In the world that was, the fabulous animals that roved the land were
creatures of unusual interest, though of limited number. More species
were to be found in the deep. Thither, Pliny explains, fall the seeds
from the innumerable figures of beasts impressed as constellations
upon the heavens, and these seeds, being mixed together in the watery
element, produce a variety of monstrous forms.
With animal life abounding in the thickets and fields of the earth,
and for every bird and beast a fable, there was less incentive to
invent new species of them than there was to make stories of ghosts,
dæmons and faeries, or of men with beast attributes or lineage or some
quality of caricature in their anatomy. With the coming of heraldry
the category of strange creatures is greatly enlarged, but the shapes
added by blazonry do not purport to be living things and have no place
in geography or in literature, save in massive volumes where the quaint
designs and quainter jargon of a curious erudition are preserved.
The ancient had naïve ideas about cross-breeding. Every unusual
animal seemed a hybrid of two known species. These were produced in
hot climates. Hence, says Pliny, arose the saying, common even in
Greece, that “Africa is always producing something new.” The males and
females of various species in that singular land, he thought, coupled
promiscuously with each other, but not always with impunity. “The lion
recognizes, by the peculiar odor of the pard, when the lioness has been
unfaithful to him, and avenges himself with the greatest fury.”
There was a belief, which lasted nearer to the present time, that the
savage dogs of India, two of which would make no scruple of attacking
the lion, had tigresses for their dams. Diodorus noted that eastern
Arabia produced beasts of double nature and mixed shape, and he deemed
it reasonable that “by the vivifying heat of the sun in southern parts
of the world many sorts of wonderful creatures are there bred.” Among
these he cites the crocodiles and river horses of Egypt. He strains
a point in support of his theory in the account of what he calls the
Struthocameli of Arabia, “who have the shape both of a camel and an
ostrich.” He describes their bodies “big as a camel, newly foaled,”
their small heads with large black eyes, their long necks, the “hairy
feathers” on their wings, their strong thighs, and “cloven hoofs.”
This creature, says the Sicilian geographer, “seems both terrestrial
and volatile, a land beast and a bird”--after all, only an inexact yet
graphic portrait of the ostrich. That this fowl is a cross between a
camel and a bird is an Arab notion; according to Aristotle it is of an
equivocal nature, part bird and part quadruped. So its Persian name
signifies, and sacred writers liken its voice to the bellowing of a
bull.
Even the breezes take part in the creation of hybrids, so men have
thought. That there is actual generative power in the wind is a belief
older than the discovery of its function in carrying the fertilizing
pollen of plants. Pliny records the popular belief that barren eggs are
breeze-begotten; hence their name of Zephyria. The modern “wind-egg”
for an egg without a shell laid by a fat hen, but supposed by Doctor
Johnson not to contain the principle of life, comes from a similar
notion. Male sheep are conceived when the northeast wind blows, and
females when the south wind blows, according to the Romans. One of the
heroic ballads of the Tartars personifies the wind as a foal which
courses about the earth. The fable about Portuguese mares, widely
credited by the ancients and roundly asserted by Pliny, is an echo
of sailor reports on the fertility of Lusitania: “In the vicinity of
Olisipo and the river Tagus, the mares, by turning their faces toward
the west wind as it blows, become impregnated by its breezes, and the
foals thus conceived are remarkable for their fleetness; but they never
live beyond three years.”
_The Unicorn_
Best known animal of legend is the unicorn. There are two veritable
unicorns, or animals with one horn--the rhinoceros and the narwhal.
The accepted description of this animal gives it the narwhal’s straight
and spirally twisted horn but none of the parts of the rhinoceros. It
is pictured with the legs of a buck, the tail of a lion, and the head
and body of a horse. Its markings suggest the zebra’s; its head is red,
its body white, its eyes blue, while its horn is red at the tip, white
at the base and black in between. The high authority of Aristotle has
determined these points.
The ancients mention five different animals as having one horn set in
the middle of the forehead. The most famous of these were the Egyptian
oryx and the Indian ass. Pliny says the oryx gazes at the Dog Star
when it rises, and sneezes in a sort of worship. It has the stature
of a bull, the form of a deer, and hair that sets forward instead
of backward. The Indian ass is described by Ctesias as having the
traditional shape and hues of the unicorn, solid hoofs, and a horn a
cubit in length. Filings of this horn, if taken in a potion, are an
antidote to poison. Drinking cups made from it give immunity also from
epilepsy. The Indian ass is so fleet it can be seized only when it
leads its foal to pasture. In defense of its young it uses its horn,
teeth, and feet, killing horses and men. It is sought for the horn and
huckle bones, the latter, Ctesias declares, “the most beautiful I have
ever seen”; they are as heavy as lead, he says, and of the color of
cinnabar.
