Hybrid Creature Research Articles

Of Cats and Crones: Hope and Ecofeminist Utopianism in Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet

Both in her visual and written productions, surrealist artist Leonora Carrington depicts mythological interspecies communities, where hybrid creatures embody the hope of a peaceful and non-exploratory relationship between humans and animals. In her <em>novella The Hearing Trumpet</em> (1974), Carrington employs the literary devices of surrealist aesthetics to envisage the creation of a geriatric and ecofeminist utopia in the wake of environmental catastrophe. This essay draws on Ernst Bloch’s notions of ‘revolutionary interest’ and the ‘Not-Yet-Conscious’, as well as on Timothy Morton’s concept of dark ecology in order to understand the transformative impulse that inspires the older characters at the helm of this narrative to overthrow the patriarchal system that oppresses them within institutional walls and to establish a posthuman, ecological society in a world entering a new Ice Age. It argues that, in projecting a post-apocalyptic vision of a planet devastated by human activity, and by simultaneously addressing questions of social marginalization and intersectionality, <em>The Hearing Trumpet</em> shows an early form of ecological awareness that rethinks human-animal interactions while anticipating concerns with ecological justice.

Credit Funds Regulation in the EU and the Debate on NPLS and AMCS

In the current EU legislative framework for investment funds – UCITS Directive and AIFMD – credit funds have rightly been singled out as something quite unique. In fact, they stand at the crossroads of capital markets’ and credit institutions’ regulations, playing a role of both an investor in a particular asset class, and of a credit facility provider. They may also effectively perform other functions, such as those of securitization vehicles, or comparable to Asset Management Companies (“AMCs”) for the management and processing of non-performing loans. They are, therefore, hybrid creatures, difficult to regulate and, sometimes, to understand. This is due not only to the absence of any specific product regulation in the context of the AIFMD, but also to the uncertainties surrounding the notion of “credit” and “credit granting” in EU law. Within the EU, legislation on credit funds developed, until now, in a haphazard manner. Absent a clear reference scheme, the result is unsatisfactory, and far from being able to integrate EU Markets in this respect. Further, more robust harmonization is therefore needed in this area, now more than ever in the context of the debate on the effects of the pandemic and the management of NPLs. The paper aims to provide sufficient evidence to support these assumptions, also taking into account the lively debate on the role of Asset Management Companies and the development of an efficient secondary market for loans in the EU.

Dead Children, Resilience, and Diversity

Dead Children, Resilience, and Diversity

Amphibious Magical Realism? The Shape of Water as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

Amphibious Magical Realism? <i>The Shape of Water</i> as Cinematic Trauma Narrative

ПЕЩЕРА — СВЯТИЛИЩЕ — МИФ: КРИТЕРИИ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ ВЕРХНЕПАЛЕОЛИТИЧЕСКИХ ДЕКОРИРОВАННЫХ ПЕЩЕР УРАЛА

Caves with the Upper Paleolithic wall paintings are known in the Southern Urals — Kapova (Shulgan-Tash) and Ignatievskaya (Yamazy-Tash). They represent the largest karst cavities in their areas with lots of figurative and non-figurative motifs. In many respects, the Urals’ decorated caves are similar to those in Western Europe: in terms of the structural organization of space, pictorial assemblages and their context. The Western European caves are often referred to as “deep sanctuaries”. Within the framework of this article, the authors address to the works of foreign experts, who have been developing this subject for more than a dozen years, in order to identify the criteria for such an interpretation. Due to the kinship of the Ice Age cave art from the Atlantic to the Urals, the interpretations of Western European art are also applicable to the Ural cave sites. Archaeological, phenomenological and mythological criteria stand out as the most important ones. Archaeological criteria were formulated by C. Renfrew: focusing attention; the border zone between this and other worlds; the presence of a deity; participation and offering. Phenomenological criteria are relied on a person’s sensory experience which is based on the main sense organs — sight, hearing, smell, touch. It is they which provide the caves with indicators of hierophony, constructing, according to M. Eliade, a collective sacred space. Of all the characteristics of myth in relation to the Paleolithic art, M. Groenen considers the presence of composite anthropomorphic creatures, composite animals and surreal, fantastic animals. Comparing unreal and hybrid creatures from the regions of Franco-Cantabria and the Urals shows their close similarity. Together with the considered archaeological criteria and criteria of the sensory experience of an ancient man in relation to the underground cavity, we can assert that the Ural decorated caves of the Upper Paleolithic are sanctuaries of the Ice Age, preserving fragments of the mythology of that distant time.

