"_Angels and ministers of grace defend us._"--"Hamlet."
The human mind has a passionate longing for knowledge even of things past
comprehension. Where it cannot know, it will imagine; what the mind
conceives it will attempt to define. Are facts wanting, poetry steps in,
and myth and song supply the void; cave and forest, mountain and valley,
lake and river, are theatres peopled by fancy, and
"as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."
Traditions of unreal beings inhabit the air, and will not vanish be they
ever so sternly commanded; from the misty records of antiquity and the
relics of past greatness as seen sculptured in stupendous ruins on the
banks of the Nile and the plains of Assyria, strange shapes look with
their mute stony eyes upon a world that knows them but imperfectly, and
vainly attempts to unriddle the unfathomable mystery of their being.
Western nations, with their growing civilisations, conjured up monsters of
benign or baneful influence, or engrafted and expanded the older ideas in
a manner suited to their genius and national characteristics.
The creatures of the imagination, "Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire,"
shapes lovely and shapes terrible begot of unreason in the credulous minds
of the imaginative, the timid and the superstitious,--or dreamy poetic
fancies of fairies and elves of whom poets sing so sweetly:
"Shapes from the invisible world unearthly singing
From out the middle air, from flowery nests
And from the pillowy silkiness that rests
Full in the speculation of the stars,--"
KEATS.
"or fairy elves,
Whose midnight revels, by the forest side
Or fountain, some belated peasant sees,
Or dreams he sees,--"
MILTON, _Paradise Lost_, Book i.
the nameless dreads and horrors of the unknown powers of darkness, the
pestiferous inhabitants of wastes and desert places where loneliness
reigns supreme, and imaginary terrors assault the traveller on every hand,
assuming forms more various and more to be dreaded than aught of mortal
birth,--such vague and indefinable ideas, "legends fed by time and
chance," like rumours in the air, in the course of time assume tangible
shape, receiving definite expression by the poet and artist until they
become fixed in the popular mind as stern realities influencing the
thoughts and habits of millions of people through successive generations.
We see them in the rude fetish of the South Sea Islander, the myriad gods
and monsters of heathen mythology, as well as in the superstitions of
mediæval Europe, of which last the devil with horned brow, cloven hoofs
and forked tail is the most "unreal mockery" of them all. The days of
Diabolism and the old witch creed are, however, passed away; but under the
dominance of these ideas during centuries, in Protestant and Catholic
lands alike, hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of all ages and
both sexes were accused of the most absurd and impossible crimes, and
subjected to almost inconceivable torture and death.
The dying Christian about to pass through the valley of the shadow of
death, in the words of the poet, expresses his faith in the nearness of
the spirit world:
"I see a form ye cannot see
I hear a voice ye cannot hear."
To the spiritually minded other forms, with more of the beautiful and less
of the hideous and frightful, revealed themselves; the solitary recluse,
his body and mind reduced to an unnatural condition by fasting and
penance, in mental hallucination beheld his celestial visitants with awe
and adoration, and saw in visions angels and archangels, cherubim and
seraphim towering in a blaze of glory to illimitable height and extremest
space. The rapt seraph and the whole angelic host of heaven to his
ecstatic gaze was a revelation and a reality as tangible as were the
powers of darkness seen and felt by more sordid natures, incapable of the
higher conceptions, and whose minds were accessible chiefly through their
terrors.
To classic fable we are indebted for very many of the fictitious animals
which heralds have introduced into coats armorial. In all ages man has
sought to explain by myths certain phenomena of nature which he has been
unable to account for in a more rational manner. _Earthquakes_ were the
awakening of the earth tortoise which carried the earth on its back; _the
tides_ were the pulses of the ocean; _lightning_ was the breath of demons,
the thunderbolt of Jupiter, the hammer of Thor; _volcanoes_ were the
forges of the infernal deities. In the old Norse legends we read of
_waterspouts_ being looked upon as sea serpents, and wonderful stories are
related of their power and influence. The Chinese imagine _eclipses_ to be
caused by great dragons which seek to devour the sun. Innumerable beliefs
cluster round the _sun_, _moon_, and _stars_. We may trace from our own
language the extent of power which these peculiar beliefs have had over
the human mind. We still speak of mad people as lunatics, gloomy people as
saturnine, sprightly people we term mercurial; we say, "Ill-starr'd
event," &c. &c. The ships of the early navigators, with masts and sails
and other requisites for directing their motion or influencing their
speed, would be objects of astonishment to the inhabitants of the
countries they visited, causing them to be received with the utmost
respect and veneration. The ship was taken for a living animal, and hence
originated, some say, the fables of winged dragons, griffons, flying
citadels, and men transformed into birds and fishes. The winged Pegasus
was nothing but a ship with sails and hence was said to be the offspring
of Neptune.