The third animal was the monoceros, on which the Orsæan Indians preyed.
It had the head of the stag, the feet of the elephant, and the tail of
the boar, while the rest of its body was horse-like. The single black
horn projecting from the middle of its forehead was two cubits long. It
lowed like a bull, was of ferocious nature, wandered alone, and could
not be taken alive. The two other unicorns of ancient story were the
single-horned horse and the single-horned ox.
There was a second growth of the fable in the Middle Ages and the
unicorn took on new dignities. It was the only animal that would
attack the elephant, disembowelling the pachyderm with one blow of its
sharp-nailed foot; and it charged the lion at sight. The king of beasts
was constrained to kingly craft, dodging behind a tree. His assailant,
says Topsell, “in the swiftness of his course runneth against the tree,
wherein his sharp horn sticketh fast”; and the lion dispatches him at
leisure. In his _Display of Heraldry_ (1724) Guillim says the unicorn
is never taken alive because “the greatness of his mind is such rather
to die.” Mediæval intelligence at last hit upon a characteristic device
to secure this creature without slaying him, and the bestiaries of
the time record it. This was to place a young virgin near his haunts.
As soon as he saw her he would run to her and lie down at her feet,
placing his head in her bosom, when the hunters could halter him.
It was the alexipharmic virtues of the unicorn’s horn that most engaged
the ages of faith, when the poisoning of princes was almost an article
of statecraft. As late as 1789 it was used to test food at the court of
France, and horns, usually of the narwhal, were in the royal museums.
The ancients had made little of this. The reference of Ctesias to the
horn of the Indian ass as an antidote for poison and a cure of the
falling sickness stands alone. What was later made of this reputed
power is shown in a passage from John of Herse, who pilgrimed to
Jerusalem in 1389: “Near the field Helyon in the Holy Land is the river
Mara, whose bitter waters Moses struck with his staff and made sweet,
so that the children of Israel could drink thereof. Even now evil and
unclean spirits poison it after the going down of the sun, but in the
morning after the powers of darkness have disappeared, the unicorn
comes from the sea and dips its horn into the stream, and thereby
expels and neutralizes the poison, so that the other animals can drink
of it during the day.”
According to Guillim, it became “a general conceit that the wild beasts
of the wilderness used not to drink of the pools, for fear of venomous
serpents there breeding, until the unicorn hath stirred them with his
horn.” Thus its office was that of water-conner for the other beasts of
the forest.
Cosmas Indicopleustes said he had seen the brazen statues of four
unicorns set upon towers in the royal palace of Ethiopia. Frobisher
found a dead “sea unicorne” on the Canadian coast with a broken horn
two yards long. Into the hollow of the horn the sailors put spiders,
where they presently died. In his second voyage (1564) Sir John Hawkins
found the Florida Indians wearing pieces of the unicorn’s horn about
their necks.
The unicorn was celebrated in Christian symbolism before it found a
permanent niche in heraldry. When Balaam blesses Israel he says, “God
led him out of Egypt even as the glory of the unicorn.” According to
the _Bestiare Divine de Guillaume Clerc de Normandie_, the animal
represents Christ, and its horn signifies the Gospel of Truth. It
became a favorite charge in Scottish heraldry and James I of England
made it the sinister support in the arms of Great Britain, replacing
the red dragon of Wales.
Purchas the Pilgrim was always expecting news of the unicorn, hearing
of it and doubting report. Browne avows his belief in the animal in a
sardonic dissertation. Far from doubting its existence, he says, “we
affirm there are many kinds thereof,” and he mentions the five classic
animals, several fishes, and “four kinds of nasicornous beetles.” What
he wants to know is which one possesses the alexipharmic horn. He
complains that the animal is not uniformly described: “Pliny affirmeth
it is a fierce, terrible creature; Vartomannus, a tame and mansuete
animal; those which Garcias ab Horto described about the Cape of Good
Hope were beheld with heads like horses; those which Vartomannus beheld
he described with the head of a deer: Pliny, Ælian, Solinus, and Paulus
Venetus affirmeth the feet of the unicorn are undivided and like the
elephant’s; but those two which Vartomannus beheld at Mecca were footed
like a goat. As Ælian describeth, it is in the bigness of an horse; as
Vartomannus, of a colt; that which Thevet speaketh of was not so big as
an heifer; but Paulus Venetus affirmeth that they are but little less
than elephants.”
