This page groups mythical creatures by whether anyone has ever claimed they were real. Wikipedia defines a legendary creature as one that "may be featured in historical accounts before modernity, but has not been scientifically shown to exist." Browsing by historicity lets a visitor separate a creature once treated as a real animal from one always understood as symbolic.
Facts
Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryA collectors' category rather than a comparative one. Michael Dylan Foster shows that Japanese yokai will not sit inside the English "monster" or "mythical creature", and the same holds for most of the traditions gathered here. 2 Origins
Whose Classification This IsThe form-based classes are a comparative folklorist's device. Stith Thompson's Motif-Index (revised edition, 1955-58) sorts fabulous beings under B0-B99 by body-plan, as a finding aid for narrative motifs rather than a claim that the creatures belong together. 1 Structure
StructureGrouped by creature form - dragons, serpents, birds, hybrids, spirits, water-spirits and the rest - which is how comparative folklore indexes arrange fabulous beings, and not how any tradition arranged its own. 1 Learn More
Beings of Myth and the Bestiary
This category gathers the creatures of myth, folklore and the bestiaries who are not gods: dragons, phoenixes, griffins, kitsune, thunderbirds, sea-serpents and the rest. Each entry records the culture the creature belongs to, the kind of being it is, and what the myths and older sources actually say about it.
These are the fabulous inhabitants of the mythic world (guardians and monsters, messengers and shape-shifters, hybrids of human and beast), known from epic, folktale, heraldry and the medieval bestiaries, and from the parallel traditions of many other cultures.
Parallels Without Merger
Similar creatures appear across cultures in related but distinct forms (the winged serpent, the fire-bird, the human-headed lion), and the temptation is to merge them into a single archetype. The atlas resists that: it notes the parallels while keeping each tradition's creature its own, since a Chinese dragon and a European dragon, or a phoenix and a Chinese fenghuang, differ as much as they resemble.
The entries stay with what the sources report rather than with later popular embellishment. The creatures group by kind (dragons, serpents, birds, hybrids, water-spirits and the rest), so a browser can move through the bestiary by type.
Historicity
Sources
1. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books and Local Legends
Stith Thompson, Indiana University Press, 1958B0-B99, Mythical Animals
2. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore
Michael Dylan Foster, University of California Press, 2015the introduction, on the difficulty of the category
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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