CHAPTER X

A FLOCK OF FABULOUS FOWLS

We are pretty sure to hear of the phenix every time a tailor or

soap-maker announces that he will rebuild his shop after it has been

burned; and its picture is a favorite with the advertising department of

fire-insurance companies. The world first learned of this remarkable

fowl when Herodotus brought back to Greece his wonder-tales from Egypt,

some 400 years before Cleopatra made so much trouble by mixing love and

politics. It will be well to quote in full the account by the great

Greek traveller as it is found in the translation by Laurent:

There is another sacred bird, called the “phenix;” which I myself

never saw except in a picture, for it seldom makes its appearance

among the Egyptians—only every five-hundred years, according to the

people of Heliopolis. They state that he comes on the death of his

sire. If at all like his picture, this bird may be thus described in

size and shape. Some of his feathers are of the color of gold;

others are red. In outline he is exceedingly similar to the eagle,

and in size also. This bird is said to display an ingenuity which to

me does not appear credible: he is represented as coming out of

Arabia, and bringing with him his father to the temple of the Sun,

embalmed in myrrh, and there burying him. The manner in which this

is done is as follows: In the first place he sticks together an egg

of myrrh, as much as he can carry, and then tries if he can bear the

burden. This experiment achieved, he accordingly scoops out the egg

sufficiently to deposit his sire within. He next fills with fresh

myrrh the opening in the egg by which the body was inclosed; thus

the whole mass containing the carcase is still of the same weight.

Having thus completed the embalming, he transports him into Egypt

and to the temple of the Sun. (_Euterpe_, Book II.)

Herodotus seems to have been most interested in the odorous embalming,

quaintly referred to in a 17th-century song—

Have you e’r smelt what Chymick Skill

From Rose or Amber doth distill?

Have you been near that Sacrifice

The Phoenix makes before she dies?

And it will be noticed that this observant reporter says nothing of the

quality that has given the bird its present popularity as a type of

recovery from disaster—its ability to “rise from its ashes,” which,

indeed, appears to have been a later conception.

Greeks of that day probably accepted this story from Herodotus without

much demur or criticism, for they had their own traditions of wonderful

birds—the Stymphalids, for example. These were gigantic and terrible

fowls that lived along the river Stymphalus, in northern Arcadia—a

region of savage mountains that the Athenians knew little about. They

were believed to be man-eating monsters with claws, wings, and beaks of

brass, and feathers which they shot out like arrows. “Heracles scared

them with a brazen rattle, and succeeded in killing part and in driving

away the rest, which settled on the island of Artias in the Black Sea,

to be frightened away after a hard fight by the Argonauts.” So Seyfert

summarizes their history; and an illustration on an antique vase in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a flock of them looking much like

pelicans.

Pausanias visited the curious River Stymphalus and found it rising in a

spring, flowing into a marsh, and then disappearing underground—a good

setting for strange happenings, and he refers to the legend in his usual

bantering way, thus:

“There is a tradition that some man-eating birds lived on its banks,

whom Hercules is said to have killed with his arrows.... The desert

of Arabia has among other monsters some birds called Stymphalides,

who are as savage to men as lions or leopards. They attack those who

come to capture them, and wound them with their beaks and kill them.

They pierce through coats of mail that men wear, and if they put on

thick robes of mat the beaks of these birds penetrate them too....

Their size is about that of cranes and they are like storks, but

their beaks are stronger and not crooked like those of storks. If

there have been in all time these stymphalides like hawks and

eagles, then they are probably of Arabian origin.”

The Greeks knew also of half-human Harpies, of web-footed Sirens, of the

Birds of Seleucia, and of various other ornithological monstrosities, so

that the tale of an Egyptian one was easily acceptable to their minds.

The ugliest of the ugly flock were the Harpies, bird-women, on whom the

ancients expended the direst pigments of their imagination, and whom

Dante makes inhabitants of the gnarled and gloomy groves wherein

suicides are condemned to suffer in the nether world—

There do the hideous Harpies make their nests

Who chased the Trojans from the Strophades

With sad announcement of impending doom;

Broad wings have they, and necks and faces human,

And feet with claws, and their great bellies fledged

They make lament upon the wondrous trees.

The Romans liked Herodotus and his story as well as they pleased the

Greeks, and Pliny heard or invented additional particulars. He insists

that only one phenix exists at a time, clothed in gorgeous feathers and

carrying a plumed head; and at the close of its long life it builds a

nest of frankincense and cassia, on which it dies. From the corpse, as

Pliny asserts, is generated a worm that develops into another phenix.

This young phenix, when it has grown large enough, makes it its first

duty to lay its father’s body on the altar in Heliopolis; and Tacitus

adds that its body is burned there. The implication in most accounts is

that the bird is male (the Egyptians are said to have believed all

vultures female), and doubtless the whole conception is a primitive

phase of the nature-worship out of which developed the more formal

Osiris-legend.

But the picture has many variants. One is that the phenix subsists on

air for 500 years, at the end of which, lading its wings with perfumed

gums gathered on Mt. Lebanon (!) it flies to Heliopolis and is

burned—_itself_ now, not its parent—into fragrant ashes on the altar of

the Sun temple. On the next morning appears a young phenix already

feathered, and on the third day, its pinions fully grown, it salutes the

priest and flies away. Here we come to the best remembered feature of

the mystery, caught and kept alive for us by the poets, such as John

Lyly,[49] who in 1591 reminded the world that—

There is a bird that builds its neast with spice,

And built, the Sun to ashes doth her burne,

Out of whose sinders doth another rise,

And she by scorching beames to dust doth turne.

De Kay[18] discourses on these notions in his _Bird Gods_:

“In the oldest tombs, discovered lately on the upper Nile by Jacques

de Morgan and others, the phenix is seen rising from a bed of

flames, which may well mean the funeral pyre of the defunct. The

inscriptions in question are so early that they belong to a period

when the ceremonial of the mummy had not become universal in Egypt,

and the conquerors of Egypt, probably a swarm of metal-using

foreigners from the valley of the Euphrates, who crossed from Arabia

and the Red Sea, were still burning the bodies of their chiefs and

kings. The phenix of these inscriptions may indicate the soul of the

departed rising from its earthly dross as the soul of Herakles,

according to the much later legend in its Greek form, rose from his

funeral pyre to join the gods of Olympus.”

Now, whether or not the priests of Heliopolis encouraged their

worshippers to believe that such a creature really existed, they

themselves knew well that it was a mere symbol of the sun; and it is

easy to identify it with the bird “bennu” spoken of in the Book of the

Dead and other Egyptian sacred texts, which unquestionably was a

picturesque representative of the sun, rising, pursuing its course, and

at regular intervals expiring in the fires of sunset, then renewing

itself on the morrow in the flames of sunrise over Arabia. Plentiful

evidence that this was perfectly understood in Greece and Italy of the

classic age may be read in the works of their essayists and poets.

Claudian (365–408), wrote, and Tickell, a British poet, translated into

verse, a long poem on the phenix. Petrarch carried their wisdom onward

when he declared there could be only one phenix at a time because there

was only one sun.

When the Arabs succeeded the Romans in the Nile Provinces they picked up

from the people remnants of the legend, and confused it with their own

ancient belief in a creature that resisted burning, by whose existence

they accounted for the incombustible property of asbestos, a mineral

known to them, but the origin of which was a mystery. It came from the

Orient, and some said it was a vegetable product, others the hair of a

rat-like animal: the western Arabs, however, mostly believed it to be

the plumage of a bird, so that naturally they identified it with the

fire-loving phenix. Arabian authors of the 10th century and onward

describe this bird, under the Greek name “salamandra,” as dwelling in

India, where it lays its eggs and produces young in fire. Sashes, they

say, are made of its feathers, and when one of them becomes soiled it is

thrown on a fire, and comes out whole, but clean.

This is an excellent example of the mingling of fact and fancy by which

a student of these old matters is constantly perplexed. It is probable

that small woven articles had long been known to the Arabs and Moors as

Eastern curiosities, for the people of southern China since very ancient

times had been collecting and preparing fibrous asbestos, and weaving it

into fire-proof cloth. Such fabrics had, no doubt, a rough, fuzzy

surface, not unlike fur or the down of birds, and might easily be

supposed to be the latter. Hence the assertion that asbestos was the

skin of a bird indestructible by fire, the identification of the phenix

with the salamandra (as a bird—it had other legendary forms), and the

trade-name “samand” given to asbestos cloth when the Arabs themselves

began to manufacture and sell it. So our proverbial idea of the

salamander goes back to a remote antiquity; but how it came to be

represented among us as a newt instead of a bird belongs to another

book.

Meanwhile on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, where the legend

of the phenix was popular, it had been introduced into Christianity as a

symbol, as we know from memorial sculpture, and from the writings of St.

Clement, who was the second pope after Peter. Its special meaning was

immortality, which in that period meant the physical resurrection of the

dead; and the peacock came to be used in the same sense, as

representing, if not virtually merged with, the phenix. The image in

men’s minds at that time appears to have been that of an eagle, a bird

closely identified with the sun, clothed in the plumage of the peacock,

another sun-bird (as representative of the gorgeous clouds at sunset);

and the very name confirms these solar associations, for our “phenix” is

the Greek word _phoinix_, crimson red. How large a place the peacock in

this aspect fills in the art and mythology of China and Japan appears in

Chapter VII.

Hulme informs us that Philippe de Thaum writes in his _Bestiary_ of the

mystic bird: “Know this is its lot; it comes to death of its own will,

and from death it comes to life: hear what it signifies. Phoenix

signifies Jesus, Son of Mary, that he had power to die of his own will,

and from death come to life. Phoenix signifies that to save his people

he chose to suffer upon the cross.” “God knew men’s unbelief,” St. Cyril

laments, “and therefore provided this bird as evidence of the

Resurrection.” St. Ambrose also declares that “the bird of Arabia

teaches us, by its example, to believe in the Resurrection.” Passages of

like tenor might be quoted from Tertullian and other expositors of the

early Christian church, all showing the most unsuspicious faith in the

real existence of such a bird.

The symbolic connection of this fabulous creature with the idea of

immortality may have been an inheritance from Jewish traditions.

According to the Talmud Eve, after eating the terrible fruit in the

Garden of Eden, tried to force it, and its consequences, on all the

animals, but the bird “chol” (the phenix) would not eat, but flew away

from temptation, and thus preserved its original gift of perpetual life.

“And now the phenix ... lives a thousand years, then shrivels up till it

is the size of an egg, and then from himself emerges beautiful again.”

In the Middle Ages this deathless bird was supposed to inhabit the

sacred garden of the Earthly Paradise.

Peacocks carved on early Christian sarcophagi are perched on a palm tree

(the conventional sign of martyrdom in primitive Christian iconography),

and hence eloquent of that rapturous belief in immortality

characteristic of the catacombs, as Mrs. Jenner expresses it.

Representations of the bird rising from a flaming nest and ascending

toward the sun are less common, but do occur in medieval heraldry, by

which pictorial path, it is probable, the notion has come down to our

own day and become the cognizance of one of the oldest American

insurance companies.

The association with the palm mentioned above recalls another line of

legendary, for some etymologists say that the name “phenix” should be so

written (not _phoenix_), and that it is the older name of the date-palm.

