The Sea Inside

de la Mare wrote, starving themselves for weeks on end and even chaining themselves to the ground in an effort to outdo each other’s piety.
    As Helen Waddell records in her charming
Beasts and Saints
, a translation of their stories published, with elegant engravings by Robert Gibbings, in 1934, many Desert Fathers demonstrated a remarkable affinity with animals. St Mark the Wrestler cured a hyena whelp that had been born blind by spitting on his fingers and signing on its eyes. St Pachome walked unharmed among snakes and scorpions and summoned crocodiles to ferry him across the river ‘as one calls a cab from a rank’. And St Simon of Stylites, who lived on a pillar for forty years, took a tree out of a dragon’s eye, in gratitude for which the creature promptly turned Christian. Such acts evoked Eden, as Waddell wrote in an era which itself was rapidly darkening: ‘In the first paradise that lies behind the memory of the world there was no cruelty …’
    Rational thought might ascribe these scenes – for which there is a term, zooscopy, a form of mental delusion in which the sufferer sees imaginary animals – to isolation and malnutrition, but Paul thrived on just such a miracle. He settled cosily in a cave, wearing a garment of palm leaves, and until the age of forty-three lived off the fruits of the same tree. His diet doubled in variety when a raven came bearing half a loaf of bread – and repeated the feat every day for the next sixty years. Since ravens live to fifty or more, this is not entirely impossible, if one sets aside the other practicalities.
    Still sustained by heavenly bread, the elderly Paul was visited by Anthony, another hermit who lived in the wilderness ‘with no fear of the wild beasts which were therein’, and who was himself ninety years old. That day the raven arrived with a whole loaf for the saints to share, an act of corvid catering depicted, sensationally, by Velázquez in a sublime painting that shows the bird flying out of the clouds and down a sheer cliff to the two aged eremites, clutching what looks suspiciously like a bagel in its beak. Evidently a diet of bread and dates was an aid to longevity: Paul lived to one hundred and thirteen, thanks to his reliable raven. At his death, around AD 345, he was buried by Anthony – who lived to one hundred and five – in a grave dug by a pair of friendly lions, as seen in the background of Velázquez’s work.

    The stories of the desert monks show how distanced we are today from animals. They evoke an age when beasts and birds meant more than just meat or servitude, since they represented the inexplicable wonder and fear of the created world. It is why medieval bestiaries resemble typological tracts and religious analogies, with their islands that turn out to be whales, unicorns able to diagnose a maiden’s virginity, and pelicans which pluck their own breasts to suckle their brood on their blood. The raven flits through such myths, shifting from creator and sustainer to destroyer and back again. Not long after Paul was interred in the desert, the mortal remains of the martyred St Vincent of Saragossa – who’d been roasted on a gridiron – were guarded from scavenging beasts by a raven. Later, St Benedict, the sixth-century founder of the famous order, was saved by a raven that snatched away a piece of poisoned bread which the saint was about to eat.

    To Christians, the raven represented the immortal soul; some even saw in the bird’s blackness a reflection of the brightness of the sun, just as the Roman followers of Mithras had seen the bird as a solar messenger. But more northerly beliefs began to darken its reputation. At the feet of the Norse god Odin sat two wolves, Gere the greedy and Freke the voracious, who fed him, while on his shoulders perched two ravens, Hugin, or Reflection, and Munin, Memory. These birds whispered in Odin’s ears of what they had seen on their daily flying missions around the world, during which they occasionally stopped to drink the blood of wounded men. They were the enablers of Odin’s omniscience and earned him the name of Rafnagud, the Raven God; his symbol was borne on the standard of his earthly armies, bent on their own predatory plunder. Unfurled on their banners, the raven was a harbinger of war. If it hung its wings, defeat loomed. If victory was imminent, it flew outstretched as though to warn its victims, ‘This is what’s coming for you,’ shortly before turning them