Griffins
One of the fiercest beasts found on maps is the Griffin, a monstrous hybrid of a lion and an eagle. The earliest known depiction of the Griffin is on a pre-3000BC Ancient Egyptian cosmetic palette, and it is possible that the beast was invented by that culture owing to the Egyptians’ inclusion of chimerical animals amongst their gods, or even more remotely to Mesopotamia, from which much Egyptian belief and custom derived. Shortly after these representations, the Griffin appeared in Iran, where it adorned cylinder seals (a cylindrical device for imprinting a design onto a flat surface) at Susa.
In the 14th century, John Mandeville described the Griffin in his Travels: ‘they have the body upward as an eagle and beneath as a lion… one Griffin hath the body more great and is more strong than eight lions… and more great and stronger than an hundred eagles such as we have amongst us. For one Griffin there will bear, flying to his nest, a great horse, if he may find him at the point, or two oxen yoked together as they go at the plough.’ Other sources attest to the Griffin’s particular aggression to men and horses.
Herodotus in the 5th century BC explains that Griffins hate men and horses because one-eyed men known as the Arimaspoi take horses to steal the gold guarded by Griffins. Herodotus locates Griffins in Northern Europe, where there ‘is by far the most gold’, which is presumably why they have colonized that area. At the time Herodotus was writing, Northern Europe was the furthest part of the known world, which naturally meant that it was full of strange and dangerous monsters. By Mandeville’s day, the extreme of the known world was Asia, where he says the Griffins in fact live.
Thus the role of the Griffin is primarily to mark where the known, civilized world ends. Their obsession with gold and predation on men, with whom they feed their young, makes the Griffin similar in some respects to European dragons, which are also associated with gold and man-eating. Some medieval bestiaries made the Griffin king of all beasts, since the lion was king of the animals and the eagle king of the birds. Despite its danger to men, the Griffin was thought to be an allegory for Christ, and in Dante’s Paradiso even had the honor of guarding heaven’s gates.
The reason for its association with Christ is the Griffin’s alleged habit of mating for life with its partner, reflecting the eternal bond of marriage. Defending its gold from thieves, the Griffin also shows a zero-tolerance policy for evil, just as Christ defeated the devil and condemned the Pharisees. Thus as well as marking the extent of the known world and signaling the dangers that lie without, the Griffin also carries important Christian messages. Legends of the Griffin similarly made it a symbol of Islamic virtue, and it is a common feature of Islamic art, such as the Pisa Griffin.