This tree was regarded in ancient Egypt as the emblem of triumph,

whence, perhaps, our modern symbolic use of its fronds; and Pliny was

informed that “in Arabia the phenix nested only on a palm,” and that

“the said bird died with the tree and revived of itself as the tree

sprang again.”

Now, Arabic authors of the Middle Ages had much to say of a mythical

bird, “anka,” that lived 1700 years; and they explained that when a

young anka grows up if it be a female the old female burns herself, and

if it be a male the old male does so. This is very phenix-like, but the

anka is distinguished by huge size, the Arabic writer Kazweenee, as

quoted by Payne,[87] describing the anka as the greatest of birds. “It

carries off the elephant,” he says, “as the cat carries off the mouse”;

and he relates that in consequence of its kidnapping a bride God, at the

prayer of the prophet Handhallah, “banished it to an island in the

circumambient ocean unvisited by men under the equinoctial line.”

I find in Miss Costello’s _Rose Garden of Persia_[88] some interesting

notes quoted from M. Garcin de Tassy, relative to the anka, which, De

Tassy says, has become a proverbial symbol in Persia for something

spoken of but not seen—and not likely to be! Here he seems to be using

the Arabic name for the bird the Persians call “simurgh,” the

signification of which, as Professor A. V. W. Jackson tells me, is “the

mythical,” and which is derived from the avestan word for

“eagle”—another link in our chain. De Tassy explains:

It [the anka] is known only by name, and is so called from having a

white line round the neck like a collar; some say because of the

length of the neck.... It is said that the inhabitants of the city

of Res ... had in their country a mountain called Demaj, a mile

high. There came a very large bird with a very long neck, of

beautiful and divers colors. This bird was accustomed to pounce on

all the birds of that mountain, and eat them up. One day he was

hungry and birds were scarce, so he pounced on a child and carried

it off. He is called ankamogreb because he carries off the prey he

seizes.... Soon after this he was struck by a thunderbolt.

Mohammed is reported to have said that at the time of Moses God

created a female bird called anka; it had eight wings like the

seraphs, and bore the figure of a man. God gave it a portion of

every thing, and afterwards created it a male. Then God made a

revelation to Moses that he had created two extraordinary birds, and

had assigned for their nourishment the wild beasts around Jerusalem.

But the species multiplied, and when Moses was dead they went to the

land of Nejd and Hijaz, and never ceased to devour the wild beasts

and to carry off children till the time when Khaled, son of Senan

Abasi, was Prophet, between the time of Christ and Mohammed. It was

then that these birds were complained of. Khaled invoked God, and

God did not permit them to multiply, and their race became extinct.

This characteristic Bedouin camp-fire novelette reminds us at once of

the famous roc, or “rukh,” to adopt the more correct spelling, with

which we are familiar from the story in the _Arabian Nights_ of Sinbad

the Sailor. Let me quote it succinctly from Payne’s edition.[87] Sinbad

had sailed on a commercial venture from his home in Basra, a port on the

Persian Gulf, and the ship had stopped at a very pleasant island,

situation unrecorded. Sinbad went ashore with others, wandered in the

lovely woods, fell asleep, and awoke to find the ship gone and himself

the only person on the island. As he was exploring the place rather

timidly he came to a great shining dome, but could see no doorway. “As I

stood,” he relates, “casting about how to gain an entrance, the sun was

suddenly hidden from me and the air became dark....”

So I marvelled at this, and lifting my head looked steadfastly at

the sun, when I saw that what I had taken for a cloud was none other

than an enormous bird whose outspread wings, as it flew through the

air, obscured the sun and veiled it from the island. At this sight

my wonder redoubled, and I bethought me of a story I had heard

aforetime of pilgrims and travellers, how in certain islands dwells

a huge bird, called the roc, which feeds its young on elephants, and

was assured that the dome aforesaid was none other than one of its

eggs. As I looked ... the bird alighted on the egg and brooded over

it, with its wings covering it and its legs spread out behind it on

the ground, and in this posture it fell asleep, glory be to Him who

sleepeth not!

When I saw this I arose, and unwinding the linen of my turban

twisted it into a rope with which I girt my middle, and bound myself

fast to his feet.

Sinbad’s purpose was to get himself carried away to some better place,

but when, next morning, the roc did bear him aloft and afar, and finally

alighted, the sailor found himself in a horrid desert. After many

further adventures and voyages Sinbad revisits his island yet does not

recognize it until the men with whom he is strolling bade him look at a

great dome. Not knowing what it was they broke it open with stones,

“whereupon much water ran out of it, and the young roc appeared within;

so they pulled it forth of the shell and killed it, and took of it great

store of meat.” Dreadful misfortune followed this inconsiderate act.

This was a well-known Arabic wonder-tale. The author of one of their

popular old books of “marvels,” several of which exist, tells almost

exactly Sinbad’s story as happening to himself, and at least two other

Arabic works are said to contain the tale with picturesque variations.

In later times the home of the monster was placed in Madagascar. Marco

Polo, the adventurous Italian, who in the 13th century wandered overland

to China, and whose _Travels_[89] are a fine mixture of fact and fancy,

had a fair idea of where Madagascar was, and recorded much that he was

told about it—mostly erroneous. He relates that the people of that

island report “That at a certain season of the year ... the rukh makes

its appearance from the southern region.... Persons who have seen this

bird assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen paces in

extent.” Marco says that he heard that the agents of the Grand Khan took

to him a feather ninety spans long. It is explained in Yule’s edition of

Polo’s _Travels_ that the supposed roc’s feather was one of the gigantic

fronds of the raphia palm “very like a quill in form.”

Such wonder-tales have a truly phenix-like quality of indestructibility.

As late as the time of Charles I of England there lived in Lambeth, on

the Surrey side of London, John Tradescant, renowned as traveller and

florist, who accumulated an extensive “physic-garden” and museum of

antiquities and curiosities. He was a man of science, but to satisfy the

popular taste of the time, as Pennant explains, his museum contained a

feather alleged to be of the dragon, and another of the griffin. “You

might have found here two feathers of the tail of the _phoenix_, and the

claw of the _rukh_, a bird capable to _trusse_ an elephant.” This

collection after the death of Tradescant’s son in 1622, became the

property of Elias Ashmole, and it was the nucleus of the Ashmolean

Museum founded at Oxford in 1682.

But phenix, rukh, anka, simurgh, garuda, feng-huang and others that have

not been mentioned, such as Yel, the mythical raven of our Northwest,

and those of Malaya described by Skeat,[7] are all, apparently, members

of the brood hatched ages ago in that same sunrise nest and still flying

amid rosy clouds of prehistoric fable.

The first glimpse of them is on the seals and tablets recovered from

Mesopotamian ruin-mounds. In the mystic antiquity of the Summerian

kingdom of Ur and its capital-city Lagash, a gigantic eagle, “the divine

bird Imgig” was the royal cognizance. In those days, as Dr. Ward[23]

discloses from his study of the oldest Babylonian cylinders, people told

one another tales of monstrous and fantastic birds of prey that could

fly away with an antelope in each talon, and which fought, usually

victoriously, against huge winged and feathered dragons with bodies like

those of crocodiles, and sometimes with human heads. Such

representations of demons were the prototypes of the grotesque

combinations of animal features, and of men and animals, more familiar

to us in the Egyptian Sphinx, the classic centaurs, and medieval angels

and devils.

When the elders in Babylon expounded the reason for faith in these

antagonistic supernatural creatures, they explained that the “divine”

eagle symbolized beneficence and protective power in the universe, while

the feathered monsters stood for the baffling forces of malignancy and

harm. In this philosophy, probably, is the underlying relationship that

connects all this Oriental flock of fabulous fowls—visionary

flight-beings in varying forms and phases that seek to portray the

powers of the air, mysterious, uncontrollable, overwhelming, capable of

all the mind of primitive man could conceive or his gods perform. All of

them became endowed in time with the luxuriant colorings of Eastern

poetry and fiction, and appear now heroic and picturesque, as one

expects of everything in the dreamy Orient of tradition.

In the cold and stormy North, however, where the sun is a source of

comfort rather than of terror, and movements of the atmosphere are more

often feared than blessed, the similar conception of a gigantic sky-bird

is far more definite. When the native of the Russian plains, struggling

homeward against driving snow, hears the shrilling and howling of the

tempest he knows Vikhar, the Wind-Demon, is abroad. Norsemen represent

him as Hraesvelg, the North Wind, an eagle: he does not “ride on the

wings of the wind,” he _is_ the wind, and the blast from the arctic sea

that beats upon your face is the air set in motion by the wings of this

colossal, invisible bird flying southward. That it is big enough to stir

the atmosphere into a veritable hurricane is plain:

From the East came flying hither,

From the East a monstrous eagle,

One wing touched the vault of heaven,

While the other swept the ocean;

With his tail upon the waters,

Reached his beak beyond the cloudlets.

And such an eagle as this one, described as a reality in the _Kalevala_,

the legendary epic of the Finns, possessing beak and talons of copper,

once seized and bore away a maiden to its eyrie, thus showing itself

true to the “form” of the East whence it came.

Most of our North American Indians typified the winds, especially those

from the north, as birds, and many tribes identified the storm-bringing

ones with their thunder-birds, which was very natural. The Algonkins

believed that certain birds produced the phenomena of wind and created

waterspouts, and that the clouds were the spreading and agitation of

their gigantic wings. The Navahos thought that a great white swan sat at

each of the four points of the compass and conjured up the blasts that

came therefrom, while the Dakotas believed that in the west is the

residence of the Wakinyjan, “the Flyers,” that is, the breezes that

develop into occasional storms.

It was in the Orient, however, where, by the way, both simurgh and

garuda serve as storm-bringers in several myths, that the conception of

gigantic bird-beings was expanded and elaborated with the picturesque

details that have been suggested in an earlier paragraph.

A very old Persian tale, with many fanciful embroiderings, runs as

follows: There are, or were, two trees—one the Tree of Life, and the

other the Tree Opposed to All Harm, the tree that bears the seeds of all

useful things; which is like the two trees in the Garden of Eden, over

in Babylon. In the latter tree sits and nests the chief of all the

mythic birds, the simurgh (called in the _Avesta_ “saena-meregha”),

which is said to suckle its young, and to be three natures “like a bat.”

“Whenever he arises aloft a thousand twigs will shoot out from that

tree, and when he alights he breaks off the thousand twigs and bites the

seeds from them. And the bird cinamros [second only to the simurgh]

alights likewise in that vicinity; and his work is this, that he

collects those seeds that are bitten from the tree of many seeds, which

is opposed to harm, and he scatters them where Tishtar [angel that

provides rain] seizes the water [from the demons of drought]; so that,

while Tishtar shall seize the water, together with those seeds of all

kinds, he shall rain them on the world with the rain.” Such is the

language of the sacred books.[26]

The simurgh figures in Firdausi’s[93] legendary epic as the

foster-parent of Zal, father of Rustam, the national hero of Persia.

