Creditable witnesses have told the following story. In a house in Limache where visitors had gathered one night, the disorderly cries of a Chonchón were suddenly heard outside. Someone made the sign of Solomon’s seal, and a heavy object fell into the backyard; it was a large bird the size of a turkey and had a head with red wattles. They cut the head off, gave it to a dog, and threw the body up on the roof. At once they heard a deafening uproar of Chonchónes, at the same time noting that the dog’s belly had swollen as though the animal had gulped down the head of a person. The next morning they searched in vain for the Chonchón body; it had disappeared from the roof. Somewhat later the town gravedigger reported that on that same day several unknown persons had come to bury a body which, when they had gone away, he found to be headless.
The Hide is an octopus that lives in the sea and has the dimensions and appearance of a cowhide stretched out flat. Its edges are furnished with numberless eyes, and, in that part which seems to be its head, it has four more eyes of a larger size. Whenever persons or animals enter the water, the Hide rises to the surface and engulfs them with an irresistible force, devouring them in a matter of moments. The Huallepén is an amphibious animal that is fierce, powerful, and shy; under three feet tall, it has a calf’s head and a sheep’s body. On the spur of the moment it mounts sheep and cows, fathering in them offspring of the same species as the mother but which can be spotted by their twisted hooves and sometimes by their twisted muzzles. A pregnant woman who sees a Huallepén, or hears its bellow, or who dreams of it three nights in a row, gives birth to a deformed child. The same happens if she sees an animal begotten by the Huallepén.
The Strong Toad is an imaginary animal different from other toads in that its back is covered with a shell like that of a turtle. This Toad glows in the dark like a firefly and is so tough that the only way to kill it is to reduce it to ashes. It owes its name to the great power of its stare, which it uses to attract or repel whatever is in its range.
Fauna of China
The following list of strange animals is taken from the T’ai P’ing Kuang Chi (Extensive Records Made in the Period of Peace and Prosperity), completed in the year 978 and published in 981:
The Celestial Horse is like a white dog with a black head. It has fleshy wings and can fly.
The Chiang-liang has a tiger’s head, a man’s face, long limbs, four hooves, and a snake between its teeth.
In the region to the west of the Red Water dwells the beast known as the Ch’ou-t’i, which has a head both front and back.
The denizens of Ch’uan-T’ou have human heads, the wings of a bat, and a bird’s beak. They feed exclusively on raw fish.
In the Country of Long Arms, the hands of the inhabitants dangle to the ground. They live by catching fish at the edge of the sea.
The Hsiao is similar to the owl but has a man’s face, an ape’s body, and a dog’s tail. Its presence foretells prolonged drought.
The Hsing-hsing are like apes. They have white faces and pointed ears. They walk upright, like men, and climb trees.
The Hsing-t’ien is a being that was decapitated for having fought against the gods, and so it has remained forever headless. Its eyes are in its chest and its navel is its mouth. It hops up and down and jumps about in clearings and other open places, and brandishes a shield and axe.
The Hua-fish, or flying snakefish, appears to be a fish but has the wings of a bird. Its appearance forebodes a period of drought.
The mountain Hui looks like a dog with a human head. It is a fine jumper and moves with the swiftness of an arrow; this is why its appearance is held to foretell the coming of typhoons. On beholding a man, the Hui laughs mockingly.
The Musical Serpent has a serpent’s head and four wings. It makes sounds like those of the Musical Stone.
The Ocean Men have human heads and arms, and the body and tail of a fish. They come to the surface in stormy weather.
The Ping-feng, which lives in the country of Magical Water, resembles a black pig with a head at each end.
In the region of the Queer Arm, people have a single arm and three eyes. They are exceptionally skilful and build flying chariots in which they travel on the winds.
The Ti-chiang is a supernatural bird dwelling in the Mountains of the Sky. Its colour is bright red, it has six feet and four wings, but has neither face nor eyes.
Fauna of Mirrors
In one of the volumes of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses that appeared in Paris during the first half of the eighteenth century, Father Fontecchio of the Society of Jesus planned a study of the superstitions and misinformation of the common people of Canton; in the preliminary outline he noted that the Fish was a shifting and shining creature that nobody had ever caught but that many said they had glimpsed in the depths of mirrors. Father Fontecchio died in 1736, and the work begun by his pen remained unfinished; some 150 years later Herbert Allen Giles took up the interrupted task. According to Giles, belief in the Fish is part of a larger myth that goes back to the legendary times of the Yellow Emperor.
In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off.
The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the colour of this line will be like no other colour. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of water will join the battle. In Yunnan they do not speak of the Fish but of the Tiger of the Mirror. Others believe that in advance of the invasion we will hear from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.
Fauna of the United States
The yarns and tall tales of the lumber camps of Wisconsin and Minnesota include some singular creatures, in which, surely, no one ever believed.
