“come basilisk
And kill the innocent gazer with thy sight.”
2 King Henry VI. Act iii. 2.
Beaumont and Fletcher also speak of “the basilisk’s death-dealing eye” in “The Woman Hater.”
Its appearance was so dreadful, it was said, that if a mirror was placed so that it could see itself, it would instantly burst asunder with horror and fear.
In Christian Art it is the emblem of deadly sin and the spirit of evil. St. Basil the Great uses it as the type of a depraved woman.
The Mythical Serpent
“The most remarkable remembrance,” says Dean, “of the power of the paradisaical serpent is displayed in the position which he retains in Tartarus. A cuno-draconictic cerberus guards the gates; serpents are coiled upon the chariot wheels of Proserpine; serpents pave the abyss of torment; and even serpents constitute the caduceus of Mercury, the talisman which he holds in his hand when he conveys the soul to Tartarus. The image of the serpent is stamped upon every mythological fable connected with the realms of Pluto. Is it not probable that in the universal symbol of heathen idolatry we recognise the universal object of primitive worship, the serpent of paradise?”
“Speaking of the names of the snake tribe in the great languages,” Ruskin says, “in Greek, Ophis meant the seeing creature, especially one that sees all round it; and Drakon, one that looks well into a thing or person. In Latin, Anguis, was the strangler; Serpens, the winding creature; Coluber, the coiling animal. In our own Saxon the Snake meant the crawling creature; and Adder denoted the groveller.”
The true serpents comprise the genera without a sternum or breastbone, in which there is no vestige of shoulder, but where the ribs surround a great part of the circumference of the trunk. To the venomous kind belong the rattlesnake, cobra de capello, spectacled or hooded snake, viper, &c. So the non-venomous, the boa constrictor, anaconda, python, black snake, common snake.
The minute viper, V. Brashyura, is celebrated for the intensity of its poison, and is truly one of the most terrible of its genus. The asp of Egypt, or Cleopatra’s asp (Coluber naja, Lin.), was held in great veneration by the Egyptians; and it is this snake which the jugglers, by pressing on the nape of the neck with the finger, throw into a kind of catalepsy, which renders it stiff, or, as they term it, turns it into a rod.
All snakes, says the celebrated naturalist Waterton, take a motion from left to right or vice versa—but never up and down—the whole extent of the body being in contact with the ground, saving the head, which is somewhat elevated. This is equally observable both on land and in water. Thus, when we see a snake represented in an up-and-down attitude, we know at once that the artist is to blame.