1. My theme today is “Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve”, so by way of introduction I’m going to read a short passage from the story of the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve, as it appears in Genesis, the first book in the Bible:
‘The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living beings. God made coverings from skins for the man and his wife and clothed them…
The man lay with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the Lord I have brought into being a male child.” Afterwards she had another child, Abel.” (Genesis 3: 20-21 & 4: 1-2) But although Cain and Abel, and their younger brother Seth, were the first ‘Sons of Adam’, I’m afraid the Bible doesn’t say who the first ‘Daughters of Eve’ were. After Eve herself, though, the first women actually to be named in the Bible are Zillah and Adah, the wives (both of them!) of Cain’s great-great-great-grandson, Lamech. But things were getting complicated by this stage, so I’ll leave it there! And if you’ve noticed some gaps in the story, you’re not the first!
2. A country I used to go to when I was a boy – but less often since – is Narnia. Narnia isn’t a country that you get to by driving or flying on a plane. You get there by some unusual routes, like through the back of a wardrobe or a picture hanging on a bedroom wall or a seat on a railway station. Or, alternatively, you get there through your own imagination and a story in a book. There are seven of these Narnia books, all written by a man named C. S. Lewis. That’s how I first got there, through a book called ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.’ In these books we can read about the Narnian world and encounter its heroes and villains, its wonderful animals and its other strange and exotic creatures – some good, some evil, and some just funny.
And there are people there too, human beings that is, who have somehow got in to the Narnian world from our world, by strange and mysterious means. They are called the “Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve.” Some of these people are children, and they are the central characters in the stories, along with Aslan, the great Lion. But when you read the books it can be the non-human – or quasi-human people – who have the biggest impact. But I can’t go into details about all of them today. But it is one group of very odd people in Narnia’s world, the Dufflepuds, who I want to say something about. 3. The Dufflepuds appear in a book called ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’, in which a group of travellers reach the remote island where the Dufflepuds live. They are called this by the travellers because of the thumping noise they make when moving around. They are invisible when the travellers first encounter them, but later they are made visible and look rather like giant mushrooms. As one of the travellers, whose name is Lucy, asks, “what are those mushroom things”, and we are told, “They were very like mushrooms…the stalks about three feet high and the ‘umbrellas’ the same length from edge to edge…But then a most extraordinary thing happened. Each of the ‘mushrooms’ suddenly turned upside-down. The little bundles which had lain at the bottom of their stalks were heads and bodies. The stalks themselves were legs. But not two legs to each body. Each body had a single thick leg right under it…and at the end of it, a single enormous foot…They had been lying flat on their backs each with its single leg up in the air and its enormous foot spread out above it…This was their ordinary way of resting; for the foot kept off both rain and sun…these little one-footed men couldn’t walk or run as we do. They got about by jumping…as if each big foot were a mass of springs.” The reason for the noise they make is now clear, “And with what a bounce they came down; that was what made the thumping sound. ” The more formal name for a Dufflepud was ‘Monopod’, which means ‘one foot’. But now we leave Narnia and the Dufflepuds, safe in the knowledge that such strange people don’t exist in our world. Or do they? 4. Two thousand years ago a famous Roman writer (who we call Pliny the Elder to distinguish him from his nephew, Pliny the Younger) wrote a very long book called ‘Natural History’. In it he had a go at describing the world as it was known at the time. Some of it is a rational and factual account, but where firm knowledge was lacking then imagination, myths, legends and travellers’ tales took over. And he writes about some of the strange peoples who, or so he’s read or been told, live in remote parts of the world, including, Pliny writes:
“A tribe of men called the Monocoli who have only one leg and hop with amazing speed. These people are also called the Umbrella-footed, because when the weather is hot they lie on their backs stretched out on the ground and protect themselves by the shade of their feet.”
