The coasts of illusion

For the most part the winged creatures of fable are exiles from mythologies broken down or forgotten. They are imperfect and confused embodiments of the phenomena of the heavens. In them one sees, what the men who repeated stories about them did not see, the diurnal journeys of the sun into the west, the shadowing storm-cloud, the lightning flash, the fury of evil winds, the hail, and the snow. But the poetry of the air, of which these creatures are the flying shreds, is weighted with terrestrial prose. Extinct birds of colossal size, prehistoric winged reptiles, and the bones of fossil mammals are reflected in the shapes of cloudland. Few of the creatures that hover there can be called fowls at all; their wings carry bodies that belong upon the earth. Thus Pliny, in one of the most flagrant of his carelessly credulous passages, makes the casual statement that Ethiopia produces “horses with wings, and armed with horns, which are called pegasi.” Because of its human affinities the dragon must be considered by itself.

The Phœnix

Of the phœnix, a true fowl of legend and its most renowned, Maundeville has a vivacious picture. This bird, he says, “is not much more big than an Eagle, but he hath a Crest of Feathers upon his Head more great than the Peacock hath; and his Neck is yellow after the Colour of an Oriel that is a fine shining Stone; and his Beak is coloured blue as Azure; and his wings be of purple Colour, and the Tail is yellow and red, cast in streaks across his Tail. And he is a full fair Bird to look upon, against the Sun, for he shineth full gloriously and nobly.”

Other men were not so sure about the phœnix. Herodotus said he had never seen it and Pliny declared he was “not quite certain that its existence is not all a fable.” Herodotus, however, had seen its picture, and the Maundeville account is copied from him.

The bird was Arabian, its legend Egyptian. It was said that there was only one phœnix in the world, and that it appeared at very long intervals. The Roman Senator, Manlius, wrote that no person had seen it eat since its food was air, that in Arabia it was sacred to the sun, and that its lifetime was five hundred and forty years. When stricken with age it built a nest of cassia and sprigs of frankincense and lay down to die; from its bones and marrow issued a worm which in time changed into a small bird. The first duty of the new bird was to perform the obsequies of its predecessor, and carry the nest containing its myrrh-swathed remains to the City of the Sun in Egypt, placing it upon the altar of that divinity.

According to the more familiar account, when the phœnix is full of years it flies to Heliopolis, sings its own dirge there, flaps its wings to fan the funeral pyre, and presently is utterly consumed; the next day emerges the new bird, fully feathered; and on the third day, its wings well grown, it salutes the priest and returns to the East. Still another account has it that in its old age the bird casts itself on the ground, receiving a mortal wound, and the new bird issues from the ichor.

In the censorship of the Emperor Claudius what purported to be a phœnix was brought to Rome and exhibited in the Comitium, but it was adjudged an imposture. Plutarch ventures the daring statement that “the brain of the phœnix is a pleasant bit, but that it causeth the headache.” He may have meant the golden pheasant, or even wine from cocoanuts, but it is said that Heliogabalus made a fruitless attempt to secure this unique tidbit for his table.

Popular art reflects the phœnix legend, metaphor still more. It is the favorite symbol of self-regeneration. The burned city, the ruined country or cause, “rises like the phœnix from its own ashes.” Jesus, whose death coincided with one of the reported flights of the fowl to Egypt, was called the Phœnix by monastic writers, and St. Clement of Alexandria cites the fowl as proof that the dead will rise again. Its effigy was taken over from the pagan urn by the Christian sarcophagus. Browne, however, thought that the notion of a solitary phœnix was repugnant to Scripture, “because it infringeth the benediction of God concerning multiplication.” At one time its image hung before chemists’ shops because of its association with alchemy. Sometimes the Arabs confused it with the salamander and pictured the latter as a bird.

The relation of the phœnix to astronomical reckoning gives a clue to the legend. It reappeared, according to some authors, at intervals of 250, 500, 654, 1,000, 1,461 or even of 7,006 years, but the accepted Phœnix Period or Cycle was 540 years, and Egypt reports having seen the fowl five times, the first in the reign of Sesostris, and the last time in A.D. 334. This relates the appearances of the phœnix to the Great Year, which Hardouin says is 532 years.