RAPTORS: ON THE ICONOGRAPHY OF AN ENIGMATIC CAPITAL IN THE NAVE OF BEVERLEY MINSTER

This article deals with the iconography of a unique fourteenth-century capital, situated near the one-time tomb of St John of Beverley in the nave of Beverley Minster, Yorkshire. The capital features two hybrid creatures, part animal, part human. Both creatures hold a severed bird’s claw. This article argues that these severed bird’s claws, resembling drinking vessels, are likely to be griffin claws. This interpretation allows for a reappraisal of the meaning of these figures and their use in the church.

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Credit Funds Regulation in the EU and the Debate on NPLs and AMCs

In the current EU legislative framework for investment funds - UCITS Directive and AIFMD - credit funds have rightly been singled out as something quite unique. In fact, they stand at the crossroads of capital markets’ and credit institutions’ regulations, playing a role of both an investor in a particular asset class, and of a credit facility provider. They may also effectively perform other functions, such as those of securitization vehicles, or comparable to Asset Management Companies (“AMCs”) for the management and processing of non-performing loans. They are, therefore, hybrid creatures, difficult to regulate and, sometimes, to understand. This is due not only to the absence of any specific product regulation in the context of the AIFMD, but also to the uncertainties surrounding the notion of “credit” and “credit granting” in EU law. Within the EU, legislation on credit funds developed, until now, in a haphazard manner. Absent a clear reference scheme, the result is unsatisfactory, and far from being able to integrate EU Markets in this respect. Further, more robust harmonization is therefore needed in this area, now more than ever in the context of the debate on the effects of the pandemic and the management of NPLs. The paper aims to provide sufficient evidence to support these assumptions, also taking into account the lively debate on the role of Asset Management Companies and the development of an efficient secondary market for loans in the EU.

Centaury Andrieja Biełego

Andrei Bely, like most Russian symbolists, absorbed and transposed mythical characters and stories into his work, especially those born in the ancient times. Centaurs derive their origins from Greek mythology and are most often presented as hybrid creatures (half man, half animal). In Bely’s view, they become a symbol of the dual nature of man who struggles with suffering resulting from the simultaneous belonging to two worlds: humans and animals, matter and senses, spirituality and dark urges. In Bely’s works, the image of these mythical animals serves as an element of an artistic game with the recipient (by analogy to the “games of centaurs”), in the course of which it becomes possible to read the artist’s attitude to the myth about these animals, to the surrounding reality, and finally – to oneself. The myth itself reveals its philosophical, psychological and hermeneutical potential. That is why in Bely’s works the presence of centaurs has a multidimensional character, built on the interpenetration of the tame and the alien, tempered and wild, real and cosmic. All this determines the transgressive quality of the myth of centaurs in the work of the Russian symbolist.

Producing fire and hybrids as seen by the Midrash Aggadah: Polemic etiological myths?

The current study analyzes several Midrashic sources that deal with the invention and discovery of fire and of the mule. It examines the narrative of the Midrashim, while comparing it with portrayal of the invention or source of these two elements in Greco-Roman mythology and culture. The rabbis did not openly voice their negative attitude to the mythological narrative concerning the discovery of fire or their reservations about crossbreeding in the Roman world. However, it seems that their homilies were polemical, aimed at presenting an alternative to the non-Jewish story. The Greek mythological narrative was rooted in a polytheistic world in which various mythological entities confronted each other, and fire figured in these confrontations. In contrast, in monotheistic Jewish thought, there is one God who grants fire to humankind with no restrictions or regret. The Jerusalem Talmud conveys the message that hybrids might be dangerous and harmful to humankind. The real-life existence of hybrid creatures that were particularly strong beasts led the ancients to assume that two animals of different species might bear other dangerous “monsters.” It is possible that the view of the Jewish sources is that crossbreeding is not merely a Jewish-religious prohibition but rather an environmental hazard. In fact, the two narratives are etiological stories. The story of Anah aims to explain an unclear verse describing the finding of the yemim and the story about the invention of fire explaining the meaning of the phrase “image of God” that sets aside human beings.

