Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Manticore - Bodleian Library MS Bodley 764, fol. 25r, c. 1240-1250 CE. One of the finest medieval bestiary illustrations: the human face, the lion's body, and the scorpion tail clearly rendered. Of all the monsters that the ancient world sent westward along the trade routes of the Persian Empire, the Manticore is among the most disturbing. Not because it is the most powerful - many monsters are more powerful - but because of the nature of its horror: a body that is lion, a tail that is scorpion, and a face that is human . It looks at you with your own kind of eyes before it devours you completely, bones and all, leaving no trace. The name itself tells the story: martichoras in Greek, from the Old Iranian mard-khora - man-eater . The Manticore does not merely kill. It consumes without remainder. And its human face - smiling, red-skinned, gray-eyed, with three rows of interlocking teeth like a shark's - ensures that the last thing its prey sees is a reflectio...

Jinn of the Air — Seljuk arts, 12th–13th century CE. The medieval Islamic visual tradition gave jinn the form of winged humanoid beings with fierce faces and complex, swirling bodies: creatures of movement, of air and fire, of a nature halfway between the human and the angelic. In the Islamic conception of creation, the universe contains three distinct orders of rational beings: angels ( malā'ika ), made of light, wholly obedient to God, without free will; humans ( ins ), made of clay, with free will, born into a physical world they must navigate toward or away from the divine; and jinn — made of smokeless fire ( nār al-samūm ), possessing free will, invisible to ordinary human perception, inhabiting the world alongside humans but not quite of the human world. The jinn (singular: jinnī , often transliterated as djinn or genie in English) are neither angels nor demons, though they can be aligned with either divine service or with opposition to it. They are the third ord...