Every age probably thinks of itself as pretty enlightened. Today, we all seem to be fairly certain that we know how the world works but we can still see examples of people believing some stunningly foolish things all the time. In the future, it’s very likely people will be writing articles about the world of today and all the silly things we believed, just as we can now look at some of the things people in the medieval world believed and wonder how we ever survived as a species.
10. Salamanders Can Live in Fire
For about 1,500 years people believed the humble salamander was somehow fireproof. This is made all the more amazing by the fact that, for those entire 1,500 years, we can safely assume everyone understood what fire did to living things. Nonetheless, this persistent belief actually gave rise to salamanders as a mythical beast.
Pliny the Elder insisted the cool flesh of the salamander could extinguish fire which probably killed a few salamanders who died trying to prove this against their will. He was just trying to prove what he’d heard from Aristotle, mind you.
By the time of Saint Isidor, between 560 and 636, people still believed this fact about salamanders and Isidor confirmed it along with suggesting they poisoned fruit. St. Augustine believed they lived in fire. Leonardo da Vinci insisted the little creatures ate fire instead of food. Paracelsus swapped fire out of the four primal elements and put the salamander in its place.
