Hunters in Theory

The most significant document in the history of monster hunting does not exist.

It has never been found in any archive. No copy has survived in any library, public or private, in any language, in any form. It is referenced, obliquely and without attribution, in texts from at least eleven distinct cultural traditions spanning four continents and three thousand years of written history. It is referenced in ways that imply its readers knew what it was, in contexts that assume familiarity without explanation, in languages that have no other connection to one another. The traditions that reference it do not agree on what to call it. They agree, with the precision of people describing the same object in different vocabularies, on what it contained.

It contained a systematic description of two categories of non-human organism sharing the human ecological niche. It described their biology in functional rather than supernatural terms. It described their vulnerabilities with the specificity of a technical manual rather than the vagueness of religious instruction. It described the methods by which they could be identified, approached, incapacitated, and destroyed. And it described – this is the detail that the compiler found most significant and most difficult to dismiss – the precautions that a practitioner must take to avoid becoming the thing they were hunting.

The compiler designates this hypothetical source document the Ur-Manual. Its existence is inferred from the convergence of traditions that reference it; its contents are reconstructed in Part Two of this document from the surviving operational knowledge distributed across those traditions. Whether it was a single physical document, a body of oral teaching with a consistent transmission protocol, or something else entirely, the compiler cannot determine. What the compiler can determine, from the convergence of the referencing traditions, is that it was old when the oldest surviving references were written. It was old in the seventh century BCE, when the Babylonian Maqlû ritual texts were compiled from material whose scribal annotations indicate it was already being copied from older sources. It was old when the Greek magical papyri of the second century BCE referenced practices whose Egyptian originals the authors treated as ancient authority. It was old, or its descendants were, when the Inquisition interrogators of the sixteenth century asked questions too specific to have been generated from theology alone.