Deities, monsters and entities from the mythological traditions of the ancient and indigenous world.
Valkyries (Valkyrjur, from Old Norse valr, "the slain," and kjósa, "to choose") are supernatural female figures in Norse and Germanic mythology who ride over battlefields and select which warriors will die and which will survive, then escort the chosen dead to Valhöll (Valhalla), the hall of the slain god Odin. Simultaneously war-spirits, ...
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Quetzalcoatl (Quetzalcōātl in Classical Nahuatl — "feathered serpent" or "precious twin") is one of the most important and complex deities in Mesoamerican religion, appearing in some form across more than a thousand years of pre-Columbian cultures from the Toltec period (c. 900–1150 CE) through the Aztec Empire (c. 1300–1521 CE) and in Maya tr...
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The phoenix is a mythological bird of extraordinary beauty and longevity that periodically combusts in fire and is reborn from its own ashes. It is one of the most globally distributed mythological figures, appearing in closely related forms across ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican traditions, making it a...
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The Minotaur — Minotauros, "Bull of Minos" — is the monstrous offspring of Pasiphae, queen of Crete, and a sacred bull sent by the god Poseidon. Half-human, half-bull, the creature was confined in the Labyrinth built by the craftsman Daedalus beneath the palace of Knossos and was fed an annual tribute of Athenian youths and maidens until slain...
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Medusa (Greek: Μέδουσα, Médousa, "guardian" or "protectress") is one of the most enduring figures in Greek mythology — a Gorgon whose gaze turned onlookers to stone, slain by the hero Perseus who used her own reflection against her. In ancient Greek tradition she was one of three Gorgon sisters (Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa), the only mortal am...
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Leviathan (Livyatan in Hebrew — possibly from lawa, "to coil") is the great sea monster of the Hebrew Bible, a creature of such overwhelming power that it functions as a symbol of primordial chaos, divine sovereignty, and the terrifying limits of human comprehension. It appears in Job, Psalms, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, and has been compared to Lo...
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Kali (Kālī — "the black one," or from kāla, "time" or "death") is one of the most powerful and iconographically distinctive figures in the Hindu tradition: a goddess of time, death, transformation, liberation, and fearsome power. She is simultaneously one of the most misunderstood figures in cross-cultural religious scholarship — frequently ...
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The dragon is arguably the most universally distributed mythological creature on earth — a large, serpentine or reptilian being of supernatural power appearing in some form in virtually every major culture from ancient Mesopotamia to pre-Columbian America. Despite this ubiquity, "the dragon" is not a single consistent entity: European and East A...
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Cerberus is the multi-headed dog who guards the entrance to the Greek underworld (Hades), preventing the living from entering and the dead from leaving. Typically depicted with three heads — though Hesiod originally gave him fifty — Cerberus is one of the most recognisable figures in classical mythology and one of the most persistent symbols of ...
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Anubis (Inpw in ancient Egyptian, rendered in Greek as Anoubis) is the jackal-headed god of the dead, embalming, cemeteries, and the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion. He is one of the oldest and most enduring figures in the Egyptian pantheon, attested from the First Dynasty (c. 3100 BCE) and remaining prominent through the Ptolemaic and ...
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