The unicorn, perhaps the most famous of legendary medieval beasts, here in the embrace of a maiden who's like "Oh looks like you've got a little boo-boo back here." Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The unicorn, perhaps the most famous of legendary medieval beasts, here in the embrace of a maiden who's like "Oh looks like you've got a little boo-boo back here."
It was said that the crocodile, while a menace to humanity, has its own mortal enemy: the serpent. As the crocodile lazes on a shore with its mouth agape, the serpent crawls in, enters the stomach, and gnaws its way out. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
It was said that the crocodile, while a menace to humanity, has its own mortal enemy: the serpent. As the crocodile lazes on a shore with its mouth agape, the serpent crawls in, enters the stomach, and gnaws its way out.
Pliny the Elder, on how to get your hands on a tiger cub: Snatch a bunch from a den, set off on a swift horse, and wait for the mother to approach, "upon which the hunter throws down one of the whelps; this she snatches up with her teeth" and returns to her lair. She'll set out again and again, "until the hunter has reached his vessel, while the animal vainly vents her fury upon the shore.” Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Zounds, the devilish salamander! Lore once claimed that the salamander is fireproof, and indeed born from flames. It is also highly poisonous, climbing into trees to muck up the fruits and falling into wells and thus tainting them. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
It may not look much like it, but that’s a beaver...chewing off its own testicles. For quite some time, this was a pervasive belief: When pursued for its valuable gonads, the beaver---knowing the aim of the hunter---chews them off and throws them at the guy. Turns out that in reality those little bumps aren’t testicles, they’re the castor glands. Funny story, though. Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Baby pelicans supposedly get all uppity as they grow up and begin poking their parents in the face. The parents retaliate, naturally, killing their young. The mother then pecks at her own chest, spilling blood on the dead babies and reviving them. Unsurprisingly, in bestiaries this represented Christ’s crucifixion, and perhaps the authors' deep-seated familial psychoses. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Baby pelicans supposedly get all uppity as they grow up and begin poking their parents in the face. The parents retaliate, naturally, killing their young. The mother then pecks at her own chest, spilling blood on the dead babies and reviving them. Unsurprisingly, in bestiaries this represented Christ’s crucifixion, and perhaps the authors' deep-seated familial psychoses.
The elephant has a long history of being hilariously misunderstood. Here, it battles its mortal enemy, the dragon (likely based on a constrictor). As the dragon squeezes it to death, the elephant topples over, crushing its murderer. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The notorious manticore. Says T. H. White: “It has a threefold row of teeth meeting alternately; the face of a man, with gleaming, blood-red eyes; a lion’s body; a tail like the sting of a scorpion, and a shrill voice which is so sibilant that it resembles the notes of flutes.” Like Jethro Tull, only with a bit less hair and sweat. Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
A doting bear with her cubs. So doting, in fact, that she must lick them into shape (indeed, it's the origin of the saying). The young are born quite hopeless, really just a lump of flesh without eyes, and their mother’s licks are what form them. Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The caladrius, whose dung will for some reason cure you of eye trouble, according to the Physiologus, the mother of all bestiaries. It also moonlights as a soothsayer. If you're laid up with an illness, invite the caladrius in. If it looks away from you, you are fated to die. If you can be cured, it stares you straight in the eye, absorbing your sickness before flying into the sun, not unlike modern doctors. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The caladrius, whose dung will for some reason cure you of eye trouble, according to the Physiologus, the mother of all bestiaries. It also moonlights as a soothsayer. If you're laid up with an illness, invite the caladrius in. If it looks away from you, you are fated to die. If you can be cured, it stares you straight in the eye, absorbing your sickness before flying into the sun, not unlike modern doctors.
The crane at right holds a stone while others sleep. Explains St. Anthony of Padua: “They divide the night into watches, so that there may be a diligent care over all. Those that watch hold a weight in one of their claws, so that, if they happen to sleep, it falls on the ground and makes a noise,” thus waking everyone up. Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Unicorns may be magical, majestic, beautiful, etc., but they have a serious weakness: virgin women. Indeed, ancient lore says that using a maiden as bait is the only way to snag yourself one of these elusive beasts. When the unicorn falls asleep in her lap, you can capture it, or if you’re feeling particularly plucky, run it through with a spear.
More Fantastically Wrong Science
That was far from mere fantasy back in the Middle Ages, though. The story was one of the more famous passages in what are known as bestiaries, gorgeous compendiums of creatures both real and imagined that sold like mad—second only to the Bible itself. While they were passed off as solid knowledge, bestiaries were almost always wildly wrong about the natural world. Nonetheless, these charming tomes were indispensable to the beginnings of modern science, helping lay the groundwork for the field of zoology as we know it.
Unicorn murder notwithstanding, bestiaries tended to hold a certain reverence for the natural world, ascribing the cleverness, not to mention vices, of humans to various animals. The beaver, for instance, was said to chew its own testicles off when pursued by hunters. And the asp could resist the snake charmer’s song by putting one ear against the ground and plugging the other with its tail.
Adorable little hedgehogs roll around on fruit to stick them to their quills. They’ll then store them in their den for the lean times. Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Each creature usually was explained in just a few paragraphs, followed by an often lengthy moral tale to relate its biology or behavior to human beings. So in casting off its testicles and throwing them in the hunter’s face, the beaver thus relieves himself of vice and tosses it right back at the devil. By plugging its ears, the asp is unwisely resisting the word of Christ.
