The Manticore is the man-eating monster of Persian and classical-medieval European legend: a fearsome beast with the face of a man, the body of a red lion, and the tail of a scorpion (or a tail that shoots venomous spines), with three rows of teeth and a voice like a trumpet, that devours human beings whole, leaving nothing behind. It is the man-eater, the lion-bodied devourer of the bestiary.
The Man-Devourer
The Manticore (from the Old Persian martiya-khvar, “man-eater,” via the Greek mantichoras) was first described to the Greeks by Ctesias, who reported it from India/Persia, and it passed through Pliny and Aristotle into the medieval bestiaries. Its form is a terrible composite: the body of a powerful lion (usually blood-red), the face and ears of a human being (often blue-eyed), three rows of teeth that meet like a comb in both jaws, and the tail of a scorpion — or a tail tipped and barbed with venomous spines or stings that it could shoot like arrows at its prey. Its voice was strange and beautiful-yet-terrible, like the blast of a trumpet mingled with a pipe.
The Eater of Men
The manticore’s defining and dreadful trait is its appetite for human flesh: it is the man-eater above all others, hunting and devouring people in preference to any other prey. So complete was its devouring — flesh, bones, clothes, possessions, all consumed — that a person taken by a manticore vanished without a trace, leaving nothing for the searchers to find, which made it all the more terrifying. With its venomous spine-shooting tail it could strike down victims at a distance, and its triple rows of teeth and lion’s strength made it a deadly hunter from which there was little escape.
The Beast of the Bestiary
In the medieval bestiaries the manticore became a stock figure of dread, and in Christian moralisation it was sometimes read as an image of the Devil, the tyrant, or the prophet of false teaching — the devourer of souls. It appears in heraldry (the “manticora” or “montegre”), sometimes with horns added, as a symbol of a dreaded and tyrannical foe. Distinct from the noble [griffin] and the gentle [unicorn], the manticore stood among the bestiary’s purest images of predatory horror. From the bestiary it has passed into modern fantasy as a classic monster. In the Manticore, the Persian and European imagination gave form to the man-eater — the human-faced, red-lion-bodied, scorpion-tailed beast that devours people whole and leaves no trace, the trumpet-voiced devourer of the bestiary.