Richard Freeman is, of course, in India now, but before he left he sent this link... http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/10/21/130722022/looking-for-new-monsters
There's something inside us that loves a good monster. We want them scary. We want them surprising. But apparently not too surprising. Across time and across cultures, our monsters come in strangely predictable forms. Read on..
"Very Little Contact two thousand years ago" does NOT mean the same thing as "No Contact". There were Romans that ended up in China following the silk road and signed graffitti on walls in Latin and in Roman script, before the Fall of Rome: and then there were any number of Nestorian Christian Byzantine Missionaries that set up Missions to the Orient. One of the things that diffused was the traditional image of the Virgin Mary as Madonna, adopted in the icongraphy of the Chinese Goddess Kwan-Yin,and the elaborate depictions of the Tortures in Hell; as well as even little decorative motifs used in Architecture. So if you can have such things diffused, certainly the representations of Blemnae and the rest could also have been diffused by even infrequent travellers.
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