THE FAMILIAR OF WITCHES
I fear no one would admit that a book of this character was anywhere
near complete did it not include at least one chapter on the observances
and superstitions connected with owls. Nevertheless I doubt whether I
should not have taken the risk of the reader’s displeasure had I not
been able to avail myself of essays by several men who have handled this
large and intricate phase of bird-lore in a way that discourages any
rivalry.
_The Atlantic Monthly_ for September, 1874, contained an article by
Alexander Young on “Birds of Ill omen,” in which one may find treated
not only the historic dread of owls, but many similar facts and fears
connected with ravens, crows, magpies, and their fellow-craftsmen in
alleged diabolism. “Most birds,” Mr. Young remarks, “were considered
ominous of good or evil according to the place and manner of their
appearance.... It is noticeable that this stigma has been affixed only
to those birds whose appearance or voice is disagreeable, and whose
habits are somewhat peculiar.” The nocturnal owls perhaps fulfil these
conditions as well as any bird could. “Their retired habits,” to quote
Broderip,[78] “the desolate places that are their favorite haunts, their
hollow hootings, fearful shrieks, serpent-like hissings and
coffin-maker-like snappings, have helped to give them a bad eminence,
more than overbalancing all the glory that Minerva and her own Athens
could shed around them.”
The little Grecian owl—it is a foreign replica of our own small screech
owl, which, as a matter of fact, gurgles rather melodiously instead of
screeching—was well thought of in Athens in its prime, and was the
special cognizance of the wise and dignified goddess of her citizens,
Pallas Athene—Minerva of the Romans. De Kay,[18] indeed, reasons her out
an owl-goddess, and it is said that statues of her have been found with
an owl’s instead of a human head. If she was a humanized expression for
the moon, as some interpret her, this little lover of moonlight is most
suitable as her symbol. Therefore one need not speculate on the reputed
“wisdom” of the owl, any owl—said to be proved wise by its being the
only bird that looks straight before it—for that reputation is merely a
reflection from the attributes of its patron, the stately goddess. Homer
makes Athene the special protector of those, chiefly women, engaged in
textile crafts; and there is an old saying that the owl was a weaver’s
daughter, spinning with silver threads. When, therefore, in the midst of
the momentous naval battle of Salamis an owl alighted on the mast of the
flagship of Admiral Themistocles, as tradition attests, it was received
as an assurance from Pallas Athene herself that she was fighting with
and for the harassed Greeks. The bird is displayed as large as space
permits on Greek coins of the period.
When the Romans took over Athene as Minerva her owl came with her, but
its symbolic importance quickly faded. The Italians cared nothing for
their little “strix”—had no use for it except to eat it or make it a
lure for their bird-catching nets, and even charged it with sucking the
blood of children; and they had no respect at all for the rest of its
tribe. The language applied to them by the Latin poets reveals the
detestation and dread with which owls were held among the Romans.
Derogatory references abound in books of the classical era, and similar
sentiments might be quoted from authors down into medieval times. Even
the elder Pliny, called a naturalist, but really hardly more than a too
credulous compiler, condemns the tribe in very harsh words—especially
the big-horned species; yet he only reflected the general belief that
they were messengers of death, whence everybody trembled if one was seen
in the town or alighted on any housetop. One luckless owl that made a
flying trip to the Capitol was caught and burnt, and its ashes were cast
into the Tiber. Twice Rome underwent ceremonial purification on this
account, whence Butler’s jibe in _Hudibras_:
The Roman senate, when within
The city walls an owl was seen,
Did cause their clergy with lustrations
(Our synod calls humiliations)
The round-faced prodigy t’ avert
From doing town and country hurt.
The deaths of several Roman emperors, among them Valentinian and
Commodus Antoninus, were presaged by owls alighting on their residences,
and it is recorded that before the death of the great Augustus an owl
sang on the Curia.
