Why Mythic Creatures are more Real than Creatures of Science?

The Captured Butterfly Is the One That Has Escaped

A guest post on Mythic Creatures by Justi Andreasen

A scientist catches a butterfly and pins it to a board. The wings remain perfect, the markings remain exact, every measurable thing remains, in a sense, triumphantly preserved. What does not remain is the most obvious thing about it. The fact that it was once a butterfly.

For the butterfly was not merely a pattern with antennae. It was a flicker, a visitation, a little uncertainty of gold moving through the garden. The pin keeps the shape and loses the life. It saves the wing and destroys the flight.

The pinned butterfly is useful. One may study it, compare it, catalogue it, and at length assign it a place in taxonomy. Out of such specimens men construct the thing called a species, and the species is what the textbook preserves.

But the textbook does not preserve the creature.

The creature, as it came in the garden, came not first as a definition but as a presence. It entered the air as music enters silence: not by occupying space only, but by altering it. Before it was named, it was noticed. Before it was understood, it was encountered. The species is what remains after this encounter has been arrested and arranged into something that can hold still under a lamp.

In short, the species is a record while the creature was an event.

Most people would admit as much if asked suddenly and without warning. But very few will follow the admission to its conclusion. We have fallen into the odd modern habit of treating the record as the reality and the encounter as the embroidery; the category as solid, the experience as subjective; the pinned thing as the true thing, and the living thing as some sort of private impression cast upon it from outside. We say, in effect, that the butterfly on the board is what the butterfly really is, and that the butterfly in the garden was merely the butterfly before science had corrected us.

I suggest the order is exactly the other way round. The encounter is primary. The species is what remains when the encounter has ended.

This is hinted at in the word itself. English species comes from the Latin species: appearance, visible form. A species is, at root, the creature as caught by its look, the form under which it can be recognized, compared, labelled, and finally put away in a drawer with others of the same sort. It is the animal considered as a visible form. But a creature is more than that, just as a man is more than his silhouette. It is more than the shape it presents to the eye. The living animal overflows the outline by which we sort it. It comes to us not only as something seen, but as something met.

Butterfly, photo released into the public domain by the artist, Jon Sullivan

The Wolf

Most of us first met animals in pictures. The wolf came to us already flattened into illustration or documentary: in profile, labelled. The encyclopedia told it was Canis lupus, of such-and-such weight, of such-and-such range. And all this is perfectly true.

The question is: true in what way?

It is true as a description. It is true as a report. It is true as the residue of measurement left behind after the dangerous and dramatic part has been settled. It is the wolf known at a distance and in safety.

But this wolf does not change the air around you. It does not darken the line of the trees. It does not make you aware of how far you are from the nearest tree you could climb to escape. It remains, with exemplary good manners, on the page.

The wolf on open ground behaves rather differently. Before you know its species, you know its presence. Before the mind produces a noun, the body has already produced a posture. Something in the world has shifted. The field is no longer merely a field. The distance between you and the treeline is no longer merely distance. Attention hardens before language arrives.

That is the wolf as encountered. The species comes later, after one has either survived the meeting or escaped it. The species is what remains once the wolf has been made safe enough to discuss.

Older stories preserved this order with much more honesty than modern science does. The wolf in Norse and Slavic myth, the wolf at the village edge, the wolf in Aesop or in Scripture: these are wolves met before they were measured. They come with hunger, menace, appetite. They are described from within the encounter. They are described, that is to say, as they actually appear.

The wolf of the textbook is the wolf after the encounter has been resolved. The wolf of myth is the wolf while it is still happening. And if we are honest about how animals are actually met (in a field, in a forest, in the black democracy of midnight) the myth is closer to the truth.

A Familiar Platitude, Taken Seriously

It is often said that myths contain truth. Usually this is said in the voice people use when they are apologizing for an old aunt: yes, of course, myths contain truth: psychological truth, poetic truth, perhaps some collective wisdom wrapped in picturesque absurdity.

Very well. Let us accept the platitude and then, for once, take it seriously.

The animals in myth often describe reality more faithfully than the animals in textbooks. For the mythic animal is the animal as first and most fully encountered, while the biological species is what remains after the encounter has been stilled, sorted, and stripped of its immediacy. The encounter is therefore not a subjective gloss upon reality. It is the primary form in which reality arrives. Classification is secondary: a noble servant perhaps, but a servant.

