A King of Fire and His Steed
Heraclitus taught us that the primal element, or root, is fire, but this hardly means that there are beings made of fire, carved of the shifting substance of flames. This almost unimaginable fancy was attempted by William Morris in the tale ‘The Ring Given to Venus’ from his cycle The Earthly Paradise (1868-70). It runs as follows:
Most like a mighty king was he, And crowned and sceptred royally;
As a white flame his visage shone, Sharp, clear-cut as a face of stone;
But flickering flame, not flesh, it was;
And over it such looks did pass
Of wild desire, and pain, and fear,
As in his people’s faces were,
But tenfold fiercer: furthermore,
A wondrous steed the master bore,
Unnameable of kind or make,
Not horse, nor hippogriff, nor drake.
Like and unlike to all of these,
And flickering like the semblances
Of an ill dream . . .
Perhaps in the above lines there is an echo of the deliberately ambiguous personification of Death in Paradise Lost (II, 666-73):
The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb.
Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d,
For each seem’d either; black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful Dart; what seem’d his head
The likeness of a Kingly Crown had on.
The Kraken
The Kraken is a Scandinavian version of the zaratan and of the sea dragon, or sea snake of the Arabs.
In 1752-54, the Dane Erik Pontoppidan, Bihsop of Bergen, published a Natural History of Norway, a work famous for its hospitality or gullibility. In its pages we read that the Kraken’s back is a mile and a half wide and that its tentacles are capable of encompassing the largest of ships. The huge back protrudes from the sea like an island. The Bishop formulates this rule: ‘Floating islands are invariably Krakens.’ He also writes that the Kraken is in the habit of turning the sea murky with a discharge of liquid. This statement has inspired the hypothesis that the Kraken is an enlargement of the octopus.
Among Tennyson’s juvenilia we find this poem to the curious creature:
The Kraken
Below the thunders of the upper deep,
Far, far beneath the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea-worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Kujata
In Moslem cosmology, Kujata is a huge bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, and feet. To get from one ear to another or from one eye to another, no more than five hundred years are required. Kujata stands on the back of the fish Bahamut; on the bull’s back is a great rock of ruby, on the rock an angel, and on the angel rests our earth. Under the fish is a mighty sea, under the sea a vast abyss of air, under the air fire, and under the fire a serpent so great that were it not for fear of Allah, this creature might swallow up all creation.
The Lamed Wufniks
There are on earth, and always were, thirty-six righteous men whose mission is to justify the world before God. They are the Lamed Wufniks. They do not know each other and are very poor. If a man comes to the knowledge that he is a Lamed Wufnik, he immediately dies and somebody else, perhaps in another part of the world, takes his place. Lamed Wufniks are, without knowing it, the secret pillars of the universe. Were it not for them, God would annihilate the whole of mankind. Unawares, they are our saviours.
This mystical belief of the Jews can be found in the works of Max Brod. Its remote origin may be the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, where we read this verse: ‘And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.’
The Moslems have an analogous personage in the Kutb.
The Lamias
According to the Greeks and Romans, Lamias lived in Africa. From the waist up their form was that of a beautiful woman; from the waist down they were serpents. Many authorities thought of them as witches; others as evil monsters. They lacked the ability to speak, but they made a whistling sound which was musical, and in the spaces of the desert beguiled travelers in order to devour them. Their remote origin was divine, having sprung from one of the many loves of Zeus. In that section of his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that deals with the power of love, Robert Burton writes:
Philostratus, in his Fourth Book de vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius a young man 25 years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreoe and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she being fair and lovely would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a Philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, among other guests, came Apollonius, who by some probable conjectures found her out to be a serpent, a Lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus’ gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece.
Shortly before his death, John Keats was moved by this reading of Burton to compose his extensive poem ‘Lamia.’
Laudatores Temporis Acti
The seventeenth-century Portuguese sea captain, Luiz da Silveira, in his De Gentibus et Moribus Asiae (Lisbon, 1669) refers somewhat obliquely to an Eastern sect whether Indian or Chinese we are not told which he calls, using a Latin tag, Laudatories Temporis Acti. The good captain is no metaphysician or theologian, but he none the less makes clear the nature of time past as conceived by the Worshippers. The past to us is merely a section of time, or a series of sections that were once the present and that may now be approximately recalled by memory or by history. Both memory and history make these sections, of course, part of the present. To the Worshippers, the past is absolute; it never had a present, nor can it be remembered or even guessed at. Neither unity nor plurality can be ascribed to it, since these are attributes of the present. The same may be said of its denizens if the plural be allowed with respect to their colour, size, weight, shape, and so on. Nothing about the beings of this Once That Never Was can be either affirmed or denied.
