FROM THE BOOK OF "IMAGINARY" CREATURES (CRYPTOZOOLOGY):

“THIS EARTH CORRUPTED...”

Throughout the centuries, man has used myth and legend to describe things which were beyond their ken; whenever our understanding fell short, we "fleshed out" the descriptions with additional detail--but all the while based on fact.  The creatures mentioned. in this study ,are based on fact, and mythologized by men who could not fully understand their existence.

It is not my intention to give undue credence to these beingb--simply to list them, and their overriding characteristics--for future study and reference:

THE AMPHISBAENA:

The Pharsalia (IX, 701-28) catalogs the real or imaginary reptiles that Cato's soldiers met up with on their scorching march across the African desert.  Among them are the Pareas..... and "the dangerous Amphisbaena, also, that moves on at both of its heads." Pliny uses nearly the same words to describe the Amphisbaena, adding: "as though one mouth were not enough for the discharge of all its venom... Brunetto Latini's Tesoro--the encyclopedia which Latini recommended to his old disciple in the seventh circle of Hell--is less terse and clearer: "The Amphisbaena is a serpent having two heads, the one in its proper place and the other in its tail; and it can bite with both, and run with agility, and its eyes glare like candles........

THE BAHAMUT:

Behemoth's fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image.  From a hippopotamus or elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in a fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens.  A Moslem tradition runs:

"God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth He made an angel.  But the angel had no base and so under the angel's feet he made a crag of ruby.  But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues, and feet.  But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish He put water, and under the water He put darkness, and beyond this men's knowledge does not reach."

So immense and dazzling is Bahamut that the eyes of man cannot bear its sight.  All the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish's nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert.  In the 496th night of the Arabian Nights we are told that it was given to Isa (Jesus) to behold Bahamut and that, this mercy granted, Isa fell to the ground in a faint, and three days and their nights passed before he recovered his senses.  The tale goes on that beneath the measureless fish is a sea; and beneath the sea, a chasm of air; and beneath the air, fire; and beneath the fire, a serpent named Falak in whose mouth are the six hells.

THE BANSHEE:

Nobody seems to have laid eyes on this "woman of the fairies." She is less a shape than a mournful screaming that haunts the Irish night and (according to Sir Walter Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft) the Scottish highlands.  Beneath the windows of the visited house, she foretells the death of one of the family.  She is held to be a token of pure Celtic blood, with no mixture of Latin, Saxon, or Danish.  The Banshee has also been heard in Wales and in Brittany.  Her wail is called keening.

THE BASILISK:

Down through the ages, the Basilisk (also know as the Cockatrice) grows increasingly ugly and horrendous until today it is forgotten.  Its name comes from the Greek and means "little king;" to the Elder Pliny (VIII, 33), it was a serpent bearing a bright spot in the shape of a crown on its head.  Dating from the Middle Ages, it becomes a four-legged cock with a crown, yellow feathers, wide thorny wings, and a serpent's tail ending either in a hook or in another cock's head.  The change in its image is reflected in a change in its name; Chaucer in the Persone's Tale speaks of the "basilicok" ("the basilicok sleeth folk by the venim of his sighte").

One of the plates illustrating Aldrovandi's Natural History of Serpents and Dragons gives the Basilisk scales instead of feathers, and the use of eight legs .... What remains constant about the Basilisk is the deadly effect of its stare and its venom.  The Gorgons' eyes turned living beings into stone; Lucan tells us that from the blood of one of them all the serpents of Libya sprang--the asp, the amphisbaena, the ammodyte, and the Basilisk.

THE CATOBLEPAS:

Pliny (VIII, 32) relates that somewhere on the borderb of Ethiopia, near the head of the Nile,

"there is found a wild. beast called the catoblepas; an animal of moderate size, and in other respects sluggish in the movement of the rest of it's limbs; its head is remarkably heavy,

                                and it only carries it with the greatest difficulty, bei.ng always bent down toward the earth.  Were it not for this circumstance, it would prove the destruction of the human race; for all who behold its eyes, fall dead upon the spot."

Catoblepas, in Greek, means "that which looks downward." The French naturalist Cuview has conjectured that the gnu (contaminated by the basilisk and the gorgon) suggested the Catoblepas to the ancients.  At the close of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Flaubert describes it and has it speak in this way:

"black buffalo with the head of a hog, hanging close to the ground, joined to its body by a thin neck, long and loose as an emptied intestine. it wallows in the mud, and its legs are smothered under the huge mane of stiff bristles that hide its face.

Obese, downhearted, wary, I do nothing but feel under my belly the warm mud.  My head is so heavy that I cannot bear its weight.  I wind it slowly around my body; with half-open jaws, I pull up with my tongue poisonous plants dampened in my breath.  Once, I ate up my forelegs unawares.

No one, Anthony, has ever seen my eyes; or else, those who have seen them have died.  If I were to lift my eyelids--my pink and swollen eyelids--you would die on the spot."

THE CELESTIAL STAG:

We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we do know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day.  They have the power of speech and implore the miners to help them to the surface.  At first, a Celestial Stag attempts to bribe the workmen with the promise of revealing hidden veins of silver and gold; when this gambit fails, the beast becomes troublesome and the miners are forced to overpower it and wall it up in one of the mine galleries.  It is also rumored that miners outnumbered by the Stags have been tortured to death.

Legend has it that if the Celestial Stag finds its way into the open air, it becomes a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence.

THE CENTAUR:

The Centaur is the most harmonious creature of fantastic zoology.  "Biform" it is called in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but its heterogeneous character is easily overlooked, and we tend to think that in the Platonic world of ideas there is an archetype of the Centaur as there is of the horse or the man.  The discovery of this archetype took centuries; early archaic monuments show a naked man to whose waist the body and hind quarters of a horse are uncomfortably fixed.  On the west facade of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Centaurs already stand on the legs of a horse, and from the place where the animal's neck should start we find a human torso.

Centaurs were the offspring of Ixion, a king of Thessaly, and a cloud which Zeus had given the shape of Hera (or Juno); another version of the legend asserts that they were the offspring of Centaurus, Apollo's son, and Stilbia; a third, that they were the fruit of the union of Centaurus with the mares of Magnesium. (It is said that centaur is derived from gandharva; in Vedic myth, the Gandharvas are minor gods who drive the horses of the sun.) Since the art of riding was unknown to the Greeks of Homeric times, it has been conjectured that the first Scythian horseman they came across seemed to them all one with his horse, and. it has also been alleged that the cavalry of the conquistadors were Centaurs to the Indians.

CERBERUS:

If Hell is a house, the house of Hades, it is natural that it have its watchdog; it is also natural that this dog be fearful.  Hesiod's Theogony gives it fifty heads; to make things easier for the plastic arts, this number has been reduced and Cerberus' three heads are now a matter of public record.  Virgil speaks of its three throats; Ovid of its threefold bark; Butler compared the triple-crowned tiara of the Pope, who is Heaven's doorman, with the three heads of the dog who is the doorman of Hell (Hudibras, IV, 2).  Dante lends it human characteristics which increase its infernal nature: a filthy black beard, clawed hands that in the lashing rain rip at the souls of the damned.  It bites, barks, and bares its teeth.

Bringing Cerberus up into the light of day was the last of Hercules' tasks. ("He drow out Cerberus, the hound of helle," writes Chaucer in the "Monke's Tale.") Zachary Grey, an English writer of the eighteenth century, in his commentary on Hudibras interprets the adventure in this way:

"This Dog with three Heads denotes the past, the present, and the Time to come; which receive, and, as it were, devour all things.  Hercules got the better of him, which shews that heroick actions are always victorious over time, because they are present in the Memory Of Posterity."

According to the oldest texts, Cerberus greets with his tail (which is a serpent) those entering into Hell, and tears to pieces those who try to get out.  A later legend has him biting the newly arrived; to appease him a honeycake was placed in the coffin of the departed.

In Morse mythology, a blood-spattered dog, Garmr, keeps watch over the house of the dead, and will fight against the gods when hell's wolves devour the moon and sun.  Some give this dog four eyes; the dogs of Yama, the Brahman god of death, also have four eyes.

Both Brahmanism and Buddhism offer hells full of dogs, which, like Dante's Cerberus, are torturers of souls.

THE CHIMERA:

The first mention we have of the Chimera is in Book VI of the Iliad.  There Homer writes that it came of divine stock and was a lion in its foreparts, a goat in the middle, and a serpent in its hindparts, and that from its mouth it vomited flames, and finally was killed by the handsome Bellerophon, the son of Glaucus, following the signs of the gods.  A lion's head, goat's belly, and Berpent's tail is the most obvious image conveyed by Homer's words, but Hesiod's Theogonydescribes the Chimera as having three heads, and this is the way it is dicted in the famous Arezzo bronze that dates from the fifth century.  Springing from the middle of the animal'B back is the head of a goat, while at one end it has a snake's head and at the other a lion's.

The Chimera reappears in the sixth book of the Aeneid, "armed with flame;"           Virgil's commentator Servius Honoratus observed             that, according     to all authorities, the monster was native to Lycia, where there was a volcano bearing its name.  The base of this mountain was infested with serpents, higher up on its flanks were meadows and goats, and toward its desolate top. which belched out flames, a pride of lions had its resort.  The Chimera would seem to be a metaphor of this strange elevation.  Earlier, Plutarch suggested that Chimera was the name of a pirate captain who adorned his ship with the images of a lion, a goat, and a snake.

CHRONOS:

The treatise Difficulties and Solutions Of First Principles by the Neoplatonist Damascius (born about A.D. 480) records a strange version of the theogony and cosmogony of Orphism, in which Chronos--or Heracles--is a monster:

"According to Hieronymus and Hellanicus (if the two are not one), Orphic doctrine teaches that in the beginning there was water and mud, with which the earth was shaped.  These two principles were taught to be the first: water and earth.  From them came the third, a winged dragon, which in its foreparts had the head of a bull, in its hindparts the head of a lion, and in its middle the face of a god; this dragon was named the Unaging Chronos..... with him Necessity, also known as the Inevitable, was born and spread to the boundaries of the Universe .... Chronos, the dragon, drew from himself a three-fold seed: moist Ether, limitless Chaos, and misty Erebus.  Under them he laid an egg, from which the world was to hatch.  The last principle was a god who was man and woman, with golden wings on its back, and bullb' heads on its sides, and on its head a huge dragon, like all manner of beasts.......

