For the most part the winged creatures of fable are exiles from
mythologies broken down or forgotten. They are imperfect and confused
embodiments of the phenomena of the heavens. In them one sees, what the
men who repeated stories about them did not see, the diurnal journeys
of the sun into the west, the shadowing storm-cloud, the lightning
flash, the fury of evil winds, the hail, and the snow. But the poetry
of the air, of which these creatures are the flying shreds, is weighted
with terrestrial prose. Extinct birds of colossal size, prehistoric
winged reptiles, and the bones of fossil mammals are reflected in
the shapes of cloudland. Few of the creatures that hover there can
be called fowls at all; their wings carry bodies that belong upon
the earth. Thus Pliny, in one of the most flagrant of his carelessly
credulous passages, makes the casual statement that Ethiopia produces
“horses with wings, and armed with horns, which are called pegasi.”
Because of its human affinities the dragon must be considered by itself.
_The Phœnix_
Of the phœnix, a true fowl of legend and its most renowned, Maundeville
has a vivacious picture. This bird, he says, “is not much more big than
an Eagle, but he hath a Crest of Feathers upon his Head more great than
the Peacock hath; and his Neck is yellow after the Colour of an Oriel
that is a fine shining Stone; and his Beak is coloured blue as Azure;
and his wings be of purple Colour, and the Tail is yellow and red, cast
in streaks across his Tail. And he is a full fair Bird to look upon,
against the Sun, for he shineth full gloriously and nobly.”
Other men were not so sure about the phœnix. Herodotus said he had
never seen it and Pliny declared he was “not quite certain that its
existence is not all a fable.” Herodotus, however, had seen its
picture, and the Maundeville account is copied from him.
The bird was Arabian, its legend Egyptian. It was said that there
was only one phœnix in the world, and that it appeared at very long
intervals. The Roman Senator, Manlius, wrote that no person had seen
it eat since its food was air, that in Arabia it was sacred to the
sun, and that its lifetime was five hundred and forty years. When
stricken with age it built a nest of cassia and sprigs of frankincense
and lay down to die; from its bones and marrow issued a worm which in
time changed into a small bird. The first duty of the new bird was to
perform the obsequies of its predecessor, and carry the nest containing
its myrrh-swathed remains to the City of the Sun in Egypt, placing it
upon the altar of that divinity.
According to the more familiar account, when the phœnix is full of
years it flies to Heliopolis, sings its own dirge there, flaps its
wings to fan the funeral pyre, and presently is utterly consumed; the
next day emerges the new bird, fully feathered; and on the third day,
its wings well grown, it salutes the priest and returns to the East.
Still another account has it that in its old age the bird casts itself
on the ground, receiving a mortal wound, and the new bird issues from
the ichor.
In the censorship of the Emperor Claudius what purported to be a phœnix
was brought to Rome and exhibited in the Comitium, but it was adjudged
an imposture. Plutarch ventures the daring statement that “the brain of
the phœnix is a pleasant bit, but that it causeth the headache.” He may
have meant the golden pheasant, or even wine from cocoanuts, but it is
said that Heliogabalus made a fruitless attempt to secure this unique
tidbit for his table.
Popular art reflects the phœnix legend, metaphor still more. It is
the favorite symbol of self-regeneration. The burned city, the ruined
country or cause, “rises like the phœnix from its own ashes.” Jesus,
whose death coincided with one of the reported flights of the fowl to
Egypt, was called the Phœnix by monastic writers, and St. Clement of
Alexandria cites the fowl as proof that the dead will rise again. Its
effigy was taken over from the pagan urn by the Christian sarcophagus.
Browne, however, thought that the notion of a solitary phœnix was
repugnant to Scripture, “because it infringeth the benediction of
God concerning multiplication.” At one time its image hung before
chemists’ shops because of its association with alchemy. Sometimes the
Arabs confused it with the salamander and pictured the latter as a bird.
The relation of the phœnix to astronomical reckoning gives a clue to
the legend. It reappeared, according to some authors, at intervals of
250, 500, 654, 1,000, 1,461 or even of 7,006 years, but the accepted
Phœnix Period or Cycle was 540 years, and Egypt reports having seen the
fowl five times, the first in the reign of Sesostris, and the last time
in A.D. 334. This relates the appearances of the phœnix to the Great
Year, which Hardouin says is 532 years.
