We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distinct places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster, not an ephemeral or accidental one.
Jorge Luis Borges, introduction to The Book of Imaginary Beings (translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni)
I.
In The Bear: History of a Fallen King, Michel Pastoureau traces the relationship between bears and humans back to an 80,000 year-old neanderthal grave, the last resting place of two individuals, one of each species. The bear has since played many roles in the imagination of Homo sapiens: mythic, totemic or even religious symbol painted on cave walls; sacred animal of the Greek goddess Artemis and of her Celtic counterparts, Artio and Andarta; symbol of might in late pagan and early Christian Europe; legendary ancestor of royal families; companion of hermit saints; the devil himself in animal form. The names Artemis, Arthur, Ursula, Orson, Arctic and Antarctic all derive from related Greek, Latin or even proto-Indo-European words for “bear,” words that survive today in the French ours, the Spanish oso, and the modern Greek arkouda.
Dethroned by the lion as king of beasts in medieval Europe, the bear lost much of its natural and cultural habitat over the next millennium, becoming a mere zoo animal, circus attraction, stuffed museum specimen or hunting trophy by the start of the 20th century. In 1902, however, President Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a captured cub on a hunting trip, a much-publicized media event that gave the bear new popularity. Stuffed “Teddy’s bears” — later teddy bears — became first a fad, then an essential children’s toy, then a children’s hero in the form of Winnie the Pooh, Rupert and Paddington. For Pastoureau, the teddy bear represents a return to the prehistoric connection between humans and bears, to the bear’s former role as a totemic, anthropomorphic, mythic figure. “We find its oldest traces in Paleolithic caves,” he writes, “and its most recent manifestations in children’s beds.”
I argue that Pokémon, the unstoppable toy and game fad of my own childhood, represents the same return to the mythic via children’s media, on a larger scale. There are now 898 Pokémon as of the series’ 25th anniversary this year. These creatures have appeared in more than 100 video games on various consoles, games that, translated into nine languages, have generated approximately $380 million in global sales. The Pokémon anime, translated into dozens of languages, has lasted for more than 1,000 episodes since its first broadcast in 1997. 24 Pokémon feature films have made more than $1.1 billion at the global box office. Pokémon Go has been downloaded more than 1 billion times, with more than $4.2 billion in global revenue. Pokémon have appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, on the sides of All Nippon Airways passenger jets, and on the packaging of any product conceivably marketed towards children. In 1999, only four years into global Pokémania, Nintendo of America executive Peter Main called Pokémon “so far beyond anybody’s original projections that there has to be more to it than a quirky niche concept.”
What is that something more? I attribute at least part of this success to Pokémon offering something very old instead of anything new, to Pokémon offering something universal instead of anything particularly Japanese. Simply put, Pokémon speaks to the age-old human desire for a world populated by mythical creatures. (Even the United States, founded during the industrial revolution upon Enlightenment principles, has its lake monsters, its Sasquatch, its Chupacabra, its Jersey Devil.) Thus, this project focuses on the creatures themselves, on how they evoke and reflect the strange creatures of eastern and western myth.
If a teddy bear represents the return of one ancient, archetypal beast, then Pokémon is an entire bestiary. I cannot possibly cover the plethora of Pokémon over the past quarter-century, which is overwhelming. Instead, considering both my own nostalgia and the 25th anniversary of the original games, I will limit myself to the original 151 creatures that so captivated my generation; I will cover only the most interesting creatures within this subset, as not even the anime writers themselves had much to say about Paras or Venonat.
II.
Pokémon Red and Blue begin with Professor Oak, who is now too old for any further adventures of his own, presenting his grandson and his neighbor, the player character, with his latest invention: a handheld electronic encyclopedia called a Pokédex. He sends the boys out on a quest to complete the Pokédex by encountering and gathering data on every species of Pokémon in the world.
