A true gargoyle is a drainpipe; the ornamental ones are called grotesques
Those snarling stone beasts on Gothic cathedrals have a practical job: each is a spout that throws rainwater clear of the walls so it cannot wash out the mortar. A carving without the spout is technically a grotesque or chimera, and the name itself comes from an old French word for throat.
Water pours into a trough cut into the back of the figure and shoots out of its mouth. Builders spread many of them around a roof so no single spout carried too much of a storm. The word traces to Old French gargoule, a water conduit, built from an imitative root garg-, the sound of gurgling, and goule, meaning an animal's mouth or throat, a cousin of the English gullet.
Stone spouts are far older than Gothic churches. Egyptian builders favoured lion heads, and Greek temples carried lion-mouthed spouts in their cornices. According to the 19th-century architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, himself a prolific maker of new gargoyles, the earliest medieval ones appear on Laon Cathedral, from around 1200 to 1220. The 54 chimeras crowding the railings of Notre-Dame de Paris date from its 1843 restoration. From the early 18th century drainpipes took over, partly because people found the figures frightening and heavy ones sometimes fell.
What they meant is disputed. Some writers see them as pictures of sin, others as charms to scare evil away from the building. In the 12th century Bernard of Clairvaux complained about monsters carved where monks were meant to read. A legend from Rouen tells of its bishop, St. Romanus, ridding the district of a fire-breathing dragon called La Gargouille, and early French gargoyles often took dragon form, echoing tales of founding bishops who drove out such beasts.
Animals carried symbolism too. The lion, the most common choice, stood for Christ, and medieval lore held that lion cubs born dead revived after three days. Rhinoceros and hippo gargoyles at Laon are modern additions with no medieval meaning. Later human figures were often crude jokes, shown vomiting or relieving themselves as the rain poured out, perhaps as a mirror held up to churchgoers. The historian Lester Burbank Bridaham warned against reading too much meaning into Gothic sculpture, and no single explanation fits every gargoyle.
Source: Gargoyle