Silveira remarks on the utter hopelessness of the sect; the Past, as such, could have no inkling of its being worshipped and could afford no help or comfort to its votaries. Had the captain given us the native name or some other clue about this curious community, further investigation would be easier. We know they had neither temples nor sacred books. Are there still any Worshippers or do they now, together with their dim belief, belong to the past?
The Lemures
The ancients suppose
d that men’s souls after death wandered all over the world and disturbed the peace of its inhabitants. The good spirits were called Lares familiares, and the evil ones were known by the name of Larvae, or Lemures. They terrified the good, and continually haunted the wicked and impious; and the Romans had the custom of celebrating festivals in their honour, called Lemuria, or Lemuralia, in the month of May. They were first instituted by Romulus to appease the ghost of his brother Remus, from whom they were called Remuria, and, by corruption, Lemuria. These solemnities continued three nights, during which the temples of the gods were shut and marriages were prohibited. It was usual for the people to throw black beans on the graves of the deceased, or to burn them, as the smell was supposed to be insupportable to them. They also muttered magical words, and, by beating kettles and drums, they believed that the ghosts would depart and no longer come to terrify their relations upon earth.
Lemprière: Classical Dictionary
The Leveller
Between 1840 and 1864, the Father of Light (whom we may also call the Inner Voice) granted the Bavarian musician and schoolteacher Jakob Lorber an unbroken series of trustworthy revelations concerning the human population, the fauna, and the flora of the celestial bodies of our solar system. Among the domestic animals we have knowledge of, thanks to these revelations, is found the Leveller, or Ground-Flattener (Bodendrücker), which renders immeasurable services on Miron, the planet identified with Neptune by Lorber’s most recent editors.
The Leveller has ten times the girth of the elephant, to which it bears a striking resemblance. It is provided with a rather stumpy trunk and with long straight tusks; its hide is of a sickly green. Its limbs, pyramid-shaped, widen enormously at the hoof; the apexes of these pyramids appear to be pinned to the body. This noted plantigrade, in advance of builders and bricklayers, is led to the rough terrain of a construction site, where, with the aid of its hooves, its trunk, and its tusks, it proceeds to flatten out and tramp the ground.
The Leveller feeds on roots and herbage and has no enemies outside of one or two species of insects.
Lilith
‘For before Eve was Lilith,’ we read in an old Hebrew text. This legend moved the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) to write the poem ‘Eden Bower.’ Lilith was a serpent; she was Adam’s first wife and gave him
Shapes that coiled in the woods and waters,
Glittering sons and radiant daughters.
It was later that God created Eve; Lilith, to revenge herself on Adam’s human wife, urged Eve to taste the forbidden fruit and to conceive Cain, brother and murderer of Abel. Such is the early form of the myth followed and bettered by Rossetti. Throughout the Middle Ages the influence of the word layil, Hebrew for ‘night,’ gave a new turn to the myth. Lilith is no longer a serpent; she becomes an apparition of the night. At times she is an angel who rules over the procreation of mankind, at times a demon who assaults those who sleep alone or those who travel lonely roads. In popular imagination she is a tall silent woman with long black hair worn loose.
The Lunar Hare
In the blotches of the moon, the English believe they make out the form of a man; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream there are two or three references to the ‘man in the moon.’ Shakespeare mentions its bundle, or bush, of thorn; in the last lines of Canto XX of the Inferno, Dante had already spoken of Cain and of these thorns. The commentary by Tommaso Casini cites the Tuscan fable in which the Lord banished Cain to the moon, condemning him to carry a bundle of thorns to the end of time. Others have seen in the moon the Holy Family; Leopoldo Lugones wrote in his Lunario sentimental:
Y está todo: la Virgen con el niño; al flanco, San José (algunos tienen la buena fortuna De ver su vara); y el buen burrito bianco Trota que trota los campos de la luna.
[And everything is there: Virgin and Child; by her side, Saint Joseph (some are lucky enough to see his staff); and the good little white donkey that trots and trots over the acres of the moon.]
