Amphiptere

Region/Culture: Western European heraldry, with roots in Greek classical natural history
Mythos: Medieval European Mythology, Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Winged serpent, a legless flying snake
Mythical Attributes: A swift, feather-winged serpent without legs, tied to vigilance and the guarding of precious things.
Role in Mythos: In its older classical form it is the venomous guardian of Arabia’s frankincense groves, and in later heraldry it becomes an emblem of swiftness and watchfulness on noble coats of arms.
Relation to Humans: In the classical accounts it was a lethal hazard that swarmed the spice trees and had to be driven off with smoke before a harvest could be gathered. In heraldry it shed that menace entirely and survived as a borrowed symbol, a mark of authority painted onto the shields of a few aristocratic houses.

At first light over the frankincense country of southern Arabia the trees seemed to bleed. Pale resin wept from the cut bark, the air went thick and sweet and resinous, and coiled in the branches were the small winged snakes that no harvester wanted to meet. They were not large. They hung among the boughs in numbers, bright-feathered and watchful, and they kept the trees as if the trees belonged to them. Only one thing moved them. Burn the gum of the storax shrub beneath the branches and the rising smoke would force them up and off, and only in that bitter haze could a person strip the precious resin without paying for it in venom.

This is the oldest face of the amphiptere, the feather-winged serpent of the spice groves. Herodotus went looking for it. He traveled to a place in Arabia near the town of Buto, and what he found was not a living swarm but a boneyard: heaps of serpent spines scattered where a narrow mountain pass opened toward the plain of Egypt, backbones great and small and smaller still, past counting. The tale fastened to the bones ran like this. Each spring the winged serpents lifted out of Arabia and flew for Egypt, and each spring the ibis birds met them in the pass and slaughtered them there. For that one service the Egyptians honored the ibis above other birds, and the bones in the dust were the proof of the bargain.

The Greeks who wrote these creatures down did not soften them. Herodotus added that if the winged serpents bred like ordinary snakes the world would be unlivable, but their mating carried its own check: the female bites through the neck of the male as he finishes, and the young, avenging the father they never knew, gnaw their way out through their mother’s belly to be born. Aelian, centuries later, repeated the ibis story almost word for word, the black bird turning back the invasion out of love for the land. He also passed on a stranger report from Megasthenes, who claimed that in India there were winged serpents that flew only by night and voided a urine that raised a festering sore on any skin it touched. The accounts vary in their particulars and agree on the essential thing. These were not ornaments. They were a hazard with feathers.

The name itself is a fossil of that older world. The Greeks sometimes called them the ophies amphipterotoi, the serpents with two pairs of wings, and from that double-winged root the heralds of medieval Europe lifted the word amphiptere. By then the creature had crossed from natural history into the painted grammar of coats of arms, and it arrived stripped of its swarm and its venom, carrying only its shape and a handful of virtues. A winged serpent on a shield read as swiftness, as vigilance, as authority. It was a rare charge. The old heraldic manuals note that it appears seldom in either English or continental arms, which made it all the more distinctive where it did. The French House of Potier bore it, azure with a purple bendlet set between two golden amphipteres, and used the serpents again as supporters flanking the shield, a device echoed by the Dukes of Tresmes and of Gesvres. A creature that began as a plague on the frankincense trade ended as a quiet boast of lineage.

What it actually looked like depended on who was drawing it. The fullest descriptions give it feathers the pale color of a sunrise, a long serpentine body coiling like a lindworm, and bat-shaped wings whose forearms were feathered and often tinged green, trailing into a tail like a wyvern’s. Other renderings feather it from snout to tail-tip, add a row of spikes down the tail, and shorten the face into something almost beaked. The constant across every version is what it lacks. It has no legs. It is a snake that flies, and nothing more is needed.

Its gifts follow from that single fact. Speed was the whole of it, the darting, airborne quickness that let a serpent take to the sky and cover ground no ordinary snake could reach, and in the classical reports a bite or a spray of venom waited at the end of the flight. Vigilance came bundled with the speed, the watchfulness of a thing that guards and does not sleep on the job. The weaknesses are just as plain. Smoke undid the Arabian serpents, the reek of burning storax peeling them off the branches they defended. The ibis undid them in the pass, year after year, a single determined bird breaking the migration before it reached Egypt. And the cruelest limit was built into the species itself, a way of breeding that killed both parents and answered, in the old logic of the story, why the air was not black with them. In heraldry it has no powers at all. It has only meaning, which on a shield is the only thing that counts.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an amphiptere?

An amphiptere is a winged serpent, a legless flying snake known from European heraldry and from older Greek accounts of natural history. In its heraldic form it usually has feathered or bat-like wings, a coiling serpent’s body, and a long tail, and it carries no legs at all. The name comes from a Greek phrase meaning “double-winged serpent.”

Where does the amphiptere come from?

The amphiptere has two origins layered on top of each other. The older one is Greek natural history, where writers like Herodotus and Aelian described feather-winged serpents living in Arabia. The later one is medieval European heraldry, which borrowed the Greek name and turned the creature into a symbolic charge on coats of arms.

What did the winged serpents of Arabia guard?

According to Herodotus, the winged serpents of Arabia guarded the trees that produced frankincense, swarming the branches in great numbers. Harvesters could only gather the valuable resin by burning the gum of the storax shrub, because the rising smoke was the one thing that drove the serpents away from the trees.

How were the winged serpents of Arabia killed?

Herodotus and Aelian both wrote that the winged serpents tried to fly from Arabia into Egypt each spring, and that ibis birds intercepted and killed them in a narrow mountain pass before they could arrive. Herodotus claimed to have seen the heaps of serpent bones left in that pass, and said the Egyptians honored the ibis for keeping the invaders out.

What does the amphiptere mean in heraldry?

In heraldry the amphiptere stands for swiftness, vigilance, and authority. It was a rare charge, appearing on only a few coats of arms, most notably those of the French House of Potier, who bore two golden amphipteres on a blue field and also used them as supporters beside the shield.