It was an ancient belief that the same aspect of heaven and order of the stars that had prevailed when the world began recurred every 532 years, and that at one of these periods, with all the planets in conjunction or all the stars returned to the same point in the ecliptic, the world would be destroyed; or else that it would perish and revive again to go through the same sequence of celestial phenomena. The phœnix, self-regenerating, sun-dedicated, westward-winging, arrayed in the gold and purple of dawn and twilight, seems to be an obscure form of the sun myth; and this inference is strengthened by the fact that at Heliopolis a bird called the bennu was a symbol of the Egyptians for the rising sun. It was a heron which “created itself” and rose in a “fragrant flame” over a sacred tree. Bennu in Egyptian and phœnix in Greek are the same word, and signify the palm tree.

The Fung-wang

There was a Chinese phœnix called the fung-wang which at long intervals and only in the reigns of upright monarchs emerged from the deserts. Six feet high, with plumage reflecting the five colors that the Chinese recognized—red, white, yellow, azure, and black—it was something like an immense bird of paradise. It was called the chief of the three hundred and sixty kinds of birds, and classed with the dragon and the unicorn as a spiritual creature. On its poll appeared the Chinese character for uprightness, on its back that for humanity, while its wings enfolded the character for integrity. Its low notes were bell tones, and its high like those of a drum. When you play the flute, in nine cases out of ten the fung-wang comes to hear, says the Shu King. It frequented only groves and gardens and would not peck living grass. The Bamboo Books record its visits as far back as 2647 B.C. The emperor in whose reign it first showed itself recast his cabinet so that officers bore the names of birds, and the Minister of the Calendar was called the Phœnix. “Another example of an interesting and beautiful species of bird which has become extinct within historic times,” rashly concludes Gould.

Flying Serpents of Araby

Another winged creature besides the phœnix sought to go out of Arabia into Egypt, but its passage was opposed. This was the flying serpent. Herodotus says he went to “a certain place in Arabia” to ask about it. He saw the backbones and ribs of these reptiles in inconceivable number, piled in a gorge, and learned why they got no further. They are met in this place by “the birds called ibises, who forbid their entrance and destroy them all.” Hence the Egyptians hold the ibis in reverence.

Josephus uses the incident as basis of a story about Moses that is not in the Pentateuch. The Ethiopians had successfully invaded the land of Egypt, and an oracle advised the defenders to choose for their general Moses the Hebrew. His choice pleased the scribes of both nations—the Egyptian because they apprehended that Moses would be slain, and the Jewish because they expected that he would be the instrument of their deliverance. The line of march lay through the country of winged serpents, powerful and mischievous creatures that came out of the ground unseen or fell upon men from the air. But Moses “made baskets like unto arks of sedges, and filled them with ibes, and carried them along with him, which animals are the greatest enemies to serpents imaginable, for these fly from them when they come near them, and as they fly they are caught and devoured.” So Moses passed on unscathed, and into the heart of an Ethiopian princess through whose aid her father’s forces were routed.

After centuries of discussion the sacred ibis of the Egyptians was finally identified by the traveler Bruce with the bird the Abyssinians call Father John; but the winged serpents have not been satisfactorily explained. It has been suggested that what Herodotus saw in the Arabian gorge was the remains of a locust invasion—a difficult surmise, although Pliny reports that the legs and wings of grasshoppers three feet long were dried in the sun and used by the Indians for saws.

The Roc

The case for the roc—a creature unknown to either Greek or Roman legend—rests mainly upon three beguiling names of travel tale. These are Aladdin and Sindbad of the Arabian Nights, and Marco Polo of the Diversities. By the magic of his lamp Aladdin, the wayward gamin of a Chinese city, had won a princess and a palace; and he had poisoned the African magician who sought to use him as a tool and then to take the lamp from him. Bent on vengeance, the magician’s brother stabbed a holy woman with the very un-Chinese name of Fatima, disguised himself in her habiliments and won entrance into the palace of Aladdin and into the confidence of his princess. The latter asked the false Fatima what she thought of her residence, and this was the reply.

