In the Classic of Mountains and Seas, there is a passage that says: "The heavens of punishment and the emperor came to fight for the gods, the emperor cut off his head, and buried the mountain of the sheep, but with the milk as the eye, the navel as the mouth, and the dry qi to dance." ”
In another book, Whimsical Naturalism, there is a similar account: "The Bremiers had no head, and their mouths and eyes were born on the chest. Interestingly, in this popular science book, there are strange legends:
Ethiopia has a monster with human faces, human ears and blue eyes. The body is like a lion, red like blood. The tail resembles a scorpion and can stab at enemies. Its call is like a ensemble of reed flutes and trumpets.
There is a poisonous animal in the sea of India called the sea hare. Pregnant women see female sea hares, just look at it, will immediately nausea, eventually lead to miscarriage.
In the easternmost part of India, along the source of the Ganges, there lives a race called Astomi, who has no mouth and lives by inhaling air and aromas from their nostrils...
The more I turned back, the more I wondered: Why are the myths and legends of the whole world so similar? Why is this knowledge in the book so strange? Who is Pliny mentioned throughout the book?
Although it risks a question mark, this is by no means a nerve-burning book, on the contrary, it is more like a wonderful talk show, and in the process of reading, it can also achieve the effect of making people laugh from time to time.
Whimsical Naturalist
This fantastic popular science book was written by "Dark Aesthetic Master" Shibusawa Ryuhiko, a famous modern Japanese writer and critic. He introduced French "Thaadism" to Japan, which had a profound impact on Yukio Mishima, Shuji Terayama, and others.
Shibusawa Ryuhiko has been committed to introducing the cultural and ideological undercurrents in Western society to the Japanese academic community, he has gone deep into the fields of religion, folklore, literature, art and other fields, created with his own unique artistic style, written a large number of fantasy literature works full of dark colors, and became an outstanding pioneer of fantasy literature in Japan.
The original intention of Shibusawa Ryuhiko to write this book was also to pay tribute to the "Natural history" written by the ancient Roman scholar Pliny the Elder.
Starting from the "Natural history", which is known as the "classic of the classics", "Fantastic Naturalist" selects twenty-two themes such as labyrinth and sundial, ethiopian monsters, sex and diaphragm, sea hares and animals in the sea, and miracles of the world, with its unique side-quest and funny spit, not only presents Pliny and his philosophy of life graphically, but also brings us into a different world where truth and false are difficult to distinguish and strange.
"Poetic Imagination"
Born in 23 A.D., Pliny's encyclopedia of everything in the world collects many myths and folklore, including facts and extremely absurd content, as Shibusawa Ryuhiko said in the book, the science of that era was actually more like witchcraft. And this kind of daily life and rumors from ancient times, in the high-tech era, still exudes a magnificent brilliance.
Pliny has an interesting passage in the book, documenting the "unknown cause of death" of various characters, "like a long and bizarre absurd poem".
"Quintus Emilius Rebida was about to go out when his thumb hit the threshold of the room and died. Gaius Avidius was about to go out to the Senate when he slipped and died in the ceremonial square. The Ambassador of Rhode Island, who defended Rhode Island in the Senate, won a lot of applause, but he died suddenly when he wanted to put the threshold of the transnational chamber... Olus Pompeii died after paying homage to the gods on Mount Capitolio... When Judge Pasbius died, he was sentencing a suspended sentence..."
In addition, there is another chapter that is very exciting. The whole chapter is full of strange deformed people from ancient times: people without voices, people who curse the sun, people who worship the souls of hell, people with two pupils who can erupt anger in their eyes, people with one leg independent... These deformed people from North Africa and India were filled with the imagination of the unknown in that era.
From Pliny, Shibusawa not only got a blueprint for a new world, but also stepped into the path of ancient Roman society. The view of nature and the world view displayed in the "Naturalist" are often not unique to Pliny, but are common to the natural philosophers of the entire ancient Greek and Roman society. They believe, "Chance is God, the great Creator of our lives." By chance, we must understand nature, which is the mother of all things and our educator. ”
An interesting conversation two thousand years apart
Pliny wrote in the Naturalist: "Magnets... Is there a more incredible stone than it? Is there anything more unreasonable in all the realms of nature? Nearly two thousand years apart, Ryūhiko Shibusawa responds in the book: "We who live in the twentieth century are not necessarily mystics who believe in mysterious phenomena, but we are very fond of mysterious things in any case." ”
Because of the lack of natural knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Pliny was very exaggerated when describing the ocean, volcanoes, herbs, ostriches, elephants and other things, which Shibusawa Ryuhiko called "poetic imagination". It was all like a beautiful misunderstanding, more like the meeting of two soul confidants two thousand years apart.
In the chapter on "Sex and the Diaphragm," Pliny argues that the diaphragm has the ability to respond sharply and is the center for managing cheerful, pleasurable emotions, so that "people who are injured on the battlefield or in the arena of gladiators will die laughing."
Ryūhiko Shibusawa commented solemnly: "Pliny succinctly describes the characteristics of the diaphragm, and ends with the unbelievable anecdote of laughing at the dead, and even with the strokes of a superb short story writer." At the end, he added: "The articles he wrote are already literature." And this simple sentence is full of his appreciation for Pliny.
In addition, Pliny recorded that there was a rooster in rimini who could speak human language. Pliny concludes his account by saying " This is the only case I know of " . Shibusawa gave only a five-word comment—"I guess so." "It's more like an interesting conversation through millennia.
Some say that Pliny was a "useless" writer who loved to collect strange examples, and that his day-and-night efforts produced only one "useless" work. But Ryūhiko Shibusawa did not think so, and also had a fondness for the "absurd", and he wrote the book after repeatedly reading the "Natural history".
Pliny's death is also an absurd ending: he died of an accidental eruption of Mount Vesuvius. In this regard, Shibusawa Ryuhiko wrote in the afterword of the book: "The death of Pliny, who is full of love for nature, is a kind of life ending that I like very much, and if I can, I would also like to die like this." ”
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Interactive Q&A
What was the first mythical story you ever heard about?