The Chinese speak of a Lunar Hare. Buddha, in one of his former lives, suffered hunger; in order to feed him, a Hare leaped into a fire. The Buddha in gratitude sent the Hare’s soul to the moon. There, under an acacia, the Hare pounds in a magical mortar the herbs that make up the elixir of life. In the common speech of certain provinces, this Hare is called the Physician or the Precious Hare or the Hare of Jade. The ordinary Hare is believed to live for a thousand years and to turn white in its old age.
Shakespeare, by the way, refers to a dead mooncalf in The Tempest (II, ii). This creature, according to commentators, is an uncouth monster begotten on earth under the moon’s influence.
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 semi-human; 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 Mandrake’s supposed human form has suggested the superstition that it grows at the foot of the gallows. Sir Thomas Browne (Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646) speaks of the grease of hanged men; the once popular German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote a novel (Alraune, 1913) around the idea of the hanged man’s seed being injected into a harlot and producing a beautiful witch. In German, ‘mandrake’ is Alraune; earlier it was Alruna, a word that comes originally from ‘rune’, which stood for ‘whisper’ or ‘buzz’. Hence (according to Skeat) it meant ‘a mystery . . . a writing, because written characters were regarded as a mystery known to the few’. Perhaps, more simply, the idea of a visible mark standing for a sound baffled the Nordic mind, and therein lay the mystery.
Genesis (XXX: 14-17) has this strange account of the reproductive powers of the Mandrake:
And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me, I pray thee, of thy son’s mandrakes.
And she said unto her, Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son’s mandrakes also? And Rachel said, Therefore he shall lie with thee tonight for thy son’s mandrakes.
And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night.
And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bare Jacob the fifth son.
In the twelfth century, a German-Jewish commentator on the Talmud wrote this paragraph:
A kind of cord comes out of a root in the ground and tied to the cord by its navel, like a squash or melon, is the animal known as the yadu’a, but the yadu’a is in all respects like a man: face, body, hands, and feet. It uproots and destroys all things around it as far as the cord reaches. The cord should be cut by an arrow, and the animal dies.
The physician Dioscorides (second century a.d.) identified the Mandrake with the circea, or herb of Circe, of which we read in the tenth book of the Odyssey:
At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. Moly the gods call it, and it is hard for mortal man to dig; but the gods are all-powerful.
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 colour 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.
Flaubert has improved upon this description, and in the last pages of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, we read:
The Manticore a gigantic red lion with a human face and three rows of teeth.
‘The iridescence of my scarlet hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the desert sands. Through my nostrils I exhale the horror of the lonely places of the earth. I spit out pestilence. I consume armies when they venture into the desert.
‘My nails are twisted into talons, like drills, and my teeth are cut like those of a saw; my restless tail prickles with darts, which I shoot left and right, before me, behind. Watch!’
The Manticore shoots the quills of its tail, which spread out like arrows on every hand. Drops of blood drip down, spattering the leaves of the trees.
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: II) we read: ‘The old lion perisheth for lack of prey.’ The Hebrew text has layish 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 for lack of prey’ grew a fantasy (translated below by T. H. White) that medieval 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 grains. 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 grains 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 centre 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 from the maze.
Ovid in a line that is meant to be clever speaks of the Semibovemque virum, semivirumque bovem (‘the man half bull, the bull half man’). Dante, who was familiar with the writings of the ancients but not with their coins or monuments, imagined the Minotaur with a man’s head and a bull’s body (Inferno, XII, 1-30).
The worship of the bull and of the two-headed axe (whose name was labrys and may have been at the root of the word labyrinth) was typical of pre-Hellenic religions, which held sacred bullfights. Human forms with bull heads figured, to judge by wall paintings, in
the demonology of Crete. Most likely the Greek fable of the Minotaur is a late and clumsy version of far older myths, the shadow of other dreams still more full of horror.
The Monkey of the Inkpot
This animal, common in the north, is four or five inches long; its eyes are scarlet and its fur is jet black, silky, and soft as a pillow. It is marked by a curious instinct the taste for India ink. When a person sits down to write, the monkey squats cross-legged near by with one forepaw folded over the other, waiting until the task is over. Then it drinks what is left of the ink, and afterwards sits back on its haunches, quiet and satisfied.
