In Mythology
Mythological creatures may have been created due to a deformative syndrome also, for instance, descriptions of mermaids may be related to the symptoms of sirenomelia. The Irish Mythology includes the Fomorians, who are almost without exception described as being deformed, possessing only one of what most have two of (eyes, arms, legs, etc.) or having larger than normal limbs.
Read more about this topic: Deformity
Famous quotes containing the word mythology:
“I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.... Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)