In this body [Medusa’s] first did noxious nature produce deadly plagues; from those jaws snakes poured forth whizzing hisses with vibrating tongues, which, after the manner of a woman’s hair flowing along the back, flapped about the very neck of the delighted Medusa. Upon her forehead turned towards you erect did serpents rise, and viper’s venom flowed from her combed locks.
What avails a Basilisk being pierced by the spear of the wretched Murrus? Swift flies the poison along the weapon, and fastens upon the hand; which, instantly, with sword unsheathed, he smites, and at the same moment severs it entirely from the arm; and, looking upon the dreadful warning of a death his own, he stands in safety, his hand perishing.
The Basilisk dwelled in the desert; or, more accurately, it made the desert. Birds fell dead at its feet and the earth’s fruits blackened and rotted; the water of the streams where it quenched its thirst remained poisoned for centuries. That its mere glance split rocks and burned grass has been attested by Pliny. Of all animals, the weasel alone was unaffected by the monster and could be counted on to attack it on sight; it was also believed that the crowing of a rooster sent the Basilisk scurrying. The seasoned traveler was careful to provide himself with either a caged rooster or a weasel before venturing into unknown territory. Another weapon was the mirror, its own image would strike the Basilisk dead.
Isidore of Seville and the compilers of the Speculum Triplex (Threefold Mirror) rejected Lucan’s fables and sought a rational explanation for the Basilisk’s origin. (They could not deny its existence, since the Vulgate translates the Hebrew word Tsepha, the name of a poisonous reptile, as ‘cockatrice.’) The theory that gained most favour was that of a misshapen egg laid by a cock and hatched by a snake or a toad. In the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne found this explanation as farfetched as the monster itself. At much the same time, Quevedo wrote his romance ‘The Basilisk,’ in which we read:
Si está vivo quien te vio,
Toda su historia es mentira,
Pues si no murió, te ignora,
Y si murió no lo afirma.
[If the man who saw you is still alive, your whole story is a lie, since if he has not died he cannot have seen you, and if he has died, he cannot tell what he saw.]
Behemoth
Four centuries before the Christian era, Behemoth was a magnification of the elephant or of the hippopotamus, or a mistaken and alarmist version of these animals; it is now—precisely—the ten famous verses describing it in Job (XL: 15-24) and the huge being which these lines evoke. The rest is wrangling and philology.
The word ‘Behemoth’ is plural; scholars tell us it is the intensive plural form of the Hebrew b’hemah, which means ‘beast.’ As Fray Luis de León wrote in his Exposición del Libro de Job: ‘Behemoth is a Hebrew word that stands for “beasts”; according to the received judgement of learned men, it means the elephant, so called because of its inordinate size; and being but a single animal it counts for many.’
We are also reminded of the fact that in the first verse of Genesis in the original text, the Hebrew name for God, Elohím, is plural, though the form of the verb it takes is singular—Bereshit bará Elohím et hashamáim veet haáretz. Trinitarians, by the way, have used this incongruity as an argument for the concept of the godhead being Three-in-One.
We give the ten verses in the translation from the Latin Vulgate by Father Knox (XL: 10-19):
Here is Behemoth, my creature as thou art, fed on the same grass the oxen eat; yet what strength in his loins, what lustihood in the navel of his belly! Stiff as cedarwood his tail, close-knit the sinews of his groin, bones like pipes of bronze, gristle like plates of steel! None of God’s works can vie with him, no weapon so strong in the hands of its maker; whole mountainsides, the playground of his fellow beasts, he will lay under tribute, as he lies there under the close covert of the marsh-reeds, thick boughs for his shadow, among the willows by the stream. The flooded river he drinks unconcerned; Jordan itself would have no terrors for that gaping mouth. Like a lure it would charm his eye, though it should pierce his nostrils with sharp stakes.
The Brownies
Brownies are helpful little men of a brownish hue, which gives them their name. It is their habit to visit Scottish farms and, while the household sleeps, to perform domestic chores. One of the tales by the Grimms deals with the same subject.
The famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson said he had trained his Brownies in the craft of literature. Brownies visited him in his dreams and told him wondrous tales; for instance, the strange transformation of Dr Jekyll into the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode of Olalla, in which the scion of an old Spanish family bites his sister’s hand.
Burak
In George Sale’s translation (1734), the opening verse of Chapter XVII of the Koran consists of these words: ‘Praise be unto him, who transported his servant by night, from the sacred temple of Mecca to his farther temple of Jerusalem, the circuit of which we have blessed, that we might show him some of our signs . . .’ Commentators say that the one praised is God, that his servant is Mohammed, that the sacred temple is that of Mecca, that the distant temple is that of Jerusalem, and that from Jerusalem the Prophet was transported to the seventh heaven. In the oldest versions of the legend, Mohammed is guided by a man or an angel; in those of a later date he is furnished with a heavenly steed, larger than an ass and smaller than a mule. This steed is Burak, whose name means ‘shining.’ According to Richard Burton, translator of The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, Moslems in India usually picture Burak with a man’s face, the ears of an ass, a horse’s body, and the wings and tail of a peacock.
One of the Islamic legends tells that Burak, on leaving the ground, tipped a jar of water. The Prophet was taken up to the seventh heaven, along the way speaking in each of the heavens with the patriarchs and angels living there, and he crossed the Unity and felt a coldness that chilled his heart when the Lord laid a hand on his shoulder. Man’s time is not commensurate with God’s time; on his return the Prophet raised the jar, out of which not a single drop had yet been spilled.
Miguel Asm Palacios, the twentieth-century Spanish Orientalist, speaks of a mystic from Murcia of the 1200s who, in an allegory entitled the Book of the Night Journey to the Majesty of the All-Generous, has seen in Burak, a symbol of divine love. In another text he speaks of the ‘Burak of the pureness of heart.’
The Carbuncle
In mineralogy the carbuncle, from the Latin carbunculus, ‘a little coal,’ is a ruby; as to the carbuncle of the ancients, it is supposed to have been a garnet.
In sixteenth-century South America, the name was given by the Spanish conquistadors to a mysterious animal—mysterious because nobody ever saw it well enough to know whether it was a bird or a mammal, whether it had feathers or fur. The poet-priest Martín del Barco Centenera, who claims to have seen it in Paraguay, describes it in his Argentina (1602) only as ‘a smallish animal, with a shining mirror on its head, like a glowing coal . . .’ Another conquistador, Gonzalo Fernández del Oviedo, associates this mirror or light shining out of the darkness—two of which he glimpsed in the Strait of Magellan—with the precious stone that dragons were thought to have hidden in their brain. He took his knowledge from Isidore of Seville, who wrote in his Etymologies:
it is taken from the dragon’s brain but does not harden into a gem unless the head is cut from the living beast; wizards, for this reason, cut the heads from sleeping dragons. Men bold enough to venture into dragon lairs scatter grain that has been doctored to make these beasts drowsy, and when they have fallen asleep their heads are struck off and the gems plucked out.
Here we are reminded of Shakespeare’s toad (As You Like It, II, i), which, though ‘ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head . . .’
Possession of the Carbuncle’s jewel offered fortune and luck. Barco Centenera underwent many hardships hunting the reaches of Paraguayan rivers and jungles for the elusive creature; he neve
r found it. Down to this day we know nothing more about the beast and its secret head stone.
The Catoblepas
Pliny (VIII, 32), relates that somewhere on the borders of Ethiopia, near the head of the Nile,
there is found a wild beast called the catoblepas; an animal of moderate size, and in other respects sluggish in the movement of the rest of its limbs; its head is remarkably heavy, and it only carries it with the greatest difficulty, being always bent down towards the earth. Were it not for this circumstance, it would prove the destruction of the human race; for all who behold its eyes, fall dead upon the spot.
Catoblepas, in Greek, means ‘that which looks downward.’ The French naturalist Cuvier has conjectured that the gnu (contaminated by the basilisk and the gorgon) suggested the Catoblepas to the ancients. At the close of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Flaubert describes it and has it speak in this way:
black buffalo with the head of a hog, hanging close to the ground, joined to its body by a thin neck, long and loose as an emptied intestine. It wallows in the mud, and its legs are smothered under the huge mane of stiff bristles that hide its face.