The Chinese speak of a Lunar Hare. Buddha, in one of his former lives, suffered hunger; in order to feed him, a Hare leaped into a fire. The Buddha in gratitude sent the Hare’s soul to the moon. There, under an acacia, the Hare pounds in a magical mortar the herbs that make up the elixir of life. In the common speech of certain provinces, this Hare is called the Physician or the Precious Hare or the Hare of Jade. The ordinary Hare is believed to live for a thousand years and to turn white in its old age.
Shakespeare, by the way, refers to a dead mooncalf in The Tempest (II, ii). This creature, according to commentators, is an uncouth monster begotten on earth under the moon’s influence.
The Mandrake
Like the barometz, the plant known as the Mandrake borders on the animal kingdom, since it gives a cry when it is torn up; this cry can drive those who hear it mad. We read in Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, IV, iii):
And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad . . .
Pythagoras called the plant anthropomorphic; the Roman agronomist Lucius Columella called it semi-human; and Albertus Magnus wrote that the Mandrake is like man himself, down to the distinction between the sexes. Earlier, Pliny had said that the white Mandrake is the male and the black the female. Also, that those who root it out first trace three circles on the ground with a sword and look westward; the smell of its leaves is so strong that ordinarily it can deprive men of the power of speech. To uproot it was to run the risk of terrible calamities. In the last book of his History of the Jewish Wars, Flavius Josephus advises us to employ a trained dog; the plant dug up, the dog dies, but the leaves are useful as a narcotic, a laxative, and for the purposes of magic.
The Mandrake’s supposed human form has suggested the superstition that it grows at the foot of the gallows. Sir Thomas Browne (Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1646) speaks of the grease of hanged men; the once popular German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote a novel (Alraune, 1913) around the idea of the hanged man’s seed being injected into a harlot and producing a beautiful witch. In German, ‘mandrake’ is Alraune; earlier it was Alruna, a word that comes originally from ‘rune,’ which stood for ‘whisper’ or ‘buzz.’ Hence (according to Skeat) it meant ‘a mystery . . . a writing, because written characters were regarded as a mystery known to the few.’ Perhaps, more simply, the idea of a visible mark standing for a sound baffled the Nordic mind, and therein lay the mystery.
Genesis (XXX: 14-17) has this strange account of the reproductive powers of the Mandrake:
And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then Rachel said to Leah, Give me, I pray thee, of thy son’s mandrakes.
And she said unto her, Is it a small matter that thou hast taken my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son’s mandrakes also? And Rachel said, Therefore he shall lie with thee tonight for thy son’s mandrakes.
And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I have hired thee with my son’s mandrakes. And he lay with her that night.
And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bare Jacob the fifth son.
In the twelfth century, a German-Jewish commentator on the Talmud wrote this paragraph:
A kind of cord comes out of a root in the ground and tied to the cord by its navel, like a squash or melon, is the animal known as the yadu’a, but the yadu’a is in all respects like a man: face, body, hands, and feet. It uproots and destroys all things around it as far as the cord reaches. The cord should be cut by an arrow, and the animal dies.
The physician Dioscorides (second century a.d.) identified the Mandrake with the circea, or herb of Circe, of which we read in the tenth book of the Odyssey:
At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk. Moly the gods call it, and it is hard for mortal man to dig; but the gods are all-powerful.
The Manticore
Pliny (VIII, 30)
informs us that according to Ctesias, the Greek physician of Artaxerxes Mnemon, among the Ethiopians there is an animal found, which he calls the mantichora; it has a triple row of teeth, which fit into each other like those of a comb, the face and ears of a man, and azure eyes, is of the colour of blood, has the body of the lion, and a tail ending in a sting, like that of the scorpion. Its voice resembles the union of the sound of the flute and the trumpet; it is of excessive swiftness, and is particularly fond of human flesh.
Flaubert has improved upon this description, and in the last pages of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, we read:
The Manticore a gigantic red lion with a human face and three rows of teeth.
‘The iridescence of my scarlet hide blends into the shimmering brightness of the desert sands. Through my nostrils I exhale the horror of the lonely places of the earth. I spit out pestilence. I consume armies when they venture into the desert.
‘My nails are twisted into talons, like drills, and my teeth are cut like those of a saw; my restless tail prickles with darts, which I shoot left and right, before me, behind. Watch!’
Collected Stories Page 53
