Rationalizations for the combinations of features include a snake trying to eat a loudly protesting rooster, and a snake that was sloughing its skin, with pieces of dead skin giving the impression of a crest and wattles around the head. The snake and rooster are strongly involved in voodoo belief, which give a cultural background to the creature. The resemblance to the basilisk is also notable.
book of Creature
The Questing Beast is a creature of many names, sizes, and appearances. Several features, however, are consistent throughout its appearances in Arthurian legend. First, it very noisy, its offspring within its belly baying and yelping constantly. It is also always a portentous creature, but what it symbolizes has varied from author to author. Finally, it is commonly pursued or hunted, whether by knights or by its own offspring within its belly, and often ends up giving birth in the process.
The oldest iterations of the Questing Beast have it encountered by Perceval over the course of his search for the Grail. In the Perlesvaus, Perceval finds a beautiful glade, with a red cross at the center of it. A knight dressed in white is seated at the far end of the glade, with a fair young damsel next to him. Soon a snow-white, emerald-eyed creature, between a fox and a hare in size, enters the glade. The whelps in its womb are barking like hounds, and it is terrified and agitated because of that. Perceval tries to take the small Beast onto his horse, but he is cautioned by the knight, who tells him the Beast has a destiny to fulfill. The Beast runs to the cross, where its twelve young are brought forth. They immediately tear their mother to pieces, but can only devour her head. Upon doing so, they go mad and scatter into the forest. King Pelles later explains the significance of the creature to Perceval: it represents Jesus Christ, and the twelve hounds that killed it and scattered are the twelve tribes of Israel, following the prevalent Christian belief of the time.
No longer a creature of purity torn apart by its own offspring, the Questing Beast is now an evil, wretched being spawned from violence. Its mother was the daughter of King Ypomenes, who lusted for her brother. When she could not have him, she instead turned to a devil, who slept with her and convinced her to accuse her brother of attempting to rape her. He was duly sentenced to be torn apart by dogs. As he died, the brother proclaimed that his sister would give birth to a monster, one from whose belly the barking of dogs would forever remind others of his shameful death. As predicted, the daughter gave birth to the Questing Beast, and she was executed for her crimes.
Our imagination has always been our greatest ally, and our worst enemy. In the face of the unknown, we populated it with creatures of all shapes and sizes, from minuscule spirits to gigantic cosmic monsters. These entities have shared our world ever since we earned the capacity to wonder.
As far as Shaun Tan is concerned, the idea of needing to belong to something can be overrated. Tan is an artist and writer whose work has earned a cult following. He's best known for his graphic novel "The Arrival" and the Academy Award-winning short film "The Lost Thing." NPR's Elizabeth Blair spoke with Tan about his new book, "Creature," a collection of his art that spans nearly 25 years.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: Shaun Tan's creatures are made of a little bit of everything, stuff from nature and your kitchen - a toaster with horns, a birdlike beast with one eye, a mechanical-looking bug towing a giant strawberry. Some of them are fierce, but a lot of them are playful and cuddly.
SHAUN TAN: I've always been interested in the strange creature as a companion, not as an adversary or antagonist or a threat or something even scary and mysterious but as the person sitting next to you.
BLAIR: In Shaun Tan's graphic novel "The Lost Thing," a boy walks on a beach, collecting bottle caps. He sees a huge, red creature like a metal pot with crab claws. Nobody else seems to even notice it. But the boy is curious.
BLAIR: Tan doesn't think his creatures are meaningless anymore, just the opposite. He says he's figured out something serious to say with them. Eventually, the boy in "The Lost Thing" understands that the creature might not belong anywhere, and that's OK.
//
George Edward Griffin (born November 7, 1931) is an American author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist. Griffin's writings promote a number of right-wing views and conspiracy theories regarding political, defense and health care. In his book World Without Cancer, he argued in favor of a pseudo-scientific theory that asserted cancer to be a nutritional deficiency curable by consuming amygdalin.[1][2] He is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island (1994),[1] which advances debunked conspiracy theories[3] about the Federal Reserve System. He is an HIV/AIDS denialist, supports the 9/11 Truth movement, and supports the specific John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory that Oswald was not the assassin.[1] He also believes that the Biblical Noah's Ark is located at the Durupınar site in Turkey.[4]
Griffin wrote and produced a number of documentary-style videos covering controversial topics similar in theme to his books. His films covered a wide range of topics including communism, espionage, the historical authenticity of Noah's Ark, the Federal Reserve System, the Supreme Court of the United States, terrorism, subversion, foreign policy, electronic voting fraud, cancer, and the chemtrail conspiracy theory.
