Cockatrice

Cockatrice (pronounced kok-uh-tris)

(1) A mythological monster, hatched supposedly by a serpent from the egg of a rooster and thus represented usually with the head, legs, and wings of a rooster, atop the body and tail of a serpent; the alternative name was basilisk.  Depicted usually as being the size and shape of a dragon or wyvern but with some lizard-like characteristics, if so minded it could kill with just a glance and could be slain only by tricking it into seeing its own reflection.  A young cockatrice was a chickatrice.

(2) In the Bible, a venomous serpent.

(3) Figuratively, a mistress; a harlot (obsolete).

(4) Figuratively, a mistress; (obsolete).

(5) Figuratively, any venomous or deadly thing (obsolete).

(6) The cobra (the common name of a number of venomous snakes, most of which belong to the genus Naja) (contested).

1382: From the Middle English cocatrice, from the Middle French cocatris, from the Old French cocatriz, from the Medieval Latin plural form caucātrīces & the unattested Latin calcātrīx (she who treads upon something), the feminine of the unattested calcātor (tracker), the construct built from calcō (tread) or calcā(re) (to tread) (a verbal derivative of calx (heel)) + -tor (the agent suffix).  The Latin was a direct translation of the Greek word ichneúmōn or ikhneúmōn which carried the same meaning.  Cockatrice is a noun; the noun plural is cockatrices.

The origin of the cockatrice certainly in ancient and frightening & fantastic beasts are common in the fables of many cultures but the one closest in appearance is thought to be one from the legends of Ancient Egypt, the mortal enemy of the crocodile, which it tracks down and kills.  In the way stories became mangled & tangled as they travelled between languages and across borders, in the Christian West, the cockatrice became conflated with the basilisk (a fire-breathing, snake-like dragon also with a murderous glance).  In the medieval era, such morphing was not uncommon and the popular association with a cock led to the legend the creature was born of a serpent, hatched from a cock's egg although there’s little to suggest there was much of a link with crocodile.  The connection with serpents persisted and it appears several times in the King James Version (KJV, 1611)) of the Bible, used to translate a Hebrew word meaning “serpent”.  In heraldry, it was used as a rampant, a beast half cock, half serpent and in slang it was used from the late sixteenth century to mean “a woman of loose virtue; a harlot”, an indication men are never short of sources when searching for ways to disparage women.  Etymologists note frequent references to “cockatrice” being a words used to describe the cobra, presumably because of the snake’s unusual hooded head and its habit of rearing up and “staring” but there appears to be scant evidence of actual use.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

The cockatrice appears in the Christian Bible’s Old Testament (Isaiah 11:5-11; King James Version (KJV, 1611)):

5. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

6 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.

7. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

8. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.

9. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

10. And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.

11. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.

Isaiah was the first of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the first of the Major Prophets in the Christian Old Testament.  In Isaiah 11, the prophet is describing to his listeners the nature of the world during the rule of a mysterious future king of Israel.  This king’s rule will be global, over the earth, men & animals and all beasts, prey & predator, will lie down together and eat together, all without bloodshed or death; in peace, together shall they live.  To illustrate how different will be this paradise, Isaiah says both the baby and the young child safely ill play surrounded by deadly, venomous snakes and be safe even from a cockatrice.  Readers were free to interpret the verse literally as an imagining the very nature of animals will change under this rule or, metaphorically, that the new regime of the Messiah's kingdom will usher in what would now be called a “new world order”, one in which all nations and peoples peacefully co-exist.  Isaiah needs to be read in conjunction with the Book of Revelation which says at the very end of history, in the new heaven and new earth, there will be no more death, mourning, crying, or pain and all wickedness will be banished from the Earth.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) lived in the England of the Elizabethan age, a time when the cockatrice was a fixture in popular culture and he used references to the mythological beast and its ability to kill with just a glance or as Shakespeare would put it, its “death-darting eye”, having the duchess in Richard III (1594) say in Act 4, Scene 1:

O ill-dispersing wind of misery!
O my accursèd womb, the bed of death!
A cockatrice hast thou hatched to the world,
Whose unavoided eye is murderous.

