Serpents vs. Deer
Why does Pulter make a monstrous serpent the natural enemy of the moose?
While the serpents certainly have a moralistic function as symbols of sin and death, the moose’s devouring precipitates an extended list of predators and prey presented more naturalistically:
- Soe have I seen a hawk A Phesant truss
- Or Patriges, Soe Melancholly Puss
- Doth Mice Surprise, Soe Foxes Snatch up Lambs
- As they lie playing by their Uberous Dams
Seventeenth-century accounts of New England only mention wolves and people as hunting moose, not snakes (see Curation Moose: Fact and Fiction. However, these same sources compare moose to other deer: both William Wood and Thomas Morton compare moose to red deer, while Wood also claims moose are “headed like a Buck” (a male fallow deer).1 Morton explicitly describes moose as a type or species of “very large Deer.”2 Pulter too seems to think comparatively when she describes her moose’s “Stag like horns” (l.14). This association of moose with deer more broadly is significant because there is precedent for a natural enmity between deer and serpents.
Philemon Holland’s English translation of Pliny’s Latin Natural History (1601) is a huge, encyclopaedic volume that contains not only information on animals and plants, but also geography, the weather and astronomy, amongst other topics. Pliny, via Holland, reports on the antipathy between deer and snakes.
This kind of Deer maintain fight with serpents, and are their mortal enemies: they will follow them to their very holes, and there (by the strength of drawing and snuffing up their wind at the nostrils) force them out whether they will or no: and therefore there is not so good a thing again to chase away serpents, as is the smoke and smell of an Harts horn burnt.
In his bestiary The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes (1607), Edward Topsell draws on Pliny but expands this account considerably.
There is many times strange conflicts betwixt the Hart and the Serpent, thus drawn forth, for the Serpent seeing her adversary lifteth her neck above the ground, and grasheth at the Hart with her teeth, breathing out very bitter hissings: on the contrary, the Hart deriding the vain endeavour of his weak adversary, readier to fight than powerful to harm him, suffereth him to embrace both his neck and Legs with his long and thin body, but at an instant teareth it into an hundred pieces. But the most strange combats are betwixt the Harts and Serpents of Libya, where the hatred is deeper; and the Serpents watch the Hart when he lieth asleep on the ground, and being a multitude of them, set upon him together, fastening their poisonful teeth in every part of his skin; some on his neck and breast; some on his sides and back, some on his Legs, and some hang upon his privy parts, biting him with mortal rage, to overthrow their foe.
The poor Hart being thus oppressed with a multitude, and pricked with venomous pains assayeth to run away, but all in vain, their cold earthy bodies and winding tails, both overcharge his strength, and hinder his pace: he then in a rage with his teeth, feet, and horn assaileth his enemies, whose spears are already entered into his body, tearing some of them in pieces, and beating other asunder: they nevertheless (like men) knowing that now they must die rather than give over and yield to their pitiless enemy, cleave fast, and keep the hold of their teeth upon his body, although their other parts be mortally wounded, and nothing left but their heads, and therefore will die together with their foe, seeing if they were asunder no compassion can delay or mitigate their natural unappeasable hatred.
The Hart thus having eased himself by the slaughter of some, (like an Elephant) at the sight of their blood, be stirreth himself more busily in the eager battle, and therefore treadeth some under foote in the blood of their fellows, others he pursueth with tooth and horn, until he see them all destroyed: and whereas the heads hang fast in his skin, for avoiding and pulling them forth, (by a divine natural instinct) he flyeth or runneth to the Waters, where he findeth sea-crabs, and of them he maketh a medicine, whereby he shaketh off the Serpent’s heads, cureth their wounds, and avoideth all their poison; this valiant courage is in Harts against Serpents, whereas they are naturally afraid of Hares and Conies, and will not fight with them.