When Rudabah’s flank was opened to bring forth Rustam her wound was

healed by rubbing it with a simurgh’s feather. Rustam himself, once

wounded unto death, was cured in the same manner, and other cases are

recorded in great variety. Firdausi explains that the simurgh had its

nest on Mt. Elburz, on a peak that touched the sky in a place no man had

ever seen; and that it was to that eyrie that it carried the princely

baby Zal, whence it was recovered by its parents. In the ancient Avestan

ritual it is stated of the vulture varengana: “If a man holds a bone of

that strong bird ... or a feather, no one can smite or turn to flight

that fortunate man. The feather of that bird brings him help ...

maintains him in his glory.” According to De Kay[18] the simurgh was a

“god-like bird that discussed predestination with Solomon, as the eagle

of Givernberg held dialogues with King Arthur.... The simurgh was a

prophet.”

But of all the fabulous birds that infest ancient Persian mythology none

is held so important as the falcon-like “karshipta,” which brought the

sacred law into the Paradise of Jamshid. “Regarding the karshipta they

say that it knew how to speak words, and brought the religion to the

enclosure which Yim made, and circulated it: there they utter the Avesta

in the language of birds.”

We read also of a gigantic bird in Iran, the “kamar,” “which

overshadowed the earth and kept off the rain till the rivers dried up.”

In the Hindu mythology Vishnu is the sun-god, while Indra represents the

lightning and storm, and the two are in general opposites, rivals,

enemies. Vishnu rides on an eagle of supernatural size and power called

garuda. In the Pahlavi translation of the stories the simurgh takes the

place of the eagle, for their characters as well as their names are

interchangeable. Garuda was born from an egg laid by Vinata, herself the

daughter of a hawk and the mother of the two immense vultures that in

Persian myths guard the gates of hell, and elsewhere figure boldly in

Oriental fables; it is a mortal enemy, now of the serpent and now of the

elephant, and now of the tortoise—all three connected with Indra. This

bird carries into the air an elephant and a tortoise in order to devour

them, and in one of the various accounts leaves them on a mountain-top

as did the simurgh and the rukh their iniquitous “liftings.”

Garuda also appears in Japanese legendary art as gario, or binga, or

bingacho, or karobinga, half woman, half bird, a sort of winged and

feathered angel with a tail like a phenix and legs like a crane. This

reminds us of the harpies of Greece. The Malays recognize the image, and

when a cloud obscures the sun Perak men will say: “Gerda is spreading

his wings to dry.”

The Chinese, and after them the Japanese, had a phenix-like bird in

their mythical aviary, which persists in the faith of the more

simple-minded of their peoples, and as a fruitful motive in the

decorative art of each. It was one of the four supernatural creatures

that in ancient Chinese philosophy symbolized the four quarters of the

heavens. The Taoists, whose religious ideas are older than Confucianism

and prevailed especially among the humble and unlearned, called it the

Scarlet Bird, and associated it with the element Fire, and with their

mystic number 7. Archaic pictures show a crested bird with long

tail-feathers—a figure that might well be meant for a peacock. The

creature itself is said not to have been seen by mortal eyes since the

time of Confucius, but it has by no means been forgotten, for it is the

fung-whang, or feng-huang (which is the names of the male and the female

of the species conjoined); and it lives even now on embroidered screens

and painted vases, or proudly distinguishes royal robes, from the

Thibetan mountains to the Yellow Sea.

A recent writer on Eastern art[68] describes the proper fung as a

gorgeously colored bird with a long tail. Its feathers are red, azure,

yellow, white, and black, the five colors belonging to the five

principal virtues; and the Chinese ideograms for uprightness, humanity,

virtue, honesty, and sincerity, are impressed on various parts of its

body. Its cries are symbolic, its appearance precedes the advent of

virtuous rulers. As in the other cases this bird carries something

away—this time an eminent philosopher, Baik-fu, was translated. In Japan

the peasantry, at least, still hold to the reality of the same bird

under the name ho-ho, and artists and symbolists have beautifully

utilized the conception.[90] The belief is that the sun descends to

earth from time to time in the form of the ho-ho, as a messenger of

love, peace, and goodwill, and rests on one or another of the torii. It

appears to have become a badge of imperial rank in China before the time

of the Ming dynasty, and, in Japan it became the symbol of the empress,

and in old times, as we are told, only empresses and royal princesses

could have its likeness woven into their dress-goods.

It will be noticed that this last-considered member of our fabulous

flock, the fung-whang or ho-ho, is the only one not of gigantic size or

distorted or terrifying aspect. This indicates to me its comparatively

recent origin, and its beneficent disposition shows that it is the

creation of men accustomed to peace under kindly skies. It is an

interesting fact that when the Mongolian felt called upon to portray

demoniac beings he exaggerated to the extent of his ability _human_

expressions of rage, villainy and ferocity, instead of using for his

purpose animals of Titanic size, or in horrifying combinations, as did

magicians south of the great mountains.

The explanation seems not far away. The territory that apparently always

has been the home of the homogeneous “yellow” race is essentially a vast

plain extending from the mountains of central Asia westward to the

Pacific and meridianally from southern China to the border of

Kamptchatka. It includes the spacious valleys of China, proper, the

plains and deserts of Mongolia, and the broad prairies that stretch

across Manchuria, making together the widest area of fairly level and

tillable land on the globe. Much of it was never forested, and from a

large part of the remainder the scanty growth of woods had been cleared

before written history began. The climate as a whole is temperate and

equable, and rarely disturbed by startling and destructive

meteorological phenomena. Furthermore, except the tigers of the jungly

southeastern border, no dangerous animals are to be feared or to be

idealized into mythical things of terror. Two evils of nature remain to

disturb the inhabitants of this favored region—annual spring-floods,

often fatally widespread; and, second, frequent earthquakes. The floods

are perfectly understood in their cause as well as in their effects, and

afford little material for superstition. As for the earthquakes, the

people long ago found a sufficient explanation in the invention of a

burrowing beast of prodigious size and strength, which they called an

“earth-dragon,” and whose movements as it stirs about heaves the ground

beneath our feet. The wave-like character of the earth-shocks showed

that the dragon must be elongated and reptile-like; and now and then a

landslide or diggings disclosed long and massive bones that evidently

were those of these subterranean monsters, although foreigners said they

were fossil remains of Mesozoic reptiles or something else. The whole

idea, in fact, is so plausible and logical, that it really belongs to

scientific hypothesis rather than to mythology.

The reaction of this tranquil geographical situation and history has

been to produce, or mould, a people gentle, self-contained and averse to

strife. This is not particularly to their credit or their discredit. It

is as natural for a race developed in the valley of the Hoang Ho to be

peaceable as for one bred along the Danube or the St. Lawrence to be

belligerent.

In such an unterrifying situation as his the Mongolian felt no impulse

to coin the manifestations of nature, elemental or animated, into

malignant demons, but rather impersonated them, if at all, as beings

with kindly intentions and of beautiful form. That such impersonations

are few, and that Chinese mythology furnishes a comparatively small

contribution to the world’s store of specimens of that primitive stage

in human mentality, is, I think, another evidence of the equable

physical environment in which the people of the Flowery Kingdom have

been nurtured, which, while it contributed to their sanity, did little

to stimulate their imaginations.

On the other hand, men and women who endured, day by day, the blistering

heat and drouth of the desert; or who knew the awe-inspiring mountains,

where gloomy glens alternate with cloud-veiled heights, the thunders of

unseen avalanches shock the ear, and appalling fires that no man kindles

rage against the snows; or who night and day must guard his or her life

in the jungle against lurking perils from tooth and claw and

poison-fang—such persons were aroused to mental as well as physical

alertness for safety’s sake, and saw in almost every circumstance of

their lives visions of unearthly power. Unable in their narrow, slowly

developing knowledge and meagre intellection, to comprehend much of what

confronted them, yet understanding some small sources and agencies of

power, what more natural than that they should picture the often

tremendous exhibitions of nature’s force as the product of enormously

_greater_ powers. Hence not only the bigness attributed to the mythical

birds we have sketched but their supernatural abilities, and also—in

accordance with constant experience of the general antagonism between

nature and human purposes—the malignancy characterizing most of them.

For, as has been said, Garuda, Simurgh, Phenix, Fung-Whang and all the

others are only visions woven out of the sunshine, the clouds and the

winds, in the loom of primitive imagination. It is quite a waste of

time, therefore, to try as some have done (notably Professor Newton[55])

to connect any one of them with some living or extinct reality, as, for

example, the Rukh with the epiornis or any other of the big extinct

ratite birds of Madagascar. Eagles and vultures and peacocks have served

as suggestions for fantastic creations of a vagrant fancy, and that is

all the reality they ever had. We do not know, probably never can know,

the ultimate source of these stories and images, so varied yet so alike;

nor whether all have spread from one source, or have in some instances

arisen independently, as would seem probable in the case of those told

about American aboriginal campfires; but we may be sure that their

conception was in the morning of civilization (more likely far back of

that) as products of the uncultured, nature-fearing, marvel-loving fancy

of prehistoric mankind.

CHAPTER XI

FROM ANCIENT AUGURIES TO MODERN RAINBIRDS

The pagans of primitive times along the shores of the Mediterranean

believed in personal gods and their guidance in human affairs. With the

approval of these gods, or of that departmental god or goddess having

charge of the matter in mind, one’s project would prosper, whereas their

disapproval meant failure and very likely some punishment under divine

wrath. The human difficulty was to learn the will of said gods.

Equally well settled was the doctrine that birds—which seemed to belong

to the celestial spaces overhead where the gods lived and manifested

their variable moods, now in sunshine and zephyr, now by storm-clouds,

and rainfall—were inspired messengers of the gods, and required reverent

attention. This, however, did but throw the difficulty one step further

back, for how could human intelligence comprehend the messages birds

were constantly bringing?

At any rate the principal and most numerous omens in the pre-Christian

centuries were drawn from birds; and this kind of divination gained so

much credit that other kinds were little regarded. It was based, as has

been indicated, on the theory that these creatures, by their actions,

wittingly or unwittingly, conveyed the will of the gods. This

super-avian attribute was by no means confined to the prominent raven

and crow, whose prophetic qualities have been portrayed in another

chapter, for various birds came to be considered “fortunate” or

“unfortunate,” from the point of view of the seeker after supernal

guidance, either on account of their own characteristics or according to

the place and manner of their appearance; hence the same species might,

at different times, foretell contrary events. Let me quote here a

succinct statement from _The Encyclopedia Londonensis_, published in the

early part of the 18th century:

If a flock of various birds came flying about any man it was an

excellent omen. The eagle was particularly observed for drawing

omens; when it was observed to be brisk and lively, and especially

if, during its sportiveness, it flew from the right hand to the

left, it was one of the best omens that the gods could give.

Respecting vultures there are different opinions, both among the

Greek and the Roman authors; by some they are represented as birds

of lucky omen, while Aristotle and Pliny reckon them among the

unlucky birds. If the hawk was seen seizing and devouring her prey,

it portended death; but if the prey escaped deliverance from danger

was portended. Swallows wherever and under whatever circumstances

they were seen were unlucky birds; before the defeat of Pyrrhus and

Antony they appeared on the tent of the former and the ship of the

latter; and, by dispiriting their minds, probably prepared the way

for their subsequent disasters. In every part of Greece except

Athens, owls were regarded as unlucky birds; but at Athens, being

sacred to Minerva, they were looked upon as omens of victory and

success. The swan, being an omen of fair weather, was deemed a lucky

bird by mariners.

