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BIRDS IN LEGEND
FABLE AND FOLKLORE
[Illustration:
ST. FRANCIS PREACHING TO THE BIRDS.
_Attributed to Giotto_
]
BIRDS IN LEGEND
FABLE AND FOLKLORE
BY
ERNEST INGERSOLL
AUTHOR OF “THE LIFE OF MAMMALS,” “NATURE’S CALENDAR,” “THE WIT OF THE
WILD,” ETC.: AND SECRETARY OF THE AUTHORS CLUB, NEW YORK
[Illustration]
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
55 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C. 4
TORONTO, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1923
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.
MADE IN THE UNITED STATES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A CHAT WITH THE INTENDING READER 3
II. BIRDS AS NATIONAL EMBLEMS 28
III. AN ORNITHOLOGICAL COMEDY OF ERRORS 51
IV. THE FOLKLORE OF BIRD MIGRATION 81
V. NOAH’S MESSENGERS 98
VI. BIRDS IN CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND FESTIVAL 109
VII. BIRDS AS SYMBOLS AND BADGES 127
VIII. BLACK FEATHERS MAKE BLACK BIRDS 154
IX. THE FAMILIAR OF WITCHES 179
X. A FLOCK OF FABULOUS FOWLS 191
XI. FROM ANCIENT AUGURIES TO MODERN RAINBIRDS 212
XII. A PRIMITIVE VIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 226
XIII. BIRDS AND THE LIGHTNING 242
XIV. LEGENDS IN AN HISTORICAL SETTING 253
XV. SOME PRETTY INDIAN STORIES 270
LIST OF BOOKS REFERRED TO 282
INDEX 287
BIRDS IN LEGEND
FABLE AND FOLKLORE
CHAPTER I
A CHAT WITH THE INTENDING READER
Angus Mac-ind-oc was the Cupid of the Gaels. He was a harper of the
sweetest music, and was attended by birds, his own transformed
kisses, which hovered, invisible, over young men and maidens of
Erin, whispering love into their ears.
When we say, “A little bird told me,” we are talking legend and folklore
and superstition all at once. There is an old Basque story of a
bird—always a small one in these tales—that tells the truth; and our
Biloxi Indians used to say the same of the hummingbird. Breton peasants
still credit all birds with the power of using human language on proper
occasions, and traditions in all parts of the world agree that every
bird had this power once on a time if not now. The fireside-tales of the
nomads of Oriental deserts or of North American plains and forest alike
attest faith in this power; and conversation by and with birds is almost
the main stock of the stories heard on our Southern cotton-plantations.
You will perhaps recall the bulbul bazar of the _Arabian Nights_, and,
if you please, you may read in another chapter of the conversational
pewit and hoopoe of Solomonic fame.
Biblical authority exists in the confidence of the Prophet Elijah that a
“bird of the air ... shall tell the matter”; and monkish traditions
abound in revelations whispered in the ear of the faithful by winged
messengers from divine sources, as you may read further along if you
have patience to turn the leaves. The poets keep alive the pretty
fiction; and the rest of us resort to the phrase with an arch smile
whenever we do not care to quote our authority for repeating some
half-secret bit of gossip. “This magical power of understanding
birdtalk,” says Halliday,[1][A] “is regularly the way in which the seers
of myths obtain their information.”
Footnote A:
This and similar “superior” figures throughout the text refer to the
List of Books in the Appendix, where the author and title of the
publication alluded to will be found under its number.
The author takes this opportunity, in place of a perfunctory Preface,
to make grateful acknowledgment of assistance to Professor A. V. H.
JACKSON, who revised the chapter on fabulous birds; to Mr. STEWART
CULIN, helpful in Chinese matters, etc.; to Professor JUSTIN H. SMITH,
who scanned the whole manuscript; and to others who furnished valuable
facts and suggestions.
Primitive men—and those we style the Ancients were primitive so far as
nature is concerned—regarded birds as supernaturally wise. This
canniness is implied in many of the narratives and incidents set down in
the succeeding pages; and in view of it birds came to be regarded by
early man with great respect, yet also with apprehension, for they might
utilize their knowledge to his harm. For example: The Canada jay is
believed by the Indians along the northern shore of Hudson Bay to give
warning whenever they approach an Eskimo camp—usually, of course, with
hostile intent; and naturally those Indians kill that kind of jay
whenever they can.
The ability in birds to speak implies knowledge, and Martha Young[2]
gives us a view of this logic prevailing among the old-time southern
darkies:
Sis’ Dove she know mo’n anybody or anything in de worl’. She know
pintedly de time anybody gwine die. You’ll hear her moanin’ fer a
passin’ soul ’fo’ you hear de bell tone. She know ’fo’
cotton-plantin’ time whe’r de craps dat gatherin’ ’ll be good er
bad. ’Fo’ folks breaks up de new groun’ er bust out middles, Sis’
Dove know what de yield ’ll be. She know it an’ she’ll tell it, too.
