TV Tropes: Encyclopedia of myth and culture

[Lynx]

For those who aren't aware, this site has a bad reputation in some parts of the internet because it's very easy to lose track of time while browsing the site. Even so, it's been a great resource for me. The tropes speak to our assumptions and archetypes at least as well as the trumps of the tarot. All silliness aside, it serves as an extensive roadmap of western psychology, and by extension, of our magical reality. I think it deserves more discussion.

The motif indices are particularly useful, being a sort of symbolism disctionary. There are a gazillion books and websites that will try to say what a certain number means, for instance, but all the ones I've found either give incomplete information, or information from an obscure source that doesn't mean anything to me, or correspondences that only mean something to the author. Very often they'll tell you that "x means y" without giving any reason. The nice thing about tv tropes is that it doesn't leave out obvious information, like what 69 means to most people, in favor of the "true" meaning. No bullshit, in other words. Using this site means you won't be limited to one culture's or one person's ideas, so you'll know if you showed x to a diverse audience, you can more or less expect y to be their reaction. IMHO, this is closer to the "true" meaning of a symbol.

Motifs main page
Animal stereotypes. These are steriotypes and don't give a full expression of a given animal's character, but it lists the traits they are best known for. Makes a good starting place for further research.
Useful notes on a variety of topics. The informal tone allows it to be more expressive than wikipedia and give you a better idea of the different opinions surrounding a topic as well as the hard facts, and thus convey more information in some respects (taken with a pinch of salt, of course).