The most inauspicious omens were given by ravens, but the degree of

misfortune which they were supposed to portend depended, in some

measure, in their appearing on the right hand or the left; if they

came croaking on the right hand it was a tolerably good omen; but if

on the left a very bad one.... The crow appearing [at a wedding]

denoted long life to the married pair, if it appeared with its mate;

but if it was seen single separation and sorrow were portended.

Whence it was customary at nuptials for the maids to watch that none

of these birds coming singly should disturb the solemnity.

It was hardly to be expected that the comprehension of all this science

of soothsaying should belong to ordinary mortals; and therefore there

arose early in its development certain clever “wise men” who declared

themselves endowed with magical power to understand the language of

birds, and to interpret both their chatter and their actions. Thus

originated the profession of _augury_, a word that spells “bird-talk” in

its root-meaning, with its later product _auspices_, or “bird-viewers.”

The augur originally was a priest (or a magician, if you prefer that

term) who listened to what the birds said; and the auspex was another

who watched what they did, or examined their entrails to observe

anything abnormal that he might construe as an answer to prayer, or

interpreted something else in the nature of an omen from this or that

divinity, or from all the gods together.

I need not describe the elaborate rites and ceremonies that came to be

associated with the practice of this kind of divination (ornithomancy),

especially under the revered and powerful College of Augurs that

practically ruled the Roman Republic, even in the Augustan age, for it

will suffice to direct attention to a few features.

Birds were distinguished by the Roman augurs as _oscines_ or _alites_,

“talkers” and “flyers.” The oscines were birds that gave signs by their

cry as well as by flight, such as ravens, owls and crows. The alites

included birds like eagles and vultures, which gave signs by their

manner of flying. The quarter of the heavens in which they appeared, and

their position relative to that of the observer, were most important

factors in determining the significance of the supposed message, as has

been extensively explained in an earlier chapter of this book.

This science or business of bird-divination, for it was both, was of

prehistoric antiquity. Plutarch[94] records that Romulus and Remus, the

fabled founders of the Latin race began their eventful life under a wild

fig-tree, where a she-wolf nursed them, and a woodpecker constantly fed

and watched over them. “These creatures,” Plutarch remarks, “are

esteemed holy to the god Mars—the woodpecker the Latins still especially

worship and honor. Romulus became skilled in divination, and first

carried the _lituus_, or diviner’s staff, a crooked rod with which

soothsayers indicated the quarters of the heavens when observing the

flight of birds.”

Among the Romans not a bird

Without a prophecy was heard.

Fortunes of empire often hung

On the magician magpie’s tongue,

And every crow was to the state

A sure interpreter of fate.—_Churchill._

The peculiar province of the auspices, or bird-inspecters, was to seek

the will of the gods as to some contemplated act or policy by watching

the behavior of the sacred chickens, cared for by an official called

_pullarius_. “If the chickens came too slowly out of the cage, or would

not feed, it was a bad omen; but if they fed greedily, so that some part

of their food fell and struck the ground, it was deemed an excellent

omen.”—and so forth and so forth.

It is rather engaging to inquire why the humble barnyard fowl was used

for so momentous a function. Partly, no doubt, because it was the most

convenient kind of bird to keep and propagate in captivity, and

therefore would always be at hand when wanted (and in case the

prophecy-demand was light an occasional pullet for the official pot

would not be missed!), but also because its witlessness made it

dependable. A devotee of this way of omen-catching would explain that of

course the bird was unconscious of the part it played; that its mind was

a mere receptacle of divine impulses to act in a certain way, the

significance of which the auspex understood and reported. If that theory

is true, it follows that the more empty-headed the “medium” is the

better, for it would then have fewer ideas of its own to short-circuit

the inspired impulses. This view has, in fact, influenced ignorant folks

everywhere in their conclusion that men who were witless, or crazy, or

had lost their mentality in a trance, were “possessed,” mostly by devils

but sometimes by good “spirits” which had found a mind “swept and

garnished,” as St. Luke said, and had become vocal tenants; whence, it

was argued, no human rationality interfered with the transmission of the

message, and men must accept what the tongues uttered as inspired words.

“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings came forth praise” that was

praise indeed, because the infants knew not what they said. That was the

reason Balaam listened with so much respect to the warning spoken by his

ass; and many a preaching ass since has had a similar reward for

articulate braying.

One more consideration suggests itself. The ominous flock kept by the

pullarius contained both cocks and hens; and the cock, as a bird of the

sun, has been “sacred” from prehistoric antiquity in that primitive

nature-worship from which the Greco-Romans were by no means free. “It is

not improbable,” we are assured by Houghton[95] “that the sacrificial

rites and consultation by augury, in which cooks figured among the

Romans, came originally from Babylonia.... I think that the figure [in a

seal] of a cock perched on an altar before a priest making his

offerings ... represents the bird in this capacity as a soothsayer.” In

fact, a whole department of the science of augury was known as

alectromancy, in which a barnyard cock was the agent or medium of

inspiration.

These practices—which were entirely void of morality—are a curious index

of the mental barbarism of the early Greeks and Romans, for they are

quite on a level with the ideas and doings of savages now.

With the advance in knowledge and enlightenment culminating in the

philosophy of Cicero and his skeptical contemporaries, both faith and

practice in this childish consultation of chickens and crows

disappeared, or descended to be merely a political sop for the credulous

populace. Even this passed away when superstitious paganism faded out of

the religion of mankind in Europe, or, more exactly, it became changed

into a faith in weather prophecy by noticing the behavior of birds and

other animals; but these prognostications are based not on a supposed

message from the gods but on deductions from observation and experience.

Let us see how far this modern method of augury is of service as a sort

of homemade Weather Bureau—we will, as it were, study the genesis of the

Rain-bird. It began early. Aristophanes tells us, of the Greeks:

From birds in sailing men instruction take

Now lie in port, now sail, and profit make.

The proprietor of Gardiner’s Island, at the eastern end of Long Island,

New York, where fish-hawks then abounded, and always since have been

under protection, told Alexander Wilson[46] many facts of interest

respecting their habits, among others the following:

They are sometimes seen high in the air, sailing and cutting strange

gambols, with loud vociferations, darting down several hundred feet

perpendicularly, frequently with part of a fish in one claw, which

they seem proud of, and to claim “high hook,” as the fishermen call

him who takes the greatest number. On these occasions they serve as

a barometer to foretell the changes of the atmosphere; for when the

fish-hawks are thus sailing high in air, in circles, it is

universally believed to prognosticate a change of weather, often a

thunder-storm in a few hours. On the faith of the certainty of these

signs the experienced coaster wisely prepares for the expected

storm, and is rarely mistaken.

It would be hard to find a better epitome of the “signs” given by birds

to the weather-prophet. Similar behavior in sea-gulls is interpreted in

the same way: but in most cases high flight is said to denote

continuance of fine weather, and in general there is good sense in that

view, because, as a rule, bad weather descends upon us from the higher

strata of the atmosphere, and birds up there would be the first to feel

its approach. Hence the joyous greeting, “Everything is lovely and the

goose honks (not ‘hangs’) high.” Sailors have a rhyme—

When men-of-war-hawks fly high, ’tis a sign of clear sky;

When they fly low prepare for a blow.

This point is made in particular in respect to swallows of various

kinds, which are regarded in most countries as presaging rain when they

all go skimming along close to the ground; but it was pure fancy that

expanded this warning into the senseless couplet

When the swallow buildeth low

You can safely reap and sow.

That is, I suppose, the season will then furnish rain enough for a good

crop. The same thing is sung of swans. But even the swallows cannot be

depended on as indicators, for in late summer and autumn they are more

likely to skim along the ground and over ponds than to go anywhere else;

and, as showing the uncertainty in men’s minds in this matter, or else

how signs change with locality, it may be mentioned that in Argentina

swallows are held to indicate coming storms not by low but by elevated

flight. Thus the naturalist Hudson[44] writes of the musical martin

(Progne), familiar about Buenos Ayres: “It is ... the naturalist’s

barometer, as whenever, the atmosphere being clear and dry, the progne

perches on the weathercock or lightning-rod, on the highest points of

the house-top, or on the topmost twig of some lofty tree, chanting its

incantation, cloudy weather and rain will surely follow within

twenty-four hours.”

None of the host of sayings, of which you may read hundreds in the

publications of the United States Weather Service, and in such

collections of odd lore as _Gleanings for the Curious_,[96] that pretend

to foretell the character of a whole season from what birds do, are

worth credence. For example, some declare that “a dry summer will follow

when birds build their nests in exposed places,” on the theory, I

suppose, that the builders will have no fear of getting wet; and

If birds in the autumn grow tame,

The winter will be cold for game.

One important exception to this kind of nonsense may be made, however,

for in certain circumstances it is fair to accept from our American

birds a broad hint as to the character of the approaching winter.

Experience convinces us that an unusually early arrival of migratory

birds from the north indicates an extra cold winter to follow. Several

northwestern sayings about ducks and geese tell us that whenever they

leave Lake Superior noticeably earlier than is their wont; or fly

southward straight and fast, not lingering near accustomed

halting-places, then a severe season is to be anticipated. In the sum

this is logical, for this reason:

Birds whose home is in the far North—and several species go to the

extreme limit of arctic lands to make their nests—must quit those

desolate coasts as soon as chilling rains, snow-storms, and frost begin

to kill the insects, bury the plants and freeze the streams, thus

cutting off food-supplies; and they must keep ahead of those

famine-producing conditions as they travel southward toward their

winter-resorts in a more hospitable zone. On the average, their arrival

in the United States will be nearly on the same date year after year.

It sometimes happens, however, that winter will pounce upon the arctic

border of the continent days or weeks earlier than usual, and the cold

and snowfall will exceed the normal quantity. In such circumstances the

birds must make their escape more hastily than ordinarily, and will come

down across the Canadian border in larger and more hurrying companies,

very likely accompanied by such species as snow-birds, crossbills, pine

finches and evening grosbeaks, which in general pass the winter somewhat

to the north of our boundary. Excessive cold in the far North is almost

certain to influence southern Canada and the northern states, and it is

therefore safe to conclude, when we witness this behavior of migratory

birds, that a winter of exceptional severity has set in at the north and

is in store for us. But the prophets are ourselves—not the birds! They

are dealing with dangerous conditions, and leave it to us to do the

theorizing.

One feature of the behavior of the fish-hawks in Wilson’s story was

their restlessness, taken by fishermen to betoken a rising storm. There

may be some value in this “sign,” since it is noted in many other cases.

Dozens of proverbs mention as indications various unusual actions

noticeable in poultry, such as crowing at odd times, clappings of the

wings, rolling in the dust, standing about in a distraught kind of way,

a tendency to flocking, and so forth. Many popular sayings tell us that

both barnyard fowls and wild birds become very noisy before an

unfavorable change in the weather.

When the peacock loudly bawls

Soon we’ll have both rain and squalls,

is one such. Virgil’s statement that “the owl” screeches unduly at such

a time is supported by modern testimony.