’Caze ev’ybody know if Sis’ Dove coo on de right han’ of a man
plowin’, dare ’ll be a good crap dat year; but ef she coo on de lef’
dar ’ll be a faillery crap dat year.
Sis’ Dove she know about all de craps dat grow out er de groun’ but
she ’special know about corn, fer she plant de fi’st grain er corn
dat ever was plant’ in de whole worl’. Whar she git it?... Umm—hum!
You tell me dat!
From the belief in the intuitive wisdom of birds comes the world-wide
confidence in their prophetic power. Hence their actions, often so
mysterious, have been watched with intense interest, and everything
unusual in their behavior was noticed in the hope that it might express
a revelation from on high. Advantage was taken of this pathetic hope and
assurance by the Roman augurs in their legalized ornithomancy, of which
some description will be found in another chapter. Nine-tenths of it was
priestly humbug to keep ordinary folks in mental subjection, as
priestcraft has ever sought to do. The remaining tenth has become the
basis of the present popular faith in birds’ ability to foretell coming
weather. Let me cite a few aboriginal examples of this faith, more or
less sincere, in the ability and willingness of birds to warn inquiring
humanity.
The Omahas and other Siouan Indians used to say that when whippoorwills
sing at night, saying “Hoia, hohin?” one replies “No.” If the birds stop
at once, it is a sign that the answerer will soon die, but if the birds
keep on calling he or she will live a long time. The Utes of Colorado,
however, declare that this bird is the god of the night, and that it
made the moon by magic, transforming a frog into it; while the Iroquois
indulged in the pretty fancy that the moccasin-flowers (cypripediums)
are whippoorwills’ shoes.
This is a little astray from my present theme, to which we may return by
quoting from Waterton[73] that if one of the related goatsuckers of the
Amazon Valley be heard close to an Indian’s or a negro’s hut, from that
night evil fortune sits brooding over it. In Costa Rica bones of
whippoorwills are dried and ground to a fine powder by the Indians when
they want to concoct a charm against some enemy; mixed with tobacco it
will form a cigarette believed to cause certain death to the person
smoking it.
To the mountaineers of the southern Alleghanies the whippoorwill reveals
how long it will be before marriage—as many years as its notes are
repeated: as I have heard the bird reiterate its cry more than 800 times
without taking breath, this must often be a discouraging report to an
anxious maid or bachelor. One often hears it said lightly in New England
that a whippoorwill calling very near a house portends death, but I can
get no evidence that this “sign” is really attended to anywhere in the
northern United States.
This, and the equally nocturnal screech-owl (against which the darkies
have many “conjurings”) are not the only birds feared by rural folk in
the Southern States, especially in the mountains. A child in a family of
Georgia “crackers” fell ill, and his mother gave this account of it to a
sympathetic friend:
Mikey is bound to die. I’ve know’d it all along. All las’ week the
moanin’ doves was comin’ roun’ the house, and this mornin’ one come
in at the window right by Mikey’s head, an’ cooed an’ moaned. I
couldn’t scare it away, else a witch would ’a’ put a spell on me.
Mikey lived to become a drunkard, is the unfeeling comment of the
reporter of this touching incident in _The Journal of American
Folklore_.
“One constantly hears by day the note of the limócon, a wood-pigeon
which exercises a most extraordinary interest over the lives of many of
the wild people, for they believe that the direction and nature of its
notes augur good or ill for the enterprises they have in hand.” This
memorandum, in Dean Worcester’s valuable book on the Philippines,[3] is
apt to the purpose of this introductory chapter, leading me to say that
the continuing reader will find doves (which are much the same in all
parts of the world) conspicuous in legend, fable and ceremony; also that
the “direction and nature” of their voices, as heard, is one of the most
important elements in the consideration of birds in general as
messengers and prophets—functions to which I shall often have occasion
to refer, and on which are founded the ancient systems of
bird-divination.
In these United States little superstition relating to animals has
survived, partly because the wild creatures here were strange to the
pioneers, who were poorly acquainted with their characteristics, but
mainly because such fears and fancies were left in the Old World with
other rubbish not worth the freight-charges; yet a few quaint notions
came along, like small heirlooms of no particular value that folks
dislike to throw away until they must. Almost all such mental keepsakes
belong to people in the backward parts of the country, often with an
ill-fitting application to local birds. A conspicuous disappearance is
that venerable body of forebodings and fancies attached to the European
cuckoo, totally unknown or disregarded here, because our American
cuckoos have no such irregular habits as gave rise to the myths and
superstitions clustering about that bird in Europe.
