Today's Monster Monday is the caladrius, a pure white bird with the power to heal the sick. The caladrius makes an excellent Improved Familiar for a benevolent spellcaster, but it is also highly sought-after by the unscrupulous and the desperate. The caladrius does not just heal sickness - it takes another's sickness on itself. For this reason, the caladrius will not usually heal those with a fatal illness, for the caladrius itself would die.
The caladrius is first mentioned by the Roman author Plutarch, who said:
we know how often those who suffer from jaundice are healed by looking at the bird charadrius. This small animal seems to be endowed with such a nature and character, that it violently attracts to itself the disease, which slips out of the body of the sick man into its own, and draws off from his eyes as it were a stream of moisture. And this is the reason why the charadrius cannot endure to look at jaundiced persons nor help them at all, but turns itself away with closed eyes; not because it grudges the use of the remedy which is sought from it, as some consider, but because it might be wounded as by a blow.The magical bird remained a popular inclusion in medieval bestiaries, where it was used as a Christ analogue (medieval bestiaries tended to view any animal as a metaphor for either Satan or Jesus, except the bonnacon). According to the Aberdeen Bestiary:
The bird called caladrius, as Physiologus tells us, is white all over; it has no black parts. Its excrement cures cataract in the eyes. It is to be found in royal residences. If anyone is sick, he will learn from the caladrius if he is to live or die. If, therefore, a man's illness is fatal, the caladrius will turn its head away from the sick man as soon as it sees him, and everyone knows that the man is going to die. But if the man's sickness is one from which he will recover, the bird looks him in the face and takes the entire illness upon itself; it flies up into the air, towards the sun, burns off the sickness and scatters it, and the sick man is cured.Other bestiaries say that the caladrius' bone marrow, not its poop, cures blindness. I decided to go with that one.
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| Caladrius - Bestiary, Royal MS 12 C XIX; 1200-1210, via Wikimedia |
