9 Mythical characters that existed in reality

In addition to fairy tales, everything has an explanation. Writer William Ralph Inge once said, “What is originality? An undiscovered plagiarism”. And it’s true, the images in story writers’ heads were probably inspired by something or someone. It is difficult, for example, to imagine what could have inspired Homer to create the image of Scylla and Charybdis, but the fact is that these monsters also have a real model, although in this case they are not a being, but a natural phenomenon.

O awesome.club tried to find out what could have impressed people to make up so many terrible things.

Leviathan is an Old Testament sea monster. It is speculated that it could be inspired by a giant sperm whale, similar to the one found during excavations in the Ica desert in Peru. Its length was approximately 17 meters, and it lived about 12 million to 13 million years ago. The teeth, 36 cm long and 12 cm wide, managed to convince anyone of the monstrous condition of their possessor and awaken the imagination to the point of exaggerating and increasing ideas about this being.

Some scientists say that the prototype of the monstrous venomous basilisk snake, which petrifies all living things with its eyes, is the Egyptian snake (its ability to spit venom can be interpreted as annihilation from a distance), others claim that it is the horned snake ( from the Greek basileus: “King”), and others that it is the common basilisk. In the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder, in his “Natural History”, described the basilisk as a small snake up to 30 cm long. In Europe, in the XIII century, thanks to the imagination of many authors, the “little snake” became a rooster with a frightening “arsenal” on different parts of the body: from the claws of a tiger to the wings of a dragon.

In eastern mythology, the giant bird Ruc (rokh, rukh, roc, rock or rock), which is so large that it feeds its children with elephants, often appears. The Florentine traveler Marco Polo had the opportunity to debunk this myth. Being a guest of the Mongolian Khan Khublai, Marco saw evidence of the existence of the Roc bird: a feather 3.5 meters long, brought from the African island of Madagascar. He suggested that the feather belonged to a griffin, greatly exaggerated by human imagination. But there is another version. Until the 17th century, Madagascar was inhabited by giant birds of the family Aepyornis, who could not fly, since they weighed up to 500 kilograms and measured about 3 meters. The feather of this adult bird could be that of a young Roc bird.

The mandrake is the root of a herbaceous plant that resembles a human figure and to which, since time immemorial, magical properties have been attributed. Pythagoras called it a “humanoid plant” and Columella, a “semi-human herb”. In some villages, the mandrake is even distinguished by gender (depending on the presence of certain “primary features” of a person). Explaining the magical properties of mandrake is very easy: the scopolamine it contains causes irreversible damage to the brain. That is why it is said that “the groaning of the mandrake causes death”.

The griffin is a winged mythological creature with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. No animal seems to fit the description. But historian Adrienne Mayor has suggested that the image of the griffin was inspired by the petrified skeletons of protoceratops that lived in the dinosaur territory of Altai. This explains the large size of the animal’s body and the presence of the beak and “wings”, which could be the remains of the dinosaur’s collarbone.

Chupacabra is a frequent character in urban legends and horror films. In general, the “witnesses” describe him as a dog or a coyote with spikes, fangs and a pig’s snout. Basically, he is dedicated to killing goats and sucking their blood. Often, sick and mutated animals (foxes, dogs, pigs) are taken for chupacabras.

The Snowman, or Bigfoot, a wild, humanoid creature, very tall and covered with hair, is a regular reference in the legends and stories of contemporary lovers of esotericism. Bigfoot “lives” in mountainous or forested areas, far from civilization. There are many theories about who this strange being is. The most plausible is that it is a gigantopithecus: a genus of anthropoid ape up to 4 meters tall and weighing up to 550 kg, which lived at the end of the Pleistocene (more than 12 thousand years ago) in the territory of present-day India, China, Thailand and Vietnam.

The sea serpent is a fantastic creature, resembling a serpent with a dragon’s head, found in myths around the world. Its model may very well be the modern king-of-herrings, also known as regaleco, oarfish or relangueiro. Some specimens of these deep-sea fish can reach 3.5 meters in length and weigh around 250 kilograms. The largest officially recorded regaleco was over 11 meters long. Wasn’t it a sea serpent by any chance?

The horrible sea monsters of ancient Greek mythology, Scylla and Charybdis, also have their prototype. In this case, the reference is not a creature, but terrible natural phenomena due to their devastating effect. Examples of these are the huge whirlpools and rocky banks near Italy, which actually sank a large number of ships.

Elves are beings known from Germanic, Scandinavian and Celtic fairy tales and folklore films. They are often described and represented as beautiful and luminous creatures: spirits of the forest. Howard Lenhoff of the University of California suggested that the prototypical image of elves was people with a genetic anomaly called Williams syndrome. This disease was first documented in 1961 in New Zealand. Its features are a childish facial expression, short stature, clear voice and a slight degree of mental retardation, which is expressed in the form of extreme sensitivity to the surrounding world, tenderness and kindness.