Browne proceeds remorselessly: The horns of the unicorn, as described
by writers or preserved in collections, are too various. Some are red,
some are black, and some have spiral markings, while “those two in the
treasure of St. Mark are plain and best accord with those of the Indian
ass.” Albertus Magnus describes one ten feet long, a narwhal’s, Browne
suggests. Others are but fossil teeth and bones and petrified tree
branches.
Yet the tradition long survived Browne. His contemporary, the
Portuguese Jesuit Lobo, said that in Abyssinia he had seen the unicorn,
in shape like a beautiful bay horse with a black tail. He could give no
minute account, for it ran with prodigious swiftness from wood to wood,
and never fed save when surrounded by animals that protected it. “The
unicorn really exists in Tibet,” Huc affirmed after traveling there in
1846. At Kordofan, in 1848, a man, whose custom was to provide Baron
Von Mueller with animal specimens, offered to sell him an _a’nasa_,
which he described as of donkey size with a tail like a boar’s, and a
single pendulous horn which it erected when it saw an enemy. In 1876
Prejevalski gave an account of the _orongo_, a stag-like creature with
two vertical horns, which he said was common in Tibet; according to
natives there were a few single horned individuals among the herds.
Every feature in the unicorn legend of the west has its counterpart
in the Chinese books. Six species of unicorns are mentioned; one
figures in the crest of the Mikado of Japan; another is sculptured in
the avenue of animals that leads to the Ming tombs north of Peking.
Another, and the best known, the _ki-lin_, appeared only in the reign
of upright monarchs. It was called a spiritual beast, chief of the
360 kinds of hairy creatures. Its pace was regular, it ambled only on
selected grounds, and its voice was like a monastery bell. So softly it
trod that it left no footprints and crushed no living thing.
All a moon myth, says one ingenious writer. But Gould declares, “I
find it impossible to believe that a creature whose existence has been
affirmed by so many authors, at so many different dates, and from so
many countries, can be the symbol of a myth.” He thinks it either a
hybrid occasionally produced by the crossing of the equine and bovine
families, or else the generic name for extinct missing links between
horses, cattle, and deer.
Whence the world’s long belief in the unicorn? Was there such an
animal, now extinct? Cuvier returns an emphatic negative: “The nations
of modern days have only been able to drive back the noxious animals
in the deserts, but have never yet suceeded in exterminating a single
species.” He goes further: there could never have been a cloven-footed
ruminant with a single horn, because its frontal bone must have been
divided, and no horn could have been placed on the suture.
Ctesias may have woven some rhinoceros details into his picture of the
so-called Indian ass. The Egyptian unicorn was called an oryx--a word
perhaps related to the Sanscrit and Teutonic aurochs. There is a large
African antelope the modern name of which is oryx. It is probable that
the correct name has been retained, and that the oryx, or gemsbok, of
to-day, is the unicorn of Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny, Lampridius, et al.
But the real oryx has two horns, while the fabled animal had but one
because the Egyptians did not understand perspective in drawing.
_The Griffin_
Greek and Persepolitan griffins are curiously alike, and both may
have derived from the winged lion of the Assyrians, emblem of the
god Nergal. Griffin lore, however, is rich in details which have no
religious significance. Herodotus speaks of the animal as guarding the
gold of the one-eyed Arimaspians in Asia north of the Altai Mountains.
Ctesias places it in the mountain barrier of India.
According to Ælian the griffin was a winged and feathered lion with
an eagle’s head and a color scheme that suggests the German imperial
flag--the breast plumage red, the wings white, and the dorsal plumage
black; “a mixed and dubious animal,” Browne calls it. Ctesias says it
had also blue neck feathers and red eyes. He describes the species as
a race of four-footed birds the size of wolves, but Maundeville says
they were as large and strong as eight lions and could carry to their
nests “a great Horse, or two Oxen yoked together as they go to the
Plough.” Of their talons the Indians made drinking cups. The griffins
built their nests like the eagle, but laid therein agates instead of
eggs. The Bactrians said that these birds dug gold out of the mountains
and made their nests therewith, and the Indians carried off so much of
it as falls to the ground. The Indians denied that the griffins were
watchmen for the gold of their district or had any use for it; they
said that when the birds see them coming to gather gold, they fear the
intruders are after their young and assail them. Also they attack all
other beasts and prevail over them, save only the lion and the elephant.
