BIRDS IN LEGENDFABLE AND FOLKLORE
St. Francis Preaching to the Birds.
Attributed to Giotto
A CHAT WITH THE INTENDING READER
Angus Mac-ind-oc was the Cupid of the Gaels. He was a harper
of the sweetest music, and was attended by birds, his own trans-
formed kisses, which hovered, invisible, over young men and
maidens of Erin, whispering love into their ears.
WHEN we say, «A little bird told me,» we are
talking legend and folklore and superstition all
at once. There is an old Basque story of a bird
— always a small one in these tales — that tells the truth;
and our Biloxi Indians used to say the same of the
hummingbird. Breton peasants still credit all birds with
the power of using human language on proper occasions,
and traditions in all parts of the world agree that every
bird had this power once on a time if not now. The
fireside-tales of the nomads of Oriental deserts or of
North American plains and forest alike attest faith in
this power; and conversation by and with birds is almost
the main stock of the stories heard on our Southern cot-
ton-plantations. You will perhaps recall the bulbul
bazar of the Arabian Nights, and, if you please, you may
read in another chapter of the conversational pewit and
hoopoe of Solomonic fame.
Biblical authority exists in the confidence of the
4 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Prophet Elijah that a «bird of the air… shall tell the
matter»; and monkish traditions abound in revelations
whispered in the ear of the faithful by winged mes-
sengers from divine sources, as you may read further
along if you have patience to turn the leaves. The poets
keep alive the pretty fiction; and the rest of us resort
to the phrase with an arch smile whenever we do not care
to quote our authority for repeating some half-secret bit
of gossip. «This magical power of understanding bird-
talk,“ says Halliday, 1 * „is regularly the way in which the
seers of myths obtain their information.»
Primitive men — and those we style the Ancients were
primitive so far as nature is concerned — regarded birds
as supernaturally wise. This canniness is implied in
many of the narratives and incidents set down in the
succeeding pages; and in view of it birds came to be
regarded by early man with great respect, yet also with
apprehension, for they might utilize their knowledge to
his harm. For example: The Canada jay is believed
by the Indians along the northern shore of Hudson Bay
to give warning whenever they approach an Eskimo camp
— usually, of course, with hostile intent; and naturally
those Indians kill that kind of jay whenever they can.
The ability in birds to speak implies knowledge, and
Martha Young 2 gives us a view of this logic prevailing
among the old-time southern darkies:
♦This and similar «superior» figures throughout the text refer
to the List of Books in the Appendix, where the author and
title of the publication alluded to will be found under its number.
The author takes this opportunity, in place of a perfunctory
Preface, to make grateful acknowledgment of assistance to Pro-
fessor A. V. H. Jackson, who revised the chapter on fabulous birds;
to Mr. Stewart Culin, helpful in Chinese matters, etc.; to Pro-
fessor Justin H. Smith, who scanned the whole manuscript; and
to others who furnished valuable facts and suggestions.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 5
Sis’ Dove she know mo’n anybody or anything in de worl’.
She know pintedly de time anybody gwine die. You’ll hear
her moanin’ fer a passin’ soul ’fo’ you hear de bell tone.
She know ’fo’ cotton-plantin’ time whe’r de craps dat gatherin’
’11 be good er bad. To’ folks breaks up de new groun’ er
bust out middles, Sis’ Dove know what de yield ’11 be. She
know it an’ she’ll tell it, too. «Caze ev’ybody know if
Sis’ Dove coo on de right han’ of a man plowin’, dare ’11 be
a good crap dat year; but ef she coo on de lef dar ’11 be a
faillery crap dat year.
Sis’ Dove she know about all de craps dat grow out er de
groun’ but she ’special know about corn, fer she plant de fi’st
grain er corn dat ever was plant’ in de whole worl\ Whar
she git it? … Umm — hum! You tell me dat!
From the belief in the intuitive wisdom of birds comes
the world-wide confidence in their prophetic power.
Hence their actions, often so mysterious, have been
watched with intense interest, and everything unusual
in their behavior was noticed in the hope that it might
express a revelation from on high. Advantage was taken
of this pathetic hope and assurance by the Roman augurs
in their legalized ornithomancy, of which some descrip-
tion will be found in another chapter. Nine-tenths of it
was priestly humbug to keep ordinary folks in mental
subjection, as priestcraft has ever sought to do. The
remaining tenth has become the basis of the present
popular faith in birds’ ability to foretell coming weather.
Let me cite a few aboriginal examples of this faith,
more or less sincere, in the ability and willingness of
birds to warn inquiring humanity.
The Omahas and other Siouan Indians used to say
that when whippoorwills sing at night, saying «Hoia,
hohin?» one replies «No.» If the birds stop at once, it is
a sign that the answerer will soon die, but if the birds
keep on calling he or she will live a long time. The
Utes of Colorado, however, declare that this bird is the
6 BIRDS IN LEGEND
god of the night, and that it made the moon by magic,
transforming a frog into it; while the Iroquois indulged
in the pretty fancy that the moccasin-flowers (cypri-
pediums) are whippoorwills’ shoes.
This is a little astray from my present theme, to which
we may return by quoting from Waterton 73 that if one
of the related goatsuckers of the Amazon Valley be heard
close to an Indian’s or a negro’s hut, from that night
evil fortune sits brooding over it. In Costa Rica bones
of whippoorwills are dried and ground to a fine powder
by the Indians when they want to concoct a charm against
some enemy; mixed with tobacco it will form a cigarette
believed to cause certain death to the person smoking it.
To the mountaineers of the southern Alleghanies the
whippoorwill reveals how long it will be before marriage
— as many years as its notes are repeated: as I have
heard the bird reiterate its cry more than 800 times with-
out taking breath, this must often be a discouraging re-
port to an anxious maid or bachelor. One often hears it
said lightly in New England that a whippoorwill calling
very near a house portends death, but I can get no evi-
dence that this «sign» is really attended to anywhere in the
northern United States.
This, and the equally nocturnal screechowl (against
which the darkies have many «conjurings») are not the
only birds feared by rural folk in the Southern States,
especially in the mountains. A child in a family of
Georgia «crackers» fell ill, and his mother gave this
account of it to a sympathetic friend:
Mikey is bound to die. I’ve know’d it all along. All las’
week the moanin’ doves was comin roun’ the house, and this
mornin’ one come in at the window right by Mikey’s head, an’
cooed an’ moaned. I couldn’t scare it away, else a witch would
’a’ put a spell on me.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 7
Mikey lived to become a drunkard, is the unfeeling com-
ment of the reporter of this touching incident in The
Journal of American Folklore.
«One constantly hears by day the note of the limocon,
a wood-pigeon which exercises a most extraordinary
interest over the lives of many of the wild people, for
they believe that the direction and nature of its notes
augur good or ill for the enterprises they have in hand.»
This memorandum, in Dean Worcester’s valuable book
on the Philippines, 3 is apt to the purpose of this intro-
ductory chapter, leading me to say that the continuing
reader will find doves (which are much the same in all
parts of the world) conspicuous in legend, fable and
ceremony; also that the «direction and nature» of their
voices, as heard, is one of the most important elements
in the consideration of birds in general as messengers
and prophets — functions to which I shall often have oc-
casion to refer, and on which are founded the ancient
systems of bird-divination.
