Astomi

Region/Culture: South Asia
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Medieval European Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A race of hairy, mouthless people who take no food or drink and live entirely on the scents they breathe in through their nostrils.
Role in Mythos: They mark the eastern edge of the known world in Greek and Roman accounts of India, one of the marvelous races said to dwell beyond the reach of ordinary life.
Relation to Humans: They were imagined as a distant people rather than a threat, glimpsed by travelers near the source of the Ganges and never truly met. Their strangeness measured how far the world could bend before it stopped resembling anything familiar.

Somewhere past the last villages of India, where the Ganges narrows toward its source and the air carries cold off the mountains, a small band of people moves through the trees with fruit held to their faces. They have no mouths. The skin where a mouth should be is smooth and continuous, and the only sound they make is the slow draw of breath through the nose. Each of them carries roots and flowers and a few wild apples, the way another traveler might carry bread and water, because the scent is the meal. When the smell of one apple fades they reach for the next.

This is the Astomi, and they are among the oldest entries in the long catalogue of wonders that Greece and Rome believed waited at the edges of the map. Their name is plain Greek, a-stomos, without a mouth, and it tells you almost everything the ancients claimed to know. They eat nothing. They drink nothing. They live on air and odour, drawing nourishment from the fragrance of roots, blossoms, and the small sour apples that grew at the foot of the Himalayas.

The account comes down through a single thread, and it is worth knowing how thin that thread is. A Greek named Megasthenes traveled to India around 300 BCE as an envoy to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, and he wrote a book about what he saw and what he was told. The book itself is lost. What survives are quotations, the most famous of them set down by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History more than three centuries later. Pliny places the Astomi at the extreme eastern boundary of India, near the source of the Ganges, and reports that they have no mouth and a body hairy all over, that they dress in cottonwool, and that they live only on the air they breathe and the scent they inhale through their nostrils. Strabo, the great geographer, mentions them too, noting that in place of mouths they have small openings through which they take in breath. A people without a mouth is also a people without speech, and that silence is part of what made them seem so far from the rest of mankind.

The detail that gives the Astomi their peculiar charm is the apples. They carry them on long journeys so as never to run short of something to smell, tucking them away the way you might keep provisions, and the image is oddly domestic for a creature so alien. Here is a being stranger than any monster, with no jaw, no teeth, no hunger as anyone understood hunger, and its survival kit is a pocket of fruit. Solinus, writing in the third century, tightened the story into a single grim line that medieval scribes loved to repeat: the people near the Ganges live only on the smell of wild apples, and if they smell something foul, they die at once.

That last clause is the hinge of the whole legend. The same nose that feeds them can kill them. Their entire existence runs on scent, and so a bad enough smell is not an unpleasantness but a poison, a stench strong enough to end a life the way a blow ends it. A race that survives on perfume can be murdered by a stink. It is the kind of logic that myth delivers without blinking.

No origin story attaches to them, no birth from a god or a curse, because the Astomi were never really a myth in that sense. They were geography. They belonged to the genre of marvels that Greek and Roman writers used to fill the unknown spaces of the east, and they lived on long after Rome fell. Medieval Europe inherited the whole strange company and gave the Astomi a new name, the Gangines, the people of the Ganges. On the Hereford Mappa Mundi, the vast world map drawn in England around 1300, two robed figures stand in the top corner of India, one shaking fruit from a branch with a stick while the other lifts an apple to where its face should be. Preachers found a use for them as well. One Dominican writer turned the apple-smeller into a warning about Christians who only sniff at holiness, taking in the fragrance of the Word while neglecting the works that would truly feed the soul.

Whether anything real lies under the legend is a question without a firm answer. One suggestion points to the mountain peoples near the Ganges headwaters, who were said to carry pungent roots and fruit to ward off the sickness that comes with thin mountain air, breathing in the sharp smell of onions or apples to steady themselves on the high passes. A traveler hearing of men who climbed into the clouds clutching apples to their noses, who would sicken without them, might carry the story home and let it harden into a race that breathed instead of ate. The truth has dissolved past recovering. What remains is the picture itself, vivid and complete: a hairy, silent people at the rim of the world, alive on nothing but the air and the apples they hold to their faces, one strong smell away from death.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Astomi?

The Astomi are a legendary race from ancient India described in Greek and Roman accounts. They had no mouths and survived without food or drink, living only on the scents they inhaled through their nostrils, especially the smell of apples, flowers, and roots.

How did the Astomi eat?

The Astomi did not eat or drink at all. They were said to draw all their nourishment from breathing air and smelling aromatic plants, and they carried roots, flowers, and wild apples with them on long journeys so they would always have a scent to live on.

Where did the Astomi live?

The Astomi were placed at the far eastern edge of India, near the source of the Ganges River, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Greek and Roman writers located them at the boundary of the known world, among the other marvelous races believed to dwell in distant India.

What could kill the Astomi?

A strong or foul odour could kill the Astomi. Because their entire survival depended on scent, an unusually powerful or unpleasant smell acted on them like poison, and according to the Roman writer Solinus they would die immediately if they smelled something offensive.

Who first described the Astomi?

The Greek ambassador Megasthenes first described the Astomi around 300 BCE in his lost book on India. His account survived through later writers, most famously Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, along with Strabo and Solinus, and medieval Europe later knew the same people as the Gangines.