‘Obese, downhearted, wary, I do nothing but feel under my belly the warm mud. My head is so heavy that I cannot bear its weight. I wind it slowly around my body; with half-open jaws, I pull up with my tongue poisonous plants dampened by my breath. Once, I ate up my forelegs unawares.
‘No one, Anthony, has ever seen my eyes; or else, those who have seen them have died. If I were to lift my eyelids—my pink and swollen eyelids—you would die on the spot.’
The Celestial Stag
We know absolutely nothing about the appearance of the Celestial Stag (maybe because nobody has ever had a good look at one), but we do know that these tragic animals live underground in mines and desire nothing more than to reach the light of day. They have the power of speech and implore the miners to help them to the surface. At first, a Celestial Stag attempts to bribe the workmen with the promise of revealing hidden veins of silver and gold; when this gambit fails, the beast becomes troublesome and the miners are forced to overpower it and wall it up in one of the mine galleries. It is also rumoured that miners outnumbered by the Stags have been tortured to death.
Legend has it that if the Celestial Stag finds its way into the open air, it becomes a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence.
The tale is from China and is recorded by G. Willoughby-Meade in his book Chinese Ghouls and Goblins.
The Centaur
The Centaur is the most harmonious creature of fantastic zoology. ‘Biform’ it is called in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but its heterogeneous character is easily overlooked, and we tend to think that in the Platonic world of ideas there is an archetype of the Centaur as there is of the horse or the man. The discovery of this archetype took centuries; early archaic monuments show a naked man to whose waist the body and hind quarters of a horse are uncomfortably fixed. On the west façade of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Centaurs already stand on the legs of a horse, and from the place where the animal’s neck should start we find a human torso.
Centaurs were the offspring of Ixion, a king of Thessaly, and a cloud which Zeus had given the shape of Hera (or Juno); another version of the legend asserts that they were the offspring of Centaurus, Apollo’s son, and Stilbia; a third, that they were the fruit of a union of Centaurus with the mares of Magnesium. (It is said that centaur is derived from gandharva; in Vedic myth, the Gandharvas are minor gods who drive the horses of the sun.) Since the art of riding was unknown to the Greeks of Homeric times, it has been conjectured that the first Scythian horseman they came across seemed to them all one with his horse, and it has also been alleged that the cavalry of the conquistadors were Centaurs to the Indians. A text quoted by Prescott runs as follows:
One of the riders fell off his horse; and the Indians, seeing the animal fall asunder, up to now having deemed the beast all one, were so filled with terror that they turned and fled, crying out to their comrades that the animal had made itself into two and wondering at this: wherein we may detect the secret hand of God; since, had this not happened, they might have slaughtered all the Christians.
But the Greeks, unlike the Indians, were familiar with the horse; it is more likely that the Centaur was a deliberate invention and not a confusion born of ignorance.
The best known of the Centaur fables is the one in which they battle with the Lapiths followed a quarrel at a marriage celebration. To the Centaurs wine was now a new experience; in the midst of the banqueting an intoxicated Centaur insulted the bride and, overturning the tables, started the famous Centauromachy that Phidias, or a disciple of his, would carve on the Parthenon, that Ovid would commemorate in Book XII of the Metamorphoses, and that would inspire Rubens. Defeated by the Lapiths, the Centaurs were forced to leave Thessaly. Hercules, in a second encounter with them, all but annihilated the race of Centaurs with his arrows.
Anger and rustic barbarism are symbolized in the Centaur, but Chiron, ‘the most righteous of the Centaurs’ (Iliad, XI, 832), was the teacher of Achilles and Aesculapius, whom he instructed in the arts of music, hunting, and war, as well as medicine and surgery. Chiron stands out in Canto XII of the Inferno, generally known as the ‘Canto of the Centaurs.’ The acute observations of Momigliano in his 1945 edition of the Commedia should interest the curious.
