prester john

(marvel comics depiction of Prester John)

A footnote on researching monsters for some new text for Josephine... the letter of Prester John, c.1165:

Our land is the home of elephants, dromedaries, camels, crocodiles, meta-collinarum, cametennus, tensevetes, wild asses, white and red lions, white bears, white merules, crickets, griffins, tigers, lamias, hyenas, wild horses, wild oxen, and wild men -- men with horns, one-eyed men, men with eyes before and behind, centaurs, fauns, satyrs, pygmies, forty-ell high giants, cyclopses, and similar women. It is the home, too, of the phoenix and of nearly all living animals.
[...]
Our land streams with honey and is overflowing with milk. In one region grows no poisonous herd, nor does a querulous frog ever quack in it; no scorpion exists, nor does the serpent glide amongst the grass, not can any poisonous animals exist in it or injure anyone...

A hoaxed letter describing a Christian kingdom in the East. It was, as Umberto Eco points out in Serendipities, used as justification for Western expansion for several generations. Created a kind of quest narrative for Christian invasion. The land is suitably mythical sounding; really, a beautiful example of the power of list-making. There is something of the Medieval bestiary tradition (itself modelled on a classical tradition) to that list. See how the collective imagination, even when its eye is political, looks encyclopaedic. Plutarch:

...the Divinity does not hate variety and changes, but takes great pleasure in them, as one may conjecture by the circuits, conversions, and mutations observable in the heavens...