Un monte era de miembros eminente
Este que, de Neptuno hijo fiero,
De un ojo ilustra el orbe de su frente,
Émulo casi del mayor lucero;
Cíclope a quien el pino más valiente
Bastón le obedecía tan ligero,
Y al grave peso junco tan delgado,
Que un día era bastón y otro caiado.
Negro el cabello, imitador undoso
De las oscuras aguas del Leteo,
Al viento que le peina proceloso
Vuela sin orden, pende sin aseo;
Un torrente es su barba impetuoso
Que, adusto hijo de este Pirineo,
Su pecho inunda, o tarde o mal o en vano
Surcada aún de los dedos de su mano.
[An eminent peak of limbs he was, this uncouth son of Neptune, lighting the orb of his forehead with an eye almost rivaling the greatest star; a Cyclops to whom the stoutest pine obeyed as a light cane, and was to his bulky mass a reed so slender that one day it was a walking-stick and the next a shepherd’s crook.
Jet black his hair, a wavy imitator of the dark waters of the Lethe, in the wind which stormily combs it, blowing in a tangle and dangling in disorder; a plunging torrent is his beard, which stern son of this Pyrenee overflows his breast, too late or badly or in vain furrowed by the fingers of his hand.]
These lines outdo and are weaker than others from the third book of the Aeneid (praised by Quintilian), which in turn outdo and are weaker than still other lines from the ninth book of the Odyssey. This literary decline matches a decline in the poet’s faith; Virgil wishes to impress us with his Polyphemus, but scarcely believes in him; and Góngora believes only in words or in verbal trickery.
The Cyclops were not the only race of men having one eye; Pliny (VII, 2) also mentions the Arimaspians, a nation remarkable for having but one eye, and that placed in the middle of the forehead. This race is said to carry on a perpetual warfare with the Griffons, a kind of monster, with wings as they are commonly represented, for the gold which they dig out of the mines, and which these wild beasts retain and keep watch over with a singular degree of cupidity, while the Arimaspi are equally desirous to get possession of it.
Five hundred years earlier, the first encyclopedist, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, had written (III, 116):
This is also plain, that to the north of Europe there is by far more gold than elsewhere. In this matter again I cannot with certainty say how the gold is got; some will have it that one-eyed men called Arimaspians steal it from griffons. But this too I hold incredible, that there can be men in all else like other men, yet having but one eye.
The Panther
In medieval bestiaries the word ‘panther’ deals with a very different animal from the carnivorous mammal of present-day zoology. Aristotle had written that it gives off a sweet smell attractive to other animals; Aelian the Roman author nicknamed ‘Honey-Tongued’ for his perfect command of Greek, a language he preferred to Latin stated that this odour was also pleasant to men. (In this characteristic some see a confusion of the Panther with the civet cat.) Pliny endowed the Panther’s back with a large circular spot that waxed and waned with the moon. To these marvelous circumstances came to be added the fact that the Bible, in the Septuagint version, uses the word ‘panther’ in a verse (Hosea, V: 14) that may be a prophetic reference to Jesus: ‘I am become as a panther to Ephraim.’
In the Anglo-Saxon bestiary of the Exeter Book, the Panther is a gentle, solitary beast with a melodious voice and sweet breath (likened elsewhere to the smell of allspice) that makes its home in a secret den in the mountains. Its only foe is the dragon, with which it fights incessantly. After a full meal it sleeps and ‘On the third day when he wakes, a lofty, sweet, ringing sound comes from his mouth, and with the song a most delightful stream of sweet-smelling breath, more grateful than all the blooms of herbs and blossoms of the trees.’ Multitudes of men and animals flock to its den from the fields and castles and towns, drawn on by the fragrance and the music. The dragon is the age-old enemy, the Devil; the waking is the resurrection of the Lord; the multitudes are the community of the faithful; and the Panther is Jesus Christ. To attenuate the amazement this allegory can awaken, let us remember that the Panther was not a wild beast to the Saxons but an exotic sound unsupported by any very concrete image. It may be added, as a curiosity, that Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’ speaks of ‘Christ the tiger.’
Leonardo da Vinci notes:
The African panther is like a lion, but with longer legs, and a more slender body. It is completely white, spattered with black spots like rosettes. Its beauty delights the other animals, which would all flock to it were it not for the panther’s terrible stare. Aware of this, the panther lowers its eyes; other animals approach it to drink in such beauty, and the panther pounces on the nearest of them.
The Pelican
The Pelican of everyday zoology is a water bird with a wingspan of some six feet and a very long bill whose lower mandible distends to form a pouch for holding fish. The Pelican of fable is smaller and its bill is accordingly shorter and sharper. Faithful to popular etymology pelicanus, white-haired the plumage of the former is white while that of the latter is yellow and sometimes green. (The real origin of pelican is from the Greek ‘I hew with an axe,’ in a confusion of its large bill with that of the woodpecker’s.) But more unusual than its appearance are its habits. With its bill and claws, the mother bird caresses her offspring with such devotion that she kills them. After three days the father arrives and, despairing over the deaths of his young, rips at his own breast with his bill. The blood that spills from his wounds revives the dead birds. This is the account given in medieval bestiaries, though St Jerome in a commentary on the 102nd Psalm (‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert’) attributes the death of the nestlings to the serpent. That the Pelican opens its breast and feeds its young with its own blood is the common version of the fable.
