E02 - Hidden and Mythical Organisms Flashcards
what is a sphinx (Greek)
body of a lion; wings and the head of a woman
what is the difference between a sphinx in Greek and in Egypt
Greek has the head of a woman
Egypt has the head of a king
what is a manticore
body of a lion; face of a person; can shoot an arrow from stinging tail; also a man-eater
Basilisk
the king of snakes; one glance at the basilisk brings death
Mandrake
root that resembles a human figure; when pulled from earth it emits a shriek that kills anyone who hears it
Apple of Sodom
grows at the site of the former towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, which god destroyed. When the apple from the tree is picked it turns to ashes and smoke in hand
Zieba Tree
a tree full of bare-breasted mystics and philosophers
The Unicorn: order of legends
1 . Ctesias: Greek Historian
- The Old Testament
- Pliny, the storyteller
- Marco Polo and the rhino
- Alicorn: medicinal unicorn horn
Ctesias: Greek Historian
Said the unicorn lived in India. It was larger than a horse and had a horn half a meter long. Filings from the horn were believed to be an antidote to poison
The Old Testament: unicorn
a group of Alexandrian scholars wanted to translate some of the books from the old testament from Hebrew to Greek. When they did not fully understand. Only knew that it was an animal
Pliny, the storyteller
- the Orsean Indians hunt an exceedingly wild beast called the Monoceros: has a stags head, elephants feet, and a boars tail. The rest of the body is like a horse and has one black horn.
- in Arab mythology the unicorn was huge, it killed elephants by skewering them, but when it had accumulated 3-4 elephants the unicorn grew tired and vulnerable: could not shake them off
- in Jewish mythology it was too big to fit on Noah’s ark. It survived by treading water, resting its horn on the ark
- In christian mythology the unicorn could be pacified by only virgins. To catch a unicorn you need a 1) virgin 2) large net
Allicorn
Alicorn touched to food would reveal the presence of poison and shavings of it were an antidote to poison (like Ctesias)
The Upas Tree
- Friar Olderic of Portenau and the Sir John Mandevill claimed that it made the deadliest poison in the world
variations on the upas tree myth
- Dr. Englebert Kampfer wrote a book called “Ammoniates Exoticae”. The local people used to get criminals to collect the sap because the tree deadly to approach. If the criminal lived he was set free.
- Rumphius - poison gas eminates from the tree. You can only approach the tree if all your skin was covered by fabric; no other plants grew near the tree; dead birds littered the ground
- London Magazine - The danger zone had a radius of 12 to 14 miles; criminals assigned to collect the sap were equipped with leather caps, protective glasses and leather gloves; only 70 of 700 returned. The ground underneath the tree was littered with dead bodies
Leschenault
- found the truth about the legend. In Hava he was shown a toxic tree but vegetation grew around it, there were no dead animals nearby
- he was able to collect poisonous latex from the tree
Why was there a bunch of dead animals in the stories
could be a confounding of 2 phenomena: a poisonous tree, and deadly CO2 emissions from dormant volcanos
What was the Piltdown man
- a possible human ancestor whose cranium, jaw, and teeth were found in Sussex, south of London
Charles Dawson
- fossil collector
- made most of the Piltdown discoveries
What happened to the Piltdown man?
- was revealed as fake
- the bones and teeth were found to be modern
- the bones were artificially stained to make them look old, teeth had file marks on them
Who was to blame for the piltdown man hoax
Probably Charles Dawson
How do these stories arise and spread
- -> observations of real organisms
- -> a priori reasoning: the idea that everything must have its opposite: the tree of life and the tree of death
- -> confounding of two or more organisms or two or more phenomena: CO2 seepage of the volcano and the toxic tree
- -> secondhand reporting: of the upas tree and the unicorn
- -> mistranslation
- -> exaggeration (size of unicorn)
- -> authorities given too much credence
- -> difficulty of verification: if something is a long way away it is difficult to prove that it doesn’t exist
- -> appearance in literature: gives legs to these stories
- -> outright fakery: alicorn = narwhales tusk posing as a unicorn
- -> good story
