Mythical Monsters E-Book

Charles Gould

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Charles Gould, the son of the ornithologist John Gould, wrote this book in the 19th century on the subject now called 'cryptozoology,' the study of (possibly imaginary) animals only known through anecdotal or folklore evidence. The core of the book is about dragons: Western, Chinese, and Japanese, although it also covers the Sea-serpent, the Unicorn, and the Chinese Phoenix. Gould hypothesized that the dragon was based on an unknown, very rare animal, a huge reptile with wings, which became extinct in historical times. He also concluded that persistent sea-serpent sightings were also due to an undiscovered surviving prehistoric marine animal. He drew on the then-emerging body of fossil evidence for prehistoric mega fauna, from flying lizards to whale-sized aquatic dinosaurs. In context the proposal was not all that outrageous. Darwin had 25 years earlier proposed that humans are part of a huge web of biological relationships over vast realms of time and space. So what other paradigms were about to be shattered? Gould leads off with a discussion of some other 'earth mysteries:' the world-wide flood myth, cultural diffusion, and Atlantis; readers looking for the cryptologist will want to skip forward to Chapter VI. Extensive illustrations, translations from rare documents, and historical accounts from newspaper articles, make this a must-have book for anyone interested in this subject.

Leseprobe

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. ON SOME REMARKABLE ANIMAL FORMS

CHAPTER 2. EXTINCTION OF SPECIES

CHAPTER 3. ANTIQUITY OF MAN

CHAPTER 4. THE DELUGE NOT A MYTH

CHAPTER 5. ON THE TRANSLATION OF MYTHS BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW WORLD

CHAPTER 6. THE DRAGON

CHAPTER 7. THE CHINESE DRAGON

CHAPTER 8. THE JAPANESE DRAGON

CHAPTER 9. THE SEA-SERPENT

CHAPTER 10. THE UNICORN

CHAPTER 11. THE CHINESE PHOENIX

APPENDIX 1. THE DELUGE TRADITION ACCORDING TO BEROSUS

APPENDIX 2. THE DRAGON

APPENDIX 3. ORIGINAL PREFACE TO "WONDERS BY LAND AND SEA"

APPENDIX 4. A MEMORIAL PRESENTED BY LIU HSIU, BY ORDER OF HIS IMPERIAL MAJESTY THE EMPEROR, ON THE "BOOK OF WONDERS BY LAND AND SEA."

APPENDIX 5. AFTER PREFACE TO THE "BOOK OF WONDERS BY LAND AND SEA."

APPENDIX 6. EXTRACTS FROM "SOCIAL LIFE OF THE CHINESE,"

APPENDIX 7. EXTRACTS FROM THE "PAN TSAOU KANG MU."

APPENDIX 8. EXTRACT FROM THE "YUEN KEEN LEI HAN."

APPENDIX 9. APPENDIX TO THE CHAPTER ON THE SEA-SERPENT

Mythical Monsters

By

Charles Gould

WITHNINETY-THREEILLUSTRATIONS

1886

© David De Angelis 2017 – all rights reserved

THE FUNG WANG. ACCORDING TO FANG HENG.

PREFACE

THE Author has to express his great obligations to many gentlemen who have assisted him in the preparation of this volume, either by affording access to their libraries, or by furnishing or revising translations from the Chinese, &c.; and he must especially tender them to J. Haas, Esq., the Austro-Hungarian Vice-Consul at Shanghai, to Mr. Thomas Kingsmill and the Rev. W. Holt of Shanghai, to Mr. Falconer of HongKong, and to Dr. N. B. Dennys of Singapore.

For the sake of uniformity, the author has endeavoured to reduce all the romanised representations of Chinese sounds to the system adopted by S. W. Williams, whose invaluable dictionary is the most available one for students. No alteration, however, has been made when quotations from eminent sinologues like Legge have been inserted.

Should the present volume prove sufficiently interesting to attract readers, a second one will be issued at a future date, in continuation of the subject.

June, 1884.

NOTE BY THE PUBLISHERS.

THE Publishers think it right to state that, owing to the Author's absence in China, the work has not had the advantage of his supervision in its passage through the press. It is also proper to mention that the MS. left the Author's hands eighteen months ago.

