The Physiologus: the Greek book from which all bestiaries were born

Before the great illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth century there is a short, almost unadorned anonymous Greek booklet that shaped for more than a thousand years the way Europe looked at animals. It is called the Physiologus, meaning ‘the naturalist’, after the name the text gives to its ideal source: an observer of nature to whom the reported facts are attributed. Written in a Greek-speaking Christian milieu, most probably in Alexandria in Egypt, the book is the common root of almost all medieval bestiaries.

A text with no author and no certain date

Its date is still debated. Scholars mostly place it between the second and fourth centuries AD, and the culture that shows through the text, steeped in allegorical exegesis in the Alexandrian manner, makes that setting plausible. The author is unknown. Over the centuries scribes attributed the work to illustrious names such as Epiphanius, Basil, John Chrysostom or Ambrose, but these attributions have no foundation and arose from the wish to give authority to a widely read book.

The original core has about fifty chapters, devoted to real and fabulous animals, but also to a few plants and stones. Next to the lion, the panther and the ant appear the phoenix, the unicorn and the sirens, with no distinction between what we would now call zoology and what we would call legend. For the author the question was not whether an animal truly existed, but what it meant within the design of creation.

The pattern of each chapter

Each entry follows an almost fixed structure. It opens with a biblical verse that names the animal, continues with the formula ‘the Physiologus says’, sets out one or more ‘natures’, that is behaviours or properties of the beast, and closes with the interpretation: the animal’s nature becomes a figure of Christ, of the devil, of the Church or of the believer’s soul. The pelican that revives its young with its own blood points to the Passion; the whale mistaken for an island points to the snares of the devil.

This method derives from the idea, shared by many Church Fathers, that the created world is a second book written by God alongside Scripture. Reading animals therefore meant deciphering a moral and theological message written into nature itself. Direct observation carried little weight; what mattered was that the meaning agreed with doctrine.

Translations, suspicions and success

Its success was rapid and vast. The Physiologus was translated into Latin as early as late antiquity, in several versions that philologists distinguish with labels such as Y, B and C, and then into Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic and several Slavonic languages. In the Anglo-Saxon world it inspired verse adaptations, such as the poems on the panther and the whale preserved in the Exeter Book, a manuscript of Old English poetry.

There were reservations too. The so-called Gelasian Decree, a list of recommended and rejected books attributed to Pope Gelasius but probably compiled in the sixth century, places a ‘Physiologus’ among the apocryphal works. The condemnation had limited effect: the book went on circulating, being copied in monastic libraries and gathering new entries.

From the trunk of the Physiologus grew, from the twelfth century onwards, the Latin bestiaries and then those in the vernacular, which added material taken from Pliny, Solinus and Isidore of Seville. Anyone who looks at a lion carved on a Romanesque portal or a pelican engraved on a reliquary is often looking at an image whose meaning was first fixed in those anonymous pages. The Physiologus did not teach what animals are like: it taught people to see them as words.