A reasonable explanation of this uneasiness is that it is the effect of

that increased electrical tension in the atmosphere that often precedes

a shower, to which small creatures are perhaps more sensitive than are

men and large animals. It will not do, then, to reject _all_ the

weather-signs popularly alleged to be given by animals.

At the same time, as has been suggested, much of the current

weather-prophecy relating to animals is silly, such, for example, that

a solitary turkey-buzzard seen at a great altitude indicates rain;

that blackbirds’ notes are very shrill before rain; that there will be

no rain the day a heron flies down the creek; that when woodpeckers

peck low on the tree-trunks expect a hard winter. These, and many

other nonsensical maxims, are in fact spurious. Most of them, no

doubt, were uttered originally in jest, or as a whimsical answer to

some inquisitive child, then repeated as amusing, and finally quoted

seriously. Others have been brought to us from the old world by early

farmer-immigrants—French in Canada, Louisiana and New England, Dutch

in New York, Swedish and German in New Jersey and Pennsylvania,

Spanish in the Southwest, and so on—and have been applied to our

native birds, where often they fail to fit. A saw that perhaps had

some value when told of the European robin or blackbird, is

ludicrously inappropriate when said of our blackbirds and robins,

which are totally different in nature and habits.

One of the most venerable of these worthless prognostics, and one that

very likely is a relic of Roman auspices, twenty-five centuries ago, is

that of the goose-bone:

“To read the winter of any year take the breast-bone of a goose

hatched during the preceding spring. The bone is translucent, and it

will be found to be colored and spotted. The dark color and heavy

spots indicate cold. If the spots are of light shade, and

transparent, wet weather, rain or snow, may be looked for.

“If the November goose-bone be thick,

So will the winter weather be;

If the November goose-bone be thin,

So will the winter weather be.”

One need not wonder at the indignant refusal of hard-headed commanders

of old who refused to let their strategy or tactics to be interfered

with by alarmed priests who reported unfavorable auguries from dissected

hens. Eusebius records the legend that a bird was presented to Alexander

the Macedonian when on the point of setting out for the Red Sea, in

order that he might read the auguries according to custom. Alexander

killed the bird by an arrow, saying, “What folly is this? How could a

bird that could not foresee its death by this arrow, predict the

fortunes of our journey?” The shocked bystanders might have replied, of

course, that the poor creature had no such knowledge in itself, but was

merely the blank on which divine intelligence was written; but the

chances are that they held their tongues! Plutarch mentions many a case

in which commanders construed the “omens” in a way contrary to the

priestly interpretation, in order to carry out some plan that could not

be delayed, and yet conciliate the superstitious soldiers.

It will have been noticed that most of the prophecies learned from birds

relate to coming rain or bad weather, and winter rather than summer. In

_The Strange Metamorphosis of Man_ (1634), as quoted by Brewer,[34]

speaking of the goose, we read: “She is no witch or astrologer, ... but

she hath a shrewd guesse of rainie weather, being as good as an almanac

to some that beleeve in her.” Men generally seem more desirous of

ascertaining the evil than the good that may be in store for them. The

feeling is, perhaps, that if we knew of dangers ahead we might prepare

for them, but that in fair days we can take care of ourselves. Almost

every country has some particular “rain-bird” whose cry is supposed to

foretell showers. In England it is the green woodpecker, or yaffle; in

Malaya a broadbill; in some parts of this country the spotted sandpiper,

or tipup; but _everywhere_ some sort of cuckoo is called “rain-bird” or

“rain-crow,” although the various cuckoos of America, Europe, and the

Orient, differ widely in appearance, habits and voice.

Why should peoples so dissimilar and widely scattered attribute to this

very diverse cuckoo family the quality of “rain-birds” more than to

another family? I can only believe that it denotes the survival of a

very ancient Oriental notion, whose significance was very real in a

symbolic way to the primitive people among whom it originated locally,

but has now been utterly forgotten.

Plunging into the thickets of comparative mythology, hoping to pluck a

few fruity facts for our pains, we find that in Hindoo myths the cuckoo

stands as a symbol of the sun when hidden behind clouds, that is, for a

rainy condition of the sky; furthermore that this bird has a reputation

for possessing exceeding wisdom surpassing that of other birds, all of

which are fabled to be supernaturally wise: and that it knew not only

things present but things to come. It was, in fact, in the opinion of

the ancient Hindoos, a prophetic bird of unrivalled vatic ability. The

Greeks thought their own cuckoo had inherited some of these qualities,

for they made it one of the birds in the Olympian aviary of Zeus, who,

please remember, was the pluvial god.

Plainly this rainy-day character was given to the bird through the

circumstance that in southern Asia, as in southern Europe, the cuckoo is

one of the earliest and quite the most conspicuous of spring-birds—and

the spring is the rainy season. In early days farmers had little

knowledge of a calendar. They sowed and reaped when it seemed fitting to

do so. The coming of the cuckoo coincided with experience, and came to

be their almanac-date for certain operations—_a signal convenient in

advice to the young, or to a newcomer_; and as a rule hoped-for showers

followed the bird’s advent. In the same way old-fashioned Pennsylvania

farmers used to connect corn-planting time and the first-heard singing

of the brown thrasher.

Hesiod instructed his rural countrymen that if “it should happen to rain

three days in succession when the cuckoo sings among the oak-trees, then

late sowing will be as good as early sowing”—doubtless good agricultural

counsel. Not more than a century ago English farmers thought it

necessary to sow barley when the earliest note of the cuckoo was heard

in order to insure a full crop. Mr. Friend[11] reasons thus about this:

“As the cuckoo only returns to our shores at a certain time, it has been

customary to predict from his appearance what kind of season will

follow; and farmers have in all ages placed great reliance on omens of

weather and crops drawn from this source.... In Berwickshire those oats

which are sown after the first of April are called ‘gowk’s’ [cuckoo’s]

oats....

Cuckoo oats and wood cock hay

Make a farmer run away.

If the spring is so backward that the oats cannot be sown until the

cuckoo is heard, or the autumn so wet that the hay cannot be gathered in

until the woodcocks come over, the farmer is sure to suffer great loss.”

So much for these old maxims; and when British or Italian immigrants

became colonists in America, and found cuckoos here, they continued the

sayings, regardless of difference in climate and other circumstances.

Our species are not early migrants in spring, are poor guides for

planters, and seem to have no prophetic gift, yet they are rain-birds

because their ancestral relatives in India were such 3,000 years ago.

CHAPTER XII

A PRIMITIVE VIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

If anyone should ask you how a particular bird came to be blue or red or

streaked, or how it happened that birds in general differ in colors and

other features, “each after its kind,” in other words how specific

distinctions came about, you, a liberal-minded and well-read person,

would undoubtedly answer that each and all “developed” these specific

characteristics. You might go on to explain that they resulted from the

combined influences of natural and sexual selection, to the latter of

which birds are supposed to be especially susceptible, and thereby show

yourself a good Darwinist.

But primitive thinkers, like children, are not evolutionists but

creationists. They believe that things were made as they are: if so,

somebody made them. They are convinced that no person like themselves or

any of their acquaintances could do it, so they attribute the feat to

some being with superhuman powers. This being is almost always the

mythical ancestor, pristine instructor or “culture-hero,” of the nation,

tribe or clan to which the thinker belongs; and it is perfectly natural

and a matter of course to assume that he had magical functions and

supernatural powers. Next, some genius invents a story to fit the case,

and as anything is possible to such a being as the hero it is adopted

and passed into the tribal history that the elders recount by the

evening fire, and that everybody accepts without suspicion or criticism.

The Hebrews, for example, said that Adam, their “first man,” “gave names

to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the

field; ... and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the

name thereof.” As to his reasons for giving this name to one creature

and another to that, it has been whimsically explained that he called

the raccoon that because “it looked like a ‘coon’”—quite as good a

reason as the legend requires.

Now the two questions at the beginning of this chapter were, in fact,

asked by a great variety of our aboriginal Americans, the red Indians,

and undoubtedly by the aborigines of most other countries; but for the

present let us stick to North America.

When some bright-witted, inquisitive Iroquois youngster, hearing and

seeing many birds on a soft June morning, asked his mother how it

happened that they wore such a diversity of plumages, she told him this

story: In the beginning the birds were naked, but some of them became

ashamed, and cried for coverings. (In those days, of course, birds

talked with one another, and even with the wiser sort of men.) They were

told that their suits were ready but were a long way off. At last the

turkey-buzzard was persuaded to go and get them. He had been a clean

bird, but during the long journey had to eat much carrion and filth,

hence his present nature. Guided by the gods he reached the store of

plumages, and selfishly chose for himself the most beautifully colored

dress, but as he found he could not fly in it he was forced to take his

present one, which enables him to soar most gracefully. Finally he

brought their varied suits to the other birds.

The Iroquois lad would be quite satisfied with this account of the

matter; but a boy on the opposite side of the continent would get a very

different explanation. He would be told that Raven did it. Raven—or the

raven—was the mythical ancestor or culture hero, as ethnologists would

say, of the foremost clan of the Tlingit tribe, whose territory was in

southern Alaska. He was present at the making of the world and its

people, and did many marvellous things. While he was at Sitka arranging

affairs in the new world he assigned to all the birds, one by one, the

place of their resort and their habits, and his good nature is shown by

the fact that to the robin and the hummingbird he assigned the duty of

giving pleasure to men, the former by its song and the latter by its

beauty. By and by the birds dressed one another in different ways, so

that they might easily be recognized apart. They tied the hair of the

bluejay up high with a string, put a striped coat on the little

woodpecker, and so on. The Kwakiutl coastal Indians of British Columbia

deny this, however. They say the birds did not select their own

costumes, but that one of their ancestors painted all the birds he found

at a certain place. When he reached the cormorant his colors were

exhausted and he had only charcoal left, hence the cormorant is wholly

black.

George Keith,[99] who in 1807 was a fur-trader on the Mackenzie River,

gathered and recorded much valuable material as to the customs and ideas

of the Beaver Indians of that region, who belonged to the Ojibway

family. In one of his stories Keith gives the Indians’ explanation of

how certain birds got their colors: it was during the time of a great

flood. At that period all birds were white, but l’épervier (the

sharp-shinned hawk), l’émerillon (the goshawk), and l’canard de France

(mallard) agreed to change to a plumage in colors—how it was to be done

the Indians were unable to say. The story proceeds:

Immediately after this event the corbeau [raven] made his

appearance. “Come,” says l’épervier to the corbeau, “would you not

wish to have a coat like mine?” “Hold your tongue!” rejoined the

corbeau. “With your crooked bill is not white handsomer than any

other color?” The others argued with the corbeau to consent, but he

remained inflexible, which so exasperated l’épervier and the others

that they determined to avenge this affront, and each taking a burnt

coal in his bill they blacked him all over. The corbeau, enraged at

this treatment, and determined not to be singular, espied a flock of

étourneaux [blackbirds] and, without shaking off the black dust of

his feathers, threw himself amongst them and bespattered them all

over with black, which is the reason for their still retaining this

color.

