The Cockatrice is the dragon-rooster monster of medieval European legend: a fearsome hybrid creature with the head, wattles, and legs of a cock and the wings and barbed serpentine tail (and often the body) of a dragon, hatched from a cock’s egg incubated by a serpent or toad, whose gaze and touch bring death — so closely related to the [basilisk] that the two became all but one. It is the dragon-cock, the death-dealing fowl of the bestiary.
The Dragon-Rooster
The Cockatrice arose in the Middle Ages, in large part from the legend of the [basilisk] crossed with the strange story of the cock’s egg. By the late medieval period the two creatures had largely merged in the popular and heraldic imagination, but where the basilisk was conceived as essentially a crowned serpent, the cockatrice took a more vivid hybrid form: the head, comb, wattles, and clawed feet of a rooster, the leathery wings of a bat or dragon, and the long, coiling, barbed tail of a serpent or dragon — a monstrous fusion of fowl and reptile, the very image of unnatural generation.
The Egg of the Cock
The cockatrice’s dread origin was a favourite of medieval lore: it was said to be hatched from an egg laid by a seven-year-old cock (an old rooster, against nature, laying a small, round, yolkless egg) under the sign of Sirius, the egg then being incubated by a toad or a serpent. From this doubly unnatural birth came the monster — and its unnaturalness was the source of its evil power. Like the basilisk, the cockatrice could kill with its glance: to look upon it, or be looked upon by it, was death; its breath and touch were likewise lethal and venomous, blighting and poisoning all around it.
The Weasel, the Cock, and the Mirror
The cockatrice shared the basilisk’s famous weaknesses. The weasel was immune to its powers and could slay it. The crowing of a cock was fatal to it — so travellers through regions said to harbour cockatrices would carry a rooster for protection. And, like the basilisk, it could be destroyed by being made to see its own reflection, dying by its own deadly gaze. The cockatrice became a common figure in heraldry (a popular and fearsome charge) and in the bestiaries and the King James Bible (where “cockatrice” translates Hebrew words for venomous serpents), a byword for deadly, unnatural evil. In the Cockatrice, the medieval European imagination gave form to the dragon-rooster — the monstrous hybrid of cock and serpent, hatched from the cock’s egg, whose gaze and breath bring death, slain by the weasel, the cock’s crow, and its own reflection, the death-dealing fowl of the bestiary.