Crooked Hillary Clinton: How Shakespeare would have imagined “death-darting eyes”.

He returned to the allusion in Act 3, Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet (1597) in the words of the doomed Juliet:

What devil art thou that dost torment me thus?
This torture should be roared in dismal hell.
Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but 'Ay,'
And that bare vowel 'I' shall poison more
Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice.
I am not I if there be such an 'I,'
Or those eyes shut that make thee answer 'Ay.'
If he be slain, say 'Ay,' or if not, 'No.'
Brief sounds determine of my weal or woe.

From before Antiquity to the horror films of the twenty-first century, fantastical beasts have often appeared and while most have been created to frighten, some have been more whimsical, such as the Jabberwock which first appeared in the nonsense poem Jabberwocky, written by Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) and included in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).  The poem was about the killing of the fearsome Jabberwock and is part of what makes the two books among the most enjoyable in English literature but in literary theory “jabberwocky” has also been co-opted to mean “a form of nonsense; unintelligible speech or writing”, the connection illustrated by one fragment from the poem:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

The author helpfully had Humpty Dumpty say that brillig means “four o'clock in the afternoon - the time when you start broiling things for dinner” but generally allowed his readers to make of the words what they will which probably was the best approach.  Alice in Wonderland was fun but those who followed would make linguistic gymnastics something else and James Joyce’s (1882–1941) Finnegans Wake (1939) was no fun for most although Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) claimed to find “a laugh on just about every page” and for A Clockwork Orange (1962) created his own slang argot, derived from a number of linguistic traditions.  As far as is known, Joyce never discussed jabberwocky but Burgess acknowledged the debt.  Other famous beasts include the leviathan & behemoth.  The leviathan was a truly massive sea creature rooted in ancient Middle Eastern and biblical texts, portrayed typically as a monstrous sea serpent or dragon, representing the primal forces of chaos and the ocean.  The behemoth was also of biblical origin and described generally as a massive, earth-bound beast, often symbolizing power and strength, thus the frequent use of the ox as an image, the creature dominating the land as the leviathan does the oceans.

Behemoth: 2020 Freightliner M2-106 in silver over black leather upholstery with alligator-hide inserts and timber trim, modified by Western Hauler, Fort Worth, Texas.

The big (and in recent decades they have got very big) US pick-up trucks appals some sensitive souls who sometimes damn the things as “behemoths” but for those for whom even they weren’t big enough, there were companies which would add enough bling to the first generation (2003-2023) of the Freightliner M2 medium-duty truck to some actually bought the things for private use.

The very clever and deliciously wicked English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) used leviathan and behemoth as metaphors to explore concepts of social and political power in his works, especially in his famous book Leviathan (1651) and the lesser-known Behemoth (published posthumously in 1682), each creature deployed as a literary device to symbolize different forms of political structures and conflicts.  In Leviathan, the sea creature represented strong, centralized government or sovereign power, the state which Hobbes regarded as not merely desirable but essential.  He envisioned society as a “body politic” in which all individuals come together under a single, absolute authority to escape the chaos of the natural state, which Hobbes described in his most memorable phrase: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  The Leviathan represented the overarching power of the sovereign, something necessary to maintain order and peace, a vision of a government which could (and should) act decisively to suppress internal conflicts and keep external threats at bay, making it at once a protector and potentially an oppressor; little wonder then Leviathan has been found on the bookshelf of more than one overthrown tyrant.  In Behemoth, Hobbes used the monster of the land when describing the chaotic and destructive nature of civil war, focusing specifically focusing the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century and the theme of the book was the way parties and political factions and ideologies can tear a society apart.  Unlike the stabilizing leviathan, behemoth represents the forces of disorder and division that arise when people reject central authority and plunge into conflict.  It’s a cautionary tale, a warning that when men live in a society lacking a unifying authority, things will devolve into factionalism, chaos and political instability, the final result something like the “state of nature” in which life descended to something “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”.