The Basilisk, the Little King of Serpents with the Deadly Gaze
The basilisk from Pliny and Lucan to the medieval bestiaries: the crowned serpent, the rooster, the weasel and the mirror, and the emblem of Basel.
The name basilisk comes from the Greek basilískos, “little king”. Ancient authors imagined it as a tiny but terrible serpent, marked on its head with a white spot like a diadem. During the Middle Ages the creature changed its appearance, acquired a rooster's legs and comb and ended up merging with the rooster-serpent the English call the cockatrice. The trait that made it famous, however, always remained the same: a deadly power that acts almost without contact.
The Serpent of Cyrene in Pliny
Pliny the Elder, in the eighth book of the Natural History, places the basilisk in Cyrenaica, today's eastern Libya. It is no more than twelve fingers long, has a white spot on its head and puts other serpents to flight with its hiss. It does not crawl as they do, but advances with the front part of its body raised. Where it passes, shrubs wither, grass burns and even stones split, so potent is its venom.
Pliny adds a striking story: a man on horseback is said to have speared a basilisk, and the venom, rising up the shaft, killed both him and his horse. Yet the creature has an enemy, the weasel, whose smell is fatal to it. The poet Lucan, in the Pharsalia, includes the basilisk among the serpents born in Libya from the blood of Medusa, which torment Cato's army during its march through the desert.
The Gaze, the Rooster and the Mirror
Later authors emphasised the power of its gaze. The basilisk could kill with a glance, and therefore, according to tradition, the surest way to defeat it was to make it see its own image reflected in a mirror. It was also said to fear the crowing of the rooster, and some sources claim that travellers heading into the deserts carried roosters with them for protection. These beliefs are reported by many medieval and Renaissance texts.
Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a curious legend about the animal's origin spread. The basilisk was supposedly born from an egg laid by an old rooster and hatched by a toad or a serpent. From this story came the image of the basilisk as a rooster with a serpent's tail, very common in the bestiaries and in Romanesque sculpture. The creature thus took on a double nature contrary to the natural order, a clear sign of its monstrous character.
The Basilisk in the Bible and in Art
The Latin version of the Bible did much for the basilisk's fame. In Psalm 90 of the Vulgate, 91 in the Hebrew numbering, there is a promise addressed to the righteous: “super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis”, you shall tread upon the asp and the basilisk. From this came the iconography of Christ trampling the beasts, found in ivories, miniatures and cathedral portals, where the basilisk represents, together with the lion and the dragon, the vanquished forces of evil.
The Swiss city of Basel adopted the basilisk as a heraldic figure, playing on the similarity of the names, and dozens of nineteenth-century basilisk fountains still adorn its streets. Leonardo da Vinci, in his notes on animals, describes it as a creature so cruel that its gaze makes even plants wither. In the eighteenth century, finally, naturalists gave the name basilisk to a genus of harmless lizards from Central America.
The basilisk reminds us of a very old idea: that evil can act at a distance, through a glance or a breath, and that to defeat it one must turn its own power against it. The mirror that kills it is an eloquent image. In medieval moral tradition vice was overcome in exactly this way, by forcing it to recognise itself for what it was, without masks and without defences.