While Oak frames this project as a scientific endeavor, “a great undertaking in Pokémon history,” the Pokedex entries themselves read more like legends or embellished travelers’ tales than natural histories. Fearow’s “huge and magnificent wings,” for example, let it “keep aloft without ever having to land for rest,” while Ponyta has hooves “ten times harder than diamonds” and is “capable of jumping over the Eiffel Tower in a single giant leap.” Many entries seem to reflect in-universe folklore and earlier accounts of doubtful veracity: Victreebell is “said to live in huge colonies deep in jungles, although no one has ever returned from there;” Haunter is “said to be from another dimension;” Chansey is “said to bring happiness to those who catch it;” Articuno is “said to appear to doomed people who are lost in icy mountains;” Arcanine is “a legendary Pokémon in China.”
A 12th century English bestiary — translated from the original Latin by T.H. White of The Sword in the Stone fame — informs us that the antelope “is an animal of incomparable celerity, so much so that no hunter can ever get near it” and that Indian bulls “can repel every weapon by the thickness of their hides.” Dragons “are bred in Ethiopia and India, in places where there is perpetual heat.” A hungry dragon, “lying in wait near the paths where elephants usually saunter, lassoes their legs in a knot with its tale and destroys them by suffocation.” Ostriches refuse to lay their eggs until the Pleiades are visible in the night sky. As in the Pokédex or a deck of Pokémon cards, each bestiary entry contains an illustration of the creature in question alongside a brief, extravagantly imaginative description.
The medieval European bestiary or book of beasts has its roots in late Classical descriptions of animals that monks compiled, embellished and reinterpreted into richly illustrated hand-copied books; key bestiary sources include Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, the 2nd century Physiologus and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. In that distant, pre-pandemic year of 2019, I saw a truly spectacular collection of bestiaries and related objects at the Getty Center’s exhibition Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World, an experience that played a large part in inspiring this series of blog posts. Bestiaries, curator Elizabeth Morrison writes in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue,
were one of the most popular illuminated book types in Northern Europe from around 1180 to 1300. They portrayed not only imaginary creatures, such as the unicorn, the siren, and the griffin, but also exotic beasts, such as the tiger, the elephant, and the ape, as well as animals common in Europe, including the horse, the dog, and the beaver. However, the distinctions based on scientific criteria that we make today were irrelevant in the Middle Ages. Questioning an animal’s status as “real” or “imaginary” was not part of the thought process of medieval bestiary readers.
The 13th century English Westminster Bestiary, for instance, contains illustrations of more than 150 creatures, from everyday animals, such as the ox and the mule, to mythical creatures that remain familiar today — the dragon, the unicorn, the manticore, the phoenix — as well as now-mostly forgotten mythical creatures such as the hydrus, the bonnacon and the two-headed amphisbaena.
In Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster analyzes Japanese mythical creatures, or yokai, using two concepts more broadly applicable to bestiaries and similar works from across the world. The book’s title refers to its central metaphor, yokai and related media as existing on a spectrum with pandemonium (Latin for “all demons”) at one extreme; in pandemonium, the natural world is haunted by powerful, sometimes malevolent creatures. Pokémon sits at the other end of the spectrum, where mythical creatures serve as entertainment in a “light-hearted, well-ordered parade.”
The medieval bestiary, on the other hand, lies closer to pandemonium. In the appendix to his bestiary translation, T.H. White compares medieval England to the wild west: an untamed land with everyday life much closer to nature and its dangers. Thus the bestiary is a world of predator and prey, of monsters that threaten animals and humans alike. On a supernatural level, the bear is certainly not the only demonic creature in the medieval animal kingdom. The fox playing dead to lure his prey, for example, represents the devil’s guile. The partridge’s theft of other birds’ eggs, the wild donkey’s braying day and night, the wolf’s glowing, wandering eye all symbolize aspects of the prowling devil. Whales lure sailors to their deaths by lifting their backs above the water so that sailors mistake them for islands and set up camp; when they feel the sailors’ campfires, the whales dive to the bottom of the ocean. “Thus,” in the words of Willene Clark’s translation, “do those suffer whose souls are non-believing and who are unaware of the Devil’s cunning.”
