The Monstrefact: The Salamander

today's Monster Fact. Now. Dungeons and Dragons players have long noticed the startling difference between salamanders of the natural world and salamanders as they appear in the D and D Monster Manual, where they are described as flaming snakes and snakelike beings that quote slither across the Sea of ash on the elemental plane of fire. Meanwhile, real life salamanders are quite remarkable but are decidedly not on fire. Ancient and medieval bestiaries are full of strange and often fiery

tales of the salamander. I turned to the writings of folk historian Carol Rose and her book Monsters, Giants and Dragons, as well as Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Imaginary Beings to piece together the different attributed features of the mythic salamander. The creature pops up in various works from the ancient Greco Roman world, most notably the writings of

Roman historian Pliny the Elder in seventy seven CE. He describes the salamander as a monstrous lizard that poisons anything it touches, known to live on the slopes of volcanoes as well as within the heart of a fire. As Borges points out, Plenty highlights the creature's natural coldness as a reason for this. It's so cold it simply resists

the fire and even extinguishes it. But Pliny also writes of another creature, the pyrosta, that lives within the copper smelting furnaces of Cyprus, and the creature, he says, dies if they leave the flames. Borges points out that later traditions would take these attributes and apply them to the salamander. It's also worth noting, though, that, as a creature of fire, the mythic salamander was, by some standards, a necessary part

of classical elemental theory. If earth, water, air, and fire are the prime building blocks of nature, then there have to be animals of each element, and that includes creatures of fire, as we discussed in yesterday's episode. Sixteenth century Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini claimed in his autobiography to have seen a salamander in the fire as a child. As Matt Simon discussed in a twenty fourteen article for Wired Magazine,

fantastically wrong the legend of the homicidal fireproof salamander. This common bit of lare likely came about as ancient people occasionally threw damp logs on their fires, logs that may have had tiny, unfortunate salamanders clinging to their underside. But as Borges stressed, the notion of a creature that lives in fire was a theologically useful bit of lore as well.

Saint Augustine, in his fifth century CEE work The City of God, used the salamander as proof that fiery living torment in the afterlife was not that far fetched a notion. Borhes notes that the mythical phoenix, another mythical creature of fire, was often cited by theologians to support the idea of a bodily resurrection during the Middle Ages. Salamanders continued to tear it up in the bestiaries. Writers of the day

described their abilities to poison the fruit of trees. They entwined to stop up the mouths of lions, and of course, extinguish fires. The creature also became associated with fibrous minerals classified today as asbestos, which are highly fire resistant. Of course, natural salamanders do not live in or tolerate fire any more than the rest of the Anna kingdom. In fact,

they are decidedly moist creatures. The truth of experience and experimentation easily extinguish the fantastic idea of a literal salamander of the flames, but the creature lived on in heraldry, alchemical symbolism, and of course fantasy. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.