manticore

Manticore illustration from The History of Four-footed Beasts (1607)

The manticore (Baricos in Greek) is a legendary creature similar to the Egyptian sphinx. It has the body of a red lion, a human head with three rows of sharp teeth (like a shark), and a trumpet-like voice. Other aspects of the creature vary from story to story. It may be horned, winged, or both. The tail is that of either a dragon or a scorpion, and it may shoot poisonous spines to either paralyze or kill its victims. The creature's feet may also be of a dragon.

Origin

The manticore myth was of Persian origin, where its name was "man-eater" (from early Middle Persian martya "man" (as in human) and xwar- "to eat"). The English term "manticore" was borrowed from Latin mantichora, itself borrowed from Greek mantikhoras—an erroneous pronunciation of the original Persian name. It passed into European folklore first through a remark by Ctesias, a Greek physician at the Persian court of King Artaxerxes II in the fourth century BC, in his notes on India ("Indika"), which circulated among Greek writers on natural history but have not survived. The Romanised Greek Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, recalled strange animals he had seen at Rome and commented,

Pliny the Elder did not share Pausanias' skepticism. He followed Aristotle's natural history by including the martichoras—mistranscribed as manticorus in his copy of Aristotle and thus passing into European languages—among his descriptions of animals in Naturalis Historia, c. 77 AD.

Pliny's book was widely enjoyed and uncritically believed through the European Middle Ages, during which the manticore was sometimes illustrated in bestiaries. The manticore made a late appearance in heraldry, during the 16th century, and it influenced some Mannerist representations, as in Bronzino's allegory The Exposure of Luxury, (National Gallery, London)^[1]— but more often in the decorative schemes called "grotteschi"— of the sin of Fraud, conceived as a monstrous chimera with a beautiful woman's face, and in this way it passed by means of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia into the seventeenth and eighteenth century French conception of a sphinx.

A manticore features as medieval sixteenth century graffiti on the wall of North Cerney church in Gloucestershire; it was seen as an unholy hybrid of the zodiacal signs Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius^[2]

In modern fiction

Canadian writer Robertson Davies wrote a novel entitled The Manticore, published in 1972. It is the second volume of his "Deptford trilogy," which begins with Fifth Business and concludes with World of Wonders. The manticore figures into protagonist David's psychoanalysis under Jungian analyst Dr. Johanna Von Haller. Interpreted as a beast with a human face, or as part beast part human, David's dream of the manticore is reflective of himself and the roles he plays interacting with other people and society.^[3] The manticore is also the creature that defeats Tarkus in the Emerson, Lake and Palmer opera.It was also in Rick Riordan's The Titan's Curse, the third book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians Saga. Power Rangers Mystic Force also has a Megazord called the Manticore Megazord, although that is not an actual manticore. J.K. Rowling references the manticore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are searching for cases of maurading beasts to help Buckbeak the hippogriff.

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Manticore

External links

• The Medieval Bestiary: Manticore

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