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The Wingless Griffin

I dreamed I was at a museum. Big, lots of marble.
The marble walls of the museum.

I saw they were cleaning out an old Egyptian wing. Workers carrying out Egyptian artifacts.

Bringing out a living king and his treasures, including an ox-sized gryfon, snake cult stuff. They led out an ox-sized gryphon.

The crowd of people watched the procession.
A crowd of people watching.

Seized by a religious urge I watched, and as each new treasure and personage went by I held my hands up and said "Reinvarnus" which meant like "renew", or "incarnate".

The wingless gryphon walked by.
Drawing used by permission, © 2019 Fort Dudak

The gryphon / griffin image has been around for a while in human history. Pictures of this beast were carved onto walls looking out over the people of Mesopotamia. Was this a real beast? Or was there something in the human heart that responded to the chimera of a monstrous eagle, and a monstrous lion?

Most of the ancient world imagined the gryphon with wings, but there's at least one image from a Minoan palace wall in Knossos, Crete. Painted somewhere between 1700 and 1450 BC, the beast drapes itself casually on the ground, as if taking a break from grooming itself. The beast looks up from its place in the wild, surrounded by tall ferns. Red smoke dances in the background and the sunlight plays over an intricate set of markings on its neck and shoulder.

The griffin was known for guarding treasure, and for protecting divinities. In my dream, it makes a certain amount of sense that this beast would have been living in a museum, protecting an ancient Egyptian king and his treasures. The psychological "meaning" of this dream is, as always, left open for interpretation.