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.