Much of the literature of marvel relates to real animals. The savage could see no great difference between them and himself; that their bodies were unlike his did not seem important. They could reason like him, they could understand what he said to them, they had souls which, like his own, lived after death. A beast could assume human shape, a man could become a beast, and it was totemic theory that some beasts were ancestors of some men.
There were tribes that acted as if they were beasts, or birds. The Bororo Indians identified themselves with gorgeous red birds that lived in the heart of the Brazilian forest, and treated them as if they were fellow mortals. Travelers have told of savages who ate maggots bred in the carcasses of animals, and on ceremonial occasions thereafter writhed, roared, barked, or grunted, in keeping with the nature of the snake, lion, jackal, or hippopotamus whose body had been the table of their feast. The people of an Alaskan island mistook the first Russian party that landed there for cuttlefish, because the men had buttons on their clothes.
Abundant traces of a belief that animals were beings of a higher order than men are found in early religion, magic, and medicine. Many of them were worshiped. Out of a fear that their spirits might work harm, all of them were propitiated even when pursued or killed. Portions of their dead bodies were used as amulets and to work spells. Their brains, blood, entrails, and excrements were a principal part of the Roman pharmacopœia in the most brilliant age of the Empire; the witches’ broth in Macbeth is an Augustan brew. Along with hundreds of like prescriptions, Pliny recites that a mole’s right foot and the earth thrown up by ants are remedies for scrofula, that a bat’s heart is an antidote for ant venom, that a hen’s brains will cure snake poison and the owlet’s a bee sting, that profuse perspiration may be checked by rubbing the body with ashes of burnt goats’ horns mixed with oil of myrtle, and that catarrh may be relieved by kissing a mule’s nostrils.
Curious as these things may seem, they come naturally from the fact that primitive man had mainly to do with animals. Outside of his tribal group he knew other men only as enemies. But all about were furred and feathered and not unfriendly creatures whose acts had a certainty and finality lifting them above the doubts and fears that harassed him. He seemed a late comer and guest in an animal world. So he did what timid peoples are wont to do. He put himself under the protection of beings more gifted than himself. He became a vassal of the beasts. This was the first feudalism.
The savage was glad to assert his kinship with the brute. In the Indian west it was through the First People, who had the human shape but an animal nature, and were transformed into beasts and birds; a beast or a bird then created the second race of men. The natives of Vancouver Island thought that when nobody was about animals laid aside their skins and were people. In places the tradition lingers that migratory birds become men when in other lands. A traveler far from home was amazed when a stranger called him by name and asked about each member of the family. The mystery was solved when he learned how this intimate knowledge was gained; the stranger was the stork that each year built its nest upon his roof.
Both in skin-shifting and shape-shifting the blood relationship between man and brute was avowed. In the one, the hero of savage epic, by donning or doffing an animal skin, put on or put off the beast nature. In the other, the human or animal actor strutted for a space on his cousin’s stage. Wizards could transform themselves, as men thought, into wolves and hyenas; the world-wide legend of the werewolf traces from the time when metamorphosis was the alpha and omega of myth. Its survivals strew the classics. Io became a heifer, Actæon a stag, Antigone a stork, Arachne a spider, Itys a pheasant, Philomela a nightingale, and Progne a swallow.
Animals took on human form to get better acquainted with men. Indian story tells of a man who unwittingly married a female buffalo. An Indian woman wedded a stranger who bade her always throw the bones in a certain place, and whenever he went out to eat she heard the barking of a dog near the bone-heap; that was what he was. There are stories from every continent of the union of women with reptiles that masqueraded as men. Perhaps because they can assume the erect posture, bears were often parties to alliances of this kind. It was thought in Iceland that they were men bewitched and that their progeny were born human but turned into cubs at a touch of the dam’s paw. The Votiaks of the American northwest say the bear traces back to man and knows his speech. When the hide is off, the California Indians aver that bears are just like people. In a Coos Indian story a girl married a fine-looking man whom she met while picking berries; but when he took her to the ancestral lodge, she found herself in a bear camp. There is a Tlingit tale of a hunter who was captured by a female grizzly—object, matrimony.
The mitigation of these world stories is that they are literalistic misreadings of old totemistic custom. Yet it is pleasant enough to learn from a Tahltan tale that caribou “like to be called people.”
Under totemism, men chose their elder brothers, the brutes, for guardians, took their names, deposited their own souls with them for safekeeping, and, after death, entered their bodies. Where totemism was unknown it was thought that the larger prowling animals might be tenanted by demons and that their weird howls at night were incidents of beast debates which had the destinies of men as their topic. It was well not to affront them even by naming them; better to use ingratiating epithets, such as “blue-foot,” “gold-foot,” “gray-beard,” “broad-brow,” “flash-eye,” “forest-brother.” The lesser sort were rogue heroes in the beast epics—among the Hottentots the jackal; among the Bantus, the rabbit; among the Orientals, the fox; among the American Indians, the turtle, coyote, and raven.
