Phoenix

In ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology, the phoenix is a mythical bird and associated with the Egyptian sun-god Re and the Greek Phoibos (Apollo). According to the Greeks the bird lives in Arabia, nearby a cool well. Each morning at dawn, it would bathe in the water and sing such a beautiful song, that the sun-god stops his chariot to listen. There exists only one phoenix at the time.
When it felt its death approaching (every 500 or 1461 years), it would build a nest of aromatic wood and set it on fire, and was consumed by the flames. When it was burned, a new phoenix sprang forth from the pyre. It then embalmed the ashes of its predecessor in an egg of myrrh and flew with it to Heliopolis ("city of the sun"). There it would deposit the egg on the altar of the sun god.
In Egypt is was usually depicted as a heron, but in the classic literature as a peacock, or an eagle. The phoenix symbolizes immortality, resurrection, and life after death. In that aspect it was often placed on sarcophagi. It is associated with the Egyptian Benu, the Garuda of the Hindus, and the Chinese Feng-huang.

Sphinx

In ancient Egypt, the Sphinx is a male statue of a lion with the head of a human, sometimes with wings. Most sphinxes however represent a king in his appearance as the sun god. The name "sphinx" was applied to the portraits of kings by the Greeks who visited Egypt in later centuries, because of the similarity of these statues to their Sphinx. The best known specimen is the Great Sphinx of Gizeh (on the western bank of the Nile) which is not a sphinx at all but the representation of the head of king Khaf-Ra (Chephren) on the body of a crouching body. It was supposedly built in the 4th dynasty (2723-2563 BCE), although others claim it dates back to the 7th-5th millennium.

The Greek Sphinx was a demon of death and destruction and bad luck. She was the offspring of Typhon and Echidna. It was a female creature, sometimes depicted as a winged lion with a feminine head, and sometimes as a female with the breast, paws and claws of a lion, a snake tail and bird wings. She sat on a high rock near Thebes and posed a riddle to all who passed. The riddle was: "What animal is that which in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" Those who could not solve the riddle were strangled by her. Finally Oedipus came along and he was the only who could answer that it was "Man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks erect, and in old age with the aid of a staff." The Sphinx was so mortified at the solving of her riddle that she cast herself down from the rock and perished.

The name 'sphinx' is derived from the Greek sphingo, which means "to strangle". In ancient Assyrian myths, the sphinx usually appears as a guardian of temple entrances.

Werewolf

In popular folklore, a man who is transformed, or who transforms himself, into a wolf in nature and appearance under the influence of a full moon. The werewolf is only active at night and during that period, he devours infants and corpses. According to legend, werewolves can be killed by silver objects such as silver arrows and silver bullets. When a werewolf dies he is returned to his human form.

Origin
The word is a contraction of the old-Saxon word wer (which means "man") and wolf -- werwolf, manwolf. A Lycanthrope, a term often used to describe werewolves, however, is someone who suffers from a mental disease and only thinks he has changed into a wolf.

The concept of werewolves, or lycanthropes, is possibly based on the myth of Lycaon. He was the king of Arcadia, and in the time of the ancient Greeks notorious for his cruelty. He tried to buy the favor of Zeus by offering him the flesh of a young child. Zeus punished him for this crime and turned him into a wolf. The legends of werewolves have been told since the ancient Greeks and are known all over the world. In areas where the wolf is not so common, the belief in werewolves is replaced by folklore where men can change themselves in tigers, lions, bears and other fierce animals.

History
In the dark Middle Ages, the Church stigmatized the wolf as the personification of evil and a servant of Satan himself. The Church courts managed to put so much pressure on schizophrenics, epileptics and the mentally disabled, that they testified to be werewolves and admitted to receive their orders directly from Satan. After 1270 it was even considered heretical not to believe in the existence of werewolves.

The charge of being a werewolf disappeared from European courts around the 17th century, but only for the lack of evidence. The belief in werewolves, however, did not completely disappear. In Europe after 1600, it was generally believed that if there were no werewolves, then at least the wolf was a creature of evil. This resulted in an unjustified and negative image of the wolf; an image that most people still have today.

(Greek) lykanthropos - lykos wolf; anthropos human being; Wolfman.