There is the Hidebehind, which is always hiding behind something. No matter how many times or whichever way a man turns, it is always behind him, and that’s why nobody has been able to describe it, even though it is credited with having killed and devoured many a lumberjack. Then there is the Roperite. This animal is about the size of a pony. It has a ropelike beak which it uses to snare even the fleetest of rabbits. The Teakettler owes its name to the noises it makes, much like those of a boiling teakettle. Vaporous clouds fume from its mouth and it walks backward. It has been seen very few times.
The Axehandle Hound has a hatchet-shaped head, a handle-shaped body, and stumpy legs. This North Woods dachshund eats only the handles of axes.
Among the fish of this region we find the Upland Trout. They nest in trees and are good fliers but are scared of water.
There’s another fish, the Goofang, that swims backward to keep the water out of its eyes. It’s described as ‘about the size of a sunfish, only much bigger.’
We shouldn’t forget the Goofus Bird that builds its nest upside down and flies backward, not caring where it’s going, only where it’s been.
The Gillygaloo nested on the slopes of Paul Bunyan’s famed Pyramid Forty, laying square eggs to keep them from rolling down the steep incline and breaking. These eggs were coveted by lumberjacks, who hard-boiled them and used them as dice.
And finally there’s the Pinnacle Grouse, which had a single wing. Thi
s enabled it to fly in one direction only, circling the top of a conical hill. The colour of its plumage varied according to the season and according to the condition of the observer.
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.
In the Garuda Purana one of the many Puranas, or traditions, of Hindu lore Garuda expounds at length on the beginnings of the universe, the solar essence of Vishnu, the rites of his cult, the genealogies of the kings descended from the sun and the moon, the plot of the Ramayana, and various minor topics, such as the craft of verse, grammar, and medicine.
In a seventh-century drama called the Mirth of the Snakes and held to be the work of a king, Garuda kills and each day devours a snake (probably the hooded cobra) until a Buddhist prince teaches him the value of abstinence. In the last act, the penitent Garuda brings back to life the bones of the many generations of serpents he has fed upon. Eggeling holds that this work may be a Brahman satire on Buddhism. Nimbarka, a mystic whose date is uncertain, has written that Garuda is a soul saved forever, as are his crown, his earrings, and his flute.
The Gnomes
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 of 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 beings. 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 Nature, writes (Chapter 7): ‘On 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.’
The Golem’s fame in the West is owed to the work of the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink, who in the fifth chapter of his dream novel Der Golem (1915) writes:
It is said that the origin of the story goes back to the seventeenth century. According to lost formulas of the Kabbalah, a rabbi [Judah Loew ben Bezabel] made an artificial man the aforesaid Golem so that he would ring the bells and take over all the menial tasks of the synagogue.
He was not a man exactly, and had only a sort of dim, half-conscious, vegetative existence. By the power of a magic tablet which was placed under his tongue and which attracted the free sidereal energies of the universe, this existence lasted during the daylight hours.
One night before evening prayer, the rabbi forgot to take the tablet out of the Golem’s mouth, and the creature fell into a frenzy, running out into the dark alleys of the ghetto and knocking down those who got in his way, until the rabbi caught up with him and removed the tablet. At once the creature fell lifeless. All that was left of him is the dwarfish clay figure that may be seen today in the New Synagogue.
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 they 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 but 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 homes of Oxen, and of those they make cups there to drynke of, and of his rybes they make bowes to shoote with.
In Madagascar, another famous traveler, Marco Polo, heard the rukh spoken of and at first understood this as a reference to the uccello grifone, the Griffon bird (Travels, III 36).
In the Middle Ages, the symbolism of the Griffon is contradictory. An Italian bestiary says that it stands for the Devil; usually it is an emblem of Christ, and this is how Isidore of Seville explains it in his Etymologies: ‘Christ is a lion because he reigns and has great strength; and an eagle because, after the Resurrection, he ascended to heaven.’
In Canto XXIX of the Purgatorio, Dante has a vision of a triumphal chariot (the Church), drawn by a Griffon; its eagle portion is golden, its lion portion white mixed with red in order to signify according to the commentaries Christ’s human nature. (White slightly reddened gives the colour of human flesh.) The commentators are recalling the description of the beloved in the Song of Solomon (V: 10-11): ‘My beloved is white and ruddy . . . His head is as the most fine gold . . .’
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bsp; Others feel that Dante wished to symbolize the Pope, who is both priest and king. Didron, in his Manuel d’iconographie chrétienne (1845, writes: ‘The pope, as pontiff or eagle, is borne aloft to the throne of God to receive his commands, and as lion or king walks on earth with strength and might.’
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, cada uno caminaua enderecho de su rostro (‘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 that they were dreadful’ went with the angels and ‘were full of eyes round about them . . .’
Collected Stories Page 51