We saw a moment ago that the negro farmer estimated what the yield of
his field would be by the direction from which the dove’s message came
to his ears. I have another note that if one hears the first
mourning-dove of the year above him he will prosper: if from below him
his own course henceforth will be down hill.
This matter of direction whence (and also of number) is of vital
importance in interpreting bird-prophecy the world over, as will be
fully shown in a subsequent chapter. Even in parts of New England it is
counted “unlucky” to see two crows together flying toward the left—a
plain borrowing from the magpie-lore of Old England. In the South it is
thought that if two quails fly up in front of a man on the way to
conclude a bargain he will do well to abandon the intended business.
Break up a killdeer’s nest and you will soon break a leg or arm—and so
on.
There always have been persons who were much disturbed when a bird
fluttered against a closed window. A rooster crowing into an open
house-door foretells a visitor. The plantation darkies of our Southern
States believe that when shy forest-birds come close about a dwelling as
if frightened, or, wandering within it, beat their wings wildly in
search of an exit, so some soul will flutteringly seek escape from that
house—and “right soon.” Similar fears afflict the timid on the other
side of the globe. On the contrary, and more naturally, it is esteemed
among us an excellent omen when wild birds nest fearlessly about a
negro’s or a mountaineer’s cabin.
When a Georgia girl first hears in the spring the plaintive call of
returning doves she must immediately attend to it if she is curious as
to her future partner in life. She must at once take nine steps forward
and nine backward, then take off her right shoe: in it she will discover
a hair of the man she is to marry—but how to find its owner is not
explained! This bit of rustic divination is plainly transferred from the
old English formula toward the first-heard cuckoo, as may be learned
from Gay’s _The Shepherd’s Week_,[8] which is a treasury of rustic
customs in Britain long ago. Says one of the maids:
Then doff’d my shoe, and by my troth I swear,
Therein I spy’d this yellow, frizzled hair.
This matter of the hair is pure superstition allied to magic, in
practicing which, indeed, birds have often been degraded to an evil
service very remote from their nature. Thiselton Dyer quotes an Irish
notion that “in everyone’s head there is a particular hair which, if the
swallow can pluck it, dooms the wretched individual to eternal
perdition.” A Baltimore folklorist warns every lady against letting
birds build nests with the combings of her hair, as it will turn the
unfortunate woman crazy. Any woman afraid of this should beware of that
dear little sprite of our garden shrubbery, the chipping-sparrow, for it
always lines its tiny nest with hair. This notion is another
importation, for it has long been a saying in Europe that if a bird uses
human hair in its nest the owner of the hair will have headaches and
later baldness. Curiously enough the Seneca Indians, one of the five
Iroquois tribes, are said to have long practised a means, as they
believed it to be, of communicating with a maiden-relative, after her
death, by capturing a fledgling bird with a noose made from her hair.
The bird was kept caged until it began to sing, when it was liberated
and was believed to carry to the knowledge of the departed one a
whispered message of love.
Now the idea underlying all this faith in the supernatural wisdom and
prophetic gift in birds is the general supposition that they are
spirits, or, at any rate, possessed by spirits, a doctrine that appears
in various guises but is universal in the world of primitive culture—a
world nearer to us sophisticated readers than perhaps we realize: but a
good many little children inhabit it, even within our doors.
“The primitive mind,” as Dr. Brinton asserts, “did not recognize any
deep distinction between the lower animals and man”; and continues:
The savage knew that the beast was his superior in many points, in
craft and in strength, in fleetness and intuition, and he regarded
it with respect. To him the brute had a soul not inferior to his
own, and a language which the wise among men might on occasion
learn.... Therefore with wide unanimity he placed certain species of
animals nearer to God than is man himself, or even identified them
with the manifestations of the Highest.
