In ancient times, it was believed that salamanders could live in the middle of fires, as the cold of their bodies extinguished the flames around them. Of course, this is quite untrue, but the story may have come about because salamanders were often seen to run out of logs thrown onto the fire.
In the first century AD, Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder threw a salamander into a fire. He wanted to see if it could indeed not only survive the flames, but extinguish them, as Aristotle had claimed such creatures could. But the salamander didn’t … uh … make it.
Yet that didn’t stop the legend of the fire-proof salamander (a name derived from the Persian meaning “fire within”) from persisting for 1,500 more years, from the Ancient Romans to the Middle Ages on up to the alchemists of the Renaissance. Some even believed it was born in fire, like the legendary Phoenix, only slimier and a bit less dramatic. And that its fur (huh?) could be used to weave fire-resistant garments.
Part of the problem, it seems, is that in addition to disproving the salamander’s powers, Pliny also wrote extensively that it had such powers—and then some. His Natural History, which has survived over the centuries as a towering catalog of everything from mining to zoology, describes the salamander as such: “It is so chilly that it puts out fire by its contact, in the same way as ice does. It vomits from its mouth a milky slaver [saliva], one touch of which on any part of the human body causes all the hair to drop off, and the portion touched changes its color and breaks out in a tetter,” a sort of itchy skin disease.
Some 500 years later, Saint Isidore of Seville wrote that while other poisonous animals strike their victims individually, the salamander slays “very many at the same time; for if it crawls up a tree, it infects all the fruit with poison and slays those who eat it; nay, even if it falls in a well, the power of the poison slays those who drink it.” He also confirmed that it’s immune to the effects of fire.
So right away the salamander was mythologized as both a miraculous survivor and a menace. Indeed, later on in the 1200s, an English writer told of one laying waste to Alexander the Great’s army simply by swimming in a river they drank from. All told, 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 horses supposedly perished after consuming the salamander’s dirty bath water. Which would be pretty embarrassing, if only it were true.
Now, it was likely Europe’s fire salamander, with its vivid yellow-on-black coloration, that served as the inspiration for the legend, according to Nosson Slifkin in his book Sacred Monsters. As you might assume from its conspicuous colors, this species is in fact quite poisonous, secreting a neurotoxin to deter predators. And if it doesn’t feel like waiting to be attacked, it can actually fire this secretion at its approaching enemies. While the toxin can cause skin irritation in humans, it’s far from capable of poisoning 4,000 soldiers. But it’s likely this poisonous nature was simply scaled up for such myths.
A few centuries later, none other than Leonardo Da Vinci added another curious characteristic to the salamander’s repertoire, claiming it “has no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin.” The alchemist Paracelsus later confirmed this as its diet, elevating the salamander to the status of one of the four “elementals” that he substituted for the classical elements earth, fire, air, and water—the salamander of course being fire.
Picture Credit : Google