Barometz (the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary)

Region/Culture: Central Asia (historical Tartary and Scythia)
Mythos: Medieval European Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts (zoophyte; a creature held to be both plant and animal)
Mythical Attributes: A living lamb joined to the soil by a stalk growing from its navel, able to graze only the grass within the cord’s reach.
Role in Mythos: It served European writers as a real marvel of the distant East and, later, as a test case in debates about where plants ended and animals began.
Relation to Humans: People of its supposed homeland were said to shear its wool for caps and clothing and to eat its sweet-blooded flesh once it had died. To the naturalists, poets, and travelers of medieval and Renaissance Europe it was an object of belief, illustration, and eventually ridicule.

On the cold plains east of the Volga, where the grass runs unbroken to the horizon and the wind carries the smell of crushed wormwood, there was said to stand a lamb that could not walk away. A stalk grew from its navel and ran down into the soil, woody and taut, holding it in place like a tether no knife had tied. The animal bent its neck and cropped the grass in a slow circle around itself. When the last blade within reach was gone, it had nowhere left to feed, and it died where it was rooted.

This was the Barometz, the vegetable lamb of Tartary, and for several centuries serious men in Europe took it seriously. They gave it Latin names, Agnus scythicus and Planta Tartarica Barometz, and a scatter of others besides, Borametz, Boranetz, the Scythian lamb, as if careful labeling could pin down something that grew sheep on a stem.

It was small, a little over two feet at the shoulder in the fullest accounts, with the soft body of a newborn lamb and a coat of fine pale wool that the people of the region were said to shear and weave into caps and other clothing. Where an ordinary lamb has horns it carried two tight curls of hair instead. Its hooves were not horn but more parted tufts of the same fleece. Cut it, and it bled. The blood was the strange part. It ran sweet, closer to honey than to anything from a butcher’s yard, and beneath the skin there was no proper flesh, only a pale substance more like the meat of a crab.

How it came into the world depended on who was telling it. In the older story the lamb was a fruit. A seed like a melon’s was set in the ground, and from it swelled a gourd, and when the gourd was cut open there lay a small lamb inside, perfectly formed, bloodied and bare of wool, ready to be eaten along with the rind that had held it. In the later and stranger version the lamb was no fruit at all but a living thing joined to a living plant, half of each, fixed to the earth by the cord at its belly and doomed the moment its pasture ran out.

The tale reached western Europe in the fourteenth century in the pages of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a book that promised the wonders of the East and delivered them by the cartload. From there it spread and hardened into something people felt obliged to argue about. An imperial ambassador named Sigismund von Herberstein, a careful man who had crossed Russia twice on the emperor’s business, wrote that he had heard of the lamb from so many trustworthy sources that he could not bring himself to dismiss it, and he placed it near the Caspian, between the Ural and the Volga. Naturalists drew it. The botanist Claude Duret defended it in print while Julius Caesar Scaliger sharpened his sarcasm against it. Two hundred years on, Erasmus Darwin was still putting it into verse, cradling his gentle borametz in snow and giving it golden hair, and Denis Diderot was using the same creature in his Encyclopédie to show how easily learned men swallow a lie when enough of them repeat it.

Older still were its cousins in other lands. Jewish folklore knew a lamb-shaped plant called the yeduah or adnei hasadeh, rooted by a navel cord and harvested only by cutting the stem from a distance with arrows, after which its bones served in divination. In China there were tales of a watersheep, also half-plant and half-animal, penned behind a fence and guarded by armed men who beat drums to keep it calm, its wool spun into fine cloth. The same idea kept surfacing wherever wool seemed to grow where no animal should be.

Its whole existence was a kind of trap. The lamb could turn its head, flex the cord, lean a little this way and that, and that was the limit of its freedom. It could not run, could not chase fresh grass, could not defend itself against anything. Wolves, the stories agreed, were the only beasts that came for it, and they came gladly; the vegetable lamb was a favorite meal, and there was nothing it could do but stand there and be taken. Humans harvested it too, for the sweet blood, the crab-pale meat, and the fleece on its back. A creature that grew its own wool and could not flee the shears was, from one point of view, the perfect livestock.

There was no animal. Behind all of it stood a plant, or two. The cotton plant, scarcely known in northern Europe until late, produced wool on a stalk and may have seeded the whole notion of sheep that ripened like fruit. Centuries later a Chinese fern gave the legend a body: the woolly underground stem of Cibotium barometz, stripped of its fronds and turned upside down, looks uncannily like a small golden lamb on four legs, the cut bases of its leaf-stalks becoming the limbs. Cabinets of curiosities sold these trimmed roots as the real thing. When the physician Engelbert Kaempfer traveled to Persia in the 1680s expressly to find the lamb, he met no one who had seen one and concluded it had never lived, though he wondered whether visitors had mistaken the soft wool of unborn lambs, cut early from the ewe, for something that had grown out of the earth. A fern, a flower, and a very long appetite for marvels were all it ever was.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Barometz?

The Barometz, also called the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary or the Scythian Lamb, was a legendary creature believed to be both a plant and an animal. It supposedly grew as a living lamb attached to the ground by a woody stalk rising from its navel, grazing the grass within reach until it had eaten everything nearby and starved.

What real plant inspired the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary?

The legend is usually traced to two real plants. The cotton plant, little known in medieval northern Europe, grows wool on a stem and likely seeded the idea, while the woolly underground stem of the fern Cibotium barometz, trimmed and turned upside down, resembles a small golden lamb, which is why curiosity collectors sold the carved roots as genuine vegetable lambs.

Could the Barometz move or defend itself?

No. The Barometz was rooted to the soil by the cord at its belly and could only bend its neck to crop the grass around it, so it could not run, follow fresh pasture, or fight back. Wolves were said to be its only animal predators, and the lamb was helpless against them.

What was the Barometz used for?

According to the legend, the people of its homeland sheared the lamb’s fine pale wool to make caps and other clothing, and its body could be eaten once it died. Its blood was said to taste sweet like honey, while its inner substance was described as resembling the meat of a crab rather than ordinary flesh.

Who wrote about the Barometz?

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary entered European awareness through the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville and was later described in detail by the ambassador Sigismund von Herberstein. Renaissance and Enlightenment figures including Claude Duret, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Erasmus Darwin, and Denis Diderot debated, defended, ridiculed, or versified the creature before it was explained as a myth.