THE CROCOTTA AND THE LEUCROCOTTA:

Ctesias, physician to Artaxerxes Mnemon in the fourth century B.C., made use of Persian sources to compile a description of India, a work of incalculable value if we are curious as to how Persians under Artaxerxes Mnemon imagined India.  In Chapter 32, he gives an account of the cynolyous, or dog-wolf, from which Pliny seems to have evolved his Crocotta.  Pliny writes (VIII, 30) that the Crocotta is "an animal which looks as though it had been produced by the coupling of the wolf and the dog, for it can break anything with its teeth, and instantly on swallowing it digest it with the stomach .... He goes on to describe another Indian animal, the Leucrocotta, as follows:

...... a wild beast of great swiftness, the size of the wild ass, with the legs of a stag, the neck, tail, and breast of a lion, the head of a badger, a cloven hoof, the mouth slit up as far as the ears, and one continuous bone instead of teeth; it is said, too, that this animal can imitate the human voice."

THE GARUDA:

Vishnu, second god of the triad that rules over the Hindu pantheon, rides either on the serpent that fills the seas or on the back of Garuda.  Pictorially, Vishnu is represented as blue, and with four arms, holding in each hand the club, the shell, the sphere, and the lotus.  Garuda is half vulture and half man, with the wings, beak, and talons of the one and body and legs of the other.  His face is white, his wings of a bright scarlet, and his body golden.  Figures of Garuda, worked in bronze or stone, are worshipped in the temples of India.  One is found in Gwalior, erected more than a hundred years before the Christian era by a Greek, Heliodorus, who became a follower of Vishnu.

THE GNOME:

The gnomes are older than their name, which is Greek but which was unknown to the ancients, since it dates from the sixteenth century.  Etymologists attribute it to the Swiss alchemist Paracelsus in whose writings it appears for the first time.

They are sprites of the earth and hills.  Popular imagination pictures them as bearded dwarfs of rough and grotesque features; they wear tight-fitting brown clothes with monastic hoods.  Like the griffons of Greece and of the East and the dragons od Germanic lore, the gnomes watch over hidden treasure. 

Gnosis, in Greek, means knowledge; and Paracelsus may have called them Gnomes because they know the exact places where precious metals are to be found.

THE GOLEM:

In a book inspired by infinite wisdom, nothing can be left to chance, not even the number of words it contains or the order of the letters; this is what the Kabbalists thought, and they devoted themselves to the task of counting, combining, and permutating the letters of the Scriptures, fired by a desire to penetrate the secrets of God.  Dante stated that every passage of the Bible has a fourfold meaning--the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the spiritual.  Johannes Scotus Erigena, closer to the concept of divinity, had already said that the meanings of the Scriptures are infinite, like the hues in a peacock's tail.

The Kabbalists would have approved this view; one of the secrets they sought in the Bible was how to create living beingb.  It was said of demons that they could make large and bulky creatures like the camel, but were incapable of creating anything delicate or frail, and Rabbi Eliezer denied them the ability to produce anything smaller than a barley grain. Golem was the name given to the man created by combinations of letters; the word means, literally, a shapeless or lifeless clod.  In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 65b) we read:

"If the righteous wished to create a world, they could do so.  By trying different combinations of the letters of the ineffable names of God, Raba succeeded in creating a man, whom he sent to Rabbi Zera.  Rabbi Zera spoke to him, but as he got no answer, he said: 'You are a creature of magic; go back to your dust.'

Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Oshaia, two scholars, spent every Sabbath eve studying the Book of Creation, by means of which they brought into being a three-year old calf that they then used for the purposes of supper."

Schopenhauer, in his book Will in Mature, writes (Chapter 7): FtOn page 325 of the first volume of his Zauberbibliothek (Magic Library), Horst summarizes the teachings of the English mystic Jane Lead in this way: whoever possesses magical powers can, at will, master and change the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms; consequently, a few magicians, working in agreement, could make this world of ours return to the state of Paradise."

Eleazar of Worms has preserved the secret formula for making a Golem.  The procedures involved cover some twenty-three folio columns and require knowledge of the "alphabets of the 221 gates," which must be recited over each of the Golem's organs.  The word Emet, which means "Truth," should be marked on its forehead; to destroy the creature, the first letter must be obliterated, forming the word met, whose meaning is "death."