It was an ancient belief that the same aspect of heaven and order
of the stars that had prevailed when the world began recurred
every 532 years, and that at one of these periods, with all the
planets in conjunction or all the stars returned to the same point
in the ecliptic, the world would be destroyed; or else that it
would perish and revive again to go through the same sequence of
celestial phenomena. The phœnix, self-regenerating, sun-dedicated,
westward-winging, arrayed in the gold and purple of dawn and twilight,
seems to be an obscure form of the sun myth; and this inference is
strengthened by the fact that at Heliopolis a bird called the bennu
was a symbol of the Egyptians for the rising sun. It was a heron which
“created itself” and rose in a “fragrant flame” over a sacred tree.
Bennu in Egyptian and phœnix in Greek are the same word, and signify
the palm tree.
_The Fung-wang_
There was a Chinese phœnix called the fung-wang which at long intervals
and only in the reigns of upright monarchs emerged from the deserts.
Six feet high, with plumage reflecting the five colors that the Chinese
recognized--red, white, yellow, azure, and black--it was something
like an immense bird of paradise. It was called the chief of the three
hundred and sixty kinds of birds, and classed with the dragon and the
unicorn as a spiritual creature. On its poll appeared the Chinese
character for uprightness, on its back that for humanity, while its
wings enfolded the character for integrity. Its low notes were bell
tones, and its high like those of a drum. When you play the flute,
in nine cases out of ten the fung-wang comes to hear, says the _Shu
King_. It frequented only groves and gardens and would not peck living
grass. The _Bamboo Books_ record its visits as far back as 2647 B.C.
The emperor in whose reign it first showed itself recast his cabinet so
that officers bore the names of birds, and the Minister of the Calendar
was called the Phœnix. “Another example of an interesting and beautiful
species of bird which has become extinct within historic times,” rashly
concludes Gould.
_Flying Serpents of Araby_
Another winged creature besides the phœnix sought to go out of Arabia
into Egypt, but its passage was opposed. This was the flying serpent.
Herodotus says he went to “a certain place in Arabia” to ask about
it. He saw the backbones and ribs of these reptiles in inconceivable
number, piled in a gorge, and learned why they got no further. They
are met in this place by “the birds called ibises, who forbid their
entrance and destroy them all.” Hence the Egyptians hold the ibis in
reverence.
Josephus uses the incident as basis of a story about Moses that is not
in the Pentateuch. The Ethiopians had successfully invaded the land of
Egypt, and an oracle advised the defenders to choose for their general
Moses the Hebrew. His choice pleased the scribes of both nations--the
Egyptian because they apprehended that Moses would be slain, and the
Jewish because they expected that he would be the instrument of their
deliverance. The line of march lay through the country of winged
serpents, powerful and mischievous creatures that came out of the
ground unseen or fell upon men from the air. But Moses “made baskets
like unto arks of sedges, and filled them with ibes, and carried them
along with him, which animals are the greatest enemies to serpents
imaginable, for these fly from them when they come near them, and as
they fly they are caught and devoured.” So Moses passed on unscathed,
and into the heart of an Ethiopian princess through whose aid her
father’s forces were routed.
After centuries of discussion the sacred ibis of the Egyptians was
finally identified by the traveler Bruce with the bird the Abyssinians
call Father John; but the winged serpents have not been satisfactorily
explained. It has been suggested that what Herodotus saw in the Arabian
gorge was the remains of a locust invasion--a difficult surmise,
although Pliny reports that the legs and wings of grasshoppers three
feet long were dried in the sun and used by the Indians for saws.
_The Roc_
The case for the roc--a creature unknown to either Greek or Roman
legend--rests mainly upon three beguiling names of travel tale. These
are Aladdin and Sindbad of the _Arabian Nights_, and Marco Polo of the
_Diversities_. By the magic of his lamp Aladdin, the wayward gamin of a
Chinese city, had won a princess and a palace; and he had poisoned the
African magician who sought to use him as a tool and then to take the
lamp from him. Bent on vengeance, the magician’s brother stabbed a holy
woman with the very un-Chinese name of Fatima, disguised himself in her
habiliments and won entrance into the palace of Aladdin and into the
confidence of his princess. The latter asked the false Fatima what she
thought of her residence, and this was the reply.
