By Ian Ziller

History Major

Why did we believe in strange things? What are the creepy crawlies that we used to think are real that are a part of legends? All these weird creatures are fantastic and bizarre, so why do people feel like they were real? Could they have been real, or at least their inspiration could have been real?

Let’s try to answer that and see if the creepy crawlies have some basis in reality. Whether they were in fact real, they probably were not, but making the case for their inspiration being real could be insightful.

First off we have dragons, those mythical creatures that can breathe fire and can fly. It is certainly interesting that both Europeans and Asians believed in dragons. The fact that two different societies believe in very similar things is very fascinating. For a lot of reasons, it might be possible that the human imagination works very similar, or it could be that a creature like that one once existed. Now I am not saying that dragons exist but there are a lot of freaky animals and many animals that we have discovered from fossils that now are extinct. So we can assume that they are the influence of many creatures.

However dragons are not the only monsters that the ancients believed in. For example, there were demons that many people in the medieval world believed in that could posses you and were believed to make people sick. There was the Cerberus, the guard dog of the underworld in ancient Greek mythology. The Greeks believed that he was the guardian and sentry of the underworld. There was also the part animal part human gods of ancient Egypt, which are also very strange looking as well.

So from all of these we can assume that from all of these creatures that there is a of imagination in the human mind.  But it also shows how many bizarre creatures once existed for the human race to come up with these creatures of legend. And think that they existed. It could also be that they did actually exist one reasons we could argue that it is strange that a lot of cultures that had not  contact with each other  believed in the  same exact creatures or very similar creatures so could they have existed yes, is it Likely no. so yes they could of existed and the fact that every culture has them   and it shows that there could be truth to them.