THE GRIFFON:

Winged monsters, says Herodotus of the Griffons in his accounts of their continual warfare with the one-eyed Arimaspians; almost as sketchy, Pliny speaks of their ears and their hooked beaks, yet judges them fabulous (X, 70).  Perhaps the most detailed description of the Griffon comes from the problematic Sir John Mandeville in Chapter 85 of his famous Travels:

"From this land men shal go unto the land of Bactry, where are many wicked men & fell, in that land are trees that beare wol, as it were shepe, of which them make cloth.  In this land are ypotains [hippopotamuses] that dwel sometime on land, sometime on water, and are halfe a man and halfe a horse, and they eate not byt men, when they may get them.  In this land are many gryffons, more than in other places, and some say they haue the body before as an Egle, and behinde as a Lyon, and it is trouth, for they be made so; but the Griffen hath a body greater than viii Lyons and stall worthier than a hundred Egles.  For certainly he wyl beare to his nest flying, a horse and a man upon his back, or two Oxen yoked togither as they go at plowgh, for he hath large nayles on hys fete, as great as it were hornes of Oxen, and of those they make cups there to drynke of, and of his rybes they make bowes to shoote with."

HANIEL, KAFZIEL, AZRIEL, AND ANIEL:

In Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel saw in a vision four beasts or angels, "and every one had four faces, and every one had four wings" and "as for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle." They went where the spirit carried them, "every one straight forward," or as the first Spanish Bible (1569) has it, eada vno caminaua ende.recho de su Postro ("each one went in the direction of his face") which of course is so unimaginable as to be uncanny.  Four wheels, or rings, "so high they were dreadful" went with the angels and "were full of eyes round about them......

An echo from Ezekiel may have been in the mind of St. John the Divine when he spoke of animals in the fourth chapter of Revelations:

                                "And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.

And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast has a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come."

In the most important of the Kabbalistic works, the Zohar or Book Of Splendor, we read that these four beasts are called Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel, and Aniel and that they face east, north, south, and west.  Stevenson remarked that if such beings were to be found in Heaven, what might be expected of Hell?

THE HARPIES:

In Hesiod's Theogony,, the Harpies are winged divinities who wear long loose hair and are swifter than the birds and winds; in the Aeneid, (Book III), they are vultures with a woman's face, sharp curved claws and filthy underparts, and are weak with a hunger they cannot appease.  They swoop down from the mountains and plunder tables laid for feasts.  They are invulnerable and emit an infectious smell; they gorge all they see, screeching the whole while and fouling everything with excrement.  Servius, in his commentaries on Virgil, writes that just as Hecate is Proserpina in Hell, Diana on earth, and Luna in heaven, and is called a three-fold goddess, Bo the Harpies are Furies in hell, Harpies on earth, and Dirae (or Demons) in heaven.  They are also confused with the Parcae, or Fates.

By order of the gods, the Harpies harried a Thracian king who unveiled men's futures, or who bought a long life with the price of his eyes, for which he was punished by the sun, whose works he had insulted by choosing blindness.  He had prepared a banquet for all his court and the Harpies contaminated and devoured the dishes.  The Argonauts put the Harpies to flight; Apollonius of Rhodes and William Morris (The Life And Death Of Jason) tell the fantastic story.  Ariosto in Canto XXXIII of the Furioso transforms the Thracian king into Prester John, fabled emperor of the Abyssinians.

Harpy comes from the Greek harpaxein, to snatch or carry away.  In the beginning they were wind goddesses, like the Maruts of Vedic myth, who wielded weapons of gold (the lightning) and milked the clouds.

THE HYDRA:

Typhon (the misshapen son of Tartarus and Terra) and Echidna, who was half      beautiful woman and half serpent, gave birth to the Hydra of Lerna.    Lempriere tells us that "It had 100 heads, according to Diodorus; 50 according to Simonides; and 9 according to the more received opinions of Apollodorus, Hyginus, etc." But what made the creature still more awful was that as soon as one of its heads was cut off, two more sprouted up in their place.  It was said that the heads were human and that the middle one was everlasting.        The Hydra's breath poisoned the waters and turned the fields brown.      Even when it slept, the pollution in the air surrounding it could         cause a man’s death.  Juno fostered the Hydra in her efforts to lessen Hercules' fame.

This monster appeared to have been destined for eternity.  Its den lay among the marshes near the lake of Lerna.  Hercules and lolaus went in search of it; Hercules lopped its heads and Iolaus applied a burning iron to the bleeding wounds, for only fire would stop the growth of the new heads.  The last head, which was deathless, Hercules buried under a great boulder, and where it was buried it remains to this day, hating and dreaming.

THE JINN:

According to Moslem tradition, Allah created three different species of intelligent beings: Angels, who are made of light; Jinn ("Jinnee" or "Genie" in the singular), who are made of fire; and Men, who are        made of earth. The Jinn were created of a black smokeless fire   some thousands of years before Adam, and consist of five orders.  Among   these orders we find good Jinn and evil, male Jinn and female.   The cosmographer al-Qaswini says that "the Jinn are aerial animals,  with transparent bodies, which can assume various forms." At first they may show themselves as clouds or as huge undefined pillars; when their form becomes condensed, they become visible, perhaps in the bulk of a man, a jackal, a wolf, a lion, a scorpion, or a snake.  Some are true believers; others, heretics or athiests.  The English Orientalist Edward William Lane writes that when Jinn take the shape of human beings they are sometimes of an enormously gigantic size and "if good, they are generally resplendently handsome; if evil, horribly hideous." They are also said to become invisible at pleasure "by rapid extension or rarefaction of the particles which compose them," when they may disappear into the air or earth, or through a solid wall.