Fearful of their vengeance, the natives go not out to gather gold
in the daytime, say the chroniclers, but under cover of night make
their raids into a frightful desert where griffin and gold are found
together. Companies of one thousand or even two thousand men set out,
equipped with mattocks and sacks. The expeditions take from three to
four years, for this region lies afar. If successful, the members
return wealthy; but should they be detected in the act of theft, says
Ælian, certain death would be their fate.
There are four explanations of this four-footed bird of classic
legend and Welsh heraldry--that the winged Assyrian lion was taken
for a portrait instead of a symbol; that the Samoyeds mistook mammoth
bones in the gold-bearing district of the Ural Mountains for remains
of monster fowls; that the griffins were merely Tibetan mastiffs of
singular ferocity and reputed tigrine decent, and that they are an
early form of the dragon. The so-called griffin’s claws in the museums
of Dresden and Vienna and in the churches elsewhere are horns of the
Caffrarian buffalo. Drinking cups made of them were used in treating
epilepsy.
_The Hippogrif_
It would be vain to seek among animals the original of the hippogrif,
a creature related to the griffin, though of more involved lineage,
and like it treated sometimes as a bird, sometimes as a beast. The
hippogrif is a product of mediæval romance, and wings its way as the
courser of more than mortal knights over countries of fable, albeit
they bear such names as Brittany, Abyssinia, Circassia, and Cathay.
As the griffin was called a hybrid between the lion and the eagle, so
the hippogrif was supposed to be a hybrid between the griffin and the
horse. It had the head, wings, and fore claws of the griffin and the
body, hind hoofs and tail of the horse. Its habitat was the Riphæan
Mountains, source of the north wind. The hippogrif enters the Orlando
cycle as the mount of an enchanter with a castle on the Pyrenees, but
later serves the far adventures of the paladins of Charlemagne.
_The Monster Rat_
The Samoyeds and Chinese who found in the river banks of the north the
frozen bodies of mammoths, with skin and flesh intact as if they had
died but yesterday, reached the strange yet natural conclusion that
this was a kind of monstrous burrowing rat. It figures in Chinese books
as _fen-shu_, the “digging rat,” or _yen-men_, the “burrowing ox.” Why
was it always dead when men came upon it? Because air and sunshine were
both fatal to it; evidently in its wanderings underground it had broken
the crust above it and died in the daylight. Sometimes the Yakuts saw
the earth tremble and knew this great rat walked beneath. “There is got
from it,” says the _Chinese Encyclopedia_, “an ivory as white as that
of the elephant, but easier to work, and not liable to split. Its flesh
is very cold and excellent for refreshing the blood.”
_The Martikhora_
In the jungles of Ind roved the martikhora--a creature with unpleasant
affinities to men, the great cats, and the serpents. Its face was
like a man’s with pale blue eyes and human ears but with three rows
of teeth. Its body was as big as the lion’s and in color red like
cinnabar. It had a tail like the scorpion’s and more than a cubit long.
The martikhora, indeed, was a sort of anticipation of the machine gun,
for it had one sting at the end of its tail, two at the roots of this
member, and a fourth on the crown of its head; and these it projected
to the distance of a hundred feet. The missiles, which were about a
foot long and no thicker than fine thread, were fatal to every animal
save the elephants. The natives, says Ctesias, hunted it from the backs
of elephants. The name of the animal means man-eater, so-called because
the beast carried off men and women. Its size, also, and general
description, and the manner of hunting it all suggest the tiger as
fearful Indians might report it. To this day the Cambodians think the
whiskers of the tiger are a strong poison. The Malays call it a demon
in beast form and speak of its Village where the houses are raftered
with men’s bones and thatched with human hair.
In heraldry the martikhora is called the montegre, manticora, or
man-tyger, and is pictured with the body of a lion, the head of an old
man, the horns of an ox, and sometimes with dragon feet.
_The Scythian Lamb_
To match the barnacle goose which came from a nut, the ages of faith
had the Scythian lamb which grew in a gourd. Maundeville has the best
account, for did he not make a meal of one? The creature is found in “a
kingdom that men call Caldilhe,” one of “the Countries and Isles that
be beyond the Land of Cathay.” In this country “there groweth a manner
of Fruit, as though it were Gourds. And when they be ripe, men cut them
in two, and Men find within a little Beast in Flesh and Bone and Blood,
as though it were a little Lamb without Wool. And men eat both the
Fruit and the Beast. And that is a great Marvel.”