Homo Duplex: the two origins of man in Rousseau’s Second Discourse

ABSTRACT A division in scholarship on Rousseau’s Second Discourse turns on the issue of division itself. Some see Rousseau’s natural man collapsing the division between man and beast through suggesting that our origins might be in orangutans, while others see Rousseau depicting a rupture of the human being from the rest of the animal kingdom through the separation of the physical and the metaphysical. I argue that in looking to the natural scientific culture of Rousseau’s own time, one can see that he is employing a uniquely informed vision of the human being that itself straddles this divide of interpretation through presenting man as both a naturally and mythically hybrid creature. To conclude, I claim that illuminating this hybrid identity of the human being also sheds new light on the kind of narrative Rousseau employs. His ‘hypothetical history’ is itself a hybrid of two distinct origin stories, mirroring the very argument Rousseau is making: that man is always a duplex of the animal and the spiritual. This moves beyond presenting Rousseau as a thinker of irresolvable paradoxes to seeing the Second Discourse as a resolved presentation of what it means to be a natural duplex.

Hybrid Creatures in Context: Centaurs, Hobby-horses and Sexualised Women (Hamlet, King Lear, The Two

Shakespearean centaurs and centaur-like images have received scholarly attention with relation to Ovid as well as to early modern philosophy, regarding the human-animal divide. This paper argues for a nuanced re-reading of relevant textual cruces in Hamlet, King Lear and The Two Noble Kinsmen in the light of a specific fusion of popular and elite cultures in the man-horse hybrid, as represented by the (male/female) centaur and the early modern hobby-horse, emphasizing the stigmatisation (the “monstrosity”) of bestial passion and illicit sexuality, signified by the hybrid creature and its animal part. English emblem books and Edward Topsell’s 1607 volume on “four-footed beasts” present a complex background to the re-visitation of these well-known passages, and illuminate how Shakespeare used elements of both popular and elite cultures to suit his dramaturgical ends and to address different strata of the audience. The paper offers an overview of the complex iconographical and conceptual semantics of centaur-like creatures, as they existed in Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ imagination, suggesting a tentative summary of the cultural memory of the centaur in early modern England.

Picturing Hybrids - Hybrid Creatures in Staged Photography

Hybrid creatures are among the favourite topics in (amateur) model photography, the most popular are humans with antlers or horns, with a fishtail, and with wings. After looking at typical associations with these creatures, the focus is on embodiment: modelling takes place in a “hybrid” situation that feels like gaining and losing control, that mixes personal expression and acting. By staging themselves as hybrid creatures, models often express a feeling of otherness, make a statement about social inequality, deal with their sexual identity, and can even find redemption through overcoming the body. Keywords: Photography, Staging, Embodiment, Corporeality, Identity, Hybridity, Gender DOI: 10.7176/JPCR/49-04 Publication date: June 30th 2020

Adaptation to Hypoxia: A Chimera?

"The Chimera was, according to Greek mythology, a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of more than one animal [...].

From Animal Anthropomorphism to Human Animality in Ulysses: Joyce After Cervantes

Joyce’s treatment of animals in Ulysses goes from anthropomorphism to human animality and debasement. The characters’ earlier encounters with animals are characterized by the projection of human thoughts and feelings onto them or the attribution of human qualities, which culminate in the actual/visionary metamorphosis of a beagle into the body of the deceased Paddy Dignam in “Circe.” Moreover, it is precisely in the Nighttown episode that we witness the degrading animalization of Lipoti and Rudolph Virag, while Bloom, whose body features various animal appendages that often turn him into a hybrid creature, undergoes several beastlike transformations. The presence of talking or anthropomorphic animals, mainly linked to an oneiric dimension, looks back to a medieval and humanistic tradition exploring the paradigm of separation of species. This essay suggests that the blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman animals in Ulysses may have been inspired by Miguel de Cervantes, whose novella The Dialogue of the Dogs is listed as part (actually in an Italian translation titled Il dialogo dei cani) of Joyce’s Trieste library. In this tale, beasts are attributed distinctive human qualities, speech first and foremost, thus subverting traditional hierarchies. Exactly as in Ulysses, moreover, animals are “elevated” to the level of humans in the same way as humans are “degraded” to the level of animals. In other words, different orders of bodies may fuse together in the absence of any ontological standard by which to enforce their hierarchical separation.

