Animal Symbolism

Animals mean different things to different people, depending on culture and on circumstance. Ancient observers took an animal's habits and its body and tied them to gods and to the spirit world. Some animals came to be read as good fortune, some as danger on the way, some as protection, and some as almost any other human wish.

Mythical animals are among the most used of these signs. The stories around them answered things people could not otherwise explain. Two of the largest already have their own pages: the dragon, master of the elements, teacher and destroyer at once, and the phoenix, the bird that rises from its own ash as rebirth, hope, and a triumph over death. Birds as a group are often taken as messengers between the ground and the spirit world. The creatures below are the ones that did not yet have a page.

Griffin

A griffin, also written griffon, is half eagle and half lion. That double body makes it one of the most contradictory animals in the bestiary. It has been called both good and evil, guardian and punisher, Satan and Christ. It has also been read as the meeting of cosmic force and psychic energy, and as spiritual enlightenment, the seasons, the sun, the earth, the sky, Apollo, and Nemesis.

Unicorn

The unicorn appears in both eastern and western myth. Descriptions differ, but the usual picture is a horse with one horn, often pure white, so that purity is the meaning before any other. It is wild, and strong, and cannot be tamed except by a true virgin. The horn was said to detect poison and to heal sickness.

Butterfly

The butterfly is read, almost everywhere, as new life, resurrection, transformation, and regeneration. In some places butterflies are the souls of the dead, waiting for a last change. Elsewhere the habit of moving from flower to flower, and staying only briefly, is taken as instability and as a shallow kind of beauty.