Dragon

DRAGON

Dragons are legendary creatures, typically with serpent or reptile, that feature in the myths of many cultures.
The two most familiar interpretations of dragons are European dragons, derived from various European folk traditions and ultimately related to Greek and Middle Eastern mythologies, and the unrelated Oriental dragons, such as the Chinese dragon. The English word "dragon" derives from Greek, "dragon, serpent of huge size, water-snake", which probably comes from the verb "to see clearly".[1]

Dragons are usually shown in modern times with a body like a huge lizard, or a snake with two pairs of lizard-type legs, and able to breathe fire from their mouths. The European dragon has bat-type wings growing from its back. A dragon-like creature with no front legs is known as a wyvern.

Although dragons occur in many legends around the world, different cultures have varying stories about monsters that have been grouped together under the dragon label. Some dragons are said to breathe fire or to be poisonous. They are hatching from eggs and possessing typically scaly or feathered bodies. They are sometimes portrayed as having especially large eyes or watching treasure very diligently. European dragons are more often winged, while Oriental versions of the dragon resemble large snakes. Dragons can have a variable number of legs: none, two, four, or more when it comes to early European literature.

Minotaur

MINOTAUR

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur, as the Greeks imagined him, was a creature with the head of a bull on the body of a man. He dwelt at the center of the Cretan Labyrinth, which was an elaborate maze-like construction built for King Minos of Crete and designed by the architect Daedalus and his son Icarus who were ordered to build it to hold the Minotaur. The Minotaur was eventually killed by Theseus. Theseus was the son of Aethra, and fathered by both Poseidon and Aegeus.

After he ascended the throne of Crete, Minos struggled with his brothers for the right to rule. Minos prayed to Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull, as a sign of approval. He was to sacrifice the bull in honor of Poseidon but decided to keep it instead because of its beauty. To punish Minos, Aphrodite (Venus) made Pasiphae, Minos' wife, to fall madly in love with the bull from the sea, the Cretan Bull. She had Daedalus, the famous architect, make a wooden cow for her. Pasiphae climbed into the bait in order to copulate with the white bull. The offspring of their coupling was a monster called the Minotaur. Pasiphae nursed him in his infancy, but he grew and became ferocious; being the unnatural offspring of man and beast, he had no natural source of nourishment and thus devoured man for sustenance. Minos, after getting advice from the Oracle at Delphi, had Daedalus construct a gigantic labyrinth to hold the Minotaur. Its location was near Minos' palace in Knossos.

From Classical times through the Renaissance, the Minotaur appears at the center of many depictions of the Labyrinth. Ovid's Latin account of the Minotaur, which did not elaborate on which half was bull and which half man, was the most widely available during the Middle Ages, and several later versions show the reverse of the Classical configuration: a man's head and torso on a bull's body, reminiscent of a centaur.This alternative tradition survived into the Renaissance, and still figures in some modern depictions, such as Steele Savage's illustrations for Edith Hamilton's Mythology (1942).

Androgeus, son of Minos, had been killed by the Athenians, who were jealous of the victories he had won at the Panathenaic festival. Others say he was killed at Marathon by the Cretan bull, his mother's former taurine lover, which Aegeus, king of Athens, had commanded him to slay. The common tradition is that Minos waged war to avenge the death of his son, and won. Catullus, in his account of the Minotaur's birth, refers to another version in which Athens was "compelled by the cruel plague to pay penalties for the killing of Androgeos." Aegeus must avert the plague caused by his crime by sending "young men at the same time as the best of unwed girls as a feast" to the Minotaur. Minos required that seven Athenian youths and seven maidens, drawn by lots, be sent every ninth year (some accounts say every year to be devoured by the Minotaur.

When the third sacrifice approached, Theseus volunteered to slay the monster. He promised to his father, Aegeus, that he would put up a white sail on his journey back home if he was successful and would have the crew put up black sails if he was killed. In Crete, Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, fell in love with Theseus and helped him navigate the labyrinth, which had a single path to the center. In most accounts she gave him a ball of thread, allowing him to retrace his path. Theseus killed the Minotaur with the sword of Aegeus and led the other Athenians back out of the labyrinth. But he forgot to put up the white sail, so when his father saw the ship he presumed Theseus was dead and threw himself into the sea, thus committing suicide.

Hydra

HYDRA

In Greek mythology, the Lernaean Hydra was an ancient nameless serpent-likewater beast (as its name evinces) that had nine heads — and for each head cut off it grew two more — and poisonous breath make its attack deadly. The Hydra of Lerna was killed by Hercules as one of his Twelve Labours. Its lair was the lake of Lerna in the Argolid, though archaeology has born out the myth that the sacred site was older even than the Mycenaean city of Argos since Lerna was the site of the myth of the Danaids. Beneath the waters was an entrance to the Underworld, and the Hydra was its guardian.

