A soul bound for rebirth takes a wrong turn, enters the womb of a sow, and is born neither man nor beast but both at once — the record files this shape simply as "Man-hog." Its witness is Werner's Myths & Legends of China (a 1922 compilation of Chinese myth), where the creature carries a name: Chu Pa-chieh, "a grotesque, even gross, personage," once an officer in heaven who held the "high office" of "Overseer-general of the Navigation of the Milky Way". Drunk, he "vilely assaulted the daughter of Yü Huang", was "beaten with two thousand blows from an iron hammer," and "exiled to earth to be reincarnated."

The exile miscarried. "During his transition a mistake was made," and, entering a sow, "he was born half-man, half-pig," a pig's head and ears set on "a human body." His first deeds run in the old monstrous grain: he began "killing and eating his mother," then "devoured his little porcine brothers", and at last, "armed with an iron rake," "robbed and then ate the travellers" who crossed his mountain. Only "the Goddess Kuan Yin" turns him — she ordains him a priest, gives him "the name of Chu (Pig)" and a religious name, Wu-nêng, which the text renders "Seeker after Strength". Thereafter this monster "was knocked down by Sun", submitted, and "declared himself a disciple of the pilgrim priest", walking the long road west as a tamed thing.

The apparatus files a second authority here, an Irish one, that our shelf has not yet wired to text, so the man-hog rests for now on the Chinese witness alone. It is an odd redemption for a body that opens by eating its own mother and closes carrying a holy man's baggage: at what point does a monster stop being one — when its hungers change, or only when someone hands it a name?