Record #3
The Amphisbaena
A double-headed serpent whose venomous body moves with uncanny agility across the desert.
Original Text
The Pharsalia (IX, 7OI-28) catalogues the real or imaginary reptiles that Cato’s soldiers met up with on their scorching march across the African desert. Among them are the Pareas, ‘content with its tail to cleave its track’ (or as a seventeenth-century Spanish poet has it, ‘which makes its way, erect as a staff’), and the Jaculi, which darts from trees like javelins, and ‘the dangerous Amphisbaena, also, that moves on at both of its heads’ . Pliny uses nearly the same words to describe the Amphisbaena, adding: ‘as though one mouth were not enough for the discharge of all its venom’
Brunetto Latini’s Tesoro - the encyclopedia which Latini recommended to his old disciple in the seventh circle of Hell - is less terse and clearer: The Amphisbaena is a serpent having two heads, the one in its proper place and the other in its tail; and it can bite with both, and run with agility, and its eyes glare like candles.’ Sir Thomas Browne in his Vulgar Errors (I646) wrote that there is no species without a bottom, top, front, back, left, and right, and he denied the existence of the Amphisbaena, ‘for the senses being placed at both extreams, doth make both ends anterior, which is impossible . . . And therefore this duplicity was ill contrived to place one head at both extreams . . . ’ Amphisbaena, in Greek means ‘goes both ways’ . In the Antilles and in certain parts of America, the name is given to a reptile commonly known as the doble andadora (Both ways goer), the ‘two-headed snake’, and ‘mother of ants’ . It is said that ants nourish it. Also that if it is chopped in half, its two parts will join again.
The Amphisbaena’s medicinal properties were celebrated by Pliny.
Brunetto Latini’s Tesoro - the encyclopedia which Latini recommended to his old disciple in the seventh circle of Hell - is less terse and clearer: The Amphisbaena is a serpent having two heads, the one in its proper place and the other in its tail; and it can bite with both, and run with agility, and its eyes glare like candles.’ Sir Thomas Browne in his Vulgar Errors (I646) wrote that there is no species without a bottom, top, front, back, left, and right, and he denied the existence of the Amphisbaena, ‘for the senses being placed at both extreams, doth make both ends anterior, which is impossible . . . And therefore this duplicity was ill contrived to place one head at both extreams . . . ’ Amphisbaena, in Greek means ‘goes both ways’ . In the Antilles and in certain parts of America, the name is given to a reptile commonly known as the doble andadora (Both ways goer), the ‘two-headed snake’, and ‘mother of ants’ . It is said that ants nourish it. Also that if it is chopped in half, its two parts will join again.
The Amphisbaena’s medicinal properties were celebrated by Pliny.