As Topsell’s allusion to a “divine natural instinct” might suggest, the antipathy between deer and snakes frequently took on biblical or moral significance for early modern readers. Anne Lake Prescott identifies that scriptural deer were frequently imagined as symbols for Christ in biblical exegesis and interpreted with the natural historical knowledge of deer’s hatred of serpents, an animal associated with sin, in mind.3 One of the most prominent biblical deer is in Psalm 42 which in the King James Version begins, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.”4 In Prescott’s words, “deer, as almost any reader of classical science, the church fathers, and bestiaries knew well, are thirsty by nature” and “snake-killing can be dangerous and thirsty work; so, filled with venom, deer race to a spring or brook whose waters will refresh and renew them.”5
In his Latin emblem book Symbolorum et Emblematum ex Animalibus (1595), Joachim Camerarius combines Psalm 42 with exactly this knowledge of deer. In the emblem “Una Salus [One Salvation]” the serpent-covered deer seeking water becomes a symbol for the Christian’s faith in God as the one means of salvation: “Una salus Deus est, pia mens solam hanc cape pressa / Aerumnis, sitiens cervus ut ardet aquas [The one salvation is God, pious mind seize this alone when pressed by troubles, as the thirsting deer burns for waters].”6
Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum et Emblematum Centuriae Tres. I. Ex herbis & stirpibus. II. Ex Animalibus quadrupedibus. III. Ex volatilibus & insectis(Leipzig, 1595), sig.2 L4r Biodiversity Heritage Library.
The snakes in the above descriptions and emblem are not big enough to devour a moose, unlike the monstrous serpent in Pulter’s “The Stately Mooz.” While Pulter’s enormous, moose-eating snake could, again, be primarily symbolic, Pliny does describe snakes with the capacity to eat large mammals such as deer.
- Chap. XIIII. Of monstrous great Serpents, and namely of those called Boa
Megasthenes writeth, that there be serpents among the Indians grown to that bigness, that they are able to swallow stags or bulls all whole… And this is the more credible, for that we see in Italy other serpents named Boa, so big and huge, that in the days of the Emperor Claudius there was one of them killed in the Vatican, within the belly whereof there was found an infant all whole. This Serpent liveth at the first of kines milk, and thereupon taketh the name of Boa.
Topsell’s Historie of Serpents (1608) is the second part of his huge bestiary and on its title page he advertises it as containing the “divine, natural and moral descriptions of all venomous beasts,” including mythical creatures and those that would now not be considered serpents.7 He also includes a woodcut of a boa, or boas as he calls it, on the title page.
Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents(London: William Jaggard, 1608), title page. LUNA Folger Digital Image Collection, STC 24124 Copy 2. Folger Shakespeare Library, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The presence of serpents in “The Stately Mooz” suggests that Pulter may have been thinking analogously between sources, synthesizing her knowledge of moose with her naturalistic and moralistic understanding of the enmity between deer and snakes to construct her own emblem.
Footnotes
1. William Wood, New Englands Prospect: A true, lively, and experimentall description of that part of America, commonly called Nevv England (London: By Tho. Cotes for Iohn Bellamie, 1634), sig. D3r. EEBO. [Spelling modernized.]
2. Thomas Morton, New English Canaan or New Canaan Containing an abstract of New England, composed in three books (Printed for Charles Green, 1637), sig. K1v. EEBO. [Spelling modernized.]
3. Anne Lake Prescott, “The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for Amoretti 67–70,” Spenser Studies 6, no. 1 (1985): 47–52.
4. Psalm 42:1 (KJV).
5. Prescott, “The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life,” 47.
6. Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum et Emblematum Centuriae Tres. I. Ex herbis & stirpibus. II. Ex Animalibus quadupedibus. III. Ex volatilibus & insectis (Leipzig, 1595), sig.2 L4r. Biodiversity Heritage Library. Spelling modernized. Translation my own, with thanks to the generous assistance of Anna Wall and Namratha Rao.
7. Edward Topsell, The Historie of Serpents (London: William Jaggard, 1608), title page. EEBO.