THE KRAKEN:

The Kraken is a Scandinavian version of the zaratan and of the sea dragon, or sea snake, of the Arabs.

In 1752-54, the Dane Erik Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen, published a Natural History Of Norway, a work famous for its hospitality or gullibility, In its pages we read that the Kraken's back is a mile and a half wide and that its tentacles are capable of encompassing the largest of ships.  The huge back protrudes from the sea like an island. The Bishop formulates this rule:  "floating islands are invariably Krakens." He also writes that the Kraken is in the habit of turning  the sea murky with a discharge of liquid.  This statement has inspired the hypothesis that the Kraken is an enlargement of the octopus.

THE LAMIAS:

According to the Greeks and Romans, Lamias lived in Africa.  From the waist up their form was that of a beautiful woman; from the waist down they were serpents.  Many authorities thought of them as witches; others as evil monsters.  They lacked the ability to speak, but they made a whistling sound which was musical, and in the spaces of the desert beguiled travelers in order to devour them.  Their remote origin was divine, having sprung from one of the many loves of Zeus.

LILITH:

"For before Eve was Lilith," we read in an old Hebrew text.  This legend moved the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) to write the poem Hden Bower.  Lilith was a serpent; she was Adam's first wife and gave him "shapes that coiled in the woods and waters, glittering sons and radiant daughters."

It was later that God created Eve; Lilith, to revenge herself on Adam's human wife, urged Eve to taste the forbidden fruit and to conceive Cain, brother and murderer of Abel.  Such is the early form of the myth followed and bettered by Rossetti.  Throughout the Middle Ages the influence of the word layil, Hebrew for "night," gave a new turn to the myth.  Lilith is no longer a serpent; she becomes an apparition of the night.  At times she is an angel who rules over the procreation of mankind, at times a demon who assaults those who sleep alone or those who travel lonely roads.  In popular imagination she is a tall silent woman with long black hair worn loose.

THE MANDRAKE:

Like the barometz, the plant known as the Mandrake borders on the animal kingdom, since it gives a cry when it is torn up; this cry can drive those who hear it mad.  We read in Shakespeare (Romeo And Juliet, IV, iii): "And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, that living mortals, hearing them, run mad...."

Pythagoras called the plant anthropomorphic; the Roman agronomist Lucius Columella called it semihuman; and Albertus Magnus wrote that the Mandrake is like man himself, down to the distinction between the sexes.  Earlier, Pliny had said that the white Mandrake is the male and the black the female.  Also, that those who root it out first trace three circles on the ground with a sword and look westward; the smell of its leaves is so strong that ordinarily it can deprive men of the power of speech.  To uproot it was to run the risk of terrible calamities.  In the last book of his History of The Jewish Wars, Flavius Josephus advises us to employ a trained dog; the plant dug up, the dog dies, but the leaves are useful as a narcotic, a laxative, and for the purposes of magic.

THE MANTICORE:

Pliny (VIII, 30) informs us that according to Ctesias, the Greek physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, among the Ethiopians

"there is an animal found, which he calls the mantichora; it has a triple row of teeth, which fit into each other like those of a comb, the face and ears of a man, and azure eyes, is of the color of blood, has the body of the lion, and a tail ending in a sting, like that of the scorpion.  Its voice resembles the union of the sound of the flute and the trumpet; it is of excessive swiftness, and is particularly fond of human flesh."

THE MERMECOLION:

The Mermecolion is an inconceivable animal defined by Flaubert in this way: "lion in its foreparts, ant in its hindparts, with the organs of its sex the wrong way." The history of this monster is also strange.  In the Scriptures (Job IV: 11) we read: "The old lion perisheth for lack of prey."     The Hebrew text has lavish for lion; this word, an uncommon one for       the lion, seems to have produced an equally uncommon translation.  The Septuagint version, harking back to an Arabian lion that Aelian and          Strabo call myrmex, forged the word  Mermecolion.  After centuries,          the origin of this was forgotten.  Myrmex, in Greek, means ant; out of the puzzling words "The ant-lion perisheth of prey" grew a fantasy (translated by T.H. White) that bestiaries succeeded in multiplying:

"The Physiologus said: It had the face (or fore-part) of a lion and the hinder parts of an ant.  Its father eats flesh, but its mother grain.  If then they engender the ant-lion, they engender a thing of two natures, such that it cannot eat flesh because of the nature of its mother, nor grain because of the nature of its father. it perishes, therefore, because it has no nutriment."

THE MINOTAUR:

The idea of a house built so that people could become lost in it is perhaps more unusual than that of a man with a bull's head, but both ideas go well together and the image of the labyrinth fits with the image of the Minotaur.  It is equally fitting that in the center of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant.

