This creature is: mythological
Note: I am not religious. Please forgive me if I have made errors regarding this creature.
Chalkydri are a kind of angel that appear in the Second Book of Enoch. In the book, Enoch (an ancestor of Noah and father of Methuselah) ascends up through various heavens. Ten heavens are described, and the Chalkydri live in fourth heaven.
There, they accompany the sun, and at sunrise all the Chalkydri start singing to tell the world’s birds a new day has arrived.
The Chalkydri have feet and tails like a lion’s, the heads of crocodiles, and “their appearance is empurpled, like the rainbow”. They have twelve angel wings each. Their size is “nine hundred measures” (whatever that means. I do not know how much a ‘measure’ is, but I presume a Chalkydri would be rather huge).
The Second Book of Enoch, also called Secrets of Enoch or 2 Enoch, is a book that nobody really knows much about. A wide range of dates have been suggested but it’s thought that it is from the first century CE. It was written by Jews or Christians. It is not included in either the Jewish or the Christian canon, but it was used by a Christian sect called the Bogomils.
The fourth heaven’s Chalkydri are mentioned alongside “phoenixes”, any reference to these I can find is of a very vague nature (basically just: they are not the same as Greek mythology phoenixes, they dwell in fourth and also sixth heaven, but beyond that no clue). “Phoenix” could even be an alternate name for Chalkydri, as the book says their “names are Phoenixes and Chalkydri” and then what follows is only a single description… so they could be the same kind of creature or at least are highly similar. But I do not know.
External links:
Chalkydri on Wikipedia
2 Enoch on Wikipedia – this article discusses the book and includes a brief description of all ten heavens.
Here are some passages on the Chalkydri in a 1926 version of the Second Book of Enoch on sacred-texts.com:
- the main bit about phoenixes and Chalkydri
- a part that mentions them singing
- a part about sixth heaven that mentions the phoenixes again
And here’s an 1896 version of the book on Internet Archive.