In these United States little superstition relating to
animals has survived, partly because the wild creatures
here were strange to the pioneers, who were poorly ac-
quainted with their characteristics, but mainly because
such fears and fancies were left in the Old World with
other rubbish not worth the freight-charges; yet a few
quaint notions came along, like small heirlooms of no
particular value that folks dislike to throw away until
they must. Almost all such mental keepsakes belong to
people in the backward parts of the country, often with
an ill-fitting application to local birds. A conspicuous
disappearance is that venerable body of forebodings and
fancies attached to the European cuckoo, totally unknown
or disregarded here, because our American cuckoos have
8 BIRDS IN LEGEND
no such irregular habits as gave rise to the myths and
superstitions clustering about that bird in Europe.
We saw a moment ago that the negro farmer estimated
what the yield of his field would be by the direction from
which the dove’s message came to his ears. I have an-
other note that if one hears the first mourning-dove of
the year above him he will prosper: if from below him
his own course henceforth will be down hill.
This matter of direction whence (and also of number)
is of vital importance in interpreting bird-prophecy the
world over, as will be fully shown in a subsequent
chapter. Even in parts of New England it is counted
«unlucky» to see two crows together flying toward the
left — a plain borrowing from the magpie-lore of Old
England. In the South it is thought that if two quails
fly up in front of a man on the way to conclude a bargain
he will do well to abandon the intended business. Break
up a killdeer’s nest and you will soon break a leg or arm
— and so on.
There always have been persons who were much dis-
turbed when a bird fluttered against a closed window.
A rooster crowing into an open house-door foretells a
visitor. The plantation darkies of our Southern States
believe that when shy forest-birds come close about a
dwelling as if frightened, or, wandering within it, beat
their wings wildly in search of an exit, so some soul will
flutteringly seek escape from that house — and «right
soon.» Similar fears afflict the timid on the other side
of the globe. On the contrary, and more naturally, it is
esteemed among us an excellent omen when wild birds
nest fearlessly about a negro’s or a mountaineer’s cabin.
When a Georgia girl first hears in the spring the plain-
tive call of returning doves she must immediately attend
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 9
to it if she is curious as to her future partner in life.
She must at once take nine steps forward and nine back-
ward, then take off her right shoe: in it she will discover
a hair of the man she is to marry — but how to find its
owner is not explained! This bit of rustic divination is
plainly transferred from the old English formula toward
the first-heard cuckoo, as may be learned from Gay’s
The Sheperd’s Week, 8 which is a treasury of rustic cus-
toms in Britain long ago. Says one of the maids :
Then doff’d my shoe, and by my troth I swear,
Therein I spy’d this yellow, frizzled hair.
This matter of the hair is pure superstition allied to
magic, in practicing which, indeed, birds have often been
degraded to an evil service very remote from their nature.
Thiselton Dyer quotes an Irish notion that «in every-
one’s head there is a particular hair which, if the swallow
can pluck it, dooms the wretched individual to eternal
perdition.» A Baltimore folklorist warns every lady
against letting birds build nests with the combings of
her hair, as it will turn the unfortunate woman crazy.
Any woman afraid of this should beware of that dear
little sprite of our garden shrubbery, the chipping-spar-
row, for it always lines its tiny nest with hair. This
notion is another importation, for it has long been a
saying in Europe that if a bird uses human hair in its
nest the owner of the hair will have headaches and later
baldness. Curiously enough the Seneca Indians, one of
the five Iroquois tribes, are said to have long practised
a means, as they believed it to be, of communicating with
a maiden-relative, after her death, by capturing a fledg-
ling bird with a noose made from her hair. The bird
was kept caged until it began to sing, when it was libe-
io BIRDS IN LEGEND
rated and was believed to carry to the knowledge of the
departed one a whispered message of love.
Now the idea underlying all this faith in the super-
natural wisdom and prophetic gift in birds is the general
supposition that they are spirits, or, at any rate, possessed
by spirits, a doctrine that appears in various guises but is
universal in the world of primitive culture — a world
nearer to us sophisticated readers than perhaps we
realize: but a good many little children inhabit it, even
within our doors.
«The primitive mind,,, as Dr. Brinton asserts, «did not
recognize any deep distinction between the lower animals
and man»; and continues:
The savage knew that the beast was his superior in many
points, in craft and in strength, in fleetness and intuition, and he
regarded it with respect. To him the brute had a soul not in-
ferior to his own, and a language which the wise among men
might on occasion learn…. Therefore with wide unanimity
he placed certain species of animals nearer to God than is man
himself, or even identified them with the manifestations of the
Highest.
None was in this respect a greater favorite than the bird.
Its soaring flight, its strange or sweet notes, the marked hues
of its plumage, combined to render it a fit emblem of power
and beauty. The Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to
Singalang Burong, the god of birds; and birds as the ancestors
of the totemic family are extremely common among the
American Indians. The Eskimos say that they have the faculty
of soul or life beyond all other creatures, and in most primitive
tribes they have been regarded as the messengers of the divine,
and the special purveyors of the vital principles… and every-
where to be able to understand the language of birds was
equivalent to being able to converse with the gods. 4
If this is true it is not surprising that savages in various
parts of the world trace their tribal origin to a super-
natural bird of the same form and name as some familiar
FABLE AND FOLKLORE n
local species, which was inhabited by the soul of their
heroic «first man.» The Osage Indians of Kansas, for
example, say that as far back as they can conceive of
time their ancestors were alive, but had neither bodies
nor souls. They existed beneath the lowest of the four
«upper worlds/' and at last migrated to the highest, where
they obtained souls. Then followed travels in which they
searched for some source whence they might get human
bodies, and at last asked the question of a redbird sitting
on her nest. She replied: «I can cause your children to
have human bodies from my own.» She explained that
her wings would be their arms, her head their head, and
so on through a long list of parts, external and internal,
showing herself a good comparative anatomist. Finally
she declared: «The speech (or breath) of children will
I bestow on your children.» 5
Such is the story of how humanity reached the earth,
according to one branch of the Osages: other gentes
also believe themselves descended from birds that came
down from an upper world. Dozens of similar cases
might be quoted, of which I will select one because of its
curious features. The Seri, an exclusive and backward
tribe inhabiting the desert-like island Tiburon, in the Gulf
of California, ascribe the creation of the world, and of
themselves in particular, to the Ancient of Pelicans, a
mythical fowl of supernal wisdom and melodious song —
an unexpected poetic touch! — who first raised the earth
above the primeval waters. This laf; point is in con-
formity with the general belief that a waste of waters
preceded the appearance, by one or another miraculous
means well within the redman’s range of experience, of
a bit of land; and it is to be observed that this original
patch of earth, whether fixed or floating, was enlarged
12 BIRDS IN LEGEND
to habitable dimensions not by further miracles, nor by
natural accretion, but, as a rule, by the labor and in-
genuity of the «first men» themselves, usually aided by
favorite animals. Thus the Seri Indians naturally held
the pelican in especial regard, but that did not prevent
their utilizing it to the utmost. Dr. W J McGee 6 found
that one of their customs was to tie a broken-winged, liv-
ing pelican to a stake near the seashore, and then appro-
priate the fishes brought to the captive by its free
relatives.
In fewer cases we find that not only tribal but also
individual origin is ascribed to a bird, the best illustra-
tion of which is the notion of the natives of Perak, in the
Malay Peninsula, that a bird brings the soul to every
person at birth. A woman who is about to become a
mother selects as the place where her baby shall be
born the foot of a certain tree — any one that appeals to
her fancy — and this will be the «name-tree» of her child.