Upon reaching the swamp near Lake Lerna, where the Hydra dwelt, Heracles covered his mouth and nose with a cloth to protect himself from the poisonous fumes. He fired flaming arrows into its lair, the spring of Amymone, a deep cave that it only came out of to terrorize neighboring villages. Then he confronted it, wielding a harvesting sickle (according to some early vase-paintings) or a sword. Ruck and Staples have pointed out that the chthonic creature's reaction was botanical upon cutting off each of its heads he found that two grew back, an expression of the hopelessness of such a struggle for any but the hero, Heracles. The weakness of the Hydra was that only one of its heads was mortal.

The details of the struggle are explicit in Apollodorus realising that he could not defeat the Hydra in this way, Heracles called on his nephew Iolaus for help. His nephew then came upon the idea (possibly inspired by Athena) of using a burning firebrand to scorch the neck stumps after each decapitation. Heracles cut off each head and Iolaus cauterized the open stumps. Its one immortal head Heracles placed under a great rock on the sacred way between Lerna and Elaius and dipped his arrows in the Hydra's poisonous blood, and so his second task was complete. The alternative to this is that after cutting off one head he dipped his sword in it and used its venom to burn each head so it couldn't grow back.
Heracles later used an arrow dipped in the Hydra's poisonous blood to kill the centaur Nessus and Nessus's tainted blood was applied to the Tunic of Nessus, by which the centaur had his posthumous revenge. Both Strabo and Pausanias report that the stench of the river Anigrus in Elis, making all the fish of the river inedible, was reputed to be due to the Hydra's poison, washed from the arrows Heracles used on the centaur.

When Eurystheus, the agent of ancient Hera who was assigning The Twelve Labours to Heracles, found out that it was Heracles' nephew Iolaus who had handed him the firebrand, he declared that the labour had not been completed alone and as a result did not count towards the ten labours set for him. The mythic element is an equivocating attempt to resolve the submerged conflict between an ancient ten Labours and a more recent twelve.

Centaur

CENTAUR

In Greek mythology, the centaurs are a race of creatures composed of part human and part horse. In early Attic and Boeotian vase-paintings, as on the kantharos illustrated below left, they are depicted with the hindquarters of a horse attached to them; in later renderings centaurs are given the torso of a human joined at the waist to the horse's withers, where the horse's neck would be.
This half-human and half-animal composition has led many writers to treat them as liminal beings, caught between the two natures, embodied in contrasted myths, both as the embodiment of untamed nature, as in their battle with the Lapiths, or conversely as teachers, like Chiron.

The centaurs were usually said to have been born of Ixion and Nephele (the cloud made in the image of Hera). Another version, however, makes them children of a certain Centaurus, who mated with the Magnesian mares. This Centaurus was either himself the son of Ixion and Nephele (inserting an additional generation) or of Apollo and Stilbe, daughter of the river god Peneus. In the later version of the story his twin brother was Lapithus, ancestor of the Lapiths, thus making the two warring peoples cousins.
Centaurs were said inhabited in the region of Magnesia and Mount Pelion in Thessaly, Mount Pholoe in Arcadia and the Malean peninsula in southern Laconia.

The Centaurs are best known for their fight with the Lapithae, caused by their attempt to carry off Hippodamia and the rest of the Lapith women, on the day of her marriage to Pirithous, king of the Lapithae, himself the son of Ixion. The strife among these cousins is a metaphor for the conflict between the lower appetites and civilized behavior in humankind. Theseus, a hero and founder of cities, who happened to be present, threw the balance in favour of the right order of things, and assisted Pirithous. The Centaurs were driven off or destroyed. Another Lapith hero, Caeneus, who was invulnerable to weapons, was beaten into the earth by Centaurs wielding rocks and the branches of trees. Centaurs are thought of in many Greek myths as wild as untamed horses. Like the Titanomachy, the defeat of the Titans by the Olympian gods, the contests with the Centaurs typify the struggle between civilization and barbarism.

Medusa

MEDUSA

In Greek mythology, Medusa "guardian, protectress" was a Gorgon, a chthonic female monster, and a daughter of Phorcys and Ceto. Only Hyginus, interposes a generation and gives another chthonic pair as parents of Medusa gazing directly upon her would turn onlookers to stone. She was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who thereafter used her head as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield.

The three Gorgon sisters Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale were children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys and his sister Ceto, chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, who places both trinities of sisters far off "on Kisthene's dreadful plain".

In most versions of the story, while Medusa was pregnant by Poseidon, god of the sea, she was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who was sent to fetch her head by King Polydectes of Seriphus as a gift. With help from Athena and Hermes who supplied him with winged sandals, Hades' cap of invisibility, a sword, and a mirrored shield, he accomplished his quest. The hero slew Medusa by looking at her harmless reflection in the mirror instead of directly at her to prevent being turned into stone. When the hero severed Medusa's head from her neck, two offspring sprang forth: the winged horse Pegasus and the golden giant Chrysaor.

Perseus then flew to Seriphus where his mother was about to be forced into marriage with the king. King Polydectes was turned into stone by the gaze of Medusa's head. Then he gave the Gorgon's head to Athena, who placed it on her shield, the Aegis.