“My opinion is that if a roc’s egg were hung up in the middle of the
dome, this hall would have no parallel in the four quarters of the
world, and your palace would be the wonder of the universe.”
“My good mother,” said the princess, “what is a roc, and where may one
get an egg?”
“Princess,” replied the pretended Fatima, “it is a bird of prodigious
size, which inhabits the summit of Mount Caucasus; the architect who
built your palace can get you one.”
The princess consulted Aladdin, and, retiring to his apartment, he
rubbed the lamp; when a genie appeared, he bade him procure the roc’s
egg. Whereupon the hall shook as if about to fall, and the genie
exclaimed in a loud and terrible voice, “Is it not enough that I and
the other slaves of the lamp have done everything for you, but you, by
an unheard-of ingratitude, must command me to bring my master and hang
him up in the midst of this dome? The attempt deserves that you, the
princess, and the palace should be immediately reduced to ashes; but
you are spared because this request does not come from yourself.” Then
he told of the presence of a conspirator in the household. Aladdin’s
killing of the latter is the final episode of the tale, the fortunate
adventurer and his spouse soon mounting the throne of China.
Sindbad encountered the parent bird on his second voyage, after he
had been abandoned on an island; and first he saw its egg. He mistook
the egg for a white dome of prodigious height and extent and found it
fifty paces around and too smooth to climb to the top. All of a sudden
the sky became dark as by a thick cloud and a huge bird came flying
toward him. It alighted on the egg, and Sindbad, creeping close to the
shell, tied himself by his turban to one of its legs, which was as big
as the trunk of a tree. The next morning he hoped the roc would carry
him away. Nor was his hope disappointed, and after an immense journey
in the air--quite from Madagascar to India--the bird alighted in the
Valley of Diamonds. There Sindbad disengaged himself, only to fall into
other adventures.
Marco Polo was the first veracious traveler to bring to the west a
report of the roc, and he was careful to state that he did not see
the bird; he only heard of it. The roc, he said, comes to Madagascar
from the south. It resembles the eagle, but is so much larger that
it can carry away an elephant. “Persons who have seen the bird,” he
continues, “assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen
paces [forty feet] from point to point, and that the feathers are eight
paces [twenty feet] long and thick in proportion.” Messer Marco guessed
that these creatures might be griffins, half birds and half lions, and
particularly questioned those who claimed to have seen them. No, was
the reply, they were fowls altogether. Kublai Khan sent messengers to
Madagascar to confirm the story. They brought back, as Marco heard,
“a feather of the roc positively affirmed to have measured ninety
spans, and the quill part to have been two palms in circumference.” The
delighted khan sent valuable gifts.
Two centuries afterward the roc reappears in the narrative of Father
Joano dos Santos, a Portuguese Dominican friar traveling in eastern
Ethiopia. He tells of a fellow Portuguese faring inland in Madagascar
to purchase ivory, and leading a large monkey on a chain. This he
fastened to the trunk of a tree and lay down to rest; a monstrous bird
snatched up both the monkey and the tree and flew away. The Shoshones
have a story of an owl which carries men away to its island larder.
Mewan legend speaks of the cannibal bird Yel-lo-kin with wings like
pine trees which snatched children by the top of the head and bore them
through the hole in the middle of the sky to its nest on the other side.
While the roc belongs to nature myth, matter-of-fact has a word to
say. The extinct dodo is recalled, which, however, could not fly. The
feather brought to Kublai, and the monstrous stump of a roc’s quill
which it is said was brought to Spain by a merchant from the China
seas, may have been taken from a species of palm growing in Madagascar
which has quill-like fronds. Southern Madagascar is frequented by very
large birds--the albatross with a wing-spread of fifteen feet, and the
condor, which may measure more than ten from tip to tip.
Everybody in the east believed that the roc, or more correctly the
rukh, really existed. When the utmost depths of Arabic credulity
are sounded, one reaches the probable basis of a legend into the
superstructure of which exaggerated details of natural history have
been built. One Arab writer says the length of the roc’s wings is ten
thousand fathoms, or nearly twelve miles, and these dimensions would
make a fair-sized storm cloud. A Chinese tale describes the bird as
a fowl which in its flight obscures the sun, and of whose quills
“water-tuns” are made. One of the riders of the roc in another tale
from the _Thousand and One Nights_ is admonished to stop his ears from
the wind, “lest thou be dazed by the noise of the revolving sphere and
the roaring of the seas.” It is shrewdly surmised that the roc is the
storm cloud and the egg it covers is the sun--true master of the slaves
of Aladdin’s lamp.
