Quotes / Basilisk and Cockatrice

Card Games

"We're not sure what one looks like, so to be safe, nobody look at anything until we're out of here."

—Parbold Drix, veteran explorer, flavor text for Sylvan Basilisk, Magic: The Gathering

"Sometimes I come across a stone finger or foot and I know I'm in cockatrice territory."

—Rulak, bog guide, flavor text for Deathgaze Cockatrice, Magic: The Gathering

Tabletop Games

"The Basilisk is a rare creature with strange powers. Growing to a prodigious size, one can always identify these creatures by the bright white marking on its head. Its breath scorches the grass and bursts rocks. Some say these creatures can turn a man to stone with a glance. Whilst the Classical references have many accounts of these beasts, they are many and often contradictory, casting their entire existence into question."

—Reinholt Schent, Scholar of the Fantastic, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition: Tome of Corruption

Video Games

Behold the cockatrice, whose diminutive stature belies its hidden might. The cockatrice can petrify any ordinary being it contacts—save those wise adventurers who eat a dead lizard or blob of acid when they feel themselves slowly turning to stone.

— The Oracle, NetHack

Gallo had long been haunted by frequent nightmares of being petrified slowly from the feet up to the head, but perhaps more frightening were his dreams of a gigantic predatory chicken. The Gallotrice’s birth was the moment he began to consider that scientific blasphemy as a form of emotional therapy might not be helping anybody.

— Gallotrice bestiary entry, Vampire Survivors

Real Life

There is the same power also in the serpent called the basilisk. It is produced in the province of Cyrene, being not more than twelve fingers in length. It has a white spot on the head, strongly resembling a sort of a diadem. When it hisses, all the other serpents fly from it: and it does not advance its body, like the others, by a succession of folds, but moves along upright and erect upon the middle. It destroys all shrubs, not only by its contact, but those even that it has breathed upon; it burns up all the grass, too, and breaks the stones, so tremendous is its noxious influence. It was formerly a general belief that if a man on horseback killed one of these animals with a spear, the poison would run up the weapon and kill, not only the rider, but the horse, as well. To this dreadful monster the effluvium of the weasel is fatal, a thing that has been tried with success, for kings have often desired to see its body when killed; so true is it that it has pleased Nature that there should be nothing without its antidote. The animal is thrown into the hole of the basilisk, which is easily known from the soil around it being infected. The weasel destroys the basilisk by its odour, but dies itself in this struggle of nature against its own self.

—Pliny the Elder, The Natural History

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