Mythical Creatures of the World

From the dragon coiled beneath a Welsh mountain to the Kappa sliding through a Japanese river, from the Kelpie haunting a Scottish loch to the Quetzalcoatl gliding above a Mesoamerican pyramid, the peoples of the world have always shared their world with beings that cannot be weighed or measured. This bestiary gathers those creatures — the dragons, serpents, water beings, forest spirits, household beings, giants, faeries, undead, demons, and impossible hybrids — into a single cross-continental survey of what the human imagination has long insisted is real.

The following pages explore the three great families of beings that recur in nearly every folk tradition: the great serpents and dragons described under Dragons Around the World; the river, lake, and sea dwellers catalogued under Water Beings; and the wild figures of the woods and high places collected under Forest Spirits. Each of those section pages branches into deeper, more specific entries.

What is a mythical creature?

A mythical creature is a being whose existence is accepted within a particular tradition, but whose body, behaviour, or origin cannot be reconciled with the categories of ordinary biology. The term covers a vast range of cases: dragons that hoard gold, faeries that dance at midnight, the household spirit that lives behind the stove, the small blue men of a high mountain valley, the winged lion of an Assyrian gate, the headless man with a face on his chest. The English word mythical comes from the Greek mythos, meaning story, and the creatures are preserved in the stories a culture tells itself about the world it lives in.

The folklorist Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928), argued that the real subject of a wondertale is not the hero or the princess, but the function the villain or helper performs. A dragon is, in his scheme, a villain who blocks access to a missing princess or a hidden treasure; a magical horse is a helper who carries the hero across a threshold. By this reading, the creatures matter less for their zoology than for the roles they play in the grammar of a story. Yet the creatures stubbornly exceed the roles assigned to them. The Norse Jörmungandr is also a creature of eschatology, encircling the world and signalling the coming of Ragnarök. The Aztec Quetzalcoatl is also a wind god and a culture-bringer. The Slavic Rusalka is also a dead girl, mourned and feared, who returns to the riverbank in early summer. The creature is a story, but it is also a theology, an ecology, and a memory.

Folk belief, natural history, and the edge of the real

Most mythical creatures began as explanations for things that the local science could not account for: the rumour of an enormous snake in a flood, the bones of a mammoth mistaken for a giant’s, the wind in the reeds taken for a voice, the flicker of a fox’s eyes in the dark taken for a will-o’-the-wisp. The medieval bestiaries of Europe, descendants of the Greek Physiologus of the second century AD, treated the dragon, the phoenix, the unicorn, and the basilisk as real animals, even when describing them in terms that no naturalist would recognise. The Aberdeen Bestiary (c. 1200) describes the dragon as “the largest of all serpents, or of all living things on the earth,” and notes that it is hatched from an egg laid by a rooster and incubated by a toad — a conviction repeated in the Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 and in the dragons of the legend of St Margaret of Antioch.

A similar mixture of zoology and wonder appears in every other tradition. The Chinese Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), compiled in fragments between the fourth century BC and the fourth century AD, catalogues four hundred and fifty mountains, three hundred rivers, and several hundred creatures, including the nine-tailed fox, the bird whose shadow wards off arrows, and the Kun, a fish so vast that, when transformed, it becomes the bird Peng, whose wings span the sky. Indian bestiaries, drawing on the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, accept the Nāga, the garuda, the gandharva, and the rakshasa as a population that co-exists with humans in a layered cosmos. Mesoamerican codexes, in turn, place Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca not in a separate plane of the unreal, but in a real but exalted tier of the same world that humans inhabit.

The persistence of the creatures in the face of advancing natural history is one of the most striking facts about them. When Linnaeus published the Systema Naturae in 1735, he intended to catalogue every living thing, and in doing so to expel the phoenix, the dragon, and the mermaid from the catalogue. The creatures were expelled, and they did not go away. They moved sideways, into the new genres of folkloristics, comparative mythology, and the novel of the nineteenth century, and from there into the modern fantasy, the role-playing game, and the cinema. The Welsh dragon Y Ddraig Goch is on the flag of Wales, the European dragon is a fundamental piece of the Dungeons & Dragons bestiary, and the Kappa of Japan appears in manga and on amulets sold at Shinto shrines.

A taxonomy of beings

The creatures of world folklore are not a heap. They cluster into families whose members recur across cultures, and a useful first pass sorts them by element, function, and habitat.