Pliny (VII, 3) says he saw a Hippocentaur embalmed in honey that had been brought to Rome from Egypt in the reign of Claudius.
In the ‘Feast of the Seven Sages,’ Plutarch humorously tells that one of the shepherds of Periander, a tyrant of Corinth, brought his master, in a leather pouch, a newborn creature that a mare had given birth to and whose face, neck, and arms were human while its body was that of a horse. It cried like a baby, and everyone thought it to be a frightening omen. The sage Thales examined it, chuckled, and said to Periander that really he could not approve his herdsmen’s conduct.
In Book V of his poem De rerum natura, Lucretius declares the Centaur impossible since the equine species reaches maturity before the human, and at the age of three the Centaur would be a full-grown horse and a babbling child. The horse would die fifty years before the man.
Cerberus
If Hell is a house, the house of Hades, it is natural that it have its watchdog; it is also natural that this dog be fearful. Hesiod’s Theogony gives it fifty heads; to make things easier for the plastic arts, this number has been reduced and Cerberus’ three heads are now a matter of public record. Virgil speaks of its three throats; Ovid of its threefold bark; Butler compares the triple-crowned tiara of the Pope, who is Heaven’s doorman, with the three heads of the dog who is the doorman of Hell (Hudibras, IV, 2). Dante lends it human characteristics which increase its infernal nature: a filthy black beard, clawed hands that in the lashing rain rip at the souls of the damned. It bites, barks, and bares its teeth.
Bringing Cerberus up into the light of day was the last of Hercules’ tasks. (‘He drow out Cerberus, the hound of helle,’ writes Chaucer in ‘The Monke’s Tale.’) Zachary Grey, an English writer of the eighteenth century, in his commentary on Hudibras interprets the adventure in this way:
This Dog with three Heads denotes the past, the present, and the Time to come; which receive, and, as it were, devour all things. Hercules got the better of him, which shews that heroick Actions are always victorious over Time, because they are present in the Memory of Posterity.
According to the oldest texts, Cerberus greets with his tail (which is a serpent) those entering into Hell, and tears to pieces those who try to get out. A later legend has him biting the newly arrived; to appease him a honeycake was placed in the coffin of the departed.
In Norse mythology, a blood-spattered dog, Garmr, keeps watch over the house of the dead and will fight against the gods when hell’s wolves devour the moon and sun. Some give this dog four eyes; the dogs of Yama, the Brahman god of death, also have four eyes.
&nb
sp; Both Brahmanism and Buddhism offer hells full of dogs, which, like Dante’s Cerberus, are torturers of souls.
The Cheshire Cat
and the Kilkenny Cats
Everyone is familiar with the phrases ‘grin like a Cheshire cat,’ which means of course to put on a sardonic face. Many explanations of its origin have been attempted. One is that in Cheshire cheeses were sold in the shape of the grinning head of a cat. Another, that Cheshire is a Palatine county or earldom and that this mark of nobility provoked the hilarity of its cats. Still another is that in the time of Richard III there was a gamewarden named Caterling who used to break into an angry smile whenever he crossed swords with poachers.
In Alice in Wonderland, published in 1865, Lewis Carroll endowed the Cheshire Cat with the faculty of slowly disappearing to the point of leaving only its grin—without teeth and without a mouth. Of the Kilkenny Cats it is told that they got into raging quarrels and devoured each other, leaving behind no more than their tails. This story goes back to the eighteenth century.
The Chimera
The first mention we have of the Chimera is in Book VI of the Iliad. There Homer writes that it came of divine stock and was a lion in its foreparts, a goat in the middle, and a serpent in its hindparts, and that from its mouth it vomited flames, and finally was killed by the handsome Bellerophon, the son of Glaucus, following the signs of the gods. A lion’s head, goat’s belly, and serpent’s tail is the most obvious image conveyed by Homer’s words, but Hesiod’s Theogony describes the Chimera as having three heads, and this is the way it is depicted in the famous Arezzo bronze that dates from the fifth century. Springing from the middle of the animal’s back is the head of a goat, while at one end it has a snake’s head and at the other a lion’s.
Collected Stories Page 48