This the second in a series of posts wherein we challenged ourselves to write a piece that attempts to convince the reader of the existence of some mythological creature.
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The Real Cyclops
By Stephen Sokol
The human mind has always shown an incredible propensity for fantastical creations, from mermaids to wendigos. However this ability to invent some alternate, magical reality has its limitations. Human brains have never built any of these fantasies from nothing. Thor was crafted from a fear of storms, wendigos from a fear of greed, and mermaids from the baser appetites of sailors. There is one creature of Greek and Roman myth that has always been written off as a pure invention of the mind, with no connection to reality whatsoever; the cyclops.
Cyclopes are portrayed in myth as huge, humanoid monsters with only one eye in the center of their forehead. Such a description is not likely to make a person believe in the Cyclops, but evidence shows that creatures of this description may have existed. The above image is of a humanoid skeleton discovered by a Pakistani farmer when he was digging for a new well. It is difficult to tell from the picture, but the skeleton actually stands at twelve feet tall. This is undeniable archaeological evidence for the existence of giants. But such evidence is hardly shocking. For millennia people have written about giants, most famously in the Old-Testament description of Goliath. But this is not the only evidence for cyclopes. The image on the left is of a child born in Saint Jude’s Literal Sacred Heart Hospital in 2013. The child is reported to have been born with a horribly deformed body, full of open wounds which had to be stitched. The infant had only one eye that was nearly blind, and no nose. It was also diagnosed with with a pituitary tumor, which would have affected the child’s growth. Despite the doctors’ best efforts the child died within five weeks. It was later discovered that the child had been given a medicine to which he was in all likelihood highly allergic, which is more plausibly what led to his death. This discovery led to many lawsuits against the hospital. Some doctors have said that, while this child would never have lived long, it might have lasted to the age of thirty. Interestingly, this is the projected average oldest age to which a “giant” can live.
What I propose is that at some point in Greek history, a child was born matching this description, having one eye and a growing disorder which turned them into a giant. Such a person would be seen as a monster, and would probably learn quickly to hate their fellow humans and possibly attack them. This poor child may have been driven to some distant island, inspiring myths such as the Odyssey in which Odysseus discovers an island with a violent cyclops on it.
As is so often the case, when humans encountered something different from the norm, they labeled it a monster, and so they created one. The birth of a myth of giant and terrible monsters with one eye most likely began with the tragically real cyclops: A deformed and frightened child alienated by society.
YES! You used the correct plural!
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