Anyway, about weasels
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
In lieu of a copy of Jane Weir’s poem suddenly appearing online yesterday, I did wonder about the title, “On the Recommendation of Ovid We Tried a Weasel” since, having never read Ovid and having been a poor student of the long eighteenth century, I didn’t know the allusion, which is to the birth of Hercules. About to give birth, Alcides’s womb was closed by Lucina as a favor to Juno since she was jealous of Jove’s philandering. However, Alcides’s servant Galanthis tricked the goddess and Hercules was born. Angry about being tricked, Lucina transformed Galanthis into a weasel.
Of course, Ovid isn’t the whole story. Galanthis’s loss became weasels’ gain, since the connection transformed weasels into a symbol not just of fertility, but of safe birth. According to Jacqueline Musacchio, by the Renaissance the weasel (and all its varieties) had become a household icon of fertility, especially among the wealthy who could afford the skins. Leonardo Da Vinci’s Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine (Cecilia Gallerani) (above) encodes a number of different meanings in the ermine she holds (including the fact that her lover was called “Little Ermine”), but as Musacchio points out, it probably also means that Gallerani was at the time pregnant with her lover’s son.
