An illumination from the 13th century Salisbury Bestiary, British Library, Harley MS 4751, Folio 9r, depicting a beaver hunt
WP
This is an animal called #CASTOR the Beaver, none more gentle, and his testicles make a capital medicine (†). For this reason, so Physiologus says, when he notices that he is being pursued by the hunter, he removes his own testicles with a bite, and casts them before the sportsman, and thus escapes by flight. What is more, if he should again happen to be chased by a second hunter, he lifts himself up and shows his members to him. And the latter, when he perceives the testicles to be missing, leaves the beaver alone.
Hence every man who inclines toward the commandment of God and who wants to live chastely, must cut off from himself all vices, all motions of lewdness, and must cast them from him in the Devil’s face. Thereupon the Devil, seeing him to have nothing of his own about him, goes away from him confused. That man truly lives in God and is not captured by the Devil who says: ’I shall persevere and attain these things’.
The creature is called a Beaver (Castor) because of the
castration.
(†) The medicine was called ’castoreum’. It was situated not in the testicles, but in a different gland. The testicles of a beaver are internal and cannot be bitten off.
’The originall of the conceit,’ says Sir Thomas Browne, ’was probably Hieroglyphicall, which after became Mythologicall unto the Greeks and so set down by Aesop, and by process of tradition stole into a totall verity’.
THE BOOK OF BEASTS
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