"In reality," says Southey, in his preface to the "Morte d'Arthur," vol.
ii. 1817, "mythological and romantic tales are current among all savages
of whom we have any full account; for man has his intellectual as well as
his bodily appetite, and these things are the food of his imagination and
faith. They are found wherever there is language and discourse of reason;
in other words, wherever there is man. And in similar states of society
the fictions of different people will bear a corresponding resemblance,
notwithstanding the differences of time and scene." And Sir Walter Scott,
in his "Essay on Romance and Chivalry," following up the same idea, adds,
"that the usual appearances and productions of nature offer to the fancy,
in every part of the world, the same means of diversifying fictitious
narrative by the introduction of prodigies. If in any romance we encounter
the description of an elephant, we may reasonably conclude that a
phenomenon unknown in Europe must have been borrowed from the East; but
whoever has seen a serpent and a bird may easily aggravate the terrors of
the former by conferring on a fictitious monster the wings of the latter;
and whoever has seen or heard of a wolf, or lion and an eagle, may, by a
similar exercise of invention, imagine a griffon or a hippogriff."
Beyond the common experiences of every-day life the popular mind
everywhere cares very little about simple commonplace practical truths.
Human nature seems to crave mystery, to be fond of riddles and the
marvellous, and doubtless it was ever so and provided for in all the old
faiths of the world.
"The multitude of dragons, diverse as they are, reflecting the fears and
fancies of the most different races, it is more than probable is a relic
of the early serpent-worship which, according to Mr. Fergusson, is of such
remote antiquity that the religion of the Jews was modern in comparison,
the curse laid on the serpent being, in fact, levelled at the ancient
superstition which it was intended to supersede. Notwithstanding the
various forms under which we find the old dragon he ever retains something
of the serpent about him, if no more than the scales. In the mediæval
devil, too, the tail reveals his descent." (Louis F. Day.)
The fictitious beings used as symbols in heraldry may be divided into two
classes: (1) Celestial beings mentioned in Holy Writ, and those creatures
of the imagination which, from the earliest ages, have held possession of
men's minds, profound symbols unlike anything in the heavens or in the
earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. They may be abstract ideas
embodied in tangible shape, such as the terrible creature, the type of
some divine quality, that stands calm, immovable, and imperishable within
the walls of our National Museum; such forms as the dragon, of the purely
imaginative class, and those creatures compounded of parts of different
real animals, yet unlike any one of them, each possessing special symbolic
attributes, according to the traditional ideas held concerning them. (2)
Animals purely heraldic, such as the heraldic tiger, panther incensed,
heraldic antelope, &c., owe their origin and significance to other ideas,
and must be accounted for on other grounds, namely, the mistaken ideas
resulting from imperfect knowledge of these objects in natural history by
early writers and herald painters, to whom they were no doubt real animals
with natural qualities, and, as such, according to their knowledge, they
depicted them; and although more light has been thrown upon the study of
natural history since their time, and many of their conceptions have been
proved to be erroneous, the well-known heraldic shapes of many of these
_lusus naturæ_ are still retained in modern armory. These animals were
such as they could have little chance of seeing, and they probably
accepted their descriptions from "travellers' tales," always full of the
marvellous--and the misleading histories of still earlier writers. Pliny
and many of the writers of his day describe certain animals in a way that
appears the absurdest fable; even the lion described by him is in some
points most unnatural. Xenophon, for instance, describing a boar hunt,
gravely tells us: "So hot are the boar's tusks when he is just dead that
if a person lays hairs upon them the hairs will shrivel up; and when the
boar is alive they--that is, the tusks--are actually red hot when he is
irritated, for otherwise he would not singe the tips of the dogs' hair
when he misses a blow at their bodies." The salamander in flames, of
frequent occurrence in heraldry, is of this class. Like the toad, "ugly
and venomous," the salamander was regarded by the ancients with the utmost
horror and aversion. It was accredited with wondrous qualities, and the
very sight of it "abominable and fearful to behold." Elian, Nicander,
Dioscorides and Pliny all agree in that it possessed the power of
immediately extinguishing any fire into which it was put, and that it
would even rush at or charge the flame, which it well knew how to
extinguish. It was believed that its bite was certainly mortal, that
anything touched by its saliva became poisonous, nay, that if it crept
over a tree all the fruit became deleterious. Even Bacon believed in it.
