[Illustration: Basilisk or Amphysian Cockatrice, tail nowed.]
_Basilisk_, the king of serpents (Greek, _Basileus_, a king), so called from having on his head a mitre-shaped crest. Old writers give wonderful accounts of the death-dealing power of this strange creature. Pliny says, "all other serpents do flee from and are afraid of it," and tells of the deadly effect of his breath and glittering eye. The Duke of Alva, the scourge of the Netherlands (1566-1575), where he left the eternal memory of his cruelties, had for a device a basilisk drawing out serpents, with the motto: "Tu nomine tantum" ("Thou dost so much by thy name alone"), a fitting emblem for so great a monster!
In allusion to its power of "looking any one dead on whom it fixed its eyes," Dryden makes Clytus say to Alexander, "Nay, frown not so; you cannot look me dead,"
"like a boar Plunging his tusk in mastiff's gore, Or basilisk, when roused, whose breath, Teeth, sting and eyeballs all are death." KING, _Art of Love_.
King Henry, when he hears of the death of his uncle Humphry, the good Duke of Gloucester, says to Suffolk:
"come basilisk And kill the innocent gazer with thy sight." _2 King Henry VI._ Act iii. 2.
Beaumont and Fletcher also speak of "the basilisk's death-dealing eye" in "The Woman Hater."
Its appearance was so dreadful, it was said, that if a mirror was placed so that it could see itself, it would instantly burst asunder with horror and fear.
In Christian Art it is the emblem of _deadly sin_ and _the spirit of evil_. St. Basil the Great uses it as the type of a depraved woman.
"The most remarkable remembrance," says Dean, "of the power of the paradisaical serpent is displayed in the position which he retains in Tartarus. A cuno-draconictic cerberus guards the gates; serpents are coiled upon the chariot wheels of Proserpine; serpents pave the abyss of torment; and even serpents constitute the caduceus of Mercury, the talisman which he holds in his hand when he conveys the soul to Tartarus. The image of the serpent is stamped upon every mythological fable connected with the realms of Pluto. Is it not probable that in the universal symbol of heathen idolatry we recognise the universal object of primitive worship, the serpent of paradise?"