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Strix
Night Skies and Shadowed Places
Danger Level: 7/10
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Abilities
FlightBlood DrainingShapeshiftingDeath Omen
Lore & Legend
Owl of the Cradle
Roman poets (Ovid, Pliny, Petronius) know the strix as a screech-owl witch-bird that attacks infants and drinks blood. Festus and later lexica keep the scare. It sits between omen-bird and shapeshifted woman; the natural-historical and the folkloric are not separated.
Medieval Latin carried the word toward 'witch.' The pagan dossier is already violent.
Primary Sources
“Ovid's Fasti and Pliny's Natural History know the strix as a night bird that threatens infants; the scare is Roman, not a medieval invention.”