ABSTRACT
Monsters and hybrids belong to the mindscape, to the fluid world of the imagination, so they can be manipulated to explore and present powerful metaphors for human life-experience and beyond. Hybrids are boundarycrossers and are therefore well equipped to act as guardians of entrances and thresholds: in his mission to penetrate Hades to find his dead father Anchises, the living Aeneas had to pass through the portals of an underworld heavily guarded by the three-headed Cerberus and other horrors. In Egyptian and Classical thought and myth, monsters, like the Sphynx, Chimaera and Centaur, were associated with risk, peril and the unknown.Thus, explorers and traders venturing to the edges of the known world regularly encountered weird, unnatural beings (McCall 1995: 104-137; King 1995: 138-167). In studying the monsters of ancient Greek myth presented on Korinthian painted ceramics, Michael Shanks (1999: 99, 102) has suggested that the incongruous mixing of different species of animal or of animal and human served not only to cross boundaries but also to deny order and difference and to present chaotic equivalence, engendering ideas of instability and violence, since each part of the hybrid strove for domination over the other(s). In this connection, it is interesting that sphinxes are often associated with
danger (McCall 1995) and that centaurs in mythic narratives generally behaved in a wild and immoderate manner (Dubois 1982: 29; Green 1997a: 906; Homer, Iliad I: 263; Odyssey XXI: 303).
