Fantastic Beasts: Chimeras everywhere!

Not so long ago, in a galaxy not far away at all, I was in the cinema watching a slew of previews before the feature presentation. One of these previews was Fantastic Beasts (and where to find them), the latest movie in the Harry Potter franchise. I have not read the stand-alone book, although it sounds similar to a middle ages bestiary that added tidbits to the series. Very little was revealed in the preview: A wizard travels to New York with a briefcase of magical creatures and some (or all?) of them escape. Eddie Redmayne, who did a great job portraying Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything”, plays Newt Scamander in his younger days before he became the author of a best-selling bestiary. Apparently he’s also a Hufflepuff!

While the name Scamander may be familiar as a Trojan warrior in the Iliad (thanks, liberal arts education), with the first name Newt it brings up the image of a salamander. I wonder if that was intentional. Several of the names in Rowling’s series evoke certain characteristics of the owner of said name, the moment you read it without knowing anything about the character. Severus Snape sounds sneaky, and Draco Malfoy certainly sounds up to no good, and the name Slytherin clearly sounds like the bad house to be in. Even more so are textbook authors. Let’s see the list from the first Harry Potter book.

·      The Standard Book of Spells by Miranda Goshawk

·      A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot

·      Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling

·      A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration by Emeric Switch

·      One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi by Phyllida Spore

·      Magical Drafts and Potions by Arsenius Jigger

·      Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by Newt Scamander

·      The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection by Quentin Trimble

When I read this list, the first two did not conjure anything noteworthy in my mind. However the next five clearly do. Magical Theory sounds addled with a lot of waffling. Potions sounds like a lot of jiggering with dangerous chemicals. The Herbology and Transfiguration authors clearly sound as if they were born to the task or so aptly named at birth. I think a more likely possibility is that they were writing under pseudonyms, pen-names, or even assumed names given their fame in a particular area. Alchemists and others in the medieval world often invoked the names of more famous people to bolster their own work, in what would look like as reverse plagiarism in the college classroom today. This is where Newt Scamander and his book first get mentioned. (Why is this a textbook for Harry? He doesn’t take Care of Magical Creatures until third year.) As to the final book on the list, the name Trimble sounds like “tremble”, and is quickly reinforced when Quirrell is first introduced as the teacher.

But back to salamanders. As amphibians, they have a dual-nature related to land and sea (or to terrestrial and aquatic environments). The ancient Maya ascribed special significance to “boundary-breaking” creatures, as I learned in a recent visit to a museum exhibit on the Maya (coincidentally the day before I saw the Fantastic Beasts preview, both of which inspired this blog post). From the blurry photo I took below, you can see that bats, diving birds, and crocodiles are among the list of creatures. So is the jaguar, which features prominently in the duality of day and night, life and death. Down through the ages, across many cultures, there seems to be a fascination with creatures that seem to span two realms. They are sometimes referred to as chimera, or having a chimeric nature.

The Chimera is first mentioned in the Iliad (thanks, Wikipedia) – a lion-headed, goat-bodied, snake-tailed, fire-breathing creature. In the Harry Potter world, the salamander is a fire-breathing lizard, related to what you might find in a medieval bestiary. (Note: If you had an amphibious, flying, fire-breathing salamander, you could span all four elements of the ancient world.) This dangerous and fantastic beast is finally defeated by Pegasus, the winged horse, yet another example of a chimeric creature! In the third Harry Potter book, we are introduced to the Hippogriff, half-eagle and half-horse, one of whom plays a prominent part in the tale. Thestrals show up in the fifth book, winged skeletal-looking horses that seem to have some connection between the realms of the living and the dead.

Lest you think that such beasts are only found in the imagination, but are only as real as the fabled unicorn, it turns out our natural world is full of chimeric creatures. Without a symbiotic lifestyle with our gut bacteria (that outnumber us easily by cell count), we might not do a good job turning our chomped food into useful energy to do work, building biomass, and ridding ourselves of toxins. One could argue that a symbiont isn’t a true chimera, but if you take a closer look at bacteria more generally, they turn out to be strange. We are used to thinking of families of related creatures having similar characteristics that are inherited vertically through genetics – this is what we observe in “larger” organisms such as bats, birds, crocodiles, salamanders, and even ourselves. Bacteria however can swap genes through horizontal gene transfer. They look like tiny monsters combining parts from other creatures – chimera, in essence. This actually makes it difficult to construct a phylogenetic “tree of life” because life history is getting erased. That hasn’t stopped scientists from trying to determine what the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) looked like, but it is not going to be easy.

What is even more puzzling perhaps is what the first eukaryote, much more “complex” than prokaryotic bacteria, might have looked like. Every eukaryotic cell in our body betrays a strange chimeric origin – genes from archaea and bacteria. Not just from one type, but from an assortment of them (at least given our present assigned groupings). Even the way we pass our genes to our descendants is chimeric. While the nuclear genome is primarily assembled from the coming together of the male and female gametes, the mitochondrial genome comes from our mothers. There seems to be close interplay between the two genomes: their differential rates of evolution, how apoptosis works, and the fact that the biochemical constituents of our respiratory chain are encoded by both genomes. Our bioenergetic core, what powers us to stay alive, is chimeric in nature. We are chimera!

Does our chimeric nature extend beyond the physical realm? This is perhaps a religious or philosophical question that we cannot test scientifically (at least through the natural sciences as currently conceived). Do humans have a non-physical soul or spirit intertwined with our physical nature? Is this why we seem to be capable of abstract thought and imagine fantastic beasts such as unicorns? We can conceive of such creatures even though, as far we know, there are no natural physical examples. We have built and immersed ourselves in virtual worlds where fantastic beasts can be found, coded in bits and bytes.

Near the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, while Harry is physically lying down in the forest and having a “conversation” with Dumbledore, he asks: “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” Dumbledore beams at Harry and replies: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”