Bestiaries also abound with creatures — both real and imaginary — that symbolize Jesus Christ. Lionesses, for instance, are said to give birth to cubs who lay dead for three days before their father breaths life into them, a reflection of Christ’s resurrection. Mother pelicans pierce their breasts in order to pour life-giving blood onto their children, an echo of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. The unicorn, which eludes all hunters, can only be caught by a virgin girl, just as Jesus Christ evaded sin and the devil but descended from heaven to be born of the Virgin Mary. The bestiary’s essential goal, Xenia Muratova writes in an essay for the Getty exhibition catalogue, is “to glorify the Creator’s work by presenting a repertory of his wonderful creatures.” Both real and mythical bestiary animals have something numinous about them, something much more pandemonic, or, perhaps, panangelic than paradelike: the bestiary draws no clear line between the natural and the supernatural.
The bestiary’s primary ‘use,’ if we must take an instrumental approach to such an extravagantly imaginative genre, was as a repository of animal allegories for sermons. The priest could point to the Christ metaphors throughout nature, for example, or to the aged eagle, which — in an echo of the phoenix myth — flies up to the sun, burns its wings in the sun’s rays, and revives itself by bathing three times in a fountain. The message, as Willene Clark translates, is to “seek the spiritual foundation of the Lord. And lift the eyes of your mind to God, who is the wellspring of justice, and then will your youth be renewed like that of the eagle.” The bestiary provides a readymade moral for the priest to use and such sermons were likely how the majority of people experienced bestiary stories in a mostly illiterate, pre-Gutenberg Europe.
Bestiaries escaped the confines of the church and of the book itself to leave a permanent cultural impression. The 13th century French Bestiary of Love (Bestiarire d’amour), for instance, uses animals not as Christian symbols but as metaphors for courtly love and lust. Beast fables such as the tales of Reynard the Fox and Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest Tale” in The Canterbury Tales draw on bestiary descriptions of animal behavior, as does animal symbolism in heraldry. Dragons, unicorns and other mythical creatures appeared on coats of arms, in church architecture, on tapestries, on caskets, as candlesticks and water vessels. They populate the verse of Shakespeare and Milton.
We even unknowingly reference the bestiaries in our modern, everyday English. The phrase “to lick someone into shape,” for instance, originates with bestiary descriptions of mother bears giving birth to formless lumps and then licking them into the shapes of cubs. “Swan song” comes from the common folk belief — recorded in bestiaries — that swans sing most sweetly just before their deaths. “Crocodile tears” originates in the doubtlessly insincere tears crocodiles were said to shed over their recently consumed human prey.
III.
Getty’s Book of Beasts exhibition featured not only medieval European bestiaries and artworks but also illustrations from Hebrew language texts and from places as far afield as modern-day Iran and India. Elizabeth Morrison’s introduction mentions medieval bestiaries in no fewer than fourteen languages: Arabic, Armenian, Catalan, Coptic, English, Ethiopian, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Latin (by far the most common) and Syrian. The medieval European bestiary has counterparts throughout the world and throughout time. I began this introduction, for instance, with a quote from Borges’ modern bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, which includes creatures such as H.G. Wells’ Morlocks and Eloi and Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat in addition to beasts of traditional folklore. Book of Beasts also featured modern bestiaries and bestiary-inspired works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Apollinaire and Alexander Calder.
One temporally closer cousin is the 13th century Ibn Bukhtishu bestiary, which was written in Gundeshapur, a major center of medicine and education in what is now Iran. This book — a combination proto-natural history and treatise on the medical uses of animal parts — shares many similarities with European bestiaries, including borrowings from classical authors such as Aristotle, the use of animals to represent human virtues and vices, and the inclusion of both real and imaginary animals. (Mythical creatures include the unicorn, the phoenix, and the simurgh.) It also shares its European counterpart’s imagination. Thus the arghun or pelican, according to scholar Anna Contadini’s paraphrase of this bestiary, “has a big beak with numerous holes producing different sounds and beautiful melodies, which have the power to charm those who happen to hear them.” 13th century Iran also saw a bestiary included as part of Zakariya al-Qazwini’s cosmography, a work known in English as Wonders of Creation or Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing; Persian, Iraqi, Arab and Turkish artists produced illustrated versions of this book for the next 600 years.
