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 is a legendary creature originating in ancient Persian tradition, with a lion's body, human face, and scorpion's tail. The name derives from Old Persian 'martyaxwar' (man-eater) and was first recorded in the 4th-century BCE Indian travelogue of Greek physician Ctesias. With blue eyes and three rows of sharp teeth, it shoots venomous spines from its tail. Depicted as a man-eating monster, it appears throughout medieval European bestiaries and became a heraldic symbol of cruelty.