Friar Odoric makes a similar report. In other stories the Scythian
lamb is a true animal attached to the earth by its umbilical cord. The
Scythian lamb of botany is a woolly fern (_Cibotium barometz_) with a
prostrate stem turned upside down. It is also called vegetable lamb
and Tartarian lamb. In his _Travels into Muscovy and Persia_ (1636)
the ambassador from the Duke of Holstein describes it as a gourd like
unto a lamb in all its members and with the lamb’s sacrificial relation
to the wolf. It grows wild in the district of Samara, in Russia, and
its growing is a kind of destructive browsing. “It changes places in
growing, as far as the stalk will reach, and wherever it turns the
grass withers, which the Muscovites call feeding.” When all available
grass fails, it dies. The rind of the gourd is covered with a sort of
hair, which makes a good substitute for fur. The natives showed the
traveler certain skins, covered with a soft frizzled wool “not unlike
that of a lamb newly weaned”--vegetable lamb, they affirmed. Scaliger
declares that alone among animals the wolf feeds on this gourd and that
wolf traps are baited with it.
[Illustration: _In Caldilhe There Groweth a Manner of Fruit, and Men
Find Within a Little Beast as Though It Were a Lamb Without Wool_]
Erasmus Darwin has these lines upon the Scythian lamb in his _Botanic
Garden_:
/*
Rooted in earth each cloven hoof descends,
And round and round her flexible neck she bends;
Crops the gray coral moss and hoary thyme;
Or laps with rosy tongue the melting rime,
Eyes with mute tenderness her distant dam,
And seems to bleat, a Vegetable Lamb.
So until 1915 stood the fable--seemingly just a tale of the credulous
Middle Age, rationalized by later science and gently derided in still
later rhyme. Then the scholarship of Berthold Laufer, basing itself
mainly upon Chinese texts, gave it long backgrounds. The Scythian lamb
has been in turn a mollusk, a marine sheep, a bird, the cotton-plant, a
strange half-human creature and--this part is surmise--an allegory of
the early Christian Church, the Lamb of Revelation that “stood on the
mount Sion.”
Unto this day fabrics are made of the undyed fleece of the true
Scythian lamb. Byssus silk is the name it bears in commerce, and
Taranto is the seat of its manufacture. The silk is derived from the
fibrous foot by which mollusks of the species called the pinna, found
in the waters about southern Italy, attach themselves to rocks. The
original Scythian lamb was this mollusk and its umbilical cord was
the byssus, or foot, which anchored it. The genesis of the legend
seems to be a statement of Aristotle that these creatures have within
them a parasite, a small crab, nicknamed the “pinna-guard” which in
gathering its own food collects fishes also for its blind, stationary,
and helpless host. Without the pinna-guard, says Aristotle, the mollusk
soon dies; and he cites the latter to illustrate his observation that
in the sea “there are certain objects concerning which one would be
at loss to determine whether they be animal or vegetable.” After
Aristotle’s time, and in the first centuries of the Christian era,
byssus fabrics, which may have been a by-product of pearl fisheries in
the Persian Gulf, appeared in the Mediterranean countries.
Here, then, is an animal living within what passed for a vegetable
that was “rooted in earth,” and that produced a substance later known
as marine wool. But how did the Adriatic mollusk and its tenant crab
become a lamb-tenanted gourd, or a veritable sheep attached to the soil
by a fleshy stem, in the plains of Asiatic Scythia? And how did this
tiny partnership of the sea floor become in turn a phœnix-like creature
of the air and the grisly Yedua, man-monster of Talmudic legend?
The process illustrates the part that travel tale, the carrying of
confused reports from place to place, has in creating myth. Though the
fable grew up in the Roman Orient and reached China only through such
reports, the superior historical sense of the Chinese has made their
annals the key to its meaning.
The first Chinese record in point, not later than A. D. 220, speaks
of a fine cloth in the Roman Orient “said by some to originate from
the down of a water sheep.” This may be inference from the almost
contemporary phrase of Alciphron, the Greek sophist, who calls byssus
textiles “woolen stuffs out of the sea.” In the sixth century Procopius
recites that each of the five hereditary satraps of Armenia had from
the Roman emperor a golden-hued cloak made from “wool gathered out of
the sea.” In an account by the Arab Istakhri, written about A.D. 950,
it is said that an animal runs out of the sea and rubs itself against
the rocks, “whereupon it deposes a kind of wool of silken texture and
golden color.” Robes of this, worn by the Ommiad princes at Cordova,
were valued at a thousand gold pieces each.
