Fantastic creatures

Phoenixes that rise again, dragons that bring the rain, serpents that bite their own tails: fantastic creatures are among the most enduring inventions of the human imagination. This section of the Symbolic Bestiary gathers twenty of them, drawn from the traditions of the ancient Mediterranean, medieval Europe, the Near East, Persia, China and Japan. For each one we reconstruct the main sources, from the poems of Homer and Hesiod to Pliny's Natural History, from the medieval bestiaries to the Orlando Furioso, and we follow the ways its meaning changed over time. Many of these creatures were born from the observation of real animals, from travellers' tales or from misunderstood fossil remains; others were shaped by poets and theologians as moral images. All of them, however, tell us something about the fears, hopes and questions of the cultures that imagined them. Legends and beliefs are presented as such, always distinguishing what the ancient texts say from what tradition added later.