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

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