Beyond Egypt, cultures living alongside crocodiles and their close relatives have generally read the animal through the same ambivalence: too dangerous to romanticize, too powerful to leave unacknowledged. In parts of West Africa and among some Aboriginal Australian groups, crocodiles appear as ancestral or totemic figures bound up with clan identity and creation narratives, treated with genuine respect rather than the more purely monstrous framing crocodiles sometimes receive in traditions that encountered them only as a threat.
The throughline across these otherwise distinct traditions is not affection but recognition: an animal capable of killing a person without warning, living at the boundary between water and land, tends to be given a religious role that acknowledges its danger directly rather than one that domesticates it into a purely comforting symbol.
Mesoamerican cosmology gives the crocodilian a larger role still. Cipactli, the first of the twenty day signs of the Aztec tonalpohualli, is a crocodile or caiman-like earth monster from whose divided body the earth itself was made in one widely recorded creation account, which places the animal not at the edge of the human world but underneath it, as the ground everything else stands on.
Indian art contributes a different reading again through the makara, a composite aquatic creature usually rendered with a crocodilian snout and jaws, which serves as the mount of the river goddess Ganga and appears at thresholds and archways across South and Southeast Asian temple architecture. The makara is not a crocodile portrait, and treating it as one flattens a deliberately hybrid form, but the crocodilian element in it is doing recognisable work: a creature of the water's edge, set where one space gives onto another.