They sleep hanging upside down by their feet. They live in shelters such as caves or hollow trees, but they also take advantage of human structures. Like most small animals that are drawn to human habitations, bats have often been identified in folk belief with the souls of the dead. As a result, in cultures that venerate ancestral spirits, bats are often considered sacred or beloved. When spirits are expected to pass on rather than return, bats appear as demons or, at best, souls unable to find peace.
According to one well-known fable, popularly attributed to Aesop, the birds and beasts were once preparing for war. The birds said to the bat, “Come with us,” but he replied, “I am a beast.” The beasts said to the bat, “Come with us,” but he replied, “I am a bird.” At the last moment a peace was made, but ever since, all creatures have shunned the bat. The earliest version of this story, by the Roman Phaedrus, contained no explicit moral, and perhaps he intended to suggest that bats prefer human civilization to nature. The learned folklorist Joseph Jacobs, however, appended the lesson: “He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends” (Aesop, p. 63). Today taxonomists place bats in a separate order of mammals, but both laypeople and scientists have puzzled for centuries whether bats are avians, flying mice, monkeys, or something else.
Revulsion against them, however, is far from universal, and their quizzical faces have often inspired affection. There were no glass windows in the ancient world, and so people had little choice but to share their homes with bats. According to Ovid, the daughters of Minyas had refused to join the revels in honor of Bacchus and stayed at home weaving and telling stories. As punishment, they were turned into bats, but they continued to avoid the woods and flock to houses. In a similar spirit, the medieval bestiaries praised bats for the way they would hang together “like a cluster of grapes,” showing affection that was not often found in human beings (White, p. 141).
In medieval times it was common for the entire household, from the lord and lady to the serfs, to sleep in the great hall of the manor, and little privacy was available. In such close quarters, they must, indeed, have felt rather like bats in a cave. In Africa, Swahili-speaking people have believed that after death the spirit of the departed hovers near his or her body as a bat. People in Uganda and Zimbabwe have believed that bats taking wing in the evening are departed spirits coming to visit the living. The flying fox, a large bat found in Ghana, however, is believed to be a demon in league with witches and sorcerers.
Perhaps the most unequivocally favorable view of bats can be found in China, where the word for “bat” also means “joy.” In ancient times the Chinese noticed the service that bats provided in eating insects, thus impeding the spread of malaria. Bats seemed to exemplify such Confucian virtues as filial piety, since they would live together in a single cave for many centuries. They were believed to live for centuries, and Shou-Hsing, the god of long life, is depicted with two bats. Bats did not really come to be thought of as spooky in Europe until the end of the Middle Ages, as folk belief became increasingly equated with witchcraft. Bats came to be regarded as familiars of witches and as a frequent disguise for the Devil. Dragons and demons would often be depicted with the wings of a bat. The association of bats with vampires-that is, the living dead-goes back only as far as the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the zoologist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon examined newly discovered bats from South America. Because the variety sucked small quantities of blood from cattle, though rarely from human beings, he called them “vampires.” At about the same time, gothic horror became fashionable throughout Europe, and popular writers discovered it was piquant to identify bats with vampires.
It was really only in the twentieth century that the new medium of movies established the popular association between the two. In a wave of vampire movies starting in the 1920s, actors such as Bela Lugosi gave Dracula and other vampires the appearance of bats. They would, for example, wear a long black cape that resembled the wings of a bat, large ears, and claws. While some vampires were purely evil, others were grandly tragic, and quite a few were not so different from ordinary human beings. In the 1950s, the popular comic-book character Batman assumed much of the paraphernalia of vampires, but he used these to fight crime rather than to capture souls. But the mystery of bats has not been diminished by either fantasy or science. In the late twentieth century, the philosopher Thomas Nagel probed the nature of consciousness in a famous essay entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He tried to imagine what it might be like to navigate by sonar and decided that the human mind was unequal to the task. His conclusion was that we must recognize facts that we can neither state nor comprehend.
