In the mythology of all ancient cultures there are animals with special attributes. The unicorns, the cancerbero, the Japanese bakeneko cats… and in Greek and Roman mythology there was a bird that was capable of curing diseases and predicted who was going to die and who was not. Join us to meet the Caladrius, the mythological bird that cures diseases.
Caladrius, the bird that heals and predicts death
The figure of Caladrius is not original to Roman mythology, like almost none of its gods. We already find it among the greek mythological animals with the name of Dhalion.
For the Romans the Caladrius was a white bird that lived in the royal gardens and was able to determine whether someone was going to die or not. The way she did it was simple; if she came closer and I looked at the sick man, he would survive and If I didn’t look at it, it was sign that he was not going to recover. The Caladrius could not be bought or sold and that is why it was raised alongside the kings as a public service. It is not clear which bird it actually was; Some authors think it was a white dove, others a swan, and in the Middle Ages it was thought it could be a golden plover or even a lark.
It was also capable of curing diseases when they were not fatal and the peculiar procedure to do so consisted of approaching the affected person, pick up or catch the disease and fly awaymoment in which evil was dispersed through the air and he cured both the sick and Caladrius himself. Other versions of the myth state that The bird approaches the sun so that it burns away the disease and the affected person heals. The Caladrius was not to be killed or eaten, since it was a sacred animal.
The dubious «virtue» of expel feces while eatingyes, the feces had healing power, since it was thought that if a paste was made with them and spread over the eyes, it could cure blindness and other eye diseases. The figure of Caladrius can also be found in the medieval bestiary and Christianity established a parallelism between this mythological bird and Jesus Christ: the bird picks up the disease and destroys it and Jesus Christ picks up man’s sin and saves him.
During the Middle Ages there were several translation errors of Latin texts which led to confusion about the effects of Caladrius. In one of them «fimus» was translated, which is manure or feces, into «femur,» which is the bone of the thigh.leading to the eyes of the sick being smeared with the marrow of the upper bone of the bird’s leg.
In some way, the attitude of the Caladrius is reminiscent of those animals that we studied in the article: Animals that predict death? and perhaps from a similar fact the Greeks and Romans derived the idea of the Dhalion or Caladrius.
If you were interested in this article, you may want to know more about mythological animals by reading the post:
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