As a memorial of the antique relation between man and beast, three out of every hundred persons in England and America bear animal names. There is a wealth of detail as to how that relation was carried down through legend into history. The woodpecker directed the Aryan migrations, the wolf suckled the founders of Rome, the nest of the eagle determined the winter camps of the legions, the flights of birds fixed the sites of cities, and their entrails decided for nations the issues of war and peace. Animal forms range the entire field of early man’s interests. Deified bulls, rams, crocodiles, hawks, and ibises thronged the hospitable pantheon of Egypt. In the speculation of various peoples the snake, the elephant, the whale, the boar, the turtle, or the catfish supported the world, and when the creature moved itself earthquake followed. The dove of Hebrew deluge story found the earth. The larger animals were in the sky as constellations before history began. When the moon is in eclipse there are men to believe that it has been swallowed by a snake, a wolf, a frog, a crab.
In their primitive judicial processes men took oath in the name of the sacred animal. In their agriculture they conceived of the life of the grain as residing in an animal corn spirit—a horse, a pig, a goat, or a dog, which hid itself in the last clump of grain to be cut. In their marriage ceremonies, the cock, duck, goat, or goose was a fertility emblem. Totem beasts are tattooed on the bodies of savages. Animal outlines, at first as a strong magic, were used upon pottery, clothes, and weapons, and as decoration are still used. In animal masks and with magical intent, dances are performed which mimic the ways of beasts. Their feet, horns, claws, and teeth enter the medicine bag of the shaman. When at last death comes to the savage, perhaps a turkey buzzard or a humming bird convoys his soul to the other world, or a dog guards the bridge over which it is to pass to a happier realm, where the hunting of animals begins anew.
The reverence paid to the least considered of animals may serve to show in what regard all of them were held and to explain the marvels told about them. Scattered through the literature and folklore of various peoples is a copious mass of traditions as to vermin worship and to practices just suggested by the fact that Beelzebub, the devil of Jewish Scripture, is the Semitic god of flies. There was a classic deity known as the mouse-Apollo and tame mice were kept in his sanctuary. The Philistines sent to Israel, with the captured Ark, golden images of mice. Isaiah bears witness that certain of the Jews met secretly in gardens and ate swine’s flesh and mice for sacramental purposes. In old stories the soul is pictured as issuing from the mouths of dying or sleeping persons in the form of a mouse. The Chams of Indo-China erected a pillar to the god rat. Herodotus tells of the destruction of an Assyrian army in Egypt by the aid of mice auxiliaries. It is still the custom in some districts of Europe for peasants to exorcise mice from the crops by running wildly with lighted torches around the fields on the eve of Twelfth Day; to put the milk teeth of children in a rat runway, so that the second teeth shall be as white and strong as the rodent’s; to treat white mice with kindness so as to bring luck to the house, and even to post a writing with a message of good will where rats and mice can see it.
While domestic animals which had killed or maimed persons were regularly tried in the criminal courts of ancient Greece and mediæval Europe, ecclesiastical courts long exercised jurisdiction over smaller animal offenders. The curse of the Church was relied upon to reach vermin against which the secular law knew itself to be powerless; yet anathema was not pronounced without judicial process. On complaint of ravaged parishes, field mice, locusts, and beetles were summoned to appear in court on a certain day and counsel was appointed to defend them. In defense of accused rats in the diocese of Autun, Chassenée, the brilliant French advocate of the sixteenth century, laid the foundations of his fame. He cited biblical and classical writers, interposed various technical objections, attributed the failure of his clients to appear to the absence of safe conducts, and demanded that the plaintiffs give bond that their cats would not molest the defendant rodents in their journey to court. On their refusal to give bond the case was adjourned without day.
Many such cases were compromised by setting aside a plot of land to which the accused creatures might repair for sanctuary. In the suit of Franciscan friars in Brazil in 1713 against white ants which had invaded their monastery, the compromise was influenced by the plea of counsel that the defendants not only had prior possession of the ground, but were more industrious than the complaining monks. Ecclesiastical suits were brought at various times against caterpillars, cockchafers, flies, leeches, moles, snails, slugs, weevils, and worms. From the ninth to the nineteenth century there is a record of 144 successful prosecutions of animals, vermin included, and these are thought to be only a fraction of the total number of such litigations. The age which brought them was no less sure that insects had rights, including the right of subsistence, than that the Church had effectual power over them.
The Elephant
About the larger creatures fable has been busy and the foremost figure is naturally the hugest of the land animals; only with mediæval and heraldic times did the lion win pre-eminence. Classic tradition revolves around the elephant’s intelligence, morality, and social traits. There are stories of its understanding Greek, and even writing it. As Pliny repeats, “it is sensible alike of the pleasures of love and glory, and, to a degree that is rare among men even, possesses notions of honesty, prudence, and equity; it has a religious respect also for the stars, and a veneration for the sun and the moon.”
