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Final Folklore arrives February 3, 10am ET (or earlier for Patreon members).

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The Sphinx has many stories from all over the land, each unique to their culture but the image of a large feline with human facial features is known all over the world.

This may be the last folklore creature we dive into, but it also could be the most well known. The Sphinx has many stories from all over the land, each unique to their culture but the image of a large feline with human facial features is known all over the world.

Immediately you probably go to the Great Sphinx of Giza, so did I.

The first stories are thought to be from as early as the third millennium BCE. They were used in imagery all over the cradle of life, Egypt, Greece, Persia, Babylon, even East Asia but the one I was drawn too was the story of the Egyptian sphinxes (1999’s The Mummy with Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser still has a chokehold on me).

They’re often seen with the body of a lion, resting guarding and a stoic man’s face often wearing a pharaonic headdress and false beard painted with reds, bright blues and yellow. They stood guard as protectors of the royals, often built to guard their royal tombs as they were believed to be a creature of good. They’re most often represented by the god Ra, the fatherly god and father of the pharaohs. They were the defenders against evil, Ra’s enemies, literal forces of darkness. Other forms were tributed to Amon with rams horns of a ram, or with the head of a falcon and wings to be from the god Horus

The Greek story of the Sphinx is where their love for riddles originates. A Sphinx made her home outside the mountains of Thebes and confronted every person who walked across her path with a riddle. If they answered incorrectly they were devoured. After years of many nobles dying, Oedipus was sent and solved the riddle leading the Sphinx to throw herself off the cliff to her death.