Pliny’s Monocoli are clearly C. S. Lewis’s Monopods, or Dufflepuds, but he places them somewhere in our world. I don’t know if he really believed in them, but he still included them in his account of the world and what lives in it. And he included some other rather odd people too, and he wasn’t the last to do so. Four hundred years after Pliny, another Roman writer who was an enormously influential Christian theologian, also wrote a very long book. It was called ‘City of God’. His name was Augustine and he was bishop of a place called Hippo in the Roman province of Africa, modern Tunisia. Although St. Augustine’s book was basically theological, like Pliny he ranged pretty widely too. Indeed, he seems to have been influenced by Pliny on some things. And this includes the various types of people, some of them very odd, who can be found in remote parts of the world. But all of them, Augustine said, are human beings, “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve” created by God. This seems fair enough, until we read about some of them! One group of people Augustine mentions sound familiar. He writes: “There is also a story of a race who have a single leg attached to their feet…They a called Sciapods (‘shadow-feet’) because in hot weather they lie on their backs on the ground and take shelter in the shade of their feet.” Here, once more, are the Monocoli, the Monopods, the Dufflepuds now called Sciapods. And like Pliny, Augustine lists them along with other strange versions of humanity. He mentions: “men without necks, and with their eyes in their shoulders”; “monsters…said to have only one eye, in the middle of their forehead”; while “others have the soles of their feet turned backwards behind their legs” and yet others “have the characteristics of both sexes…and…alternate between begetting and conceiving.” “Then there are men without mouths who live only by inhaling through their nostrils.”
And so it goes on, including “others whose height is only a cubit – the Greeks call them ‘Pygmies’. If these really were the inhabitants of the Central African rainforests who later inherited the name, then here is a link between real people and the beings imagined by the likes of Pliny. For Augustine, though, as a Christian, the question was, if such people really existed, were they truly human? Were they divinely created, were they “sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve”? He thought so, and wrote:
“But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man – that is a rational and mortal being – derives from that one first-created human being. And this is true, however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodily shape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part, or quality.” Whatever we may think of Augustine and some of the bizarre creatures he describes, in these words he was surely on to something with which we would be in sympathy. It is a refutation of any prejudice or ideology which denies the humanity of any “son of Adam” or “Daughter of Eve.” He writes, “God is the creator of all…He has the wisdom to weave the beauty of the whole design out of the constituent parts in their likeness and diversity.” And he wasn’t talking about strange and mythological beings here, “monstrous races” as he called them, but about truly human beings who, in some way or another, appear to be divergent “from the norm.”
5. Augustine does ask though, with respect to “certain monstrous races of men”,
“whether we are to suppose that they descended from the sons of Noah, or rather from that one man from whom they themselves derived.” Augustine thought they did, and his mention of the sons of Noah is significant here, because it was from Noah’s three sons, according to the Bible story, that the human race recovered after the catastrophe of the Flood. As we read in the book of Genesis (9: 18-20):
“The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth…These three were the sons of Noah, and their descendants spread over the whole earth.” The sons of Noah represent both the unity of humankind as “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”, but also the division of humanity into races and nations and all the subdivisions that we have subsequently both caused and suffered. But although we affirm that we are one human race, one human species, and that we all share one ancestry, in fact that one original ancestry did, like Noah’s family, give rise to a variety of descendants. And as the study of human origins has revealed, there have actually been several human species besides ourselves, living alongside each other for very long periods indeed. All had the same origin, all were human, but over millions of years they evolved and became distinct species. There were Neanderthals, there was Homo Erectus, there was Homo Floresiensis – the so-called ‘Hobbits’, named after Tolkien’s fictional creations and known from their remains on one Indonesian island. They remind us of St. Augustine’s cubit-high ‘pygmies’. All these, and more, were human, but they were not Homo Sapiens, our own species, and all became extinct long ago, leaving just us.
Augustine believed, or half-believed, in a humanity that included some pretty weird branches of the family tree, with its roots in the three sons of Noah and their wives, and in Adam and Eve. But however bizarre they were, Augustine still saw them, if they existed, as human. We don’t believe in Monopods, Monocoli, and Sciapods. Dufflepuds only exist in a book – or in Narnia. Men with eyes in their shoulders or the middle of their foreheads, people who are male on one side and female on the other, or, for that matter, giants like the Nephilim, who are mentioned in the Old Testament (Genesis 6: 4, Numbers 13: 32-33) – all such creatures have faded back into the myths and legends from which they came. But the affirmation that, for all our variety, human beings are of one stock, one race, one species – the “Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve”, as we are known in Narnia – holds good. And we should act accordingly, as brothers and sisters – as the neighbours who Jesus calls us to love as we love ourselves.
Cliff Reed
12th September 2025
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House 