Beast

Serpent-bodied Enchantress · Seductress and Devourer in Greek Mythology

A monster of Greek myth, the upper body a beautiful woman and the lower body that of a great serpent. Once the beautiful queen of Libya and a lover of Zeus, she was driven by Hera's jealousy to the loss of all her children, and from her grief and rage was changed into a creature that, by night, steals and devours the children of other mothers (Diodorus Siculus, Library 20.41, 1st c. BCE). Hera further denied her sleep by cursing one of her eyes to remain forever open, and she carries her eyes out in a bowl when she leaves home (Plutarch, On Curiosity 2). Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana 4.25 (3rd c. CE) tells how a Lamia seduced the young Menippus, and was unmasked at the wedding feast by the philosopher Apollonius — the source which John Keats reworked in his poem Lamia (Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, Taylor & Hessey, 1820), turning her into a tragic figure of love and revealed truth.

Strix · Night Bird — Vampiric Bird of Ancient European Myth

A vampiric bird-creature of Roman and Greek myth, a nocturnal raptor that creeps into the bedrooms of sleeping infants to drink their blood and entrails. It is described variously as a witch transformed into a bird, or as a demon born in the shape of a bird. The most canonical account is Ovid's Fasti 6.131-168 (c. 8 CE), which depicts it as 'with a large head, staring eyes, a beak fit for plunder, grey feathers and curved talons', and describes the ritual of the goddess Carna with hawthorn branches that protected the newborn king Procas. Etymologically the figure is the direct ancestor of the later European vampire tradition — Romanian Strigoi, Italian strega 'witch', French stryge — all of which descend from the Latin strix.

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.

Seventh Labor of Heracles in Greek Myth

The Cretan Bull (Greek Tauros Kretikos, Latin Taurus Cretensis) is the great sacred bull of Greek myth, the target of the seventh of Heracles' Twelve Labours and of Theseus' Marathonian exploit — one of the rare beasts to appear in the cycles of two major heroes. The bull was originally sent by Poseidon to King Minos of Crete as a sign of royal legitimacy, with the understanding that Minos would sacrifice it back to the sea-god. Minos kept the beast and substituted another for the sacrifice, and the angered Poseidon caused Minos' queen Pasiphae to fall in love with the bull. Using a wooden cow constructed by the master craftsman Daedalus, Pasiphae mated with the bull and bore the Minotaur. The bull then ran mad across Crete until Heracles caught it bare-handed and brought it across the sea to Mycenae as his seventh labour; released there, it wandered to the plain of Marathon, where Theseus subdued it and offered it at the Athenian temple of Apollo.

King of Serpents in Medieval European Legend

The Basilisk (Greek basiliskos 'little king', Latin basiliscus) is the legendary serpent-king of Greco-Roman natural history and medieval European bestiaries. The first detailed description is in Pliny the Elder's Natural History VIII.33 (c. 77-79 CE), where the basilisk is a small serpent twelve fingers long (about 23 cm) inhabiting the deserts of Cyrene in North Africa, with a crown-shaped white mark on its head, whose hiss alone scatters all other snakes; whose gaze kills any creature that meets it; whose breath withers grass and shatters stone; and whose corpse is still venomous — Pliny relates an anecdote of a horseman who pierced one with a spear, only for the venom to travel up the shaft and kill rider and horse alike. From the twelfth century onward, English bestiaries such as the Aberdeen Bestiary and MS Bodley 764 reshaped the figure into a hybrid with the head, wings, and feet of a rooster and the tail of a snake, identifying it with the cockatrice. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998) made the basilisk a canonical figure of modern fantasy.

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.

Two-Headed Serpent of Greek Myth

The Amphisbaena (Greek Amphisbaina, 'going both ways') is a legendary two-headed serpent of Greek and Roman myth, possessing a head at each end of its body and able to travel in either direction. Its name derives from Greek amphis (both ways) and bainein (to go). The Roman poet Lucan's Pharsalia describes the Amphisbaena among the desert serpents born when Perseus carried the head of Medusa over Libya and her blood dripped onto the sand. Pliny the Elder, Natural History VIII.35, notes drily that the Amphisbaena is the only serpent with two heads, 'as if a single mouth were not enough to release its poison'. The motif entered medieval bestiaries and heraldry as a standard charge, and was canonised again in Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings (1957). Folk medicine credited its skin and living body with talismanic powers, particularly to protect pregnant women.

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.

Sphinx · Guardian of Riddles — Hybrid of Human and Lion

The Sphinx (Greek Sphinx, Egyptian shesep-ankh) is a mythic composite of human head and lion body, developed in two parallel traditions. The Egyptian Sphinx, usually a wingless male with the head of a pharaoh, served as guardian of temples and tombs, exemplified by the Great Sphinx of Giza (73 m long, 20 m high), carved from a single limestone outcrop in the reign of Khafre around 2530 BCE. The Greek Sphinx, by contrast, is a winged female with a savage temper who took her station outside Thebes in Boeotia and devoured travellers who could not answer her riddle. When Oedipus solved her riddle, 'What walks on four legs at dawn, two at noon, and three at evening?', answering 'Man', the Sphinx hurled herself from her cliff. From this Egyptian-Greek synthesis the Sphinx became the archetype of the guardian-tester: wisdom and threat, protection and danger, fused in a single hybrid body.

Nue · Chimera — Legendary Japanese Monster

The Nue (Japanese Nue) is the canonical iconographic figure of the Heian-period Japanese chimeric yokai, possessed of the face of a monkey, the body of a raccoon dog (tanuki) or wildcat, the legs of a tiger, and the tail of a snake — one of the most mysterious composite yokai of Japanese legend. The name derives from the archaic Japanese name of the indigenous bird White's thrush (Zoothera dauma, in Japanese tora-tsugumi), whose sad and uncanny cry, when heard, is said in the canon to portend disaster — the canonical bird of the Onmyodo (Yin-Yang Way) belief of the Heian Imperial court. The iconographic origin is the Onmyodo belief of the Heian period (794-1185) and the canonised gunki-mono (military-tale) tradition of the late twelfth century. The decisive textual source is the chapter Nue in Book 4 of the early thirteenth-century Heike Monogatari (Tale of the Heike), the decisive canon of Japanese gunki-mono: in the spring of 1153 a black cloud appeared every dawn over the Heian-kyo Imperial Court from the eastern mountains and disturbed the sleep of Emperor Konoe (reigned 1139-1155), causing his illness; Minamoto no Yorimasa (1104-1180), the greatest archer of the Heian period, shot the nue down from within the black cloud — the decisive textual canon of the Nue legend. The 1779 yokai catalogue Konjaku Gazu Zoku Hyakki by Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788) established the visual canon of the Nue.