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Dave's Mythical Creatures and Places |
Mermecolion
| Description | The
head of a lion on the body of an ant.
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| Features | The lion
head would want to eat meat, but the ant body could not digest it, so
these creatures would die shortly after birth. This "creature"
probably originated by a mistranslation by the Septuagint of the Hebrew word
for lion into a word that suggested an ant and lion hybrid. This left later
commentators to have to explain what an ant-lion was. Physiologus
writers used the idea as an allegory for the instability of uncertainty.
(see below)
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| Also Called | Ant-Lion,
Formicoleon
Other ants: The gold-digging ants of Taprobana. |
| Described by | Isidore of
Seville- "Formicoleon has the name for this, that it is the lion of the
ants, or at least ant and lion at the same time. For it is a small creature
that is very hostile to ants. It hides itself in the sand and kills
the ants as they are carrying grains. And it is called lion and ant
because it is, as it were, an ant to other animals, but a lion to ants."
(Brehaut, 1912) Early versions of the Physiologus: "Eliphaz the king of the Temanites said, 'The ant-lion perished because it had no food.' The Physiologus said: 'It had the face (or fore-part) of a lion and the hinder parts of an ant. Its father eats flesh, but its mother grains.' If they engender the ant-lion, they engender a thing of two natures, such that it cannot eat flesh because of the nature of its mother, nor grains because of the nature of its father. It perishes, therefore, because it has no nutriment. So is every double-minded man; unstable in all his ways..." (Kevan, D. K. McE. 1992. Antlion ante Linné: [Myrmekoleon] to Myrmeleon (Insecta: Neuroptera: Myrmeleonidae [sic]). Pp. 203-232 in Current Research in Neuropterology. Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Neuropterology [Symposium held in Bagnères-de-Luchon, France, 1991.] M. Canard, H. Aspöck, and M. W. Mansell, eds. Toulouse.)
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