cursed-into-monstrous-form
morphological TMI D661
Figures bearing this motif (21)
Loathly Worm · salience 0.95
“The princess Margaret was turned into a loathly worm by her stepmother the queen and banished to the Spindleston hills, where her poisonous breath blighted the country for miles until the people feared a permanent wasteland.”
Charybdis · salience 0.9
“transformed into a monster by Zeus as punishment for her insatiable greed”
Gorgon · salience 0.9
“Medusa was said to have once been a beautiful maiden who was transformed into a Gorgon as punishment by the goddess Athena.”
Headless Mule · salience 0.9
“this terrifying entity is the cursed form of a woman who committed adultery with a priest or was tempted by the devil”
Scylla · salience 0.9
“Scylla was once a beautiful nymph, transformed into a monster by the jealous sorceress Circe.”
Siren · salience 0.9
“they were originally nymphs who were transformed as punishment or cursed to their fate”
Wanyūdō · salience 0.9
“As divine retribution for his cruelty, he was condemned to become one with the wheel of his cart”
Azhi Dahaka · salience 0.9
“His origin as a mortal man corrupted and physically transformed by Ahriman”
Medusa · salience 0.9
“Medusa was once a beautiful maiden whose hair was transformed into snakes by Athena as punishment after Poseidon violated her in Athena's temple”
Lamia · salience 0.9
“Hera compels Lamia to devour her own offspring or drives her to madness and grief so severe that Lamia is transformed into a monstrous, child-eating daemon”
Loup-Garou · salience 0.9
“In many tellings the transformation is a punishment: a man who neglects his religious duties — in French-Canadian tellings, seven years without making his Easter communion — is cursed into the beast's shape.”
Cercopes · salience 0.7
“Their end elsewhere is less merciful: one account has them turned to stone for trying their deceptions on Zeus himself, and another strand remembers them transformed into the monkeys they had always resembled.”
Melusine · salience 0.6
“She is typically described as a beautiful woman who is transformed, or reveals herself to be, a serpent or dragon from the waist down every Saturday”
Rokurokubi · salience 0.6
“In many stories the condition is explained as a curse or karmic consequence, sometimes tied to a broken religious precept in a past life, and it is frequently discovered only by accident, as when a husband or houseguest wakes in the night to find the sleeper's neck stretched impossibly long or the head altogether missing from the pillow.”
Xtabay · salience 0.6
“In the dominant telling, it is Utz-Colel who, unable to bear this posthumous judgment, appeals to dark or evil spirits and returns as the demon Xtabay, while Xkeban is redeemed rather than becoming the demon.”
Iara · salience 0.55
“her father, leading the tribe, then threw her into the river (often placed at the Solimões or the Meeting of the Waters) as punishment, after which she was transformed by the river's spirits into the being she becomes.”
Aswang
“Origin stories vary widely: in some tellings the condition is inherited within a bloodline and passed down through families, in others it can be transmitted by a bite, a curse, or contact with an object such as a black chick or an egg, and in still others it is acquired through a pact or ritual.”
Uktena
“some tellings describe it as a man transformed by the Little Men into the monstrous horned serpent and sent to kill the Sun, a task at which he failed”
Kabandha
“The story most consistently told is that Kabandha's monstrous transformation came from a confrontation with the god Indra: in one telling he quarrelled with or challenged Indra directly, while another attributes his deformity to a sage's curse, but both converge on the same result, that a blow from Indra drove his head and legs into his own body, leaving him swollen and misshapen with his single eye and huge mouth exposed on his torso and his arms grown to extraordinary length.”