Symbolic Bestiary

Every mythology has its own. In Greek myth Pegasus, the eagle of Zeus, the owl of Athena and the serpent of Asclepius stand out; in Egyptian myth the cat of Bastet, the ibis of Thoth and the scarab Khepri; in Norse myth Odin's ravens, Huginn and Muninn, and the wolf Fenrir. Many of these animals later passed into medieval bestiaries and the constellations.

A medieval bestiary is a book that describes real and fantastic animals and draws moral and religious lessons from them. Each chapter tells of a feature of the animal, often a legendary one, such as the pelican reviving its young with its own blood, and interprets it as an image of Christ, the devil or a virtue. The most famous bestiaries are the illuminated codices produced in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as the Aberdeen Bestiary.

The Physiologus is an anonymous Greek text, probably composed in Alexandria in Egypt between the second and fourth centuries AD. It gathers a few dozen short chapters on animals, plants and stones, each followed by a Christian interpretation. It was translated into Latin and many languages of the Mediterranean and the Christian East, and became the main source of the medieval bestiaries, which gradually expanded its content.

The phoenix is a legendary bird which, according to ancient sources, was reborn after its own death. Herodotus describes it as a bird that came to Heliopolis every five hundred years; later authors tell that it burned on a pyre of spices and rose again from the ashes. For this reason it became a symbol of rebirth and immortality, and Christians read it as an image of the resurrection. Dante mentions it in the Inferno.

According to a legend handed down by the Physiologus and the bestiaries, the pelican kills its young and after three days brings them back to life by bathing them in the blood it draws from its own breast. Christian authors read the story as an image of Christ's sacrifice and of the Eucharist. This is why the pelican appears on altars, stained glass and coats of arms, and Dante, in the Paradiso, calls Christ «our pelican».

The Chinese zodiac includes twelve animals, each associated with a year in a twelve-year cycle: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig. A widespread legend explains their order with a great race called by the Jade Emperor, in which the rat came first by riding on the back of the ox. The cycle is also combined with the five elements.

The black cat's bad reputation took hold in late medieval and early modern Europe, when the cat, and especially the black one, became associated with witches and the devil in demonological treatises and in the trials. It is not a universal belief: in ancient Egypt the cat was sacred to the goddess Bastet, and in some traditions, for example in parts of the British Isles, a black cat is considered a good omen.