The parents believe that a soul has been waiting for this
child in the form of a bird that for some time before
the birth frequents all the trees of the chosen kind in
that vicinity, searching for the occasion when it may de-
liver its charge, intrusted to it by Kari, the tribal god.
This bird must be killed and eaten by the expectant
mother just before the actual birth or the baby will never
come to life, or if it does will speedily die. A poetic
feature in this tender explanation of the mystery of life
among the jungle-dwellers is that the souls of first-born
children are brought always by the newly hatched off-
spring of the bird that contained the soul of the mother
of the child. 7
Apart from this singular conception of the source of
existence, the general theory of spirituality in birds is
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 13
based, as heretofore intimated, on the almost universal
belief that they are often the visible spirits of the dead.
The Powhatans of Virginia, for example, held that the
feathered race received the souls of their chiefs at death;
and a California tribe asserted that the small birds whose
hard luck it was to receive the souls of bad men were
chased and destroyed by hawks, so that those of good
Indians alone reached the happy hunting-grounds beyond
the sky.
James G. Swan relates in his interesting old book about
early days at Puget Sound, 10 that the Indians at Shoal-
water Bay, Oregon, were much disturbed one morning
because they had heard the whistling of a plover in the
night. The white men there told them it was only a
bird’s crying, but they insisted the noise was that of
spirits. Said they: «Birds don’t talk in the night; they
talk in the daytime.“ „But,“ asked Russell, „how can you
tell that it is the memelose tillicunis, or dead people?
They can’t talk.“ „No,“ replied the savage, „it is true they
can’t talk as we do, but they whistle through their teeth.
You are a white man and do not understand what they
say, but Indians know.»
This bit of untainted savage philosophy recalls the
queer British superstition of the Seven Whistlers.
Wordsworth, who was a North-countryman, records of
his ancient Dalesman —
He the seven birds hath seen that never part,
Seen the Seven Whistlers on their nightly rounds
And counted them.
The idea that the wailing of invisible birds is a warning
of danger direct from Providence prevails especially in
the English colliery districts, where wildfowl, migrating
i 4 BIRDS L IN LEGEND
at night and calling to one another as they go, supply
exactly the right suggestion to the timid. Sailors fear
them as «storm-bringers.» Even more horrifying is the
primitive Welsh conception (probably capable of a similar
explanation) of the Three Birds of Rhiannon, wife of
Pwyll, ruler of Hades, that could sing the dead to life
and the living into the sleep of death. Luckily they were
heard only at the death of great heroes in battle.
How easily such things may beguile the imagination
is told in Thomas W. Higginson’s book on army life in
the black regiment of which he was the colonel during
the Civil War. This sane and vigorous young officer
writes of an incident on the South Carolina Coast:»I
remember that, as I stood on deck in the still and misty
evening, listening with strained senses for some sound
of approach of an expected boat, I heard a low con-
tinuous noise from the distance, more mild and desolate
than anything my memory can parallel. It came from
within the vast circle of mist, and seemed like the cry
of a myriad of lost souls upon the horizon’s verge; it
was Dante become audible: yet it was but the accumu-
lated cries of innumerable seafowl at the entrance of the
outer bay.» 9
But I have rambled away along an enticing by-path,
as will frequently happen in the remainder of this book
— to the reader’s interest, I venture to believe.
Returning to the theme of a moment ago, I recall that
the Rev. H. Friend lx tells us that he has seen Buddhist
priests in Canton «bless a small portion of their rice, and
place it at the door of the refectory to be eaten by the
birds which congregate there.» These offerings are to
the «house spirits,» by which the Chinese mean the spirits
of their ancestors, who are still kindly interested in the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 15
welfare of the family. This is real ancestor-worship ex-
pressed in birds; and Spence 12 records that «the shamans
of certain tribes of Paraguay act as go-betweens between
the members of their tribes and such birds as they imagine
enshrine the souls of their departed relatives.» The
heathen Lombards ornamented their grave-posts with
the effigy of a dove. This notion of birds as reincarnated
human souls is not confined to untutored minds nor to
an ancient period. Evidences of its hold on the human
imagination may be found in Europe down to the present
day, and it animates one of the most picturesque super-
stitions of pious followers of Mahomet, two forms of
which have come to me. The first is given by Doughty, 13
the second by Keane, 14 both excellent authorities.
Doughty says: «It was an ancient opinion of the
idolatrous Arabs that the departing spirit flitted from
man’s brainpan as a wandering fowl, complaining thence-
forward in perpetual thirst her unavenged wrong;
friends, therefore, to avenge the friend’s soul-bird, poured
upon the grave their pious libations of wine. The bird
is called a ’green fowl.»»
Quoting Keane: «It is a superstition among the Mo-
hammedans that the spirits of martyrs are lodged in the
crops of green birds, and partake of the fruit and drink
of the rivers of paradise; also that the souls of the good
dwell in the form of white birds near the throne of God.»
But the spirits represented in birds are not always
ancestral or benevolent: they may be unpleasant, fore-
boding, demoniac. The Indians and negroes along the
Amazons will not destroy goatsuckers. Why? Because
they are receptacles for departed human souls who have
come back to earth unable to rest because of crimes done
in their former bodies, or to haunt cruel and hard-hearted
Z 6 birds in legend
masters. In Venezuela and Trinidad the groan-like cries
of the nocturnal, cave-dwelling guacharos are thought
to be the wailing of ghosts compelled to stay in their
caverns in order to expiate their sins. Even now, the
Turks maintain that the dusky shearwaters that daily
travel in mysterious flocks up and down the Bosphorus
are animated by condemned human souls.
By way of the ancestral traditions sketched above,
arise those «sacred animals» constantly mentioned in
accounts of ancient or backward peoples. Various birds
were assigned to the deities and heroes of Egyptian and
Pagan mythology — the eagle to Jove, goose and later the
peacock to Juno, the little owl to Minerva, and so on; but
to call these companions «sacred» is a bad use of the term,
for there was little or nothing consecrate in these ascrip-
tions, and if in any case worship was addressed to the
deity, its animal companion was hardly included in the
reverential thought of the celebrant.
It is conceivable that such ascriptions as these are the
refined relics of earlier superstitions held by primitive
folk everywhere in regard to such birds of their territory
as appealed to their imaginations because of one or an-
other notable trait. Ethnological and zoological books
abound in instances, which it would be tedious to catalog,
and several examples appear elsewhere in this book. A
single, rather remarkable one, that of the South African
ground-hornbill or bromvogel, will suffice to illustrate
the point here. I choose, among several available, the
account given by Layard, 15 one of the early naturalist-
explorers in southern Africa :
The Fingoes seem to attach some superstitious veneration to
the ground-hornbills and object to their being shot in the
neighborhood of their dwellings, lest they should lose their
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 17
cattle by disease…. The Kaffirs have a superstition that if
one of these birds is killed it will rain for a long time. I am
told that in time of drought it is the custom to take one alive,
tie a stone to it, then throw it into a «vley»; after that a rain is
supposed to follow. They avoid using the water in which this
ceremony has been performed…. Only killed in time of
severe drought, when one is killed by order of the rain-doctor
and its body is thrown into a pool in a river. The idea is that
the bird has so offensive a smell that it will make the water
sick, and that the only way of getting rid of this is to wash it
away to the sea, which can only be done by a heavy rain.
