Manticore pendant

The manticore, an epic chimeric maneater, for ferocious courge and cunning.

The manticore pendant, brass quenched in alchemically distilled oil of ruby, and given a Garnet inlay.
The manticore is one of antiquity’s most enigmatic mythological creatures — a beast said to possess the body of a lion, the face of a man, and a tail armed with venomous spines or serpents. Its earliest known appearance traces back to Persian mythology, where it was called martikhora, meaning “man-eater.” From there, the legend spread to Greece, largely through Ctesias, a 5th-century BCE physician and historian who described the creature in his Indica as a monstrous predator of the East, symbolizing both wonder and terror (Davydov & Skorbatyuk, 2014).
By the Middle Ages, the manticore had been absorbed into European bestiaries, joining creatures like the griffin, unicorn, and basilisk as moral or theological symbols rather than zoological possibilities. Its man-like visage was said to represent deception — the beast that “speaks like a man but kills like a lion.” In French courtly literature, manticores were sometimes portrayed as allegories of political corruption or human duality, blending intellect with savagery (Wood, 2018).
In Islamic and Ottoman scholarship, the creature also appeared through reinterpretation of older sources, often linked with lions in bestiaries such as Ḥayāt al-Ḥayawān (“The Life of Animals”), where it symbolized both ferocity and healing in the context of lion skins used for protection (Göksu & Afyoncu, 2025). Later allegorical and Jungian readings, such as those in Robertson Davies’s The Manticore, interpreted the beast as a psychological archetype — an embodiment of the shadow self, fusing humanity’s civilized mask with its primal urges (Quintal, 2022).
Across centuries and cultures, the manticore’s hybrid nature has reflected humanity’s enduring fascination with the boundaries between the human and the monstrous — a mirror of our fears, our intellect, and our imagination, forever prowling between myth and meaning.

These are a limited edition with Garnet inlay and come with a brass chain. These are pre-made and ship out immediately.