When surrounded by hunters, report had it that elephants placed themselves in battle line, with the smaller-tusked animals in front, so that the enemy might see that the spoil was unworthy the seeking. When they perceived themselves about to be overcome, they broke off their teeth against a tree in order to pay their ransom. While other animals avoided fire, they resisted and fought it because they saw it destroyed the forests. When worn out by disease, they have been seen lying on their backs and casting grass up into the air, “as if deputing the earth to intercede for them with its prayers.”
John Lok, in his Voyage to Guinea, paraphrases an ancient belief as to the feud between the elephant and what he calls the dragon: “They have continual warre against Dragons, which desire their blood, because it is very colde; and therefore the Dragon lying awaite as the Elephant passeth by, windeth his taile, being of exceeding length, about the hinder legs of the Elephant, & so staying him, thrusteth his head into his tronke and exhausteth his breath, or else biteth him in the Eare, whereunto he cannot reach with his tronke, and when the Elephant waxeth faint, he falleth downe on the serpent, being now full of blood, and with the poise of his body breaketh him: so that his owne blood with the blood of the Elephant runneth out of him mingled together, which being colde, is congealed into that substance which the Apothecaries call Sanguis Draconis, (that is) Dragons blood, otherwise called Cinnabaris, commonly called Cinoper or Vermilion, which the Painters use in certaine colours.”
The elephant is polygamous, although, as Lok says, “Plinie and Soline write that elephants use none adulterie.” It was thought that the intercourse of the sexes took place every second year, in a honeymoon of five days’ length, and that the couples purified themselves in a river before rejoining the herd. Of these nuptial journeys Buffon says, “In their march love seems to precede and modesty to follow them, for they observe the greatest mystery in their amours.” To this day the East Africans think that if their wives are unfaithful while they are on an elephant hunt, themselves will be killed or maimed by their quarry.
It was a Roman belief that when elephants met a man who had lost his way in the woods they would go gently before him and bring him to a plain path. Sindbad had a kindred experience on his seventh voyage when a herd conducted him to their cemetery so that henceforth “I should forbear to kill them, as now I knew where to get their teeth without inflicting injury on them.” It is still widely believed that somewhere in Central Africa, perhaps in a remote valley of the western Sudan, is an elephant graveyard whither all the aged and ailing pachyderms of the continent repair, sometimes traveling thousands of miles in order to die in peace amid the relics of their kind. No elephants dead of natural causes are ever found, tradition avers, and from time to time expeditions have sought the vast riches of this storehouse of mortuary ivory.
To the elephant various peoples have accorded royal honors. Akbar, the great Mogul, erected a monument to a favorite elephant, which still stands near the deserted city of Fatephur Sikri; it is a tower seventy-two feet high, studded with hundreds of artificial tusks. At the court of Siam the traditional rank of the chief white elephant has been next to the queen and before the heir-apparent. The chief of the Burmese court herd has the residence and honors of a minister of state. “The king of Pegu,” says one of the Hakluyt travelers, “is called the King of the White Elephants. If any other king have one, and will not send it him, he will make warre with him for it; for he had rather lose a great part of his kingdome than not to conquere him.” This was history when penned. In the sixteenth century a long war was waged between Pegu, Siam, and Aracan, wherein five kings were killed, in order to obtain possession of one white elephant. These albinos are regarded as an appurtenance of royalty and lack of them is an ill omen. Siam is the Land of the White Elephant.
The Rhinoceros
The ancients had less to say of the rhinoceros than of the monoceros or unicorn, for which fabulous beast it may have provided the pattern; but they wove legends about the virtues of its horn and its feud with the elephant. Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote that when the rhinoceros walked its horn shook, but that rage tightened it so that the beast was able to uproot trees. Its skin was four fingers thick, and so hard that from it, instead of iron, men made plowshares. In later ages the horn was kept for the cure of diseases and detection of poison. Drinking cups were made of it on a turner’s lathe, and the mediæval west accepted the tradition of the east that these would sweat at the approach of poison. Horns taken from young bull rhinoceroses which had never coupled with females were preferred. Set in gold and silver, the goblets were an acceptable present for kings. Thunberg was one of the first inquirers to put the superstition to the test by bringing the horn and various poisons together; there was no chemical reaction.
The tongue, not the horn, of the rhinoceros was its weapon of offense, according to old belief. Marco Polo says that this member, in the Sumatran species, is armed with long sharp spines, wherewith, after trampling its enemies, it licks them to death. Pliny has a like story.
The Hippopotamus
Of the hippopotamus two travelers’ tales may be noted. Pliny gives it on hearsay that the river horse enters a cornfield backward, so that there will be no one waiting to waylay it when it comes out. The statement of Father Joano dos Santos in his history of eastern Ethiopia (1506) may best be set down verbatim: “The hippopotamus is naturally of a sickly constitution, and subject to gouty paines, which it cures by scratching the stomach with the left foot; and it has further been noticed, when it wishes to effect a perfect cure that it falls on the horn of the hoof of the left foot; this, entering the stomach, appeases and terminates the pain. Hence the Caffres and Moors make use of this horn as a remedy for the gout.”
