Mythical Monsters

Charles Gould

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9783849641825
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

An exploration into all beasts fabled, fabricated, fantastical, and fanciful, from across the world, including the Chinese and Japanese Dragon, Unicorn, Phoenix, and the spate of Sea Serpents sighted off the 19th century New England coast.

Mythical Monsters

Charles Gould

Contents:

Mythical Monsters

Preface.

Introduction.

On The Credibility Of Remarkable Stories.

Chapter I. On Some Remarkable Animal Forms.

Chapter Ii. Extinction Of Species.

Extinct Post Tertiary Mammalia.

Local Extinction.

Chapter Iii. Antiquity Of Man.

Chapter Iv. The Deluge Not A Myth.

Chapter V.On The Translation Of Myths Between The Old And The New World.

Chapter Vi. The Dragon.

Winged Serpents.

Classical Dragon And Mediæval Dragon.

Chapter Vii. The Chinese Dragon.

The "Yih King" Or "Yh King."

The Annals Of The Bamboo Books.

The "Shu King" Or "Shoo King"

The "’Rh Ya."

The "Shan Hai King" Or Classic Of Mountain And Seas.

The Pan Tsao Kang Mu.

The Yuen Kien Lei Han.

Chapter Viii. The Japanese Dragon.

The White Dragon.

Conclusion Of Dragon Chapters.

Chapter Ix. The Sea-Serpent.

The Barque "Pauline" Sea-Serpent.

Chapter X. The Unicorn.

The Poh.

Chapter Xi. The Chinese Phoenix.

Appendix I. The Deluge Tradition According To Berosus.

Appendix Ii. The Dragon.

Ælianiis De Naturâ Animalium.

Appendix Iii. Original Preface To "Wonders By Land And Sea" ("Shan Hai King").

Appendix Iv. A Memorial Presented By Liu Hsiu, By Order Of His Imperial Majesty The Emperor, On The "Book Of Wonders By Land And Sea."

Appendix V. After Preface To The "Book Of Wonders By Land And Sea."

Appendix Vi. Extracts From "Social Life Of The Chinese,"

Appendix Vii. Extracts From The "Pan Tsaou Kang Mu."

Appendix Viii. Extract From The "Yuen Keen Lei Han."

Appendix Ix. Appendix To The Chapter On The Sea-Serpent.

Mythical Monsters, C. Gould

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Mythical Monsters

PREFACE.

THE Author has to express his great obligations to many gentlemen who have assisted him in the preparation of this volume, either by affording access to their libraries, or by furnishing or revising translations from the Chinese, &c.; and he must especially tender them to J. Haas, Esq., the Austro-Hungarian Vice-Consul at Shanghai, to Mr. Thomas Kingsmill and the Rev. W. Holt of Shanghai, to Mr. Falconer of Hong-Kong, and to Dr. N. B. Dennys of Singapore.

For the sake of uniformity, the author has endeavoured to reduce all the romanised representations of Chinese sounds to the system adopted by S. W. Williams, whose invaluable dictionary is the most available one for students. No alteration, however, has been made when quotations from eminent sinologues like Legge have been inserted.

Should the present volume prove sufficiently interesting to attract readers, a second one will be issued at a future date, in continuation of the subject.

June, 1884.

NOTE BY THE PUBLISHERS.

THE Publishers think it right to state that, owing to the Author's absence in China, the work has not had the advantage of his supervision in its passage through the press. It is also proper to mention that the MS. left the Author's hands eighteen months ago.

13, WATERLOO PLACE. S.W.
January, 1886.

INTRODUCTION.

IT would have been a bold step indeed for anyone, some thirty years ago, to have thought of treating the public to a collection of stories ordinarily reputed fabulous, and of claiming for them the consideration due to genuine realities, or to have advocated tales, time-honoured as fictions, as actual facts; and those of the nursery as being, in many instances, legends, more or less distorted, descriptive of real beings or events.

Now-a-days it is a less hazardous proceeding. The great era of advanced opinion, initiated by Darwin, which has seen, in the course of a few years, a larger progress in knowledge in all departments of science than decades of centuries preceding it, has, among other changes, worked a complete revolution in the estimation of the value of folk-lore; and speculations on it, which in the days of our boyhood would have been considered as puerile, are now admitted to be not merely interesting but necessary to those who endeavour to gather up the skeins of unwritten history, and to trace the antecedents and early migrations from parent sources of nations long since alienated from each other by customs, speech, and space.

I have, therefore, but little hesitation in gravely proposing to submit that many of the so-called mythical animals, which throughout long ages and in all nations have been the fertile subjects of fiction and fable, come legitimately within the scope of plain matter-of-fact Natural History, and that they may be considered, not as the outcome of exuberant fancy, but as creatures which really once existed, and of which, unfortunately, only imperfect and inaccurate descriptions have filtered down to us, probably very much refracted, through the mists of time.

I propose to follow, for a certain distance only, the path which has been pursued in the treatment of myths by mythologists, so far only, in fact, as may be necessary to trace out the homes and origin of those stories which in their later dress are incredible; deviating from it to dwell upon the possibility of their having preserved to us, through the medium of unwritten Natural History, traditions of creatures once co-existing with man, some of which are so weird and terrible as to appear at first sight to be impossible. I propose stripping them of those supernatural characters with which a mysteriously implanted love of the wonderful has invested them, and to examine them, as at the present day we are fortunately able to do, by the lights of the modern sciences of Geology, Evolution, and Philology.

For me the major part of these creatures are not chimeras but objects of rational study. The dragon, in place of being a creature evolved out of the imagination of Aryan man by the contemplation of lightning flashing through the caverns which he tenanted, as is held by some mythologists, is an animal which once lived and dragged its ponderous coils, and perhaps flew; which devastated herds, and on occasions swallowed their shepherd; which, establishing its lair in some cavern overlooking the fertile plain, spread terror and destruction around, and, protected from assault by dread or superstitious feeling, may even have been subsidised by the terror-stricken peasantry, who, failing the power to destroy it, may have preferred tethering offerings of cattle adjacent to its cavern to having it come down to seek supplies from amongst their midst.

To me the specific existence of the unicorn seems not incredible, and, in fact, more probable than that theory which assigns its origin to a lunar myth.

Again, believing as I do in the existence of some great undescribed inhabitant of the ocean depths, the much-derided sea-serpent, whose home seems especially to be adjacent to Norway, I recognise this monster as originating the myths of the midgard serpent which the Norse Elder Eddas have collected, this being the contrary view to that taken by mythologists, who invert the derivation, and suppose the stories current among the Norwegian fishermen to be modified versions of this important element of Norse mythology.

I must admit that, for my part, I doubt the general derivation of myths from the contemplation of the visible workings of external nature." It seems to me easier to suppose that the palsy of time has enfeebled the utterance of these oft-told tales until their original appearance is almost unrecognisable, than that uncultured savages should possess powers of imagination and poetical invention far beyond those enjoyed by the most instructed nations of the present day; less hard to believe that these wonderful stories of gods and demigods, of giants and dwarfs, of dragons and monsters of all descriptions, are transformations than to believe them to be inventions.

The author of Atlantis, indeed, claims that the gods and goddesses of ...

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