What medieval monsters inspired the legends of Halloween?
Long before illuminated pumpkins and Halloween costumes, Europe already knew stories of men transformed into wolves, the dead returning from their graves, and fantastic creatures capable of terrifying entire populations. Some legends came from antiquity; others arose from medieval religious beliefs and folk traditions.
These stories circulated orally and also appeared in chronicles, manuscripts, and religious accounts, but to understand their origins, it is useful to distinguish between the creatures of bestiaries, the figures of supernatural legends, and the monsters whose current image was born centuries later.
Medieval bestiaries and their fantastic creatures
What is a medieval bestiary and what creatures appear in it?
Let's start by defining what a medieval bestiary is.
It is an illustrated book that described real and fantastic animals, accompanied by moral and religious interpretations.
Its pages included lions, foxes, and deer alongside dragons, unicorns, griffins, and mermaids, and the animals could represent virtues, sins, or Christian teachings. The lion, for example, was associated in certain texts with Christ, while mermaids warned of the dangers of seduction.
Numerous manuscripts of this genre existed, inspired by ancient traditions and works such as the Physiologus, which was highly influential during the Middle Ages.
Bestiaries focused mainly on animals and fantastic beings, while vampires, werewolves, and demons belonged primarily to legends, chronicles, and religious texts, and were normally not part of bestiaries.
Dragons, basilisks, and other medieval mythological creatures
Among the beings that were part of bestiaries were many mythological creatures that today are clearly recognized and, in many cases, associated with medieval fantasy.
The dragon, for example, was one of the most recognizable creatures of the medieval imagination and was usually depicted as a gigantic animal, often winged and capable of breathing fire. In the Christian tradition, it symbolized evil, and the legend of Saint George, who defeats one to save a princess, became one of its most well-known representations.
The basilisk, inherited from descriptions from antiquity, was also among these creatures. It was said that it could kill with its gaze or through its poisonous breath, and its appearance varied between a crowned serpent and a creature with the features of a rooster and a reptile.
Other mythological animals that appeared in bestiaries more frequently were griffins, with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, although they also appeared in illustrated manuscripts.
Mermaids, for their part, made an appearance representing the dangers that lurked for sailors and, like many other beings, fueled the imagination about unknown territories and their supposed inhabitants.
Creatures from medieval legends
The origin of werewolves
The werewolf legend predates the Middle Ages; already in Greek mythology, King Lycaon was transformed into a wolf as punishment by Zeus, and during the European Middle Ages, these narratives mixed with rural superstitions and beliefs about the intervention of the devil.
Even the term lycanthropy comes from Greek and refers to the transformation into a wolf.
According to legends, a person could become a wolf through a curse, a spell, or a diabolical pact, but regardless of the origin, this figure always represented the fear of losing human identity and being subjected to the instincts of a beast.
Furthermore, wolf attacks on livestock and, occasionally, people, contributed to fueling these stories, while during the Early Modern period, several judicial processes against people accused of this alleged transformation kept the belief alive.
The dead who returned: the origin of vampires and the “living dead”
Vampire legends are related to beliefs about the dead returning to torment the living.
In the 12th century, the English chronicler William of Newburgh recorded accounts of corpses that left their graves and terrified certain communities, who were known as revenants, a term that designates the deceased who return to the world of the living.
In Eastern Europe, stories also circulated about corpses to which diseases and misfortunes were attributed, while the decomposition of bodies and the lack of medical knowledge favored some supernatural interpretations.
Although the modern conception of the vampire, with prominent fangs and a fondness for blood, acquired its characteristic features centuries later, and Gothic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries consolidated its image, especially with Dracula, the novel published by Bram Stoker in 1897.
Spirits, demons, and witches in medieval beliefs
Religious manuscripts and medieval chronicles recorded beliefs about demons and evil spirits that could tempt people, cause nightmares, or intervene in human affairs.
In religious illustrations, they often appeared with horns, claws, wings, and deformed faces, especially in scenes related to hell and divine judgment.
Among the supernatural beings were incubi and succubi, demons linked to sexual encounters during sleep, and beliefs about witches were also widespread: they were attributed spells, potions, and pacts with the devil.
Although these ideas had existed since before, the great witch hunts reached special intensity during the Early Modern period, between the 15th and 17th centuries.
Creatures of yesteryear that come to life again today
Halloween today revives many of these figures through costumes, stories, and horror movies.
Their current representations combine ancient legends, medieval beliefs, and characters popularized by later literature; however, although their nature and the way they are viewed have changed over time, setting aside fear to be replaced by fascination with the fantastic and the unknown, their origins still exist in a distant past where, far from being stories for leisure, they were a real fear of everything they could not explain...