The Hyena
The foul countenance and abject gaze of the hyena, its misshapen body, its slinking tread, its affinities with both the wolf and the cat tribes, have been provocative of legend. It lurks in caves and ruins by day, it prowls for carrion food at night, it despoils graveyards of their dead, it roams through unlighted villages, and its howl when excited has a weird note, as of a demon’s laughter; so antique fable had much to work upon. “Of prodigious strength,” Ctesias called the beast under its Indian name of Krokottas; and, indeed, no animal of its size has jaws so powerful. He credited it with the courage of the lion, the speed of the horse, and the strength of the bull. It imitated the human voice, he said, and, pronouncing their names, called men out at night, when it fell upon and devoured them. “We cannot in the least credit this,” is however, the comment of Diodorus Siculus.
Pliny, and Solinus after him, thought that the hyena was male one year and female the next—an opinion challenged by Aristotle. It was supposed to carry a stone in its eye which, placed under a man’s tongue, would enable him to prophesy. Purchas says the beast “hath no necke joynt, and therefore stirres not his necke but with bending about his whole body.” Improving upon Ctesias, he says the animal draws near to sheepcotes at night in order to learn the names of herdsmen, whom afterward it decoys to destruction. Its eyes are “diversified with a thousand colours” and the touch of its shadow “makes a dogge not able to barke.” Buffon mentions, only to scout, the notion that the hyena fascinates shepherds so that they cannot move, and renders shepherdesses distracted in love. As a supposed hybrid, Raleigh excludes it from the Ark. A kind of worship is still paid it in East Africa, where the oath of the hyena is administered; it is a crime to kill one and a misdemeanor to mimic its voice. Stories are told of gold rings found in the ears of dead hyenas similar to those worn by sorcerers and workers in iron.
The Gnu
Near the headwaters of the Nile, according to Pliny, roams the catoblepas, an animal of moderate size and of movements made cumbersome by a head immoderately heavy, which is always bent down toward the earth. This is a fortunate thing, for otherwise “it would prove the destruction of the human race,” since “all who behold its eyes fall dead upon the spot.” In this demon-beast of dejected aspect Cuvier recognizes the antelope-gnu, a horned creature apparently compounded of a bison’s head, a horse’s body, and an antelope’s legs; a fantastic and mournful silhouette of the African prairies.
The Crocodile
The standing of the crocodile in ancient Egypt, and among the savages of the East Indies to this day, has been that of a sacred, or at least a tabooed, animal. It had its own temple at Memphis, where it was worshiped as a divinity, and tame crocodiles took part in the religious processions. The Dyaks of Borneo and the Minangkabauers of Sumatra never kill a crocodile unless it has killed a man. Its privileged position among animals is due to a variety of reasons, of which only three need be noted: it is a dangerous reptile, it flourishes mainly where other food is plenty, and its meat is not agreeable to most palates, having, as Sir Samuel Baker puts it, “the combined flavor of bad fish, rotten flesh, and musk.” Such a creature it is both savage superstition and policy to let alone, and even to flatter.
The older explanations of crocodile worship are more fantastic. According to Plutarch, this reptile is a symbol of deity because it is the only aquatic animal which has its eyes covered with a thin membrane, so that, like divinity, it sees without being seen. He adds that the Egyptians worship God symbolically in the crocodile, that being the only animal without a tongue, like the Divine Logos, which is in no need of speech. One species has something more than a hundred teeth, wherefore Achilles Tatius declares, “the number of its teeth equals the number of days in a year.”
In his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Ludolf saw a crocodile which the Knights Templars, by extracting certain of its teeth, had converted into a serviceable beast of burden. “In winter,” says Maundeville, “the Cockodrills lie as in a dream.” Purchas provides a detail on a matter of peculiar interest to the mediævals: one lobe of the crocodile’s liver is poison, the other counter-poison.
“Crocodile tears” are defined as simulated weeping, and back of this useful metaphor is the venerable tradition set down in Hakluyt’s collection: “His nature is ever when hee would have his prey, to cry and sobbe like a Christian body, to provoke them to come to him, and then hee snatcheth at them, and thereupon came this proverbe that is applied unto women when they weepe, Lachrmyæ Crocodili, the meaning whereof is, that as the Crocodile when hee crieth, goeth then about most to deceive, so doeth a woman most commonly when shee weepeth.”
Snakes
Most of the numerous snake traditions have a religious significance. The older writers, however, have left observations which belong to natural history. Pliny recites it as “a well-known fact” that a serpent 120 feet in length was taken at the river Bagrada in the Punic Wars by the Roman army under Regulus. The monster was besieged as if it were a fortress, balistæ and other engines being used. Of India, known from earliest time for its immense serpents, the most striking reptile story Ctesias has to tell is of a snake only a fathom long, and without fangs. It is purple with a white head and does execution by vomiting. Flesh putrefies wherever the vomit falls. Suspended by the tail, it yields two kinds of poison, amber-hued when the snake is living, black when obtained from a carcass. A sesame seed’s bulk of the former brings instant death to him who swallows it, his brains oozing from his nostrils, while the latter brings death from consumption after about a year.
