Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,

focusing on mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time.

The gleam of my scarlet hair mingles with the reflection of the great sands.

I breathe through my nostrils the terror of solitudes.

I spit forth plague, I devour armies when they venture into the desert.

My claws are twisted like screws, my teeth shaped like sauce,

and my curving tail bristles with darts which I cast to right and left before and behind.

See, see!

These are the words of the Manticore, as related in Gustaf Labear's 1874 dramatic poem, The Temptation of Saint Anthony.

The Monster itself, however, is no mere French literary creation.

It emerges from the pages and dreamscapes of antiquity and beyond.

By virtue of its depictions and mythic riddles, the Sphinx tends to enjoy far greater fame among fantastic lion human hybrids,

but the Manticore is even more fabulous in form.

While it does possess the body of a lion and the head of a man,

it also boasts a tale of fan spikes that may be launched at its adversaries like venomous missiles.

The Monster's face makes it even more chimerical, not perfectly human, but color-to-deep red,

and possessing a cavernous maw full of interlocking teeth that pliny the elder compared to those of a comb.

The Roman pliny was citing the work of earlier Greek physician Cetesius, who would have lived in Anatolia, now part of Turkey during the 5th century BCE.

He also states that the creature's cry is like that of a flute and a trumpet combined, and that above all else, it craves the taste of human flesh.

While the Manticore's popularity in Western traditions and in the Christian Church would span centuries,

the creature's origins seemed to date back to ancient Mesopotamia, perhaps as a distortion of the Persian Mardhkora, meaning man's slayer.

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