The dragon, though, as we have seen, at times induced to mount guard over other people’s property, is ordinarily a very Ishmaelite; his hand is against everybody, and everybody’s hand against him; yet would he appear, if we may credit Pliny, to bear an excess and maximum of ill-will against the elephant. The elephant always strikes one as being such a great good-natured beast, as one who could do so much mischief if he would, yet spends his strength instead for the good of others, that it is difficult to understand how he should in so pre-eminent a degree have earned the ill-will of so potent an enemy. The dragon would appear to be always the aggressor, and the elephant has to defend himself as well as he can against the uncalled-for attack: it is satisfactory in this case to know that the scaly assailant sometimes fully meets his match. In Book VIII. of Pliny’s history we read that “India bringeth forth the biggest elephants, as also the dragons, that are continually at variance with them, and evermore fighting, and those of such greatnesse that they can easily clasp and wind them round the elephants, and withall tie them fast with a knot. In this conflict they die, both the one and the other; the elephant hee falls downe dead as conquered, and with his great and heavie weight crusheth and squeaseth the dragon that is wound and wreathed about him. Also the dragon assaileth him from an high tree, and launceth himselfe upon him, but the elephant knowing well enough he is not able to withstand his windings and knottings about him, seeketh to come close to some trees or hard rocks, and so for to crush and squeese the dragon between him and them. The dragons ware hereof, entangle and snare his feet and legs first with their taile; the elephants on the other side undoe those knots with their trunke as with a hand, but to prevent that againe, the dragons put in their heads into their snout, and so stop their wind, and withall fret and gnaw the tenderest parts that they find there.” One does not quite understand how this last counter-plan of the dragon is effected, but it is evidently to be understood as equivalent to “checkmate.”
In the “Bestiare Divin” of Guillaume this antagonism of the elephant and dragon is again referred to, and indeed we find it an accepted belief throughout the Middle Ages. Pliny’s work was held for centuries in the greatest admiration, and to add “as Pliny saith” to any statement, no matter how wild, was considered amply sufficient. Guillaume’s description of the dragon is as follows—“C’est le plus grand des animaux rampants. Il nait en Éthiopie: il a la gueule petit, le corps long et reluisant comme or fin. C’est l’ennemie de l’éléphant; c’est avec sa queue qu’il triomphe de lui: là est, en effet, le principe de sa force; sa gueule ne porte point venin de mort.” The book of Guillaume is a fair type of several books of the sort written by ecclesiastics during the Middle Ages. Such books were an attempt to show that all the works of nature were symbols and teachers of great Scriptural truths; hence, while much that they give is interesting, their statements always require to be received with great caution. If the facts of the case got at all in the way of a good moral, so much the worse for the facts; and if a little or a great modification of the true state of the case could turn a good moral into one much better, the goodness of the intention was held to amply justify the departure from the hampering influence of the real facts. The MS. of Guillaume dates from the thirteenth century, and is at present preserved in the National Library in Paris. The writer was a Norman priest. The work has been very well reproduced in a French dress by Hippeau, a compatriot of the writer.[7] As we simply wish in our extract to bring out the belief in the antagonism between the elephant and the dragon, we forbear to add any moral teachings that a more or less morbid symbolism was able to deduct from the supposititious fact; but we shall have occasion to quote again more than once from the “Bestiare,” and doubtless the peculiar connection between scientific error and religious truth will have an opportunity of making itself felt in one or more of these extracts.
