Alligator and Crocodile in Myth and Folklore

But terror and scorn for the crocodile go at least equally far back in history. In paintings to illustrate The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the goddess Ammut would be shown waiting hungrily to devour those who were found wanting, as a soul was weighed in balance. In this capacity, she had the head of a crocodile, as well as the forepart of a lion and the hind legs of a hippopotamus. Several monsters of legend to whom human sacrifices were made may originally have been crocodiles. In Greek mythology, for example, the Ethiopian maiden Andromeda was chained to a rock to be eaten by such a creature before the hero Perseus saved her. Human sacrifices to crocodiles of people chained beside a lake or river have been widely practiced from Africa to Korea.

The crocodile has been closely associated with magic from time immemorial. In one Egyptian text from the early second millennium B.C., a sorcerer made a wax crocodile and threw it into the Nile River. It immediately grew large and devoured his wife’s lover. Sorcery is always closely linked with deception, and in Western Europe the crocodile has been a symbol of hypocrisy. Bestiaries would report that crocodiles weep as they eat human beings. Naturalist Edward Topsell wrote in 1658 that the crocodile, “to get a man within his danger, he will sob, sigh, and weep, as though he were in extremity, but suddenly he destroyeth him.” Topsell noted that, according to other observers, the crocodile wept after eating a man, much as Judas had cried after betraying Christ (vol. 2, p. 688).

Several cultures, Arabs and some African tribes, for example, have offered accused criminals to crocodiles as a test, and those people who were eaten or bitten were presumed to be guilty. In the Middle Ages, the entrance to Hell was sometimes depicted as a huge jaw filled with teeth, often resembling that of a crocodile. The idea that crocodiles eat only the guilty has persisted into the latter half of the twentieth century among the Turkana people who live around Lake Rudolph in Kenya. When Alistair Graham saw them wading casually into waters filled with crocodiles, he was told by a tribesman, “My conscience is clear; therefore, I am in no danger” (Graham, p. 68).

In the British classic for children Peter Pan (first published in 1904), James M. Barrie created the villain Captain Hook. A hypocritical murderer like the crocodile of legend, the captain is called Hook for an iron claw that has replaced one of his hands. His hand was bitten off by a crocodile, which liked the morsel so much that it has followed Hook ever since, though the beast does not seem to threaten anybody else. The crocodile has also swallowed a clock, and the captain is terrified whenever he hears it tick. Eventually Hook is thrown to the crocodile, the clock stops, and the captain goes contentedly to his death, a bit like the victim of a human sacrifice who believed that to be eaten was an exalted destiny.