The Minotaur, half bull and half man, was born of the furious passion of Pasiphae, Queen of Crete, for a white bull that Neptune brought out of the sea.  Daedalus, who invented the artifice that carried the Queen's unnatural desires to gratification, built the labyrinth destined to confine and keep hidden her monstrous son.  The Minotaur fed on human flesh and for its nourishment the King of Crete imposed on the city of Athens a yearly tribute of seven young men and seven maidens.  Theseus resolved to deliver his country from this burden when it fell to his lot to be sacrificed to the Minotaur's hunger.  Ariadne, the King's daughter, gave him a thread so that he could trace his way out of the windings of the labyrinth's corridors; the hero killed the Minotaur and was able to escape the maze.

THE PERYTON:

The Sibyl of Erythraea, it is said, foretold that the city of Rome would finally be destroyed by the Perytons.  In the year A.D. 642 the record of the Sibyl's prophecies was consumed in the great conflagration of Alexandria; the grammarians who undertook the task of restoring certain charred fragments of the nine volumes apparently never came upon the special prophecy concerning the fate of Rome.

In time it was deemed necessary to find a source that would throw greater light upon this dimly remembered tradition.  After many vicissitudes it was learned that in the sixteenth century a rabbi from Fez (in all likelihood Jakob Ben Chaim) had left behind a historical treatise in which he quoted the now lost work of a Greek scholiast, which included certain historical facts about the Perytons obviously taken from the oracles before the Library Of Alexandria was burned by Omar.  The name of the learned Greek has not come down to us, but his fragments run:

"The Perytons had their original dwelling in Atlantis and are half deer, half bird.  They have the deer's head and legs.  As for its body, it is perfectly avian, with corresponding wings and plumage ...

Its strangest trait is that, when the sun strikes it, instead of casting a shadow of its own body, it casts the shadow of a man.  From this, some conclude that the Perytons are the spirits of wayfarers who have died far from their homes and from the care of their gods ...

.... and have been surprised eating dry earth.... flying in flocks and have been seen at a dizzying height above the Columns of Hercules.

.... the [Perytons] are mortal foes of the human race; when they succeed in killing a man, their shadow is that of their own body and they win back the favor of their gods.

                         .... and those who crossed the seas with Scipio to conquer Carthage came close to failure, for during the passage a formation of Perytons swooped down on     the      ships,      killing      and        mangling many .... Although our weapons have  no effect against it, the animal--if such it be--can kill no more than a single man.

.... wallowing in the gore of its victims and then fleeing upward on its powerful wings.

.... in Ravenna, where they were last seen, telling of their plumage which they described as light blue in color, which greatly surprised me for all that is known of their dark green feathers ....

THE PHOENIX:

In monumental effigies, in pyramids of stone, and in treasured mummies, the Egyptians sought eternity.  It is therefore appropriate that their country should have given rise to the myth of a cyclical and deathless bird, though its subsequent elaboration is the work of Greece and of Rome.  Adolf Erman writes that in the mythology of Heliopolis, the Phoenix (benu) is the lord of jubilees or of long cycles of time.  Herodotus, in a famous passage (11, 73), tells with insistent skepticism an early form of the legend:

"Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix.  I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for  the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five  hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say.  It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies.  If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red.  He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness.  The Egyptians tell a tale of this bird's devices which I do not believe.  He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun's temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him.  His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt.  Such is the tale of what is done by this bird."

THE SATYR:

Satyr was the Greek name for them; Rome called them Fauns, Pans, and Sylvans.  In the lower part of the body they were goats; their torso, arms, and head were human.  SAtyrs were thickly covered with hair and had short horns, pointed ears, active eyes, and hooked noses.  They were lascivious and fond of their wine.  They attended Bacchus in his rollicking and bloodless conquest of India.  They set ambushes for nymphs, relished dancing, and their instrument was the flute.  Country people paid homage to them, offering them the first fruits of the harvest.  Lambs were also sacrificed in their honor.

In Roman times, a specimen of these demigods was surprised asleep in his mountain den in Thessaly by some of Sulla's soldiers, who brought him before their general.  The Satyr uttered inarticulate sounds and was so loathsome to the eyes and nostrils that Sulla had him at once sent back to the wilderness.

SCYLLA:

Before becoming a monster and then turned into rocks, Scylla was a nymph with whom Glaucus, one of the sea gods, had fallen in love.  In order to win her, Glaucus sought the help of Circe whose knowledge of herbs and incantations was well known.  But Circe became attached to Glaucus on sight, only she was unable to get him to forget Scylla, and so to punish her rival she poured the juice of poisonous herbs into the fountain where the nymph bathed.  At this point, according to Ovid (Metamox-phoses, XIV, 59-67):

"Scylla comes and wades waist-deep into the water; when all at once she sees her loins disfigured with barking monster-shapes.  And at the first, not believing that these are parts of her own body, she flees in fear and tries to drive away the boisterous, barking things.  But what she flees she takes along with her; and, feeling for her thighs, her legs, her feet, she finds in place of these only gaping dogs'-heads, such as a Cerberus might have.  She stands on ravening dogs, and her docked loins and her belly are enclosed in a circle of beastly forms......

