About

Jawnomicon is a bestiary of 692 figures from folklore, myth and cryptid report. It began as the figure roster of a game and has grown in batches drafted from a library of reference volumes. Most of what is on a figure's page was written or extracted by a language model. This page says which parts, and what was read.

What each part of a page is

The line under the name: Machine-written. One sentence saying what the figure is. A shared link carries it too, followed by the works that record the figure.
Traditions, regions, kinds: Assigned by a model from the description and checked in batches. The first tradition listed is the primary one.
Named in: The reference works whose entries name this figure, from a census of 33,331 names read across 47 works. 603 of the 692 figures have at least one; the rest say “no reference works yet”, which for most of them means no work we have read names them at all. The text of those works is never reproduced here.
Traits: 615 motifs and 177 powers, extracted from each description by a model. The sentence shown under a trait is the sentence of the description it was read from, not a quotation from a source.
Kinship: 26 lines of descent, added by hand in a kinship pass and approved one by one. These are the gold lines on the constellation.
Symbols: Objects and signs a figure carries or is known by, matched from a symbol vocabulary; the sentence under each is from the description.
Roles: 13 roles — trickster, shadow, threshold and ten more — which no reference work prints as a headword, so the wording of each is ours, and so is the reading. What it was read from is not: unlike every other row here, these were judged from the figures' own entries in the works that name them rather than from the description on this page, and each claim cites the works it was read in. 606 figures carry a role and 581 meet one without carrying it, which is the commoner case — a bestiary is largely a catalogue of what the carriers of these roles encounter. 218 figures carry no role: some because no reference-work passage on them is reachable, so nothing was judged at all, and the rest because the reading found none. How well this reads has been measured, and it is uneven. A second model family re-judged 200 of these claims without seeing the first's answers, and every claim the two read differently went to two further readers — a third family among them — who chose between the two readings blind. Where a figure is read as meeting a role, the claim holds 69%–75% of the time, and both adjudicators found that independently. Where a figure carries a role and two separate readings reached it, 83%–97%. Where a figure carries a role on one reading alone, the two adjudicators disagreed with each other and we do not know — that is 225 of the 1187 claims here, and it is the weakest thing on this page. A range rather than a figure because two defensible ways of counting disagree; the lower end assumes the claims both readers accepted are only as good as the 91% of them a third reader upheld.
Personality profile: 29 axes scored by two models against a written rubric, kept where the two agreed. It scores the description written here. Axes that do not apply to a figure are listed unscored.
Description: Machine-written. 346 were imported from the game's design documents; 346 were drafted in growth batches from documented tradition and approved before entry. Paragraphs marked as extrapolation have no source at all.
Constellation and families: Two figures are joined when they share more traits than chance would give two figures with vocabularies that size. The 41 families are groups found in that map; their names are the site's, not the sources'. Resemblance is not descent. The map holds 692 figures, which is all of them.

Works analyzed

47 works, with the number of figures each one records.

Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore, Theresa Bane · 361
Giants, Monsters, and Dragons, Carol Rose · 282
Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, Maria Leach, editor · 232
Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins, Carol Rose · 225
Mysterious Creatures: A Guide to Cryptozoology, George M. Eberhart · 126
An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Katharine Briggs · 62
Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, Ad de Vries · 61
An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, J. C. Cooper · 53
The Fairy Mythology, Thomas Keightley · 52
The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore, Patricia Monaghan · 44
The Library, Apollodorus, translated by J. G. Frazer · 44
Early Greek Myth, Timothy Gantz · 39
The Gods of the Egyptians, E. A. Wallis Budge · 36
Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, Hesiod, translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White · 30
The Sháhnáma, Firdausi, translated by Arthur George Warner and Edmond Warner · 28
Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, Jeremy Black and Anthony Green · 25
Legends of the Fire Spirits, Robert Lebling · 24
The Book of Yōkai, Michael Dylan Foster · 24
A Complete Guide to Heraldry, Arthur Charles Fox-Davies · 22
The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg · 22
Japandemonium Illustrated, Toriyama Sekien, translated by Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt · 20
The Heraldic Imagination, Rodney Dennys · 19
Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders, William Henderson · 17
A Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology and Religion, John Dowson · 16
American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, Jan Harold Brunvand, editor · 16
British Goblins, Wirt Sikes · 16
Myths and Legends of Japan, F. Hadland Davis · 16
Mythical Monsters, Charles Gould · 15
Philippine Folk Literature: The Myths, Damiana L. Eugenio · 15
Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, John Lindow · 14
American Indian Myths and Legends, Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, editors · 12
An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya, Mary Miller and Karl Taube · 11
Malay Magic, Walter William Skeat · 11
Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, Sabine Baring-Gould · 10
Egyptian Mythology, Geraldine Pinch · 10
Myths and Legends of the Bantu, Alice Werner · 10
African Mythology A to Z, Patricia Ann Lynch · 9
Russian Folk Belief, Linda J. Ivanits · 9
The Kalevala, translated by John Martin Crawford · 9
The Mythology of South America, John Bierhorst · 9
The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia, R. Campbell Thompson · 8
Gods and Fighting Men, Lady Gregory · 7
The Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest · 4
Australian Legendary Tales, K. Langloh Parker · 3
The Dragon in China and Japan, M. W. de Visser · 3
Hawaiian Mythology, Martha Beckwith · 2
george grey polynesian mythology · 1

The census lists every name read from those works, including the 2,049 not yet in the bestiary.

For agents

The symbol atlas is one JSON file holding the symbol vocabulary, where each symbol sits in a symbol-domain taxonomy, and the figures attested bearing it — enough to ask for a symbol and a figure in one lookup, without this site or its graph. It carries no text from any reference work.

Version

Built from the v50 bestiary. The constellation and the families were rebuilt against it, so every figure is on the map.