Wang Tai-hai (1791)
The Monster Acheron
Only one person, one time, ever saw the monster Acheron; this took place in the twelfth century in the Irish town of Cork. The original version of the story, written in Gaelic, is now lost, but a Benedictine monk from Regensburg (Ratisbon) translated it into Latin, and from this translation the tale passed into a number of languages, among them Swedish and Spanish. Of the Latin version there are some fifty-odd manuscripts extant, agreeing in all the essentials. Visio Tundali (Tundal’s Vision) is the story’s name, and it has been considered one of the sources of Dante’s poem. Let us begin with the word ‘Acheron’. In the tenth book of the Odyssey it is one of the rivers of hell, flowing somewhere on the western borders of the inhabited world. Its name is reechoed in the Aeneid, in Lucan’s Pharsalia, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Dante engraves it in a line: Su la trista riviera d’Acheronte (‘On the sad shores of the Acheron’).
In one myth, Acheron is a Titan suffering punishment; in another, dating earlier, he is placed close to the South Pole, below the constellations of the antipodes. The Etruscans had ‘books of fate’ that taught divination and ‘books of Acheron’ that taught the ways of the soul after bodily death. In time, Acheron came to stand for hell.
Tundal was an Irish gentleman, well-mannered and brave, but of hardly irreproachable habits. He once fell ill while at the home of a lady friend, and for three days and nights was taken for dead, except for a bit of warmth in his heart. When he recovered his senses, he told that his guardian angel had shown him the lands beyond this world. Of the many wonders he saw, the one which interests us here is the monster Acheron. He is bigger than any mountain. His eyes flame and his mouth is so large that nine thousand persons could fit in it. Two damned men, like pillars or atlantes, prop it open; one stands on his feet, the other on his head. Three throats lead inside and belch undying fire. From deep in the beast’s belly comes the continuous wailing of the countless lost souls who are being devoured. Devils tell Tundal that the monster is called Acheron. His guardian angel deserts him, and Tundal is swept inside with the others. There he finds himself in the midst of tears, darkness, gnashing teeth, fire, unbearable burning, icy cold, dogs, bears, lions, and snakes. In this legend, hell is a beast with other beasts inside it.
In 1758, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote: ‘It has not been granted me to perceive Hell’s general shape, but I have been told that in the same way that Heaven has a human shape. Hell has the shape of a devil.’
The Mother of Tortoises
Twenty-two centuries before the Christian era, the good emperor Yü the Great travelled and measured with his steps the Nine Mountains, the Nine Rivers, and the Nine Marshes, and divided the land into Nine Provinces fit for virtue and agriculture. In this way he held back the Waters that threatened to flood Heaven and Earth, and left us this account of his Public Works (Legge’s translation):
I mounted my four conveyances (carts, boats, sledges, and spiked shoes), and all along the hills hewed down the woods, at the same time, along with Yi, showing the multitudes how to get flesh to eat. I opened passages for the streams throughout the nine provinces, and conducted them to the sea. I deepened the channels and canals, and conducted them to the streams, at the same time, along with Chi, sowing grain, and showing the multitudes how to procure the food of toil in addition to flesh meat.
Historians tell that the manner in which he divided his territory was revealed to him by a supernatural or sacred Tortoise that arose from the bed of a river. There are those who claim that this amphibious creature, the mother of all Tortoises, was made of water and fire; others attribute a less common substance to it: starlight of the constellation Sagittarius. On the Tortoise’s shell could be read a cosmic treatise called the Hong Fan (Universal Rule), or a diagram made of black and white dots of the Nine Subdivisions of that treatise.
To the Chinese, the heavens are hemispherical and the earth quadrangular, and so, in the Tortoise with its curved upper shell and flat lower shell, they find an image or model of the world. Moreover, Tortoises share in cosmic longevity; it is therefore fitting that they should be included among the spiritually endowed creatures (together with the unicorn, the dragon, the phoenix, and the tiger) and that soothsayers read the future in the pattern of their shells.
Than-Qui (Tortoise-Spirit) is the name of the creature that revealed the Hong Fan to the emperor.
The Nagas
Nagas belong to the mythology of India. They are serpents but often take the form of a man.