“My opinion is that if a roc’s egg were hung up in the middle of the dome, this hall would have no parallel in the four quarters of the world, and your palace would be the wonder of the universe.”

“My good mother,” said the princess, “what is a roc, and where may one get an egg?”

“Princess,” replied the pretended Fatima, “it is a bird of prodigious size, which inhabits the summit of Mount Caucasus; the architect who built your palace can get you one.”

The princess consulted Aladdin, and, retiring to his apartment, he rubbed the lamp; when a genie appeared, he bade him procure the roc’s egg. Whereupon the hall shook as if about to fall, and the genie exclaimed in a loud and terrible voice, “Is it not enough that I and the other slaves of the lamp have done everything for you, but you, by an unheard-of ingratitude, must command me to bring my master and hang him up in the midst of this dome? The attempt deserves that you, the princess, and the palace should be immediately reduced to ashes; but you are spared because this request does not come from yourself.” Then he told of the presence of a conspirator in the household. Aladdin’s killing of the latter is the final episode of the tale, the fortunate adventurer and his spouse soon mounting the throne of China.

Sindbad encountered the parent bird on his second voyage, after he had been abandoned on an island; and first he saw its egg. He mistook the egg for a white dome of prodigious height and extent and found it fifty paces around and too smooth to climb to the top. All of a sudden the sky became dark as by a thick cloud and a huge bird came flying toward him. It alighted on the egg, and Sindbad, creeping close to the shell, tied himself by his turban to one of its legs, which was as big as the trunk of a tree. The next morning he hoped the roc would carry him away. Nor was his hope disappointed, and after an immense journey in the air—quite from Madagascar to India—the bird alighted in the Valley of Diamonds. There Sindbad disengaged himself, only to fall into other adventures.

Marco Polo was the first veracious traveler to bring to the west a report of the roc, and he was careful to state that he did not see the bird; he only heard of it. The roc, he said, comes to Madagascar from the south. It resembles the eagle, but is so much larger that it can carry away an elephant. “Persons who have seen the bird,” he continues, “assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen paces [forty feet] from point to point, and that the feathers are eight paces [twenty feet] long and thick in proportion.” Messer Marco guessed that these creatures might be griffins, half birds and half lions, and particularly questioned those who claimed to have seen them. No, was the reply, they were fowls altogether. Kublai Khan sent messengers to Madagascar to confirm the story. They brought back, as Marco heard, “a feather of the roc positively affirmed to have measured ninety spans, and the quill part to have been two palms in circumference.” The delighted khan sent valuable gifts.

Two centuries afterward the roc reappears in the narrative of Father Joano dos Santos, a Portuguese Dominican friar traveling in eastern Ethiopia. He tells of a fellow Portuguese faring inland in Madagascar to purchase ivory, and leading a large monkey on a chain. This he fastened to the trunk of a tree and lay down to rest; a monstrous bird snatched up both the monkey and the tree and flew away. The Shoshones have a story of an owl which carries men away to its island larder. Mewan legend speaks of the cannibal bird Yel-lo-kin with wings like pine trees which snatched children by the top of the head and bore them through the hole in the middle of the sky to its nest on the other side.

While the roc belongs to nature myth, matter-of-fact has a word to say. The extinct dodo is recalled, which, however, could not fly. The feather brought to Kublai, and the monstrous stump of a roc’s quill which it is said was brought to Spain by a merchant from the China seas, may have been taken from a species of palm growing in Madagascar which has quill-like fronds. Southern Madagascar is frequented by very large birds—the albatross with a wing-spread of fifteen feet, and the condor, which may measure more than ten from tip to tip.

Everybody in the east believed that the roc, or more correctly the rukh, really existed. When the utmost depths of Arabic credulity are sounded, one reaches the probable basis of a legend into the superstructure of which exaggerated details of natural history have been built. One Arab writer says the length of the roc’s wings is ten thousand fathoms, or nearly twelve miles, and these dimensions would make a fair-sized storm cloud. A Chinese tale describes the bird as a fowl which in its flight obscures the sun, and of whose quills “water-tuns” are made. One of the riders of the roc in another tale from the Thousand and One Nights is admonished to stop his ears from the wind, “lest thou be dazed by the noise of the revolving sphere and the roaring of the seas.” It is shrewdly surmised that the roc is the storm cloud and the egg it covers is the sun—true master of the slaves of Aladdin’s lamp.