In central India the owl is now generally regarded as a bird of ill
omen. “If one happens to perch on the house of a native, it is a sign
that one of his household will die, or some other misfortune befall him
within a year. This can only be averted by giving the house or its value
in money to the Brahmins, or making extraordinary peace-offering to the
gods.” It is easy to calculate the origin of that particular form of
superstition. In southern India, according to Thurston (quoted by
Lauffer), the same dread prevails; and there the natives interpret the
bird’s cries by their number, much as they did those of crows. “One such
screech forebodes death; two screeches, success in any approaching
undertaking; three, the addition by marriage of a girl to the family;
four, a disturbance; five, that the hearer will travel. Six screeches
foretell the coming of guests; seven, mental distress; eight, sudden
death; and nine signify favorable results. The number nine plays a great
rôle in systems of divination.”
In view of this Oriental and Greco-Latin history, which spread with the
imperial civilization into all western Europe, and in view of the bad
associations of these birds in the Old Testament, where they are
pronounced “unclean,” and relegated to the desert as companions of a
dreadful company (_Isaiah_, xxxiv, II), it was natural that owls should
be regarded with almost insane fear and aversion in the Middle Ages, as
the record shows they were. In Sweden even yet, the owl is considered a
bird of sorcery, and great caution is necessary in speaking of any of
them to avoid being ensnared; moreover it is dangerous to kill one, as
its associates might avenge its death. Nuttall,[79] the English-American
ornithologist, notes that he often heard the following couplet when he
was a child in the old country:
Oh!—o-o-o—o-o!
I was once a king’s daughter, and sat on my father’s knee,
But now I’m a poor hoolet, and hide in a hollow tree.
This is explained in the northern counties of England by a legend that
Pharaoh’s daughter was transformed into an owl, and when children hear
at night the screams of one of these nocturnal hunters they are told the
story of its strange origin—but why _Pharaoh’s_ daughter? Then there is
that cryptic “little ode” quoted from the memory of his childhood by
Charles Waterton[73] in reference to the barn-owl, and explained
elsewhere in this book, which runs thus:
Once I was a monarch’s daughter, and sat on a lady’s knee,
But now I’m a nightly rover, banished to the ivy-tree,
Crying hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, for my feet are
cold
Pity me, for here you see me, persecuted, poor and old.
If the delvers into Indo-European mythology are right, the dread of owls
existed long before the Romans colonized among Gauls and Britons, and
were in turn overrun by Teutonic hordes. It exists among the wildest
savages in every part of the world where owls prowl with ghostly silence
and stealth and hoot in the darkness, startling men’s nerves, and it
survives in all peasantries. In that delightful Sicilian book by Mrs.
John L. Heaton,[80] we have a narrative of a journey after dark with
some village-women. “A screech-owl [_cuca_] hooted. Gra Vainia crossed
herself, and Donna Ciccia muttered: ‘Beautiful Mother of the Rock,
deliver us!’ Donna Catina touched something [a gold cross] in the bosom
of her dress.” On another occasion: “The silence that fell again was
broken by the hoot of the cuca. ‘Some one must die,’ shuddered Donna
Catina.”
Owls have always been regarded as the familiars of witches, sometimes
bearing them through the night on noiseless wings to some unholy tryst,
sometimes contributing materials to their malignant, magic-brewing
recipes. It was by meddling in such matters that the hero of that fine
old romance, _The Golden Ass_ of Apuleius, fell into his ridiculous and
painful predicament.
British poets, and especially the dramatists from Chatterton down, have
taken advantage of the black repute of owls to enhance any scene of
horror they want to depict, Ben Jonson’s _Masque of Queens_ furnished
excellent examples; and my friend J. E. Harting,[42] of London, has
gathered into his admirable _Ornithology of Shakespeare_ many
owl-extracts from the great master’s play. “The owlet’s wing,” Mr.
Harting finds, “was an ingredient in the cauldron wherein the witches
prepared their ‘charm of powerful trouble’ (_Macbeth_, iv, I); and with
the character assigned to it by the ancients, Shakespeare, no doubt,
felt that the introduction of an owl in a dreadful scene of tragedy
would help to make the scene come home more forcibly to the people who
had from early times associated its presence with melancholy, misfortune
and death.... Its doleful cry pierces the ear of Lady Macbeth while the
murder is being done:
Hark! Peace!
It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman
Which gives stern’st good-night.