None was in this respect a greater favorite than the bird. Its
soaring flight, its strange or sweet notes, the marked hues of its
plumage, combined to render it a fit emblem of power and beauty. The
Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to Singalang Burong, the god of
birds; and birds as the ancestors of the totemic family are
extremely common among the American Indians. The Eskimos say that
they have the faculty of soul or life beyond all other creatures,
and in most primitive tribes they have been regarded as the
messengers of the divine, and the special purveyors of the vital
principles ... and everywhere to be able to understand the language
of birds was equivalent to being able to converse with the gods.[4]
If this is true it is not surprising that savages in various parts of
the world trace their tribal origin to a supernatural bird of the same
form and name as some familiar local species, which was inhabited by the
soul of their heroic “first man.” The Osage Indians of Kansas, for
example, say that as far back as they can conceive of time their
ancestors were alive, but had neither bodies nor souls. They existed
beneath the lowest of the four “upper worlds,” and at last migrated to
the highest, where they obtained souls. Then followed travels in which
they searched for some source whence they might get human bodies, and at
last asked the question of a redbird sitting on her nest. She replied:
“I can cause your children to have human bodies from my own.” She
explained that her wings would be their arms, her head their head, and
so on through a long list of parts, external and internal, showing
herself a good comparative anatomist. Finally she declared: “The speech
(or breath) of children will I bestow on your children.”[5]
Such is the story of how humanity reached the earth, according to one
branch of the Osages: other gentes also believe themselves descended
from birds that came down from an upper world. Dozens of similar cases
might be quoted, of which I will select one because of its curious
features. The Seri, an exclusive and backward tribe inhabiting the
desert-like island Tiburon, in the Gulf of California, ascribe the
creation of the world, and of themselves in particular, to the Ancient
of Pelicans, a mythical fowl of supernal wisdom and melodious song—an
unexpected poetic touch!—who first raised the earth above the primeval
waters. This last point is in conformity with the general belief that a
waste of waters preceded the appearance, by one or another miraculous
means well within the redman’s range of experience, of a bit of land;
and it is to be observed that this original patch of earth, whether
fixed or floating, was enlarged to habitable dimensions not by further
miracles, nor by natural accretion, but, as a rule, by the labor and
ingenuity of the “first men” themselves, usually aided by favorite
animals. Thus the Seri Indians naturally held the pelican in especial
regard, but that did not prevent their utilizing it to the utmost. Dr.
W. J. McGee[6] found that one of their customs was to tie a
broken-winged, living pelican to a stake near the seashore, and then
appropriate the fishes brought to the captive by its free relatives.
In fewer cases we find that not only tribal but also individual origin
is ascribed to a bird, the best illustration of which is the notion of
the natives of Perak, in the Malay Peninsula, that a bird brings the
soul to every person at birth. A woman who is about to become a mother
selects as the place where her baby shall be born the foot of a certain
tree—any one that appeals to her fancy—and this will be the “name-tree”
of her child. The parents believe that a soul has been waiting for this
child in the form of a bird that for some time before the birth
frequents all the trees of the chosen kind in that vicinity, searching
for the occasion when it may deliver its charge, intrusted to it by
Kari, the tribal god. This bird must be killed and eaten by the
expectant mother just before the actual birth or the baby will never
come to life, or if it does will speedily die. A poetic feature in this
tender explanation of the mystery of life among the jungle-dwellers is
that the souls of first-born children are brought always by the newly
hatched offspring of the bird that contained the soul of the mother of
the child.[7]
Apart from this singular conception of the source of existence, the
general theory of spirituality in birds is based, as heretofore
intimated, on the almost universal belief that they are often the
visible spirits of the dead. The Powhatans of Virginia, for example,
held that the feathered race received the souls of their chiefs at
death; and a California tribe asserted that the small birds whose hard
luck it was to receive the souls of bad men were chased and destroyed by
hawks, so that those of good Indians alone reached the happy
hunting-grounds beyond the sky.
James G. Swan relates in his interesting old book about early days at
Puget Sound,[10] that the Indians at Shoalwater Bay, Oregon, were much
disturbed one morning because they had heard the whistling of a plover
in the night. The white men there told them it was only a bird’s crying,
but they insisted the noise was that of spirits. Said they: “Birds don’t
talk in the night; they talk in the daytime.” “But,” asked Russell, “how
can you tell that it is the _memelose tillicums_, or dead people? They
can’t talk.” “No,” replied the savage, “it is true they can’t talk as we
do, but they whistle through their teeth. You are a white man and do not
understand what they say, but Indians know.”
This bit of untainted savage philosophy recalls the queer British
superstition of the Seven Whistlers. Wordsworth, who was a
North-countryman, records of his ancient Dalesman—
He the seven birds hath seen that never part,
Seen the Seven Whistlers on their nightly rounds
And counted them.
The idea that the wailing of invisible birds is a warning of danger
direct from Providence prevails especially in the English colliery
districts, where wildfowl, migrating at night and calling to one another
as they go, supply exactly the right suggestion to the timid. Sailors
fear them as “storm-bringers.” Even more horrifying is the primitive
Welsh conception (probably capable of a similar explanation) of the
Three Birds of Rhiannon, wife of Pwyll, ruler of Hades, that could sing
the dead to life and the living into the sleep of death. Luckily they
were heard only at the death of great heroes in battle.
How easily such things may beguile the imagination is told in Thomas W.
Higginson’s book on army life in the black regiment of which he was the
colonel during the Civil War. This sane and vigorous young officer
writes of an incident on the South Carolina Coast: “I remember that, as
I stood on deck in the still and misty evening, listening with strained
senses for some sound of approach of an expected boat, I heard a low
continuous noise from the distance, more mild and desolate than anything
my memory can parallel. It came from within the vast circle of mist, and
seemed like the cry of a myriad of lost souls upon the horizon’s verge;
it was Dante become audible: yet it was but the accumulated cries of
innumerable seafowl at the entrance of the outer bay.”[9]
But I have rambled away along an enticing by-path, as will frequently
happen in the remainder of this book—to the reader’s interest, I venture
to believe.