Dragons and great serpents are the most widespread of the families, and the most varied. The European dragon of Beowulf, Siegfried, and St George is a winged, fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding quadruped, kin to the crocodile. The Chinese Lung dragon is a long, scaled, wingless, weather-controlling serpent, kin to the river, the rain cloud, and the imperial throne. The Mesoamerican feathered serpent is a god of wind, learning, and the morning star. The Aboriginal Australian Rainbow Serpent is a creator. The Yoruba Aido-Hwedo, the great cosmic serpent, supports the world and eats the cast-iron disc of the sun at dusk so that the sun may be remade at dawn. The family is unified not by body plan but by a shared sense of bigness, of age, of being older than humans, and of being sacred.

Water beings — mermaids, mermen, kelpies, nixies, rusalki, the Japanese Kappa, the West African Mami Wata, the Polynesian fish-tailed Tangaroa, the Yacuruna of the Amazon — share the green element. They are usually beautiful, usually dangerous, usually female, and almost always the bringers of either love or drowning. The mermaid of the Caribbean, the Melusine of France, and the selkie of the Hebrides trade in the same currency: a body that is half-fish, half-human, and a bargain that always goes wrong.

Forest and mountain spirits — the Slavic Leshy, the Himalayan Yeti, the North American Sasquatch, the Australian Yowie, the Caucasus Almas, the Amazon Mapinguari, the Wild Man of medieval Europe, the green man of the cathedrals — are the dwellers of the threshold. They are the world that human habitation has not yet cleared. They are also, often, the more-than-human relative.

Household beings — the Slavic Domovoi, the German Kobold, the Scandinavian Nisse or Tomte, the English brownie, the Welsh coblynau, the Scottish Red Cap — are the small guardians of the home. They expect a bowl of milk, a saucer of porridge, a corner of the kitchen, and a good word. They punish neglect.

Giants — the Norse Jotun, the Greek Titans, the Irish Fomorians, the Vedic Asuras, the Japanese Oni — are the older gods or the older enemies. They are the size of the world before the world was measured.

Faeries — the Tuatha Dé Danann of Ireland, the Tylwyth Teg of Wales, the fee of France, the fay of England, the vilia of Slavic tradition, the peri of Persia — are the old gods in their diminished, beautiful, and dangerous form. They have moved, in most European traditions, from the open field to the barrow, the hollow hill, the fairy ring, and the mist.

Undead beings — the vampire, the ghoul, the revenant, the draugar, the Jiangshi, the penanggalan — are the bodies of the dead that do not stay down. They are the strongest single example of a creature that belongs to folk religion and to the modern horror genre in equal measure, and the vampire of Eastern Europe is the family’s most famous member.

Demons and djinn — the djinn of Arabian and North African tradition, the oni of Japan, the daeva of Persia, the asura of the later Hindu tradition — are the beings of a moral ambiguity. The djinn of the desert can be good or evil, Muslim or pagan, bound by a ring of brass or free in the wind.

Hybrid creatures — the sphinx, the griffin, the manticore, the chimera, the hippocampus, the lamassu of Assyria, the garuda of India, the pixiu of China, the camazotz of the Maya — are the combinations. They are the moments when the bestiary tries to express something the world does not contain, and so it combines the parts of things it does.

The European bestiary

The European tradition begins in the bestiary. The Greek Physiologus (c. 200 AD) gathered twenty-four animals, each paired with a Christian moral. The Latin Bestiarius that followed, and the richly illuminated bestiaries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the Aberdeen, the Ashmole, the Sherborne, the Northumberland — gave the medieval reader a zoology in which the dragon was a snake, the unicorn was a horse with a horn, and the phoenix was a bird that burned and rose again. The bestiary was a Christian text, but it drew on Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia (77 AD), which in turn drew on Aristotle, on Egyptian temple-lore, and on the travellers’ reports of the Hellenistic world.

The dragon of the European bestiary is unambiguous: large, often winged, breathing fire, living in a cave, guarding a treasure, and doomed to be killed by a hero or a saint. The English Beowulf dies killing the dragon after taking its hoard. The Norse Sigurd, on the advice of the dwarven smith Regin, slays the dragon Fáfnir and eats its heart. The Greek Apollo kills Python at Delphi and takes the oracle. St George, in the legend that begins in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1260), rescues a princess of Libya from a dragon by making the sign of the cross. St Michael, in the Book of Revelation, defeats a dragon identified as the devil. Margaret of Antioch tames a dragon with her girdle. Even in the naturalised, post-bestialiary world of the twentieth century, the dragon remained the shape of an old enemy — a thing to be slain, ideally by a hero, sometimes by a saint, occasionally by a clever man with a wile.

