Creatures of Myth and Imagination: Europe and the Americas

Introduction

Creatures of Myth and Imagination: Europe and the Americas

Birds with fangs, snakes with feathers, legumes with arms and legs: For millennia, humans have selected and combined elements from nature to devise supernatural creatures unlike anything seen in the known world. A global phenomenon born of the imagination, hybrid beings have played key roles in storytelling, identity formation, and the bridging of heaven and earth. Given material form, they have taken part in sacred rites, enlivened daily life, and joined the dead in their graves. 

Creatures of Myth and Imagination examines the impulse to invent composite beings in Latin America and Western Europe between 500 and 1500, long before direct contact began in the late fifteenth century. Comparing these parallel, independent traditions invites us to explore the many ways in which hybrids transform the mundane into the magical and, in the process, to understand the paradoxical human desire to both order and disorder the world. 

Brought into existence through both observation and invention, hybrid beings also serve as metaphors for artistic creation. The mythical creatures of the Americas and Europe encourage us to consider the challenges that sculptors, metalsmiths, painters, and weavers the world over faced in shaping them. Artists’ interpretations have given us some of the most perplexing, terrifying, humorous, and beloved images and objects ever made, revealing the extraordinary scope of the human imagination and continuing to enchant us today.

Bridging Realms

In the Americas and Europe, hybrid creatures could traverse earthly and supernatural realms, linking the human and the divine. Their images conveyed doctrine, established and reinforced identities, and defined social and cosmological boundaries. Monumental representations of these beings occupied the viewer’s space in a dramatic way, enhancing their effectiveness as agents of social control.

In ancient Mexico, large-scale images of such supernatural beings were distributed throughout a sacred geography. They marked boundaries and crossroads; they were found in mountains, caves, and springs; and they dominated public spaces, such as plazas, as well as the more restricted ritual spaces of temples. In Europe, hybrid creatures depicted in mural painting and architectural sculpture played equally integral roles in the spiritual landscape, guarding church entrances, conveying prayers at altars, and offering spiritual edification in monastic spaces. Whether seen in a cloister or a plaza, these monumental images radiated power, charisma, and the ability to transform and be transformed.

Creature Companions

Terrifying and magnificent in the public sphere, the hybrid beings of Europe and the Americas were equally at home in more intimate settings, where they sometimes took on new meanings. Representations decorating utilitarian objects could signal an individual’s religious beliefs, political persuasions, and social status.

One beloved option for giving form to hybrids was the distinctive, multifunctional, shaped vessel. European aquamanilia, used to pour water for handwashing, were often fashioned into fantastical creatures, including centaurs and unicorns. Found in both domestic and religious settings, they could amuse diners at table or enhance ritual. On Peru’s north coast, potters shaped containers into anthropomorphized birds and other hybrids for ritual use. Once enjoyed in life, these ceramic objects could also be brought to the grave to commemorate the status, identity, and refinement of the departed. In both regions, such vessels provided rich opportunities for self-expression, from the creative choices of artists and patrons to what were surely lively conversations among their users.

Nature, Compounded

Hybrids are creative blends of elements drawn from nature. Artists deconstructed and reassembled distinctive, powerful features, such as wings, claws, and large ears, into impossible beings endowed with exceptional abilities. Those who possessed and beheld composite creatures believed these beings were capable of expanding human spheres of action.

In the arts of the Americas and Europe, hybrids indicate an awareness of the natural order while they simultaneously disrupt familiar category distinctions. Some, such as a human figure from Colombia with bat and crocodile features and a basilisk (a combination of a rooster and a snake) from Italy, join elements of animals that normally inhabit different spheres (earth, air, or water). Beings of terror and delight, hybrids are like the natural world—still only partly understood but an inescapable element of the human experience. Resulting from keen observation of the environment, they perhaps represent a way of making sense of nature in all its complexity.

Creating the Uncreated

In premodern Europe and the Americas, rich mythological traditions ensured that many hybrids were believed to be real, even if no human had ever seen them. Thus, to Europeans, unicorns frolicked at the edges of the world, while in northern Peru, fox-warriors charged into battle.

Challenging artists to visualize the unseen, hybrid beings provided opportunities to use organic materials, from shell and ivory to feathers, to recall their animal sources and, by extension, activate the abilities of those animals. The compound nature of hybrids also enabled artists to juxtapose characteristics, as with a fearsome beast wearing a collar of flowers on a tapestry from the Swiss Alps and a muscular runner with a set of wings on an ear ornament from the Moche culture. These traditions converged in the sixteenth century, the first period of sustained contact between Europe and the Americas, prompting an exchange of imagery and the creation of new hybrids for new contexts and new audiences.

Variety, Play, and Possibility

As sums of animal, vegetable, and mineral forms, hybrid creatures appear in seemingly endless, visually playful combinations, from reinventions of long-standing types, such as the winged angels of Europe and feathered serpents of the Americas, to new confections. In the Americas, hybrids were potent symbols of metaphysical transformation and empowered those who possessed them. In the European tradition, charismatic griffins, centaurs, and dragons were ubiquitous, although their meanings were rarely stable, and they were capable of referencing a number of ideas and values.

It is not always possible to pinpoint the significance of hybrids in the art of the past, in part because their elusive, indeterminate forms resist interpretation and categorization. Yet that variability—and great possibility—is a large part of their appeal. The charm of the composite creature is evident in its abiding popularity today, from children’s books to film and television, reminding us of the persistent human impulse to combine and compound.