On the trail of mythical beasts

01 April 2009 by Sumit Paul-Choudhury

WHAT makes so many people want to believe in fabulous creatures? Chris Lavers and Joshua Blu Buhs set out to explore this question, and although one tackles an ancient myth and the other a modern one, they come up with remarkably similar answers.

The Natural History of Unicorns might sound whimsical, but in fact it is an erudite, scholarly book which uses the unicorn to illuminate millennia of social and geographical change. Unicorns appear in many guises in many cultures - from the ferocious one-horned ass described by the Greeks to the courtly, Christianised goat of medieval Europe and beyond. Lavers's achievement is to show how each of these is a chimera based on startlingly accurate reports of real animals, carried over trade routes stretching from the African jungle to the Arctic Circle.

The unicorn's susceptibility to virgin maidens, the curative qualities of its horn, its elusiveness and temperament: Lavers explains how these properties were shaped to suit the ideologies and beliefs of different societies, throwing up - and answering - fascinating questions along the way. For example, did khutu, a material used in ornamental knife handles, come from narwhals, giant birds, musk oxen or woolly mammoths?

For those, like myself, who always assumed that our forebears more or less made up unicorns from folk superstitions and a pinch of rhinoceros, Lavers's book offers revelations not only about mythical creatures, but about the extent and effects of globalisation in ancient times. It's eminently readable, too.

One of the themes of Lavers's book - that belief in mythical animals is a product of social change - is central to Bigfoot, an exhaustive study of wild-man myth-making in the 20th century. Buhs's book starts out in similar territory to that of Lavers, suggesting that the Himalayan legend of the yeti became "folklore for an industrial age" because it meshed well with Britain's post-colonial concerns and drew on popular fascination with far-flung places - a kind of media-accelerated version of the same processes that created unicorns.

Buhs goes on to describe how the search for Bigfoot and Sasquatch was dominated by the concerns of white, working-class men. For this disenfranchised group the quest was a validation of their lifestyle, skills and knowledge, which they perceived as being threatened by mass media, formal education and popular culture. The hunters' desire to be accepted as scientific, while simultaneously disparaging the scientific establishment, makes for thought-provoking reading: there are obvious parallels with the attitudes of intelligent-design enthusiasts and climate change sceptics.

Popular culture eventually defanged Bigfoot, and unicorn-hunting has fallen out of fashion. But both Lavers and Buhs suggest that these myths, and others like them, will persist in one form or another. Tellingly, both trace their respective subjects all the way back to Gilgamesh, one of the world's oldest fictional texts, in which the wild man Enkidu is tamed by female sexuality. If belief in fabulous beasts has such deep roots, it is unlikely to go away any time soon - although with the Earth becoming an ever-smaller place, Buhs suggests that future monster-hunters may have to turn their attention to the stars.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury is the editor of NewScientist.com

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227021.600-on-the-trail-of-mythical-beasts.html