Returning to the theme of a moment ago, I recall that the Rev. H.
Friend[11] tells us that he has seen Buddhist priests in Canton “bless a
small portion of their rice, and place it at the door of the refectory
to be eaten by the birds which congregate there.” These offerings are to
the “house spirits,” by which the Chinese mean the spirits of their
ancestors, who are still kindly interested in the welfare of the family.
This is real ancestor-worship expressed in birds; and Spence[12] records
that “the shamans of certain tribes of Paraguay act as go-betweens
between the members of their tribes and such birds as they imagine
enshrine the souls of their departed relatives.” The heathen Lombards
ornamented their grave-posts with the effigy of a dove. This notion of
birds as reincarnated human souls is not confined to untutored minds nor
to an ancient period. Evidences of its hold on the human imagination may
be found in Europe down to the present day, and it animates one of the
most picturesque superstitions of pious followers of Mahomet, two forms
of which have come to me. The first is given by Doughty,[13] the second
by Keane,[14] both excellent authorities.
Doughty says: “It was an ancient opinion of the idolatrous Arabs that
the departing spirit flitted from man’s brainpan as a wandering fowl,
complaining thenceforward in perpetual thirst her unavenged wrong;
friends, therefore, to avenge the friend’s soul-bird, poured upon the
grave their pious libations of wine. The bird is called a ‘green fowl.’”
Quoting Keane: “It is a superstition among the Mohammedans that the
spirits of martyrs are lodged in the crops of green birds, and partake
of the fruit and drink of the rivers of paradise; also that the souls of
the good dwell in the form of white birds near the throne of God.”
But the spirits represented in birds are not always ancestral or
benevolent: they may be unpleasant, foreboding, demoniac. The Indians
and negroes along the Amazons will not destroy goatsuckers. Why? Because
they are receptacles for departed human souls who have come back to
earth unable to rest because of crimes done in their former bodies, or
to haunt cruel and hard-hearted masters. In Venezuela and Trinidad the
groan-like cries of the nocturnal, cave-dwelling guacharos are thought
to be the wailing of ghosts compelled to stay in their caverns in order
to expiate their sins. Even now, the Turks maintain that the dusky
shearwaters that daily travel in mysterious flocks up and down the
Bosphorus are animated by condemned human souls.
By way of the ancestral traditions sketched above, arise those “sacred
animals” constantly mentioned in accounts of ancient or backward
peoples. Various birds were assigned to the deities and heroes of
Egyptian and Pagan mythology—the eagle to Jove, goose and later the
peacock to Juno, the little owl to Minerva, and so on; but to call these
companions “sacred” is a bad use of the term, for there was little or
nothing consecrate in these ascriptions, and if in any case worship was
addressed to the deity, its animal companion was hardly included in the
reverential thought of the celebrant.
It is conceivable that such ascriptions as these are the refined relics
of earlier superstitions held by primitive folk everywhere in regard to
such birds of their territory as appealed to their imaginations because
of one or another notable trait. Ethnological and zoölogical books
abound in instances, which it would be tedious to catalog, and several
examples appear elsewhere in this book. A single, rather remarkable one,
that of the South African ground-hornbill or bromvogel, will suffice to
illustrate the point here. I choose, among several available, the
account given by Layard,[15] one of the early naturalist-explorers in
southern Africa:
The Fingoes seem to attach some superstitious veneration to the
ground-hornbills and object to their being shot in the neighborhood
of their dwellings, lest they should lose their cattle by
disease.... The Kaffirs have a superstition that if one of these
birds is killed it will rain for a long time. I am told that in time
of drought it is the custom to take one alive, tie a stone to it,
then throw it into a “vley”; after that a rain is supposed to
follow. They avoid using the water in which this ceremony has been
performed.... Only killed in time of severe drought, when one is
killed by order of the rain-doctor and its body is thrown into a
pool in a river. The idea is that the bird has so offensive a smell
that it will make the water sick, and that the only way of getting
rid of this is to wash it away to the sea, which can only be done by
a heavy rain.
The ground where they feed is considered good for cattle, and in
settling a new country spots frequented by these birds are chosen by
the wealthy people. Should the birds, however, by some chance, fly
over a cattle kraal, the kraal is moved to some other place.... It
is very weak on the wing, and when required by the “doctor” the bird
is caught by the men of a number of kraals turning out at the same
time, and a particular bird is followed from one hill to another by
those on the lookout. After three or four flights it can be run down
and caught by a good runner.... The Ovampos [of Damara land] seem to
have a superstition [that the eggs cannot be procured because so
soft that] they would fall to pieces on the least handling.