13, WATERLOO PLACE. S.W.

January, 1886.

INTRODUCTION

IT would have been a bold step indeed for anyone, some thirty years ago, to have thought of treating the public to a collection of stories ordinarily reputed fabulous, and of claiming for them the consideration due to genuine realities, or to have advocated tales, time-honoured as fictions, as actual facts; and those of the nursery as being, in many instances, legends, more or less distorted, descriptive of real beings or events.

Now-a-days it is a less hazardous proceeding. The great era of advanced opinion, initiated by Darwin, which has seen, in the course of a few years, a larger progress in knowledge in all departments of science than decades of centuries preceding it, has, among other changes, worked a complete revolution in the estimation of the value of folk-lore; and speculations on it, which in the days of our boyhood would have been considered as puerile, are now admitted to be not merely interesting but necessary to those who endeavour to gather up the skeins of unwritten history, and to trace the antecedents and early migrations from parent sources of nations long since alienated from each other by customs, speech, and space.

I have, therefore, but little hesitation in gravely proposing to submit that many of the so-called mythical animals, which throughout long ages and in all nations have been the fertile subjects of fiction and fable, come legitimately within the scope of plain matter-of-fact Natural History, and that they may be considered, not as the outcome of exuberant fancy, but as creatures which really once existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and inaccurate descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very much refracted, through the mists of time.

I propose to follow, for a certain distance only, the path which has been pursued in the treatment of myths by mythologists, so far only, in fact, as may be necessary to trace out the homes and origin of those stories which in their later dress are incredible; deviating from it to dwell upon the possibility of their having preserved to us, through the medium of unwritten Natural History, traditions of creatures once co-existing with man, some of which are so weird and terrible as to appear at first sight to be impossible. I propose stripping them of those supernatural characters with which a mysteriously implanted love of the wonderful has invested them, and to examine them, as at the present day we are fortunately able to do, by the lights of the modern sciences of Geology, Evolution, and Philology.

For me the major part of these creatures are not chimeras but objects of rational study. The dragon, in place of being a creature evolved out of the imagination of Aryan man by the contemplation of lightning flashing through the caverns which he tenanted, as is held by some mythologists, is an animal which once lived and dragged its ponderous coils, and perhaps flew; which devastated herds, and on occasions swallowed their shepherd; which, establishing its lair in some cavern overlooking the fertile plain, spread terror and destruction around, and, protected from assault by dread or superstitious feeling, may even have been subsidised by the terror-stricken peasantry, who, failing the power to destroy it, may have preferred tethering offerings of cattle adjacent to its cavern to having it come down to seek supplies from amongst their midst.1

To me the specific existence of the unicorn seems not incredible, and, in fact, more probable than that theory which assigns its origin to a lunar myth.2

Again, believing as I do in the existence of some great undescribed inhabitant of the ocean depths, the much-derided sea-serpent, whose home seems especially to be adjacent to Norway, I recognise this monster as originating the myths of the midgard serpent which the Norse Elder Eddas have collected, this being the contrary view to that taken by mythologists, who invert the derivation, and suppose the stories

1 This tributary offering is a common feature in dragon legends. A good example is that given by El Edrisi in his history of the dragon destroyed by Alexander the Great in the island of Mostachin (one of the Canaries?).

2 The latest writer on this point summarizes his views, in his opening remarks, as follows:—"The science of heraldry has faithfully preserved to modern times various phases of some of those remarkable legends which, based upon a study of natural phenomena, exhibit the process whereby the greater part of mythology has come into existence. Thus we find the solar gryphon, the solar phœnix, a demi-eagle displayed issuing from flames of fire; the solar lion and the lunar unicorn, which two latter noble creatures now harmoniously support the royal arms. I propose in the following pages to examine the myth of the unicorn, the wild, white, fierce, chaste, moon, whose two horns, unlike those of mortal creatures, are indissolubly twisted into one; the creature that endlessly fights with the lion to gain the crown or summit of heaven, which neither may retain, and whose brilliant horn drives away the darkness and evil of the night even as we find in the myth, that Venym is defended by the horn of the unicorn."—The Unicorn; a Mythological Investigation. Robert Brown, jun., F.S.A. London, 1881.