The Rhinoceros of the Air

Another monstrous fowl, the rhinoceros of the air, was reported in mediæval travel and still commands the faith of the Samoyeds. Purchas abstracts the description given by Andrea Corsali in his Abyssinian travels. The bird is much bigger than an eagle and has a bow-fashioned bill or beak four feet long, with a horn between the eyes streaked with black. “It is a cruel fowle and attends on battels and campes.” The Siberian myth gives this winged rhinoceros gigantic dimensions. The tusks and bones of the great pachyderms, found in the tundras, are thought by native hunters to be the beaks and talons of monster birds. The nearest approach of fact to the Abyssinian prodigy is perhaps the horned screamer, or unicorn bird, whose cries “resembling the bray of a jackass, but shriller,” unpleasantly disturbed for the naturalist Bates the solitude of the Brazilian forest.

The Harpies

Those forbidding sister groups, the gorgons, the sirens, and the harpies, are perhaps different aspects of the storm clouds and the storm wind—the baleful lightning, the shrieking sea gales, the violent gusts that snatch (harpazo) away soul and body. Of the three, the gorgons and sirens will be left within the domain of nature myths. The harpies may be migrants from the religions of Egypt, in which Nekhbet, the vulture-goddess, is sometimes represented as a woman with a vulture’s head, and the soul is depicted as a human-headed bird fluttering from the mouths of the dying. Yet they have that savor of the soil, that touch of the grotesque, that suggestion of coarse reality that belong rather to travel tale. Though with woman faces, their attributes are animal.

Hesiod describes them as maidens, winged and golden-haired, who harassed the blind King Phineus at his banquets. The myth is retold in grosser form in the story of the Argonauts, whence these sisters, driven away by the comrades of Jason, make their flight to the Æneid and find roost in an isle where the Trojans cast anchor. The picture Virgil drew of them superseded the more flattering accounts of poets before him, and the immense vogue of this poet in later ages led the romancers of the Charlemagne cycle to adopt his report without abatement.

The harpies of Virgil are, as the poet Morris pictures them, “dreadful snatchers,” like women down to the breast, with scanty, coarse black hair, dim eyes ringed with red, bestial mouths, gnarled necks, and birds’ claws. Their faces are pale with hunger. When the Trojans slay the island cattle and prepare meat for a feast, the birds swoop down with a horrible clamor, seize part of the meat, and defile the rest. Nimbly they dodge the Trojan swords, and their feathers are like steel mail. From a cliff they reproach the visitors for slaying their cattle and warring upon them, and as Æneas departs they shriek direful predictions after him.

In the legends of Charlemagne the bird-sisters reappear when Astolpho, cousin of Orlando, reaches Abyssinia riding the hippogrif. Here is another blind king, like Phineus, “prey to a flock of obscene birds called harpies, which attacked him whenever he sat at meat, and with their claws snatched, tore, and scattered everything, overturning the vessels, devouring the food, and infecting what they left with their filthy touch.” They are put to flight with one blast of Astolpho’s horn and driven by him and his hippogrif into a cavern, the entrance of which he blocked up so that they are seen no more.

That is, so far as the romancer of that time knew. They reappeared in the New World on the Isthmus of Darien, where Balboa was pursuing, amid the fens of a haunted land, the adventure of the mines of Dobayba and the elusive golden temple. The Indians told him there had been a horrible tempest, and when they ventured forth again they found that two monstrous creatures had come in with the storm. They were apparently a mother and her daughter. They had woman faces and eagle claws and wings; the branches of the trees where they perched broke with their weight. Swooping down, they would seize a man and carry him away to the hilltops to devour him. At last the natives killed the older bird by a stratagem, and, suspending her body from their spears, bore it from town to town to appease the alarm of their people. The younger harpy disappeared.

