Peryton

Also Known As: Spanish Peritón; sometimes rendered in English as the winged stag
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It casts the shadow of a human being rather than its own, and recovers its true shadow only by killing a person.
Role in Mythos: Invented by Jorge Luis Borges as a survivor of Atlantis and a foretold destroyer of Rome, it functions as a literary hoax that has been repeatedly mistaken for ancient tradition.
Relation to Humans: The account calls perytons mortal enemies of the human race, hunting in flocks and killing to redeem themselves in the eyes of their gods. They are also said to be the spirits of travellers who died far from home, which makes their hostility a kind of grievance rather than appetite.

The shadow lands first. It spreads across hot flagstones in the unmistakable outline of a man, shoulders, arms, a head, and there is no man standing anywhere near it to cast it. Look up into the glare and the owner is there instead: a stag’s head tilted against the wind, antlers raking the air, a bird’s body behind it, wings wide as a barn door, two cloven forelegs drawn up neat beneath the breast feathers.

That is the peryton, and the account that describes it is one of the great forgeries in the literature of monsters.

The frame Jorge Luis Borges built around the creature is elaborate enough to be flattering. The Sibyl of Erythraea, it is said, foretold that Rome would at last be destroyed by the perytons. In the year 642 the record of her prophecies burned in the great conflagration of Alexandria, and the grammarians who worked over the charred fragments of the nine volumes never recovered the passage concerning Rome. Later a source was wanted. After many vicissitudes it emerged that a sixteenth-century rabbi from Fez, in all likelihood Jakob ben Chaim, had left a historical treatise quoting a Greek scholiast whose own work is lost and whose name has not come down to us. It is from those quoted fragments, and only from those, that everything known about perytons descends.

None of it happened. Borges invented the creature for his *Manual de zoología fantástica* in 1957, written with Margarita Guerrero, expanded as *El libro de los seres imaginarios* in 1967 and translated into English as *The Book of Imaginary Beings* in 1969. There is no peryton in Greek, Roman or medieval writing. The word itself appears nowhere before him and was very likely his own coinage. He also salted the passage with tells for anyone paying attention: the opening sentence hedges with “it is said” before a single fact has been offered, the Sibylline books are given as nine when the familiar story leaves three, and the burning of the Alexandrian library by Omar is itself a legend rather than a record. A scholar as careful as Borges does not make three such slips by accident.

The fragments themselves are wonderfully economical. The perytons had their first dwelling in Atlantis, and when the earthquake took the island they were the ones who could simply leave. They have the head and legs of a deer. The body is perfectly avian, wings and plumage and all. They eat dry earth, which is the detail that convinces, because nobody inventing a monster to frighten people would give it a diet of dust. They fly in flocks, and they have been seen at a dizzying height above the Columns of Hercules, small and deliberate against the blue, the sound of them arriving long after the sight.

The strangeness sits in the shadow. Struck by the sun, a peryton throws the silhouette of a man across the ground beneath it, and from this some concluded that the creatures are the souls of travellers who died far from home and beyond the care of their own gods. The shadow is the borrowed remnant of the life they lost. A peryton carries it the way a debtor carries a note, and there is exactly one way to settle.

It kills a human being. Once it has, the shadow that follows it is its own at last, cloven feet and antlers and folded wings, and the gods it was estranged from take it back. The fragments say the perytons are mortal foes of the human race, and this is why: not hunger, but restitution. It is a good piece of monster design because the appetite and the theology are the same act. The passage goes on to report a flock falling on Scipio’s ships during the crossing to Carthage, wings coming out of the sun over the water and men going down on the decks, and a last appearance at Ravenna, where the birds circling the town were noted for plumage of an unusually pale blue.

The limitation is built into the same logic. A peryton needs one death and one only. After that it has nothing left to want from us, and the whole terrible economy of the thing switches off. Whatever else it may be, it is not insatiable. Borges also leaves them permanently short of the thing they were prophesied to do, since Rome still stands and the only copy of the prophecy went up in smoke, so the flocks are stranded between a promise nobody can read and a shadow they each get to redeem exactly once.

The afterlife has been busier than the invention. Gary Gygax put the peryton into the first *Monster Manual* in 1977, close enough to Borges that the borrowing is not in doubt, and from there it spread through four decades of games, card art and fantasy fiction as though it had always been there. Diane Duane took the name in 1983 for *So You Want to Be a Wizard*, keeping the shadowless-soul idea and discarding the deer entirely in favour of enormous wolves. Radio astronomers at Parkes borrowed it too, naming a class of mysterious signals perytons because they mimicked bursts from beyond the galaxy while being something else entirely. In 2015 the source was traced to a microwave oven in the observatory kitchen, opened a few seconds early. Even the impostor signal turned out to be an impostor, which Borges would have enjoyed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a peryton?

A peryton is a creature with the head and legs of a stag and the body, wings and plumage of a large bird. It was invented by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and first appeared in his *Manual de zoología fantástica* in 1957. Its defining trait is that it casts the shadow of a human being instead of its own.

Is the peryton a real myth?

No. The peryton is a modern literary invention, not an ancient or medieval creature. Borges presented it as if it came from a lost Greek text quoted by a sixteenth-century rabbi of Fez, but that chain of sources was part of the fiction, and the word peryton appears in no source earlier than Borges.

Why does a peryton cast a human shadow?

According to Borges, perytons are held to be the spirits of travellers who died far from home and beyond the protection of their own gods, and the human shadow is what remains of that lost life. The shadow is not permanent. Once a peryton kills a human being, it begins to cast its own shadow and regains the favour of its gods.

Where did perytons come from?

Perytons are said to have lived in Atlantis and to have escaped by flight when an earthquake destroyed the island. Afterwards they were reported in flocks at great height above the Columns of Hercules, attacking Scipio’s ships on the crossing to Carthage, and finally at Ravenna, where they were noted for pale blue plumage.

How dangerous is a peryton?

A peryton will kill a human being once, because a single death is what it needs to recover its own shadow and its standing with its gods. After that killing it has no further motive to attack. The Sibyl of Erythraea was said to have prophesied that perytons would one day destroy Rome, a prophecy that burned before anyone could act on it.