One sees this in the way Hebrew Scripture divides the animal world. In Genesis the animals are sorted, not by genetic analysis, but by how they are met. There are livestock and wild beasts; small creatures of the sea and great sea creatures. These divisions follow the form of human engagement. Livestock are animals that can be gathered into the orbit of human life. Wild beasts resist that orbit. Small sea creatures are edible. Great sea creatures threaten us.

The modern biologist is scandalized because he thinks the ancient writer was attempting a laboratory report and got it wrong. But the ancient writer was doing something far more sensible: describing the world as it appears to creatures who must live in it.

The textbook tells us that the killer whale is a mammal. This is useful if one wants to know certain structural facts. It tells us nothing about the first moment when a dark shape with large teeth rises toward you from below.

The categories of Genesis are shaped by encounter and purpose. Light reveals, darkness conceals. Fresh water sustains, salt water does not. Dry land is where one may stand, the sea is where one cannot. Animals fit the pattern. Tame beasts serve, wild beasts menace. Small sea creatures are what we eat, great sea creatures are what eat us. The supposedly objective categories of modern science (wavelength, chemistry, genome) arrive only after this original drama has been bracketed out.

The Reversal

The modern assumption is that species is the granite floor of reality, and myth a sort of decorative wallpaper hung over it by poetic tribes and excitable grandmothers. The truth, I think, is nearly the reverse. Encounter is the ground. Species is what is left when the ground has been paved over.

You may have heard the grand story that philosophy was born when men advanced from mythos to logos. Nietzsche, who wished in his own way to return to myth, saw that philosophers often honor a thing by embalming it. They make a mummy out of it and then congratulate themselves on preserving it. But nothing real ever came alive out of a museum case. The story keeps the thing alive because it keeps the thing moving. It shows us not how to deal with a beast after it has been stuffed, but how to face it while it still has teeth.

The Dragon

If encounter is the primary form of reality, then a strange consequence follows. Some things may exist at the level of encounter which do not exist at the level of species.

The dragon is the clearest example.

You will not find one in a textbook. It has no Latin name. It cannot be bred in captivity or satisfactorily mounted in a museum. If dissected, it would probably collapse into several categories at once.¹ And so we are informed, with the grave confidence of people who have mistaken a ruler for the universe, that dragons do not exist.

But notice what has happened to the word exist. It has been narrowed until it means only one sort of thing: the thing that holds still, the thing that can be isolated, repeated, and measured. In short, the species.

Yet there are many real things that do not exist in that fashion. Jonathan Pageau offers friendship as a useful example. A friend, for instance. A friend is one of the most real presences in human life, indeed civilisation may be said to depend more on friendship than on fossils. Yet there is no zoological specimen of “friend.” No one has ever pinned friendship to a cork-board. Friendship is not a species but a mode of encounter, and it is real precisely because it is encountered.

A dragon belongs to this order. It is, as Pageau has put it, the unknown in animal form. It is what appears when the edge of knowledge is reached and something still presses from beyond it. It is danger when danger has outgrown our available categories.

Greek red figure vase from Apulia, circa 340-330 BC. The hero Perseus frees Andromeda from a marine monster ketos (Cetus). The artist envisaged the monster as a dragon but the generic word ketos was also applied to sharks and whales. Shared under Wikimedia Commons

Suppose your boat is attacked by a sea dragon, and suppose that some capable fellow manages to kill the monster, haul it ashore, and deliver it to a laboratory. There the men of science examine it gravely and announce that it was not a sea dragon after all, but merely a white shark. This is very much as if a scientist were to inspect the body of your dead enemy and inform you, with professional satisfaction, that it was never really your enemy, but only a specimen of Homo sapiens.²

The report that concluded it was a white shark may account for the carcass. It does not account for the event. It does not tell us what it meant to the hungry men who could not fish those seas for fear of that peril, nor what manner of thing it was that had to be faced and slain. The sea dragon names what happened. The scientific paper names what was left behind.

Many thinkers have said that the dragon symbolises chaos. Usually this is meant to demote the dragon, as if to say that the dragon is only a poetic convenience, a picture painted on the blackboard of the mind. . Taking Pageau’s side, I mean almost the opposite. Dragons exist. They exist as strangers exist, as enemies exist: not as tidy organisms in a cabinet, but as real forms of encounter that disclose the limits of our categories.

