To Catch a Catoblepas by the Tail

Detail of Sludge, the Catoblepas, a wall-mounted sculpture by author, paper mache and mixed media, inspired by an illustration by David A. “DAT” Trampier in the D&D Monster Manual, 1978.

When I was a child there was a dog on my street named Sultan. It was a big, loud German Shepherd; very territorial and on a short chain in the yard at the end of my street. The kids on the street said he used to have a brother named Satan and I was too little to know what Sultan meant, so it might as well have meant the devil. Sultan’s bark penetrated my little body, even from the sidewalk across the street. No one ever walked on the sidewalk in front of his yard. Even if you weren’t afraid of him, his bark would hurt your ears.

And yet I stood and made faces and danced and managed to get Sultan crazy more than once. I never threw anything at him. I could never have gotten close enough. One day Sultan got loose and chased me under the porch of our house. It had slats on the sides and you really weren’t supposed to be able to get under there, but we cut one slat with a saw to make a secret fort. It was dank and full of spiders so this might have been the one time it was useful. I hid under the porch and Sultan paced around, ready to kill me. When he wandered far enough away, I made a break for the stockade gate to my backyard. Sultan got to me before I reached the gate, but he only nipped my little boy's leg.

This is the context in which I first read about the dreaded Catoblepas. I had played Dungeons & Dragons with my friends across the street as early as I can remember. I could have been seven or eight. The Monster Manual was the most thorough encyclopedia of anything I would have read at the time, a most valued guide of creatures from myth and legend. And amongst its much loved pages was artist David A. “DAT” Trampier’s Catoblepas. Trampier’s grumpy, rumpled creature looked like the offspring of a warthog and a brontosaurus. It had the look of having had a few too many rough nights drinking. If a Catoblepas lived on my street, or in the swamp behind my elementary school, it probably would have killed me.

The Catoblepas, by David A. “DAT” Trampier, from a celebration of his art from Heavy Metal’s “The D&D Monster Manual Art of Dave “DAT” Trampier”. Trampier’s story is a poignant one. His art is iconic and recognizable to players of a certain vintage, but despite his success in his 20s, he left behind illustrating and disappeared from public life. After being discovered in a college newspaper story he refused offers to return to the industry until he was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2014.

The strange nature of Catoblepas was that its gaze could kill you, but its name came from the Greek verb meaning “to look downward,” Romanized from Κατωβλεψ, because its neck was thought to be too weak to hold up its head. So it was very unlikely to look up at you. And therein, I believe, was its charm to me. I had seen Ray Harryhousen’s Clash of the Titans and would not have dared to seek out Medusa. She was fast and wily and very scary (in addition to turning one to stone.) But Trampier’s Catoblepas was a sluggish looking creature and I would have tried to sneak up behind it and whack it with a stick. Which is why it would have probably killed me.

Images of the Catoblepas From Natural Histories

Images of the Catoblepas from historical natural history texts, (left) Der Naturen Bloeme manuscript, 1350, from the National Library of the Netherlands; and (right) by Jan Jonston, from Historia Naturalis de Quadrupedibus, 1614, Amsterdam.

The strange Catoblepas has a strange history. It was not dreamt up for Dungeons & Dragons, or told of in Greek or Roman myths, but was written of quite seriously by Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder, in the first century of the common era in a serious text, Naturalis Historia (Natural History), a ten volume text that would become the model for encyclopedias. It told of everything that needed to be known about the natural world including animals, but also botany, astronomy and mathematics, and many other topics. Pliny wrote that the Catoblepas was to be found in Ethiopia near the head of the Nile. Pliny’s Catoblepas seems to have been picked up as a verified creature by future natural historians, who added to it a dangerous fiery or poisonous breath. The creature is depicted by some artists as a sort of wildebeest, which may have been its model. Leonardo da Vinci, in the 15th century, gives an account of the creature that is similar to the rest: “It is not a very large animal, is sluggish in all its parts, and its head is so large that it carries it with difficulty, in such wise that it always droops towards the ground; otherwise it would be a great pest to man, for any one on whom it fixes its eyes dies immediately.” In the 19th century, the creature reared its head (or tried to) in the novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Gustave Flaubert wrote that its neck was as “long and loose as an emptied intestine.” In the 20th century, Jorge Luis Borges, that lover of things whose veracity may be questioned, included the Catoblepas in his wonderful The Book of Imaginary Beings (which I have also found entirely in a free pdf online).