The ground where they feed is considered good for cattle,
and in settling a new country spots frequented by these birds
are chosen by the wealthy people. Should the birds, however,
by some chance, fly over a cattle kraal, the kraal is moved to
some other place. … It is very weak on the wing, and when
required by the «doctor» the bird is caught by the men of a
number of kraals turning out at the same time, and a particular
bird is followed from one hill to another by those on the look-
out. After three or four flights it can be run down and caught
by a good runner…. The Ovampos [of Damara land] seem
to have a superstition [that the eggs cannot be procured because
so soft that] they would fall to pieces on the least handling.
It seems to me likely that the sense of service to men
in its constant killing of dreaded snakes — birds and ser-
pents are linked together in all barbaric religious and
social myths — may be at the core of the veneration paid
the hornbill, as, apparently, it was in the case of the
Egyptian ibis. This wader was not only a foe to lizards
and small snakes, but, as it always appeared in the Nile
just as the river showed signs of beginning its periodic
overflow, a matter of anxious concern to the people, it
was regarded as a prescient and benevolent creature fore-
telling the longed-for rise of the water. At Hermopolis,
situated at the upper end of the great fertile plain of
the lower Nile, the ibis was incarnated as Thoth (identi-
fied by the Greeks with Hermes), one of the highest gods
T S BIRDS IN LEGEND
of the ancient Egyptians. This ibis, and other incarnated
animals, originally mere symbols of lofty ideas, came to
be reverenced as real divinities in the places where their
cult flourished (although they might enjoy no such dis-
tinction elsewhere), were given divine honors when they
died, and were, in short, real gods to their devotees; that is
to say, the sophisticated Egyptians of the later dynasties
had elevated into the logical semblance of divinity this
and that animal-fetish of their uncultured ancestors.
Another singular case of a bird rising to the eminence
of tutelary deity is that of the ruddy sheldrake (Casarca
rutila) or Brahminy duck in Thibet. From it is derived
the title of the established church of the lamas (practi-
cally the government of that Buddhistic country); and
their abbotts wear robes of the sheldrake colors. In
Burmah the Brahminy duck is sacred to Buddhists as a
symbol of devotion and fidelity, and it was figured on
Asoka’s pillars in this emblematic character. This shel-
drake is usually found in pairs, and when one is shot
the other will often hover near until it, too, falls a vic-
tim to its conjugal love. 16
A stage in this process of deification is given by Tylor
in describing the veneration of a certain bird in Poly-
nesia, as a Tahitian priest explained it to Dr. Ellis, the
celebrated missionary-student of the South Seas. The
priest said that his god was not always in the idol repre-
senting it. «A god,» he declared, «often came to and
passed from an image in the body of a bird, and spiritual
influence could be transmitted from an idol by imparting
it by contact to certain valued kinds of feathers. "This
bit of doctrine helps us to understand what Colonel St.
Johnston has to tell in his recent thoughtful book 48 on the
ethnology of Polynesia, of the special use of the feathers
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 19
(mainly red) of particular birds in the insignia of chiefs,
and in religious ceremonials; and he comments as
follows :
In the Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga groups the very special mats
of the chiefs were edged with the much-prized red feathers
usually obtained with great difficulty from Taverni Island.
…In Tahiti the fan was associated with feathers in a pe-
culiar idea of sacredness, and feathers given out by the priests
at the temple at the time of the «Pa’e-atua» ceremony were taken
home by the worshippers and tied on to special fans. These
beautiful feathers of the Pacific were, of course, prized by an
artistic people for their colors alone, but there seems to have
been something more than that, something particularly con-
nected with a divine royalty. In Hawaii the kahili, the sceptre
of the king, was surmounted with special feathers. The royal
cloaks (as in Peru) and the helmets had feathers thickly sewn
on them; the para-kura, or sacred coronet of Tangier was made
of red feathers; and the Pa’e-atua ceremony that I have just
written of consisted of the unwrapping of the images of the
gods, exposing them to the sun, oiling them, and then wrapping
them once more in feathers — fresh feathers, brought by the
worshippers, and given in exchange for the old ones, which
were taken away as prized relics to be fastened to the sacred
fans.
Can it be that the feathers represent divine birds, symbolic
of the «Sky People»? We know that many birds were peculiarly
sacred (the tropic bird of Fiji might be mentioned among
others), and the messages of the gods were said to have been
at first transmitted by the birds, until the priests were taught
to do so in the squeaky voices — possibly imitative of bird-cries —
they adopted.
Such deifications of birds took place elsewhere than
in Fiji and Egypt. Charles de Kay has written a learned
yet readable book 18 devoted to expounding the worship
of birds in ancient Europe, and their gradual mergence
into deities of human likeness. He calls attention to re-
mains in early European lore indicating a very extensive
connection of birds with gods, pointing to a worship of
20 BIRDS IN LEGEND
the bird itself as the living representative of a god, «or
else to such a position of the bird toward a deity as to
fairly permit the inference that at a period still more
remote the bird itself was worshipped.» The Poly-
nesian practices detailed above certainly are of very
ancient origin, probably coming to the islands with the
earliest migrants from the East Indian mainlands; and
the theology involved may be a lingering relic of the
times and ideas described in De Kay’s treatise.
To carry these matters further is not within my plan,
for they would lead us into the mazes of comparative
mythology, which it is my purpose to avoid as far as
possible, restricting myself to history, sayings, and allu-
sions that pertain to real, not imaginary, birds.*
The distinction I try to make between the mythical and
the legendary or real, may be illustrated by the king-
fisher — in this case, of course, the common species of
southern Europe. Let us consider first the mythical side.
Alcyone, daughter of /Eolus, the wind-god, impelled by
love for her husband Ceyx, whom she found dead on
the shore after a shipwreck, threw herself into the sea.
The gods, rewarding their conjugal love, changed the
pair into kingfishers. What connection exists between
this, which is simply a classic yarn, and the ancient theory
of the nidification of this species, I do not know; but
the story was — now we are talking of the real bird, which
the Greeks and Latins saw daily — that the kingfisher
hatched its eggs at the time of the winter solstice in a
nest shaped like a hollow sponge, and thought to be
♦Nevertheless, I have made one exception by devoting a chap-
ter to «a fabulous flock» of wholly fictitious birds, namely, the
phenix, rukh (roc), simurgh and their fellows — all hatched from
the same solar nest — because they have become familiar to us, by
name, at least, in literature, symbolism, and proverbial sayings.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 21
solidly composed of fish-bones, which was set afloat, or
at any rate floated, on the surface of the Mediterranean.
The natural query how such a structure could survive the
shock of waves led to the theory that Father yEolus made
the winds «behave» during the brooding-time. As Pliny
explains: «For seven days before the winter solstice, and
for the same length of time after it, the sea becomes calm
in order that the kingfishers may rear their young.»
Simonides, Plutarch, and many other classic authorities,
testify to the same tradition, which seems to have be-
longed particularly to the waters about Sicily. More
recent writers kept alive the tender conceit.
