Here we have an allegory or parable that has been told since the dawn of times. It appeared first in the Hindu Mahabharata and in the sayings of the Buddha, and made its way westward with the Silk Road. Through the ages, it has been told by grandmothers, Brahmin, Jesuits, Buddhist monks, jesters, teachers, you name it: Here is a Dutch Baroque illustration!
Emblem XLVI, Doot-Kiste voor de Levendige of Sinne-Beelden (Coffin Before the Living, of Emblems).
A traveller lost in the jungle (of life) is pursued by a ferocious beast (here a bear, a fierce bear: no cuddly Winnie the Pooh). The traveller finds themself suspended from a thin branch (or root) high above a pit, where a dragon waits with an open maw, ready to swallow them up. To make things even more complicated, an even number of rats, half of them black half of them white, are cutting the root or branch from which the human character is hanging. Ever tantalizing the human's mouth, there are apples (or honey) within and yet without reach, always on the treetop.
In the Mahabharata, the enemy at surface level (replacing the bear here) is an ogress, or rakshasi in Sanskrit (a common villainess in Eastern tales) but the gist is the same: dragon in the pit, rats (an even number, half black half white) eating away at the branch, honey in the traveller's mouth (in this Sanskrit version, the human hangs upside down, like the Hanged Man in Tarot, "like a ripe jackfruit hanging from its stalk"). The Balavariani version (told by the mentor sage Balavar to the young prince Jehosaphat, ie Latinized Boddhisattva, or Future Buddha) the story is exactly the same but with a wild unicorn (a fierce beast, as much to do with our unicorn piñatas and plushies as the bear in the Dutch version has to do with Winnie the Pooh). The story also appears in the Gesta Romanorum, the collection that supplies the sources for Shakespeare's King Lear, Pericles, and Merchant of Venice, also with a fierce unicorn in the Gesta. Another version, closer to the Mahabharata, is told in the Sanskrit Panchatantra and in its Andalusi version, Calila e Dimna. In nineteenth-century Russia, Tolstoy retold the same story, dragon in the pit and rats and all, even with the drops of honey, in A Confession. Most recently, a Bollywood film in Tamil has revisited the age-old allegory.
The ogress (or beast) at the top and the dragon at the bottom are heavily inspired by Scylla and Charybdis, while the rats and the honey (or fruit) are self explanatory:
The jungle, as we have said before, is life. The monster at surface level, whether ogress, bear, or unicorn, is Death, always on the prowl, and the dragon at the bottom is also Death (compare the Hellmouth of the Passion Play), ready to swallow us all with an open maw. The traveller is trapped between two aspects of Death, ie between Scylla and Charybdis. The branch to which we cling is also life, and that even number of rats (either two, for night and day in general or the Sun and the Moon, four, for the seasons, or 24, for the hours) represent time, the daylight and nighttime moments eating away at our precarious existence. The tantalizing honey or apples are the pleasures or positive emotions, and though the Baroque was a cynical period (Marvell: "the cramp of Hope does tear," "the pestilence of Love does heat," and "Joy's cheerful madness does perplex"), it also supplies a chipper counterpoint of carpe diem, of enjoying these pleasures and positive emotions (the same applies to this very century, but saying YOLO instead of carpe diem), a counterpoint to the allegory of the dragon in the pit and to other broadsides exploring the same themes (the Dance of Death, Death and the Maiden, the Three Quick and Three Dead, etc.)
