Fire Salamander

Salamanders in Literature

Salamanders have long been associated with magic and the occult. Back in the first century AD, a Roman author named Pliny was claiming that they could extinguish fire with their super-cold bodies. (Aristotle would call BS on this 300 years later.) In the 400s AD, St Augustine would claim that salamanders, which live in fire, are proof that humans can also burn indefinitely in fire -- in Hell. During the Renaissance, around 1500 AD, Leonardo Da Vinci would claim that salamanders need no food except fire. None of these things are at all true; salamanders are just pretty little amphibians. People in the olden days had some weird ideas.