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Thread: A wizard's bestiary

  1. #1

    A wizard's bestiary

    A beautifully illustrated book, covering many aspects of cryptozoology from around the world.

    A WIZARD'S BESTIARY
    A Menagerie of Myth, Magic, and Mystery

    Foreword:Creatures of the Night
    by Jacques Vallee

    Creatures of the Night—is it wise to force them out of the gloom where they linger, like the ancient Chimaera that was part goat, part lion, and part Dragon, and presided over the passage of the evening sun into the darkness? At dusk, like the Salamander, they emerge at the intersection of magical biology and human imagination. Gubernatis, in his erudite Mythological Zoology , believes the Salamander represents the moon which lights itself, lives by its own fire, has no ray of its own, and makes the rays (and hairs) of the sun fall off.

    Before our friends Oberon and Ash, many scholars and sorcerers of every age, in their wisdom—or their temerity?—have attempted to catalogue and to elucidate the strange beings described by their contemporaries. The monsters did not always hide in the secret convenience of the dark. Some even dared to expose themselves in full daylight, the better to scare honest medieval folks out of their wits.

    Thus we find in Schedel’s Chronicles of Nuremberg (1493) the stupefying representation of a being with six arms, seen by astonished townspeople. A creature observed in Rome in 1530 had feet like a duck’s, an enormous forked tail like a fish, the breasts of a woman, and a human face with straight ears, like those of a deer. Gesner published an engraving of it in Zurich in 1558

    http://www.keychests.com/media/bigdisk/pdf/1660.pdf
    sit on the edge to watch something unfold with a force we cannot control but communicate with

  2. #2
    Thanks for this book recommendation and especially for the link to the pdf. I read a few pages and I can see I'll return to it frequently. Cryptozoology has been an interest of mine for years for a number of reasons, not the least of them being that sometimes these "mythical" animals show up in real life and are identified and accepted by mainstream science. another reason for my interest is the lingering hope that some creatures believed extinct like the Tasmanian Tiger will be found in a remote corner somewhere. Good stuff. Great fun!

  3. #3
    Thanks WildMage, Like Doc, I like this kind of reading. Makes you wonder what the our ancestors really saw.
    "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"
    Sherlock Holmes

  4. #4
    It does look like an interesting read.
    Last edited by CasperParks; 12-30-2014 at 05:57 PM.

  5. #5
    Thanx, I was doing some completely unrelated research, in egyptology and vedic linking and happened to stumble onto to this. It was just too cool not to share.

    My path of research was taking to the Mountains of the Moon in Africa, and the Puranas describing the source of the Nile as coming from lake Victoria. i.e. the twin peaks of Somagiri, which reside in the Congo, makes me wonder if the source of ancient wealth in minerals and metals way back when also happened to be in the Congo as it is today.

    I also ran into another page, I will try to find it again, where monument/temples in Central America had elephants carved out of stone. That was new and really interesting, which can only point to a few possibilities ... elephants were around when the temples were built, contact with a civilization that had elephants, or some form of recollection of a time when elephants were in Central America.

    *WM*
    sit on the edge to watch something unfold with a force we cannot control but communicate with

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