Ichneumon

What it is

The ichneumon belongs to medieval animal lore, where it appears as a small hunter with a grudge against dragons. It is described as ferret-shaped but thinner, with a long head, and as quick on its feet: it can clear a couple of yards in a single jump. When a dragon comes into view, the animal is said to plaster itself with mud and to block its own nostrils with its tail before going on the attack. Some writers gave it the same quarrel with the asp and the crocodile. The word also served for the Egyptian mongoose, a snake-killing animal, and could mean an otter.

Where it comes from

The Greek word ἰχνεύμων means "tracker", and the animal's home is given as Egypt. It reaches medieval literature through older natural history. Pliny the Elder called it the asp's enemy to the death and set its battles in Egypt, while Strabo described its tactics against asps and crocodiles and noted that a people called the Heracleotae honoured it. Leonardo da Vinci repeated the account of its mud coatings. The poet Nemesianus, in the surviving opening of his Cynegetica, touches on the chase of this animal in riverbank rushes; the poem is fragmentary, and any longer description of that hunt has not come down to us.

How it is done

Accounts of the fight follow a pattern. The ichneumon rolls in Nile mud, lets the sun dry it, and repeats this until it wears several hardened layers. Pliny says it then turns its back and lifts its tail so the serpent's strikes land on the coating, before twisting round and taking the asp by the throat. Strabo has it seize the snake by head or tail and drag it into the river. For crocodiles, he says it waits until one lies basking with its mouth open, drops inside, eats through the belly and emerges from the carcass.

Tools and materials

Its equipment is mud and its own body. The mud of the Nile, dried in the sun and built up in layers, is said to serve as armour, and Leonardo compared the finished result to a coat of mail. The tail works as a plug for the nostrils during combat. Speed and a long leap belong to the picture too, and the Greek name, "tracker", points to an animal that follows its quarry. Strabo adds that the same mud covering protects it.

What it is for

In the lore the ichneumon exists as an enemy: its business is the destruction of the asp, and in some tellings of the dragon and the crocodile as well. Strabo says it destroys both the eggs and the grown snakes. He also records that the Heracleotae worshipped the animal for this hostility to crocodiles and asps, which gives the creature a place in cult as well as in description. Pliny treats the feud as the animal's chief distinction rather than an accident of nature.

Peoples and places

Egypt is the country the writers attach to the animal: Pliny, Strabo and Leonardo all set its battles there, and Leonardo calls it a native of Egypt. Beyond that, Strabo names one people, the Heracleotae, as worshippers of the ichneumon, and it is their regard for the animal that he explains. No other community appears in the accounts. Later English verse gives the word a second life: Christopher Smart, in Jubilate Agno, records that his cat Jeoffrey killed an "Ichneumon-rat".

What people believe

The accounts rest on a view of nature as a web of fixed hatreds between species. Each animal has its declared opponent, and the ichneumon's is the asp, with the dragon and the crocodile added by some writers. Pliny treats this hostility as the creature's glory. Within that scheme the mud coating is not ordinary dirt but armour, gathered and hardened deliberately, and the animal's cunning is what makes the contest worth telling. Strabo's Heracleotae take the further step of giving the enemy of snakes a place in worship.

Compare and confuse

The word covers more than the beast of the medieval accounts. It is the usual name for the Egyptian mongoose, Herpestes ichneumon, an animal that does attack snakes, and it can also be used for an otter. The variant echinemon appears in the same literature. Two things therefore share one name: the mongoose that hunts snakes and the literary animal enlarged into a fighter of dragons and crocodiles.

Questions people ask about Ichneumon

Good reading and sources

• For I will consider Jubilate AgnoThe Guardian, Article

• Ichneumon (medieval zoology) on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data