What Withdraws

Old stories are full of a pattern modernity has almost forgotten how to recognize: some realities vanish the moment one tries to hold them still.

Trolls wander by night, but sunlight turns them to stone. Rumpelstiltskin has power so long as his name is hidden; once named, he tears apart. Bigfoot and the creature of Loch Ness are famous above all for their refusal to pose properly for a photograph.

The modern conclusion is immediate and shallow: therefore they are inventions.

But the older pattern suggests something subtler. It suggests that these belong to a mode of reality that cannot survive full arrest. They are real as encounter and unreal as specimen. They cannot be made into species because the very act of pinning them is what causes them to disappear. To pin a dragon is to kill it.³

The fairy traditions of Britain and Ireland preserve this with extraordinary clarity. For centuries people reported encounters with fairies in a tone of almost irritating matter-of-factness. A man met the small folk on a hillside. A household moved because some uncanny presence had attached itself to the home. Such things were not told as one tells fiction but as one tells weather. Sometimes a mark remained: a furrow in the earth, a vessel left behind after the vision had passed.

Robert Kirk, the Scottish minister writing in 1691, described fairies as beings “of a middle nature betwix man and Angel,” with bodies “somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud.” The phrase is wonderful partly because it is so precise, and partly because it tries to say exactly the sort of thing modern categories do not know how to do anything with. Kirk was not being vague. He was being exact about a type of existence that the educated classes were beginning to lose the equipment to perceive.

What happened afterward is revealing. Over time belief in fairies did not disappear because no one encountered anything strange. It disappeared because the framework for receiving such encounters changed. What had once been a possible event became, by definition, an impossible one. The experiences remained, the interpretation was forbidden. The new test could not register the thing, and so the thing was pronounced nonexistent.

The Partition

The Irish tradition gives us an image of this process. The Tuatha Dé Danann, once rulers of Ireland, are defeated, and the land is partitioned. The Milesians take what is above ground. The Tuatha take what is below. They become the people of the mounds, dwelling beneath the visible world, accessible only through ancient passage tombs and only at certain seasons, when the wall between worlds grows thin.

It is a marvelous story because it is also a diagnosis.

For modernity performed a similar partition on the whole of reality. The sciences took the upper world: the visible, measurable, repeatable world. The world of what can be made to sit still and answer questions. What could not do this was not exactly disproved. It was driven underground. It became unofficial, impolite, uncredentialed.

But the older world did not vanish merely because it lost tenure.

It is not the mounds that have disappeared, nor the openings, nor even the tales. All these remain. What may have disappeared is something in ourselves. The old power of seeing a thing before we have pinned a name upon it.

The Flight

The naturalist’s pin preserves the species and kills the creature. To classify is to arrest. To arrest is to end an encounter and keep only its corpse. What is classified is real in the way a photograph is real: it keeps a contour while losing a life.

The creatures of myth were never meant to survive this treatment. They belong to that borderland where reality is still in motion, still arriving, still demanding not merely observation but response. The dragon is chaos when chaos takes body. The fairy is the inhabitant of the land we had wrongly supposed was empty. These are not evasions of reality. They are descriptions of how reality first confronts us, before the dissection has begun.

The mythic is the primary account. The species is the secondary one. The textbook gives us what remains after life has been detained long enough to be diagrammed.

People say myths contain truth. They are right, though they commonly mean less by it than they ought. The world we encounter is larger than the world we have learned to classify. The animals of myth are not primitive errors later corrected by science. They are records of real encounters that scientific language, for all its precision, is not built to contain.

There are still dragons. We have only trained our eyes like a photographer’s shutter that refuses to open for anything in motion. The pin preserves the wing and loses the flight. And we have been foolish enough to forget that the flight was the more real thing.

1. Like many ancient monsters, the dragon transgresses categories.

2. Footnote: This thought experiment is borrowed, in spirit, from Pageau’s “The Dragons that Almost Exist.”

3. The same is true of angels, though in the opposite direction. And it is true not only of creatures, but of places as well. That is why Paradise, and perhaps Hell too, are not “real” places in the modern geographical sense. But that is a matter for another essay.