Referring back to the “300 Animals,” the natural history that was considered good enough for the people living in the year of grace 1786, we find, after the account of the Dart, “so called from his flying like an arrow from the tops of trees and hedges upon men, by which means he stings and wounds them to death,” the following description:—“The Cockatrice is called the king of serpents, not from his bigness—for he is much inferior in this respect to many serpents—but because of his majestic pace, for he does not creep upon the ground, like other serpents, but goes half upright, for which cause all other serpents avoid him; and it seems nature designed him that pre-eminence, by the crown or coronet upon his head. Writers differ concerning the production of this animal. Some are of opinion that it is brought forth of a cock’s egg sat upon by a snake or toad, and so becomes a cockatrice. It is said to be half a foot in length, the hinder part like a serpent, the fore part like a cock. Others are of opinion that the cock that lays the egg sits upon and hatches it himself. These monsters are bred in Africa and some parts of the world.” In England it would appear, so far as we have observed the matter, that the hens have entirely usurped the egg-laying department, and we are therefore spared the mortification of finding that our hoped-for chick has assumed the less welcome form of a cockatrice, for we shall see that the advent of a cockatrice is no laughing matter. The book goes on to tell us that authors differ about the bigness of it, for some say it is a span in compass and half a foot long, while others, with a truer sense of the marvellous, realise more fully that bulk is a potent element in all such matters, and at once make it four feet long. Its poison is so strong that there is no cure for it, and the air is in such a degree affected by its presence that no creature can live near it. It kills, we are assured, not only by its touch, but even the sight of the cockatrice, like that of the basilisk, is death. We read, for instance, in “Romeo and Juliet” of “the death-darting eye of cockatrice;” and again in “King Richard III.”—“A cockatrice hast thou hatched to the world whose unavoided eye is murtherous;” while in “Twelfth Night” we find the passage, “This will so fright them both, that they will kill one another by the look, like cockatrices.” After this we can scarcely wonder at a certain vagueness of description, as those who never saw the animal have full licence of description, while those, less fortunate, who have had an opportunity of studying from the life have forfeited their own in doing so. The only hope of getting an idea of it would be the discovery of a dead specimen, for we read that “as all other serpents are afraid of the sight and hissing of a cockatrice, so is the cockatrice itself very fearful of a weasel, which after it has eaten rue will set upon and destroy the cockatrice. Besides this little creature, it is said there is no other animal in the world able to contend with it.” We can well imagine the indignant astonishment of the cockatrice, after being for years the monarch of all it surveyed, when the gallant little weasel, strong in the triple armour which makes a quarrel just, and duly fortified by the internal application of rue, charges boldly home and takes him, monstrorum rex, by the throat. At the time that our authorised version of the Old Testament was made there was a sufficient belief in the creature to make the translation of some Hebrew word seem correctly rendered by the word cockatrice, for we read in the book of Isaiah that one sign of the millennial peace shall be that the child shall put his hand, unharmed, upon the den of the cockatrice; and a little farther on we find the passage, “For out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.” In the fifty-ninth chapter the workers of iniquity are described as hatching the cockatrice egg, and amongst the judgments pronounced upon the impenitent Jews by the prophet Jeremiah we find the verse, “Behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, amongst you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you.” The heraldic cockatrice is represented as having the head and legs of a cock, a scaly and serpent-like body, and the wings of a dragon.
Guillim[8] in his “Heraldry” says that “the Cockatrice is called in Latin Regulus, for that he seemeth to be a little King among Serpents: not in regard of his Quantity, but in respect of the Infection of his pestiferous and poisonous Aspect wherewith he poisoneth the Air. Not unlike those devillish Witches that do work the Destruction of silly Infants, as also of the Cattel of such their Neighbours whose prosperous Estate is to them a most grievous Eye-sore. Of such Virgil in his Bucolicks makes mention, saying, I know not what wicked Eye hath bewitched my tender Lambs.” The belief in the evil eye has been almost universal, and may be found in tribes the most remote from each other either in distance or in time. If it were not that Guillim is so ostentatiously loyal, and, like all heralds, a zealous upholder of rank and state, one might suspect him almost of a touch of bitter sarcasm in ascribing royal rank to the cockatrice, not from his magnanimity, not from his noble bearing, not from his beauty, but from the power of inflicting injuries that he so especially displays. When we consider what sort of a sovereign politically, socially, and every way the second Charles was, Guillim’s dedication of his book to him errs somewhat, perhaps, on the side of fulsome and sickening adulation:—“To the most August Charles the Second, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. Dread Sovereign, Here is a Firmament of Stars that shine not without your Benign Beam; you are the Sun of our Hemisphere that sets a splendour on the Nobility: For as they are Jewels and Ornaments to your Crown, so they derive their lustre and value from thence. From your Breast, as from a Fountain, the young Plants of honour are cherisht and nurst up. Your vertuous Atcheivements are their Warrant and Example, and your Bounty the Guerdon of their Merit. And as all the Roman Emperors after Julius Cæsar, were desirous to be called Imperatores and Cæsares after him, so shall all succeeding Princes in this our Albion (in emulation of your Vertues) be ambitious to bear your Name to Posterity.”