In one of the books of the Mahabharata, Arjuna is pursued by Ulupi, the daughter of a Naga king, and firmly but gently has to remind her of his vow of chastity; the maiden tells him that his duty lies in soothing the unhappy. The hero grants her a night. The Buddha, meditating under a fig tree, is chastised by the wind and the rain; a Naga out of pity coils itself around him in a sevenfold embrace and opens over him its seven heads so as to form a kind of umbrella. The Buddha converts him to the Faith.
Kern in his Manual of Indian Buddhism, speaks of the Nagas as cloudlike serpents. They live underground in deep palaces. Believers in the Greater Vehicle tell that the Buddha preached one law to mankind and another to the gods, and that this latter the secret law was kept in the heavens and palaces of the serpents, who revealed it centuries later to the monk Nagarjuna.
We give an Indian legend set down by the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien early in the fifth century:
King Asoka came to a lake near whose edge stood a lofty pagoda. He thought of pulling it down in order to raise a higher one. A Brahman let him into the tower and once inside told him:
‘My human form is an illusion. I am really a Naga, a dragon. My sins condemn me to inhabit this frightful body, but I obey the law preached by the Buddha and hope to work my redemption. You may pull down this shrine if you believe you can build a better one.’
The Naga showed him the vessels of the altar. The king looked at them with alarm, for they were quite unlike those made by the hands of men, and he left the pagoda standing.
The Nasnas
Among the monstrous creatures of the Temptation is the Nasnas, which ‘has only one eye, one cheek, one hand, one leg, half a torso and half a heart’. A commentator, Jean Claude Margolin, credits the invention of this beast to Flaubert, but Lane in the first volume of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1839) says it is believed to be the offspring of the Shikk, a demonical creature divided longitudinally, and a human being. The Nasnas, according to Lane (who gives it as Nesnás), resembles ‘half a human being; having half a head, half a body, one arm, and one leg, with which it hops with much agility . . .’ It is found in the woods and desert country of Yemen and Hadhramaut, and is endowed with speech. One race has its face in the breast, like the blemies, and a tail like that of a sheep. Its flesh is sweet and much sought after. Another variety of Nasnas, having the wings of a bat, inhabits the island of Ráïj (perhaps Borneo) at the edge of the China seas. ‘But God,’ adds the sceptical authority, ‘is All-Knowing.’
The Norns
In medieval Norse mythology the Norns are the Fates. Snorri Sturluson, who at the beginning of the thirteenth century brought order to the scattered Northern myths, tells us that the Norns are three and that their names are Urth (the past), Verthandi (the present), and Skuld (the future). These three heavenly Norns ruled the fate of the world, while at the birth
of every man three individual Norns were present, casting the weird of his life. It may be suspected that the names of the Norns are a refinement or addition of a theological nature; ancient Germanic tribes were incapable of such abstract thinking. Snorri shows us three maidens by a fountain at the base of the World Tree, Yggdrasil. Inexorably, they weave our fate.
Time (of which they are made) seemed to have quite forgotten them, but around 1606 William Shakespeare wrote the tragedy of Macbeth, in whose first scene they appear. They are the three witches who predict what fate holds in store for Banquo and Macbeth. Shakespeare calls them the weird sisters (I, iii):
The weird sisters, hand in hand,
Posters of the seas and land,
Thus do go about, about . . .
Wyrd among the Anglo-Saxons was the silent goddess who presided over the destiny of gods and men.
The Nymphs
Paracelsus limited their dominion to water, but the ancients thought the world was full of Nymphs. They distinguished them by names according to the places they haunted. The Dryads, or Hamadryads, dwelled in trees, without being seen, and died with them. Other Nymphs were held to be immortal or, as Plutarch obscurely intimates, lived for above 9,720 years. Among these were the Nereids and the Oceanids, which presided over the sea. Nymphs of the lakes and streams were Naiads; those of mountains and caves, Oreads. There were also Nymphs of the glens, called Napaeae, and of groves called Alseids. The exact number of the Nymphs is unknown; Hesiod gives us the figure three thousand. They were earnest young women and very beautiful; their name may mean simply ‘marriageable woman’. Glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death. A line of Propertius affirms this.
Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations Page 61