Out of many traditions that snakes have power to fascinate or injure without striking, two opinions from respectable sources may be given. Ulloa, the Spanish explorer, thinks the breath of the cobra produces “a kind of inebriation,” in persons, as does “the urine of the fox” and “the breath of the whale.” Lobo, the Portuguese friar, reports that while lying on the ground in Abyssinia, he was seized with a pain which forced him to rise, when he discovered a serpent something more than four yards from him. He revived himself with “that sovereign remedy” a bezoar stone. These serpents, he explains, have wide mouths and swallow air in great quantities, which they presently eject with such force that it kills at four yards.
Grasshoppers
Classic writers knew the grasshopper less as a pest than as a food, and it has a pleasant place in myth. Tithonus, beloved of Aurora and dowered by the gods with immortality but not with eternal youth, was changed by her into a grasshopper after he shrank up with old age. There is a grasshopper fable to which Strabo gives a naturalistic and Solinus a supernatural tinge. In southern Italy, Rhegium and Locris are divided by a river flowing through a deep ravine. The insects on the Locrian side sing, while those on the other side are silent.
Strabo suggests that this is because it is sunny on the Locrian side, and densely wooded across the river. In the one case the membranes used in stridulation are dry and horny and therefore resonant when rasped together; in the other, they are so softened by shade and dew that they produce no sound. Solinus has a simpler explanation. Hercules passed by Rhegium and its grasshopper orchestra irritated him. So he bade the insects be silent, and, resentful or forgetful, failed to lift the embargo.
The Salamander
The best account of the salamander appears in the Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini. “One day,” he said, “when I was about fifteen years of age, my father was in a cellar where they had been scalding some clothes for washing. He was alone, and was playing upon the viol and singing in front of a good fire of oakwood, for the weather was very cold. On looking at the fire accidentally, he saw a small animal resembling a lizard, gambolling joyously in the midst of the fiercest flames. My father instantly perceiving what it was, he called my sister and me, pointed out the animal to us, and gave me a severe box on the ear, which caused me to shed a perfect deluge of tears. He gently wiped my eyes and said to me, ‘My dear boy, I did not strike you as a punishment, but only that you should remember that that lizard which you behold in the fire is a salamander, an animal which has never been seen by any known person.’ He afterwards kissed me and gave me a few quattrini.”
That the salamander is able to live in flames, Aristotle thought, and Ælian, and Nicander, and Pliny. The last named tells why: This lizard is so cold that it extinguishes fire like ice. There is great danger in its venom. Unless precautions are taken it might destroy whole nations, for if it crawls up a tree it infects all the fruit and those who eat thereof are killed. It will also poison water or wine in which it is drowned. Sir Thomas Browne concedes that it may resist a flame or put out a coal, but “thus much will many humid bodies perform.”
The Spider Dance
The tarantula is a large, brown mining spider which is found on both shores of the Mediterranean, and is said to be numerous near Taranto in southern Italy, whence its name. Its bite is painful, although not dangerous, but in the fifteenth century the superstition arose that it caused what is called tarantism, a nervous affection with some of the symptoms of hydrophobia, and now classed with St. Vitus dance. Those who were bitten, or believed themselves to be, assumed a livid color, lost the senses of sight and hearing, and sank into a deep depression; nausea and sexual excitement were also remarked. Only music could arouse the sufferer; under the influence of lively strains he would dance himself into a perspiration and the poison of the spider bite would escape through the skin. If the dance was continued to exhaustion the patient was cured, at any rate for a time.
The disease soon assumed the form of a contagion communicated from one person to another. Dancers were violently affected by bright colors. Red was the favorite, and then green and yellow, and one man’s hue might be another’s madness. Sufferers sought water, some plunging into the sea, others immersing their heads in a tub or carrying globes of water while dancing. Old and young, skeptical visitors as well as natives, and women more than men, were the victims. Attacks lasted from two to six days, and recovery was effectual until warm weather came the following year, when the symptoms had again to be exorcised to music. One woman was a tarantant for thirty summers.
The earliest mention of the mania is in the writings of Nicolas Perotti, a contemporary of Columbus. It broke out at the same time that the St. Vitus dance appeared in Germany. A like superstition and a like cure are known in a Persian province. The northern nations were first to recover and since the seventeenth century the epidemic has slowly waned. The lively Neapolitan folk dance, called the tarantella, is a memorial of the madness that set the Middle Ages dancing with a spider calling the tune.