Along the coast the mourning halcyon’s heard
Lamenting sore her spouse’s fate,
are lines from Ariosto’s verse almost duplicated by
Camoens; and Southey —
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles,
The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles.
while Dryden speaks of «halcyons brooding on a winter
sea,» and Drayton makes use of the legend in five differ-
ent poems. It is a fact that in the region of southern
Italy a period of calm weather ordinarily follows the
blustering gales of late autumn, which may have sug-
gested this poetic explanation; but one student believes
that the story may have been developed from a far earlier
tradition. «The Rhibus of Aryan mythology, storm-
demons, slept for twelve nights [and days] about the
winter solstice… in the house of the sun-god Savitar.»
Such is the history behind our proverbial expression
for tranquillity, and often it has been used very remotely
22 BIRDS IN LEGEND
from its original sense, as when in Henry VI Shakespeare
makes La Pucelle exclaim: «Expect St. Martin’s sum-
mer, halcyon days,» St. Martin’s summer being the
English name for that warm spell in November known to
us as Indian summer. All this is an extended example
of the kind of poetic myth which has been told of many
different birds, and which in this book is left to be sought
out in treatises on mythology.
In contrast with this sort of tale I find many non-
mythical notions, historical or existing, concerning the
actual kingfisher, which properly belong to my scheme.
One of the oldest is the custom formerly in vogue in
England, and more recently in France, of turning this
bird into a weathercock. The body of a mummified king-
fisher with extended wings would be suspended by a
thread, nicely balanced, in order to show the direction
of the wind, as in that posture it would always turn its
beak, even when hung inside the house, toward the point
of the compass whence the breeze blew. Kent, in King
Lear, speaks of rogues who
Turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters.
And after Shakespeare Marlowe, in his Jew of Malta,
says:
But how stands the wind?
Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?
We are told mat the fishermen of the British and French
coasts hang these kingfisher weathervanes in the rigging
of their boats; and it seems likely to me that it was among
sailors that the custom began.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 23
Although Sir Thomas Browne 33 attributed «an occult
and secret property» to this bird as an indicator of wind-
drift, it does not otherwise appear that it had any magical
reputation: yet the skin of a kingfisher was sure to be
found among the stuffed crocodiles, grinning skulls and
similar decorations of the consulting-room of a medieval
«doctor,» who himself rarely realized, perhaps, what a
fakir he was. Moreover, we read «That its dried body
kept in a house protected against lightning and kept
moths out of garments.»
On the American continent, probably the nearest ap-
proach to the «sacredness» discussed in a former para-
graph, is the sincere veneration of their animal-gods, in-
cluding a few birds, by the Zuriis and some other Village
Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, which has been
studied minutely by our ethnologists. Yet we read of
many other sacred birds among the redmen. The red-
headed woodpecker is regarded as the tutelary deity of
the Omahas, and as the patron-saint of children, because,
they say, its own family is kept in so safe a place.
Pawnees have much the same sentiment toward the wren,
which they call «laughing-bird» because it seems always
happy. The crow was the sacred bird of the «ghost-
dance» — a religious ceremony of high significance among
the tribes of the Plains, as is explained in Chapter IX.
The Navahos regard the mountain bluebird as sacred on
account of its azure plumage, which (as something blue)
is representative of the South; and it is deemed the herald
of the rising sun, which is their supreme image of God.
One of their old men told Stewart Culin that «two blue
birds stand at the door of the house in which [certain]
gods dwell.»
In most cases among our Indians, as elsewhere, it is un-
24 BIRDS IN LEGEND
lawful to kill or eat such a bird, which indicates a rela-
tion to totemism. Thus, as Powers 19 asserts, the Mono
Indians of the Sierra Nevada, never kill their sacred black
eagles, but pluck out the feathers of those that die and
wear them on their heads. «When they succeed in cap-
turing a young one, after a fortnight the village makes a
great jubilation.,, Some Eskimos will not eat gulls’
eggs, which make men old and decrepit.
Whatever tradition or superstition or other motive
affected the choice of any bird as a tribal totem, or en-
dowed it with «sacredness,» practical considerations were
surely influential. It is noticeable that the venerated ibis
and hawk in Egypt were useful to the people as devourers
of vermin — young crocodiles, poisonous snakes, grain-
eating mice and so forth. Storks in Europe and India,
and the «unclean» birds of Palestine forbidden to the
Jews, were mostly carrion-eaters, and as such were de-
sirable street-cleaners in village and camp. A tradition
in the ^Lgean island Tenos is that Poseidon — a Greek St.
Patrick — sent storks to clear the island of snakes, which
originally were numerous there. Australian frontiers-
men preserve the big kingfisher, dubbed «laughing- jack-
ass,» for the same good reason. The wiser men in early
communities appreciated this kind of service by birds,
and added a religious sanction to their admonition that
such servants of mankind should not be killed. It was the
primitive movement toward bird-protection, which, by
the way, was first applied in this country to the scaveng-
ing turkey-buzzards and carrion-crows of the Southern
States.
As for the smaller birds, where special regard was
paid them it was owing, apart from the natural humane
admiration and enjoyment of these pretty creatures, to
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 25
the mystery and fiction of their being animated by spirits.
When they were black, like ravens and cormorants, or
were cruel night-prowlers, such as owls, or uttered dis-
consolate cries, they were thought to be inhabited by
dread, malignant, spirits «from night’s Plutonian shore,»
as Poe expresses it, but when they had pretty plumage,
pleasing ways and melodious voices, they were deemed
the embodiment of beneficent and happy spirits — per-
haps even those of departed relatives.
Hence we have the notion that some birds are lucky
and others unlucky in their relation to us. Those that
bring good luck are mainly those kinds that associate
themselves with civilization, such as the various robins,
wrens and storks, the doves and the swallows. Even so,
however, time and place must be considered in every case,
for the dearest of little birds when it pecks at a window-
pane, or seems bent on entering a cottage door will arouse
tremors of fear in a superstitious heart — much more so
a bird that ordinarily keeps aloof from mankind. Frazer
records, in his essay on Scapegoats, that if a wild bird flies
into a rural Malay’s house, it must be carefully caught
and smeared with oil, and must then be released into the
open air with a formula of words adjuring it to take away
all ill-luck. In antiquity Greek women seem to have done
the same with any swallow they found inside the house,
a custom mentioned by both Pythagoras and Plato — the
latter humorously proposing to dismiss poets from his
ideal State in the same manner. Such doings remind
one of the function of the scapegoat; and in fact, accord-
ing to Frazer, the Hazuls, of the Carpathian Mountains,
imagine they can transfer their freckles to the first
swallow they see in the spring by uttering a certain com-
mand to the bird. Are these practices distorted reminis-
26 BIRDS IN LEGEND
cences of the conjuring by the Hebrew shaman as de-
scribed in the Old Testament?
This shall be the law of the leper in the day of his cleansing:
He shall be brought into the priest…. Then shall the priest
command to take for him that is to be cleaned two birds alive
and clean, and cedar wood and scarlet and hyssop. And the
priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an
earthen vessel over running water. As for the living bird, he
shall take it and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop,
and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird
that was killed over the running water; and he shall sprinkle
upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times,
and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird
loose into the open field. (Lev. xiv, 27.)
The matter of «luck» in this hocus-pocus seems to lie
in the chance as to which birds is chosen to be «scapegoat,»
and so is allowed to remain alive, cleaning its feathers as
best it may. Evidently, the bird that wishes to do noth-
ing to offend anyone must go warily. A cuckoo, for ex-
ample, may spoil the day for an English milkmaid by
incautiously sounding its call before her breakfast.
