Of Heroes and Beasts

The fourth installment in the "Beasts in Books" series had to be the Centaur.  I conceived of him, fully-grown, in my mind, in appropriate mythological fashion.  He rested and matured in my mind while I worked on another commission.

Having just finished Madeline Miller's "The Song of Achilles," I was inspired to draw the centaur. She writes the centaur Chiron so elegantly.  In Greek culture, centaurs have generally suffered from a bad reputation, known chiefly for their lusty and destructive tendencies, due to the fact that they are half-man half-horse.  In art, you may find them most famously on the Parthenon reliefs, where they battle the tribe of Lapiths.  However, a few centaurs stand out as more man than beast: Pholus and Chiron.

I took as my inspiration the most famous of the centaurs: Chiron.  Son of the titan Cronus and a cloud goddess, Chiron was tutored by Artemis (virgin goddess of the hunt) and her brother Apollo (god of the sun, the hunt, poetry, and medicine), learning at their hands to hunt, to play, and to heal.  He tutored most of the heroes of ancient mythology, including Achilles, Hercules, Jason, and Actaeon on the heights of Mt. Pelion. 

I took as another point of inspiration Ovid's Fasti, Book V, May 3, which tells of Chiron's accidental death from the hydra-poisoned spear of Hercules, in the company of both Hercules and the young Achilles:

"In less than four nights, Chiron, the semi-human
Joined to the body of a tawny horse, reveals his stars.
Pelion is a mountain facing south in Haemonian Thessaly:
The summit’s green with pines, the rest is oak.
Chiron, Philyra’s son, lived there. An ancient rocky cave
Remains, inhabited once, they say, by that honest old one.
He’s thought to have exercised those hands, that one day
Sent Hector to his death, in playing on the lyre.
Hercules visited him, most of his labours done,
Only the last few tasks remaining for the hero.
You could have viewed Troy’s twin fates, together:
One the young scion of Aeacus, the other Jove’s son.
Chiron received young Hercules hospitably,
And asked him the reason for his being there.
He replied, as Chiron viewed his club and lion-skin, saying:
‘The man is worthy of these weapons, the weapons of the man!’
Nor could Achilles, daringly, restrain his hands,
From touching that pelt shaggy with bristles.
While the old one handled the arrows, encrusted with poison,
A shaft fell from the quiver and lodged in his left foot.
Chiron groaned, and drew its blade from his body:
Hercules, and the Thessalian youth groaned too.
Though the Centaur himself mixed herbs culled
From Pagasean hills, treating the wound with ointments,
The gnawing venom defied his remedies, and its evil
Penetrated his body, to the marrow of his bones.
The blood of the Lernean Hydra fused with
The Centaur’s blood, giving no chance for aid.
Achilles, drenched in tears, stood before him as before
A father, just as he would have wept for Peleus dying.
Often he caressed the feeble fingers with loving hands,
(The teacher had his reward for the character he’d formed),
And he kissed him, often, and often, as he lay there, cried:
‘Live, I beg you: don’t leave me, dear father!’
The ninth day came, and you, virtuous Chiron,
Wrapped your body in those fourteen stars."


On May 5 and 6, Ovid discusses the constellations Centaurus and Scorpio; one appears to be shooting the other. In the drawing, I've added the Ovid in its original Latin.  The border contains a pattern commonly found on Greek pottery, and in the corners, in Greek red figure pottery style, are the centaur shooting at the scorpion, to match their constellations in the spring night sky.  Below are two of Chiron's students: Hercules, with club and lion skin, and Achilles, armored as we would see him in the Trojan War.   Chiron himself, in the body of the artwork, is how I imagined him, with long horse ears and a mane in place of hair. His eyes are dark like a horse's. He wields a bow but it is not notched with an arrow; I imagine him at the hunt on the heights of Pelion.

"The Centaur" 2012 Jessica Boehman

A Great Horse Came Bounding out of the Sea

The third in my "Beasts in Books" series is the hippocampus, the Greek hybrid seahorse, with forequarters of a horse and hindquarters of a fish. The word derives from the Greek "hippos" (horse) and "kampos" (sea monster); its fantastical nature is therefore found in his very name.  Pausanius says they are part whale, Philostratus says that they are akin to dolphins, while Homer claims they were golden-hooved. 

What would a hippocampus look like? My first inclination was to make him with a fine coat from head to tail, like a seal.  I could imagine them rolling and frolicking in the surf.  But then again, I was imagining a cold water animal.  The waters of the Aegean would not befit such a suit of hair.  Would he be slick, like a dolphin? But then, we would lose his horse-like nature.  I decided to make him a true mythological hybrid, with a fish's scales and tail, but muscular, so he could propel the chariots of Poseidon.  I gave him a ridge of mane all the way down his back, in place of a dorsal fin.  I kept his surroundings fantastical, flanking him with the real (octopodes and fishes) and the imaginary (mermaids).

His text draws from the Argonautica, the text from Apollonius Rhodius, a Hellenistic poet who wrote the story of Jason and the Argonauts.  In this scene, the hippocampus rises from the surf and gallops away. His appearance is seen as an omen, and the men decide to carry the ship on their shoulders across the desert in the sea horse's wake. The speaker is Peleus, an Argonaut whose later fame came from his demigod hero son, Achilles:

"A great horse came bounding out of the sea, a monstrous animal, with his golden mane waving in the air. He shook himself, tossing off the spray in showers. Then, fast as the wind, he galloped away. Peleus was overjoyed and at once explained the portent to the others. `It is clear to me,’ he said, `that Poseidon’s loving wife has just unyoked his team. As for our mother, I take her to be none but the ship herself. Argo carried us in her womb; we have often heard her groaning in her pain. Now, we will carry her. We will hoist her on our shoulders, and never resting , never tiring, carry her across the sandy waste in the track of the galloping horse. He will not disappear inland. I am sure that his hoofprints will lead us to some bay that overlooks the sea."

