by Xauri'El Zwaan

Created on: January 31, 2009

Many centuries ago, there was a trend among medieval intellectuals to compile what was known as a 'Bestiary' - a purportedly authoritative compendium of all animals known to man the world over. In the days before naturalism or taxonomy, when even a place as close as India might seem like an alien land, European scholars had to rely for their information on whatever sources they could dig up - traveller's tales, classical mythology, untrammeled fantasy, and the Christian Bible; detailed and informative reports, worthy of Darwin or Linnaeus, side by side with rumours, speculation, and outright lies. Such a mish-mash of credulous reportage led to some humorous results; picture perfect descriptions of fantastic creatures like the Elephant or Orangutan, side by side with all manner of Dragons, Giants both headless and two-headed, and the like. The Unicorn is a prime example; its existence was inferred from ancient mediterranean pottery painted with images of equine creatures with a single horn. Only much later did someone realize that these were more easily explained as primitive depictions of a two-horned animal, seen in profile.

Humans tend to have difficulty telling fantasy from reality. We're limited creatures with unlimited aspirations; we have a deep need to explain and understand the world around us, even those parts that lie beyond the reach of our senses - and our minds. Imagination is one of the glories of human existence, and we project the contents of our imagination onto the unknown. For most of human history, for most of humanity, 'the unknown' has included anything beyond your own tribe or village; even the most well-travelled of explorers could barely see a fraction of the planet, and must needs rely on poorly translated and half-understood local legends and beliefs for their information. Thus, faraway lands became populated with creatures of imagination and myth. The advance of transportation, communication, and scientific thought has cut through a lot of this accumulated cultural invention, relegating such beings as fairies, vampires, djinni, and flying horses to the pages of what is generally recognized as fiction. But the human imagination has not lost its power, nor the human desire to know the unknown and explain the unexplainable. We have learned to project our fantasies into those domains that even the all-seeing eyes of technology cannot yet penetrate; alien planets light-years distant, the 'undiscovered country' of the future, and the immaterial

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