The ancients made them offerings of honey, olive oil, and milk. They were minor goddesses, but no temples were erected in their honour.
The Odradek
Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.
No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on two legs.
One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a brokendown remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished. In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of.
He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again. Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him he is so diminutive that you cannot help it rather like a child.
‘Well, what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says.
‘And where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. And that is usually the end of the conversation. Even these answers are not always forthcoming; often he stays mute for a long time, as wooden as his appearance.
I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that one can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find almost painful.
Franz Kafka: The Penal Colony (Translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir)
[This piece was originally titled Die Sorge des Hausvaters — ‘The Cares of a Family Man’.]
An Offspring of Leviathan
In the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compendium of lives of the saints written by the Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine, read and re-read in the Middle Ages but now neglected, we find much curious lore. The book went through numerous editions and translations, among them the one into English printed by William Caxton. Chaucer’s ‘Second Nonne’s Tale’ has its source in the Legenda aurea; Longfellow also was inspired by the work of Jacobus, taking the, title from the Golden Legend for one of the books of his trilogy Christus.
Out of Jacobus’ medieval Latin, we translate the following from the chapter on St Martha (CV [100]):
There was at that time, in a certain wood above the Rhone between Arles and Avignon, a dragon that was half beast and half fish, larger than an ox and longer than a horse. Armed with a pair of tusks that were like swords and pointed as horns, it lay in wait in the river, killing all wayfarers and swamping boats. It had come, however, from the sea of Galatia in Asia Minor and was begotten by Leviathan, the fiercest of all water serpents, and by the Wild Ass, which is common to those shores . . .
One-Eyed Beings
Before it became the name of an optical instrument, the word ‘monocle’ was applied to beings who had a single eye. So, in a sonnet composed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Góngora writes of the Monóculo galán de Galatea (‘The monocle who yearns for Galatea’) referring, of course, to Polyphemus, of whom he had previously written in his Fábula de Polifemo:
Un monte era de miembros eminente
Este que, de Neptuno hijo fiero,
De un ojo ilustra el orbe de su frente,
Émulo casi del mayor lucero;
Cíclope a quien el pino más valiente
Bastón le obedecía tan ligero,
Y al grave peso junco tan delgado,
Que un día era bastón y otro caiado.
Negro el cabello, imitador undoso
De las oscuras aguas del Leteo,
Al viento que le peina proceloso
Vuela sin orden, pende sin aseo;
Un torrente es su barba impetuoso
Que, adusto hijo de este Pirineo,
Su pecho inunda, o tarde o mal o en vano
Surcada aún de los dedos de su mano.
[An eminent peak of limbs he was, this uncouth son of Neptune, lighting the orb of his forehead with an eye almost rivaling the greatest star; a Cyclops to whom the stoutest pine obeyed as a light cane, and was to his bulky mass a reed so slender that one day it was a walking-stick and the next a shepherd’s crook.
Jet black his hair, a wavy imitator of the dark waters of the Lethe, in the wind which stormily combs it, blowing in a tangle and dangling in disorder; a plunging torrent is his beard, which stern son of this Pyrenee overflows his breast, too late or badly or in vain furrowed by the fingers of his hand.]
These lines outdo and are weaker than others from the third book of the Aeneid (praised by Quintilian), which in turn outdo and are weaker than still other lines from the ninth book of the Odyssey. This literary decline matches a decline in the poet’s faith; Virgil wishes to impress us with his Polyphemus, but scarcely believes in him; and Góngora believes only in words or in verbal trickery.
The Cyclops were not the only race of men having one eye; Pliny (VII, 2) also mentions the Arimaspians, a nation remarkable for having but one eye, and that placed in the middle of the forehead. This race is said to carry on a perpetual warfare with the Griffons, a kind of monster, with wings as they are commonly represented, for the gold which they dig out of the mines, and which these wild beasts retain and keep watch over with a singular degree of cupidity, while the Arimaspi are equally desirous to get possession of it.
Five hundred years earlier, the first encyclopedist, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, had written (III, 116):
This is also plain, that to the north of Europe there is by far more gold than elsewhere. In this matter again I cannot with certainty say how the gold is got; some will have it that one-eyed men called Arimaspians steal it from griffons. But this too I hold incredible, that there can be men in all else like other men, yet having but one eye.
