Mythological Age

Nemean Lion · Invulnerable Beast — Immortal creature of Greek myth

The Nemean Lion (Greek Leon Nemeios) is the gigantic golden lion of Greek myth that inhabited the valley of Nemea in the northeast Peloponnese, the target of the first of Heracles' Twelve Labours. According to Hesiod's Theogony it was the offspring of Typhon and Echidna (or Orthrus and the Chimera); a variant tradition has the moon-goddess Selene drop it from the sky. Its defining trait was a hide that no bronze or iron weapon could pierce. Heracles tried arrow, sword, and club without effect and finally chased the lion into a cave with two mouths, sealed one entrance, and strangled it with his bare hands. Even his blade was useless for skinning: only the lion's own claws (or teeth) could cut the hide, a trick the goddess Athena revealed to him. Heracles wore that hide as a cloak for the rest of his life, with the head as helmet, and the lion-skin became the most distinctive emblem of his iconography.

Hydra · Lernaean serpent — Multi-headed mythical beast

The Hydra (Greek Hydra, Latin Hydra) is the most famous many-headed monster of Greek mythology, properly the Lernaean Hydra after its swampy haunt at Lerna in the Peloponnese near Argos. Born of Typhon and Echidna, sister to Cerberus, Chimera, and Orthrus, the Hydra was reared by the goddess Hera as a test for Heracles. Its heads number nine in the canonical account, though variant traditions give seven, fifty, or a hundred; one central head is immortal. Its signature power is regenerative: cut off one head and two grow back. Its breath and blood are venomous. As the second of Heracles' Twelve Labours, the hero, aided by his nephew Iolaus who cauterised each severed neck with a torch, finally lopped off the immortal head and buried it under a great rock. He then dipped his arrows in the Hydra's blood, beginning a chain of poisonings that ran through the rest of Greek myth.

Medusa · Monster — Ancient creature with snakes for hair

Medusa (Greek Medousa) is the youngest of the three Gorgon sisters of Greek myth, Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, and the only one of the three who is mortal. According to Hesiod's Theogony she is the daughter of the sea deities Phorcys and Ceto, with serpents for hair and a gaze that turns any who behold her to stone. The first-century Roman poet Ovid, in Metamorphoses IV, supplied the most influential variant: Medusa had once been the beautiful priestess of Athena's temple, was raped within the sanctuary by Poseidon, and was transformed into a monster by Athena, who punished the desecration of her shrine. The hero Perseus slew her, aided by Hermes' winged sandals, Hades' helm of invisibility, and Athena's polished bronze shield, by looking only at her reflection. From her severed neck sprang the winged horse Pegasus and the giant Chrysaor; her head, the Gorgoneion, became a powerful apotropaic device fixed at the centre of Athena's aegis.

Phoenix · Firebird — Legendary bird reborn from flames

The Phoenix (Greek Phoinix, Latin Phoenix) is the immortal bird of ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman myth. At the end of a 500-year life (or, in alternative reckonings, the 1461-year Egyptian Great Year), it builds a nest of frankincense, cinnamon, and myrrh, sets itself alight upon it, and is reborn from its own ashes as a new young phoenix. The earliest Greek literary reference is in Herodotus, Histories II.73 (fifth century BCE), where the bird is associated with Heliopolis in Egypt; the bird's true root is the Egyptian Bennu, sacred to the sun god Ra at Heliopolis, a grey heron figured as the soul of Ra and the embodiment of the first light of creation. From Greco-Roman tradition the figure was taken up in 1 Clement 25, c. 96 CE, where the early Christian author cites the phoenix as a natural proof of the resurrection of Christ, and from there it became a standard image of Christian iconography. The Chinese fenghuang, Slavic Zhar-Ptitsa, and Persian Simurgh are distinct in origin but were later compared and conflated with the phoenix in nineteenth-century comparative mythology.

Naga · Serpent People — Mythical half-human, half-serpent beings

The Naga (Sanskrit nāga, 'serpent') is a semi-divine serpent-being of Indian and Southeast Asian mythology, depicted as a human-cobra hybrid: human torso above, vast coiled serpent body below, often crowned with multiple hoods. Nagas guard rivers, lakes, wells, and the subterranean realm of Patala, summon monsoon rains, and hoard treasure in jewel-encrusted underground palaces. In Hinduism, Vishnu sleeps on the cosmic serpent Shesha amid the milk-ocean; Shiva wears Vasuki coiled around his neck. In Buddhism, the naga-king Mucalinda sheltered the freshly enlightened Buddha for seven days beneath his seven hoods. In Jainism, the twenty-third Tirthankara Parshvanatha is always depicted with a seven-headed naga halo. Across Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos, multi-headed naga balustrades flank every temple stairway, and Angkor Wat's seven- and nine-headed naga causeways link the human and divine realms.

Pegasus · Winged Horse — A Legendary Creature from Greek Mythology

Pegasus (Greek Pegasos) is the winged horse of Greek myth, born from the blood of Medusa when Perseus severed her head and the blood mingled with the foam of the sea. His brother, born in the same moment, is the golden-sworded giant Chrysaor. Hesiod's Theogony 280-286 derives the name from Greek pege ('spring' or 'fountain'), where the foam from which Pegasus rose was conceived as a marine spring. The hero Bellerophon, given a golden bridle by Athena, tamed Pegasus at the spring of Peirene in Corinth and together they slew the Chimera, his most celebrated exploit. The spring of Hippocrene ('horse-spring') on Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses, is said to have sprung where Pegasus struck the ground with his hoof, making him also the emblem of poetic inspiration. When Bellerophon, grown proud, tried to ride Pegasus up to Olympus, Zeus sent a gadfly that stung the horse and threw the hero, but Pegasus reached Olympus safely and became the bearer of Zeus's thunderbolts. He is fixed in the heavens as the constellation Pegasus.