It seems to me likely that the sense of service to men in its constant
killing of dreaded snakes—birds and serpents are linked together in all
barbaric religious and social myths—may be at the core of the veneration
paid the hornbill, as, apparently, it was in the case of the Egyptian
ibis. This wader was not only a foe to lizards and small snakes, but, as
it always appeared in the Nile just as the river showed signs of
beginning its periodic overflow, a matter of anxious concern to the
people, it was regarded as a prescient and benevolent creature
foretelling the longed-for rise of the water. At Hermopolis, situated at
the upper end of the great fertile plain of the lower Nile, the ibis was
incarnated as Thoth (identified by the Greeks with Hermes), one of the
highest gods of the ancient Egyptians. This ibis, and other incarnated
animals, originally mere symbols of lofty ideas, came to be reverenced
as real divinities in the places where their cult flourished (although
they might enjoy no such distinction elsewhere), were given divine
honors when they died, and were, in short, real gods to their devotees;
that is to say, the sophisticated Egyptians of the later dynasties had
elevated into the logical semblance of divinity this and that
animal-fetish of their uncultured ancestors.
Another singular case of a bird rising to the eminence of tutelary deity
is that of the ruddy sheldrake (_Casarca rutila_) or Brahminy duck in
Thibet. From it is derived the title of the established church of the
lamas (practically the government of that Buddhistic country); and their
abbotts wear robes of the sheldrake colors. In Burmah the Brahminy duck
is sacred to Buddhists as a symbol of devotion and fidelity, and it was
figured on Asoka’s pillars in this emblematic character. This sheldrake
is usually found in pairs, and when one is shot the other will often
hover near until it, too, falls a victim to its conjugal love.[16]
A stage in this process of deification is given by Tylor in describing
the veneration of a certain bird in Polynesia, as a Tahitian priest
explained it to Dr. Ellis, the celebrated missionary-student of the
South Seas. The priest said that his god was not always in the idol
representing it. “A god,” he declared, “often came to and passed from an
image in the body of a bird, and spiritual influence could be
transmitted from an idol by imparting it by contact to certain valued
kinds of feathers.” This bit of doctrine helps us to understand what
Colonel St. Johnston has to tell in his recent thoughtful book[48] on
the ethnology of Polynesia, of the special use of the feathers (mainly
red) of particular birds in the insignia of chiefs, and in religious
ceremonials; and he comments as follows:
In the Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga groups the very special mats of the
chiefs were edged with the much-prized red feathers usually obtained
with great difficulty from Taverni Island.... In Tahiti the fan was
associated with feathers in a peculiar idea of sacredness, and
feathers given out by the priests at the temple at the time of the
“Pa’e-atua” ceremony were taken home by the worshippers and tied on
to special fans. These beautiful feathers of the Pacific were, of
course, prized by an artistic people for their colors alone, but
there seems to have been something more than that, something
particularly connected with a divine royalty. In Hawaii the
_kahili_, the sceptre of the king, was surmounted with special
feathers. The royal cloaks (as in Peru) and the helmets had feathers
thickly sewn on them; the _para-kura_, or sacred coronet of Tangier
was made of red feathers; and the Pa’e-atua ceremony that I have
just written of consisted of the unwrapping of the images of the
gods, exposing them to the sun, oiling them, and then wrapping them
once more in feathers—fresh feathers, brought by the worshippers,
and given in exchange for the old ones, which were taken away as
prized relics to be fastened to the sacred fans.
Can it be that the feathers represent divine birds, symbolic of the
“Sky People”? We know that many birds were peculiarly sacred (the
tropic bird of Fiji might be mentioned among others), and the
messages of the gods were said to have been at first transmitted by
the birds, until the priests were taught to do so in the squeaky
voices—possibly imitative of bird-cries—they adopted.
Such deifications of birds took place elsewhere than in Fiji and Egypt.
Charles de Kay has written a learned yet readable book[18] devoted to
expounding the worship of birds in ancient Europe, and their gradual
mergence into deities of human likeness. He calls attention to remains
in early European lore indicating a very extensive connection of birds
with gods, pointing to a worship of the bird itself as the living
representative of a god, “or else to such a position of the bird toward
a deity as to fairly permit the inference that at a period still more
remote the bird itself was worshipped.” The Polynesian practices
detailed above certainly are of very ancient origin, probably coming to
the islands with the earliest migrants from the East Indian mainlands;
and the theology involved may be a lingering relic of the times and
ideas described in De Kay’s treatise.
To carry these matters further is not within my plan, for they would
lead us into the mazes of comparative mythology, which it is my purpose
to avoid as far as possible, restricting myself to history, sayings, and
allusions that pertain to real, not imaginary, birds.[B]
Footnote B:
Nevertheless, I have made one exception by devoting a chapter to “a
fabulous flock” of wholly fictitious birds, namely, the phenix, rukh
(roc), simurgh and their fellows—all hatched from the same solar
nest—because they have become familiar to us, by name, at least, in
literature, symbolism, and proverbial sayings.
