suzdal, Russia, I came across something strange: an icon depicting a military saint with the head of a ferocious-looking beast.  And, as if this wasn’t strange enough, the saint in question turned out to be none other than St. Christopher!  Of course, I had to find out what this was all about.

According to the earliest accounts, St. Christopher was a soldier martyred for his faith in Syrian Antioch round about the year 300. [1]  According to all the accounts, he was named Reprebus (or, Reprobus, literally, “wicked”), but after his baptism he was named Christopher (literally, “Christ-bearer”).  By 452 there was a church dedicated to him in Bithynia; the earliest Greek passions likely date from the sixth century and the earliest Latin passions from the ninth century in France.  These early accounts gave rise to the depiction of St. Christopher with a dog’s head, because they describe him as coming from a land of cannibals and dog-headed people.  For example, a late ninth-century Latin manuscript describes him thus:  

“There was a certain man who, since he was a foreigner from the land of man-eaters, had a terrible appearance, a dog's head as it were [qui habebat terribilem visionem et quasi canino capite].”

And again:

“His head was terrifying, like that of a dog [Caput ejus terribile ita ut canis est].  His hair was very long, and gleamed like gold.  His eyes were like the morning star, and his teeth like the tusks of a boar.  Words are not sufficient to tell of his greatness.” [2]

The Latin tradition appears not to have taken the description literally.  (It did, however, add embellishments, so that the medieval western accounts—which reached their final form in the wildly popular thirteenth-century Golden Legend—depict the saint as a giant who carried the child Jesus across a river on his shoulders.)  In contrast, the Greek tradition did take the description of the martyr quite literally—hence the icons depicting St. Christopher as dog-headed (Gk: κυνοκεφαλος, kunokephalos).

But why do the ancient accounts describe Reprebus/Christopher as coming from a land of cannibals and dog-headed people in the first place?  The short answer is that they do so in order to emphasize his foreignness.  

In the earliest accounts, Reprebus is captured and forced to serve as a soldier in the numerus Marmaritarum (“Unit of the Marmitae”), which means that he was one of the Marmitae, a people who lived in the region in northern Africa known to the ancients as Marmarica. [3]  This fact is significant because, in ancient literature, mythic characteristics accrued to Africa (and India) owing to their location at the edge of the known world, the oikoumenē.  Both continents were defined by their supposed abundance of natural wonders, of bizarre and inexplicable phenomena.  The Greeks even had a proverb about this: “Libya always brings forth some new thing.” [4]

Icon, Christopher "Cynephelous" (17th c., Asia Minor),
Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens

Ancients and medievals delighted in cataloguing the reported wonders of Africa and Asia.  In these catalogues of wonders, Cynocephalics (Dog-heads) appeared alongside other “monstrous races”—One-eyes, Ear-sleepers, Shadow-feet, and No-noses; races of hermaphrodites, of pygmies, and of anthropophagi (cannibals).  For example, in the fifth century BC the Greek physician and historian, Ctesias of Cnidus, wrote of a people living in the mountains of India who have the heads of dogs and who communicate by barking.  Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) drew on Ctesias’ account, including the Dog-heads in his Natural History in a section on “the wonderful forms of different nations.”  They even make an appearance in Augustine’s City of God under his discussion of whether “certain monstrous races of men [quaedam monstrosa hominum genera], spoken of in secular history,” are also descendants of Adam, that is, are truly human (civ. 16.8.1).  And the late fifteenth-century Nuremberg Chronicle contains a section on “strange peoples”, in which Dog-heads figure prominently.  (Here is Beloit College’s edition.)

Interestingly, although Augustine was skeptical about the truth of the reports of Pliny et al., he stands in a long tradition of philosophical and theological consideration of the “monstrous races” in order to ask what it means to be human.  This tradition extends at least through the Enlightenment, especially with respect to that most monstrous of races, the anthropophagi.

Reprebus, the cynocephalic cannibal from the edge of the world, is the Other par excellence.  The story of his conversion and martyrdom serves in part to illustrate the liberality of God’s love extending even to those whose very humanity is contested.  Indeed, the author of the eighth-century Passion from which I have been quoting states explicitly that he is relating the saint’s story in order to teach that the Lord rewards even converts from “nations who are only recently converted to the Lord,” and frequently refers to God as diligens humanum genus, “the lover of the human race.”  St. Christopher the Dog-headed, however fantastic, bears witness to the power of God’s love to transform even the unlikeliest, to do more than we can ask or imagine.

[1] David Woods, professor of classics at University College Cork, has an excellent page devoted to St. Christopher on his website, The Military Martyrs.  

[2] “Passio Sancti Christophori, martyris” [= BHL 1764], Anal. Boll. X (1891), pp. 394ff.  Translated by David Wood (here).  The passion is well worth reading.

[3] David Woods, “The Origin of the Cult of St. Christopher" (October 1999), The Military Martyrs.

[4] James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton, 1992), p. 88.