Monsters: West vs East

[Ursus]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/10/21/130722022/looking-for-new-monsters

 

 

This is a Five Monster Collection from a 2000 year old text. Back in the first century, AD, Pliny the Elder, a great Roman scholar, collected descriptions of creatures who lived at the very edge of the known world. Sailors claimed to have seen them. Travelers too. They'd shown up in folktales. They didn

[caldrail]

There is some interesting variations. Whilst the europeans regarded monsters as inherently inimical to their god fearing civilisation, the chinese represented their monsters as creatures you could forge a relationship with, albeit a somewhat ambiguous one. The middle east seems to have concentrated on the creatures characteristics, it's ability work magic or to have hidden wisdom, or even it's symbolic place in the cosmos, which almost forms a bridge between east and west ideas of monsters.

 

The greco-roman monsters I notice are obstacles. Whilst they don't threaten civilisation, being basically dumb animals, they represent achievements or obstacles in heroic tales, and the useful ones are gifts from the gods, marking out the hero as special by virtue of his temprorary ownership of some mystical beast (notice how Suetonius highlights a horse Caesar had when he was young, a creature with strange hoofs like hands, marking Caesar as favoured og the gods and thus destined for great things).