Realms of Fantasy and Myth: Week 16 - Sphinx

Sep 22, 200917 min read

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Published: Sep 22, 2009

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Realms of Fantasy and Myth: Week 16 - Sphinx

Welcome to the sixteenth issue of my weekly news article! I hope you enjoy it, and please, show the featured artists some love and recognition through pageviews,

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This week's creature feature is:  Sphinx

From Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphinx :

A sphinx is a zoomorphic mythological figure which is depicted as a recumbent lion with a human head. It has its origins in sculpted figures of Old Kingdom Egypt, to which the ancient Greeks applied their own name for a female monster, the "strangler", an archaic figure of Greek mythology.
Later, the sphinx image, something very similar to the original Egyptian concept, was exported into many other cultures, albeit often interpreted quite differently due to translations of descriptions of the originals and the evolution of the concept in relation to other cultural traditions. Generally the role of sphinxes was as temple guardians; they were placed in association with architectural structures such as royal tombs or religious temples.
In Greek mythology, a sphinx is represented as a monster with a head and breasts of a woman, the body of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and a serpent headed tail. It was said in late lore that Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Ethiopian homeland (the Greeks always remembered the foreign origin of the Sphinx) to Thebes in Greece where she asks all passersby the most famous riddle in history: “Which creature in the morning goes on four legs, at mid-day on two, and in the evening upon three, and the more legs it has, the weaker it be?” She strangled and devoured anyone unable to answer. Oedipus solved the riddle by answering: Man—who crawls on all fours as a baby, then walks on two feet as an adult, and then walks with a cane in old age. By some accounts (but much more rarely), there was a second riddle: "There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first." (answer: day and night—both words are feminine in Greek.) Bested at last, the tale continues, the Sphinx then threw herself from her high rock and died.
A composite mythological being with the body of a lion and the head of a human being is present in the traditions, mythology and art of South and South-East Asia[5] Variously known as purushamriga (Sanskrit, "man-beast"), purushamirukam (Tamil, "man-beast"), naravirala (Sanskrit, "man-cat") in India, or as nara-simha (Pali, "man-lion") in Sri Lanka, manusiha or manuthiha (Pali, "man-lion") in Myanmar, and nora nair or thepnorasingh in Thailand.

Now, for the features!  Works are featured from various categories, in no particular order:

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LOA: look but don't touch by sparkpenguin

Sphinx Doll Closeup 2 by ThisUsernameFails

A Different Kind of Librarian by ElectricGecko

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Mature Content

A very clean sphinx by noire-arc-en-ciel

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Thank you so much for viewing, and come back next week for a different inhabitant of the Realms of Fantasy and Myth!