My fairy lord, this must be done with haste;
For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger;
At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,
Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all,
That in cross-ways and floods have burial,
Already to their wormy beds are gone;
For fear lest day should look their shames upon,
They wilfully themselves exile from light,
And must for aye consort with black-browed night.
Not so, however, with the fairies, for Oberon rejoins:—
But we are spirits of another sort:
I with the morning's love have oft made sport;
And, like a forester, the groves may tread,
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt-green streams.
The cock was one of the attendants or emblems of Æsculapius or Asclêpius, the god of medicine of the Greek mythology, and this fowl was commonly sacrificed to him. In addition to his knowledge in the art of healing disease, he possessed the power of raising the dead to life. He was believed to be the son of Apollo. According to Plato, the last words of Socrates were, "Criton, we owe a cock to Asclêpius." This bird, as well as the serpent, was one of his sacred emblems.
The Roman god Janus is regarded by many to be in some respects a Latin form of the Greek Asclêpius. He opens the year and the daily morning, and is the porter of heaven. One of his peculiar emblems was a cock, by the means of whose matutinal song he was supposed to announce the approach of the dawn.
The crowing of a cock of the colour of gold is to be the signal of the dawn of Ragnarock, "the great day of arousing," according to Scandinavian mythology. A black cock is likewise said to crow in the Niflheim, or "land of gloom."
J. Bossewell, in "Workes of Armourie" (1597), says:—"The lyon dreadeth the white cocke, because he breedeth a precious stone called allectricium, like to the stone that bright Calcedonius, and for that the cocke beareth such a stone, the lyon specially abhorreth him." The stone referred to was said to be similar to a dark crystal, and about the size of a bean.
A most astounding story affirming the supernatural attributes of chanticleer is related in Pinkerton's "General Collection of Voyages and Travels." In the "Voyage to Congo," a Capuchin "missioner," named Father Morolla, relates the following remarkable incident with the utmost gravity and evidently with perfect faith in the veracity of the story:—On the capture of a certain town by the army of Sogno, a large cock was found with an iron ring attached to one of its legs. The unfortunate rooster was speedily placed in the pot and boiled in the most orthodox fashion. When, however, his captors were about to commence their improvised feast, to their astonishment the cooked "pieces of the cock, though sodden and near dissolved, began to move about, and unite into the form they were in before, and being so united, the restored cock immediately raised himself up, and jumped out of the platter upon the ground, where he walked about as well as when he was first taken. Afterwards he leaped upon an adjoining wall, where he became new-feathered all of a sudden, and then took his flight to a tree hard by, where, fixing himself, he, after three claps of his wings, made a most hideous noise, and then disappeared. Every one may imagine what a terrible fright the spectators were in at this sight, who, leaping with a thousand Ave-Marias in their mouths from the place where this had happened, were contented to observe most of the particulars at a distance."
The fabulous animal, the cockatrice, was believed to result from a "venomous egg" laid by an aged cock, and hatched by a toad. The monster had the head and breast of the dunghill champion, and "thence downwards the body of a serpent." Toads are frequently referred to by old writers in connection with witches and witchcraft.
In a MS. "Medycine Boke," belonging to Dr. Sampson Jones, of Bettws, Monmouthshire (1650-90), is the following strange recipe, entitled, "Cock water for a consumption and cough of the lungs":—"Take a running cock and pull (pluck) him alive, then kill him and cutt him in pieces and take out his intrals and wipe him cleane, breake the bones, then put him into an ordinary still with a pottle of sack and a pottle of red cow's milk," etc., etc.