Further south, on Puget Sound, once lived the tribe of Twanas, who held

that in former times men painted themselves in various hues, whereupon

Dokblatt, their culture-hero, who notoriously was fond of changing

things, turned these men into birds, which explains the present

diversity in avian plumage.

The Arawaks of Venezuela, however, account for this matter by saying

that the birds obtained their gay feathers by selecting parts of a huge,

gaudily colored water-snake that the cormorant killed for them by diving

into the water; yet the cormorant, with great modesty, kept for himself

only the snake’s head, which was blackish.

Most explanatory stories concern single kinds of birds, and inform us

how they got the peculiar features by which we identify them with their

names; and here we get back to the nearctic raven. A history of the

exploits of this personage—bird, bird-man or bird-god—who is the hero of

more tales than any other of the giants that flourished in the formative

period of the northern Indian’s world, would fill a big book. “The

creator of all things and the benefactor of man was the great raven

called by the Thlingit Yel, Yeshil or Yeatl, and by the Haida

Ne-kilstlas. He was not exactly an ordinary bird but had ... many human

attributes, and the power of transforming himself into anything in the

world. His coat of feathers could be put on or taken off at will like a

garment, and he could assume any character whatever. He existed before

his birth, never grows old, and will never die.” So Mr. (now Admiral)

Niblack, U. S. N., characterized this supreme magician;[100] and Dr. E.

W. Nelson[101] adds that this creation-legend is believed by the Eskimos

from the Kuskoquim River in southern Alaska northward to Bering Strait,

and thence eastward all along the Arctic Coast. The purely mythological

relation of this widely revered northwestern raven is thus summarized by

Brinton[27]:

This father of the race is represented as a mighty bird, called Yel,

or Yale, or Orelbale, from the root [Athabascan] _ell_, a term they

apply to everything supernatural. He took to wife a daughter of the

Sun (the Woman of Light), and by her begat the race of men. He

formed the dry land for a place for them to live upon, and stocked

the rivers with salmon that they might have food. When he enters his

nest it is day, but when he leaves it it is night; or, according to

another myth, he has two women for wives, the one of whom makes the

day, the other the night. In the beginning Yel was white in plumage,

but he had an enemy ... by whose machinations he was turned black.

Yel is further represented as the god of the winds and storms, and

of the thunder and lightning.

It is plain that in studying the deeds and accidents attributed to this

American member of the sun-born “fabulous flock” described in another

chapter, it is often difficult to separate Raven the demigod, from the

sable, kawing, cunning bird so conspicuous all over northern Canada; and

in this respect Yel differs from Rukh, Simurgh, and the other similar

figments of Oriental fancies, in that he is modelled upon a real bird,

rather than on something utterly unknown to earthly ornithology.

A favorite tale with many variants describes how the cormorant lost its

voice. As the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Islands tell it, Raven once

invited the cormorant to go a-fishing with him. The cormorant went, and

naturally caught many fish, while the Raven took none. Then Raven, angry

made the cormorant stick out its tongue. “There is something on it,”

quoth Raven, and pulled the tongue out by the roots; and that is why

cormorants have no voice.[C]

Footnote C:

The cormorant was once a wool-merchant. He entered into a partnership

with the bramble and the bat, and they freighted a large ship with

wool. She was wrecked and the firm became bankrupt. Since that

disaster the bat skulks about until midnight to avoid his creditors,

the cormorant is forever diving into the deep to discover its

foundered vessel, while the bramble seizes hold of every passing sheep

to make up the firm’s loss by stealing the wool. This is an ancient

European story quite as silly as the Haida one.

Here Raven is plainly the supernatural, irresponsible being of Totemic

importance, who often presented himself as a man or in some other form,

for he could assume any shape he liked. Thus the Hudson Bay Eskimos

relate that Raven was a man who loudly cautioned persons when moving a

village-camp not to forget the deer-skin under-blanket called “kak”: so

he got that nickname, and ravens still fly about fussily calling _kak!

kak!_ The Tlingits also have a story in which Raven begins the action as

a man, and ends plain bird—an outwitted one at that. Raven was in a

house and played a trick on Petrel, then tried to get away by flying up

through the smoke-hole in the roof, but got stuck there. Seeing this

Petrel built a birchwood fire under him, so as to make much smoke. The

raven was white before that time, but the smudge blackened him forever.

The Greenland Eskimos account for the change in the raven from white to

black by the story of its vexing the snow-owl, which was its fast friend

in the ancient days before marvels became marvellous. One day the raven

made a new dress, dappled black and white (the summer plumage), for the

owl, which in return fashioned a pair of whalebone boots for the raven,

and also a white dress, as was proper for ravens at that time; but the

raven would not stay quiet while it was tried on. The owl shouted

angrily, “Sit still or I shall pour the lamp over you!” Nevertheless the

bird kept hopping about until the owl, out of patience, picked up the

soapstone saucer-lamp and drenched him with the sooty lamp-oil. Since

then the ever-restless raven has been black all over.

The Haidas say that the crow likewise was originally white, and that on

one occasion Raven turned it black as a spiteful sort of joke.

It is interesting to recall that in classic myth ravens were once as

white as swans and as large; but one day a raven told his patron,

Apollo, that Coronis, a Thessalian nymph whom he passionately loved, was

faithless, whereupon the god shot the nymph with his dart, but hating

the telltale bird

... he blacked the raven o’er

And bid him prate in his white plumes no more,

as Ovid sings in Addison’s translation. Some accounts say that one of

Odin’s messenger-ravens was white. To this day the peasants about

Brescia, in Italy, speak of January 30 and 31, and February 1, as

“blackbird days,” and explained that many years ago the local blackbirds

were white; but in one hard winter it was so cold these thrushes were

compelled to take refuge in chimneys, and ever since have worn a sooty

plumage.

This belief that the sable brotherhood of the crow-tribe was once white

seems to be universal, and perhaps arises in the equally general, albeit

somewhat childish, feeling that nothing is as it used to be; and coupled

with this is the similarly common feeling that every event or condition

ought to be accounted for. Thus we get a glimpse at the psychology in

these primitive stories of the reason why this and that animal is as we

see it. Skeat[7] found among the Malays, for example, a legend that in

the days of King Solomon the argus pheasant was dowdily dressed, and it

besought the crow to paint its plumage in splendid colors. The crow

complied and gave the pheasant its present beautifully variegated

costume; but when the artist asked for a similar service toward itself

from the pheasant the latter not only refused but spilt a bottle of ink

over the crow.

To return to the erratic, and usually mischievous career of Yel, the

Northwestern (raven) culture-hero, it is remembered that often, kindly

or unkindly, he changed sundry birds besides owls from something else

into their present form. For example, he sent a hawk into the Tlingit

country after fire. Previously the hawk’s bill had been long, but in

bringing the fire this long beak was burned short, and has ever remained

so. Nelson[101] learned from Alaskan Eskimos why the short-eared owl has

so diminutive a beak, nearly hidden in the feathers of the flat face.

This owl, it appears, was once a little girl who lived in a village by

the lower Yukon. “She was changed by magic into a bird with a long bill,

and became so frightened that she sprang up and flew off in an erratic

way until she struck the side of a house, flattening her beak and face

so that she became just as the owls are seen to-day.”

Raven made woodpeckers (red-shafted flickers) out of the blood that

gushed from his nose after he had bruised it; and Haida fishermen now

tie scarlet flicker feathers to their halibut hooks “for luck.” Their

neighbors, the Clalams, thought it better to use a piece of kingfisher

skin—and in my opinion their reasoning was the sounder of the two.

Perhaps it was Raven whom the Tshimshian Indians of Nass River meant

when they spoke of “Giant’s” treatment of the gulls. The Giant, as

Professor Boaz heard it designated, had some oolachans (smelts) and

stuck them on sticks to roast by his fire. “When they were done a gull

appeared over the Giant. Then the Giant called him ‘Little Gull.’ Then

many gulls came, which ate all the Giant’s oolachans. They said while

they were eating it _qana, qana, qana!_ Then he was sad. Therefore he

took the gulls and threw them into the fireplace, and ever since the

tips of their wings have been black.”

The culture-hero of the Twana Indians of the Puget Sound region was

Dokibat, as has been mentioned, who had a habit of changing things,

turning men into stones or birds, and so forth. A boy hearing that he

was coming, and fearing some unpleasant transformation, ran away,

carrying with him a water-box (used in canoe-journeys by sea) with water

in it. The water shaking about sounded somewhat like _pu-pu-pu_ when

repeated rapidly; but as the boy ran wings came to him and he began to

fly, and the noise in the box sounded like the cooing of the wood-dove,

which the Twans called “hum-o.” A man was pounding against a cedar-tree.

Dokibat came along and asked him what he was doing. “Trying to break or

split this tree,” was the answer. Dokibat said: “You may stop and go

away, and I will help you.” As the woodman went wings came to him, also

a long bill and a strong head, and he became a woodpecker.

How the woodpecker got the red mark on the back of its head, which is a

characteristic of most species, is explained by the Algonkins thus,

according to Schoolcraft:[102] Manabozho, the renowned culture-hero of

the Ojibways and their relatives, made a campaign against the Shining

Manito, and at last, finding him in his lair, a mortal combat began. At

length Manabozho had left only three arrows, and the fight was going

against him. Ma-ma, the woodpecker, cried out: “Shoot him at the base of

the scalp-lock; it is his only vulnerable spot!” (The Indians have many

stories turning on this point, and reminding us of that of Achilles.)

Then with the third and last arrow Manabozho hit the fatal spot, and

taking the scalp of the Shining Manito as a trophy he rubbed blood from

it on the woodpecker’s head, which remains red in his descendants. That

the redheaded species (_Melanerpes torquatus_), abundant in summer in

the Ojibway country, is meant here is evident from the further statement

that its red feathers were thereafter regarded as symbols of valor, and

were chosen to ornament the warriors’ pipes, for no other woodpecker of

the region could furnish enough such feathers to answer the purpose.

The Menominees, of southern Wisconsin, had a different story relating to

the scarlet crest of another kind of woodpecker. They say that

Ball-carrier, who was a bad-tempered sort of fellow among their

demigods, promised the logcock, or big black woodpecker of the forest,

that if he would kill a certain Cannibal-Woman he should have a piece of

her scalp with its lock of red hair. So the bird rushed at her and drove

his chisel-like beak into her heart. Then Ball-carrier gave her red

scalp-lock to the logcock, which placed it on his own head, as one may

see now. In Indo-European mythology woodpeckers figure among

lightning-birds, and the red mark on their heads is deemed the badge of

their office.

The need of accounting for notable features like this in animals seems

to have appealed to all sorts of people, all around the world, in each

case according to local ideas. Thus an Arabic tradition current in

Palestine accounts for the fork in the tail of swallows by the fact that

a bird of this species baffled a scheme of the Old Serpent (Eblis) in

Paradise, whereupon the serpent struck at it, but succeeded only in

biting out a notch in the middle of its tail. Another example: Nigerian

negros say that the vulture got its bald head by malicious transference

of a disease with which a green pigeon had been suffering—a native guess

at the filth-bacteria to which modern zoologists attribute the

nakedness! Oddly enough, a folk-tale in Louisiana, related by

Fortier,[106] similarly explains the baldness of our turkey-buzzard by

saying it came from a pan of hot ashes thrown at the vulture’s head in

revenge for an injury it had committed on a rabbit—and “buzzards never

eat bones of rabbits.”