Natural history has given the name of harpy to a buzzard, an eagle, a fly, and two species of bats. Neither of the last named, however, is the vampire bat of which Bates has left a portentous portrait. Its spread of wing is nearly two and a half feet. “Nothing in animal physiognomy can be more hideous than the countenance of this creature when viewed from the front; the large, leathery ears standing out from the sides and top of the head, the erect, spear-shaped appendage on the top of the nose, the grin and the glistening black eye, all combining to make up a figure that reminds one of some mocking imp of fable.” It seems to be fact that villages in Central America have been abandoned because of the nocturnal attacks of this animal. Dampier professes to have seen on an island near Sebo bats “with bodies as big as ducks and with a wing spread of eight feet.” The custom of nailing up dead bats as witch-or-devil forms is common. “An animal,” says Buffon, “which, like the bat, is half quadruped and half bird, and which, in fact, is neither the one nor the other, is a kind of monster.” He suggests that “the wings, the teeth, the claws, the voracity; the nastiness, and all the destructive qualities and noxious faculties of the harpies bear no small resemblance to those of the Ternat bat.”

The Stymphalian Birds

The Stymphalian birds, according to Greek legend, frequented a lake in the northeast of Arcadia, which lay on the main route from Argolis and Corinth westward. To disperse or destroy them was the sixth labor of Hercules. These birds were anthropophagous, used their feathers as arrows, and were equipped with brazen claws, wings, and feet. Diodorus has a milder account in which they figure merely as voracious poachers of the fruits of the neighborhood. With a brazen pan the hero made such an uproar that they flew away, appearing again, in the story of the Argonauts, as tenants of the island of Aretias.

Pausanias visited the township of Stymphalus in his tour of Greece. He describes a temple to Artemis Stymphalia standing there, and the figures of the birds Stymphalides under its roof; behind the temple were marble statues of young women with the legs of fowls. The birds, he says, are as large as cranes, but resemble the ibis save that they have stronger beaks and less curved; so, indeed, they are represented on coins of Stymphalus. Herodotus rationalizes the legend by intimating that their feathery arrows were, in truth, hail or snow.

The Cockatrice

“The weaned child,” said Isaiah, prophesying the good time coming, “shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.” The cockatrice was a monster with the head and plumage of a cock and a barbed serpent’s tail, and so it is represented in heraldry. The word is an old French corruption of the Latin for crocodile, but popular etymology attributed the name to the fact that the prodigy was hatched from an aged cock’s egg by a serpent. Because of the crest crowning its head it is also called a basilisk, from the Greek basilikos, or “little king.”

Its habitat was Africa. It was horrid to look upon and its glance and breath were alike fatal, while its voice struck terror to other serpents. Its own image, reflected in a mirror, would kill it. The basilisk of Cyrene, Pliny said, was not more than twelve fingers in length, but it destroyed all shrubs save the rue, and consumed grasses and shattered stones merely by breathing upon them. “He infecteth the water that he cometh neare,” according to Leigh. It was believed that if a horseman killed a basilisk with a spear-thrust, its poison would ascend the weapon and destroy not only the rider, but his mount. Even its dead body hung in a temple kept swallows from building and spiders from spinning there. However, if a man saw the basilisk first, he went scatheless and the creature itself might die, while women could seize it without suffering harm. The effluvium of the weasel and the crow of the cock were alike fatal to it. Travelers passing near its haunts sometimes took a cock along.

While its deadly nature has persisted, the shape of the cockatrice has changed. To the ancients it was merely a baleful lizard. Its confusion in the Middle Ages with the cock gave it feathers and a beak. As soon as hatched by a toad or snake from a cock’s egg laid in a stable it hid itself in crevice, cistern, or rafter, for to be seen was to die. Later the heralds and painters represented it with the head of a hawk, sometimes even with the head of a man. Its ashes would turn base metals into gold. People thought that cock’s eggs were used in the devil’s chrism whereby his anointed hags could assume beast form or ride the clouds. In Browne’s time there was traffic in counterfeited cockatrices made by joining the dead bodies of pheasants and serpents, or out of the skins of thornbacks. The basilisk of natural history, which may have been the original of the fable, is a harmless creature, although of frightful aspect.