The Catoblepas Sculpture Project

Various steps towards having a hangable piece of art. For more images, check out the Catoblepas page of this site. (Photos by the author and the author's wife.)

When I met my wife-to-be, we discovered that we both owned jackalopes, small faux-taxidermized rabbits with horns. If that isn't a sign of finding one's soulmate, I really don't know what is. Given that she was a fan of Portland, Maine's International Cryptozoology Museum and I had already had several small art pieces depicting things like the Yeti and a giant squid attacking a ship, we decided to create a cryptid wall. Rachel recently described our décor style as “A Night at the Museum”; we have a suit of armor, tapestry prints, several globes and a collection of fantastic maps of this world and a few fictitious ones. So we weren't far off from having a set of faux-taxidermized fantasy creature wall-mounted heads before we bought our home.

My art projects generally begin when I want something that does not already exist or if it does exists, I can't afford to buy it. To my knowledge, there are no other wall-mounted sculptures of a Catoblepas, but there are some wonderful artists to be found selling fantasy sculpture on Etsy and their own sites and when we started decorating our house, I quickly bought some beautiful pieces that were within my price range and then ran out of options. My Catoblepas project was inspired by the extraordinary art of Dan “the monster-man” Reeder of Gourmet Paper Mache. Reeder’s web tutorials and his Paper Mache Dragons led me step by step through sculpting a head with cloth and paper mache. Of course, Reeder does dragons, and I had already bought a dragon head for my wall. I looked through my trusty Monster Manual for inspiration and found Trampier’s Catoblepas.

Reeder’s resources came close to solving all of my problems, but my Catoblepas needed a long sloping neck and somewhere in my process I thought the creature’s tusks should be made of a polymer clay that ended up being quite a bit heavier than I expected. I did not expect a paper or cloth mache shell to hold it up as far away from the wall as I wanted it so I needed to engineer something that I thought would hold it and yet allow me to bend it to the shape I wanted. This and my worrying about the paint stretched my process out a bit longer than a year, but I finally finished and got it hung!

I named him Sludge because the black and dark blue swirls of his paint looked oil-like to me and because the Catoblepas has come to represent the wastelands, to be a symbol of life contaminated by pestilence. And he looked like a Sludge. He took his place with several other creatures in my barn. Sometimes people suggest that the trophy-like heads lead to the logical conclusion that I hunted these creatures and killed them, but I don’t think of it that way. I am not a hunter and would not kill real animals to mount on my walls. I don’t think of Sludge or the others as dead either. I like to imagine them having conversations when we are out of the house. I also like to think of them as protectors. And because Sludge hangs opposite my front door, I like to think that if anyone comes in who shouldn’t, the intruder will have to roll against death ray or I will find the corpse when I get home.

Stealing Fire: John Colarusso and the Tales of the Narts

A fountain in Vladikavkaz, Russia with the Nart Sosruquo, dancing on the edge of a magic bowl. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

A range of mountains cuts diagonally across the body of land between the Black and Caspian Seas. It is a land rich in folklore and may preserve details of myths that we have lost from the canon of Western knowledge. The Nart tales, stories of superhuman men and women who strove against monsters and gods, are popular and beloved among the people of the Caucasus and those in diaspora around the globe, but these stories have only been available in English to the wider reading public for twenty years or so. Their availability to English readers is largely the responsibility of one scholar, Canadian linguist and anthropologist, John Colarusso.

