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Chimeras are the sirens of artists
and of the creative.
"I am joyful and light of heart! I reveal to men dazzling prospects with paradises in the clouds and distant felicities. I fill their hearts with the eternal follies, plans for happiness, projects for the future, dreams of glory, declarations of love and virtuous resolutions. I urge them to embark on perilous travels and vast undertakings...I search for new perfumes, bigger flowers, unknown pleasures."
The words which the Chimera shouts to Flaubert's St. Antony in an unfinished, over ambitious work by Gustave Moreau: Les Chimères.
The Chimera is one of the primordial monsters in Greek mythology. She is a sister of the Spinx and is part lion, part goat, and part serpent. In the eastern Mediterranean and southwest Asia, this creature served as a calendar emblem - each third corresponded to a season: the lion to spring, the goat to summer, and the serpent to winter.
The slaying of the Chimera, a child of Echidne, is one of the earliest Greek myths to appear in art. Bellerophon, our hero, rumored to be the son of Poseidon, must confront the Chimera as an act of atonement. He has been sent on this possibly fatal errand by an older man, who perceives him as the troublesome third leg of a sexual triangle. Unlike the Hydra and Medusa, the Chimera is no danger to anyone, although, like her father Typhon (also a variant of a dragon), she does breathe flames.
Winged Pegasus, one of Medusa's offspring released by the severing of her head by Perseus, was the steed that Bellerophon rode to defeat Chimera. Many arrows were shot into Chimera's body but it was the cruelly plunged piece of lead into her gullet that lead to her demise. The flames she issued melted the soft metal, which flowed down her throat, burning her to death from the inside.
The Chimera came to stand for a figment of the imagination, a fantasy, an elusive delusion. She is so deep-rooted a metaphor that she is, in effect, real.
"O speculators about perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you created in the like quest. Go and take your places with the seekers after gold" -Leonardo da Vinci.
"What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy!" - Blaise Pascal, philosopher.
chimera or chimaera \ki'mira, -me- also ka\ n -s[L chimaera, fr. Gk chimaira chimera, she-goat; akin to ON gymbr yearling ewe, L bimus two years (winter) old, hiems winter — more at HIBERNATE] 1 a usu cap : a she-monster in Greek mythology represented as vomiting flames and usu as having a lion's head, goat's body, and dragon's or serpent's tail or a lion's body and head together with a goat's head together with a goat's head rising from the back — compare GRYLLUS b : a similar imaginary monster; specif : a grotesque animal form in painting or sculpture compounded from parts of different real or imaginary animals c : a horrible or frightening manifestation d : an often fantastic combination of incongruous parts, esp : a fabrication. 2 : an illusion or fabrication of the mind or fancy ; esp : a utopian or unrealizable dream or aim.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged)
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