Cerberus · Infernal Gatekeeper — Legendary triple-headed hound

The colossal three-headed hound of Greek myth, set at the gate of the underworld of Hades. In Hesiod's Theogony 310-318 (c. 700 BCE) he is the offspring of the great monsters Typhon and Echidna, sibling of the Hydra, the Chimera, and Orthos; Hesiod gives him fifty heads, but from Pindar and Stesichorus in the fifth century BCE the canonical three-headed form has been standard (Apollodorus, Library 2.5.12, 1st-2nd c. CE). His task is two-way: he prevents the dead from rising and the living from descending. The twelfth and last of the labours of Heracles was to bring Cerberus alive from the underworld; Virgil's Aeneid 6.417-425 (19 BCE) shows the Sibyl casting a honey-and-drugged cake to send the three heads at once to sleep, and Dante in Inferno 6.13-33 (c. 1308-1320) sets him as the warden of the gluttonous in the third circle of Hell. J. K. Rowling's three-headed Fluffy in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Bloomsbury, 1997), who is sent to sleep by music, is a direct descendant of the same canonical motif.

Borges's Imaginary Stag-Bird Hybrid

The Peryton is a composite imaginary beast introduced as a canonical entry by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero in their Manual de zoologia fantastica (1957). It has the body and head of a stag and the dark plumed wings of an enormous bird, but its most striking feature is that the shadow it casts under the sun is not its own: it is the shadow of a human being. Borges presents the entry by citing a fictitious sixteenth-century manuscript of an Arab physician at Fez, together with a fictitious fragment of the Erythraean Sibyl preserved at Ravenna, from which we learn that the Peryton was once human and only after killing one mortal acquires the right to cast its own shadow. The 1967 expanded edition El libro de los seres imaginarios, translated into English by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in 1969, fixed the Peryton in fantasy literature; in 1983 Gary Gygax canonised it as a Dungeons and Dragons monster in the Monster Manual II.

Persian Legendary Lion-Man-Scorpion Hybrid

The Manticore (Persian martyaxwar, 'man-eater') is a composite beast of ancient Persian tradition, with the body of a lion, the face of a human, and the tail of a scorpion. The earliest Greek reference is in the Indika of Ctesias of Knidos (fourth century BCE), a Greek physician at the Persian court, who describes it as an Indian man-eater with blue eyes, three rows of shark-like teeth, and a tail that shoots venomous spines like arrows. Ctesias' account is hearsay he gathered at the Persian court; later scholars have read it as a Greek interpretation of the Indian tiger overlaid with Persian-Indian mythic elements. Pliny's Natural History and Aelian's De natura animalium expanded the description, and Isidore of Seville's Etymologies fixed the Latin manticora. From the twelfth-century Aberdeen Bestiary and MS Bodley 764 onward, the manticore became a standard image in medieval bestiaries, then a heraldic emblem of cruelty and cannibalism. Gary Gygax's 1977 Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual added bat-wings and standardised the modern fantasy manticore.

Charybdis · Oceanic Monster — The Devouring Whirlpool

A monstrous sea-creature of Greek myth who lives at the foot of a narrow cliff in the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Daughter of Poseidon and Gaia in the later tradition, she was changed into a creature by the wrath of Zeus; three times a day she draws the dark sea down into a vast whirlpool and again belches it back, swallowing every ship and creature that comes too near. In Homer's Odyssey book 12 (c. eighth century BCE) Odysseus must pass between Charybdis and the six-headed Skylla on the opposite cliff, and from that ordeal comes the English idiom 'between Scylla and Charybdis' for an unwinnable choice.

Valkyrie · Warrior Maidens — Choosers of the Slain in Norse Mythology

Valkyrie (Old Norse Valkyrja — 'chooser of the slain', English Valkyrie) is the female semi-divine being of Norse mythology — the decisive canon — who guides the souls of warriors to the war god Odin (Odin), derived from the Old Norse 'valr (the slain)' + 'kjósa (to choose)' meaning 'chooser of the slain (chooser of the slain)' — the decisive canonical vocabulary — the decisive canonical iconographic figure who decides who falls gloriously on the battlefield and guides the souls of dead heroes to the gods' hall Valhalla (Valhalla) to gather the army (Einherjar) for the final war of Ragnarok. Aliases — Valkyrja (Valkyrja), Walküre (Walküre, German), chooser of the slain, Odin's handmaid, Dísir (Dísir) — are the decisive canonical vocabulary. The decisive textual canon is the decisive origin canon of the Völuspá (Völuspá), Grímnismál (Grímnismál), and Helgakviða Hundingsbana (Helgakviða Hundingsbana) of the Poetic Edda (Poetic Edda) in the Codex Regius (Codex Regius) of c. 1270, and the decisive canon of Gylfaginning (Gylfaginning) Chapter 36 of the Prose Edda (Prose Edda) of Snorri Sturluson (Snorri Sturluson) of c. 1220.