Blood that gives life to the dead suggests the Eucharist and the cross, and so a famous line of the Paradiso (XXV, 113) calls Jesus Christ nostro Pellicano—mankind’s Pelican. The Latin commentary by Benvenuto of Imola amplifies this point: ‘He is called pelican because he opened his side for our salvation, like the pelican that revives its dead brood with the blood of its breast. The pelican is an Egyptian Bird.’
The Pelican is common in ecclesiastical heraldry and it is still engraved on chalices. The bestiary by Leonardo da Vinci describes the Pelican in this way:
It is greatly devoted to its young and, finding them in the nest killed by snakes, tears at its breast, bathing them with its blood to bring them back to life.
The Peryton
The Sibyl of Erythraea, it is said, foretold that the city of Rome would finally be destroyed by the Perytons. In the year a.d. 642 the record of the Sibyl’s prophecies was consumed in the great conflagration of Alexandria; the grammarians who undertook the task of restoring certain charred fragments of the nine volumes apparently never came upon the special prophecy concerning the fate of Rome.
In time it was deemed necessary to find a source that would throw greater light upon this dimly remembered tradition. After many vicissitudes it was learned that in the sixteenth century a rabbi from Fez (in all likelihood Jakob Ben Chaim) had left behind a historical treatise in which he quoted the now lost work of a Greek scholiast, which included certain historical facts about the Perytons obviously taken from the oracles before the Library of Alexandria was burned by Omar. The name of the learned Greek has not come down to us, but his fragments run:
The Perytons had their original dwelling in Atlantis and are half deer, half bird. They have the deer’s head and legs. As for its body, it is perfectly avian, with corresponding wings and plumage . . .
Its strangest trait is that, when the sun strikes it, instead of casting a shadow of its own body, it casts the shadow of a man. From this, some conclude that the Peryt
ons are the spirits of wayfarers who have died far from their homes and from the care of their gods . . .. . . and have been surprised eating dry earth . . . flying in flocks and have been seen at a dizzying height above the Columns of Hercules.
. . . they [Perytons] are mortal foes of the human race; when they succeed in killing a man, their shadow is that of their own body and they win back the favour of their gods.
. . . and those who crossed the seas with Scipio to conquer Carthage came close to failure, for during the passage a formation of Perytons swooped down on the ships, killing and mangling many . . . Although our weapons have no effect against it, the animal if such it be can kill no more than a single man.
. . . wallowing in the gore of its victims and then fleeing upward on its powerful wings.
. . . in Ravenna, where they were last seen, telling of their plumage which they described as light blue in colour, which greatly surprised me for all that is known of their dark green feathers.
Though these excerpts are sufficiently explicit, it is to be lamented that down to our own time no further intelligence about the Perytons has reached us. The rabbi’s treatise, which preserved this description for us, had been on deposit until before the last World War in the library of the University of Dresden. It is painful to say that this document has also disappeared, and whether as a consequence of bombardment or of the earlier book burning of the Nazis, it is not known. Let us hope that one day another copy of the work may be discovered and again come to adorn the shelves of some library.
The Phoenix
In monumental effigies, in pyramids of stone, and in treasured mummies, the Egyptians sought eternity. It is therefore appropriate that their country should have given rise to the myth of a cyclical and deathless bird, though its subsequent elaboration is the work of Greece and of Rome. Adolf Erman writes that in the mythology of Heliopolis, the Phoenix (benu) is the lord of jubilees or of long cycles of time. Herodotus, in a famous passage (II, 73), tells with insistent scepticism an early form of the legend:
Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix. I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness. The Egyptians tell a tale of this bird’s devices which I do not believe. He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun’s temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him. His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such is the tale of what is done by this bird.
Some five hundred years later, Tacitus and Pliny took up the wondrous tale; the former justly observed that all antiquity is obscure, but that a tradition has fixed the intervals of the Phoenix’s visits at 1,461 years (Annals, VI, 28). The latter also looked into the Phoenix’s chronology; Pliny records (X, 2) that, according to Manilius, the bird’s life coincides with the period of the Platonic year, or Great Year. A Platonic year is the time required by the sun, the moon, and the five planets to return to their initial position; Tacitus in his Dialogus de Oratoribus gives this as 12,994 common years. The ancients believed that, upon fulfilment of this vast astronomical cycle, the history of the world would repeat itself in all its details under the repeated influence of the planets; the Phoenix would be a mirror or an image of this process. For a closer analogy between the cosmos and the Phoenix, it should be recalled that, according to the Stoics, the universe dies in fire and is reborn in fire and that the cycle had no beginning and will have no end.
Time simplified the method of the Phoenix’s generation.
