A book about rocks might not seem the first place to look for ornithological information, but the great lapidary encyclopedia of the Italian physician Camillo Leonardi is full of bits and pieces of arcane bird lore.
Composed right around the year 1500, Leonardi’s book finally made its way into English translation two and a half centuries later; that text tells us that the stone called
Quirus is a juggling Stone, found in the Nest of the Hoopoop.
It’s clear enough what a “hoopoop” might be. But what is a “juggling stone”?
Fortunately, Leonardi wrote in a language more readily comprehensible than that of his eighteenth-century translator.
The quirinus, he says, or quirus,
is a tricky stone — praestigiosus — that has been found in the nest of the Hoopoe.
And sure enough, our friends at the OED confirm that the English adjective “juggling” was in use in the mid-eighteenth century to mean “cheating, deceptive, tricky.” And what is so underhanded about the quirinus?
Its quality is that if anyone places it on the breast of a sleeping person, it will force him or her to confess his misdeeds.
Terrifying, if you think about it; far worse than the mean childhood trick of pouring water across an innocent sleeper’s hand.
Kunstmann in his well-known hoopoe book records a similar belief, attested in the late fifteenth century by the German poet Hans Vintler; but Vintler attributes the power to the poor bird’s heart:
Some superstitious people, Vintler tells us,
place the heart of a Hoopoe onto sleeping people so that it will reveal hidden things to them.
In other sources, the hoopoe’s innards have exactly the opposite virtus. According to the fourteenth-century natural historian Konrad von Megenberg, the bird’s heart actually helps witches and secret evildoers keep their wicked deeds secret.
The quirinus has another, perhaps more practical effect, according to a tale recorded in Anton von Perger’s Pflantzen-Sagen:
If you mix the powdered stone with the sap of catnip and spread it on an animal, the animal will become pregnant and bear a black young.
Powerful stuff. Remember all this the next time you find a hoopoe’s nest.
