Animal-hybrid types

Cat-headed and bull-headed beings are ancient. Egyptian Bastet and Sekhmet, the Minotaur and the Mesopotamian lamassu all predate the flying saucer by millennia. Channelled cosmology adopted the feline form as the 'Lyran feline' lineage, one of the supposed original humanoid families, while the Taurian is a modern synthesis of bull myth with the constellation Taurus.

The Felinid has the eyes, ears and musculature of a cat on an upright frame and is described as graceful, proud and protective. The Taurian is the bull-headed type, heavy, horned and slow to anger, drawn from the Minotaur and from bull cults. Neither has a sighting record; both come from channelled genealogies and from myth.

Animal-human composites are among the oldest images humans made; the lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel is about 40,000 years old. Cat-headed Bastet and the bull-headed gods of the Near East supplied the shapes. The channelled literature of the 1980s, above all The Prism of Lyra, placed feline races in Lyra as ancestors of humanity.

These are archetypes of the imagination and are catalogued as such. Their modern popularity owes more to film, from Cats to Avatar, than to any report. The Atlas includes them because they recur across sources, not because anyone has met one.