Since it is almost Halloween, what could be more fitting than a horror story featuring a mythical creature? Gather ’round ye old phone screen for the tale of the Warsaw Basilisk.
This story has been examined by many scholars — not for its veracity, but to establish that the account did indeed occur in the late 16th century. The outline of it goes as follows:.
It happened in the city of Warsaw in 1587 that two little girls (one was five years old) disappeared. When one of the mothers went searching for her daughter along with her nursemaid, they came upon the 30-year old ruins of a house and looked into the cellar below. The nursemaid entered first, and saw the motionless bodies of the two children — and then, her back to the mother, the nursemaid fell to the floor immobile.
The mother ran back out to announce what had transpired, and soon the whole town was talking about the affair, with rumors that there was a basilisk hiding beneath the ruins.
Now a basilisk was a monster with its origins in antiquity. The Roman naturalist Pliny wrote about basilisks as a sort of deadly snake which had a white spot on its head that looked like a diadem (basilisk means “little king” in Greek) — they traveled about upright and spread poison wherever they went. Other Medieval writers recorded that its glare would kill. By the 1200s, basilisks became confused with another mythical creature called cockatrices, which were thought to have the heads of roosters, and dragon-like wings.
The basilisk was eventually retrieved from the cellar. No one would go below to search for the monster until a convicted criminal agreed to do so on condition that he be spared execution and remitted of all punishment. Fashioning a costume of leather (to prevent the poison, one assumes) with tiny mirrors amassed all over (so the basilisk could look at its own reflection), the man brought out a living monstrosity.
The bodies of its three victims were swollen, their eyes protruding “like the halves of hen’s eggs”.
Even Early Modern people had fears about things that go bump in underground spaces, it seems . . .
Sources: “On the trail of the Warsaw Basilisk,” Mike Dash, July 23, 2012, _Smithsonian Magazine_. “The Career if the Cockatrice,” Laurence A. Breiner, _Isis_ March 1979, vol 70 no 1 pp 30-47, Univ of Chicago Press., Image British Library Harley 4751, fol 59, ca 1225-1250