_The Rhinoceros of the Air_
Another monstrous fowl, the rhinoceros of the air, was reported in
mediæval travel and still commands the faith of the Samoyeds. Purchas
abstracts the description given by Andrea Corsali in his Abyssinian
travels. The bird is much bigger than an eagle and has a bow-fashioned
bill or beak four feet long, with a horn between the eyes streaked
with black. “It is a cruel fowle and attends on battels and campes.”
The Siberian myth gives this winged rhinoceros gigantic dimensions.
The tusks and bones of the great pachyderms, found in the tundras, are
thought by native hunters to be the beaks and talons of monster birds.
The nearest approach of fact to the Abyssinian prodigy is perhaps the
horned screamer, or unicorn bird, whose cries “resembling the bray of a
jackass, but shriller,” unpleasantly disturbed for the naturalist Bates
the solitude of the Brazilian forest.
_The Harpies_
Those forbidding sister groups, the gorgons, the sirens, and the
harpies, are perhaps different aspects of the storm clouds and the
storm wind--the baleful lightning, the shrieking sea gales, the violent
gusts that snatch (_harpazo_) away soul and body. Of the three, the
gorgons and sirens will be left within the domain of nature myths.
The harpies may be migrants from the religions of Egypt, in which
Nekhbet, the vulture-goddess, is sometimes represented as a woman with
a vulture’s head, and the soul is depicted as a human-headed bird
fluttering from the mouths of the dying. Yet they have that savor
of the soil, that touch of the grotesque, that suggestion of coarse
reality that belong rather to travel tale. Though with woman faces,
their attributes are animal.
Hesiod describes them as maidens, winged and golden-haired, who
harassed the blind King Phineus at his banquets. The myth is retold
in grosser form in the story of the Argonauts, whence these sisters,
driven away by the comrades of Jason, make their flight to the Æneid
and find roost in an isle where the Trojans cast anchor. The picture
Virgil drew of them superseded the more flattering accounts of poets
before him, and the immense vogue of this poet in later ages led
the romancers of the Charlemagne cycle to adopt his report without
abatement.
The harpies of Virgil are, as the poet Morris pictures them, “dreadful
snatchers,” like women down to the breast, with scanty, coarse black
hair, dim eyes ringed with red, bestial mouths, gnarled necks, and
birds’ claws. Their faces are pale with hunger. When the Trojans slay
the island cattle and prepare meat for a feast, the birds swoop down
with a horrible clamor, seize part of the meat, and defile the rest.
Nimbly they dodge the Trojan swords, and their feathers are like
steel mail. From a cliff they reproach the visitors for slaying their
cattle and warring upon them, and as Æneas departs they shriek direful
predictions after him.
In the legends of Charlemagne the bird-sisters reappear when Astolpho,
cousin of Orlando, reaches Abyssinia riding the hippogrif. Here is
another blind king, like Phineus, “prey to a flock of obscene birds
called harpies, which attacked him whenever he sat at meat, and with
their claws snatched, tore, and scattered everything, overturning the
vessels, devouring the food, and infecting what they left with their
filthy touch.” They are put to flight with one blast of Astolpho’s horn
and driven by him and his hippogrif into a cavern, the entrance of
which he blocked up so that they are seen no more.
That is, so far as the romancer of that time knew. They reappeared in
the New World on the Isthmus of Darien, where Balboa was pursuing,
amid the fens of a haunted land, the adventure of the mines of Dobayba
and the elusive golden temple. The Indians told him there had been
a horrible tempest, and when they ventured forth again they found
that two monstrous creatures had come in with the storm. They were
apparently a mother and her daughter. They had woman faces and eagle
claws and wings; the branches of the trees where they perched broke
with their weight. Swooping down, they would seize a man and carry him
away to the hilltops to devour him. At last the natives killed the
older bird by a stratagem, and, suspending her body from their spears,
bore it from town to town to appease the alarm of their people. The
younger harpy disappeared.
Natural history has given the name of harpy to a buzzard, an eagle,
a fly, and two species of bats. Neither of the last named, however,
is the vampire bat of which Bates has left a portentous portrait.