The Swallow
Swallows show themselves suddenly in the northern climes in April, and as suddenly vanish at the threshold of autumn. They are often seen skimming the surface of water. Doctor Kalm, the Swedish traveler, reports that in April, 1750, he saw great numbers perched upon posts, “and they were as wet as if they had just come out of the sea.” That the swallow comes out of the sea in the spring and returns to it in the fall is a belief of unknown antiquity. Thus, thought Luther, it repeated each year the process of creation recorded in Genesis, when the water obeyed the command to bring forth “fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”
There is a considerable literature on the reputed hibernation of the swallow. It has been credited with electing at will the winter economy of the wild goose, the bear, or the batrachian. In Mediterranean countries it is conceded that swallows migrate. In England and Germany, according to one eighteenth-century observer, they “retire into clefts and holes in rocks, and remain there in torpid state.” In the colder northern countries popular opinion has been that they submerge in the sea. Regnard, the French comic poet, who made a journey to Lapland in 1681, accepted this on the word of trustworthy Danes and Swedes.
In the eighteenth century the secretary to the city of Dantzig obtained sworn testimony in support of this opinion from collectors of the revenues of the king of Prussia. The mother of the Countess Lehndorf reported that she saw “a bundle of swallows” brought from under water to a warm room, where they revived and fluttered about. Count Schlieben said that while fishing on his estate he saw several swallows netted, one of which he carried into a warm room; it lay there for an hour and then began to stir and fly around. Collector-General Witkowski said that in 1741 he got two swallows from the great pond at Didlacken, and that these birds revived in a warm room, “fluttered about, and died three hours later.” Six other witnesses made their several oaths to similar incidents.
A final touch of poetry is given by the statement of Doctor Wallerius, the celebrated Swedish chemist, who deposed “that he had seen more than once swallows assembling on a reed till they were all immersed and went to the bottom; this being preceded by a dirge of a quarter of an hour’s length.” Holy, luck-bringing, and inviolate, men everywhere have thought the swallow, and the solemn descents into the sea with which legend credited it deepened this character.
Wild Geese
About wild geese a still more fantastic belief obtained up to four centuries ago, when the Dutch discovered Spitzbergen. It was thought that goslings grew upon trees in the form of nuts. The nuts fell into the sea and the chicks came forth. Therefore a decree at the Sorbonne in Paris adjudged that wild geese were not birds and could be eaten in Lent. In Spitzbergen, Barentz came upon the breeding grounds of these migratory fowl, and, breaking open the eggs, discovered the unhatched young in them. So the myth passed. “It is not our fault,” he remarked, “that we have not known this before, when these birds insist upon breeding so far northward.” Two variants of the story are found among Norwegian writers. Jonas Ramus says that “a particular sort of Geese found in Nordland leave their seed on old trees and stumps and blocks lying in the sea”; a shell forms around the seed, and from the shell, as from an egg, young geese are hatched by the sun. Pontoppidan describes what seems to be the goose barnacle which contains “the little creature reported to be a young wild goose.” It looks like “little crooked feathers squeezed together” and is merely a “living sea insect.” While the legend was credited it was used to confirm the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
Animal Politics
Fable dowered various creatures with the political institutions and social sense of the ant and bee. Pearl oysters were said to live in settlements under the rule of the oldest. Cranes placed sentinels on guard at night, each with a stone in its claw; if the bird nodded the stone fell to the ground, betraying its neglect of duty. Cranes, rooks and storks, even modern observers assert, hold criminal courts. Twice a year a pair of ravens was assigned to each farm in Iceland by a parliament of their fellows. The storks of Egypt were supposed every winter to make the Mecca pilgrimage and were regarded as hajjis. Because the panther’s diet was aromatic roots and herbs, its breath was balmy and medicinal, and when it walked abroad all the other beasts attended it. Wild beasts and apes tended a mountain shrine near Srinagar in India, bringing daily offerings of flowers. In Ceylon “very pious and credible persons” told Ibn Batuta that the bearded black monkeys had their own sultan, who wore a green turban woven of leaves, as if he wished to seem an Islamite, and maintained a council of state and a harem.
Other Animal Marvels
Marvel tales about animals might be recited almost indefinitely, and a respectable authority ancient or modern, named for each. A few representative ones may be noted. It is a well-known fact, says Solinus, that magpies have died because they could not master the pronunciation of a difficult word. In South America, according to Purchas, men make clean their teeth with the beards of seals, “because they bee wholesome for the toothache.” The she-camel, so says Launcelot Addison, father of the essayist, “brings forth her young in a negligent slumber.” The toucan, says Humboldt, makes an extraordinary gesture when preparing to drink, which the monks assert is the sign of the cross upon the water, and so the creoles call it diostede (God gives it to thee). Bordering the country of the grasshopper-eaters in Africa, says Diodorus, is a fair land which has been untenanted since rain bred a multitude of venomous spiders that stung many persons to death and drove away the remainder. Plutarch thought that the ibis became more sacred by standing with straddled legs so as to form a triangle. Buffon confutes the notion, based on the noisome odor of the shrewmouse, that its bite is dangerous to cattle. Isaac Walton cites a polygamous fish which “goes courting she-goats on the grassy shore.” Even Linnæus thought that birds of paradise had neither wings nor feet.