Farther east, the Han Dynasty atlas and encyclopedia known as The Classic of Mountains and Seas (c. 1st century A.D.) includes descriptions of real and imaginary animals alongside geography, geology, anthropology, medicine and astronomy. As Anne Birrell writes in the introduction to her translation, this book treats mythical creatures “in the same scientific manner of description as known species.” These creatures, which include ghosts, giants, dragons and qilin, “inspired successive collections of illustrations down the centuries, which graphically evoke their strange and monstrous features.” The book in fact features so many mythical creatures that editor/translator Richard E. Strassberg published just these sections, alongside 16th century illustrations, as A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas. (It continues to inspire artists to this day, as seen in Qiu Anxiong’s 2004-2008 woodblock print series New Classic of Mountain and Seas.)
One illustrated edition made its way to Japan in the 10th century, where it would have a major impact. The Classic of Mountains and Seas and two other illustrated Chinese encyclopedias laid the foundations for the production of Japanese bestiaries during the Edo period (1603-1837.) This period, Foster writes in a bestiary of his own, The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore,
witnessed the development of an encyclopedic mode of expression…. Japanese cities were becoming bigger and bigger, literacy rates were rising, and a lively commercial book industry was developing. Along with fiction and other works of entertainment, there were all sorts of almanacs, farming manuals, travel guides, dictionaries and compendia.
Yokai first appeared in illustrated encyclopedias alongside real plants and animals. Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788) — best known in the western world as the teacher of the influential ukiyo-e artist Utamaro — published the first yokai bestiary in 1776, with three further volumes between 1779 and 1784. Together, his illustrated bestiaries cover more than 200 creatures. As in medieval Europe, mythical creatures invaded late 18th and 19th century Japanese culture, appearing in or on woodblock prints, garments, kabuki dramas, Noh masks, board games, magic lantern shows and netsuke, and even as targets in shooting galleries. Foster describes yokai karuta (“yokai cards”), a game that predicts Pokémon by well over a century, in terms that make them closely resemble Pokémon cards or Pokédex entries:
Information about each yokai was compressed into a single, discrete unit; the phrase describing the creature was associated with a visual representation. The yokai became a tiny capsule of knowledge, as tight and self-contained as an encyclopedia entry.
Indeed, Foster ends Pandemonium and Parade by considering the continued presence of yokai in Japanese anime, live-action cinema, fan communities and video games. “The Pokémon world,” he writes, “shares critical structural affinities with yokai culture,” such as the encyclopedic mode and the presence of in-universe Pokémon experts such as Professor Oak. For Foster, Pokémon is “one of the most prominent and explicitly commercial incursions of Japanese monsters into the world economy.” In his words, “the popularity of this multiplatform game deserves much more space than I can give it here.”
I plan on giving it that space.
IV.
The cross-cultural preponderance of bestiaries, as I hope my little world tour illustrated, seems to reflect a fairly universal fascination with cataloguing and illustrating fantastical creatures. Where have bestiaries gone in 2021? The most obvious answer is that, over the past several centuries, scientific disciplines such as biology and zoology have taken over many of the functions once served by the bestiaries, such as describing the habitat, diet and behavior of animals. Indeed, early modern Europe had a somewhat vague boundary between the old bestiary and the new science of zoology. The 16th century Swiss Renaissance man Conrad Gesner, for instance, included several fantastic animals in his zoological encyclopedia, Historia Animalium (1551-1558). “This carefully conducted and appropriately skeptical study of all known animals,” in the words of cultural historian Martin Arnold, “was nonetheless indebted to bestiaries, for it included such mythical creatures as unicorns, basilisks, and dragons.” About two centuries later, the father of taxonomy Carl Linnaeus exposed a ‘hydra’ as a skillful, Dr. Frankenstein-esque assemblage of different animal parts; Linnaeus included no dragons in his Systema Natura (1758-9) but did assign the genus Draco to the real-life flying lizards of southeast Asia. Science marches on, to use a truly stale cliché, and our modern science has no room for mythical creatures.
