John Matthews - The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures - The Ultimate A–Z of Fantastic Beings from Myth and Magic

’…sometimes he angers me

With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, And of a dragon, and a finless fish, A clip-wing’d griffin, and a moulten raven, A couching lion, and ramping cat, And such a deal of skimble-shamble stuff As puts me from my faith.’

Around us are many such muggles as Hotspur who are content to inhabit mundane reality, just as in the world of Harry Potter, where magicians are distinct from nonmagicians. But we do not have to become magicians in order to explore the world of the supernaturals, though it does help to have a flexible imagination that is prepared to follow dreams, listen to traveller’s tales and explore the ways in which we can encounter these magical creatures for ourselves. If we are prepared to loiter on the borders of the worlds, we will find what we had never imagined as well as some of the things that we did.

According to Darwinian theories of evolution, it is logical to consider animals as the forerunners of human life, to see all creatures as part of a huge family tree of living beings. Such scientific theories are seen as being at odds with the traditional stories and myths told about the creating creatures who take an active part in the formation of life, but the mythic imagination allows intelligence and wisdom to animals in ways that science discounts or ignores.

Darwin’s evolutionary pronouncements encouraged people to see themselves as descendants of a long tree of life, but when he made his discoveries public in the 19th century some people were astounded and distressed to find that they might have ape forebears, or that they might themselves be ‘monkey’s uncles’. In our own time, in 21st-century USA, the gap between received scientific history and religious tradition still jars the pedestrian foot on the pavement of scientific progress. In that country, and elsewhere, some fundamentalist Christians doggedly deny the Darwinian theory of evolution of our descent through a chain of creatures, and continue to assert that human beings are the result of nothing less than a direct and discrete creation by God. What they make of the discovery of early hominids and other fossils is unknown to us, but this must be highly inconvenient evidence to such believers at the very least. ( See ‘Epilogue’, page 645.)

Natural historians tell us that our bodies bear the mark of our animal origins from the serpentine scales of our skins, the bovine horn of our nails and the animal hair that grows on our bodies, among a variety of other physiological and cellular similarities. But the link between people and animals is not merely an evolutionary connection. It is a fundamental mythic understanding that is shared by traditional societies: we are part of a sacred continuum of life that cannot be severed without supreme loss of meaning.

In traditional reckoning, the passing of time is frequently marked by the listing of a sequence of living beings, including a succession of animals. A traditional Irish reckoning of lifetimes, goes like this:

‘Three fields to a tree

Three trees to a hound

Three hounds to a horse

Three horses to a human being

Three human beings to a deer

Three deer to an eagle

Three eagles to a salmon

Three salmon to a yew

Three yews to an age of the world.’

This is not a measure of literal commensuration but a measurement of myth and memory. What is so salutary in this particular list is that human beings are located between horses and deer in mythic longevity.

In every culture throughout the world, there is a rich vein of animal myths and stories that are related to the primal beginnings of the world. These cycles of stories are often the very first stories ever told. In them, the wisdom and lore of the first animal beings relate how human beings should behave, revealing how things were first instituted. We see such animal story cycles from the unbroken oral traditions that pass through the classical, medieval and renaissance times, from the fables of Aesop to the animal stories of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book and Just So stories. Buddha used the Jataka animal tales to teach people about right behaviour. In these stories, it is the animals that are in charge.

The animals of such stories are not domesticated, tamed or subdued to the will of humans, nor are they anthropomorphized animals or storybook characters whose actions mimic humans. They are wise beings in their own right whose words and actions cause the world to come into being. They are almighty, omniscient and full of wisdom. Some are tricksters, like Coyote or Raven, who both involve themselves in the laying down of laws for humans and whose lateral thinking discovers useful tools for living such as fire or agriculture. They are guardians for those times when humans overstep the respectful mark whereby all living creatures can be threatened by destruction or they are animals who partake of humanity in some way, like the Centaurs who are the teachers of humanity, bringing music, art and other essential skills.

We live in a time where we most urgently need the wisdom of the animals and creating creatures. Although Darwinian theories of evolution have told us that human beings are the summit of the evolutionary ladder, at the top of the food chain, we need the salutary wisdom of the animals to put us in our place, to remind us that we too are animals – sometimes animals ‘of little brain’. And like that supremely humble anthropomorphism Winnie the Pooh, a bear of little brain, with a little help from our animal advisors, we can sort out even the most troubling of problems.

In the Vedas, the Hindu god, Shiva, calls upon all the gods to help him overcome the invading asuras – ‘the non-gods’ or demons. They will be able to do this, he tells them, only if they are willing to leave off their godly forms and assume their animal nature. The gods are revolted by the idea and decline his invitation. We know from a wide range of world mythology how divinities have both humanoid as well as other animal forms – sometimes represented by their having animal heads on human bodies. A similar myth is told of the Olympian gods of Greece who fled the ravages of the monstrous Typhon by hiding themselves as animals among the Egyptian animal-headed gods so that they might not be noticed. This way of shape-shifting into animal form is not confined to gods alone.

From early times, we find the widespread notion that human beings have a multiple soul, part of which manifests in animal form. Shamanic traditions hold that in order to live in the most balanced way possible, it is necessary to discover the identity of this animal soul and meet it in dreams and visions, to dance with it in rituals, to wear parts of the animal in question, to keep attuned to its powers, to take its name or explore its nature in order to be fully at one with our soul. When someone falls sick, a shaman sends out part of his own soul to journey into the spirit realms to find the animal nature of the person’s soul and bring it back again. Cajoling, pleading, hunting, stalking, trapping and herding, the shaman uses all the skills of a real hunter to bring back the animal soul.

Magical creatures include all those animals that are the guardians of our animal soul. Among the Tzotzil-speaking Indians of Zinacanan in the highlands of Mexico, we find the belief that human beings have multiple souls, one of which is called the chanul. When the ancestors imbue unborn embryos with souls, they also install a shared soul in the embryo of an animal, so that when a Zinacanteco baby is born, then an ocelot or jaguar or coyote or opossum is also born. During childhood, the child discovers the animal with which it shares its soul. This companionship lasts throughout life, with the animal sharing its nature with the human.