The medieval bestiary also included creatures that were not part of the Christian economy at all. The Wild Man of the Woods — the homo sylvestris — was a hairy, naked, mute figure who lived outside the village and was sometimes hostile, sometimes benign. He was a figure of the moral imagination as much as of the forest, the natural man in the wild, and his descendants include the green man of the churchyard carvings, the Sasquatch, and the filmic Bigfoot. The faeries of the medieval French lais of Marie de France — the gwas, the bisclavret, the werewolf — are an entirely different kind of creature, and yet they are part of the same medieval zoology.

The Chinese, Indian, and East Asian bestiaries

The bestiary is not a European invention. The Chinese Shan Hai Jing is the oldest of the world-bestiaries, and the Chinese dragon is the most elaborate of all the dragons. The Lung (or Long) is a long, sinuous, four-legged, scaled, antlered, pearl-chasing, weather-controlling being, closely related to rivers, rain, the imperial throne, and the year. The Lung Wang, the Dragon King, presides over the four seas, and a Dragon Boat Festival is held in his honour in the fifth lunar month. The Nine-Dragon Wall in the Forbidden City, the dragon-roofed halls of every Chinese temple, and the dragon-embroidered robes of the Qing emperors are the most visible evidence of the dragon’s reach.

The Indian Nāga is a great serpent, sometimes with one head, sometimes with many, sometimes with a human face, sometimes crowned. The Nāga is the king of the snakes, the guardian of treasure, the holder of occult knowledge, and the patron of the water. The Nāga king Shesha (also called Ananta, the infinite) supports the world on his thousand hoods. The Hindu god Vishnu reclines on Shesha between cycles of creation. The Buddhist Nāga Mucalinda shelters the meditating Buddha from a storm with his coils. The Nāga is also a being of the village: in Kerala and in parts of South India, a five-hooded stone serpent is still installed in a family shrine, fed milk and rice, and consulted at weddings and births.

The Japanese Ryū is kin to the Chinese Lung, and the Japanese Kappa is a small, water-dwelling, river-imp of the kind discussed in the water beings family. The Hindu Rakshasa, the Buddhist Asura, the Zoroastrian Daeva, the Persian div, the Turkic Albastı, and the Arabian ghul are the beings of a moral imagination that has spent two thousand years negotiating the boundary between the divine and the demonic.

The African bestiary

The African bestiary is older than the European bestiary in some of its forms. The rock art of the Sahara, painted between 6000 and 2000 BC, includes therianthropes — figures that are part human, part animal — and these are among the earliest mythical creatures known. The Yoruba of Nigeria and Benin have a rich and still-living bestiary, including the Aja (great serpents), the Iwin (dwarf spirits), the Emere (mermen and mermaids), and the Egbere (sylvan spirits). The Mami Wata of the West African coast, half-fish, half-human, is depicted in the famous Mami Wata paintings of the late twentieth century, and her image is exported across the Atlantic in the syncretic Vodou of Haiti and the Candomblé of Brazil. The Mami Wata water spirits are a striking case of a creature that is also a cult, an icon, and a trade good.

The North African bestiary, centred on the Maghreb and on Egypt, is dominated by the djinn of the Quran, the ghul of the desert, and the sila of the Atlas Mountains. The djinn of the desert are the most powerful of the family, a category of being older than Islam and reabsorbed into it. The South African bestiary includes the Tikoloshe of the Zulu, a short, violent, sexually predatory dwarf-creature of the homestead, and the Aigamuxa of the Khoisan, a sand-dwelling cannibal.

The American bestiary

The American bestiary divides into three principal traditions: the indigenous American, the imported European, and the syncretic Caribbean and Latin American. The indigenous American bestiary includes the Thunderbird of the Plains and the Pacific Northwest, a great winged creature whose wingbeats make the thunder; the Quetzalcoatl of Mesoamerica, the feathered serpent who brings the arts, the calendar, and the morning star; the Moccasin of the Iroquois, the great horned serpent of the eastern woodlands; the Piasa of the Illinois, the painted bird-monster on the river bluffs; the Curupira of the Amazon, the red-haired child of the forest whose feet point backwards; and the Mapinguari, the Amazonian sloth-creature described in colonial Brazilian sources and still reported by rubber-tappers and indigenous hunters.

