The Salamander, the Animal That Lives in Fire and the Elemental Spirit
From Aristotle and Pliny to Paracelsus, from salamander wool to the emblem of Francis I: how a small amphibian became the spirit of fire.
The real salamander is a small amphibian with moist skin, fond of cool and shady places. Yet for more than two thousand years European tradition regarded it as the creature of fire par excellence, able to pass through flames unharmed or even to put them out. From this belief the elemental salamander was born in the Renaissance, one of the spirits that, according to some philosophers, inhabited the four elements of nature.
The Ancient Sources: a Cold Animal
Aristotle, in the History of Animals, reports without much commitment that the salamander, so it is said, puts out fire by walking through it. Pliny the Elder develops the notion: the salamander is so cold that on touching the flames it extinguishes them just as ice would. In another passage of the Natural History, however, Pliny himself lets some doubt show about this belief, which he partly attributes to the magi.
The origin of the legend is perhaps simpler than it seems. Salamanders spend the winter hidden under bark or inside rotting logs. When those logs were thrown on the hearth, the animals ran out of the flames, giving the impression that they had been born in the fire. The name itself, of Greek origin, has an uncertain etymology, which some scholars trace back to an eastern language.
Salamander Wool and Medieval Marvels
In the Middle Ages the salamander entered the bestiaries as a symbol of the righteous man who passes through the fire of temptation without being burned, recalling the three young men in the furnace in the Book of Daniel. At the same time reports spread of an incombustible fabric, called salamander wool or skin, which was cleaned by throwing it into the fire. The famous Letter of Prester John, which circulated in Europe from the twelfth century, speaks of precious garments made from these animals.
In reality that fibre was asbestos, a mineral known since antiquity for its resistance to heat. Marco Polo, in his Travels, speaks of it clearly: he explains that the salamander of the fables was not an animal, but a substance extracted from the mountains and worked like thread. Few medieval texts show the boundary between direct observation and legend with such clarity.
Paracelsus and the Spirits of Fire
The transformation of the salamander into a spiritual being is due above all to Paracelsus, the Swiss physician and alchemist of the early sixteenth century. In his Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris, published after his death, he described four kinds of creatures, each linked to an element: nymphs or undines to water, sylphs to air, pygmies or gnomes to earth and salamanders to fire. They were beings similar to humans, but lacking an immortal soul.
This doctrine enjoyed great success. In 1670 the abbé Montfaucon de Villars made it the subject of a brilliant and ironic book, The Count of Gabalis, which spread the elemental spirits through French and English culture. Earlier still, King Francis I of France had chosen the salamander among flames as his emblem, with the motto “Nutrisco et extinguo”, “I nourish and I extinguish”, still visible in the châteaux of Chambord and Fontainebleau.
Benvenuto Cellini, too, relates in his Life that as a child he saw a small salamander moving among the embers of the hearth, and that his father boxed his ear so that he would never forget the marvel. The episode neatly sums up the fortune of this figure: a common animal, observed in unusual circumstances, which the imagination turns into the sign of a higher reality, able to live where any other creature would perish.