Imaginary beasts
Fantastic beasts
have been imagined and recorded in objects, architecture and art in
most human societies. But not all are nightmare creations. Some,
like the snake-dragon of ancient Mesopotamia and the Chinese
dragon, are metaphors for gods or kings. However, these same
fabulous animals mean different things in different cultures. The
dragon, for example, was consistently identified with evil in the
Bible.
Imaginary beasts often have the attributes of several animals -
combining their best (or worst) features to create a terrifying
monster or 'super' animal. In Greek mythology the sphinx was a
beast with a woman's head and the body of a lion. However, in Egypt
the name is used to refer to a composite creature with the body of
a lion and the head of another creature, usually a human, but
sometimes a hawk or ram.
Sphinxes
The sphinx in Egypt represents royal power, combining the
physical strength of the lion with the worldly might of a king.
It’s a creature with terrifying power. The Great Sphinx by the
pyramids of Giza is the most famous, but this form of statue was
used throughout the following millennia.
A 1250 BC limestone statue of a hawk-headed sphinx in the
British Museum collection originally stood, alongside a similar
one, near the temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel. It is possible
that they were intended to represent the king's powerful ability to
defeat his enemies in the south of Egypt. Egyptian artists and
craftsmen were adept at combining animals to create fantastic
forms, including snake-headed men, winged lions with falcon heads
and fantastic demons with up to four heads.
Monsters at sea
Encounters with real monsters like the whale and the giant squid
have spawned terrifying sea-monsters in the imagination of sailors.
Composite creatures such as the makara from India and the
Greek ketos and skylla are represented in
artefacts from these cultures.
A terracotta plaque from the island of Mílos in the Aegean Sea,
dating to around 465-435 BC, shows Skylla, a sea-monster in Greek
mythology. Skylla's lair was a cave i
n a tall cliff face.
Sailors were forced to sail close to the cliff to avoid being
sucked into the terrible whirlpool of Charybdis nearby. As they did
so, Skylla's six heads would lean out and snatch six victims from
the decks of the ship.
In Homer's Odyssey, Skylla is described as an evil
monster with twelve feet; she has the bark of a new-born puppy, but
each of her six heads has three rows of teeth, 'thick and close,
and full of black death'.
Skylla is shown in the plaque with the head and torso of a woman
and the tail of a sea-monster, her pleated skirt neatly hiding the
junction between the two. The snapping dogs' heads at her waist
evoke both her many, man-devouring heads and Homer's description of
her voice.
Dragons
Representations of dragons appear in a number of different
cultures, but wherever they appear, they are always powerful
creatures. In China and Asia dragons are associated with rain: in
Hindu mythology Vritra causes the monsoon floods. In Britain the
red dragon of Wales was su
pposed to have
defeated the white dragon symbolising Saxon aggressors and Biblical
dragons are invariably evil.
As composite beasts dragons combine the attributes of different
animals. These attributes may vary from culture to culture and from
time to time but common features are wings, scaley skin ('dragon'
comes from drakon, the Greek word for a large serpent),
four clawed feet, horns and deadly breath. Furthermore dragons have
supernatural powers and, when they represent the forces of evil,
require correspondingly heroic adversaries like Siegfried, who slew
the dragon Fafnir in Norse mythology.
Misrepresentations of real animals
Some apparently fantastic creatures are, however, real animals
that have been misrepresented. Word of mouth was often the only way
of passing on eye-witness accounts of animals from distant lands
and the artist, given the task of depicting such creatures, had to
use his or her own imagination to complete the picture.
Albrecht Dürer prepared his famous drawing and woodcut The
Rhinosceros from reports of the arrival in Lisbon, Portugal of
an Indian rhinoceros on 20 May 1515. No rhinoceros had been seen in
Europe for over 1000 years, so Dürer had to work solely from these
reports.
He has covered the creature's legs with scales and the body with
hard, patterned plates. Perhaps these features interpret lost
sketches, or even the text, which states, '[The rhinoceros] has the
colour of a speckled tortoise and it is covered with thick
scales'.
This fanciful creation was so convincing that for the next 300
years European illustrators borrowed from his woodcut, even after
they had seen living rhinoceroses without plates and scales.
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