Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time. The gleam of my scarlet hair mingles with the reflection of the great sands. I breathe through my nostrils. The terror of solitudes. I spit forth plague. I devour armies when they venture into the desert.
My claws are twisted like screws, my teeth shaped like saws, and my curving tail bristles with darts, which I cast to right and left, before and behind. See see These are the words of the Manticore, as related in Gustave Flaubert's eighteen seventy four dramatic poem The Temptation of Saint Anthony. The monster itself, however, is no mere French literary creation. It emerges from the pages and dreamscapes of antiquity and beyond.
By virtue of its depictions and mythic riddles. The sphinx tends to enjoy far greater fame among fantastic lion human hybrids, but the manticore is even more fabulous in form. While it does possess the body of a lion and the head of a man, it also boasts a tale of fans spikes that may be launched at its adversaries like
venomous missiles. The monster's face makes it even more chimerical, not perfectly human, but colored a deep red and possessing a cavernous maw full of interlocking teeth that Pliny the Elder compared to those of a comb. The Roman plain was fighting the work of earlier Greek physician Cetasius, who would have lived in Anatolia now part of Turkey during
the fifth century b CE. He also states that the creature's cry is like that of a flute and a trumpet combined, and that above all else, it craves the taste of human flesh. While the Manticor's popularity in Western traditions and in the Christian Church would span centuries, the creature's origins seemed to date back to ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps as a distortion of the Persian mard cora, meaning man slayer.
Noted scholar Dorothea McEwen also pointed to some of the similarities between the manticore and the Ethiopian Sebitat, a human headed lion with serpents for tales. It lacks only the teeth in its resemblance to the manticor, and to be sure, plenty points to Ethiopian origins for the Manticor as well. However, many sources speak of the manticore as a creature of ultimate Persian origins, but the manticore itself seems rather unconcerned
with such distinctions. All human beings are equal in its eyes, creatures worthy of mockery, hunting, and ravenous consumption. Thanks to my son Sebastian for suggesting this episode as he was reading through the Dungeons and Dragons fifth Edition Monster Manual with me and had some questions about this fabulous creature. Tune into additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your
Mind is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.