The distinction I try to make between the mythical and the legendary or
real, may be illustrated by the kingfisher—in this case, of course, the
common species of southern Europe. Let us consider first the mythical
side. Alcyone, daughter of Æolus, the wind-god, impelled by love for her
husband Ceyx, whom she found dead on the shore after a shipwreck, threw
herself into the sea. The gods, rewarding their conjugal love, changed
the pair into kingfishers. What connection exists between this, which is
simply a classic yarn, and the ancient theory of the nidification of
this species, I do not know; but the story was—now we are talking of the
real bird, which the Greeks and Latins saw daily—that the kingfisher
hatched its eggs at the time of the winter solstice in a nest shaped
like a hollow sponge, and thought to be solidly composed of fish-bones,
which was set afloat, or at any rate floated, on the surface of the
Mediterranean. The natural query how such a structure could survive the
shock of waves led to the theory that Father Æolus made the winds
“behave” during the brooding-time. As Pliny explains: “For seven days
before the winter solstice, and for the same length of time after it,
the sea becomes calm in order that the kingfishers may rear their
young.” Simonides, Plutarch, and many other classic authorities, testify
to the same tradition, which seems to have belonged particularly to the
waters about Sicily. More recent writers kept alive the tender conceit.
Along the coast the mourning halcyon’s heard
Lamenting sore her spouse’s fate,
are lines from Ariosto’s verse almost duplicated by Camoens; and
Southey—
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles,
The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles.
while Dryden speaks of “halcyons brooding on a winter sea,” and Drayton
makes use of the legend in five different poems. It is a fact that in
the region of southern Italy a period of calm weather ordinarily follows
the blustering gales of late autumn, which may have suggested this
poetic explanation; but one student believes that the story may have
been developed from a far earlier tradition. “The Rhibus of Aryan
mythology, storm-demons, slept for twelve nights [and days] about the
winter solstice ... in the house of the sun-god Savitar.”
Such is the history behind our proverbial expression for tranquillity,
and often it has been used very remotely from its original sense, as
when in _Henry VI_ Shakespeare makes La Pucelle exclaim: “Expect St.
Martin’s summer, halcyon days,” St. Martin’s summer being the English
name for that warm spell in November known to us as Indian summer. All
this is an extended example of the kind of poetic myth which has been
told of many different birds, and which in this book is left to be
sought out in treatises on mythology.
In contrast with this sort of tale I find many non-mythical notions,
historical or existing, concerning the actual kingfisher, which properly
belong to my scheme. One of the oldest is the custom formerly in vogue
in England, and more recently in France, of turning this bird into a
weathercock. The body of a mummified kingfisher with extended wings
would be suspended by a thread, nicely balanced, in order to show the
direction of the wind, as in that posture it would always turn its beak,
even when hung inside the house, toward the point of the compass whence
the breeze blew. Kent, in _King Lear_, speaks of rogues who
Turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters.
And after Shakespeare Marlowe, in his _Jew of Malta_, says:
But how stands the wind?
Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?
We are told that the fishermen of the British and French coasts hang
these kingfisher weathervanes in the rigging of their boats; and it
seems likely to me that it was among sailors that the custom began.
Although Sir Thomas Browne[33] attributed “an occult and secret
property” to this bird as an indicator of wind-drift, it does not
otherwise appear that it had any magical reputation: yet the skin of a
kingfisher was sure to be found among the stuffed crocodiles, grinning
skulls and similar decorations of the consulting-room of a medieval
“doctor,” who himself rarely realized, perhaps, what a fakir he was.
Moreover, we read “That its dried body kept in a house protected against
lightning and kept moths out of garments.”
On the American continent, probably the nearest approach to the
“sacredness” discussed in a former paragraph, is the sincere veneration
of their animal-gods, including a few birds, by the Zuñis and some other
Village Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, which has been studied
minutely by our ethnologists. Yet we read of many other sacred birds
among the redmen. The redheaded woodpecker is regarded as the tutelary
deity of the Omahas, and as the patron-saint of children, because, they
say, its own family is kept in so safe a place. Pawnees have much the
same sentiment toward the wren, which they call “laughing-bird” because
it seems always happy. The crow was the sacred bird of the
“ghost-dance”—a religious ceremony of high significance among the tribes
of the Plains, as is explained in Chapter IX. The Navahos regard the
mountain bluebird as sacred on account of its azure plumage, which (as
something blue) is representative of the South; and it is deemed the
herald of the rising sun, which is their supreme image of God. One of
their old men told Stewart Culin that “two blue birds stand at the door
of the house in which [certain] gods dwell.”
