Chalkydri

Also Known As: Slavonic khalkedry; from Greek χαλκύδραι, khalkýdrai, “brazen hydras” or “copper serpents”; also rendered Chalkidri, Khalkedra
Region/Culture: West Asia/Middle East
Mythos: Jewish Mythology, Christian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Elementals
Mythical Attributes: Twelve angelic wings apiece, a body nine hundred measures long and coloured like a rainbow, and the carrying of the sun’s heat and dew.
Role in Mythos: They attend the sun on its circuit through the fourth heaven and open the day with song.
Relation to Humans: No one prays to them, bargains with them or meets them, and the Book of the Secrets of Enoch records no cult, no offering and no encounter. The only thing that reaches the ground is the sound: when the chalkydri sing at daybreak, every bird on earth answers.

Nine hundred measures across, and the first thing they do every morning is sing.

The Slavonic Book of the Secrets of Enoch carries the patriarch up through one heaven after another, and at the fourth it stops to show him the working parts of daylight. The gates the sun enters. The reckoning of the hours of the year. The circuit that runs twenty-eight years and then begins again from the beginning. Moving with all of that machinery are creatures the book calls the flying elements of the sun, and there are two kinds of them. One is the phoenix, which needs no introduction. The other is the chalkydri, which does.

They have a crocodile’s head and the feet and tail of a lion. Their colour is given as empurpled, like the rainbow, a phrase that reads as ornament until you try to hold the picture and realise the text is describing a hide that will not settle on one shade. Each has twelve wings, and the wings are said to be like the wings of angels rather than like the wings of birds. Nine hundred measures is the size. The book never says measures of what, and no later reader has managed to fix the number to anything, so the only honest scale is the one the sentence itself gives: too large to stand next to.

The work assigned to them is physical. They attend and accompany the sun, bearing heat and dew, as it is ordered them from God. Warmth on one side of the ledger and wet on the other, both of them freight, both of them carried by muscle and wingbeat rather than conjured. Picture the sun sinking under the rim of the earth with its rays still burning, and the chalkydri going down with it in convoy, hauling the next morning’s temperature and the next morning’s water somewhere out of sight beneath the world. They do this every day. It is closer to haulage than to holiness.

Then the sun comes up, and they open their mouths. At the rising the phoenixes and the chalkydri break into song together, and the text is careful about what happens next: every bird flutters its wings, rejoicing at the giver of light. The dawn chorus in a garden is presented as an echo. The birds are answering something they can hear and the listener cannot. And the singing is not spontaneous, because the passage closes by noting that they sang at the command of the Lord, which quietly removes any suggestion that the creatures are doing this because they feel like it.

Where they came from is not recorded. Enoch is shown no account of their making, no first chalkydri, no moment when the sun was given its escort. They are simply already at work when he arrives, in the way that the gates and the hours are already at work.

The name is stranger than the animal. Behind the Slavonic sits a Greek word, and the reading that has stuck since R. H. Charles is χαλκύδραι, brazen hydras or copper serpents. There is no serpent anywhere in the description. Nobody has reconciled the name with the body. It is possible the word arrived attached to something else entirely and was later fitted to the solar creatures, and it is equally possible the compiler simply liked the sound of bronze.

The description itself is not stable either. The Book of the Secrets of Enoch survives in more than twenty Church Slavonic manuscripts copied between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, split into a longer and a shorter family, and scholars have argued for over a century about which family is closer to the lost Greek behind them. In the longer recension, as Andrei Orlov summarises it in the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, the parts swap around: the creature takes the form of a lion, and it is the legs, the tail and the head that belong to the crocodile. Same menagerie, reassembled. For a being whose entire biography is one paragraph of anatomy, that is a substantial disagreement.

They travel, thinly, outside the book. The chalkydri turn up again in a medieval Greek dialogue, the Panagiotae cum Azymita Disputatio, a long way in time and temper from a Second Temple ascent vision. The phoenixes had better luck. In the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch a single enormous bird flies ahead of the sun and takes the worst of its heat so the earth is not scorched, doing much the same job with far more drama, and the chalkydri are nowhere in it.

What they can do follows exactly from what they are for. They fly beside a star without burning. They lift heat and dew as cargo. Their voices set the birds of the world moving, which is the closest thing to power over anything terrestrial that the text grants them. Beyond that the limits close in fast. They sing when told. They carry what they are given. They have no names, no ranks, no quarrels, no falls from grace, and unlike the Grigori one heaven above them they never once disobey. Nothing in the record suggests a chalkydri has ever wanted anything. Whatever twelve wings and nine hundred measures are worth, the creature spends all of it going in circles behind the sun, and is at the eastern gate again the next morning, singing on cue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the chalkydri?

The chalkydri are angelic solar creatures described in 2 Enoch, the Slavonic Book of the Secrets of Enoch. They live in the fourth heaven, accompany the sun on its daily circuit, and carry its heat and dew. The text groups them with the phoenixes and calls both “flying elements of the sun.”

What do the chalkydri look like?

According to 2 Enoch, a chalkydri has a crocodile’s head with the feet and tail of a lion, a purple colouring like a rainbow, twelve wings of the sort angels have, and a size of nine hundred measures. The longer manuscript recension reverses some of this, giving the body of a lion with the legs, tail and head of a crocodile. The text never explains what a “measure” is.

What does the name Chalkydri mean?

The name is generally read as the Greek χαλκύδραι, meaning “brazen hydras” or “copper serpents,” an interpretation proposed by R. H. Charles. Nothing in the description of the creature is serpentine, so the name and the body do not match, and the mismatch has never been explained.

What do the chalkydri do at sunrise?

At daybreak the chalkydri and the phoenixes break into song at the command of God, and every bird on earth flutters its wings in response, rejoicing at the giver of light. In 2 Enoch the ordinary dawn chorus is presented as an answer to a sound made in the fourth heaven.

Where do the chalkydri appear outside 2 Enoch?

Almost nowhere. Beyond 2 Enoch, the chalkydri surface in a medieval Greek text, the Panagiotae cum Azymita Disputatio. The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch describes a comparable solar guardian, but there the creature is a phoenix and the chalkydri are absent.