“And when the murderer rushes in immediately afterwards, exclaiming ‘I
have done the deed. Did thou not hear a noise?’ she replies ‘I have
heard the owl scream.’ And later on: ‘The obscure bird clamored the
live-long night!’... Should an owl appear at a birth, it is said to
forebode ill luck to the infant. King Henry VI, addressing Gloster,
says: ‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign’; while upon another
occasion its presence was supposed to predict a death or at least some
dire mishap.... When Richard III is irritated by the ill news showered
thick upon him, he interrupts the third messenger with ‘Out on ye, Owls!
Nothing but songs of death.’”
It is not surprising on turning to the medieval pharmacopœia, where
there was quite as much magic as medicine, that the owl was of great
potency in prescriptions. “Thus the feet of the bubo, burnt with hard
plumbago, was held to be a help against serpents. If the heart of the
bird was placed on the left breast of a sleeping beauty, it made her
tell all her secrets: but the warrior who carried it was strengthened in
battle.” A modern relic of this bit of superstitious therapeutics was
found by me in _The Long Hidden Friend_, a little book printed at
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1863, which was a crude translation by George
Homan of a German book published at Reading, Penn., in 1819. It consists
of a long series of remedies and magic arts to be followed, and which
were actually in use in that region in cases of disease. Some of them
introduced birds, one of which is reminiscent of the “sleeping beauty”
mentioned a moment ago, and reads thus: “If you lay the heart and right
foot of a barn-owl on one who is asleep, he will answer whatever you ask
him, and tell what he has done.” This should be known to our chiefs of
police, whose detectives appear to be wasting much time in applying the
extractive process called the Third Degree.
The owl tribe, among the most innocent and serviceable, in its relation
to mankind, of avian groups, has been as outrageously slandered south of
the Mediterranean as north of it. “The inhabitants of Tangier,” as
Colonel Irby tells us[81] in his book on the ornithology of Gibraltar,
consider the barn-owls, numerous there, “the clairvoyant friends of the
Devil.”
The Jews believe that their cry causes the death of young children; so,
in order to prevent this, they pour a vessel of water out into the
courtyard every time they hear the cry of one of these owls, the idea
being that thus they will distract the bird’s attention, and the infant
will escape the intended malice. The Arabs believe these owls can cause
all kinds of evil to old as well as young, but they content themselves
with cursing the bird whenever it is seen or heard. The Mohammedans say:
“When these birds cry they are only cursing in their own language; but
their malediction is harmless unless they know the name of the
individual to whom they wish evil, or unless they have the malignity to
point out that person when passing him. As the Devil sleeps but little
when there is evil work to be done, he would infallibly execute the
commands of his favorite, if one did not, by cursing him, thus guard
against the power of that enemy.”
It is a pleasure to have this long record of misdemeanors and diabolism
relieved by at least one good deed in history. Having read in
Watters’s[57] curious little volume that the Tartars attribute to the
barn-owl the saving of the life of their great commander Genghis Khan, I
searched far and wide for the particulars of what seemed likely to be an
entertaining incident, and at last I came upon the facts in the eleventh
volume of _Purchase His Pilgrims_. It appears that Changius Can, as the
old historian spells it, had his horse shot under him in a certain fight
that was going against him, and he ran and hid in a thicket of
shrubs—which is a novel view of the “Tartar Terror.” “Whither, when the
enemies were returned, with purpose to spoil the dead Carkass, and to
seek out such as were hidden, it happened that an Owle came and sate
upon those little trees or shrubs which he had chose for his court,
which when they had perceived they sought no further in that place,
supposing that the said bird would not have sat there if any man had
been hidden underneath.”
A very similar legend in China accounts for the use of peacock plumes as
insignia of rank and is related as follows by Katherine M. Ball[68]: In
the Chin dynasty a defeated general took refuge in a forest where there
were many peacocks. When the pursuing forces arrived, and found the fowl
so quiet and undisturbed, they concluded that no one could possibly have
come that way, and forthwith abandoned the search. The general—who later
became the ancestor of five kings—was thus able to escape, and so
grateful was he that later, when he came into power, he instituted the
custom of conferring a peacock feather as an honor for the achievement
of bravery in battle.
Japan has a similar mythical legend.
Frenchmen call the common brown owl of Europe _chouette_; and when in
1793 disgruntled smugglers and Royalist soldiers were carrying on
guerrilla warfare in Brittany and Poitu against the new order of things,
they came to be called Chouans, “owls,” from the signal-cries they made
to one another in their nocturnal forays as appears so often in Balzac’s
novel _The Chouans_.
