The Salamander by Jorge Luis Borges — Read

Not only is it a small dragon that lives in fire, it is also (according to one dictionary) ‘an insectivorous batrachian with intensely black smooth skin and yellow spots'. Of these two characters, the better known is the imaginary, and the Salamander's inclusion in this book will surprise no one. In Book X of his Natural History, Pliny states that the Salamander ‘is so intensely cold as to extinguish fire by its contact, in the same way that ice does'; later he thinks this over, observing sceptically that if what magicians said about the Salamander were true, it would be used to put out house fires. In Book XI, he speaks of a four-footed, winged insect called the ‘pyrallis' or ‘pyrausta' living ‘in the copper-smelting furnaces of Cyprus, in the very midst of the fire'; if it comes out into the air and flies a short distance, it will instantly die. The Salamander in man's memory has incorporated this now forgotten animal.

The phoenix was used as an argument by theologians to prove the resurrection of the flesh; the Salamander, as a proof that bodies can live in fire. In Book XXI of the City of God by St Augustine, there is a chapter called Whether an earthly body may possibly be incorruptible by fire, and it opens in this way: