Fig. 26.—Egyptian four-winged serpent—as drawn on ancient Egyptian temples.
Fig. 27.—Two-winged serpent, symbolic of the goddess Eileithya, from a drawing on an Egyptian temple.
It would be a very interesting but a lengthy task to trace out the origin and history of the various traditional monsters, such as the basilisk, the gorgon, the cockatrice, the salamander, and the epimacus, which have come into European legend and belief, and to give some account of the special deadly qualities of each. St. Michael and St. George slaughtering each his dragon and rescuing a lovely maiden from its clutches are only appropriations by the new religion of the similar deeds ascribed to Greek heroes, such as Hercules, Bellerophon, and Perseus. Often a belief in the existence of a monster has arisen by a misunderstanding, on the part of a credulous people, of a drawing or carving showing a strange mixture of the leading characteristics of different animals, which was meant by the man who made it to be only symbolic of a combination of qualities. Just as the Latins and mediæval people credulously accepted Greek symbolic monsters as real, and transmuted Greek heroes into Christian saints, so were the Greeks themselves deluded by strange carvings and blood-curdling legends which reached them at various dates from mysterious Asia into a belief in the actual existence of a variety of fantastic monsters. “The Greeks,” says M. E. Pottier, a distinguished French writer on Greek mythology, “often copied Oriental representations without understanding them.” The conventional dragon probably came from Indian sources through Persia to China, on the one hand, spreading eastwards, and to the Latins of the early Roman Empire, on the other hand, spreading westwards; but at what date exactly it is difficult to make out.
In mediæval, as well as in earlier times, marvellous beasts were brought into imaginary existence by the somewhat unscrupulous enterprise of an artist in giving pictorial expression to the actual words by which some traveller described a strange beast seen by him in a foreign land. Thus the “unicorn,” which was really the rhinoceros, was seen by travellers in the earliest times, and was described as an animal like a horse, but with a single horn growing from its forehead. The heraldic draughtsman accordingly takes the spirally twisted narwhal’s tusk, brought from the northern seas by adventurous mariners (the narwhal being called “the unicorn fish”) as his unicorn’s horn, and plants it on the forehead of a horse, and says, “Behold! the unicorn.” Meanwhile the real “unicorn,” the rhinoceros, became properly known as navigation and Eastern travel extended, and true unicorns’ horns, the horns of the rhinoceros, richly carved and made into drinking cups, not at all like the narwhal’s tusk, were brought to Europe from India. One was sent to Charles II. by “the Great Sophy,” and handed over to the Royal Society by the King for experiment. These horns were asserted to be the most powerful antidote or destroyer of poison, and a test for the presence of poison in drink. There was no truth whatever in the assertion, as the Royal Society at once showed. Yet they were valued at enormous prices, and pieces were sold for their weight in gold. A German traveller in the time of Queen Elizabeth saw one which was kept among the Queen’s jewels at Windsor, and was valued, according to this writer, at £10,000.
Credulity, fancy, and hasty judgment are accountable for the belief in mythical and legendary monsters. Yet they have great interest for the scientific study of the growth of human thought and of the relationships of the races of mankind. They are often presented to us in beautiful stories, carvings, or pictures, having a childlike sincerity and a concealed symbolism which give to the wondrous creatures charm and human value.