Читать книгу The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures: The Ultimate A–Z of Fantastic Beings from Myth and Magic - John Matthews - Страница 7

Magical creatures and fabulous animals form part of the order of nature that we can call the supernaturals. The place of their existence is not in the physical world, but in the otherworldly realms that surround and permeate our own world. Because the Otherworld and our own everyday world overlap at different points, where time and place interface with timeless space, these are the points where we encounter its inhabitants. For example, the unicorn does not just live in times past because the stories we tell about it seem fabulous, it has its own timeless existence in the Otherworld. It can cross out of that realm and appear when it chooses and to whom it chooses.

Those who go in pursuit of the supernaturals must be prepared to follow them into other dimensions. It is only time and placebound folk who deny their existence, because they have lost the flexibility and sense of adventure to go in quest of them. These otherworldly dimensions and the coordinates of transfer between realms have become less known and frequented in an age that is becoming sealed into one side of reality. This reserve or scepticism about other realms is not a problem that has arisen just in our time, as Shakespeare shows in Henry IV, where Hotspur rants about Glendower’s arcane beliefs:

’…sometimes he angers me

With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, And of a dragon, and a finless fish, A clip-wing’d griffin, and a moulten raven, A couching lion, and ramping cat, And such a deal of skimble-shamble stuff As puts me from my faith.’

Around us are many such muggles as Hotspur who are content to inhabit mundane reality, just as in the world of Harry Potter, where magicians are distinct from nonmagicians. But we do not have to become magicians in order to explore the world of the supernaturals, though it does help to have a flexible imagination that is prepared to follow dreams, listen to traveller’s tales and explore the ways in which we can encounter these magical creatures for ourselves. If we are prepared to loiter on the borders of the worlds, we will find what we had never imagined as well as some of the things that we did.