Pegasus

PEGASUS

In Greek mythology, Pegasus was a winged horse. There are many versions of birth for Pegasus. One of the version is that they sprang from the blood issuing from Medusa’s neck.

Pegasus is a sacred animal. It has a rider that ride it. His name is Bellerophon.
Bellerophon found Pegasus when Pegasus was drinking at the Pierian spring. And then Pegasus approached him and allowed him to ride. Bellerophon use Pegasus to fight against Chiimeras and Pegasus. But when Bellerophon tried to see gods, Zeus sent down a gadfly to sting Pegasus and then Bellerophon fall. After that Pegasus taken by Zeus and lived in Olympus. It was tamed by Zeus and given task to carried Zeus’s thunderbolts.

Because of his faithful service to Zeus, he was honoredwith trandformation into a constellation. On the day of its catasterism, when Zeus transformed its into canstellation, a single feather fell into earth near Tarsus.

Unicorn

UNICORN

A unicorn is a mythological creature. Though the modern popular image of the unicorn is sometimes that of a horse differing only in the horn on its forehead, the traditional unicorn also has a billy-goat beard, a lion's tail, and cloven hooves these distinguish it from a horse. The unicorn is a beast that does not seem to have been conceived out of human fears. It is fierce good, selfless solitary, but always mysteriously beautiful. It could be captured only by unfair means, and its single horn was said to neutralize poison.

Unicorns are not found in Greek mythology, but rather in a natural history, for Greek writers of natural history were convinced of the reality of the unicorn, which they located in India, a distant and fabulous realm for them.
In Chinese mythology, is sometimes called "the Chinese unicorn", it is a hybrid animal that looks less unicorn than chimera, with the body of a deer, the head of a lion, green scales and a long forwardly-curved horn.

In Japanese version (kirin) more closely resembles the Western unicorn, even though it is based on the Chinese qilin.
The Que Ly of Vietnamese myth, similarly sometimes mistranslated "unicorn" is a symbol of wealth and prosperity that made its first appearance during the Duong Dynasty, about 600 CE, to Emperor Duong Cao To, after a military victory which resulted in his conquest of Tây Nguyên.

Werewolf

WEREWOLF

A werewolf or werwolf, also known as a lycanthrope is a mythological human with the ability to shapeshift into a wolf or an anthropomorphic wolf creature, either purposely, by being bitten or scratched by another werewolf, or after being placed under a curse. This transformation is often associated with the appearance of the full moon and it is vulnerable to silver bullets.

Werewolves are often attributed super-human strength and senses, far beyond those of both wolves or men. The werewolf is generally held as a European character, although its lore spread through the world in later times. Shape shifters, similar to werewolves, are common in tales from all over the world.

The term lycanthropy, a synonym of werewolf, comes from Ancient Greek lykánthropos. That can transform into animal. The term therianthrope literally means "beast-man. The word has also been linked to the original werewolf of classical mythology, Lycaon, a king of Arcadia who, according to Ovid's Metamorphoses, was turned into a ravenous wolf in retribution for attempting to serve his own son to visiting Zeus in an attempt to disprove the god's divinity.

There is also a mental illness called lycanthropy in which a patient believes he or she is, or has transformed into, an animal and behaves accordingly. This is sometimes referred to as clinical lycanthropy to distinguish it from its use in legends. Despite its origin as a term for man-wolf transformations, lycanthropy is used in this sense for animals of any type.

Many believed said that were wolf had curved fingernails, low set ears and a swinging stride. He likes to kill all of creature that has flesh. They can become a werewolf because he infected by another werewolf or infected a curse. Werewolf is vulnerable to silver weapons and highly resistant to other attacks.

Titan

TITAN

This is about Titan in mythology.

In Greek mythology, the Titans were a race of powerful deities, descendants of Gaia and Uranus, that ruled during the legendary Golden Age.

In the first generation, there were twelve Titans. The males were Oceanus, Hyperion, Coeus, Cronus, Crius and Iapetus and the females were Mnemosyne, Tethys, Theia, Phoebe, Rhea and Themis. The second generation of Titans consisted of Hyperion's children Eos, Helios, and Selene; Coeus's daughters Leto and Asteria; Iapetus's sons Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Menoetius; and Crius's sons Astraeus, Pallas, and Perses.

Their role as Elder Gods was overthrown by a race of younger gods, the Olympians, in the Titanomachy ("Battle with the Titans") which effected a mythological paradigm shift that the Greeks may have borrowed from the Ancient Near East.

Another myth concerning the Titans that is not in Hesiod revolves around Dionysus. At some point in his reign, Zeus decides to give up the throne in favor of the infant Dionysus, who like the infant Zeus is guarded by the Kouretes and its guise. The Titans decide to slay the child and claim the throne for themselves apathetically; they paint their faces white with gypsum, distract Dionysus with toys, then dismember him and boil and roast his limbs. Zeus, enraged, slays the Titans with his thunderbolt; Athena preserves the heart in a gypsum doll, out of which a new Dionysus is made.