Salamanders

Pliny the Elder, one of the ancient sources most responsible for spreading the fire-resistant salamander legend, was not entirely credulous about it himself; even as he records the popular belief that salamander secretions could extinguish fire, he notes that when the claim was actually put to a direct test, the salamander he describes did not survive contact with flame, an early, half buried moment of scepticism embedded within the very text that helped the legend spread through the following fifteen centuries of natural history writing.

Francis I's adoption of the salamander as his personal emblem, with the motto I nourish and extinguish, left a permanent mark on French royal architecture: the creature appears carved and painted by the hundreds throughout the Chateau de Chambord, the vast hunting lodge he began building in the Loire Valley in 1519, along with his other residences, so that visitors today encounter Paracelsus's future fire-elemental already established as a royal French symbol decades before Paracelsus wrote about it. The Golden Dawn later assigned salamanders their own ruling king, Djin, completing the set of four elemental rulers, Paralda, Nichsa, Djin and Ghob, that the order attached to Paracelsus's air, water, fire and earth beings respectively.

Sources Naturalis Historia (Natural History)Pliny the Elder with The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie

The salamander's reputation for surviving fire produced a trade as well as a legend, and the trade is the part that can be verified.

Cloth woven from asbestos fibre has the property the legend needed: it can be thrown into a fire and drawn out clean and undamaged, the burning simply removing whatever has soiled it. Such cloth circulated in the medieval and early modern world under the names salamander wool, salamander's hair and salamander skin, and it was sold, and bought, on the understanding that it came from the animal. A cloth that cleaned itself in flame was worth a great deal, and an origin story that explained the property was part of what was being sold.

Marco Polo saw through it. Describing a mining district he places in Chinchintalas, he reports a substance dug out of the ground as veins in the rock, pounded, washed and spun into thread, from which cloth is made that is cleaned by fire. He states directly that the salamander is not a beast, as people in his part of the world believed, and that what they were being sold was a mineral. Whether he saw the workings himself or reported them at second hand is disputed, but the identification is correct and it is several centuries ahead of the natural history writing around it.

The false etymology has outlived the correction in one place. Chemists gave the name asbestos to the mineral from a Greek word for unquenchable, so both the animal and the rock ended up named for the same property, and only one of them ever had it.