cockatrice

“For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the LORD.”

That is from the Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 8, verse 17. For several years now, I have been meeting with friends via Zoom to read the Bible together, and this is how far we have gotten. Each person is reading from the bible of their choice and this is what comes up in the King James version. The other versions have vipers and adders but it looks like only the KJV has cockatrices. 

We of course wondered what they were. I have run across it before but get the word mixed up with cicitrix, which means 'scar'. One of our group had heard it come up recently on the Game of Thrones sequel House of the Dragon and told us it was some kind of monster. And  I had a sneaking suspicion that it had come up in The Once and Future King and a sinking feeling that I might have already written it up for this blog and just forgotten it--it's happened before. (I didn't--it was corkindrill that I'd looked into, but to think of T. H. White in relation to this word is not to have gone too far afield, as he was the first and for a while the only person to translate a medieval bestiary into English).

But let's get to it, shall we?

A cockatrice transom at Belvedere Castle in Central Park

As you can see above, a cockatrice is a mythical beast, which Wikipedia tells us is a two-legged dragon with a rooster's head. I'll get a little deeper into this in a minute, but first let's look at the etymology.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary,  the word means a fabulous monster. It comes to us by way of Old French cocatriz, which leads back to the Late Latin calcatrix, which in turn comes from the Latin calcare "to tread.". This is a translation of the Greek word ikhneumon, which means "tracker" or "tracer." The dictionary goes on to tell us that this fabulous beast was said to kill with a glance and that it could be killed only by tricking it into gazing at its own reflection. 

It then leads on to this wonderful paragraph, which I will quote in full:

In classical writings, an Egyptian animal of some sort, the mortal enemy of the crocodile, which it tracks down and kills. This vague sense became hopelessly confused in the Christian West, and in England the word ended up applied to the equivalent of the basilisk. Popularly associated with cock (n.1), hence the fable that it was a serpent hatched from a cock's egg. It also sometimes was confused with the crocodile. Belief in them persisted even among the educated because the word was used in the KJV several times to translate a Hebrew word for "serpent." In heraldry, a beast half cock, half serpent. Also, in old slang, "a loose woman" (1590s).

from the Biodiversity Heritage Library

To choose just a few favorite things from that paragraph, I am amused by the idea that the sense of this creature becomes hopelessly confused over time, so that it is associated with the basalisk; that simply because of its name it comes to be thought of as some mutant being from a cock's egg; and that  it is thought to be  the mortal enemy of the crocodile, but also, well, the crocodile itself. Oh, yes--and let's not forget the gratuitous insult to women thrown in at the end. (no blame to the etymologist intended.) Let me just say that if there is a way to turn a word into some kind of slam against women, it will eventually be done. But let's move on.

On reflection, I really must refer us back to the corkindrill post above, because I seem to have covered all this hazy crocodile reference before!

I have to confess that I have always thought that a basalisk was some kind of building, no doubt mixing it up with a basilica, except that if I'd been quizzed on it, I would have pictured it as a kind of tower. But no. Here is a drawing, which may or may not be representative of basalisks as a whole:

Ulisse Aldrovandi

If you've become intrigued with the cockatrice, I will refer you to a marvelous essay which I stumbled on through the Wikipedia post: "The Career of the Cockatrice" by Laurence A. Breiner. You can read it here, at JSTOR. Don't be put off by the whole members only vibe, because if you look closely you'll see that there is an independent researcher's button, where you can access 100 articles a month or free, which is probably about 98 more than I will often need. Let me entice you with the opening sentence.

The cockatrice, which no one ever saw, was born by accident toward the end of the twelfth century and died in the middle of the seventeenth, a victim of the new science.

The article delves into the cockatrice in heraldry and alchemy and has much more to say about it than I have either the acumen or the space to consider. But I can leave you with an image of its use in heraldry which I've come across. Ladies and gents, I give you the Arms of Bogan of Totnes, Devon: