Ichneumon

Also Known As: Echinemon, Neomon, Neomen, Ycnheomon, Suillus, the pharaoh’s rat; Greek ikhneumon, “the tracker”
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It coats itself in Nile mud and bakes the layers hard in the sun until it is wearing armour, then kills asps and, in the bestiaries, dragons.
Role in Mythos: In Egypt it is the cobra’s killer turned into one of the cobra goddess’s own forms; in the Latin natural historians it is the small animal that beats the crocodile.
Relation to Humans: Herodotus recorded that dead ichneumons were embalmed and buried in sacred vaults in their own towns, and Late Period bronzes were cast as reliquaries to hold their mummies. To people the animal is harmless, and it was honoured precisely because of what it killed.

The mud goes on in layers. The animal wades into the shallows at the river’s edge, rolls until it is heavy and black with silt, then climbs the bank and lies flat in the sun until the coating dries pale and tight and begins to craze along the joints. Then it goes back down and does it again. By the third or fourth coat the thing standing on the mudflat is not quite an animal any more. It is a low grey crust with a pointed head and a long tail, and it walks toward the asp without hurrying.

Pliny gives the fight three moves. The ichneumon turns its back and lifts its tail, and the serpent strikes at the tail, and the strikes land in baked clay and accomplish nothing. It keeps turning, keeps absorbing, waits. Then the head goes sideways, the eye finds the throat, and the asp is finished. Pliny had already explained why the snake could be beaten this way: nature gave the asp dim eyes set in its temples rather than facing forward, so it is roused more by sound than by sight, and it is fighting something it can barely see.

Underneath the story is an ordinary animal, and it is not a monster. Herpestes ichneumon, the Egyptian mongoose, still works the Nile marshes. Its body runs to about two feet with a black-tipped tail nearly as long again, the legs are short, the snout is pointed, and from any distance the gliding low gait reads more like a reptile than a mammal. The coat is coarse and grizzled, flecked brown and yellow. At first light it comes along a canal bank with its head down and the tip of its tail curling forward, reading the ground by nose, and that is the whole of its ordinary business. The Greeks named it the tracker for exactly that. Isidore of Seville, seven centuries after Pliny, thought the name came from the animal’s ability to smell the difference between good food and poison, and passed on an older Latin name, suillus, which he derived from saeta, bristle, because the hair on it stands up rather than lying down.

What the legend adds is the crocodile. Strabo, travelling in Egypt around the turn of the first century, found the ichneumon worshipped at Heracleopolis in direct opposition to the neighbouring Arsinoites, who worshipped crocodiles, which made two adjacent towns theologically incompatible in a way that must have been awkward at festivals. The Heracleopolitans had their reasons. Their animal destroyed asps and asps’ eggs alike, seized the snakes by head or tail, dragged them into the river and drowned them there, and then went looking for something larger.

It found the crocodile asleep. Pliny sets the scene with unusual care: the animal full of fish, hauled out on the shore with its mouth still fouled with the meal, and a small bird, called the trochilus there and the king-bird in Italy, hopping in to clean out first the mouth, then the teeth, then the throat, while the crocodile gapes wider and wider for the pleasure of the scratching. That is the moment the ichneumon has been waiting for. It goes down the open throat like a thrown javelin and gnaws out the belly. Strabo tells it more coldly and follows it further, all the way through the intestines and out through the wall of the dead body.

The real animal does none of this.

That never mattered. Long before Pliny, Egypt had made the creature holy, and the reasons were its own. Herodotus, walking the country in the fifth century, noted that ichneumons were embalmed and buried in sacred vaults in their own towns, the way dogs were. The bronze evidence is stranger. Hollow Late Period statuettes of Wadjet, the cobra goddess of Buto, were made to hold mummified ichneumons; an inventory of a dozen such objects in Berlin suggests that three quarters of them still contained one, though whether anybody looked inside or only inferred it is not clear. The logic is Egyptian and it is deliberate. A hostile force is converted into a protective one, so the cobra’s most efficient killer becomes one of the cobra goddess’s own forms. Some of those reliquaries are shaped as obelisks, which is a sun ray in Egyptian terms and also a body of Osiris, so the animal sealed inside becomes Osiris too. A separate bronze in Vienna carries a small obelisk against the animal’s chest with an inscription naming it an incarnation of Atum. In the temple pairings the bright-eyed ichneumon of Wadjet at Buto stands opposite the near-blind shrew of Horus at Letopolis, day against night. On a floor of the Casa del Fauno at Pompeii, a cobra and an ichneumon face each other across an Egyptianising border, still braced, long after anyone in Italy had seen either one alive.

The medieval version keeps the trick and changes the target. Isidore dropped the armour entirely and kept only the feint: the raised tail is bait, the asp commits its whole force to it, and while it is busy being deceived it is seized. Thomas of Cantimpré copied that into his encyclopedia of nature almost word for word around the middle of the thirteenth century, adding only that the beast wears bristles instead of hair. The bestiaries then promoted the enemy from asp to serpent and from serpent to dragon, restored the mud, and gave the animal one further refinement: it plugs its own nostrils with its tail before going in, so that nothing of the dragon can be breathed. The crocodile business was handed to a twin, the hydrus, which rolls in mud, lets itself be swallowed whole and eats its way out of the belly, and which the bestiaries read as Christ going down into a crocodile that stands for hell and tearing it open from the inside. Illuminators stopped worrying much about which of the two they were drawing. Leonardo, sketching notes toward a bestiary of his own, was still recording the recipe: mud, sun, mud again, three or four coats until the creature is wearing a coat of mail.

Its powers all come from the same modest source. It is small, and being small is the point, because it can get inside the thing that means to eat it. It can build armour out of any riverbank in Egypt, which means it can arm itself anywhere it stands. It can be struck again and again without harm, because the venom lands in clay. It hunts by scent, so nothing hides from it for long. And it kills from within, which no amount of hide or bulk defends against.

The limits follow just as directly. The armour is dried mud, and dried mud stops a strike and nothing else, not weight, not teeth. No account anywhere describes the ichneumon winning a fight it did not first spend hours preparing for. Against the crocodile it wins only by patience, only while the enemy is asleep with its mouth propped open by a bird, and only by taking the appalling risk of climbing into it; against a waking crocodile it is a small animal beside a very large one. Nor was it ever safe from people. Nemesianus, writing on hunting, sends his hunters into the reeds along the riverbanks after it, which is the last honest note in the whole tradition. An animal the priests of one town sealed in bronze was, in the next, something you flushed out of the rushes with dogs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ichneumon?

The ichneumon is a legendary beast of Egyptian and Greco-Roman lore that passed into the medieval bestiaries, based on the real Egyptian mongoose, Herpestes ichneumon. Ancient writers described it rolling in Nile mud, drying the layers hard in the sun until they formed armour, and then attacking asps and crocodiles in that coating. Its Greek name means “the tracker”.

How does the ichneumon kill a crocodile?

Strabo and Pliny both describe the ichneumon waiting until a crocodile is asleep on the bank with its jaws open, then going down the open throat and eating through the entrails and belly. Pliny adds that the crocodile’s mouth is being held open by a small bird, the trochilus, that cleans its teeth, and that the ichneumon enters like a thrown javelin. Strabo has the ichneumon emerge afterwards through the dead body.

Why did the ancient Egyptians honour the ichneumon?

The Egyptians valued the ichneumon as a killer of cobras, and Herodotus recorded that dead ichneumons were embalmed and buried in sacred vaults in their own towns, as dogs were. Hollow Late Period bronze statuettes of the cobra goddess Wadjet were made as reliquaries to hold mummified ichneumons, so that the snake’s deadliest enemy became one of the snake goddess’s own forms. Another bronze, now in Vienna, identifies the animal by inscription as an incarnation of the god Atum.

Why does the ichneumon fight a dragon in medieval bestiaries?

The bestiaries inherited the ichneumon from Pliny and Isidore of Seville and steadily promoted its enemy, from asp to serpent to dragon. In that version the ichneumon coats itself in mud, closes its nostrils with its own tail so it cannot breathe the dragon in, and attacks. Isidore himself kept only the tail feint and left the mud out.

Is the ichneumon a real animal?

The animal is real; almost everything told about it is not. The Egyptian mongoose is about two feet long with a black-tipped tail nearly as long again, hunts by scent along riverbanks, and does kill snakes, but it does not build mud armour, plug its nose with its tail, or climb down a crocodile’s throat. Those details come from ancient natural history, chiefly Pliny and Strabo, and were repeated with growing confidence for the next fifteen hundred years.