Pliny’s Mirabilia
Pliny is authority for the fables which follow: The ant rests from her labors at the changes of the moon. The sea remains calm while the halcyon is hatching her young upon it. When the sun is in Cancer the bodies of dead crabs on the seashore are transformed into serpents. When the porcupine stretches its skin it discharges its quills like missiles. Lions resent it if a man looks at them asquint. The breath of the elephant will draw serpents from their retreats. Only by using the left hand can one pull snakes from their holes. They will flee from a naked man, but pursue one clothed. The best way to catch eels is to put the bait in the end of a hollow fishing rod and suffocate them by blowing through it.
Bears crawl into their dens on their backs in order to leave no betraying trail. Ostriches throw stones at their pursuers. Vultures will entice a bull over a precipice by holding their wings before its eyes. The boding raven is most so when it swallows its voice as if choked. If a horse follows in the track of a wolf it will burst asunder beneath its rider. If a shrewmouse crosses the rut of a wheel it will die at once. The pastern bones of swine promote discord. Madness in he-goats may be calmed by stroking their beards. She-goats in pasture never look at one another at sunset. Goats breathe through their ears, are never quite free from fever, and are therefore more lascivious than sheep. Roebucks grow fat on poisons.
As to birds and insects, it is doubtful if they dream; yet pigeons “have a certain appreciation of glory.” At a certain season cuckoos become hawks. The crow is at enmity with the weasel, the duck with the sea-mew, but there is friendship between the peacock and the pigeon, the turtle-dove and the parrot, the heron and the crow. Quails sometimes settle so thickly on ships at night as to sink them. Locusts make their whirring noise by grinding their teeth. Hornets, wasps, and bees will not attack a person stung by a scorpion. In high winds bees carry small stones for ballast. It is not certain whether their honey is “the sweat of the heavens, or whether a saliva emanating from the stars, or a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself.”
Stranger than these classic beliefs is the early Christian tradition of the small hole found in the forefeet of pigs when the hair is removed. Therein of old time passed the legion of devils in the country of the Gadarenes. The rings about the hole which seem branded in the skin are the marks of demons’ claws as they entered their unclean habitation. Javanese Moslems have it that the peacock was gatekeeper of Paradise and admitted the devil by swallowing him. A third domestic creature, the cock, could scatter ghosts and demons by his dawn cry.
Browne Catalogues Vulgar Errors
The treatise upon Vulgar Errors which Sir Thomas Browne made in the seventeenth century attacks many notions that had come down to his time from a past without date. Among them are the following: Swans sing their own death songs. The badger has the legs of one side shorter than the other. Spermaceti is the spawn of the whale. Lampries have nine eyes. There is antipathy between the toad and the spider. There is a lucky-stone in the toad’s head. The pelican pierces her breast and feeds her young with her own blood. The clicking sound made in a wainscoting by the beetle called the death-watch presages bereavement. Peacocks are ashamed of their legs. Storks will live only in republics or free states. Lions are afraid of cocks.
Each of these beliefs the great physician confutes in turn, remarking, for example, that storks nest in kingly France and in the dominions of the Great Turk, and that a lion, escaped from a menagerie, had robbed a hen roost in Bavaria.
Beasts of the Hermits
A chapter of charming legends has for its theme not the remarkable traits of different species of animals, but the conduct of single creatures that came under the influence of holy men who went out into the deserts in the early days of the Christian era. In the absence of human society the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field formed for the hermit the society of the waste. The crocodile, protected and worshiped by pagan Egypt, the gross-looking hippopotamus, the venomous serpents, and above all the hyena, with its fearful laughter, rimmed the anchorite’s life with a horizon of supernatural terror; these were embodied dæmons with designs upon his very soul. But sometimes he could cast out the evil spirit that tenanted them, and there were other and gentler beasts that became his servants and companions. In them the unfriendly deserts were made to repeat the polity of Eden, where all created things obeyed man.
Wild asses, lions, stags, wolves, and fowls were the hermit’s domestic animals. Stags, harnessed to plow, cultivated the field of St. Leonor, and took the place of St. Colodoc’s cattle when these were driven away because he had sheltered a hunted deer. St. Helenus rode on the back of a crocodile. Dragons guarded the cell of Abbot Ammon. The lion from whose foot St. Gerasimus extracted a thorn protected his ass. St. Costinian saddled and rode a bear. St. Sulpicius tells of a she-wolf as tame as a dog and of a lioness under a palm tree that moved modestly aside at a hermit’s command until he had eaten his fill of dates. Swallows sang upon the knees of St. Guthlac.
Not all of this, it may be, is the mere poetry of pious imaginations. After the breakdown of Roman civilization in the west, many of the oxen, horses, and dogs returned to the wild state, and what the hermits did in some cases was merely to recall them to their ancient allegiance. Here and there among so many thousands of solitaries, so Kingsley urges, were men such as become horse-tamers and bee-takers in settled communities, whose natures won them friends in the world of brutes. The very quietude of the hermits, their habit of silent meditation in field and forest, would disarm the fears of wild things and draw them toward companionship.