The Animalistic Nebuchadnezzar and the Heroic Encounter: Daniel 4:30 Iconographically Revisited

This article reassesses the significance of the description of Nebuchadnezzar in animalistic terms in Dan 4:30 by turning to the common Achaemenid-era visual image of the Heroic Encounter. This visual motif was widespread throughout the empire and depicts a heroic figure controlling or engaging in combat with a variety of animals, including hybrid creatures. In light of this visual motif from the immediate sociohistorical context, Daniel’s image of an animalistic Nebuchadnezzar appears at once rooted in and resistant to aspects of Achaemenid imperial ideology as it suggests that the true hero who controls all is YHWH rather than any Persian king or deity.

Kafka’s animals between mimicry and assimilation

Abstract In Kafka’s literary world, several animals emerge; they belong to an odd and enigmatic fauna, on the edge between violence and artistry but also between stillness and music; according to the writer, scripture represents both the fault and the punishment waiting for the solitary artist. Animals, especially depicted as hordes of small mice or other rodents, also hint to the heterogeneous structure of the Self, who doesn’t manage to keep under control all the divisions in his ambiguous dentity. Through opposition between the point of view of the subject, who considers his own isolation as indispensable to carry on writing, and the multitude of escaping small animals, Kafka also expresses and experiences his own impossibility of “description” (Beschreibung). In the meantime, Kafka’s animals embody the creatural and unconscious sources of imagination the writer draws from that constantly escape his own control and willingness, pushing forwards into an unknown and inhospitable region, towards the wasteland, the eternal winter that can be identified with scripture. In writing, a deep metamorphosis of the Self takes place. Kafka shares this belief with one of the writers he most admired and considered his master, Gustave Flaubert, who firmly thought that, while writing, one loses his previous identity, becoming someone else, even assuming the appearence of the “otherness”. We can state that Kafka’s imagery of animals takes to the extreme the paradox and ambiguity the idea of writing relies on, also reproducing, especially, in his hybrid creatures, the feeling of uncertainty and lack of safety of the assimilated Jewish artist.

Waterlings Among Us: Poetry, Intractability, and the Possibilities of Democratic Politics

When the Slovenian poet Veno Taufer endeavors in his ekphrastic book of poetry Vodenjaki (1986; Waterlings, 2000) to explore the work of Neolithic sculptors along the Danube River in Lepenski Vir, he excavates and animates for his readership the crucial figure of the Waterling. Carved artfully from stone some 9,000 years ago, these statues, termed “Waterlings” by Taufer, represent hybrid humanoid figures. This hybridity is fundamentally important to the statues because it imbues them with their aesthetic vitality. That is, their affective energy as made material objects derives from the tension between the distinct figurative forms combining to comprise each statue. More deeply, that carefully crafted hybridity also signals the makers’ understanding of the importance of art to mind. These physical renderings of hybridity inspire metaphysical reflection on it. They compel the audience to consider the limits of form(s) and the power of artifice, with each statue encouraging its viewer to reckon how she, too, is a hybrid creature in and of a hybrid world. In other words, the Waterling becomes a metonym for a phenomenology, which this article explores.

Thinking and Writing “Donkey” in Ancient Egypt

Abstract This article explores the role of donkeys in ancient Egypt through a lexicographical lens. It presents the terminology used for the animal in religious texts focusing on three case studies. Firstly, the most common word used for donkey aA, which appears in economic, literary and religious texts, will be examined. The second section will look into the entity hiw opening to a world of fantastic beings and hybrid creatures. And finally we will see that the number of signs associated to donkeys multiplied in the Ptolemaic period and are generally connected with the god Seth. With these three short investigations, different facets of the donkey are explored, revealing an animal that can be both an evil being and a threatening tool.

Reading Primo Levi on “hybridity” in the context of South Africa: Moving towards humanizing descriptions of the other

Primo Levi discovered his otherness – his Jewish identity – by experiencing discrimination: through the anti-Semitic laws enforced by the Fascist regime in the 1930’s and the year of imprisonment in Auschwitz. After his return to Italy, the notion of the “hybrid” helped Levi describe his own non-fixated identity and was presented by him as a protection against the fear of the stranger and the return of the concentration camps as its threatening result. In this article I explore Levi’s literary writings on hybridity and relate them to South African theologian Nico Koopman, who proposes a pedagogy of hybridity to support pluralistic societies in moving from alienation and oppression to human dignity and freedom. I propose that a dialogue between the post-Holocaust and post-apartheid context on hybridity can enrich our self-understanding as hybrid creatures and enable just relationships with others.