She then found herself supported by twelve feet, and she had six heads, each with three rows of teeth.  This metamorphosis so terrified her that she threw herself into the strait separating Italy and Sicily, where the gods changed her into rocks.  During storms, sailors speak of the dreadful roaring of the breakers when driven into the uneven cavities of the rock.

This legend is also found in the pages of Homer and Pausanias.

THE SHAGGY BEAST OF LA FERTE-BERNARD:

Along the banks of the Huisne, an otherwise peaceful stream, there roamed during the Middle Ages a creature that became known as the Shaggy Beast (La velue).  This animal had somehow managed to survive the Flood despite its exclusion from the Ark.  It was the size of a bull, and it had a snake's head and a round body buried under long green fur.  The fur was armed with stingers whose wound was deadly.  The creature also had very broad hooves that were similar to the feet of the tortoise, and its tail, shaped like a serpent, could kill men and cattle alike.  When its anger was aroused, the Shaggy Beast shot out flames that withered crops.  At night it raided stables.  Whenever the farmers attempted to hunt it down, it hid in the waters of the Huisne, causing the river to flood its banks and drown the valley for miles.

THE SIRENS:

Through the course of time the image of the Sirens has changed.  Their first historian, Homer, in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, does not tell us what they were like; to Ovid, they are birds of reddish plumage with the faces of young girls; to Apollonius of Rhodes, in the upper part of the body they are women and in the lower part seabirds; to the Spanish playwright Tirso de Molina (and to heraldry), "half woman, half fish."               No less debatable is their nature.  In his classical dictionary       Lempriere calls them nymphs; in Quicherat's they are monsters, and in Grimal's they are demons.  They inhabit a western island, close to Circe's, but the dead body of one of them, Parthenope, was found washed ashore in Campania and gave her name to the famed city now called Naples.  Strabo, the geographer, saw her grave and witnessed the games held periodically in her memory.

The Odyssey tells that the Sirens attract and shipwreck seamen, and that Ulysses, in order to hear their song and yet remain alive, plugged the ears of his oarsmen with wax and had himself lashed to the mast.  The Sirens, tempting him, promised him knowledge of all the things of this world.....

A legend recorded by the mythologist Apollodorus in his Bibliotheca, tells that Orpheus, aboard the Argonauts' ship, sang more sweetly than the Sirens and that because of this these creatures threw themselves into the sea and were changed into rocks, for their fate was to die whenever their spell went unheeded.  The sphinx, also, threw herself from a precipice when her riddle was solved.

THE SPHINX:

The Sphinx of Egyptian monuments (called by Herodotus androsphinx, or man-sphinx, in order to distinguish it from the Greek Sphinx) is a lion having the head of a man and lying at rest; it stood watch by temples and tombs, and is said to have represented royal authority.  In the halls of Karnak, other Sphinxes have the head of a ran, the sacred animal of Amon.  The Sphinx of Assyrian monuments is a winged bull with a man's bearded and crowned head; this image is common on Persian gems.  Pliny in his list of Ethiopian animals includes the Sphinx, of which he details no other features than "brown hair and two mammae on the breast."

The Greek Sphinx has a woman's head and breasts, the wings of a bird, and the body and feet of a lion.  Some give it the body of a dog and a snake's tail.  It is told that it depopulated the Theban countryside asking riddles (for it had a human voice) and making a meal of any man who could not give the answer.  Of Oedipus, the son of Jocasta, the Sphinx asked, "What has four legs, two legs, and three legs, and the more legs it has the weaker it is?" (So runs what seems to be the oldest version.  In time the metaphor was introduced which makes. of man"s life a single day.  Nowadays the question goes, "Which animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?") Oedipus answered that it was a man who as an infant crawls on all fours, when he grows up walks on two legs, and in old age leans on a staff.  The riddle solved, the Sphinx threw herself from a precipice.

TALOS:

.... and then there is Talos, the warden of the island of Crete.  Some consider this giant the work of Vulcan or of Daedalus; Apollonius of Rhodes tells us about him in his Argonautica (IV, 1638-48):

"And Talos, the man of bronze, as he broke off rocks from the hard cliff, stayed them from fastening hawsers to the shore, when they came to the roadstead of Dicte's haven.  He was of the stock of bronze, of the men sprung form ash-trees, the last left among the sons of the gods; and the son of Cronos gave him to Europa to be the warder of Crete and to stride round the island thrice a day with his feet of bronze.  Now in all the rest of his body and limbs was he fashioned of bronze and invulnerable; but beneath the sinew by his ankle was a blood-red vein; and this, with its issues of life and death, was covered by a thin skin."

It was through his vulnerable heel, of course, that Talos met his end.  Medea bewitched him with a hostile glance, and when the giant again began heaving boulders from his cliff, "he grazed his ankle on a pointed crag, and the ichor gushed forth like melted lead; and not long thereafter did he stand towering on the jutting cliff."

In another version of this myth, Talos, burning red-hot, would put his arms around a man and kill him.  The bronze giant this time met death at the hands of Castor and Pollux, the Dioseuri, who were led on by the sorceress Medea.