The Greek myths tell of a people in the wondrous east, a land of female warriors and sorcerers. Circe and the Amazons and the land of the Golden fleece were all inspired by the people of the Caucuses. Those Caucasian peoples in turn told stories that seemed to look to the west: of a demi-god punished for stealing the holy fire by being bound to a mountain; of a hero who fought a cyclopean giant in his cave and freed its prisoners by lashing them under the monster's sheep. But the stories you aren't likely to recognize are perhaps the greater value. The stories that point to lost pantheons, lost elements of the western cycles of mythology and stories that teach us that women are not only equal to men; sometimes they are greater.

The “Narts” of Colarusso’s Nart Sagas; Ancient Myths and Legends of the Circassians and Abkhazians are heroes. They are said in some tales to predate and to be larger than modern humans. The word Nart translates to “manly man,” or heroic man, and is related to the Indo European root that gives us the Greek root andro- for man (though it is used almost as an honorific before the names of males and females in the stories). Reading the tales I was struck by certain elements that mark them as folk tales and other elements that struck me as interconnected mythology. For instance, there is a tale early in the collection reminiscent of Grimms’ “The Golden Bird,” wherein three brothers stand watch over successive nights by an apple tree, but only the youngest witnesses a bird stealing the apples. The Nart tale’s mythological component is that the apples play a role in the fertility of Nart women. It is reminiscent of Idunn’s youth-restoring apples. Furthermore, the youngest of the sons in the Nart tale is Warzameg, a recurring character who becomes the leader of the Narts. The tales are a motley and exciting bunch in this regard and also in that they vary between prose and verse. They seem to me an opportunity to read stories that have been documented at a point where they may be on the verge of becoming something else. It is important to note for those with some knowledge of Nart stories that Colarusso has also edited a collection of Ossetian Nart tales that have been available in English longer and seem to be in a more developed literary state, closer to an epic cycle, with characters and likely tales that overlap with those of the Circassian and Abkhazian collection. I have not yet read the Ossetian tales and my descriptions and comments deal solely with Colarusso’s translations of the Circassian and Abkhazian tales.

Sosruquo returns to his men with fire by Murat Dyshek, National Museum of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic, Nalchik.

When I started researching this article, and rereading Colarusso’s Circassian and Abkhazian Nart tales, I discovered that everything I found in English regarding Narts was related to Colarusso’s work. I first read the collection four years ago and would post online about stories I found exciting or unusual, and the Narts seemed to be as new and unknown to my friends. Given that since that time I’ve never seen folklore and mythology-savvy people mention the Narts, and all Nart materials only related to one scholar, I began to wonder, briefly, if I had stumbled upon a work of fiction meant to look like folktales and had been tricked! This is not the case. If one speaks Russian or at least reads some Cyrillic, they will find no difficulty in locating information about Narts online. But Colarusso’s almost unique status in the field in English is worth noting. “I seem to have kicked the door open,” said Colarusso.

Colarusso is a man who was destined for scholarship in some field. He started in physics, but the vicissitudes of scholarship grants and programs saw him shift to philosophy, where he had to learn Greek, and, eventually, he found himself studying linguistics. The Harvard linguistics program at the time required him to learn a language and become an expert in that language’s family. He chose Circassian, because he was drawn to the complexity of the grammar and phonology. Colarusso conjectures that it is likely the difficulty of Circassian languages that has kept English speakers from bringing the Nart tales to a wider English-speaking audience. A Circassian speaker is able to hear and distinguish roughly twice the number of consonant sounds than the twenty-four an English speaker regularly uses. The story may not be fair to the language, but Colarusso said that his brother-in-law, a medical doctor, once rushed into his room at the sound of the language. “The very first time I recorded some words...I was playing the recording and my brother-in-law came running into the room thinking I was throwing up. And I said ‘No, no, these are the sounds I recorded today and I am not sick.’”

Nart horsemen by artist Umar Mizhalani. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

Colarusso says that his ability to hear and learn Circassian and other languages (he listed five or more other languages, living and dead, that he has learned or worked in, in addition to the northern Causasian tongues he is expert in) likely owes itself to his childhood in understanding his father's mother, who only spoke an Italian dialect. “It’s a queer savant ability, nothing to do with intellect, really.” Colarusso also credits his mother and grandmother with his interest in mythology. While he isn’t a trained folklorist, Colarusso’s knowledge and interest in Indo European mythologies is sprinkled through Nart Sagas, where, in his notes, he does not seem to miss an opportunity to make connections between any detail in a story that seems to reflect a connection to another tale. In this way, mythology enthusiasts will get many references to Greek, Celtic, Germanic and Indic tales.