The Invasion of the Cathedrals
The church had yet another chapter to write in the story of the beasts, and this time they became hieroglyphs on the vast scroll of the cathedrals. The early significance of animals in the life of man was completely revived in the mediæval fanes, but as allegory rather than reality. Brute and fowl were created, it was thought, only to illustrate the truth of God’s word and to convey some spiritual message. Did not Job say, “Ask the beast and it will teach thee, and the birds of heaven and they will tell thee”? What they taught and told was set forth at large in the cathedral, which became in very fact a rebus carved in stone. With effects that were indescribably quaint, and beautiful at times, Christian symbolism wrought itself in ecclesiastical architecture in an age when few could read other writing.
From Egypt, where cenobites were already in communion with desert creatures, the impulse came; and from India, where Buddhist ascetics were taught to pattern their humility from the ass that sleeps by the roadside, their aloofness from the rhinoceros that wanders alone. Its immediate source was the Physiologus, or Naturalist, the compilation by an Alexandrian Greek of what the ancient world reported of animals and plants, with moral reflections added. The compendium was translated into all of the languages of Europe and several African and Asiatic tongues, and, being in the vernacular, may have been for a time more widely read than the Bible itself. For the unlearned a source of pleasant stories and forerunner of the bestiaries, for the learned it was a theological treatise. Its subject-matter entered patristic writings and popular sermons and was at length transferred to stone.
The vogue of animal symbolism in Christian churches covered half a millennium, was at its height in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was still alive at the Reformation, and left its marks in sacred vessels and ecclesiastical vestments as well as in sculpture. Façades, portals, buttresses, and gargoyles of church exteriors, and cloisters, chancels and chapels of interiors, were decorated with animal forms. As an emblem of priestly chastity, the elephant was embroidered on sacerdotal vestments. Lamps, censers, and sacramental vessels repeated the outline or carried the effigy of the griffin, the pelican, the dolphin. Sculptured lions ramped at cathedral doors, lizards peeped from crevices, and all about the sanctuary were the figures of foxes and ferrets, harts and hedgehogs, panthers and partridges, the whale, the crocodile, the tortoise, and a hundred other flying, walking, creeping, or swimming things.
Though St. Bernard denounced this as “the foul and tattered vesture of pagan allegory,” every animal was a text, or was designed to be. The lion typified majesty, the ox patience, the ram spiritual leadership, the turtle-dove constancy, the skin-sloughing snake the repentant believer, the salamander the righteous who extinguish the flames of desire. The sun-staring, youth-renewing eagle was an admonition to those grown old in sin to face the day star of revelation. Ravens symbolized Jews who battened on the carrion of the Law. Sometimes virtues and vices were pictured as women riding animals or bearing animal devices—Humility on a panther, Chastity on a unicorn, Devotion on an ibex, Patience with a swan helmet, Love with a pelican shield, Lust with a siren-buckler.
Animal symbolism had also its secular phases. Amorous troubadours likened themselves to flame-walled salamanders; or, disappointed in love, likened woman to the double-natured dragon and the hooting owl. By degrees the secular impulse invaded the churches. Animal sculptures were admitted as such and not as cipher characters of divine script; and satire, inspired or tolerated by the regular body of clergy, raided the sheepfold of allegory. This was directed against the preaching friars and the failings of the monastic orders, all the actors in the beast-epos of Reynard the fox entering the sanctuary as its auxiliaries. The animals overran windows, balustrades, cornices, and capitals; foxes were significantly depicted in palmer weeds; a stall in the cathedral at Amiens showed Reynard preaching to a flock of fowls and with pious gesture reaching for the nearest hen. Death, “the sarcastic and irreverent skeleton,” capered among the creatures in the dance macabre. At the outset an attack on religious abuses, the secular phase became in effect a lampoon of the very rites of the church.
Among other figures that caricatured its principal ceremonies under its own roof, says Evans in his authoritative study of the period, were “apes in choristers’ robes, swine in monks’ hoods, asses in cowls chanting and playing the organ, sirens in the costume of nuns with their faces carefully veiled and the rest of their persons exposed, stags in chasubles ministering at the altar and wolves in the confessional giving absolution to lambs.” The ass, which the east had long celebrated for its devoted service and which has a high niche in biblical story, attained a place in the churches of the west which neither fact fully accounts for. There was thought to be some mystic relation between its anatomy and the architecture of a cathedral. In a catechism of the last century used in a French town it was recited among other details that the head of the ass signified the bell of the town cathedral, its paunch the poor-box and its tail the aspergill for sprinkling holy water. In the one-time popular Feast of the Ass, a living ass was led up the nave into the chancel, the chants were sung in a braying tone, and the officiating priest dismissed the congregation with a loud hee-haw.
The ceremony has passed. Most of the beast figures have been removed from the cathedrals. Animal symbolism still lives, but more in letters than in stone.