A few more examples of fantastical bestiary critters, which you can see in the gallery at top:
• To steal a tiger cub, a hunter must grab a bunch at once and make off on a swift horse. As their furious mother closes in on him, he drops a single cub, which the mother snatches up and takes back to her den. She thus returns to the hunter for one cub at a time, until he escapes on a ship, ideally with at least one left.
• The magical salamander was said to be fireproof as well as extremely poisonous, tainting wells and even fruit on trees. Indeed, when a salamander got into a river that Alexander the Great’s army drank from, 4,000 men and 2,000 horses supposedly grew sick and, no doubt weakened by the embarrassment of being bested by a salamander, keeled over.
• Crocodiles may be jerks, but they’re far from invincible. As they sun themselves on the shore, mouths agape, the serpent will crawl in and make its way into the crocodile’s guts, eventually bursting through the poor reptile.
For all of the popularity of bestiaries in the Middle Ages, strangely enough one wasn’t translated into English (most were written in Latin) until 1954: T. H. White’s seminal Book of Beasts. In it, White goes to lengths to emphasize that while bestiaries were wildly wrong nearly all of the time, they were in fact quite compassionate works, painting animals as creatures to be not only respected, but revered.
The fox was said to roll itself in red mud to appear blood-stained, then flop over on its back and hold its breath. The scavenging birds that come to investigate it are thus bamboozled (read: devoured). Rochester Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
Now, it’d be an understatement to say there was a bit of an illiteracy problem in the Middle Ages. Consequently, bestiaries featured incredibly vivid, lively illustrations that spelled out the behaviors of the various creatures. Above, for instance, is a fox, a “fraudulent and ingenious animal” that was said to play dead to attract and attack birds. A medieval illiterate peasant would have heard such a cautionary tale in church, for the devil metaphorically works in much the same way on humans. Thus was the bestiary a work of universal accessibility.
Such symbolism was so important in the Middle Ages, according to White, “that it did not matter whether certain animals existed”—the part man, part lion, part scorpion with probably some identity issues known as the manticore, for instance—but “what did matter was what they meant.” It was an era of intense faith that a higher power had created every creature with a meaning to be decoded by man, or in the case of plants, a clue that the species was meant to treat a certain organ. Known as the doctrine of signatures, this held that a walnut, for instance, could treat brain problems because it looks an awful lot like a brain itself.
The bestiaries can all trace their lineage to one masterwork: the Physiologus, whose anonymous author probably lived in Alexandria in the first few centuries AD. He or she dug deep into the animal lore of the ancients, combining thoughts of Aristotle, who was arguably the first true scientist (if you haven’t yet picked up Armand Marie Leroi’s fantastic new book The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science, do so immediately), as well as Pliny the Elder, who in compiling an encyclopedia of all Roman knowledge was sure to include epically fantastical animal “facts,” I guess just in case they turned out to be true.
Not only is the asp exceedingly deadly to humans, it’s far from easy to charm. When snake charmers try to lure it out of its hiding place, the asp will press one ear against the ground and plug the other with its tail. White’s bestiary translation notes: “Apart from men, asps are the only other creatures which do such a thing, namely, refuse to listen.” Worksop Bestiary/British Library. Used with permission.
The Physiologus was a huge hit. It was translated into everything from Syriac to Latin to Icelandic, spreading all over Europe and the Middle East and Africa. And when a scribe got his hands on it, according to White there was no reason he “should not expand his copy with interpolations” from later authorities. Thus the bestiary “began to grow like a living tree.” Later authors grabbed older bestiaries and tacked on extra bits. They cut things here and there. In the words of White, the bestiary was “a kind of naturalist’s scrapbook, which has grown with the additions of several hands.”
This went on throughout the Middle Ages until the 16th century rolled around, and naturalists started growing suspicious of the bestiaries’ claims. Then came along British polymath Sir Thomas Browne, science’s most accomplished party pooper, whose work Vulgar Errors ripped the bestiary’s many bizarre claims to pieces. Elephants do indeed have knees, he assured his readers, and beavers aren’t anywhere close to being capable of chewing off their own testicles. And in busting these myths, according to White, Browne “began to raise the subject of biology to a scientific level for the first time since Aristotle.”
Generations of natural historians followed Browne, trusting not in the strange moral tales of their forebears, but in direct observation. And in 1859, the science of biology tallied what is arguably its ultimate triumph with Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. Far from the fanciful speculations of the bestiaries, science could now explain not only the deep biology of animals, but how and why they got that way.
So today we find ourselves owing an unlikely debt to some of history’s most erroneous works. Plus, the next time you come across a unicorn, you’ll know exactly what to do.
Check yourself into rehab immediately.
Browse the full Fantastically Wrong archive here. Have a crazy theory or myth you want me to cover? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.
References:
Badke, D. (2010) The Medieval Bestiary
Curley, M. (1979) Physiologus: A Medieval Book of Nature Lore. University of Chicago Press
Pliny the Elder (1855) Natural History. Taylor and Francis
White, T. H. (1960) The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts. Capricorn Books
No comments:
Post a Comment