Such has been the mental attitude underlying the amaz-
ing ideas and practices that will be found described in
succeeding chapters of this collection of traditional bird-
lore, much of which is so juvenile and absurd. Until
one reviews the groping steps by which mankind ad-
vanced with very uneven speed — a large body of it having
yet hardly begun the progress, even among the «civilized»
— from the crudest animism to a clearer and clearer com-
prehension of «natural law in the physical world,» he
cannot understand how men gave full credence to fictions
that the most superficial examination, or the simplest
reasoning, would show were false, and trembled before
the most imaginary of alarms. Add to this childish
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 27
credulity the teachings of religious and political leaders
who had much to gain by conserving the ignorance and
faith of their followers; add again the fruitful influence
of story-tellers and poets who utilized ancient legends
and beliefs for literary advantage, and you have the his-
tory and explanation of how so many primitive super-
stitions and errors have survived to our day.
CHAPTER II
BIRDS AS NATIONAL EMBLEMS
SEVERAL nations and empires of both ancient and
modern times have adopted birds as emblems of
their sovereignty, or at least have placed promi-
nently on their coats of arms and great seals the figures
of birds.
Among these the eagle — some species of the genus
Aquila — takes precedence both in time and in importance.
The most ancient recorded history of the human race is
that engraved on the tablets and seals of chiefs who
organized a civilization about the head of the Persian
Gulf more than 4000 years before the beginning of the
Christian era. These record by both text and pictures
that the emblem of the Summerian city of Lagash, which
ruled southern Mesopotamia long previous to its subjuga-
tion by Babylonia about 3000 B. C, was an eagle «dis-
played,» that is, facing us with wings and legs spread
and its head turned in profile. This figure was carried
by the army of Lagash as a military standard; but a
form of it with a lion’s head was reserved as the special
emblem of the Lagash gods, with which the royal house
was identified — the king’s standard.
After the conquest of Babylonia by Assyria this eagle
of Lagash was taken over by the conquerors, and appears
on an Assyrian seal of the king of Ur many centuries
later. «From this eagle,» says Ward, 23 «in its heraldic
attitude necessitated by its attack on two animals [as
28
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 29
represented on many seals and decorations] was derived
the two-headed eagle, in the effort to complete the
bilateral symmetry. This double-headed eagle appears
in Hittite art, and is continued down through Turkish and
modern European symbolism.»
Among the host of rock-carvings in the Eyuk section
of the mountains of Cappadocia (Pteria of the Greeks)
that are attributed to the Hittites, Perrot and Chipiez
found carvings of a double-headed eagle which they
illustrate; 112 and they speak of them as often occurring.
«Its position is always a conspicuous one — about a great
sanctuary, the principal doorway to a palace, a castle
wall, and so forth; rendering the suggestion that the
Pterians used the symbol as a coat of arms.»
Dr. Ward thought the Assyrian two-headed figure of
their national bird resulted from an artistic effort at
symmetry, balancing the wings and feet outstretched on
each side, but I cannot help feeling that here among the
Hittites it had its origin in a deeper sentiment than that.
It seems to me that it was a way of expressing the dual
sex of their godhead, presupposed, in the crudeness of
primitive nature-worship, to account for the condition
of earthly things, male and female uniting for productive-
ness — the old story of sky and earth as co-generators of
all life. Many other symbols, particularly those of a
phallic character, were used in Asiatic religions to typify
the same idea; or perhaps the conception was of that
divine duality, in the sense of co-equal power of Good
and Evil, God and Satan, that later became so conspicuous
in the doctrine of the ancient Persians. Could it have
been a purified modification of this significance that made
the eagle during the Mosaic period — if Bayley 24 is right
— an emblem of the Holy Spirit? And Bayley adds
3Q
BIRDS IN LEGEND
that «its portrayal with two heads is said to have re-
corded the double portion of the spirit bestowed on
Elisha.»
Old Mohammedan traditions, according to Dalton,
give the name «hamca» to a fabulous creature identical
with the bicephalous eagle carved on Hittite rock-faces.
Dalton 25 says also that coins with this emblem were
struck and issued by Malek el Sala Mohammed, one of
the Sassanids, in 1217; and that this figure was engraved
in the 13th century by Turkoman princes on the walls
of their castles, and embroidered on their battle-flags.
To the early Greeks the eagle was the messenger of
Zeus. If, as asserted, it was the royal cognizance of the
Etruscans, it came naturally to the Romans, by whom
it was officially adopted for the Republic in 87 B. C,
when a silver eagle, standing upright on a spear, its
wings half raised, its head in profile to the left, and
thunderbolts in its claws, was placed on the military
standards borne at the head of all the legions in the
army. This was in the second consulship of Caius
Marius, who decreed certain other honors to be paid to
the bird’s image in the Curia.
One need not accuse the Romans of merely copying the
ancient monarchies of the East. If they thought of any-
thing beyond the majestic appearance of the noble bird,
it was to remember its association with their great god
Jupiter — the counterpart of Zeus. Nothing is plainer as
to the origin of the ideas that later took shape in the
divinities of celestial residence than that Jupiter was the
personification of the heavens; and what is more natural
than that the lightnings should be conceived of as his
weapons? Once, early in his history, when Jupiter was
equipping himself for a battle with the Titans, an eagle
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 31
brought him his dart, since which time Jupiter’s eagle has
always been represented as holding thunderbolts in its
talons. The bird thus became a symbol of supreme power,
and a natural badge for soldiers. The emperors of im-
perial Rome retained it on their standards, Hadrian
changing its metal from silver to gold; and «the eagles
of Rome» came to be a common figure of speech to ex-
press her military prowess and imperial sway.
By such a history, partly mythical, and partly practical
and glorious, this bird came to typify imperialism in gen-
eral. A golden eagle mounted on a spear, was the royal
standard of the elder Cyrus, as it had been of his
ancestors.
When Napoleon I. dreamed of universal conquest he
revived on the regimental banners of his troops the
insignia of his Roman predecessors in banditry — in fact
he was entitled to do so, for he had inherited them by
right of conquest from both Italy and Austria, the
residuary legatees of Rome. Discontinued in favor of
their family bees by the Bourbons, during their brief
reign after the fall of Bonaparte, the eagle was restored
to France by a decree of Louis Napoleon in 1852. There
is a legend that a tame eagle was let loose before him
when he landed in France from England to become
President of the first French Republic. Now it is the
proper finial for flagstaffs all over the world except,
curiously, in France itself, where a wreath of laurel
legally surmounts the tricolor of the Republic, which has
discarded all reminders of royalty. Thus the pride of
conquerors has dropped to the commonplace of fashion —
Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
32 BIRDS IN LEGEND
The destruction of the Italian and western half of the
old Roman empire was by the hands of northern bar-
barians who at first were mere conquerors and despoilers,
but finally, affected by their contact with civilization and
law, became residents in and rulers of Italy, and were
proud to assume the titles and what they could of the
dignity of Roman emperors. In the eighth century
Charlemagne became substantially master of the western
world, at least, and assumed the legionary eagle as he
did the purple robes of an Augustus; and his successors
held both with varying success until the tenth century,
when German kings became supreme and in 962 founded
that very unholy combination styled the Holy Roman
Empire. For hundreds of years this fiction was main-
tained. At times its eagle indicated a real lordship over
all Europe; between times the states broke apart, and, as
each kept the royal standard, separate eagles contended
for mastery. Thus Prussia and other German kingdoms
retained on their shields the semblance of a «Roman»
eagle; and the Teutonic Knights carried it on their savage
expeditions of «evangelization» to the eastern Baltic lands.