The Panther
In medieval bestiaries the word ‘panther’ deals with a very different animal from the carnivorous mammal of present-day zoology. Aristotle had written that it gives off a sweet smell attractive to other animals; Aelian the Roman author nicknamed ‘Honey-Tongued’ for his perfect command of Greek, a language he preferred to Latin stated that this odour was also pleasant to men. (In this characteristic some see a confusion of the Panther with the civet cat.) Pliny endowed the Panther’s back with a large circular spot that waxed and waned with the moon. To these marvelous circumstances came to be added the fact that the Bible, in the Septuagint version, uses the word ‘panther’ in a verse (Hosea, V: 14) that may be a prophetic reference to Jesus: ‘I am become as a panther to Ephraim.’
In the Anglo-Saxon bes
tiary of the Exeter Book, the Panther is a gentle, solitary beast with a melodious voice and sweet breath (likened elsewhere to the smell of allspice) that makes its home in a secret den in the mountains. Its only foe is the dragon, with which it fights incessantly. After a full meal it sleeps and ‘On the third day when he wakes, a lofty, sweet, ringing sound comes from his mouth, and with the song a most delightful stream of sweet-smelling breath, more grateful than all the blooms of herbs and blossoms of the trees.’ Multitudes of men and animals flock to its den from the fields and castles and towns, drawn on by the fragrance and the music. The dragon is the age-old enemy, the Devil; the waking is the resurrection of the Lord; the multitudes are the community of the faithful; and the Panther is Jesus Christ. To attenuate the amazement this allegory can awaken, let us remember that the Panther was not a wild beast to the Saxons but an exotic sound unsupported by any very concrete image. It may be added, as a curiosity, that Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’ speaks of ‘Christ the tiger’.
Leonardo da Vinci notes:
The African panther is like a lion, but with longer legs, and a more slender body. It is completely white, spattered with black spots like rosettes. Its beauty delights the other animals, which would all flock to it were it not for the panther’s terrible stare. Aware of this, the panther lowers its eyes; other animals approach it to drink in such beauty, and the panther pounces on the nearest of them.
The Pelican
The Pelican of everyday zoology is a water bird with a wingspan of some six feet and a very long bill whose lower mandible distends to form a pouch for holding fish. The Pelican of fable is smaller and its bill is accordingly shorter and sharper. Faithful to popular etymology pelicanus, white-haired the plumage of the former is white while that of the latter is yellow and sometimes green. (The real origin of pelican is from the Greek ‘I hew with an axe’, in a confusion of its large bill with that of the woodpecker’s.) But more unusual than its appearance are its habits. With its bill and claws, the mother bird caresses her offspring with such devotion that she kills them. After three days the father arrives and, despairing over the deaths of his young, rips at his own breast with his bill. The blood that spills from his wounds revives the dead birds. This is the account given in medieval bestiaries, though St Jerome in a commentary on the 102nd Psalm (‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert’) attributes the death of the nestlings to the serpent. That the Pelican opens its breast and feeds its young with its own blood is the common version of the fable.
Blood that gives life to the dead suggests the Eucharist and the cross, and so a famous line of the Paradiso (XXV, 113) calls Jesus Christ nostro Pellicano — mankind’s Pelican. The Latin commentary by Benvenuto of Imola amplifies this point: ‘He is called pelican because he opened his side for our salvation, like the pelican that revives its dead brood with the blood of its breast. The pelican is an Egyptian Bird.’
The Pelican is common in ecclesiastical heraldry and it is still engraved on chalices. The bestiary by Leonardo da Vinci describes the Pelican in this way:
It is greatly devoted to its young and, finding them in the nest killed by snakes, tears at its breast, bathing them with its blood to bring them back to life.
The Peryton
The Sibyl of Erythraea, it is said, foretold that the city of Rome would finally be destroyed by the Perytons. In the year a.d. 642 the record of the Sibyl's prophecies was consumed in the great conflagration of Alexandria; the grammarians who undertook the task of restoring certain charred fragments of the nine volumes apparently never came upon the special prophecy concerning the fate of Rome.