The Iowas account for the peculiar baldness of this bird by a long story

recounted by Spence[12] in which their mythical hero Ictinike figures.

Ictinike asked a buzzard to carry him toward a certain place. The crafty

bird consented, but presently dropped him in a tall hollow tree.

Ictinike was wearing ’coonskins, and when presently some persons came

along he thrust their tails through cracks in the trunk. Three women,

thinking that raccoons had become imprisoned in the tree, cut a hole to

capture them, whereupon Ictinike came out and the women ran away. Then

Ictinike lay down wrapped in his furs as if asleep, and an eagle, a

crow, and a magpie came and began pecking at him. The buzzard, thinking

this meant a feast, rushed down from the sky, and Ictinike jumped up and

tore off its scalp, since which the buzzard has been bald.

But many explanations of why birds are now so or so make no mention of

Ravens or Ictinikes, but just tell you the fact. Thus the Eskimos of

northwestern Alaska relate that one autumn day very long ago the cranes

prepared to go southward. As they were gathered in a great flock they

saw a beautiful girl standing alone near a village. Admiring her

greatly, the cranes gathered about her, and lifting her on their

wide-spread wings bore her far up and away. While the cranes were taking

her aloft their brethren circled about below her so closely that she

could not fall, and with hoarse cries drowned her screams for help. So

she was swept away into the sky, and never seen again. Always since that

time the cranes have circled about in autumn, uttering loud cries.

The Hudson Bay Eskimos tell their boys and girls when they see the funny

little guillemots by the sea-cliffs and ask about them, that once a lot

of children were playing near the brink of such a precipice. Their noisy

shouts disturbed a band of seal-hunters on the strand below; and one of

the men exclaimed, “I wish the cliff would topple over and bury those

noisy children!” In a moment the height did so, and the poor infants

fell among the rocks below. There they were changed into guillemots and

dwell to this day on the crags at the edge of the sea.

Another juvenile story explains that the swallows became what they are

by a change from Eskimo children who were making “play-house” igloos of

mud on the top of a cliff. To this day the swallows come every summer

and fix their mud nests to the rocks, recalling their childish joy in

the previous state of their existence. Hence the Eskimo children

particularly love to watch these birds in their “igluiaks,” which are

said not to be molested by the predatory ravens.

Once a long war was fought between the brants and the herons, according

to a Tlingit legend, but at last the swans intervened and a peace was

arranged. To celebrate it the herons indulged in much dancing, and have

been dancers ever since. I am inclined to think this another crane

legend, because the few herons known in the Tlingit country do not

indulge in such antics, whereas the cranes do “dance” a great deal in

the mating-season. These Indians, by the way, say that they learned the

use of pickaxes by watching a heron strike the ground with its beak; and

the suggestion of snowshoes was caught from the ptarmigan, on whose feet

grow in winter expansions of the toes that serve to make it easier for

the bird to walk on snow.

The ruffed grouse, the Ojibways declare, was marked with eleven spots on

its tail to remind him of the time when he wouldn’t do as he was told,

and had to fast eleven days as a punishment. On the other hand Manabozho

rewarded the kingfisher for some useful information by hanging a medal

(in color) about its neck; but in bestowing the medal Manabozho snatched

at the kingfisher’s head, intending to twist it off—a very

characteristic dodge of these treacherous old culture-heroes—but only

rumpled the bird’s crest, so that it has been a ragged sort of headdress

ever since.

The extinct Chitimacha Indians of northern Louisiana had a tale that a

man set the marshes on fire, and a little bird uprose through the smoke

and remonstrated. The man was angry and threw a shell at the bird, which

wounded its wings and made them bleed, and thus the red-winged blackbird

got its scarlet shoulders.

A familiar and active little shrike of the northern border of South

America is the kiskadee, with a conspicuous white mark on its head. The

Arawaks say that this radiant little songster, which has the same sort

of fierce hostility to hawks and other large birds as distinguishes our

doughty kingbird, got tired of a war that was going on among the

animals, put a white bandage around its head and pretended to be sick.

The war halted long enough to expose the fraud of the little malingerer,

and kiskadees were sentenced to wear the white bandage perpetually.

Arawak story-tellers also relate that the trumpeter (Psophia) and a

kingfisher quarrelled over the spoils of war, and knocked each other

into the ashes, which accounts for the gray of their plumage. The

nakedness of the trumpeter’s legs is owing to his stepping into an ant’s

nest, and getting them picked clean. The owl discovered a package among

the spoil of the war that contained only darkness, since which that bird

cannot endure daylight. It is interesting to compare with this the

adventure of the trumpeter current among the Maquiritares, which is

related elsewhere.

So the stories go on. The Pimas, for example, believe that the mountain

bluebird was originally an unlovely gray, but acquired its present

exquisite azure coat by bathing in a certain lake of blue water that had

neither inlet nor outlet. It bathed in this regularly for four mornings.

On the fourth morning it shed all its plumage and came out with the skin

bare; but on the fifth morning it emerged from its bath with a coat of

blue.

This tradition is somewhat sentimental, as befits the sweetly warbling

and beloved bluebird, which is not only a favorite, but has a certain

sacredness in the southwest; but often, in the majority of cases

perhaps, a rough humor tinges the history. Thus Manabush, a mythical

ancestor of the Menominees, once assembled all the birds by a

subterfuge, and then killed several. The little grebe, or “hell-diver,”

was one of those chosen for death, and as it was a poor runner it was

easily caught. Manabush said contemptuously, “I won’t kill you, but you

shall always have red eyes and be the laughing-stock of all the birds.”

With that he gave the poor bird a kick, sending it far out into Lake

Michigan and knocking off its tail, so that the hell-diver is red-eyed

and almost tailless to this day.

I have restricted this chapter mainly to examples from the folklore of

the American Indians, but, were there not danger of becoming tedious,

many more might be quoted from the fireside tales of other countries,

especially Africa. African traditions, however, can hardly be held to

account for the following explanations by some Southern darkies as given

by Martha Young[2]:

The bluejay was yoked into a plow by the sparrow, and the

necklace-like mark on his breast is the mark left by the yoke worn

in this degrading service.

The buzzard originally had a “fine plume sweepin’ from de top of his

head,” but lost it in a quarrel with a dog. “Sense dat day Buzzard

don’t never miss fust pickin’ out de eye of ev’thing that he gwine

eat,” so that it cannot see to resist if it is not quite dead.

Darkies say that the hummingbird lost her voice—“she choke her voice

clean out of her wid honey”—through being so greedy when she first

discovered the honey in flowers, by reason of contracting a

“swimmin’ in de head” by incessant whirling, as her poising on wings

seems to the negroes. “She hav a notion now that she los’ her voice

... deep in some flower. She’s al’a’rs lookin’ fer dat los’ voice.

Flash in dis flower! Dash in dat flower! But she’ll nuvver, nuvver

fin’ it.”

Charles G. Leland quotes in his _Etruscan Roman Remains_[97] a note

given him by Miss Mary Owen, of St. Joseph, Missouri, that the negroes

and half-breeds in southern Missouri consider the redheaded woodpecker a

great sorcerer, who can appear as either a bird or as a redman with a

mantle or cloak on his arm. He is supposed to be very grateful or very

vengeful as his mood requires. He sometimes bores holes in the heads of

his enemies, while they sleep, and puts in maggots which keep the

victims forever restless and crazy. He made the bat by putting a rat and

a bird together.

CHAPTER XIII

BIRDS AND THE LIGHTNING

Nothing in nature, except perhaps the rising and setting of the sun, has

impressed mankind more than the fearsome phenomena of a thunder-storm.

Such a storm in the Rocky Mountains, or among the Californian Sierras,

is truly terrifying in its magnificence, and it is none the less so in

the Alps or Himalayas or on the volcanic summits of Central Africa. The

lightnings dart about the darkly clouded peaks, and the thunder-crashes

leap from cliff to cliff in echoes that stun one, for they seem like

vast iron missiles hurled by Titanic strength, and rebounding from crags

that are falling in prodigious ruin—perhaps on your head.

On the plains, too, such a storm may be fearfully grand, for amid

rolling thunders and a tremendous downpour of rain come an incessant

flash and sparkle of lightnings that illuminate the prairie with a

violet flame almost blinding in its glare. A person who did not

comprehend the physical meaning of such a display might well be excused

for trembling in awe and terror—moreover, the danger is real.

I believe that almost from the first there were wise men, the

philosophers of their time, who understood that the clouds were fleeting

masses of fog, that rain was the water pressed out of them, and that the

lightning and its associated rumble were somehow as natural as the

blowing of the wind. The mass of wondering and terrified people,

however, could not think of the rush and noise and glare of stormy

weather otherwise than as something produced by living beings of huge,

mysterious and usually destructive power; and they were as real to them,

although invisible, as are the electric currents and tremendous

air-vibrations to us. Among the aboriginal Chinese electricity was

represented as residing on the mountains in the form of birds, and their

Thunder-god is pictured with a bird’s beak and claws, and armed with a

drum and hammer.

“The drama of mythology,” De Gubernatis tells us, “has its origin in the

sky; but the sky may be either clear or gloomy; it may be illumined by

the sun or by the moon; it may be obscured by the darkness of night, or

the condensation of its vapors into clouds.... The god who causes rain

to fall, who from the highest heaven fertilizes the earth, takes the

form now of a ram, now of a bull; the lightning that flies like a winged

arrow, is represented now as a bird, now as winged horse; and thus, one

after another, all the shifting phenomena of the heavens take the form

of animals, becoming at length now the hero himself, now the animal that

waits upon the hero, and without which he would possess no supernatural

power whatever.”

To the minds of the redmen in the eastern part of the United States the

violent storms frequent in summer were somehow produced by vague

supernatural beings spoken of as Thunder-gods; but on the open prairies

and plains of the West, where even more terrific electric disturbances

occur, and also along the Northwest Coast and in Alaska, they were

attributed to birds of enormous size, who darkened the rain-clouds with

their shadows and produced thunder by flapping their wings and lightning

by opening their eyes, shooting flaming arrows, and so forth. Some

tribes believed in one such bird only, others in a family or flock of

them variously colored, while still others declared that the agent was a

giant who clothed himself in a huge bird-skin as a flying-dress.

If one asked what any one of these creatures was like, the answer

usually was that it resembled a colossal eagle. The Comanches and

Arapahoes described it to Dr. Mooney as a big bird with a brood of small

ones, and said that it carried in its claws a quantity of arrows with

which it strikes the victims of lightning. This reminds us of the bird

of Jove in classic fable, clutching the javelins of his master, the

Thunderer; and a comic touch is that these southern Indians called the

eagle stamped on our coins by their thunder-bird’s name, innocently

supposing that our national emblem was their “baa,” the lightning-maker!

