The Basilisk As It’s Seen Throughout History
The basilisk has been known as a king of serpents all through historical accounts; his head is reared spanning centuries. Often heroes are depicted in crests, and statues, as slaying the basilisk who represents a symbol of fear. One of the most early accounts of the basilisk’s existence was written in a bestiary by Pliny the Elder around 79 AD. He was first describing a “catoblepas”, which some have attribute to a wildebeest, because of its large, cow-like characteristics. Pliny said that its gaze was lethal, and then went on to describe the basilisk as having the same lethal gaze.
He goes on to say that the basilisk does not crawl and wind along ground, but instead raises up, with half of its body upright, and moves forward. Also, everything the basilisk touches or breathes on withers and dies, that stones even crumble. Pliny goes on to say that although a man drove a spear into a basilisk, killing it, that the venom crept up the spear, into both man and horse and killed them. He also states “yet a sillie weazle hath a deadly power to kill this monstrous serpent, as pernicious as it is”, which perhaps alludes to a mongoose’s ability to kill a deadly poisonous snake.
Later, Venerable Bede attested to the legend of how a basilisk is born; a serpent’s egg, being hatched in a rooster’s nest. Isidor of Seville claimed that the basilisk was king of all the other snakes, because of his lethal gaze, and venom, all other snakes fled before the basilisk. Alexander Neckham was also the first to say that the basilisk produced a “pollution of the air” which was lethal as well, as the basilisk breath. Later on that theory was developed more Pietro d’Abano. Theophilus Presbyter gives instruction in his book for the making of a basilisk, because supposedly it can turn copper to gold. Albertus Magnus believed in the killing gaze of the basilisk, as he wrote of it in “De Animalibus”, but not in its ability to perform alchemy, or that it was a snake’s egg hatched in the cockerel’s nest.
The more well known English poet, and scholar, Geoffrey Chaucer also wrote about the basilisk, except he instead called it a “basilcok,” when writing of it in The Canterbury Tales. Even Leonardo DaVinci has written on the basilisk, in his bestiary. He wrote that the basilisk was “so utterly cruel that when it cannot kill animals by its baleful gaze, it turns upon herbs and plants, and fixing its gaze on them withers them up.” The method in which a weasel kills a basilisk was also recorded by DaVinci, in which he states: “This beast finding the lair of the basilisk kills it with the smell of its urine, and this smell, indeed, often kills the weasel itself.”