[8] The reader must notice the near approach to similarity of name in the Frenchman Guillaume, author of “Le Bestiare Divin,” and in the Englishman Guillim, the writer on heraldry, and at the same time make due discrimination. They are men of widely different periods, and approach our subject from wholly different directions. [Back]
The Basilisk, to whom also was given the title of king of the serpents, was another of the stern, very stern realities of our forefathers, though, like the cockatrice, it has fallen a victim to the march of intellect. Its royal rank was bestowed upon it not from its pestiferous qualities, but from the crest or coronet it wears, or rather wore, as the species may now be considered extinct. Like the monstrous kraken of the Norway seas and the classic harpy or minotaur, down to the sheeted spectre that clanked its chains last century in churchyard or corridor, it has failed to make good its claims to our credence; and even the great sea-serpent, that from time to time appears in the columns of the newspapers when Parliament is not sitting, will have to appear very visibly elsewhere as well, or the scepticism of the nineteenth century will disestablish it. The basilisk was by some old writers described as a huge lizard, but in later times it became a crested serpent. Exact accuracy on this point was impossible, as, like the cockatrice, the glance of its eye was death. Pliny says, “We come now to the basiliske, whom all other serpents do flie from and are afraid of; albeit he killith them with his very breath and smell that passeth from him: yea, and by report, if he do but set his eye on a man it is enough to take away his life.” Readers of Shakespeare will recall the passage in King Henry VI., “Come, basilisk, and kill the innocent gazer with thy sight;” and again where the Lady Anne exclaims to Richard III., with reference to her eyes, “Would that they were basilisk’s, to strike thee dead.” Beaumont and Fletcher, too, in their “Woman Hater,” speaks of “The basilisk’s death-doing eye.” Dryden avails himself of the same old belief, and makes Clytus say to Alexander, “Nay, frown not so; you cannot look me dead;” and in another old poem, King’s “Art of Love,” we find the lines, “Like a boar plunging his tusk in mastiff’s gore, or basilisk, when roused, whose breath, teeth, sting, and eyeballs all are death.” The only way to kill the basilisk was held to be to cause it to gaze on its own image in a mirror, when its glance would be as fatal to itself as it had hitherto been to others. To effect this, however, evidently presents many practical difficulties, and he must have been a bold man who ventured on so perilous an errand, where the least nervousness or mismanagement of the mirror would be literally fatal in bringing the basilisk to a proper state of reflection.
The basilisk is mentioned by most of the old writers, by Dioscorides, by Galen, Pliny, Solinus, Ælian, Ætius, Avicen, Ardoynus, Grevinus, and many others. Aristotle makes no mention of it. Scaliger gravely describes one that was found in Rome in the days of Leo IV., while Sigonius and others are so far from denying the possibility of such a beast that they have duly set forth various kinds or sub-species. Pliny, for instance, describes a thing he calls the Catoblepas, while Ætius gives details of another called Dryinus, each being only modifications of the basilisk idea. Where, of course, the whole thing was purely a figment of the imagination, the multiplication of species presents no difficulty at all, and it really makes little difference whether all the peculiarities and properties be focussed on one creature, or whether they be divided by a three or a four, and due distribution of them made to a like number of slightly varying monsters. There is no doubt but that if Baron Munchausen had turned his attention to this branch of natural history, we should have had many more species to record, and some of them probably still more wonderful than any at present described. The very indefiniteness of the descriptions gives them an added charm and affords full scope for romancing. Familiarity is undoubtedly likely to lead to contempt, and probably if the Zoological Society of London are ever able to add a basilisk to their fine collection of reptiles it will be a very disappointing feature.
The Phœnix had what we may be allowed to call a literary existence amongst the Greeks and Romans, but scarcely became a visible creation of the artist until the mythic fowl was accepted by the early Christians as a type of the resurrection of the body—an association of ideas that afterwards rendered its use very common, and Tertullian, amongst other early writers, thus refers to its symbolic use. According to a tale narrated to Herodotus on his visit to Heliopolis, the phœnix visited that place once every 500 years, bringing with it the body of its predecessor, and burning it with myrrh in the sanctuary of the Sun-god; but the version on which the Christian moral and application is based is somewhat different. It is founded on the old belief that the phœnix, when it arrived at the age of 1461 years, committed itself to the flames that burst, at the fanning of its wings, from the funeral pyre that it had itself constructed of costly spices, and that from its ashes a new phœnix arose to life. This belief, which appears to us so absurd, was for hundreds of years as accepted a fact as any other point in natural history. The home of the phœnix was said to be at that delightfully vague address, somewhere in Arabia.
In Hoole’s translation of the “Orlando Furioso” of Ariosto we have both the mystic bird and its very indefinite home thus referred to:—