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Mythological Creatures

Where do mythological creatures come from? Obviously they are man-made; shaped by the collective consciousnesses of ancient cultures. But that still doesn't explain where they came from. Scratch the surface of many myths and legends and you find a natural event retold in unnatural terms by ancient peoples who needed an explanation for whatever unnerved or shocked them, but whose scientific knowledge was nil. But not so with mythological creatures, virtually all of which bear no resemblance to any creature that has ever walked the earth.


So what are the possibilities?
One of the more popular theories is that mythological creatures were "created" like a jigsaw without a picture, from fossil bones of long-extinct animals, found by puzzled people who had no concept of dinosaurs, or even of extinction.

This goes some way to explain how human giants came into mythological being; many dinosaur leg bones apparently being remarkably similar in shape to human leg bones. But it doesn't explain, for example, how the winged horse Pegasus came about, or the half-man, half-horse Centaur, or the half-man, half-goat Satyr. Ancient people may have lacked scientific knowledge, but they weren't stupid. They might not have been able to identify a dinosaur bone, but they could certainly identify a human, horse, goat or birds-wing bone! Mammoths, so often found whole, and whose bones would have been in places where an elephant would never been seen, seem to have completely escaped such feats of human imagination ... !

What about dragons? Dragons are, of course, one of my personal favourites, and a good example because they are one of most enduring mythological creatures and one that has turned up in some shape or form in every early culture on the planet. There are very few animal bones, extinct or otherwise that could have had similar bones to a bat-winged creature with a snake-like body, let alone for those bones to have turned up all over the world. It is also worth remembering that dragons started out as human-sized. Like a Fisherman's Tale, they grew bigger and bigger every time their story was told!

Another theory is that mythological creatures (especially dragons) were the manifestation of a people's fears - in the case of dragons, their innate fear of fire and reptiles.

Dragons usually have two or four legs, a bit like a lizard, or no legs at all - like a snake. Virtually all have scaly bodies, bat-like wings, they lay eggs, they have fire-breathing and/or poisonous breath and generally live in burrows or caves. It isn't surprising that the Slavik dragon is almost identical in shape to the Welsh dragon, when the Celtic people are thought to have originated in Eastern Europe. But like the Welsh dragon, not all dragons were feared or considered malevolent. Some were positively lucky!

The difficulty with myths is that they are impossible to date. Many are first encountered around 500-300 BC, but that is just when the first evidence of the myth comes to light. But no dragons-like creatures appear in prehistoric cave paintings, so presumably they came into being after early Homo Sapiens. A dragon-like creature is mentioned in the book of Job, and in various cultures, around the time of Christ's birth, mention dragons in the present, as living creatures. But everywhere had its own pet dragon – from Aboriginal Australians to the Vikings. It seems unlikely that one story about one dragon, especially as it started life a lot smaller and less significant than the monster created largely by medieval legends, could have been carried, via natural human migration, all round the world .. and obviously, not to Australia!
So how did every culture, whose paths would never have crossed, manage to produce such remarkably similar images of a non-existent creature.

Or was it ... could dragon-like creatures have existed? Ancient mythological creatures have one thing in common; they are all hybrids; and other than in a few bizarre Chimeran examples, most were hybrids of just two different, but fairly common-or-garden animals. How or why would humans imagine, create, erroneously perceive and deify something as mundane as, for example, a fish-tailed goat, or a one-horned rabbit? Even a winged horse or a mermaid isn't a particularly exciting combination of creatures in a world where much larger and scarier, predatory animals were far more wide-spread and feared than they are today, and were therefore infinitely more suitable for hybridizing and sculpting into a myth. There is an uncomfortable reality about mythological creatures.

Some of us are of the opinion that the human species – Homo Sapiens – was "altered" in some way, quite early in its evolution, thus starting in motion the evolutionary cycle that would set the human species apart from every other species on the planet in almost every respect. Given that humans have evolved so rapidly and radically different from every other species, even its closest mammal relatives, it is extremely unlikely that this alteration could have occurred by even several genetic mutations.

About the only other possibility is that human DNA was deliberately and substantially altered by entity(ies) unknown, and by means unknown. Could these unknown entities have also played with other animals' DNA? If they could manipulate our DNA to such an extent, then surely they could alter any DNA. Winged horses, half-man half-goat ... all the other weird and wonderful animal combinations that make up our mythological records ... could they simply have been early experiments in genetic engineering by advanced entities calculating the scope of earthly DNA?

Most mythological creatures begin their existence in the areas from Greece to the Middle East (coincidentally the same area where Jesus was supposedly born?) The legends of the most famous mythological creatures didn't travel terribly far from that area, but dragons travelled round the world. So did mermaids. From their beginnings in Assyria in 1000 BC, almost every culture has since acquired its mermaids.

There are few records on how mythological creatures reproduced. The winged horse/men were produced, one at a time, via a peculiar version of a Cesarean! Many other creatures appeared to be one-offs. But we know how dragons reproduced. They laid eggs. Of course they did, they were reptilian. Presumably, as mermaids were half fish, they laid eggs also. So what if ... (to quote from that very famous Dinosaur Film!) ... life found a way!?


by Mercury

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