The bestiary’s artistic and mythological aspects have stayed somewhat closer to their medieval and Edo-period imaginative exuberance. In his essay “On-Fairy Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien calls our perception of fairy tales as mere children’s entertainment
an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the ‘nursery’ as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused.
The wolf in the woods loses its menace in its increasingly industrial and increasingly urbanized society, Little Red Riding Hood descends from the world of legend into that of bedtime stories and cartoon comedies, pandemonium becomes parade. In a similar fashion, the bestiary has gone from the most popular secular book in medieval Europe to an archaic genre that I must spend some time explaining. But, just as Disneyfied fairy tales have had a long and profitable afterlife in pop culture, bestiaries have survived in a somewhat new form, as fantasy rather than folklore: the Pokédex, Pokémon itself, the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Alien Species. If fairy tales have been relegated to the nursery (alongside the bear, as we’ve seen), then the bestiary has for the most part been relegated to the game room, the teenager’s bedroom, the fantasy and science fiction reader’s library, or the Game Boy.
A few months after the Getty’s Book of Beasts I had the great privilege of seeing the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) exhibition Every Living Thing: Animals in Japanese Art, a multimedia retrospective ranging from ancient tomb sculptures to samurai armor to modern art, featuring yokai, zodiac animals and others. As I admired the artworks, I thought of these creatures’ deep affinity with those of the bestiary, and reflected more broadly on the comparative lack of animals in our postmodern, postindustrial world. For the bestiarist or the ukiyo-e printmaker, for Shakespeare or the prehistoric cave painter, animals provided an inexhaustibly rich symbolic language. Of course, none of these artists limited themselves to animals that actually exist.
Yes, Pokémon is undoubtedly an unusually long-lived children’s fad that has survived and thrived on shrewd marketing, corporate synergy, fanboyism and Millennials’ refusal to give up childish things. But it has outlived most of its competitors and imitators, and has shown a remarkable ability to cross cultural, linguistic and temporal boundaries. I think it owes at least some of that success to it serving — in its own kitschy, childish, commercial way — as kind of plastic, electronic bestiary, a Noah’s ark for such necessary monsters as fairies, firebirds, western dragons, eastern dragons, kappa, kitsune and baku.
Bibliography
Arnold, Martin. The Dragon: Fear and Power. Reaktion Books, 2018.
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Book of Imaginary Beings. Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. 1974. Vintage, 2002.
Contadini, Ana. “The Ibn Buhtisu Bestiary Tradition: The Text and Its Sources.” Journal of History of Medicine 6 (1994), p.349-264.
A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways Through Mountains and Seas. Edited and Translated by Richard E. Strassberg. University of California Press, 2002.
The Classic of Mountains and Seas. Translated by Anne Birrell. Penguin Books, 1999.
Forbes, Thomas R. ‘‘Medical Lore in the Bestiaries.’’ Medical History Vol.12.3, 1968.
Foster, Michael Dylan. Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai. University of California Press, 2009.
Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California Press, 2015.
Kardos, Michael. “Review of STRASSBERG, Richard E, Editor, Translator, Commentator. A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways through Mountains and Seas.” Asian Folklore Studies 62 (2), 2002.
King, Sharon R. “Mania for ‘Pocket Monsters’ Yields Billions for Nintendo.” New York Times, 26 Apr. 1999.
Masatomo, Kawai and Robert T. Singer, eds. The Life of Animals in Japanese Art. Princeton University Press, 2019.
Morrison, Elizabeth, ed. Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World. Getty Publications, 2019.
Pastoureau, Michel. The Bear: History of a Fallen King. Translated by George Holoch. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Tolkien, J.R.R. "On Fairy-Stories." Poems and Stories. Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
White, T.H. The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the 12th Century. 1954. Dover, 2010.
