GRYPHON
Party up front, more party in the back. That's the gryphon for ya. But there's so much more.
We've covered many hybrid creatures in the Creature Feature, but perhaps none as iconic as the gryphon. Typically pictured with the back legs and tail of a lion with the head, wings and talons of an eagle, the gryphon is kind of like the kelpie in its weird Frankenstein body. Ancient Greek texts dating back to the 7th century BC associate the beasts with gold deposits in central Asia. Pliny the Elder, sort of the Roman Darwin of his day noted for writing the literal template for all encyclopedias, first described gryphons as having wings. Though other authors tended to disagree, the image of the gryphon with wings eventually won out and proliferated—probably because it looks cool as hell.
But all this begs the question: were gryphons just the fantasies of Greeks, Romans and Mesopotamians trying to one-up each other on creating the raddest creature? Or were they real? Poetry accounts from the regions of modern-day China, Mongolia and India refer to gryphons hoarding and guarding gold. Some writings spoke of four-legged birds, and others around the same time period gave descriptions of gold-gathering ants which some scholars think were garbled and mixed up with the descriptions of gryphons. But ants are a long way from freaky eagle-lions. Some said gryphons laid eggs in burrows with gold nuggets. That gets us into a whole discussion of gryphon reproductive anatomy because if the back half is a mammalian lion, then what the hell is going on with the eggs? Seems like everyone had their own ideas.
This brings us to the symbolism. Akin to the blind men describing an elephant, the disparate and far-fetched accounts of gryphons made it so nobody quite knew what these creatures were, but everyone knew pieces of them. This only added to its mystique. And so, exotic animal artifacts said to belong to gryphons became coveted. Think eagle talons or peacock feathers or ostrich eggs. What was somebody going to say? Hey, isn't this an eagle talon? You could simply reply, No, dipshit, it's a GRYPHON feather, and then jack up your price due to their idiocy. And, where value comes into play, so too does iconography. We start seeing gryphons on crests and seals, claims of these artifacts as cures to various ailments all the way to blindness, gryphons as symbols of wealth, security, heraldry. The list goes on. Because of its broad description and piecemeal attributes, the gryphon could kind of be whatever you wanted and nobody could argue. It's in many ways the ultimate folklore Voltron. So, what lore will you assemble?
See you out there.
