Hellbender Salamanders: Etymology?

Salamander Alchemy

(Image from Wikipedia)

One longstanding, albeit erroneous belief about salamaders is that they can imperviously withstand the flames of even very hot fires, as I learned in my history-of-science days, thereby prompting my speculation yesterday:

I wonder if "hellbender" has some connection to old beliefs about salamanders. They were believed impervious to fire, able to live in flames, and therefore somehow linked to the devil. But I'm just guessing. Anybody know the etymology?

I've tried to find evidence, though the links are only tenuous, but here's some information from an online Medieval Bestiary:

Pliny the Elder [1st century CE] (Natural History, Book 10, 86): The salamander is a shaped like a lizard, but is covered with spots. A salamander is so cold that it puts out fire on contact. It vomits from its mouth a milky liquid; if this liquid touches any part of the human body it causes all the hair to fall off, and the skin to change color and break out in a rash. Salamanders only appear when it rains and disappear in fine weather. (Book 11, 116): It is fatal to drink water or wine when a salamander has died in it, as is drinking from a vessel from which the creature has drunk.

Augustine [5th century CE] (City of God, Book 21, chapter 4): If the salamander lives in fire, as naturalists have recorded, this is a sufficiently convincing example that everything which burns is not consumed, as the souls in hell are not.

Isidore of Seville [7th century CE] (Etymologies, Book 12, 4:36): The salamander alone of animals puts out fires; it can live in fire without pain and without being burned. Of all the venomous animals its strength is the greatest because it kills many at once. If it crawls into a tree it poisons all of the fruit, and anyone who eats the fruit will die; if it falls in a well it poisons the water so that any who drink it die.

The site then helpfully links to images from bestiaries. One image from the Museum Meermanno (Hague, Netherlands) has a manuscript dating from 1450 that shows what appears to be a serpent in a tree offering an apple to a man:


The text, however, identifies this creature as a salamander: "Een salamandra vergiftigt de appels in een boom; een man eet een vergiftigde appel" (translation: "A salamander poisons the apples in a tree; a man eats a poisoned apple"). The Medieval Bestiary website describes the scene in this way:

Museum Meermanno, MMW, 10 B 25 (f. 43r) shows the salamander as a snake spiraling up an apple tree; the snake has an apple in its mouth, making the scene very similar to some manuscript illustrations of the temptation of Eve. A man holding an apple stands near the tree, a hand to his head and looking sick.

The belief that salamanders could live in fire, the remarks by Augustine about salamander-like souls in hell remaining unconsumed by hellfire, and the pictorial connection between salamanders and Satan all suggest that further investigation into the etymology of "hellbender" with respect to bestiary books and alchemical texts could prove fruitful.

Perhaps some Medievalist could supply more information?

Aquinas: Careless Curiosity

The Slothful Punished in Hell

(Nicolas le Rouge, Le grant kalendrier des Bergiers, 1496)

In a somewhat obscure passage of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (but is anything not obscure in that tome!), Hans Blumenberg observes -- on Thomas Aquinas discussing sloth (acedia) as a sin and a vice -- that for Aquinas, sloth leads both to indolence and to curiosity:

The acedia [indifference, apathy] that is dealt with here accomodates itself better to the syndrome of the 'postparadisaic' situation. Thomas uses this cardinal vice to epitomize the despondency and indolence of the man who has deviated from his vocation, who conceals from himself in this pure melancholy the seriousness of the cura, actio, and labor [care, action, and labor] that are his task. Acedia is a form of sadness that surrenders itself to its own heaviness and thereby turns away from the goal of its existence, indeed, from all purposeful behavior and 'exertion' whatever (fuga finis [flight from purpose]). Curiositas is only one of the forms that this purposelessness takes. Here lies the connection with its definition as inconsistency, as premature failure with respect to the demands of a reality that no longer holds itself open to man in immediate self-givenness. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy, page 334)

By the "postparadisiac" situation referred to here, Blumenberg means the "fallenness" of the world that renders its no longer teleologically fitted to mankind's senses and reason. Recall that Augustine used this reasoning to cast suspicion upon curiosity for its tendency to focus one's attention upon the misleading things of this world and away from one's soul. Unlike Augustine, however, Aquinas is strongly Aristotelian and therefore more interested in the empirical things of this world. One must still seek God's purposes in this cosmos, of course, but this takes focused, purposeful effort. Lack of effort, or purposelessness, results from sloth and manifests itself in carelessness, inactivity, and inexertion on the one hand and in curiosity on the other.

We may find ourselves surprised to read that the vice of sloth leads to the vice of curiosity, since that seems a kind of activity, but that is what Aquinas says in Summa Theologica II. 2, Question 35, Article 4. In Objection 3, Aquinas notes that:

[Isidore of Seville] states that from sloth seven things arise, viz. "idleness, drowsiness, uneasiness of the mind, restlessness of the body, instability, loquacity, curiosity." (Summa Theologica II. 2, q. 35, a. 4, obj. 3)

In his Reply to Objection 3, Aquinas notes that Pope Gregory I ("the Great") specifies some of the effects of sloth as belonging to the "wandering of the mind after unlawful things," concerning which Aquinas observes:

This tendency to wander, if it reside in the mind itself that is desirous of rushing after various things without rhyme or reason, is called "uneasiness of the mind," but if it pertains to the imaginative power, it is called "curiosity"; if it affect the speech it is called "loquacity"; and in so far as it affects a body that changes place, it is called "restlessness of the body," when, to wit, a man shows the unsteadiness of his mind, by the inordinate movements of members of his body; while if it causes the body to move from one place to another, it is called "instability"; or "instability" may denote changeableness of purpose. (Summa Theologica II. 2, q. 35, a. 4, rep. obj. 3)

Thus does sloth lead to action, but action without purpose, lazy, an idleness in activity, and since "idleness is opposed to carefulness" (Summa Theologica II. 2, q. 35, a. 2, obj. 3), hence to carelessness.

Hence the irony -- given the etymological link between care (cura) and curiosity (from curiosus, meaning "careful") -- of a careless curiosity.