All these were more or less conventional figures of
the Bird of Jove in its natural form, but a heraldic figure
with two heads turned, Janus like, in opposite directions,
was soon to be revived in the region where, as we have
seen, it had been familiar 2000 years before as the
national emblem of the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire,
which for hundreds of years contested with Rome, both
the political and the ecclesiastical hegemony of the world.
Just when this symbol came into favor at Constantinople
is unknown, but one authority says it did not appear be-
fore the tenth century. At that time the Eastern em-
perors were recovering lost provinces and extending their
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 33
rule until it included all the civilized part of western Asia,
Greece, Bulgaria, southern Italy, and much of the islands
and shores of the Mediterranean; and they asserted re-
ligious supremacy, at least, over the rival European em-
pire erected on Charlemagne’s foundation. It would
seem natural that at this prosperous period, when
Byzantium proudly claimed, if she did not really possess
all «the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that
was Rome,» such a double-headed device might be
adopted, signifying that she had united the western power
with her own. The evidence of this motive is doubtful,
however, for it is not until a much later date that the
figure begins to be seen on coins and textiles, first at
Trebizond, particularly in connection with the emperor
Theodore Lascaris, who reigned at the beginning of the
13th century. Dalton 25 suggests plausibly that this
symbol may have become Byzantine through the circum-
stance that this Lascaris had previously been despot of
Nicomedia, in which province Bogaz-Keui and other
Hittite remains were situated, and where the bicephalous
carvings heretofore alluded to are still to be seen on rock-
faces and ruins, always in association with royalty.
It is very attractive to think that this form of eagle
was chosen, as has been suggested, to express the fact
that Constantinople was now lord over both halves, East
and West, into which Diocletian had divided the original
empire of Rome. Whether this idea was behind the
choice I do not know, but at any rate the two-faced
eagle became latterly the acknowledged ensign of imperial
Byzantium, and as such was introduced into European
royal heraldry, whether or not by means of the returning
Crusaders, as commonly stated, remains obscure.
In the 15th century what was left of the Holy Roman
34 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Empire became the heritage of the Austrian house of
Hapsburg which had succeeded the German Hohen-
stauffens; and to Sigismund, head of the house in that
century, is ascribed the design in the Austrian arms of
the two-headed eagle, looking right and left, as if to
signify boastfully that he ruled both East and West.
These were relative and indefinite domains, but as he
had, by his crowning at Rome, received at least nominal
sovereignty over the fragmentary remains in Greece of
the ancient Eastern Empire, he was perhaps justified in
adopting the Byzantine ensign as «captured colors’*; but
a rival was soon to present a stronger claim to these
fragments and their badge.
In this same period, that is in the middle of the 15th
century, Ivan the Great of Russia was striving with high
purpose and despotic strength to bring back under one
sway the divided house of Muscovy, together with what-
ever else he could obtain. To further this purpose he
married, in 1472, Sophia Paleologos, niece of the last
Byzantine emperor, getting with her Greece and hence a
barren title to the throne of the Eastern empire — a barren
title because its former domain was now over-run by the
Turks, but very important in the fact that it included
the headship of the Greek, or Orthodox, Church. From
this time Russia as well as Austria has borne a two-faced
eagle on its escutcheon; and, although both birds are
from the same political nest, the feeling between them
has been far from brotherly.
It may be remarked here, parenthetically, that in Egypt
the cult of the kingly eagle never flourished, for the
griffon vulture, «far-sighted, ubiquitous, importunate,»
became the grim emblem of royal power; and a smaller
vulture {Neophron pcrcnopterus) is called Pharaoh’s
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 35
chicken to this day by the fellaheen. By «eagle» in Semitic
(Biblical) legends is usually meant the lammergeier.
Prussia had kept a single-headed eagle as her cog-
nizance in remembrance of her previous «Roman» great-
ness; and it was retained by the German Empire when
that was created by Bismarck half a century and more
ago. From it the Kaiser designated the two German
military orders — the Black Eagle and the superior Red
Eagle; and Russia and Serbia have each instituted an
order called White Eagle. The traditional eagle of
Poland is represented as white on a black ground. It was
displayed during the period of subjection following the
partition of the country in 1795, with closed wings, but
now, since 19 19, it spreads its pinions wide in the pride
of freedom.
In the years between 191 4 and 19 19 an allied party of
hunters, enraged by their depredations, zvent gunning for
these birds of prey, killed most of them and sorely
wounded the rest!
Although several species of real eagles inhabit the
Mediterranean region and those parts of Europe and Asia
where these nations lived, and warred, and passed away,
and are somewhat confused in the mass of myth and tra-
dition relating to them, the one chosen by Rome was
the golden eagle, so called because of the golden gloss
that suffuses the feathers of the neck in mature birds.
Now we have this species of sea-eagle in the United
States, and it has been from time immemorial the honored
War-eagle of the native redmen. If it was needful at
our political birth to put any sort of animal on our seal,
and the choice was narrowed down to an eagle, it would
have been far more appropriate to have chosen the golden
rather than the white-headed or «bald» species — first be-
36 BIRDS IN LEGEND
cause the golden is in habits and appearance far the nobler
of the two, and, second, because of the supreme regard
in which it was held by all the North American aborigi-
nes, who paid no respect whatever to the bald eagle. On
the other hand, the white head and neck of our accepted
species gives a distinctive mark to our coat of arms.
The history of the adoption of this symbol of the United
States of America is worth a paragraph.
On July 4, 1776, on the afternoon following the morn-
ing hours in which the Congress in Philadelphia had
performed the momentous duty of proclaiming the inde-
pendence of the United States, it dropped down to the
consideration of its cockade, and appointed a committee
to prepare a device for a Great Seal and coat-of-arms
for the new republic. 26 Desiring to avoid European
models, yet clinging to the traditions of art in these
matters, the committee devised and offered in succession
several complicated allegorical designs that were promptly
and wisely rejected by the Congress. Finally, in 1782, the
matter was left in the hands of Charles Thomson, Secre-
tary of the Congress, and he at once consulted with
William Barton of Philadelphia. They abandoned
allegory and designed an eagle «displayed proper,» that
is, with a shield on its breast. Mr. Barton, who was
learned in heraldry, explained that «the escutcheon being
placed on the breast of the eagle displayed is a very
ancient mode of bearing, and is truly imperial.» To
avoid an «imperial» effect, however, a concession was
made to local prejudice by indicating plainly that the bird
itself was the American bald eagle — unless, indeed, that
happened to be the only one Barton knew!
This design was finally adopted in 1782. Since then
the Great Seal has been re-cut several times, so that the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 37
bird in its imprint is now a far more reputable fowl than
at first — looks less as if it were nailed on a barn-door
pour encourager les autrcs. In its right claw it holds a
spray of ripe olives as an emblem of a peaceful disposi-
tion, and in its left an indication of resolution to en-
force peace, in the form of American thunderbolts —
the redman’s arrows.