Herodotus speaks of an egg and Pliny of a maggot, but the poet Claudian at the end of the fourth century already celebrates an immortal bird that rises out of its own ashes, an heir to itself and a witness of the ages.
Few myths have been as widespread as that of the Phoenix. In addition to the authors already cited, we may add: Ovid (Metamorphoses, XV), Dante (Inferno, XXIV), Pellicer (The Phoenix and its Natural History), Quevedo (Spanish Parnassus, VI), and Milton (Samson Agonistes, in fine). Shakespeare at the close of Henry VIII (V, iv) wrote these fine verses:
But as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir,
As great in admiration as herself . . .
We may also mention the Latin poem ‘De Arte Phoenice,’ which has been attributed to Lactantius, and an Anglo-Saxon imitation of it dating from the eighth century. Tertulius, St Ambrose, and Cyrillus of Jerusalem have used the Phoenix as a proof of the resurrection of the flesh. Pliny pokes fun at the physicians who prescribe pills compounded of the nest and ashes of the Phoenix.
The Pygmies
In the knowledge of the ancients, this nation of dwarfs measuring twenty-seven inches in height dwelled in the mountains beyond the utmost limits of India or of Ethiopia. Pliny states that they built their cabins of mud mixed with feathers and eggshells. Aristotle allots them underground dens. For the harvest of wheat they wielded axes, as though they were out to chop down a forest. Each year they were attacked by flocks of cranes whose home lay on the Russian steppe. Riding rams and goats, the Pygmies retaliated by destroying the eggs and nests of their foes. These expeditions of war kept them busy for the space of three months out of every twelve.
Pygmy was also the name of a Carthaginian god whose face was carved as a figurehead on warships in order to spread terror among the enemy.
The Rain Bird
When rain is needed, Chinese farmers have at their disposal besides the dragon the bird called the shang yang. It has only one leg. Long ago, children hopped up and down on one foot, wrinkling their brows and repeating: ‘It will thunder, it will rain, ‘cause the shang yang’s here again!’ The tradition runs that the bird drew water from the rivers with its beak and blew it out as rain on the thirsting fields.
An ancient wizard had tamed it and used to carry it perched on his sleeve. Historians tell us that it once paraded back and forth before the throne of the Prince of Ch’i, hopping about and flapping its wings. The Prince, greatly taken aback, sent his chief minister to the Court of Lu to consult Confucius. The Sage foretold that the shang yang would cause the whole countryside and near-by regions to be flooded unless dikes and channels were built at once. The Prince was not deaf to the Sage’s warning, and so in his domain countless damage and disaster were avoided.
The Remora
Remora, in Latin, means ‘delay’ or ‘hindrance.’ This is the strict meaning of the word which was figuratively applied to the Echeneis, a genus of sucking fishes credited with the power of holding a ship fast by clinging to it. The Remora is a fish of an ashen hue; on the top of its head it has a cartilaginous disc with which it creates a vacuum that enables it to cling to other underwater creatures. Here is Pliny’s acclamation of its powers (IX, 41):
There is a quite small fish that frequents rocks, called the sucking-fish. This is believed to make ships go more slowly by sticking to their hulls, from which it has received its name; and for this reason it also has an evil reputation for supplying a love-charm and for acting as a spell to hinder litigation in the courts, which accusations it counterbalances only by its laudable property of stopping fluxes of the womb in pregnant women and holding back the offspring till the time of birth. It is not included however among articles of diet. It is thought by some to have feet, but Aristotle denies this, adding that its limbs resemble wings.
(Pliny then goes on to describe the murex, a variety of purple fish also credited with
bringing ships under full sail to a standstill: .’ . . it is a foot long and four inches wide, and hinders ships, and moreover . . . when preserved in salt it has the power of drawing out gold that has fallen into the deepest wells when it is brought near them.’)
It is remarkable how from the idea of delaying ships the Remora came to be associated with delays in lawsuits and later with delayed births. Elsewhere, Pliny tells that a Remora decided the fate of the Roman Empire in the Battle of Actium, detaining the galley in which Mark Antony was reviewing his fleet, and that another Remora stopped Caligula’s ship despite the efforts of its four hundred oarsmen.
‘Winds blow and storms rage,’ exclaims Pliny, ‘but the Remora overmasters their fury and holds ships fast, achieving what the heaviest of anchors and the thickest of hawsers could never achieve.’
‘The mightiest power does not always prevail. A ship may be detained by a small remora,’ repeats the fine Spanish writer Diego de Saavedra Fajardo in his Political Emblems (1640).
The Rukh
The Rukh (or as it is sometimes given, roc) is a vast magnification of the eagle or vulture, and some people have thought that a condor blown astray over the Indian Ocean or China seas suggested it to the Arabs. Lane rejects this idea and considers that we are dealing rather with a ‘fabulous species of a fabulous genus’ or with a synonym for the Persian Simurgh. The Rukh is known to the West through the Arabian Nights, The reader will recall that Sindbad (on his second voyage), left behind by his shipmates on an island, found
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