Iaculus

The Iaculus appears in the vast catalogue of monstrous beings that adorn the portal of the abbey church, a stone menagerie of the damned that forms the threshold to the vision of the Last Judgment. Carved among the dense foliage of the capitals and the deep arches of the embrasures, the Iaculus is one of the many creatures from Satan's bestiary assembled to act as a guard and crown to the throne of the Seated One, singing its glory in their defeat. The portal, which the young Adso of Melk contemplates on his first day at the abbey, presents a world reversed: the defeated of Armageddon face Him who will come to separate the quick from the dead, and the Iaculus is part of that population of the nether world that seems to have gathered to act as a vestibule, a dark forest, a desperate wasteland of exclusion before the apparition of the Seated One in the tympanum.

The Iaculus in the Bestiary of the Portal

The Iaculus is listed among a host of other mythical and monstrous creatures, including the amphisbaena, basilisk, blemmyae, centaur, chimera, cyclops, cynocephali, dragon, gorgon, griffin, harpy, hydra, leucrota, manticore, minotaur, salamander, sciopod, siren, and unicorn. This bestiary of the damned is not merely decorative; it serves a parabolic and allegorical purpose, justified by the moral lesson it conveys. The creatures, including the Iaculus, are part of a larger symbolic language that the abbey's builders used to communicate the terrors of sin and the promise of judgment. The Iaculus, as a flying serpent, is a creature of the air, a detail that aligns with the medieval understanding of such beasts as portents or agents of chaos, often associated with the Devil's power to corrupt from above.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The Iaculus, like the other monsters on the portal, is a figure of the inverted world that the marginalia of the illuminator Adelmo of Otranto also depict. The old blind monk Jorge of Burgos condemns these images as lies about the form of creation, showing the world as the opposite of what it should be. The Iaculus, as part of this monstrous assembly, embodies the threat of the unknown and the chaotic, a creature that exists on the edge of the known world, much like the library's forbidden books that are kept in the region called "Leones" (Africa), where monsters and falsehoods are housed. The Iaculus is thus a symbol of the dangerous knowledge that the abbey's library both contains and seeks to suppress, a creature of the margins that, like the forbidden book of Aristotle's Poetics, threatens to overturn the established order of truth and falsehood, of the sacred and the profane.