Introduction
More than three hundred and fifty years ago, lightning struck the Brass Tower.
Three hours was all it took for the ensuing inferno to destroy the temple. The flames greedily devoured centuries-old timbers, leaving nothing behind but ash and brittle charcoal. The archive collapsed in a shower of cinders, spilling books into the night like meteors. Wind-blown pages, streaming flame, fluttered down into the temple garden, carrying fire into the arms of the hapless cheri trees below. Brass melted and flowed like wax. While the Brass Tower burned, its twin to the east glowed red with reflected firelight.
Finally, just before midnight, the heavens opened up and extinguished the inferno. We may never know how many people died in the disaster – the contemporary accounts appear to be unconcerned with the human cost. It is said that three pokémon died and were reborn in that fire, transformed into elemental forces that have endlessly raced across the land ever since.
The lightning-strike that destroyed the Brass Tower also seared its way onto Johtoan culture. The towers of Ecruteak City had become the region's most sacred ground, their timbers legendarily hewn from the branches of the World Tree – symbols of the harmony between humanity and the natural world, where kings received the blessings of Heaven. A contemporary diarist, Osmund Defoe, lamented:
"Now surely is the bitterest Winter of this realm: who now has the wisdom to say whether it be some evil or the judgement of Heaven that hath severed us from all Gaia?"
The story of the Burned Tower has a powerful hold on the Johtoan imagination, a legend of legends, with legendary pokémon there at the soul and centre. 'Legendary pokémon' - this now-familiar term was originally coined by Evangelist scholars during the Enlightenment. Anxious to reduce what they saw as pagan superstitions down to cold, quantifiable facts, they created and quibbled over endless arbitrary taxonomies: legendary, pseudo-legendary, mythical, etc. Their zeal for a quantifiable world was not entirely out of zeal for science. In attempting to deny the mystique of these pokémon they sought to diminish paganism and so glorify their own god.
History, folklore, and science blend fluently in legendary pokémon. These pokémon more than any other have defied the Enlightenment, retaining their antediluvian arcana despite the flowering of empiricism. Traditionally the Middle Kingdom of Kanto-Johto is home to ten, assuming you don't count Kanto's dragons or the tyranitar of Johto. This series aspires to illuminate this interweaving of legendary narrative and scientific discovery. In the articles that follow, the biology of the ten legendary pokémon is explored alongside their cultural history.
We live in exciting times. The world is getting smaller as the depth of our knowledge grows. Yet we need not consign their cultural significance to the forgotten past:
"By viewing Nature, Nature's handmaid Art,
Makes mighty things from small beginnings grow."
These Enchanted Isles encompasses the very broadest vista that natural history allows. Nevertheless, I think, appropriately so. These pokémon are an intrinsic part of our past, and our present, and will continue to be so in our future.
Author's Note: There's a lot I could say on the worldbuilding choices in this introduction, but I'll be brief. First, why ten legendary pokémon? I hint to the reason why in "traditionally" - for reasons that'll become clear in the Mew article, I've chosen not include Mewtwo in this definition. Secondly, I'm aware that the game canon has the burning of the Brass Tower happen 150 years before the present day. Assuming that means around the 1850s, I've chosen to push this back to the 17th century as a deliberate departure from canon.