Quoth he: "The salamander liveth in the fire and hath the power to
extinguish it." There is, too, a lingering popular belief that if a fire
has been burning for seven years there will be a salamander produced from
it. Such is the monstrous character given to one of the most harmless of
little creatures: the only basis of truth for all this superstructure of
fable is the fact that it exudes an acrid watery humour from its skin when
alarmed or in pain.
Spenser, in the "Fairy Queen," Book 1, cant. v. 18, according to the
mistaken notions of his time, compares the dangerous dissimulation and
treacherous tears of Duessa (or Falsehood) to the crocodile:
"As when a weary traveller that strays
By muddy shore of broad seven-mouthed Nile,
Unweeting of the perilous wand'ring ways,
Doth meet a cruel, crafty crocodile,
Which in false guise hiding his harmful guile,
Doth weep full sore, and shedding tender tears;
The foolish man, that pities all the while
His mournful plight, is swallowed unawares
Forgetful of his own that minds another's cares."
And Shakespeare, _2 Henry VI_. iii. 1:
"as the mournful crocodile
With sorrow snares relenting passengers."
Quarles, too, in his "Emblems":
"O what a crocodilian world is this,
Compos'd of treach'ries and insnaring wiles!"
Bossewell, an heraldic writer of the sixteenth century, after the model of
his forerunner, Gerard Leigh, edified his readers with comments on natural
history in such a delightful manner (according to his friend Roscarrocke)
as to provoke the envy of Pliny in Elysium, though now these descriptions
in many instances only serve to call up a smile from their very absurdity.
With "veracious" histories of this description, is it to be wondered at
that such beings as those referred to were made use of in heraldry and
accepted as types or emblems of some particular quality in man? As an
instance of how an error in the form of an animal may be perpetuated
unperceived, it may be mentioned that even in the best books on heraldry,
natural history, and in other illustrated publications, the elephant is
rarely to be seen correctly delineated. A peculiarity in his formation is
that the hind legs bend in the same manner as the fore legs, so that,
unlike other quadrupeds, it can kneel and rest on its four knees, whereas
it is usually depicted with the hind legs to bend in the same way as those
of the horse or the cow. When artists and herald-painters continue to
commit this blunder unobserved, some palliation may be afforded to the old
heralds for their offences against zoology in the errors and delusions
arising from lack of information. They could have little opportunity of
acquiring a correct knowledge of the rarer kinds of animals; they had not
the advantage of seeing menageries of wild beasts, or of consulting books
on natural history with excellent illustrations, as the modern herald may
do. Only when their scanty information fell short did they venture to draw
on their imaginations for their beasts, after the manner of an ancient
worthy, who "where the lion's skin fell short, eked it out with the
fox's."
Some writers, however, maintain that these monstrosities are not so much
the result of ignorance of the real forms of the beasts as that they were
intended to typify certain extraordinary qualities, and therefore
exaggeration of the natural shapes and functions was needful to express
such qualities. This may be true in some instances. Under this idea the
noble form of the lion may have been distorted to resemble the wild cat in
the fury of its contortions. _The Panther incensed_, breathing fire and
smoke out of its mouth, nose and ears, seems as if taken from some
misleading history--like that of the boar, by Xenophon, already referred
to--or the result of the erroneous description of some terrified
traveller. This is a natural and probable mode of accounting for its
unnatural appearance. It may, however, fairly be said that the natural
ferocity of the brute, and also its destructive qualities, are most fitly
typified by the devouring flame issuing from the head of this bloodthirsty
and treacherous beast of prey.
_The Heraldic Pelican_, again, is evidently a mistake of the early
artists, similar to the heraldic tiger, heraldic antelope, &c., and the
persistent following of the traditional "pattern" by the heralds when once
established. Early Christian painters always represented this emblem of
devoted self-sacrifice, _A Pelican in her piety_--that is, feeding her
young with her own blood--as having the head and beak of an eagle or bird
of prey such as they must have believed it to possess, and with which it
would be possible that it could lacerate its own breast; and not with the
clumsy and ungainly "bill" peculiar to this species of bird, which we know
is more suited to gobble up small reptiles than to "_vulning_" itself.
Some symbols, again, are neither real nor do they pretend to be fabulous,
such as the _two-headed eagle_, but are pure heraldic inventions that have
each their special signification. _The tricorporate lion_ lays no claim to
be other than the symbol of a powerful triune body under one guiding head;
the _three legs conjoined_--the arms of the Isle of Man--is an old Greek
sign for expedition. Many other instances will, no doubt, occur to the
reader of similar emblems of this class.