The bat: the Minyades, Lucifer's wings and the sleep of reason

The bat flies in the dark, hangs upside down and escapes every simple classification: it is not a bird, yet it flies; it is a mammal, yet it dwells in the night sky. This borderline nature made it, in European tradition, a suspect creature, linked to night, to caves and to the underworld. From Ovid's Metamorphoses to Goya's etchings, its membranous profile has accompanied the imagination of evil and darkness.

The daughters of Minyas and the name of evening

Ovid, in the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, tells of the Minyades, daughters of Minyas, king of Orchomenus, who during the feasts of Bacchus refused to take part in the rites and went on spinning and telling each other stories. The god punished them by turning them into bats, condemned to shun the light and haunt rooftops at nightfall. The myth links the animal to the rejection of the sacred and to flight from the light.

The Latin name vespertilio derives from vesper, evening, and refers to the hour when the bat appears. From it descends the Italian pipistrello, through popular forms such as vipistrello, still used by Dante. In Leviticus, moreover, the bat is listed among the unclean flying creatures, together with several birds of prey, and this classification strengthened its bad reputation in Christian culture.

The wings of demons

In the Middle Ages Christian art began to give demons membranous wings, in contrast to the feathered wings of angels. The contrast was eloquent: feathers referred to light and heaven, bare membrane to night and caves. Dante fixes the image in Canto XXXIV of the Inferno, where Lucifer beats six great wings that «had no feathers, but were like a bat's».

Aesop's fable of the bat which, during the war between birds and beasts, declared itself now for one side and now for the other, helped make it a symbol of duplicity and opportunism. The bat thus became the animal of those who truly belong nowhere, who adapt to circumstances and deserve no trust: an idea that easily overlapped with that of the deceiving demon.

From Goya's Capricho to vampires

In 1799 Francisco Goya published the series of the Caprichos. In plate 43, entitled El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, a man asleep at a table is surrounded by owls and bats rising from the shadows. The work is a reflection on reason which, when it falls asleep, leaves room for the monsters of superstition and ignorance.

In the eighteenth century European naturalists had given the name vampires to certain American bats that feed on blood, drawing on the Eastern European legends then much discussed. The link between bat and vampire, later reinforced by Gothic literature, thus arose from a meeting of natural history and folklore. In the countryside, meanwhile, it was said that bats got tangled in people's hair.

Today we know that bats are precious to ecosystems and protected throughout Europe. Their nocturnal reputation, however, tells a coherent cultural story: from the punishment of the Minyades to Lucifer's wings and on to Goya's sleep of reason, the bat has embodied whatever lies outside the light, doubt, ambiguity and the fear of the unknown.