Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Ever see a hawk pick up a snake?

I recently saw this for the first time in my life: a hawk swooped down and picked up a fairly long snake right off the road by my house. Wow! It was really weird and kind of magical to see the hawk fly by with the snake hanging down. Of course I quickly put this event in D&D terms, and realized this could be where the Couatl creature came from! Whoa.

This in turn got me thinking about other mythical things that might have real world inspirations. I could easily see the centaur in the mind of a human who had never seen anyone ride a horse before, for example. Or if you had never before seen a beautiful Greek statue, then the first time you do see one, you might easily believe it was a real person who had been petrified. Mythological misunderstanding might make a great subplot premise for BG III someday.

One thing I have not figured out is the genie in the bottle thing. Where the @#$% (heck) does that come from?

I read somewhere when I was a kid that elephant skulls are where cyclops came from, their nasal cavity being mistaken for an eye-socket.

As for genies, I have no idea, but my mind went immediately to canopic jars in which mummified organs are stored. In 1001 nights I believe bottles are sealed with the sign of David, so there's also a kabbalistic connection

Centaurs from Greek mythology are largely believed to be derived from people of the eastern steppes who were nomadic horsemen. This isn’t because Greeks never had seen a person riding a horse before, but because over time a group of peoples who are exceptionally gifted riders become half-horse in the mythological imagination of the people who retell these stories over several generations.

I have never read 1001 Nights before, so this information is second hand, but as I understand it the djinn (genie) living in an oil lamp was not originally a part of those stories or Arabic folklore, and was added much later.

Makes sense!

Suspect a lot of these creations are due to poor quality/spoiled food in our early past. Lots of sources of .."interesting" and mind altering organics It is indeed facinating how our brain constructs images that can lead to something like a cyclops, vampire, werewolf etc. I recall reading some of the bible (revelations I think) and thought, fack, what where they smoking when they came up with this

Actually, this was more uncommon than you think. Horses during the ancient period were too small and weak to be ridden, at least in the area around greek and the Mediterranean sea general. Thats why everyone used chariots instead of cavalry.


Some classic origins of mythical creatures: The source for unicorns were people describing rhinos (although the horns of Narwhales were also mistaken for unicorn horns. They have such a "unicorn horn" on display in Vienna, next to the Holy Grail).
Mermaids probably come from the description of manatee.
In china there are actually snakes that jump and glide from tree to tree which could have been the source for eastern dragons.

I was a history major in undergrad, so I know more about the subject than you think I do.

While riding horses was rare in Ancient Greece, they still knew it was a thing, and it shows up in their pottery and some early sculptures. It was also an Olympic sport.

As I am one with an ardent appreciation of the classics, allow me to fill in what your memory has forgotten. So, the Mediterranean has some interesting geological features where it meets the ocean which means that its own water level will not necessarily correspond with sea level. As a result, at the end of the ice age it was mostly if not entirely dry, as its own water level rose in response to whatever phenomena was responsible various expressions of life came to inhabit the region. As the region filled it also became impassible and so some rather unlikely, and unfortunate, population centers were left essentially stranded -such as people, who would become the Minoans and other Greeks, as well as elephants. Dwarfism is a pretty straightforward adaption to environmental constraints, one can see it in goldfish readily, whom will remain diminutive if lacking sufficient volume to grow, but also with many other animals. Most recently it was observed in a species of toad which shrank by a third in just a century on two different islands. It happens amongst people as well, which is why those native to the Mediterranean were historically so short. I mean, 5'2'' was the average height of a Roman male, now it is the average height of an Italian female.

In any event, this is what was likely responsible for the description of Cyclops on Odysseus' journey home following the fall of Troy. A lot of contemporary research has offered incredible illumination on the events of both the Illiad and the Odyssey, for instance, we know the day Troy fell now as June 1st 1312 since the Illiad mentions two eclipses which took places and the seasons in which they occurred with sufficient detail to model when those events would have occurred in relation to one another, which only occurs every 5000 years or so if memory serves. We also know that the concept of money had not been invented yet as of that time by account of what constituted the wealth seized from Troy and the terms in which it was described. Academia takes some hard raps, but at least in the classics departments, there is still some very real scholarship going on and we learn a little bit more about those wily Greeks every year.

EDIT: Anyway, here is a picture of a dwarf elephant from Malta, an island in the Mediterranean which should help make the Greek interpretation of the fossils they found make more sense:

This, a fossile, lacking its teeth giving it a more anthropomorphic aesthetic.



And this for scale:

I will skip the silliness about ancient horses since it was corrected previously. . .Nor will I discuss the incredibly limited and naïve medieval misconceptions, because as much as I love them, the scholars of that period were dangerously credulous, woefully inexperienced, and sadly very easily mislead. They did the best they could with what they had, but the fall of Rome left them isolated and with only incomplete sources from which to draw. However, you are absolutely wrong about the Rhino. Pliny the Elder described Rhinos with sufficient accuracy that there is little doubt that he was personally familiar with the animal, Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny's unicorn however is as follows:

"“But the most fell and furious beast of all other, is the Licorne or Monoceros: his bodie resembleth an horse, his head a stagge, his feet an Elephant, his taile a bore; he loweth after an hideous manner; one blacke horn he hath in the mids of his forehead, bearing out two cubits in length: by report, this wild beast cannot possibly be caught alive."

Now Rhinos can be aggressive, but they are hardly furious, and also noone would compare the body of a Rhino with a horse. Also, even the Black Horn Rhino's horn is mottled grey and black -just like its body. Describing the horn as black suggests it was a unique feature. Also, the Romans routinely caught and employed Rhinos in the colosseums. We know, for instance, that in the inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre Rhinos were pitted against both bulls and elephants and men and are depicted in numerous fresco. So yeah, the unicorn was never a Rhino, that was a conflation which would arise later. That's cool though, because noone really knows what the fuck Pliny was talking about either, so don't feel bad. I tend to believe he was describing this though:

Elasmotherium sibericum






Not an actualu specimum. but for scale:










The only problem is that we have no corroborative fossil evidence, our best guess is that it went extinct from 25,000 years before Pliny's account. A small detail

@Distant Stranger: Thank you for featuring this. I have never seen this animal prior to your post. What an absolute wealth of loss So many extinct wonders.

Thank you man, I try.

As addendum, I forgot to mention Pliny the Elder lived during the Roman Republic, meaning the cubit he uses for distance may have been the ancient Roman cubit of 47 inches, as opposed to the latter Roman cubit which was shorter than the Egyptian cubit at 20 inches. So that would make his unicorn sporting a horn at the pants shitting length of eight feet.

Wow, look at that elephant skull! Yeah, if I were a moderately successful landowner in the Dark Ages and I found a skull like that on my property, you can bet I'd be taking it down to the town tavern and telling everybody there how I defeated a horrible cyclops up in the hills. I love a tall tale.

Come to think of it, even better would be to find an old pteradactyl skull, and maybe a piece of wing. "Gather 'round, and I'll tell ye 'bout the dragon in Caermyrddin ..."

This is nifty stuff.
It's also interesting to think how you can link prehistoric and ancient creatures to early religions and mythology, which after Christianity took over, were turned into a pantheon of Demons.

Christianity absorbed a lot of the old traditions. Saturnalia anyone?? As did all of the religions. Its odd though, why do we want to make monsters in the first place? Its like Santa Claus, have you been bad??? Kiss goodbye to your presents Are all monsters just a lesson in morality..

Most parables were designed to teach morality, though ancient peoples probably invented monsters for the same reasons they do now: entertainment, warnings, convent explanations for events outside of their control, genuine fear or belief, etc...

I think it's cute that you people think that monsters weren't real. Adorable.

To the OP: The DnD monsters drew heavily on existing legend, and why not! The DnD Coatl is directly lifted from the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl, also called the Feathered Serpent.

Of course, Quetzalcoatl could have been inspired by a snake-eating bird. Particularly in S America, where 3m Tall avian monsters with hooked bills as long as your arm used to be the apex predators ( The Phorusrhacidae ).

Never turn your back on a chicken...

That didn't begin with Christianity, Judaistic tradition tread that ground far before Christ. Cabbalism is hardly new, and hardly scriptural.



Listen to the Snake Lady, monsters are hardly an invention. A couple years back they found the finger bones of a child in the fossilized remains of giant bird shit, dating back some 120,000 years. It is fairly well established that burial practices were conducted by our ancestors of that era, so its not simply plausible but pretty fucking likely giant winged things would knab errant kids without a second thought if they strayed too far from their parents. In South American they found the skeletal remains of a young girl, 16, dated around 10,000 years ago toward the end of the ice age at the bottom of what is now an underwater cave with very low oxygen levels resulting in immaculate conditions for preservation. Her bones suggested that her musculature was equivalent to that of a professional male athlete of around 30 and that she'd also survived more that one child birth as well as numerous healed breaks and fractures. Also around her remains were those of dozens of other animals who had fallen to the same sort of death, the overwhelming majority of which were predatory species.

That is the the world we clawed our way out of.

I try not to be mean to strangers online, but seriously? Seriously?! Humans have invented countless monsters, spirits, ghosts, and demons. The reality of monstrous prehistoric animals doesn’t disprove that people have invented monsters throughout history.