7/29/2019 The Zoology of the Imagination
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The Zoology of the Imagination
The zoology of our dreams is far poorer than the zoology of the
Maker.
Jorge Luis Borges,
The Book of Imaginary Beings.
Here are creatures of every possible kind. Creatures that hold
up the world; creatures that destroy
the world; creatures who are one half human, one half animal and
sometimes even part god. Here
are animals we think we know, but whose natures are magical;
creatures who have strange
characteristics such as faces in the middle of their bodies,
animal heads, forelegs and back legs of
different species. Here also are creatures that follow us,
padding silently through the night; creaturesthat prey upon us,
from the fearsome and terrible fire-breathing dragon, to the body
of water that
has a mind of its own and will leap up and chase you before
gobbling you up. All are the product in
one form or another of human imagination, from a time before
thought was organized into word
and word into text.
Curiously, it seems we have come full circle, since in our own
time imagination responds more to
visual stimuli rather than to ancient tales, and we are by no
means bereft of creatures that enthral,
scare and astonish us with their wonder. Film and TV are, for
many of us, the first and most
immediate source of myth and folktale from the classic
stop-frame animation of Ray Harryhausen,
who gave us Medusa and Pegasus in Jason and the Argonauts, to
Steven Spielbergs Jurassic Park,with its credible dinosaurs, we
have gained an appetite for ever more wondrous creatures.
Whether
we think of the computer-animated adventures of the ogre Shrek,
or the mythic creatures conjured
up, and sometimes ridden, by Harry Potter and his friends at
Hogwarts Academy, we are not content
simply to accommodate the creatures we have known from the past
we want more. The cinema
has not been slow to satisfy this appetite and to stretch our
imagination even further. George Lucas
has given us a veritable menagerie of new species in his Star
Wars universe from Wookies to
Bantha, from Rancor to Hutt. In addition, a legion of movies and
TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire
Slayer, Angel and Ultraviolet, numerous versions of Dracula and
the Blade trilogy, have kept the
history of Vampires and Werewolves fresh and alive in our
dreams. These clearly demonstrate that
we have not seen the last of the creatures that are to enter
into creation.
The naming of animals is a primal task, one that God, in the
Christian myth, gave to Adam in the
Garden of Eden. Naming is a means of understanding more about an
animal, for the name denotes
the nature. Our collection is a wonderful menagerie where names
have been arranged in
alphabetical order for ease of consultation, but we urge you to
read where your imagination prompts
you, as it pleases you to explore, to learn more about
Kkuuxuginaagits, the Ganiagwaidhegowa or the
wonderfully onomatopoeic Toatoatavaya-o.
This book is a zoology of the imagination more than it is a
natural history. It follows the myths of
magical creatures wherever they show themselves, myths that are
primal stories encoding
