The weasel: Galanthis, Theophrastus and a name not to be spoken
The servant Galanthis turned into a weasel, the superstitious man of Theophrastus, the Physiologus, Eliduc and euphemistic names: the weasel in European lore.
Small, quick and a skilful predator, the weasel was for centuries a familiar animal in the houses and barns of Europe, where it hunted mice before the cat became widespread everywhere. This very closeness made it the object of contrasting beliefs: its passing could be a bad omen, but the animal was also considered the enemy of the basilisk and the keeper of healing secrets. Ancient and medieval sources preserve many traces of it.
Galanthis and the labour of Alcmena
Ovid, in the ninth book of the Metamorphoses, tells of the birth of Hercules. Jealous Juno had instructed Lucina, goddess of childbirth, to prevent Alcmena from giving birth to Jupiter's son. The servant Galanthis, sensing the trick, falsely announced that the child had been born; the goddess, taken by surprise, released her spell and Alcmena gave birth. Lucina punished the servant by turning her into a weasel.
The myth also explained a curious ancient belief: since Galanthis had helped the birth with a lying mouth, the weasel was said to give birth through its mouth. The Physiologus and the medieval bestiaries took up the idea, claiming that the weasel conceived through the ear and gave birth through the mouth, and they interpreted it as an image of those who hear the divine word without putting it into practice.
The superstitious man of Theophrastus
In his Characters, written in the fourth century BC, Theophrastus describes the superstitious man with irony. Among his obsessions is this: if a weasel crosses his path, he will not continue on his way until someone else has gone ahead of him, or until he has thrown three stones across the road. The description shows that the weasel was already then considered an animal of ill omen.
The belief crossed the centuries and is found in various European popular traditions, where meeting a weasel, especially at the start of a journey or an undertaking, was interpreted as an unfavourable sign. The omen often depended on the direction in which the animal ran, according to a logic similar to the one the ancients applied to the flight of birds.
Gentle names and hidden powers
Many European languages call the weasel by affectionate or flattering names. The Italian donnola is a diminutive of donna, woman; the Spanish comadreja recalls the godmother or gossip; the French belette means little beauty. Linguists interpret these names as euphemisms: so as not to attract bad luck, people avoided uttering the animal's original name and called it by a gentle epithet instead.
Beneficial powers were also attributed to the weasel. Pliny considers it the only animal able to kill the basilisk, and in the lai Eliduc by Marie de France, composed in the twelfth century, a weasel brings its companion back to life with a red flower, showing the protagonists how to revive a maiden believed dead. Later the ermine, a relative of the weasel, became an emblem of purity, as in Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine.
The weasel sums up many contradictions of European symbolic thought. A punished servant and the saviour of a hero, an unlucky omen and an enemy of monsters, an animal not to be named and the bearer of a flower that restores life: its figure shows that even the smallest and most common creatures could become, in tradition, the keepers of deep and lasting meanings.