Many of Griffin's books and films were published by other organizations such as Robert Welch's American Opinion in Belmont, Massachusetts, and Western Islands in Boston. Griffin also produced printed works and films with Major General John K. Singlaub, publisher and national security journalist John H. Rees, and U.S. Congressman Larry McDonald at the Western Goals Foundation, a private domestic intelligence agency active in the United States beginning in 1979.[8]
Griffin presented his views on the U.S. money system and opposition to the Federal Reserve system in his 1993 movie and 1994 book, The Creature from Jekyll Island.[5][a] In it, he presents his argument that the central banking system of the United States constitutes a banking cartel and an instrument of war and totalitarianism.[9][11] The book was a business-topic bestseller,[12][13] and influenced Ron Paul when he wrote a chapter on money and the Federal Reserve in his New York Times bestseller, The Revolution: A Manifesto.[14]
Edward Flaherty, an academic economist writing for Political Research Associates, characterized Griffin's description of the secret meeting on Jekyll Island as "amateurish" and "highly suspect".[15] Jesse Walker, the books editor for Reason magazine, says the book has grains of truth but "reduce[s] things too much to a certain narrative, where the mustache-twirlers are behind everything."[9] Peter Conti-Brown of The Wharton School and The Brookings Institution identifies the book as "the leading popular account of the conspiracists", noting that "while [they] hit their target in noting the existence and significance of the Jekyll Island meeting, [...] the 'creature' established [...] bore little relationship, from a governance standpoint, to the Federal Reserve System." In his words, the book should be referenced "for entertainment but not information".[16] In a movie review for The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote that the book "has been debunked".[17]
In 1964, Griffin wrote his first book, The Fearful Master, on the United Nations, a topic that recurs throughout his writings. While he describes his work as the output of "a plain vanilla researcher," Griffin also agrees with the Los Angeles Daily News's characterization of him as "Crusader Rabbit".[18]
In 1973, Griffin wrote and self-published the book World Without Cancer and released it as a video;[27][28] its second edition appeared in 1997. In the book and the video, Griffin asserts that cancer is a metabolic disease like a vitamin deficiency facilitated by the insufficient dietary consumption of amygdalin. He contends that "eliminating cancer through a nondrug therapy has not been accepted because of the hidden economic and power agendas of those who dominate the medical establishment"[29] and he wrote, "at the very top of the world's economic and political pyramid of power there is a grouping of financial, political, and industrial interests that, by the very nature of their goals, are the natural enemies of the nutritional approaches to health."[30]
Since the 1970s, the use of laetrile (a semi-synthetic version of amygdalin) to treat cancer has been identified in the scientific literature as a canonical example of quackery and has never been shown to be effective in the treatment or prevention of cancer.[31][32][33] Emanuel Landau, then a Project Director for the APHA, wrote a book review for the American Journal of Public Health, which noted that Griffin "accepts the 'conspiracy' theory ... that policy-makers in the medical, pharmaceutical, research and fund-raising organizations deliberately or unconsciously strive not to prevent or cure cancer in order to perpetuate their functions". Landau concludes that although World Without Cancer "is an emotional plea for the unrestricted use of the Laetrile as an anti-tumor agent, the scientific evidence to justify such a policy does not appear within it."[34]
In 1992, Griffin wrote and narrated The Discovery of Noah's Ark, based on David Fasold's 1988 book, The Ark of Noah.[4] Griffin's film said that the original Noah's Ark continued to exist in fossil form at the Durupınar site, about 17 miles (27 km) from Mount Ararat in Turkey, based on photographic, radar, and metal detector evidence. Griffin also said that towns in the area had names that resembled terms from the Biblical story of the Great Flood. He endorsed the historicity of the Biblical account of the flood, and speculated that the flood was the byproduct of massive tides caused by a gravitational interaction between Earth and a large celestial body coming close to it.[18] 2ff7e9595c
Comments