In most cases among our Indians, as elsewhere, it is unlawful to kill or
eat such a bird, which indicates a relation to totemism. Thus, as
Powers[19] asserts, the Mono Indians of the Sierra Nevada, never kill
their sacred black eagles, but pluck out the feathers of those that die
and wear them on their heads. “When they succeed in capturing a young
one, after a fortnight the village makes a great jubilation.” Some
Eskimos will not eat gulls’ eggs, which make men old and decrepit.
Whatever tradition or superstition or other motive affected the choice
of any bird as a tribal totem, or endowed it with “sacredness,”
practical considerations were surely influential. It is noticeable that
the venerated ibis and hawk in Egypt were useful to the people as
devourers of vermin—young crocodiles, poisonous snakes, grain-eating
mice and so forth. Storks in Europe and India, and the “unclean” birds
of Palestine forbidden to the Jews, were mostly carrion-eaters, and as
such were desirable street-cleaners in village and camp. A tradition in
the Ægean island Tenos is that Poseidon—a Greek St. Patrick—sent storks
to clear the island of snakes, which originally were numerous there.
Australian frontiersmen preserve the big kingfisher, dubbed
“laughing-jackass,” for the same good reason. The wiser men in early
communities appreciated this kind of service by birds, and added a
religious sanction to their admonition that such servants of mankind
should not be killed. It was the primitive movement toward
bird-protection, which, by the way, was first applied in this country to
the scavenging turkey-buzzards and carrion-crows of the Southern States.
As for the smaller birds, where special regard was paid them it was
owing, apart from the natural humane admiration and enjoyment of these
pretty creatures, to the mystery and fiction of their being animated by
spirits. When they were black, like ravens and cormorants, or were cruel
night-prowlers, such as owls, or uttered disconsolate cries, they were
thought to be inhabited by dread, malignant, spirits “from night’s
Plutonian shore,” as Poe expresses it, but when they had pretty plumage,
pleasing ways and melodious voices, they were deemed the embodiment of
beneficent and happy spirits—perhaps even those of departed relatives.
Hence we have the notion that some birds are lucky and others unlucky in
their relation to us. Those that bring good luck are mainly those kinds
that associate themselves with civilization, such as the various robins,
wrens and storks, the doves and the swallows. Even so, however, time and
place must be considered in every case, for the dearest of little birds
when it pecks at a window-pane, or seems bent on entering a cottage door
will arouse tremors of fear in a superstitious heart—much more so a bird
that ordinarily keeps aloof from mankind. Frazer records, in his essay
on Scapegoats, that if a wild bird flies into a rural Malay’s house, it
must be carefully caught and smeared with oil, and must then be released
into the open air with a formula of words adjuring it to take away all
ill-luck. In antiquity Greek women seem to have done the same with any
swallow they found inside the house, a custom mentioned by both
Pythagoras and Plato—the latter humorously proposing to dismiss poets
from his ideal State in the same manner. Such doings remind one of the
function of the scapegoat; and in fact, according to Frazer, the Hazuls,
of the Carpathian Mountains, imagine they can transfer their freckles to
the first swallow they see in the spring by uttering a certain command
to the bird. Are these practices distorted reminiscences of the
conjuring by the Hebrew shaman as described in the Old Testament?
This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing: He
shall be brought into the priest.... Then shall the priest command
to take for him that is to be cleaned two birds alive and clean, and
cedar wood and scarlet and hyssop. And the priest shall command that
one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water.
As for the living bird, he shall take it and the cedar wood, and the
scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in
the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water; and he
shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy
seven times, and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living
bird loose into the open field. (_Lev. xiv, 27._)
The matter of “luck” in this hocus-pocus seems to lie in the chance as
to which bird is chosen to be “scapegoat,” and so is allowed to remain
alive, cleaning its feathers as best it may. Evidently, the bird that
wishes to do nothing to offend anyone must go warily. A cuckoo, for
example, may spoil the day for an English milkmaid by incautiously
sounding its call before her breakfast.
Such has been the mental attitude underlying the amazing ideas and
practices that will be found described in succeeding chapters of this
collection of traditional birdlore, much of which is so juvenile and
absurd. Until one reviews the groping steps by which mankind advanced
with very uneven speed—a large body of it having yet hardly begun the
progress, even among the “civilized”—from the crudest animism to a
clearer and clearer comprehension of “natural law in the physical
world,” he cannot understand how men gave full credence to fictions that
the most superficial examination, or the simplest reasoning, would show
were false, and trembled before the most imaginary of alarms. Add to
this childish credulity the teachings of religious and political leaders
who had much to gain by conserving the ignorance and faith of their
followers; add again the fruitful influence of story-tellers and poets
who utilized ancient legends and beliefs for literary advantage, and you
have the history and explanation of how so many primitive superstitions
and errors have survived to our day.