Cowled child

From Plastic Tub

cowled child n. 1.

The phenomena of infant mophology has long fascinated persons whose intellectual pursuits lay at their most comfortable in untoward position, reflecting spiritual traditions to which the researcher has -- perhaps only casually -- sworn fealty. Nearly without exception, human religious experience autogyrates between the idea of being and non-being, living and death. The lives of men appear in our soul dramas as but limping children, somehow muscled and terse, mouthing dangerously invented languages of body, motion, of sword's edge and needle's point. To muddle with spyglass and pencil in the naked twilight of this experience is the duty of a lone nut, the errant scientician, the Gnomic up-ender, the Catholic.

It should come as no surprise then, that Europe's Mother Church has an abandoned trunk of scholarly information concerning those states of mankind which split asunder the differences between man and animal, angel and monkey, chirping non-life and low-lamp glow of gloamy non-existance. It takes a strange kind of man, in other words, to study strange kinds of men -- or as the case may be, very strange examples of newly birth children, in particular those examples which display superflous body parts, glaring omissions in design or unnatural body developments requiring immediate medical and prieslty attentions.

The so-called cowled child is just such a spectular birth-object.

-- tersely sorting this cry from the collective wilderness are the