Its spread of wing is nearly two and a half feet. “Nothing in animal
physiognomy can be more hideous than the countenance of this creature
when viewed from the front; the large, leathery ears standing out from
the sides and top of the head, the erect, spear-shaped appendage on the
top of the nose, the grin and the glistening black eye, all combining
to make up a figure that reminds one of some mocking imp of fable.” It
seems to be fact that villages in Central America have been abandoned
because of the nocturnal attacks of this animal. Dampier professes to
have seen on an island near Sebo bats “with bodies as big as ducks and
with a wing spread of eight feet.” The custom of nailing up dead bats
as witch-or-devil forms is common. “An animal,” says Buffon, “which,
like the bat, is half quadruped and half bird, and which, in fact, is
neither the one nor the other, is a kind of monster.” He suggests that
“the wings, the teeth, the claws, the voracity; the nastiness, and all
the destructive qualities and noxious faculties of the harpies bear no
small resemblance to those of the Ternat bat.”
_The Stymphalian Birds_
The Stymphalian birds, according to Greek legend, frequented a lake
in the northeast of Arcadia, which lay on the main route from Argolis
and Corinth westward. To disperse or destroy them was the sixth labor
of Hercules. These birds were anthropophagous, used their feathers as
arrows, and were equipped with brazen claws, wings, and feet. Diodorus
has a milder account in which they figure merely as voracious poachers
of the fruits of the neighborhood. With a brazen pan the hero made such
an uproar that they flew away, appearing again, in the story of the
Argonauts, as tenants of the island of Aretias.
Pausanias visited the township of Stymphalus in his tour of Greece.
He describes a temple to Artemis Stymphalia standing there, and the
figures of the birds Stymphalides under its roof; behind the temple
were marble statues of young women with the legs of fowls. The birds,
he says, are as large as cranes, but resemble the ibis save that they
have stronger beaks and less curved; so, indeed, they are represented
on coins of Stymphalus. Herodotus rationalizes the legend by intimating
that their feathery arrows were, in truth, hail or snow.
_The Cockatrice_
“The weaned child,” said Isaiah, prophesying the good time coming,
“shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.” The cockatrice was a
monster with the head and plumage of a cock and a barbed serpent’s
tail, and so it is represented in heraldry. The word is an old French
corruption of the Latin for crocodile, but popular etymology attributed
the name to the fact that the prodigy was hatched from an aged cock’s
egg by a serpent. Because of the crest crowning its head it is also
called a basilisk, from the Greek _basilikos_, or “little king.”
Its habitat was Africa. It was horrid to look upon and its glance
and breath were alike fatal, while its voice struck terror to other
serpents. Its own image, reflected in a mirror, would kill it. The
basilisk of Cyrene, Pliny said, was not more than twelve fingers in
length, but it destroyed all shrubs save the rue, and consumed grasses
and shattered stones merely by breathing upon them. “He infecteth the
water that he cometh neare,” according to Leigh. It was believed that
if a horseman killed a basilisk with a spear-thrust, its poison would
ascend the weapon and destroy not only the rider, but his mount. Even
its dead body hung in a temple kept swallows from building and spiders
from spinning there. However, if a man saw the basilisk first, he went
scatheless and the creature itself might die, while women could seize
it without suffering harm. The effluvium of the weasel and the crow
of the cock were alike fatal to it. Travelers passing near its haunts
sometimes took a cock along.
While its deadly nature has persisted, the shape of the cockatrice has
changed. To the ancients it was merely a baleful lizard. Its confusion
in the Middle Ages with the cock gave it feathers and a beak. As soon
as hatched by a toad or snake from a cock’s egg laid in a stable it
hid itself in crevice, cistern, or rafter, for to be seen was to die.
Later the heralds and painters represented it with the head of a hawk,
sometimes even with the head of a man. Its ashes would turn base metals
into gold. People thought that cock’s eggs were used in the devil’s
chrism whereby his anointed hags could assume beast form or ride the
clouds. In Browne’s time there was traffic in counterfeited cockatrices
made by joining the dead bodies of pheasants and serpents, or out of
the skins of thornbacks. The basilisk of natural history, which may
have been the original of the fable, is a harmless creature, although
of frightful aspect.