By etymological error and a device of ancient trade, the mollusk, which
had already become a water sheep, got itself wings. Pinna, its name, is
also the classic Latin word for “feather,” an ambiguity which may have
confused the Arabs; and the filaments of the shellfish are rather like
the plumage of fowls. Byssus weaves were held at so high a price that
they were counterfeited in feather fabrics, and to promote their sale
the discovery of a wonderful bird was at length announced. The Arab,
Kazwini, calls it _abu baraquish_ and pictures it as like the stork;
but “every hour its plumage glitters in another color, red, yellow,
green and blue.” The fabric from its plumage is named “phœnix-feather
gold” in a Chinese work of the Mongol period. Skilled artisans, it is
related, weave a soft golden brocade from the neck feathers of the
phœnix, which in the spring drop to the foot of the mountains. These
were probably the feathered headskins of peacocks, which in China are
still made into jackets.
When the _Annals_ of the T’ang Dynasty (618-906) were compiled, the
water sheep had become a land animal of Syria, or Fu-lin as that
country was called. Here is the Chinese account: “There are lambs
engendered in the soil. The inhabitants wait till they are going to
sprout, then build enclosures around as a preventive measure for wild
beasts that might rush in from outside and devour them. The umbilical
cord of the lambs is attached to the soil, and when forcibly cut off
they will die. The people, donning cuirasses and mounted on horseback,
beat drums to frighten them. The lambs shriek from fear and thus their
umbilical cord is ruptured. Thereupon they set out in search of water
and pasture.”
It was part of the tradition of the marine sheep that it yielded its
fleece of its own accord, and this was carried over into the later
Chinese story that the Scythian or Syrian lamb must itself rupture the
umbilical cord, which others could not sever without killing it. The
appearance of men in armor to frighten it to this end is elucidated
by a passage from the thirteenth-century Arab traveler, Abul Abbas.
After the pinna comes ashore and lets its wool escape, he records, it
is pounced upon by large crabs. In the Chinese story, these crabs have
become men on horseback and their shells are the cuirasses worn by the
horsemen.
A debased version of the same story appears in the Mongol period when
a thirteenth-century Chinese traveler describes the “sheep planted on
hillocks” in the countries of the western sea. The umbilical cord of a
sheep is planted and watered. At the time of the first thunder peals it
begins to grow. When matured, the creature is frightened by the sound
of wooden instruments and, breaking off the cord that attaches it to
the ground, roams about in search of herbage. This was the tale Odoric
and Maundeville heard; that the lamb was inclosed in a gourd may have
been their own invention, or the report of some early attempt to relate
it to the cotton pod, which about a generation ago was conjectured to
be the basis of the fable.
“Creatures called Lords of the Field are regarded as beasts,” says
the Talmud. The same creature is also called the Man of the Mountain.
“It draws its food out of the soil by means of the umbilical cord; if
its navel be cut, it cannot live,” says Simeon a thirteenth-century
rabbi. In the detailed portrait by Rabbi Meir the timid vegetable lamb
undergoes a wolfish transformation: “There is an animal styled Yedua,
with the bones of which witchcraft is practiced. It issues from the
earth like the stem of a plant, just as a gourd. In all respects the
Yedua has human form in face, body, hands, and feet. No creature can
approach within the tether of the stem, for it seizes and kills all. As
far as the stem stretches, it devours the herbage all around. Whoever
is intent on capturing this animal must not approach it, but tear at
the cord until it is ruptured, whereupon the animal soon dies.”
Laufer thinks that the Jewish legend is early Christian allegory
misunderstood; that the Man of the Mountain is “the lamb that stood on
the mount Sion,” a symbol of the Church itself the followers of which
are attached to the earth by sensual pleasures; and that the mounted
horsemen of the Chinese version, who cause the lambs to break their
connection with the earth, may be the two hundred thousand horsemen of
Revelation that symbolize the Last Judgment.
_Gold-guarding Ants_
Bits of turquoise, chips of obsidian arrow heads, and fragments of
prehistoric jewelry are found in the little heaps of earth which ants
bring up from underground on the sites of vanished cities in New
Mexico. On the Pajarito plateau ant-gold is not unknown. Ant-gold is
the theme of one of the most circumstantial and puzzling stories told
by ancient travelers. Herodotus lays its scene somewhere near Cabul.
The Indians of that district send forth men in search of gold into a
sandy desert “where live great ants in size somewhat less than dogs,
but bigger than foxes.” A number of these were caught by hunters and
sent to the Persian king. The ants live underground and, “like the
Greek ants, which they very much resemble in shape, throw up sand-heaps
as they burrow.”
