Were I but for one instant to loose my spells whereby I hold it in subjection, in that moment would end my life days and thine .' The glance of its eye sufficeth to turn to stone any living thing that standeth before it. 'Behold and see, that which sprung from the egg of a cock, hatched by the deaf adder. Eddison's high fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 4 has King Gorice show a cockatrice to Gro: In Second Nephi 24:29, a Cockatrice is mentioned. never threaten with your eyes, they are no cockatrice's. Nathan Field, in the first scene of his play The Honest Man's Fortune (1647), also uses the idea that a cockatrice could kill with its eyes:

Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice. Hath Romeo slain himself? Say thou but 'Ay,'Īnd that bare vowel 'I' shall poison more 1593), the Duchess of York compares her son Richard to a cockatrice: In Proverbs 23:32 the similar Hebrew tzeph'a is rendered 'adder', both in the Authorized Version and the Revised Version. The Revised Version-following the tradition established by Jerome's Vulgate basiliscus-renders the word as ' basilisk', and the New International Version translates it as ' viper'. This usage was followed by the King James Version, the word being used several times. The first use of the word in English was in John Wyclif's 1382 translation of the Bible to translate different Hebrew words. It was also thought that a cockatrice would die instantly upon hearing a rooster crow, and according to legend, having a cockatrice look at itself in a mirror is one of the few sure-fire ways to kill it. It was repeated in the late-medieval bestiaries that the weasel is the only animal that is immune to the glance of a cockatrice. The cockatrice has the reputed ability to kill people by either looking at them-'the death-darting eye of Cockatrice' -touching them, or sometimes breathing on them. It is thought that a cock egg would hatch out as a cockatrice, and this could be prevented by tossing the egg over the family house, landing on the other side of the house, without allowing the egg to hit the house. This legend has a possible Egyptian folk root the eggs of the ibis were regularly destroyed for fear that the venom of the snakes they consumed would cause a hybrid snake-bird to hatch. Cockatrice became seen as synonymous with basilisk when the basiliscus in Bartholomeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum (ca 1260) was translated by John Trevisa as cockatrice (1397). Īccording to Alexander Neckam's De naturis rerum (ca 1180), the basilisk ( basiliscus) was the product of an egg laid by a rooster and incubated by a toad a snake might be substituted in re-tellings.

An extended description of the cocatriz by the 15th-century Spanish traveller in Egypt, Pedro Tafur, makes it clear that this refers to the Nile crocodile.

The twelfth century legend was based on a reference in Pliny's Natural History that the ichneumon lay in wait for the crocodile to open its jaws for the trochilus bird to enter and pick its teeth clean. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a derivation from Old French cocatris, from medieval Latin calcatrix, a translation of the Greek ichneumon, meaning tracker. It is described in its current form in the late fourteenth century. Essentially, biblical versions vary in how they translate the Hebrew word tsepha. The cockatrice was first mentioned in the 1611 King James translation of the Bible in Isaiah chapters 11, 14 and 59 however, the majority of commentaries believe what the KJV calls cockatrices are actually an adder or a serpent known as a basilisk. Described by Laurence Breiner as 'an ornament in the drama and poetry of the Elizabethans', it was featured prominently in English thought and myth for centuries. A cockatrice overdoor at Belvedere Castle (1869) in New York's Central Park.Ī cockatrice is a mythical beast, essentially a two-legged dragon, wyvern, or serpent-like creature with a rooster's head.

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