Why Won’t Wizards Go Near a Manticore?
IN J. K. ROWLING’S HARRY
POTTER AND THE Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione, trying to find a
legal ruling that will save Buckbeak the hippogriff, comes across a
revealing reference: “This might help, look—a manticore savaged
someone in 1296, and they let the manticore off—oh—no, that was
only because everyone was too scared to go near it.”
That’s not surprising. The manticore may be the
nastiest magical creature. A combination of man and beast, with
sharp teeth and a vicious manner, it supposedly lived throughout
ancient Asia. A frightening description was sketched in the second
century by a Roman historian who drew from reports written as much
as seven hundred years earlier:
There is in India a wild beast, powerful, daring, as big as the largest lion, of a red colour like cinnabar, shaggy like a dog,
“Manticore” comes from the Persian word martikhora, meaning “man-eater.”
Manticore, from a 1607
woodcut.
To the end of its tail is attached the sting of a
scorpion, and this might be over a cubit [eighteen inches] in
length; and the tail has stings at intervals on either side. But
the tip of the tail gives a fatal sting to anyone who encounters
it, and death is immediate.
If one pursues the beast it lets fly its stings,
like arrows, sideways, and it can
shoot a great distance; and when it discharges its stings straight
ahead it bends its tail back; if however it shoots in a backwards
direction, then it stretches its tail to its full extent. Any
creature that the missile hits it kills; the elephant alone it does
not kill. These stings which it shoots are a foot long and the
thickness of a bulrush. One writer asserts (and he says that the
Indians confirm his words) that in the places where those stings
have been let fly others spring up, so that this evil produces a
crop.
According to the same writer the Manticore devours
human beings; indeed it will slaughter a great number; and it lies
in wait not for a single man but would set upon two or even three
men, and alone overcomes even that number.
The Indians hunt the young of these animals while
they are still without stings in their tails, which they then crush
with a stone to prevent them from growing stings. The sound of
their voice is as near as possible that of a trumpet.
A more recent description comes from the famous French poet and novelist of the nineteenth century, Gustave Flaubert. In The
Carol Rose, an expert in magical creatures, says in
the Middle Ages the manticore was thought to be a representative of
the prophet Jeremiah. This connection
derived from the belief that the manticore lived deep in the Earth.
Jeremiah had been imprisoned in a dungeon.
See also: Beasts