THE TIAO T'IEH:

Poets and mythology seem to have ignored it, but everyone at some time has discovered a T'ao T'ieh for himself at the corner of a capital or in the middle of a frieze, and felt a slight uneasiness.  The dog that guarded the flocks of the threefold Geryon had two heads and a single body, and luckily was killed by Hercules.  The T'ao T'ieh inverts this order and is still more horrible: its huge head is connected to one body on the right and another on the left.  Generally it has six legs since the front pair serves for both bodies.  Its face may be a dragon's. a tiger's, or a person's; art historians call it an "ogre's mask." It is a formal monster, inspired by the demon of symmetry for sculptors, potters, and ceramicists.  Some fourteen hundred years B.C., under the Shang Dynasty, it already figured on ceremonial bronzes.

T'ao T'ieh means "glutton" and it embodies the vices of sensuality and avarice.  The Chinese paint it on their dishes in order to warn against self-indulgence.

THE UNICORN:

The first version of the Unicorn is nearly identical with the latest.  Four hundred years B.C., the Greek historian and physician Ctesias told that among the kingdoms of India there were very swift wild asses with white coats, purple heads, blue eyes, and in the middle of their foreheads a pointed horn whose base was white, whose tip was red, and whose middle was black.  Pliny, more precise, wrote (VIII, 31):

...... the fiercest animal is the unicorn, which in the rest of the body resembles a horse, but in the head a stag, in the feet an elephant, and in the tail a boar, and has a deep bellow, and a single black horn three feet long projecting from the middle of the forehead.  They say that it is impossible to capture this animal alive."

The Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ, mercury, and evil have all been represented by the Unicorn.  In his Psychologie and Alchemie (1944), Jung gives a history and an analysis of these symbols.

A small white horse with the forelegs of an antelope, a goat's beard, and a long twisted horn projecting straight out from its forehead is the picture usually given of this imaginary animal.

THE ZARATAN:

There is one story that has ranged the whole of geography and all epochs--the tale of mariners who land on an unknown island which then sinks into the sea and drowns them because it is a living creature.  This invention is found in the first voyage of Sindbad and in Canto VI, Stanza 37, of Orlando Furioso (Ch'ella sia una isoletta ci credemo--"we believed it [the whale] to be a small island."); in the Irish legend of St. Brendan and in the Greek bestiary of Alexandria; in the Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555) by the Swedish ecclesiastic Olaus Nagnus and in this passage from the opening of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, "stretched out huge in length," is compared to a whale (203-8):

"Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam, the pilot of some small night-foundered skiff; deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell, with fixed anchor in his scaly rind, moors by his side under the lee, while night invests the sea...."

Paradoxically, one of the earliest versions of the legend gives it in order to refute it.  This is recorded in the Book Of Animals by al-Jahiz, the ninth-century Moslem zoologist.  We translate its words from the Spanish version by Miguel Asin Palacios:

"As for the zaratan, I never met anyone who actually saw it with his own eyes.

There are sailors who assert that they have drawn alongside certain sea islands, seeing wooded valleys and crevices in the rock, and landed to light a big fire; and when the heat of the flames reaches the zaratan's spine, the beast began to slip under the waters with them on top of him, and with all the pants growing on him, until only those able to swim away were saved.  This outdoes even the boldest, most imaginative piece of fiction"

Let us now consider a thirteenth-century text by al-Qazwini, the Persian cosmographer who wrote in Arabic.  It comes from a work of his entitled Wonders Of Creation, and runs this way:

"As for the sea turtle, it is of such huge size that people on shipboard take it for an island.  One merchant has reported:

'Rising out of the sea we discovered an island with green plants, and we went ashore and dug pits for a cooking fire, and the island began to move and the sailors said, ' 'Back to the ship!  It's a turtle!  The heat of the fires has wakened him and we'll be lost!' ' "

In the Anglo-Saxon bestiary of the Exeter Book, the dangerous island is a whale, "skilled in treachery," that deliberately tricks seafarers.  They camp on its back seeking rest from their labors at sea; suddenly the Ocean's Guest sinks down and the men drown.  In the Greek bestiary, the whale stands for the whore of the Proverbs ("her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell:); in the Anglo-Saxon bestiary it stands for the Devil and Evil.  These same symbolic values will be found in MobyDick, written ten centuries later.

EPILOGUE:

Now that this study is completed, we see that variants from the original creatures God put on earth abound in myth and legend--and perhaps in fact.

I wonder if the Lord didn't have more reason to destroy the earth with water than just the sins of man: perhaps the corruption of the earth was farther reaching than we know.  Maybe He had to cleanse it, not only from the corruption that comes from within (sin), but the corruption that is found externally when a plant, animal, or man for that matter is changed in a way that is not pleasing to God--by an adversary hell-bent on displeasing Him.

Time will tell.  "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then, as to face; now I know in part: but then shall I know even as also I am known." (I Corinthians 13:12)

--Brian L. Jackson, 1990

(TEXT TAKEN FROM “The Book Of Imaginary Beings,” BY JORGE LUIS BORGE, E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY, NEW YORK, 1963)

The Voice In The Wilderness, Inc., 1996