Not much of this spookish and legendary lore seems to have been imported
into the United States, or else it has disappeared, except that which
still lingers among the superstitious negroes of the South. A writer in
one of the early issues of _The Cosmopolitan_ (magazine) related that to
the black folks of the Cotton Belt forty years or so ago the quavering
“song” of our small mottled screech-owl spoke of coming death; but the
birds were considered sensitive to countercharms put upon them from
within the house over which they crooned their tremulous monologue.
“Jest jam de shevel inter de fire, en time hit git red-hot dee ’ll hesh
dere shiverin’!” If you don’t like that, sprinkle salt on the blaze, or
turn a pair of shoes up on the floor with the soles against the wall.
“Perhaps this faint semblance to a laid-out corpse will pacify the
hungry spirit; the charm certainly, according to negro belief, will
silence its harsh-voiced emissary.”
The darkies warn you that you must turn back on any journey you are
making if a screech-owl cries above you. An old “hoot-owl,” however, may
foretell either good or bad fortune according as its three hoots are
given on the right or left hand. This is an unfailing sign, and is
especially heeded in ’coon or ’possum hunting, at night, when three
hoots from the left will send any hunter home hopeless.
All these indications and charms bear the familiar marks of the Old
World fears and formulas, but it is surprising to meet them on the
fields of Dixie-land.
Owls were too well understood by our native redmen to be regarded with
much superstition, and the smaller ones were well liked. Prince
Maximilian mentions in his _Travels_ (about 1836) that owls were kept in
the lodges of the Mandans and Minnitarees, who lived in permanent
villages in the upper Missouri Valley, and were regarded as
“soothsayers,” but I think they were no more than pets, as they are now
in Zuñi houses. Yet in the American Museum of Natural History in New
York is a stuffed owl mounted on a stick, labeled as an object
“worshipped” by the sorcerers among the Menominee Indians (eastern
Wisconsin), “who believe they can assume the shape of an owl, and can in
this disguise attack and kill their enemies”—that is, they try to make
others believe so. The owl is chosen for their disguise, of course,
because it typifies the sly, unseen method of attack in darkness with
which they sought to terrify the people.
Mr. Stuart Culin tells me that in Zuñi owls, of which four kinds are
recognized by names, are not considered sacred, and are killed for their
feathers, which are used on ceremonial masks, and, once a year, to
decorate long prayer-sticks. The people, he says, think that a certain
big gray owl lives in a house like a man, and if any Indian goes to its
house and the owl looks at him he will surely die. When the headmen go
out at night for some ceremony, and this owl is heard, it is a sign that
rain will come very soon. This large owl and the small burrowing-owl are
kept in houses as pets. Children are afraid of them, and they are
utilized by parents to make the youngsters behave themselves.
The Ashochimi, a mountain tribe of Californian Indians now extinct, as
described by Powers,[19] feared certain hawks and owls, regarding them
as malignant spirits which they must conciliate by offerings, and by
wearing mantles of feathers, thus:
When a great white owl alights near a village in the evening, and
hoots loudly, the headman at once assembles all his warriors in
council to determine whether Mr. Strix demands a life or only
money.... If they incline to believe that he demands a life, someone
in the village is doomed and will speedily die. But they generally
vote that he can be placated by an offering, and immediately set out
a quantity of shell-money and pinole, whereupon the valorous
trenchermen fall to eat the pinole themselves, and in the morning
the headman decorates himself with owl-feathers, carries out the
shell-money with solemn formality and flings it into the air under
the tree where the owl perched.
A somewhat more spiritual view was taken by the Pimas of old times in
the southwestern deserts. Their ideas of the destiny of the human soul
varied, but one theory was that at death the soul passed into the body
of an owl. “Should an owl happen to be hooting at the time of a death,
it was believed that it was waiting for the soul.... Owl-feathers were
always given to a dying person. They were kept in a long, rectangular
box or basket of maguey leaf. If the family had no owl-feathers at hand
they sent to the medicine-man who always kept them. If possible, the
feathers were taken from a living bird when collected; the owl might
then be set free or killed.”[83]