Mythical Creatures

150 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

Creatures from myth, folklore and the bestiaries: dragons, phoenixes, griffins, kitsune, thunderbirds and the rest. Each entry records the culture it belongs to, the kind of being it is, and what the sources actually say about it. Many creatures appear in several traditions in different forms, and a shared name or shape does not always mean a shared origin.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 150

Origins

Whose Classification This Is: The form-based classes are a comparative folklorist's device. Stith Thompson's Motif-Index (revised edition, 1955-58) sorts fabulous beings under B0-B99 by body-plan, as a finding aid for narrative motifs rather than a claim that the creatures belong together. 1

Structure

Structure: Grouped by creature form - dragons, serpents, birds, hybrids, spirits, water-spirits and the rest - which is how comparative folklore indexes arrange fabulous beings, and not how any tradition arranged its own. 1

Status

Standing as a Comparative Category: A collectors' category rather than a comparative one. Michael Dylan Foster shows that Japanese yokai will not sit inside the English "monster" or "mythical creature", and the same holds for most of the traditions gathered here. 2

Sources

Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books and Local Legends Stith Thompson, 1958, B0-B99, Mythical Animals
The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore Michael Dylan Foster, 2015, the introduction, on the difficulty of the category

Learn More

Beings of Myth and the Bestiary

This category gathers the creatures of myth, folklore and the bestiaries who are not gods: dragons, phoenixes, griffins, kitsune, thunderbirds, sea-serpents and the rest. Each entry records the culture the creature belongs to, the kind of being it is, and what the myths and older sources actually say about it.

These are the fabulous inhabitants of the mythic world (guardians and monsters, messengers and shape-shifters, hybrids of human and beast), known from epic, folktale, heraldry and the medieval bestiaries, and from the parallel traditions of many other cultures.

Parallels Without Merger

Similar creatures appear across cultures in related but distinct forms (the winged serpent, the fire-bird, the human-headed lion), and the temptation is to merge them into a single archetype. The atlas resists that: it notes the parallels while keeping each tradition's creature its own, since a Chinese dragon and a European dragon, or a phoenix and a Chinese fenghuang, differ as much as they resemble.

The entries stay with what the sources report rather than with later popular embellishment. The creatures group by kind (dragons, serpents, birds, hybrids, water-spirits and the rest), so a browser can move through the bestiary by type.