The imported European bestiary arrived with the colonial period and the slave trade, and it carried the dragon, the faery, the witch, the vampire, and the sea-monster. The European creatures were sometimes re-absorbed: the colonial-Caribbean Chupacabra of the twentieth century is a hybrid of imported vampire and indigenous folk-creature, and the Mothman of Point Pleasant is a hybrid of imported moddey dhoo (the Manx black dog) and the local Appalachian story of the 1960s. The American bestiary is therefore a palimpsest.

The modern survival of the creatures

The mythical creatures have not gone away. They live, in the twenty-first century, in the fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien (whose dragons, including Glaurung and Smaug, descend directly from the Beowulf dragon), Ursula K. Le Guin, and Robin Hobb; in the game of Dungeons & Dragons (whose dragon classification — black, blue, green, white, red, gold, silver, bronze — is one of the most popular bestiaries ever constructed); in the A Song of Ice and Fire cycle of George R.R. Martin and the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones, which blends the European dragon of Beowulf and the Asian dragon of Dungeons & Dragons into a single beast; in the Harry Potter novels of J.K. Rowling; in the Monsterverse films of Legendary Pictures (Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra); in the How to Train Your Dragon films of DreamWorks; and in the Pokémon franchise, whose first generation is itself a bestiary in the strict sense.

The creatures also live, less visibly, in the daily life of the modern world. The Welsh dragon Y Ddraig Goch is on the flag of Wales, painted on the wall of Cardiff Castle, and worn on the cap of every Welsh rugby and football supporter. The Japanese Kappa is a charm for children sold at summer festivals. The Chinese dragon is a Lunar New Year parade, a dragon boat, and a perfume brand. The Slavic Domovoi is a small wooden figure sold in Russian souvenir markets as a house-god. The Norse Mjölnir is a pendant sold in airport gift shops from Reykjavik to Sydney. The imaginary creatures, in other words, have become part of the working furniture of identity.

The dragon and the founding hero

The dragon is, in most traditions, the opponent of a founding hero. The Babylonian Marduk defeats the dragon Tiamat in the Enuma Elish (c. 1200 BC) and creates the world from her body. The Hittite storm god slays the serpent Illuyanka in the Anatolian myth of the dragon-slaying. The Greek Zeus casts the hundred-headed Typhon into Tartarus, and Apollo shoots the Python at Delphi. The Vedic Indra slays the serpent Vritra to release the waters, an act the Brahmins called the ahi-bhakta, the dragon-sacrifice. The Christian St Michael casts the dragon identified as the devil into the abyss, in the Book of Revelation 12. The Chinese hero Yu the Great tames the flood by controlling the Dragon King of the four rivers; the Japanese storm god Susanoo slays the Yamata no Orochi, the eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent, to free a maiden of the Izumo; the Aztec Quetzalcoatl descends into the underworld to retrieve the bones of the previous humanity, in a myth that is the Mesoamerican dragon-quest in the strict sense. The hero who meets a dragon is, almost always, a founder: the dragon is the older thing that the founder must face in order to remake the world.

The creature as a mirror

The deepest reading of the mythical creature is that it is a mirror. The European dragon is the strong thing that the hero must kill in order to inherit a country: a comment on the founding act of monarchy. The Asian dragon is the beneficent power that fills the rivers and the clouds: a comment on the dependency of the rice field on the rain. The Quetzalcoatl is the morning star that the priests of Tula and Cholula served and the city of Teotihuacan honoured. The Kelpie of the loch is the beauty that the Highlander should not trust, and is also the loch itself. The Mami Wata is the trade good, the wealth, the foreign goods that came up the river to the village; she is also the foreign wife. The Sasquatch is the continent before the settlers came; it is also the settler, displaced, grown hairy, returned to the woods.

This mirror-reading has limits. It can be a thin explanation. The most powerful of the creatures — the dragon of Beowulf, the Kelpie of Loch an Ruathair, the Quetzalcoatl of Cholula — exceed the symbolic reading, and they survive the reading precisely because they exceed it. The bestiary, in the end, is the most basic of all the human arts of memory: it is the catalogue of the things we do not know, written in the form of the things we say we have seen.

Mythical Creatures of the World

In this section

Dragons Around the World

Forest Spirits

Water Beings