In time it was deemed necessary to find a source that would throw greater light upon this dimly remembered tradition. After many vicissitudes it was learned that in the sixteenth century a rabbi from Fez (in all likelihood Jakob Ben Chaim) had left behind a historical treatise in which he quoted the now lost work of a Greek scholiast, which included certain historical facts about the Perytons obviously taken from the oracles before the Library of Alexandria was burned by Omar. The name of the learned Greek has not come down to us, but his fragments run:
The Perytons had their original dwelling in Atlantis and are half deer, half bird. They have the deer’s head and legs. As for its body, it is perfectly avian, with corresponding wings and plumage . . .
Its strangest trait is that, when the sun strikes it, instead of casting a shadow of its own body, it casts the shadow of a man. From this, some conclude that the Perytons are the spirits of wayfarers who have died far from their homes and from the care of their gods . . .. . . and have been surprised eating dry earth . . . flying in flocks and have been seen at a dizzying height above the Columns of Hercules.
. . . they [Perytons] are mortal foes of the human race; when they succeed in killing a man, their shadow is that of their own body and they win back the favour of their gods.
. . . and those who crossed the seas with Scipio to conquer Carthage came close to failure, for during the passage a formation of Perytons swooped down on the ships, killing and mangling many . . . Although our weapons have no effect against it, the animal if such it be can kill no more than a single man.
. . . wallowing in the gore of its victims and then fleeing upward on its powerful wings.
. . . in Ravenna, where they were last seen, telling of their plumage which they described as light blue in colour, which greatly surprised me for all that is known of their dark green feathers.
Though these excerpts are sufficiently explicit, it is to be lamented that down to our own time no further intelligence about the Perytons has reached us. The rabbi’s treatise, which preserved this description for us, had been on deposit until before the last World War in the library of the University of Dresden. It is painful to say that this document has also disappeared, and whether as a consequence of bombardment or of the earlier book burning of the Nazis, it is not known. Let us hope that one day another copy of the work may be discovered and again come to adorn the shelves of some library.
The Phoenix
In monumental effigies, in pyramids of stone, and in treasured mummies, the Egyptians sought eternity. It is therefore appropriate that their country should have given rise to the myth of a cyclical and deathless bird, though its subsequent elaboration is the work of Greece and of Rome. Adolf Erman writes that in the mythology of Heliopolis, the Phoenix (benu) is the lord of jubilees or of long cycles of time. Herodotus, in a famous passage (II, 73), tells with insistent scepticism an early form of the legend:
Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix. I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness. The Egyptians tell a tale of this bird’s devices which I do not believe. He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun’s temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him. His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such is the tale of what is done by this bird.
Some five hundred years later, Tacitus and Pliny took up the wondrous tale; the former justly observed that all antiquity is obscure, but that a tradition has fixed the intervals of the Phoenix’s visits at 1,461 years (Annals, VI, 28). The latter also looked into the Phoenix’s chronology; Pliny records (X, 2) that, according to Manilius, the bird’s life coincides with the period of the Platonic year, or Great Year. A Platonic year is the time required by the sun, the moon, and the five planets to return to their initial position; Ta
citus in his Dialogus de Oratoribus gives this as 12,994 common years. The ancients believed that, upon fulfilment of this vast astronomical cycle, the history of the world would repeat itself in all its details under the repeated influence of the planets; the Phoenix would be a mirror or an image of this process. For a closer analogy between the cosmos and the Phoenix, it should be recalled that, according to the Stoics, the universe dies in fire and is reborn in fire and that the cycle had no beginning and will have no end.
Time simplified the method of the Phoenix’s generation.
Herodotus speaks of an egg and Pliny of a maggot, but the poet Claudian at the end of the fourth century already celebrates an immortal bird that rises out of its own ashes, an heir to itself and a witness of the ages.
Few myths have been as widespread as that of the Phoenix. In addition to the authors already cited, we may add: Ovid (Metamorphoses, XV), Dante (Inferno, XXIV), Pellicer (The Phoenix and its Natural History), Quevedo (Spanish Parnassus, VI), and Milton (Samson Agonistes, in fine). Shakespeare at the close of Henry VIII (V, iv) wrote these fine verses:
Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - the Giovanni Translations (And Others) Page 62