Intriguing. I never dwelt on the question what made Pokémon so popular, and appreciate the relationship drawn with this earlier cultural phenomenon of beasteries.
I don't have an answer to this, or even a concrete question, but I wonder about your placing of Pokemon on the parade end of the spectrum. Pokemon is of course short for "pocket monsters," i.e. some sort of monster; nonetheless, in the series they are more cute than frightening, and, being a show directed at children (this is also true about the games, but there it might be mere technical simplification), while it is violent in essence it is not graphically violent; no blood, no real contact blows (until the first Pokemon movie, at least), nobody dies. Team Rocket are more buffoons than malicious characters, if only due to their lack of success.
"[...] in pandemonium, the natural world is haunted by powerful, sometimes malevolent creatures." It's perhaps remarkable that the human world of Pokemon, though altogether presented as modern, is penetrated and surrounded by nature. There are no roads connecting the cities; they are interspersed by meadows and forests haunted by (level appropriate) pokemon.
I think I recall not all the yokai being necessarily "demonic", either. Is that right? I'd guess it has to do with the Christian evil-good dualistic world view that is foreign to the Japanese religious worldview.
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I wonder about the human drive behind these cultural phenomena. One is, indeed, the fascination with living beings and with their understanding. Another, I'd say, is the drive some have of cataloging. Pokemon's creator was fascinated with insects, I, as a child in a more urban environment, tabulated on a sheet of paper the (chemical) elements I found in the encyclopedia — until I accidentally hit upon the article "element," which had already such a table, and my brain exploded. Yet another, one can imagine, is a turn towards a kind of scholarly conquering of nature — if the "here be dragons" induces fear of the unknown, their arrangement in a codex prospectively deprives them of at least the element of surprise. It is even made more explicit in pokemon: Ash is not merely going out to complete a Linnaeutic project (a detail I have completely forgotten about), but also to train(!) the pokemon, and, further —here is a complete dominion— to battle them against each other. Pawns in the hands of humans.
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It's the first time I hear about yokai karuta (or karuta in general), thank you. I wonder if you have seen such cards as described, with a description? I searched and found some photos of such cards where there's a name to the yokai, but not even a phrase, to say nothing of a description (it might be on the flip side, but I sustain my skepticism). It doesn't really matter to the greater picture, but I wonder if Foster did not add that bit to sustain the more elegant than if otherwise connection he makes between them and pokemon cards. For that matter, such monsters with description existed in Magic the Gathering (the first trading card games according to Wikipedia), which has further semblances to the Pokemon card game which it precedes (I'm thinking of the elemental aspect.. the colors of magic, white, black &c vs. the elements in Pokemon).
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The Red Riding Hood's wolf in the woods menace had been lost not only as nature receded before the cities of Men, but because the story as I think it's commonly known today has been, as you put it, Disneyfied. A long time ago. There were stark differences between the (original, if I remember correctly) story arising/ captured at the French royal court and the story as it was recorded by the brothers Grimm (which ultimately came from the French). I vaguely recall some lewd suggestion made by the wolf to the girl — here too we can take animals to symbolize human virtues and vices.
Reading about here again, I couldn't help but see something suggestive in the virgin that alone can capture and tame a unicorn, especially with the incarnation (or resurrection of the flesh, you might say) bit.
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I liked reading your "The bestiary’s primary ‘use,’ if we must take an instrumental approach to such an extravagantly imaginative genre, was as a repository of animal allegories for sermons." I have long thought about fiction along similar lines, as a manner by which to make abstract ideas memorable and complicated ideas easily communicable. Instead of saying "a person who is accused by authorities, against whose bureaucratic machinery he feels helpless, for an unidentifiable crime" you can simply evoke Kafka's Franz K., for example.
So we're not going to have entries about Paras or Venonat?
You briefly covered bears and Persia. I am currently working on writing about the book of Daniel, where Persia is compared to a bear. I'd also be interested in astrological references.