Pegasus

A white horse with enormous wings helped a Greek hero kill the chimera, flying straight into the fatal attack. But when that same hero tried to fly all the way to Olympus itself, believing he deserved a seat among the gods, he fell back to earth. The horse, however, kept climbing alone, and became a constellation you can still see in the sky today.

A white horse with great wings, a symbol of flight and poetic inspiration. Tamed by Bellerophon with the golden bridle given by Athena, it helps him slay the Chimera; when the hero tries to fly to Olympus, he falls, but Pegasus ascends and becomes a constellation.

Within the folk and mythological corpus compiled by the Codex Monstrorum, the creature Pegasus occupies a distinctive role in the symbolic imagination of its culture of origin. Its mythos articulates primal human anxieties, the mystery of untamed wilderness, and social norms preserved through the lens of bestiary literature.

With a strike of its hoof on Mount Helicon it caused the Hippocrene spring of the Muses to gush — origin of the link between Pegasus and poetic inspiration. A servant of Zeus, it carries his thunder and lightning; it is a constellation in the northern sky.

An emblem of poetry and the soul's upward impulse, Pegasus is also a symbol of glory, speed, and heroic triumph mediated by the divine (Athena's bridle). Bellerophon's fall warns against excess (hybris).

First appearance and primary records: The winged horse of Greek mythology, born from the blood of Medusa beheaded by Perseus; attested in Hesiod (Theogony, 8th–7th c. BCE) and widely told by Pindar and Ovid.

Oral transmissions and preserved manuscripts indicate that legends surrounding Pegasus underwent substantive evolution over successive centuries. From archaic oral traditions to classical and medieval written records, each period reframed the creature according to its own ethical and cosmological paradigms.

A muscular white horse with great feathered eagle-wings; it radiates nobility and lightness. The wings set it apart from the ordinary horse and express its celestial nature.

It encodes poetic inspiration, the flight of the spirit, and heroic glory; its origin in Medusa's blood binds life and death, horror and beauty. With Bellerophon it warns against hybris. It binds poetry, sky, and transcendence.

The archetypal winged horse of the West, it is the symbolic root of the hippogriff and kin to the Norse Sleipnir (extraordinary horse); it stands out for its chthonic birth (from Medusa) and its link to the Muses and poetry.

From Greek pottery and coins to Rubens and the Renaissance, from heraldry to advertising and film, Pegasus is one of the most widespread symbols of the West, tied to inspiration, speed, and transcendence.