Yesterday I replaced twelve pictures on Gods and Monsters. Not because they were ugly. Because the words underneath them had changed, and the pictures were now saying something the words denied.
One of them was the Batibat, the Ilocano spirit that sits in the knothole of a house post and crushes you while you sleep. Our picture was a grotesquely fat old woman leaning over a sleeping man. It is a GOOD picture. I said so out loud when it came up for review, and I said I thought it was better than whatever would replace it.
Then I read our own entry properly. The sources do not agree about the batibat, and the disagreement is the whole story. The fat old woman comes from one short story, “The Fat Woman in the Post”, in Manuel and Lyd Arguilla’s Philippine Tales and Fables, 1957, and from there she has been copied everywhere anyone writes about the creature. Maximo Ramos, the Filipino folklorist whose The Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology and The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore are the actual record, does summarise that story. But the batibat his own Ilokano informants described was something huge and hulking, and in the second book he describes it as unmistakably MALE, in terms a good deal too specific for a family website.
So we had run a picture for two years that got the sex of the thing wrong, and I liked it. Authenticity beats cool, and that is easy to say now. I made the wrong call first.
That sent me looking backwards, through everything this site has ever used.
What is on the drive
Every piece of art Gods and Monsters has ever published is on an external drive on my desk. Two thousand nine hundred and eighty image files, filed A to Z, going back to May 2023. Beside them are 117 renders that never went anywhere and 43 layered Photoshop files. Three years of trying to draw things nobody has ever photographed.
Lined up against what is actually live, it comes out like this. 2,934 creatures currently carry a picture. 1,816 of them have been redrawn at least once. Eighty-nine have been drawn three times. Exactly one has been drawn four.
I checked those last two by comparing the pictures themselves rather than trusting the upload dates, because WordPress will happily show you the same image twice under different names and it looks like a new version. Five creatures lost a version that way.
Zână: three fairies and a Romanian
The zână is the fairy of Romanian folklore, her name inherited from the Roman goddess Diana. She is the one with four pictures. August 2024 to August 2026, and nothing else on the site has more.
Look at the first three and tell me which country you are in. You cannot. Any one of them would sit just as comfortably on an Irish page, a German page or a Slovenian page. That is not a failure of skill. All three are competently made. They are simply not about Romania, and it took two years and four attempts to put her in a country.
I nearly got this wrong myself, writing this article. We also carry Zana e Malit, the warlike mountain fairy of Albanian folklore, on her own page with her own artwork. The Romanian entry notes that zână and Albanian zanë are cognate, which is exactly why the two collapse together if you are moving quickly. I had one creature’s pictures filed under the other’s name until I stopped and checked which page each image was the featured image OF. Same failure as the one this whole article is about, committed while writing about it.
Curupira: the picture we never took
The Curupira guards the forest in Brazilian folklore. Our own entry calls the backward-turned feet his most famous feature, and it is the whole trick of him: you follow his tracks and you walk away from him, deeper into the trees, until you are lost. He is a set of misleading footprints with a creature attached.
He has four pictures. The site has run him since July 2023 and the drive goes back further, to May.
In NOT ONE of the four can you see his feet.
Three years, four attempts, craft improving each time, and we never once drew the only detail that stops him being a hairy man in a jungle. It is very easy to keep making a picture better and never notice you are not making it about the right thing.
Harpy: from monster, to anatomy, to story
The Harpy has three, running from May 2023 to July 2026.
That third one is the only one that is actually about a harpy. In the old Greek stories harpies are not monsters you fight. They are the reason the food is gone. Blind old Phineus lays a meal and they take it, every time, and foul what they leave behind. Robbing the table is not a scene the harpy turns up in. It is the entire job.
The other nine
The twelve replaced yesterday all failed the same test in different ways. Four of them show something the rewritten entry now says is late or invented: the Baykok is airborne, and the entry dates the flying version to 1995; Baubas and Bauk both have a fully drawn creature where the text asks for an empty corner and formless dark.
Three had an attribute simply wrong. The Balaur had horns where the entry says none. Gud-elim stood on four legs where the entry says two. Bai Ze had clawed paws where the oldest surviving painting gives it cow’s hooves.
Two were the wrong creature altogether. The Basilisco Chilote is a snake with a rooster’s comb, and we had drawn a bird. Hemera had a chariot, horses and a sun crown, which is the iconography of Eos, and the entry’s whole point is that the two cannot honestly be told apart.
And three were missing what the entry names. Baš Čelik should be chained at the knees, elbows and throat with no readable face. Basajaun‘s hair should hide his face. The Knocker should have an oversized head and a mouth from ear to ear.
None of these were bad pictures. Every one of them was a good picture of the wrong thing.
What it comes down to
I went in expecting a story about art getting prettier. It is not that.
All three of the long chains show the same movement, and it is the movement from a picture of a monster to a picture of a specific thing in a specific place. The zână gets a nationality. The harpy stops being a design and starts stealing lunch. The Bunyip stops being a readable armoured crocodile and becomes something dark and wet you cannot get a clear look at, which is a much more honest way to draw an animal nobody has ever clearly seen.
And the Curupira sits there as the warning, because craft and accuracy are different problems and only one of them tells you when it is missing. A picture on this site is not decoration for the entry. It is a claim, exactly like a sentence is. If I would not write it down, it should not be in the frame.
We have drawn the Curupira four times without ever drawing his feet. That is the one I am going to fix next.
Further Reading
- Maximo D. Ramos, The Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (University of the Philippines Press, 1971) and The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore (Phoenix, 1990). The record for the Batibat and for the Aswang, and the reason we know the fat woman is a late arrival.
- Manuel and Lyd Arguilla, Philippine Tales and Fables (1957). Where “The Fat Woman in the Post” comes from, and with it every picture of the batibat you have ever seen.
- Basil Johnston, The Manitous (1995). Where the Baykok learned to fly.
Explore More on Gods and Monsters
- Curupira, the backward-footed forest guardian, and the rest of Brazilian mythology
- Zână and the Balaur in Romanian mythology
- Zana e Malit in Albanian mythology
- Batibat and Aswang in Philippine mythology
- Baubas in Lithuanian mythology, and Basajaun in Basque mythology
- Bai Ze in Chinese mythology, Gud-elim in Mesopotamian mythology, and the Alux in Mayan mythology
- Batara Kala, Baš Čelik, Bauk, Baykok, Basilisco Chilote, Hemera, Knocker and Bunyip