Manticore
A man-eating beast of ancient report with a lion’s body, a man’s face with three rows of teeth, and a tail with a scorpion’s sting; in heraldry the mantiger.
Meaning
The manticore (MAN-ti-kor, as Dictionary.com respells it) is a beast that Greek writers placed in the East. Pliny, following the Greek doctor Ctesias, describes the “mantichora” as having “a triple row of teeth, which fit into each other like those of a comb, the face and ears of a man”, blue eyes, a blood-red lion’s body and “a tail ending in a sting, like that of the scorpion”, with a voice like flute and trumpet together and a taste for human flesh. Its name comes from an Old Iranian word meaning “man-eater”, Britannica and Dictionary.com agree, and both think the original was probably the tiger. Medieval writers made it a figure of the devil.
Origin and history
Ctesias, as Pliny reports him, put the manticore among the Ethiopians; Britannica suggests that the earliest Greek account was a garbled description of the Caspian tiger, which would fit the name. The bestiaries kept Pliny’s creature, adding, as John Vinycomb quotes one, that “his voice is like a small trumpet” and that he is “very wild”. Medieval writers, Britannica says, used it as a symbol of the devil.
The mantiger in heraldry
Heralds turned the manticore into the mantiger or manticora satyral: in Vinycomb’s description, the body of a heraldic tiger with a mane and the head of an old man with long spiral horns. Two satyrals supported the arms of the Lords Stawell, and the mantigers supporting the arms of the Earl of Huntingdon are drawn without horns.
Robertson Davies’s Manticore
Britannica notes the manticore’s best-known modern appearance: in the Canadian writer Robertson Davies’s novel The Manticore (1972), the hero dreams of a sibyl leading a manticore and works through the dream in Jungian analysis.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeBasilisk and cockatriceThe “little king” of serpents, which ancient and medieval writers said could kill with its breath or its look, and the cockatrice, its medieval double, a two-legged dragon with a cock’s head.
- The same shape in Cave and rock artLascaux cave paintingsHundreds of painted and engraved animals, horses above all, on the walls of Lascaux, a cave above Montignac in the Dordogne, France. They were made more than 20,000 years ago and found by four teenagers in 1940. The cave has been closed to the public since 1963.
See also
Chimera, Minotaur, Centaur, Hydra, Harpy, Siren.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 8.30 (tr. Bostock and Riley), Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley (1855), book VIII, chapter 30, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Book VIII, chapter 30
- Manticore (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Manticore”, online edition (archived copy), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article
- Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art (John Vinycomb, 1906), John Vinycomb, Fictitious & Symbolic Creatures in Art, with Special Reference to Their Use in British Heraldry (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906), Project Gutenberg, Mantiger, Montegre or Manticora Satyral, pp. 218–219
- Manticore (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Manticore” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry, pronunciation and origin
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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