The Mandans, a Dakotan tribe, say that the thunder-bird has two toes on

each foot—one before and one behind; and the Algonquian Blackfeet

represent it on their medicine-lodges by simply drawing four black

bird-claws on a yellow shank. When it flies softly, as is usually its

way, according to the Mandans, it is not heard by mankind, but when it

flaps its wings violently a roaring noise is produced. It breaks through

the clouds to force a way for the rain, and the glance of its fiery eyes

appears in the lightnings. “We don’t see the thunder-birds,” a Winnebago

Indian explained. “We see their flashes only.”

This terrifying creature dwelt on a remote mountain, or on some rocky

elevation difficult of access, and built a nest as big as a village,

surrounded by the bones and horns of the great animals on which it

preyed. Every tribal district seems to have had at least one pair. The

Indians about Lake Superior believed that theirs were at home on the

beetling heights of that bold promontory on the northern shore of the

lake long celebrated as Thunder Cape. This is, for natural reasons, a

theatre of electric action, which the Chippeways accounted for by the

fiction of a magic bird—quite as natural in its way as is the

meteorology. At any rate the redmen feared to climb the mountain and

prove their theory, for they said men had been struck by lightning there

in impious attempts at investigating the bird-god—the old story of

religious interference with scientific curiosity. These same people held

that their thunder-bird sat on her eggs during fair weather, and hatched

out her brood in the storm—which hatching _was_ the storm.

“A place,” says the ethnologist Mooney,[77] “known to the Sioux as

Waqkina-oye, ‘the Thunderer’s nest’—... is in eastern South Dakota in

the neighborhood of Big Stone Lake. At another place, near the summit of

the Coteau des Prairies, in eastern South Dakota, a number of large

round boulders are pointed out as the eggs of the thunder-bird.

According to the Comanches there is a place on upper Red River where the

thunder-bird once alighted on the ground.... The same people tell how a

hunter once shot and wounded a large bird which fell to the ground.

Being afraid to attack it alone on account of its size, he returned to

camp for help, but on again approaching the spot the hunters heard the

thunder rolling and saw flashes of lightning shooting out from the

ravine where the bird lay wounded. On coming nearer the lightning

blinded them so that they could not see the bird, and one flash struck

and killed a hunter. His frightened companions then fled back to camp,

for they knew it was a thunder-bird.”

In contrast to this the Eskimos of the lower Yukon Valley tell of a

former man of their race who dared, after others had failed, to raid the

lair of and kill a gigantic fowl that for a long time had preyed as a

“man-eater” on the village of their ancestors; and they have held this

man in high honor as a hero to this day.

This conception of a thunder-and-lightning-producing bird has a

prominent place among the notions of the native inhabitants of the

northwestern American coast-country, where the attributed

characteristics and deeds vary with local surroundings and tribal

peculiarities. In one place a storm was supposed to result from its

activity in catching whales; and a Chehalis legend has it that

Thunderbird sprang from a whale killed by South Wind. As soon as it was

born South Wind followed it, and Ootz-Hooi, the giantess, found its nest

and threw the eggs down a cliff. From these eggs sprang the Chehalis

people. The Tlingit, of the Southern Alaskan coast-region, account for

the great amount of rain that falls in a thunder-shower by explaining

that the thunder-bird carries a lake on its back. A conventional

representation of the thunder-bird as it appears to the Haidas of this

Northwest Coast decorates the title-page of this book.

The Salish Indians of the Thomson River region, in southern British

Columbia, believe that the thunder-bird uses its wings as bows to shoot

arrows, _i.e._, lightnings. “The rebound of his wings in the air, after

shooting, makes the thunder. For this reason the thunder is often heard

in different parts of the sky at once, being the noise from each wing.

The arrowheads fired by the thunder are found in many parts of the

country. They are of black stone and of very large size.” The last

statement may refer to meteoric stones, or it may be purely fanciful. A

common belief among the farmer-folk of Europe is that the smooth,

chisel-shaped tools or weapons of prehistoric (Neolithic) men,

frequently turned up by the plow, and known technically as “celts,” are

thunderbolts; but this is only incidental to the present theme.

The raven is a hero-bird among the Cherokees, who say that he became

black by attempting to bring fire from a hollow tree that had been set

on fire purposely by “the Thunderer” by means of lightning. The bird did

not succeed, and blackened its plumage forever.

In Japan the ptarmigan, a dweller on mountain-tops, is called _rai-cho_,

“thunder-bird,” and is “sacred to the God of Thunder,” as Weston

expresses it, adding that “pictures of them are often hung up in

farmers’ cottages as a charm against lightning.”

Thunderstorms are usually accompanied by much wind, and the common

conception of birds as the agent of wind, or the wind itself, has been

exhibited briefly in another chapter; it prevailed not only among our

American Indians but in various other parts of the world, including

South Africa—or did, when men were less skeptical of such ideas than

now. In ancient Sanskrit mythology the delicate white cirrus cloud

drifting overhead was a fleeting swan, and so also was it in the creed

of the early Scandinavians and to our wild Navahoes—a good illustration

not only of independent and parallel images for an idea, but of the

likeness of human minds under great diversity of race and conditions.

Black clouds were thought of by the Norse folks as “ravens coursing over

the earth and returning to whisper the news in the ear of listening

Odin,” as Baring-Gould expresses it. The immemorial resemblance traced

between bird and cloud is not far-fetched: and recurs to the modern poet

as it did in olden times to the Psalmist when he spoke of the wings of

the wind. “The rushing vapor is the roc of the _Arabian Nights_, which

broods over its great luminous egg, the sun, and which haunts the

sparkling Valley of Diamonds, the starry sky.... If the cloud was

supposed to be a great bird, the lightnings were regarded as writhing

worms or serpents in its beak.... The lightning-bolt, shattering all it

struck, was regarded as the stone dropped by the cloud-bird.”[54]

In the _Kalevala_ Puhuri, the North Wind, father of Pakkanen, the Frost,

is sometimes personified as a gigantic eagle.

These facts and considerations prepare the way for legends that began to

be told in the very beginning of things, because then, and until

yesterday, all ordinary folks thought them true as well as interesting;

and they are repeated even now as curiosities of primitive faith—stories

of birds and plants called “openers.”

The oldest, perhaps, is the Rabbinical legend of Solomon, who desired to

obtain a stone-breaking “worm” (so the idea was even then ancient!) in

possession of Asmodeus, the Demon of Destruction. Asmodeus refused to

fetch it, and told Solomon that if he wanted this magic creature (whose

name was _schamir_) he must find the nest of “the,” not “a,” moorhen and

cover it with a plate of glass so that the mother-bird could not get

access to her young. This was done. When the moorhen returned and saw

the situation she flew away, brought the schamir from its hiding-place,

and was about to lay it on the glass, which it would break; but Benaiah,

Solomon’s agent, who lay in wait, shouted, and so frightened the bird

that she dropped the schamir, whereupon Benaiah picked it up, as he had

planned to do. It was by aid of this “worm,” which shaped the stone-work

for him, that Solomon was able to build his Temple without sound of

hammer or saw. Other versions assert that a raven or an eagle was the

bird, and that the magic glass-breaker was a stone brought from the

uttermost East.

The story travelled to Greece, and there became attached to the hoopoe,

a small crested bird that figures largely in south-European and African

wonder-tales. A hoopoe, runs the Greek story, had a nest in an old wall

in which was a crevice. The proprietor, noticing the rent in his wall,

plastered it over; thus when the hoopoe returned to feed her young she

found that the nest had been covered so that she was unable to enter it.

Forthwith she flew away in quest of a plant called poa (the

springwort?), and having found a spray returned and applied it to

the plaster, which at once fell off from the crack and gave her free

access to her nest. Then she went forth to seek food, but during her

absence the master again plastered up the hole. The object was again

removed by means of the magic poa, and a third time the hole was

stopped and opened in the same way.

The springwort and several other flowering plants were credited in

old times with a magical property in opening locks. “Pliny records

the superstition concerning it almost in the same form in which it

is now found in Germany. If anyone touches a lock with it the lock,

however strong, must yield.... One cannot easily find it oneself,

but generally the woodpecker [according to Pliny, also the raven; in

Switzerland and Swabia the hoopoe; in the Tyrol the swallow] will

bring it under the following circumstances: When the bird visits its

nest the nest must be stopped up with wood. The bird will open it by

touching it with a spring-wurzel. Meantime a fire or a red cloth

must be placed near by, which will so frighten the bird that it will

let the magic root fall.”

The English antiquary Aubrey (1626–97) records an anecdote of a keeper

of a baronial park in Herefordshire who “did for exprinent’s sake drive

an iron naile thwert the hole of the woodpecker’s nest, there being a

tradition that the damme will bring some leafe to open it. He layed at

the bottom of the tree a cleane sheet, and before many houres passed the

naile came out, and he found a leafe lying by it on the sheet. They say

the moonwort will do such things.” The moonwort is a fern which was

formerly reputed to have power to draw nails out of horseshoes.

From such roots as these grew the superstitions and legends innumerable

of plants that would cure a snake (another lightning-symbol) or other

animal of wounds, or even restore the dead. A tradition of the Middle

Ages is that two little birds were seen fighting till one was exhausted.

“It went away and ate of a certain herb and then returned to renew the

battle. When the old man who witnessed the encounter had seen this done

several times he took away the herb on which the bird was wont to feed,

whereupon the little bird, unable to find its plant, set up a great cry

and died.” It is a foolish little story, but illustrative.

One reads of magic crystals, and of gems with marvellous properties that

would open mountains in which princes or glittering treasures were

hidden. A curious example of this is related by Leland[97] anent the

constant and ordinarily fruitless hunt for treasure in ancient Etruscan

tombs, which went on in Italy for centuries. “When one would find a

treasure,” the peasants told Leland, “he must take the door of the house

in which he dwells and carry it forth into the fields at night until he

comes to a tree. Then he must wait till many birds fly over him, and

when they come he must throw down the door, making a great noise. Then

the birds in fear will speak with a human voice, and tell where the

treasure is buried.”

Much of this tinctures the mental life of many uneducated persons to

this day. They will tell you now at Rauen, in Germany, that a princess

is entombed alive in the Markgrafenstein, and that she and her wealth

can be released only by one who will go there on a Friday at midnight

carrying a white woodpecker—which would seem to make an albino of that

species well worth searching for! The woodpecker of old was a

“lightning-bird” because, among other reasons, it was supposed to get

fire by boring into wood, as did primitive savages by means of the

fire-drill; and its red cap was not only a badge of its office, but a

lightning-symbol in general.

Let me illuminate this matter still more by quoting the comments of John

Fiske[98] on the mythical conceptions of this character that are so old,

and so cherished among the unlearned:

Among the birds enumerated by Kuhn [author of _The Descent of Fire_]

and others as representing the storm-cloud, are likewise the wren or

kinglet (French _roitelet_); the owl, sacred to Athenæ; the cuckoo,

stork and sparrow; and the red-breasted robin, whose name Robert was

originally an epithet of the lightning-god Thor. In certain parts of

France it is still believed that the robbing of a wren’s nest will

render the culprit liable to be struck by lightning. The same belief

was formerly entertained in Teutonic countries with respect to the

robin....

Now, as the raven or woodpecker, in the various myths of schamir, is

the dark storm-cloud, so the rock-splitting worm, or plant or pebble

is nothing more or less than the flash of lightning carried and

dropped by the cloud....