There is gold in the sand, but the ants are formidable enemies and
fleet in pursuit. So the Indians harness a female camel between two
males, and the female is one that has lately dropped a foal. The inroad
is timed so that the caravans arrive when the sun is hottest and the
ants are hiding from the heat. Herodotus continues:
“The Indians fill their bags with the sand and ride away at full speed;
the ants, however, scenting them, as the Persians say, rush forth in
pursuit. Now these animals are so swift, they declare, that there
is nothing in the world like them; if it were not, therefore, that
the Indians get a start while the ants are mustering, not a single
gold-gatherer could escape. During the flight the male camels grow
tired and begin to drag; but the females recollect the young which they
have left behind, and never flag. Thus, say the Persians, the Indians
get most of their gold.”
In substance the story is repeated in the letter which Prester John
sent to the Pope in the twelfth century. The “emmet valley” also
appears in the _Arabian Nights_. Megasthenes said that the plain
tenanted by the monster ants is three thousand stadiæ in circumference
and lies eastward in the mountains in the kingdom of the Dardæ. In
winter the ants dig holes and pile the auriferous earth in heaps at the
pit mouths. Pliny declares the ants are of the color of cats and the
size of Egyptian wolves; that they work in winter and are despoiled
in summer. “The horns of the Indian ant,” he remarks, “fixed up in
the temple of Hercules at Erythræ were objects of great wonderment.”
Nearchus, admiral of Alexander, reports having seen skins of these
ants as large as leopard skins. Ctesias speaks in his _Persica_ of a
horse-pismire which was fed by the magi and became of such monstrous
size that it took two pounds of meat a day to victual it. As late as
the sixteenth century there is a story by Busbequius that the Shah of
Persia sent one of the Indian ants as a present to Sultan Soliman at
Constantinople. Maundeville transfers the whole scene to Taprobane
(Ceylon) and varies the incidents: Men do not enter ant-land but send
thither mares to which empty vessels are suspended. “It is Pismire
nature that they let nothing be empty among them, but anon they fill
it, and so they fill those Vessels with Gold.” When the foals neigh in
the distance their dams return to them with a golden burden.
What were these ants, and whence the fable?
It will be noted that the griffins were cast in a similar rôle in
another Indian gold quest. It may be accepted that good-sized animals,
or the skins of animals, were seen in menageries, museums, and temples,
and identified with the ant custodians of the Scythian metal. It
has been suggested that these were some other burrowing animal--the
anteater, or the marmot; but neither is fleet of foot. M. de Weltheim
thought the Herodotoan ant might be the corsac, a small Asiatic fox.
Philology has a word to offer. The gold collected on the plains of
Little Tibet is popularly known as _pippilika_, or “ant gold,” from
the belief that ants bring it up, or bare the veins which carry it.
McCrindle asserts that the gold-diggers were neither ants nor other
animals, but “Tibetan miners, who, like their descendants of the
present day, preferred working their mines in winter when the frozen
ground stands well and is not likely to trouble them by falling
in.” Thus the raid and retreat would be accomplished with the same
expedition with which any tribe would make a sudden foray on another
tribe equipped with equal ordnance and cavalry. Metaphor still speaks
of the miner as a mole or a human ant.
_The Questing Beast_
In _Le Morte d’Arthur_, Malory describes a singular animal with an
economy of phrase that whets curiosity. Arthur had had a heavy dream
of griffins and serpents that devoured his land, and to put it out of
his mind he went a-hunting. And he followed a white hart until his
horse fell dead under him and his quarry was embushed. “He set him down
by a fountain, and there he fell in great thoughts. And as he sat him
so, him thought he heard a noise of hounds, to the sum of thirty. And
with that the king saw coming toward him the strangest beast that ever
he saw or heard of; so the beast went to the well and drank, and the
noise was in the beast’s belly like unto the questyng of thirty couple
hounds; but all the while the beast drank there was no noise in the
beast’s belly; and therewith the beast departed with a great noise,
whereof the king had great marvel.”
Followed a knight hight Pellinore, and sought to borrow the king’s
horse to pursue this animal, and the king would have taken over his
quest for a twelvemonth, but he would not. After Pellinore’s death it
is Palomides that rides across the pages of romance, well in the rear
of the questing beast.
_The Beasts of Revelation_
The beasts of Revelation were but symbols; yet they moved like
realities through the imagery of the Church, and, undergoing a sea
change, appeared alive in the distant Atlantic Islands of Irish epic.