Colarusso’s Nart Sagas text grew out of his desire to cement his Circassian language skills. He earned a grant to translate regional cycles of Nart tales and did so with the help of ex-pat Circassians living in New Jersey (and later Austria). Colarusso said that they would provide him with suggestions of tales to work on and would supply him with “pidgin English” crib sheets that were indecipherable as English, but helped him to further understand Circassian. English-speaking Circassians know Colarusso’s work. When I was searching for art to run with this piece, the admin of a Circassian cultural group online immediately recommended I speak to Colarusso. Colarusso’s linguistic and cultural knowledge in the Caucasus have also been tapped by two U.S. administrations. When the Nart project was over, though, the tales went into a file drawer and sat for a decade until his wife discovered the files and told him to publish them.

Respect Your Wife!

The Nart sorceress Qaydukh, lighting her husband's way across the linen bridge. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

The consequences of disrespecting or undervaluing one’s wife was one of the more surprising themes in Colarusso’s collection. In two of the tales, a husband who disrespects his wife’s contribution to the household dies when she unexpectedly revokes that help. My favorite version of the tale had a passage that so articulated the invisible labor of women that I posted it on International Women’s Day a few weeks ago: “[Psabida] set off in the night. He wore a coat made by Qaydukh and shoes made by Qaydukh. She was the woman who did all that for him. She is the woman. If not for her, he could not have done those things for himself.” Psabida’s horse so loves his wife (who cares for it when Psabida returns from a raid) that it rebels against its master because he had a fight with his wife. In this and another version of a similar tale, the husband dies, but defying my expectations for this sort of a story, the wife is rewarded rather than punished. In each version she gets a better husband, who respects her. There is a sentimental spin on the theme in another tale in which the head of the Narts feels he must divorce his wife because people say he derives his greatness from her. The conclusion brought tears to my eyes.

The Smith and the Invulnerable Hero

Nart Lady Setenaya and the divine smith Tlepsh at the birth of the hero Sosruquo in a painting by Marina Bekaldy. (Image courtesy Lhiten Hatko.)

The most memorable hero of the collection, for his conception and birth, is the Nart Sosruquo, the invulnerable man. The story is retold with slightly different details in regional versions in Colarusso’s collection, but Sosruquo is generally birthed from a stone by the Nart blacksmith Tlepsh, a figure who also stands apart in the tales as a divine though he lives among men. At birth Sosruquo’s flesh is searing hot to the touch and Tlepsh alternately hammers and douses the child, hardening his flesh to the toughness of metal. In one version he dips the newborn in molten iron and feeds it to him by the bowlful. The following detail also makes Sosruquo interesting as a matter of comparative mythology: Sosruquo’s legs are vulnerable because that is where Tlepsh holds him with his tongs. This, of course, recalls the flawed heel of the Greek Achilles, a hero also burned in divine fires to remove his mortality.

The association of more than one nigh-invulnerable European hero with heat, fire or a smith, makes Colarusso believe that the Sosruquo story preserves an element that may once have applied to all of them. The Irish hero Cuchulainn, for example, derives his popular name from the smith Culann; he is “the hound of Culann.” Furthermore, Cuchulainn’s body heats up in battle to the extent that he must be repeatedly dunked in water afterwards, causing much the same result as dousing hot metal: the water rapidly boils. Cuchulainn and Achilles are both also described as dark of skin, perhaps a detail left over from a forging tale similar to Sosruquo’s. Sigurd the dragon slayer, from the Volsung Saga, derives his limited invulnerability by covering himself in the blood of a dragon, but he too is raised by a blacksmith. Like Achilles and Sosruquo, he is vulnerable in a spot that he missed.

