Last night while sitting before my work computer I felt the gaze of a watching creature. I have written about evil and the supernatural lately, so perhaps this feeling echoed my latent paranoia. In the dark shadows behind my computer I noticed this object.

My reproduction of a famous sculpture recreates the mythical creature, the chimera. The beast has the head of a lioness, a serpent for a tail, eagle claws for feet, and a goat head protruding from its midsection. The chimera arose in Greek mythology as a monstrous fire breathing beast composed of many animal parts. Homer described the chimera in his Iliad as “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.”  The hypothesis about the origin of this myth refers to an area in southwest Turkey. Hikers on the “Lycian Way” encountered an area of over two dozen vents in the ground spewing forth flaming methane.

In modern times, the term chimera has come to represent a single organism composed of genetically distinct cells resulting in male and female organs, two different blood types, or subtle variations of form. This situation can occur in animals by organ transplantation such as a bone marrow transplant that can change someone’s blood type. in 1953, a human chimera was discovered to have blood containing two different blood types. Apparently this resulted from her twin brother’s cells living in her body.

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