St. John beheld the shapes of locusts like unto horses prepared for
battle; “and their faces were as the faces of men, and they had hair as
the hair of women, and they had tails like unto scorpions.” He saw also
a beast coming up out of the earth; “and he had two horns like a lamb,
and he spake as a dragon.” Above all, John saw the beast that came up
out of the sea, a leopard with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a
lion, and with the dragon’s authority; and the beast had seven heads
and ten horns, “and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.” The Whore of
Babylon rode this beast--composite of seven mountains and ten kings,
the text explains--to world power and to downfall; and rode on into
literature, and an unending controversy.
_American Contributions_
Animal elders are America’s main contribution to the collection
of fabulous beasts. The Indian believed that every species had a
giant ancestor like itself in form, but with supernatural powers to
protect it. Hunters who killed more animals than they needed for food
felt the vengeance of the elder beasts. The latter gave a tribe its
medicine, and themselves became totems. They are sometimes represented
as in human form and living in stately lodges. The Pacific coast of
South America has also stories of a house-haunting ram, a repulsive
tree-dweller, a water-monster resembling a distended cowskin, and a
creature with the head of a heifer and the body of a sheep.
According to members of the Forest Service, American lumberjacks have
their own mythology. Product of camp-fire chaff and a whimsical humor,
the creatures that people it are noted here only because, both in name
and in nature, they illustrate the traditional instinct for composites
that elsewhere has wrought to more serious ends. They include the
tote-road shagamaw, with the head of a lion, the forepaws of a bear
and the hind legs of a moose; the splinter cat, which crushes hollow
trees in search of raccoons; the hugag, with buffalo body and jointless
legs, which sleeps leaning against a tree; the sausage-like wapaloosie,
which lives on fungi; the billdad, which kills fish with its tail; the
gumberoo, which explodes when it gets too near a fire; the snoligoster,
a spiked and legless crocodile, and the lachrymose squonk. A common
human figure in these tales is the grotesque giant, Paul Bunyan.
_The Prodigies of Heraldry_
In the later totemism, which is called heraldry, the following fabulous
creatures with human, animal, or bird attributes, or an admixture of
all of these, were represented on crests and coats of arms: allerion,
chimera, cockatrice, dragon, griffin, harpy, hydra, lyon-dragon,
lyon-poisson, mermaid, montygre, martlet, opinicus, pegasus, sphinx,
sagittary, satyr, tarask, tityrus, unicorn, wyvern, winged lyon, winged
bull.
Several of these are noted elsewhere in this study, and a word will
serve for the rest. The allerion is an eagle without beak or claws. The
chimera, says Bossewell, is “a beast or monstre having thre heades,
one like a Lyon, an other like a Goate, the third like a Dragon.” The
hydra is a seven- or nine-headed water serpent. The lyon-dragon is
a composite of a lion and a dragon, and the lyon-poisson of a lion
and a fish. The martlet is a swallow without feet. The opinicus is a
composite of camel, dragon, and lion. The pegasus is a winged horse.
The sphinx is a figure with a woman’s head and breasts, a lion’s body,
and usually eagle’s wings. The sagittary is the centaur of antiquity
with the head, arms, and body of a man from the waist up, united to
the body and legs of a horse. The heraldic satyr has a human face, a
leonine body, and the horns and tail of an antelope. The tarask is a
dragon-basilisk on the shield of Tarascon. “The tityrus is ingendred
between a sheep and a buck-goat,” says Guillim. The wyvern is a
serpentine dragon with a long tail and only two legs. The winged lyon
is an achievement of Venice, the winged bull a memory of Assyria.
Other heraldic creatures, not so well authenticated, are mentioned
by Randle Holme in his _Academy of Armory_. These include the
ass-bittern, the cat-fish, the devil-fish, the dragon-tyger, the
dragon-wolf, the falcon-fish with a hound’s ear, the friar-fish, the
lamya, compounded of a woman, a dragon, a lion, a goat, a dog, and a
horse; the lyon-wyvern, the minocane or homocane, half child and half
spaniel dog; the ram-eagle, the winged satyr-fish, and the wonderful
pig of the ocean.
The menagerie of blazonry has been enlarged by representing nearly
all of the animals at times with fish-tails, when they are said to be
marined. The zodiacal sign of the capricorn, shown as half goat and
half fish, is a familiar example. Sometimes the sea-horse is drawn as
an enlarged hippocampus, sometimes with the forequarters of a horse and
a fish tail. Griffins and unicorns are marined in German heraldry.