It is more often though the unprecedented detail of the Circassian and Abkhazian Nart tales that delights, as with the tales of wives who gain the upper hand. I may also have buried the lede on Sosruquo’s conception, which is the only long-range projectile insemination I have ever read. And if that isn’t enough to entice you, yet another tale might well be retitled, “How the Narts Stopped Throwing their Elders from the Cliff.” The Nart tales are fresh and fun and may well prove themselves indispensable to the study of Indo European mythologies.

The images in this article were provided by Lhiten Hatko, administrator of the Circassians UK group on Facebook. Hatko and members of the group were indispensable in researching the artwork.

Daylight for the Win; A Folklorist’s Notebook Celebrating Equinox

An arrival of daffodils in our yard in Southern New Hampshire, March 19. Photo by my wife, who helped uncover them a bit yesterday.

In just hours our daily allotments of light and darkness will balance precariously for a moment and then tumble in the direction of the sun. It is the spring equinox, and it will occur at 5:37 a.m. EDT. If you are awake, you will have sixty seconds to be aware of the actual moment. Or you can choose to enjoy it all day. It is the first day of spring, a day of equal day and night that heralds longer days to come.

I’ve made a more conscious effort to note the solar holidays since I began writing this blog. They are the traditional holidays of the year, celebrated and observed by our ancestors in preindustrial times, when the light of the day governed so much of what they could do. The time of the year also determined the sorts of activities they engaged in as they were more tied to the raising of animals and crops for food. I feel that I benefit by stopping to observe not only the changes of the seasons, but the midpoints that herald their coming. The sun is the great reality that all life shares.

Early Morning Deer

Deer venturing into the fields at dawn. By author on March 16 in Merrimac, Massachusetts.

This particular solar holiday has special interest to me because it is my birthday. I felt excited when I first saw “First Day of Spring” on a calendar page on my birth date. It seemed special, to confer a mythological dimension to my life. I still feel that way. The day is traditionally cold in New England. I spent many birthdays arguing that I should be able to play outside in shirtsleeves. I would slowly grow disavowed of that determination until finally, I came in, chilled to the bone.

This month had an association with traditions that have attached themselves to Christian Easter: fertility symbols of eggs and rabbits. Easter takes its name from a goddess figure and the month named for her: Eostre; Ēosturmōnaþ (Eostre’s Month). Eostre was likely a dawn goddess. Her name rings similar to the Greek goddess of the rosy-fingered dawn: Eos; also of the East, where the sun rises. I have researched Eostre before, but there is never as much to know about Old English divinities and their Germanic cousins as I would like. So let me speculate. All seasons are reflections of relative sunlight, the coming or leaving of the light. It seems fitting to celebrate a goddess of the dawn in this season. Perhaps the particular timing of the equinox this year provides us the opportunity to celebrate the moment of balance and the dawn, an hour or so later.

Nowruz: Persian New Year

An Iranian Haftsin (هفت‌سین‎) table, traditional for the Persian celebration of New Year, Nowruz. Haftsin means "seven S’s" and in Farsi, each of the objects on a Haftsin start with the letter S and symbolize hopes and wishes for a happy new year. (From Share.America.gov).

In Iran and for Persian peoples around the world, tomorrow is New Year, Nowruz. I like the Persian New Year because (unlike the western New Year) it is positioned in a time of significant seasonal change. (Of course, it is also my birthday!) But the western New Year is in the dead of winter. It’s cold and dark on December 31st and it’s cold and dark on January 1st. There is no magical day on Earth when the local weather always agrees to change on a certain date and tomorrow’s weather may or may not make you feel that something special has happened. But the spring is a time of new life, which I see in the daffodils pushing up outside my house and the birds carrying bits of dry grass and twigs to the birdhouses I obstinately mounted on poles in December, screwing the bases with difficulty into the frozen ground. Life has decided it is a new year, however we should observe it.

So Happy Spring to the light-loving peoples of the northern hemisphere and to you if you celebrate tomorrow as a holiday. Happy Eostre Month to the people who undoubtedly celebrate it and Happy Nowruz!