Basilisks

Last week we discussed a gustatory society that is run by House Jerbiton, which has subscription boxes, and I talked about how if the subscription boxes were lost they could be a sort of treasure, because you’re magi could use them to get past some of the lesser limits of Hermetic magic. I had, however, missed another point, and it’s one that I’ve covered before on the podcast when I was talking about eels.

In medieval belief, and in Ars Magica, vermin arise abiologically that is they just occur. If you have enough dirt lying around dust mites will occur simply arising out of the inanimate matter. If you have enough books around and the west wind blows into your library you will get bookworms, even if there were no bookworms there before, not because eggs are carried in or something like that, but because vermin arise from inanimate matter.

There is a low level Rego Animal spell that forces this: it turns meat into the usual arising vermin for beef which are maggots. Even mice were believed, in some areas, to arise from inanimate matter. Usually people restricted themselves to bugs earthworms and, in the most complicated case eels, because it was difficult to see the sexual organs of these tiny animals but mice quite clearly were capable of sexual reproduction because they found baby mice so I’m not sure why they thought they produced themselves abiologically.

Moving on, my point is that the ancient Greeks particularly, and the medievals who followed them, thought that there were a wide variety of weird things that just spontaneously emerge. With reference to basilisks the Latin word for basilisk is basilico, which technically means dragon. It comes from a Greek word for royal or imperial and their name for the basil plant was also basilico. They thought that if you left basil leaves, particularly between bricks, so that they decayed you would get scorpions. Scorpions were related to basilisks because both of them are venomous.

While I’m mentioning basilisco I’ll point out that there are two quite distinct types of basilisk an dthey’ve been started independently in Ars Magica. If you came into the game through Dungeons & Dragons you may think I’m talking about the basilisk and the basilcock or cockatrice. No, no dear listener: the second type of basilisk is what in the Italian Alps is currently called the basilisco. It’s what we, in the Rhine book, called the Tatzlewurm, which is a basilisk-like creature that has a cat-like head and either too sharp forward claws or for stubbly little legs and a serpents body. The tatzlewurm, or as I say in the Ladin-speaking parts of the Alps, the basilisco, is a basilisk. It becomes more snake-like the further south you go and interestingly it becomes more chicken-like the further northwest you go. In English you get a thing that’s quite similar to the cockatrice and has an origin story that involves eggs put in dung heaps.

Most disconcerting for a monster hunting Flambeau to go in looking for the sort of basilisk that turns you into stone by staring at you, and instead facing the quieter, sneakier, and more physically-imposing tatzlewurm. Basilisk juice – sorry that is the juice from the basil herb – was considered to be a remedy for the venom of the basilisk the little regal dragon. It may be a folkloristic version of a cobra in which case it’s an Animal of Virtues

What I was thinking about, with reference to last week’s subscription boxes, is this: if you leave meat in one of these boxes and you don’t use the right preservation magic, then the meat will decay. Who knows what will come out of it? The ancient Greeks had a ritual that we’ve seen written down (we don’t know how often they performed it) where they buried a dead ox with its horns emerging from the ground, then waited for it to decay. Then they lopped off the horns so that the bees could escape. They believed honey bees were produced by the rotting of ox corpses.

So say you’ve been sent a chunk of elephant meat, or even an elephant bone, and it decays: what comes out of that?

If you kill a dragon and (unlike my characters who seem to strip the dragon for parts) you go “Well it’s blood is poisonous, so we’re not going near that. We’ll just leave it there.” what things emerge from the dragons corpse that serve a role similar to the maggots or the mice?

This is even more likely to occur if it’s a faerie. There are a lot of fairy stories that say mosquitoes arose spontaneously from the ashes of a cremated giant .

Plot hooks

There are several varieties of basilisk. They start in Italy and sweep up through the Alps, then out to the west, and have quite different types as you go across the mountains of the Greater Alpine Tribunal. Does this indicate that someone there has been mucking with them? We know that at least one character in the Alps has been breeding syrenii (flying serpents) so why could he not have been breeding tatzelwrums? It would explain the vast differences in phenotype if they are creatures of virtue rather than fairies.

Calling back to last week: if you lose one of these subscription boxes what horrible plague are you letting loose through the process of decay? What life arises from decaying matter?

Are these another thing that they investigate at the gustatorial feasts because presumably they don’t eat everything from each of the creatures they make. Maybe they cast that Animal spell (the name of which has temporarily escaped me) on all the leftovers to see what comes out. Often it will just be maggots or ladybugs or crickets or something normal, but what if they get some strange animal? Aerial jellyfish? Small, talkative spiders? Is there, somewhere in the order, a list of what happens when you cause meat to decay and which creatures you get?

Could one of these creatures be something that your character really wants, because you have a strange magical specialization, and this thing that’s been described is the perfect familiar for you? Would you have to hunt down how to make whatever bizarre creature is the meat from which your preferred familiar species emerge?

Are there species of animals that are found in the Order of Hermes that are not found anywhere else in Europe, because someone caused the animal to emerge by forcing the decay of meat?

Can it be competitively bred? Are there basilisk shows, the same way that in the real world we have cat shows? (Honestly if anyone’s breeding cat dragons, it’s the Black Lineage of Cats aligned to House Jerbiton).

Basil of Virtue repels snakes, repels and creates scorpions, and can cure poisons. That sounds like a powerful Creo source. The one complicating factor is that it may actually be a sort of low-level miracle caused by a divine herb. Basil, the king of herbs, is thought by some to have grown on the crucifix.

Nonetheless if a character you value has been poisoned there are worse ideas than transforming them into basil plants, then transforming them back. There are some plants that are immune to the poisons which would destroy human bodies, and they can purge the poison while in plant shape. It may be that the basil naturally has curative properties due to its essential nature, but the idea that, after your characters fight a basilisk, you may heal all of your grogs by transforming the turb into an orchard for a season, is an unusual one.