Gryphons, Unicorns and Mythic Beasts

A company of beasts

Gryphons, unicorns, phoenixes, winged horses, sea serpents and many-tailed foxes have all been named as kintypes and theriotypes for as long as the communities have kept records. What they have in common is that they are animals of a kind. They have bodies, instincts and habits in the stories, not only powers and meanings, and those who identify as them often describe an inner life that feels more like an animal's than a spirit's.

That raises a question no other family of kintypes quite faces: which community, and which word?

Theriomythic or otherkin

Some people who identify as a mythic beast call themselves theriomythic, meaning a therian whose theriotype happens to be a creature of myth. Others call themselves otherkin and speak of a kintype. Both are in long and respectable use.

The reasons people give for their choice tend to fall along these lines:

• How the creature is felt. A person who experiences their gryphon as a body with hunger, territory and a hunting eye may feel that therian describes it best. A person who experiences their phoenix as a being of meaning and spirit may lean toward otherkin.
• Where they feel at home. The two communities grew from different roots and keep somewhat different customs. Many people simply settle where the conversation feels familiar.
• How the creature is described in its own stories. A unicorn of the old bestiaries is a wild beast. A unicorn of later tellings is close to a spiritual being.

Neither word is more correct, and some people use both. In the past, theriomythic therians sometimes had to argue for their place in therian spaces, and that argument has largely been settled in their favor. Whoever asks which word you use is asking about your experience, not checking your credentials.

The beasts in legend

Gryphons

The gryphon, with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, appears in the art of the ancient Near East and of Greece. Herodotus passed on reports of gryphons guarding gold in the far north-east of the known world. Later the gryphon became a favorite of heraldry, a fitting guardian joined from the king of beasts and the king of birds.

Unicorns

Greek writers of antiquity described a one-horned wild beast said to live in India. In the medieval bestiaries the unicorn was fierce and impossible to catch, except by a maiden, and its horn was believed to cleanse water and reveal poison. The long twisted tusks of narwhals were sold for great sums as unicorn horn. East Asian tradition has its own gentle, hoofed creature of good omen, the qilin, which is sometimes called a unicorn in English though its own stories describe it quite differently.

Phoenixes

Herodotus heard in Egypt of a sacred bird that came to the city of the sun once in five hundred years, though he admitted he had seen it only in paintings. Later tellers gave the phoenix its familiar story of burning and rising from its own ashes. The great bird of Chinese tradition, the fenghuang, is often translated phoenix, but it is its own creature with its own meanings.

Winged horses, sea serpents and many-tailed foxes

The winged horse of Greek myth, Pegasus, sprang into the world from the blood of the Gorgon. Sea serpents coil through sailors' tales and old maps of the northern seas, and the Norse imagined one serpent so vast that it circled the whole world. In East Asia the fox spirit grows more tails as it grows in age and wisdom, until the oldest have nine. The page on fox spirits and the glossary entry on the kitsune tell their stories more fully.

What people commonly describe

Because these creatures are bodies as well as legends, the experiences people describe often resemble those of therians.

• Composite bodies. Gryphons commonly speak of wings and four legs at once, of a beak and of forepaws with talons, and of the oddness of feeling both.
• Single striking features. A horn felt on the brow, hooves, a mane, a long serpentine spine, or several tails where one would be expected.
• Instincts that match no one earthly animal. A raptor's eye in a body that also wants to sprawl in the sun like a great cat.
• Cycles of ending and renewal, for some who identify as phoenixes, sometimes felt as a pattern in their own lives.
• Depth and length, for those who identify as sea serpents, often with a strong pull toward open water.

These come as phantom and mental shifts and as steady background awareness, in the ways described on the page on shifting. None of them involves any change to the body.

Learning a creature you cannot watch

A wolf therian can watch wolves. A gryphon cannot watch gryphons. People with mythic kintypes have developed a few sensible habits for this.

• Study the nearest living animals. Eagles and big cats for gryphons, horses for unicorns and winged horses, foxes for many-tailed foxes, large snakes and eels for sea serpents. The real animals are often where the instincts make most sense.
• Read the legends from more than one culture. They disagree, and the disagreements are useful. Notice which version rings true and which leaves you cold.
• Keep the legend and the self apart. A creature that grants wishes in the stories does not grant wishes in the person. The legend is a description of a shape, not a list of abilities.
• Take your time. The guidance on theriotypes and kintypes applies here with very little change.

Respect for sacred creatures

Some creatures that look like mythic beasts to an outsider are something more to others. The qilin and the fenghuang carry deep meaning in East Asian culture. In Japan foxes are honored as messengers at many shrines of a Shinto deity, and some great birds and serpents of other lands are the companions or forms of gods in living religions.

Identifying as such a creature is a personal matter, and nobody may forbid it. But it does not make anyone a voice for the tradition the creature comes from. The people best regarded in this corner of the community learn widely, credit their sources, speak about sacred things briefly and carefully, and listen when people from those traditions speak.

Rarer kin

A unicorn may go years without meeting another. Mythic beast kintypes are scattered thinly, and holding one can be lonely in a way that more common identities are not. Some find fellowship among therians, some among otherkin, and some under the wider roof of the alterhuman umbrella. Dragons, perhaps the best known of the mythic kin, have a page of their own on dragonkin.

The community at its best has always made room for the unusual. A creature that appears in only a handful of old stories is no less real to the person who recognizes it in themselves.