Caspar Henderson, contributor
(Image: Jay Town/Newspix/Rex Features)
You may think you know otherwise, but the panther is actually a brightly coloured beast from whose mouth comes a sweet odour, as if it were a mixture of every perfume. And the less well-known bonnacon, which resembles a bull, saves itself from its enemies by projectile-evacuating a long stream of acrid excrement.
Whether real creatures or a chimerical combination of them, scores of animals fill the pages of medieval bestiaries - compendia of stories about real and imaginary animals. Notable for their gorgeously illuminated images, the tales within them conjoin fantastical supposition with religious and moral instruction.
The vibrant panther, for example, is followed by other animals because of its sweet scent. ?Only the dragon is seized by fear and flees into the caves beneath the earth,? we learn from a bestiary in Aberdeen, UK. In the accompanying illustration, gold leaf depicting the air around the panther's mouth is ribbed and waved in such a way that it appears to move as you turn the page. ?Thus,? continues the text, ?our Lord Jesus Christ, the true panther, descended from heaven and saved us from the power of the devil.?
Yet, over time our scientific discoveries have encroached on the realm of myth and legend. More and more real creatures have been found that were previously unimagined, often no less extraordinary than those depicted in a medieval bestiary. Think what it must have been like to have seen a platypus or an axolotl for the first time.
These new discoveries still amaze us. We satiate our appetite for nature?s novelties by compiling cabinets of curiosities, attending zoos and botanical gardens and watching wildlife television. You need only open the pages of a magazine such as New Scientist in any given week to learn of some astonishing discovery that casts light on one or several of the beautiful - and possibly strange - forms that have evolved.
Life is a work in progress, a constant experiment. It has resulted in creatures which no sane creator could have imagined, creatures that make you laugh, or gasp in astonishment, and then make you think. Consider the leafy seadragon (see above), which looks more like seaweed than seaweed does and is at the same time unutterably weird, or the sea slug Elysia chlorotica, which photosynthesises with genes stolen from the algae it eats and is as green as a leaf. Marvel at the barreleye fish, whose eyes face upwards underneath a transparent dome like the seats in the cockpit of a helicopter, or the giant tube worms that thrive in scorching black sulphurous smoke on the sea bed and which are taller than humans but have no digestive tract. Dive into deep time and picture the pterosaurs - featherless flying reptiles that in some species grew as big as giraffes and had crests on their heads at least as big and probably as colourful as anything worn at the Rio carnival.
Bestiaries are full of allegory and symbol because, for the medieval mind, everything was believed to embody a religious or moral lesson. Thinkers and scientists such as Hume and Darwin discredited this way of looking at nature. In at least two respects, however, the world is becoming allegorical again.
Firstly, as humans increasingly twist the world to serve our purposes and our growing numbers, we leave ever less space for other animals to evolve independently. Secondly, our ingenuity is making it possible to create entirely new organisms ?from an idea rather than an ancestor?, as an editorial in Nature on the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species put it. Much of life is governed or at least heavily influenced by what we imagine, what we value or fail to value.
Medieval bestiaries give a striking, delightful and sometimes hilarious picture of a 13th-century world view. In in some respects, however, our own times are not so very different. We are still animals that dream and for the most part seek meaning. We need to dream uninhibitedly but act responsibly and with humility.
Caspar Henderson is the author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st century bestiary (Granta 2012)
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