"The Hippocampus" pencil. Copyright 2012 Jessica Boehman

 

Of Virgins and Unicorns

Perhaps the most famous of the mythological beasts, save for the dragon, the unicorn (monoceros) has a long history dating back to antiquity, where he may be found in the writings of Aristotle, Aelian, Philostratus, and Pliny the Elder.  In the eyes of the ancients, he was a hybrid animal like the ones that the Greeks and Romans were used to describing in their mythologies, even though this animal plays no real part in the lore of that culture.  They describe him in fantastical terms, with the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the tail of a boar, and the feet of an elephant. And, of course, the single horn on its brow that identified him as the unicorn.  One other detail remained, one that would persist throughout the rest of the unicorn's history: it could not be captured alive.

In the Middle Ages, the unicorn was a commonplace element in bestiaries that described real and imagined animals alike.  In manuscripts, he is shown in a range of colors from brown to white to blue.  He sometimes looks like a horse, at other times, a goat.  Of course, the most famous image of him is held here in NYC, from the Cloisters Unicorn Tapestries.  There, he is shown as a slight white horse tamed by a maiden.

The legend has it that only a virgin could tame the unicorn.  This came down to us through the Physiologus bestiary: "He is a small animal, like a kid, but surprisingly fierce for his size, with one very sharp horn on his head, and no hunter is able to catch him by force. Yet there is a trick by which he is taken. Men lead a virgin to the place where he most resorts and leave her there alone. As soon as he sees this virgin he runs and lays his head in her lap. She strokes him and he falls asleep. The hunters then approach and capture him and lead him to the palace of the king." 

The identification of the unicorn with Christ, white in his purity, able to only be tamed by the Virgin Mary, seems clear.   

But thinking of what the unicorn of my imagination could have been like, I wondered about him and his tamer.  Girls in this period were married very young, so in order for the tamer to be a virgin, she must have been just a child.  What a horrible thing for a young girl to be used as the means to catch the elusive unicorn.  Since many of the medieval images showed the unicorn as a goat, I wonder if he had some qualities of the goat.  I made him slight and small, like a pony, and swift of foot, not so much larger than the child who would tame him.  His cloven hooves make it easier for him to ascend rocky passages, where mounted hunters could not easily follow.  His horn follows the twisting pattern of the narwhal horns (actually a tooth) that were sold as unicorn relics in Europe.  In the border that surrounds him, I made a medieval-style unicorn hunt through the forest at night.  Though the dogs and hunters close in on him, we know he will escape. There is no virgin to be found here, so our unicorn will win the day.

"The Unicorn" Pencil. Copyright 2012 Jessica Boehman

 

In this country be many Griffins

About fifteen months ago I was lying in my bed in the middle of the night. I wasn't sleeping well as I was recovering from my third abdominal surgery since I was a teenager. It's impossible to roll over due to the incisions (I sleep on my side) and my back was sore from being in one position.  So I spent my time daydreaming, even though it was nighttime.

I imagined drawing a series of mythological beasts that looked realistic, and looked like they had been found within the pages of the books that described them.  Did you ever wonder if these creatures were real and we've just forgotten them, or chose not to believe in them? If you consider mythology, it tells the stories of a culture that is defunct, or the stories of a religion in which you do not believe--but people once did believe.  Is it possible, with some squinting of the eyes, that we could still see these creatures in the shadows of the forest? Is it possible to believe them back into being?

I can't pinpoint why the Griffin was the first on my list, the one that demanded attention from me.  I like his long history, his roots in Egypt and Greece.  In Egypt, old renditions associate griffins with the sun and with the lotus flower, so I've imbedded four lotuses within sun disks as a nod to his ancient heritage.  I always imagine encountering such beasts nesting high up in dense forests; so I've filled his border with trees growing black feathers.  The Egyptians, the Greeks (including Philostratus), the Italian writer Dante, and even the Persians wrote about griffins.

The text in the image below (yes, I've been playing on this concept recently), is from the middle ages.  It's from a text of the fictional Sir John Mandeville, simply called The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.  It reads:

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"In that country be many griffins, more plenty than in any other country. Some men say that they have the body upward as an eagle and beneath as a lion; and truly they say sooth, that they be of that shape. But one griffin hath the body more great and is more strong than eight lions, of such lions as be on this half, and more great and stronger than an hundred eagles such as we have amongst us. For one griffin there will bear, flying to his nest, a great horse, if he may find him at the point, or two oxen yoked together as they go at the plough. For he hath his talons so long and so large and great upon his feet, as though they were horns of great oxen or of bugles or of kine, so that men make cups of them to drink of. And of their ribs and of the pens of their wings, men make bows, full strong, to shoot with arrows and quarrels."

The text claims that Mandeville had traveled through the known world, from England, all the way through Europe to Northern Africa, Persia, and Turkey. He claims to have seen cotton plants that sprouted wooly lambs and goats:

If he believed in such wondrous plants, then the griffins of which he spoke must be real as well.  I hope they are, somewhere out there.

"In this country be many Griffins" Pencil. Copyright 2012 Jessica M. Boehman