Arcane

Borges's Imaginary Stag-Bird Hybrid

The Peryton is a composite imaginary beast introduced as a canonical entry by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero in their Manual de zoologia fantastica (1957). It has the body and head of a stag and the dark plumed wings of an enormous bird, but its most striking feature is that the shadow it casts under the sun is not its own: it is the shadow of a human being. Borges presents the entry by citing a fictitious sixteenth-century manuscript of an Arab physician at Fez, together with a fictitious fragment of the Erythraean Sibyl preserved at Ravenna, from which we learn that the Peryton was once human and only after killing one mortal acquires the right to cast its own shadow. The 1967 expanded edition El libro de los seres imaginarios, translated into English by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in 1969, fixed the Peryton in fantasy literature; in 1983 Gary Gygax canonised it as a Dungeons and Dragons monster in the Monster Manual II.

Persian Legendary Lion-Man-Scorpion Hybrid

The Manticore (Persian martyaxwar, 'man-eater') is a composite beast of ancient Persian tradition, with the body of a lion, the face of a human, and the tail of a scorpion. The earliest Greek reference is in the Indika of Ctesias of Knidos (fourth century BCE), a Greek physician at the Persian court, who describes it as an Indian man-eater with blue eyes, three rows of shark-like teeth, and a tail that shoots venomous spines like arrows. Ctesias' account is hearsay he gathered at the Persian court; later scholars have read it as a Greek interpretation of the Indian tiger overlaid with Persian-Indian mythic elements. Pliny's Natural History and Aelian's De natura animalium expanded the description, and Isidore of Seville's Etymologies fixed the Latin manticora. From the twelfth-century Aberdeen Bestiary and MS Bodley 764 onward, the manticore became a standard image in medieval bestiaries, then a heraldic emblem of cruelty and cannibalism. Gary Gygax's 1977 Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual added bat-wings and standardised the modern fantasy manticore.