There were men in the Congress in 1782, as well as
out of it, who disliked using any eagle whatever as a
feature of the arms of the Republic, feeling that it
savored of the very spirit and customs against which the
formation of this commonwealth was a protest. Among
them stood that clear-headed master of common sense,
Benjamin Franklin, who thought a thoroughly native and
useful fowl, like the wild turkey, would make a far truer
emblem for the new and busy nation. He added to the
turkey’s other good qualities that it was a bird of courage,
remarking, with his own delightful humor, that it would
not hesitate to attack any Redcoat that entered its barn-
yard!
Franklin was right when he argued against the choice
of the bald eagle, at any rate, as our national emblem.
«He is,» he said truly, «a bird of bad moral character;
he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen
him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for
himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk, and
when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish and is
bearing it to its nest the bald eagle pursues him and takes
it from him. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little
kingbird attacks him boldly. He is therefore by no means
a proper emblem.»
None of these depreciatory things could Franklin have
truly said of the skilful, self-supporting, and handsome
3 8! BIRDS IN LEGEND
golden eagle — a Bird of Freedom indeed. (Audubon
named a western variety of it after General Washington.)
This species was regarded with extreme veneration by
the native redmen of this country. «Its feathers,» says
Dr. Brinton, the ethnologist, «composed the war-flag of
the Creeks, and its image, carved in wood, or its stuffed
skin, surmounted their council-lodges. None but an ap-
proved warrior dare wear it among the Cherokees, and
the Dakotas allowed such an honor only to him who
first touched the corpse of the common foe. The
Natchez and other tribes regarded it almost as a deity.
The Zuni of New Mexico employed four of its feathers
to represent the four winds when invoking the raingod.»
Hence a war-song of the O jib ways reported by School-
craft :
Hear my voice ye warlike birds!
I prepare a feast for you to batten on;
I see you cross the enemy’s lines;
Like you I shall go.
I wish the swiftness of your wings;
I wish the vengeance of your claws;
I muster my friends;
I follow your flight.
Doesn’t this sound like a bit from the Saga of Harold
Hadrada?
Mexico did better in choosing her crested eagle, the
harpy (Thrasaetus harpia),& magnificent representative of
its race, renowned from Paraguay to Mexico for its hand-
some black-and-white plumage adorned with a warrior’s
crest, and for its grand flight, dauntless courage and
amazing endurance. Quesada tells us that the Aztecs
called it the winged wolf. The princes of Tlascala wore
its image on their breasts and on their shield as a symbol
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 39
of royalty; and in both Mexico and Peru, where it was
trained for sport in falconry, it was preferred to the
puma, which also was taught to capture deer and young
peccaries for its master, as is the cheeta in India. Cap-
tive harpies are still set to fight dogs and wildcats in
village arenas, and rarely are vanquished.
The tradition is that the Aztecs, a northern Nahuatl
tribe, escaping from the tyranny of the dominant Chiche-
mecas, moved about A. D. 1325 into the valley of Mexico
(Tenochtitlan), and settled upon certain islets in a
marshy lake — the site of the subsequent City of Mexico;
and this safe site is said to have been pointed out to
them by a sign from their gods — an eagle perched upon
a prickly-pear cactus, the nopal, in the act of strangling
a serpent. This is the picture Cortez engraved on his
Great Seal, and Mexico has kept it to this day.
Guatemala was a part of ancient Mexico; and perched
on the shield in Guatemala’s coat-of-arms is the green or
resplendent trogon {Plmromacrus mocinno), the native
and antique name of which is quetzal. This is one of
the most magnificent of birds, for its crested head and
body (somewhat larger than a sparrow’s) are iridescent
green, the breast and under parts crimson, and the wings
black overhung by long, plumy coverts. The quetzal’s
special ornament, however, is its bluish-green tail, eight
or ten inches long, whose gleaming feathers curve down
in the graceful sweep of a sabre. It has been called the
most beautiful of American birds, and it is peculiar to
Central America.
How this trogon came to be Guatemala’s national sym-
bol, made familiar, by all its older postage-stamps, is a
matter of religious history. One of the gods in the
ancient Aztec pantheon was Quetzalcoatl, of whom it was
4 o
BIRDS IN LEGEND
said in their legends «that he was of majestic presence,
chaste in life, averse to war, wise and generous in action,
and delighting in the cultivation of the arts of peace.»
He was the ruler of the realm far below the surface of
the earth, where the sun shines at night, the abode of
abundance where dwell happy souls; and there Quetzal-
coatl abides until the time fixed for his return to men.
The first part of the name of this beneficent god, asso-
ciated with sunshine and green, growing things, meant
in the Nahuatl language a large, handsome, green feather,
such as were highly prized by the Aztecs and reserved for
the decoration of their chiefs; and one tradition of the
god’s origin and equipment relates that he was furnished
with a beard made of these plumes. These royal and
venerated feathers were obtained from the trogon, which
his worshippers called Quetzal-totl. The emerald-hued
hummingbirds of the tropics also belonged to him.
Although Mexico and Central America were «con-
verted» to Christianity by a gospel of war and slavery, the
ancient faith lived on in many simple hearts, especially in
the remoter districts of the South, and nowhere more per-
sistently than among the Mayas of Guatemala and Yuca-
tan, whose pyramidal temples are moldering in their uncut
forests. When, in 1825, Guatemala declared its inde-
pendence and set up a local government, what more
natural than that it should take as a national symbol the
glorious bird that represented to its people the best in-
fluence in their ancient history and the most hopeful sug-
gestion for the future.
In the religion of the Mayas of Yucatan the great god
of light was Itsamna, one of whose titles was The Lord,
the Eye of the Day — a truly picturesque description of
the sun. A temple at Itzmal was consecrated to him
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 41
under the double name Eye of Day-Bird of Fire. «In
time of pestilence,“ as Dr. Brinton informs us, 27 „the
people resorted to this temple, and at high noon a sacrifice
was spread upon the altar. The moment the sun reached
the zenith a bird of brilliant plumage, but which in fact
was nothing else than a fiery flame shot from the sun, de-
scended and consumed the offering in the sight of all.»
Another authority says that Midsummerday was cele-
brated by similar rites. Hence was held sacred the flame-
hued ara, or guacamaya, the red macaw.
The Musicas, natives of the Colombian plateau where
Bogota now stands, had a similar half-superstitious re-
gard for this big red macaw, which they called «fire-bird.»
The general veneration for redness, prevalent throughout
western tropical America, and in Polynesia, is doubtless
a reflection of sun-worship.
Let us turn to a lighter aspect of our theme.
France rejoices, humorously, yet sincerely, in the cock
as her emblem — the strutting, crowing, combative chan-
ticleer that arouses respect while it tickles the French
sense of fun. When curiosity led me to inquire how this
odd representative for a glorious nation came into exis-
tence, I was met by a complete lack of readily accessible
information. The generally accepted theory seemed to
be that it was to be explained by the likeness of sound be-
tween the Latin word gallus, a dunghill cock, and Gallus,
a Gaul — the general appellative by which the Romans
of mid-Republic days designated the non-Italian, Keltic-
speaking inhabitants of the country south and west of
the Swiss Alps. But whence came the name «gaul»? and
why was a pun on it so apt that it has survived through long
centuries? I knew, of course, of the yarn that Diodorus
Siculus repeats: that in Keltica once ruled a famous man
42
BIRDS IN LEGEND
who had a daughter «tail and majestic» but unsatisfactory
because she refused all the suitors who presented them-
selves. Then Hercules came along, and the haughty
maiden surrendered at Arras. The result was a son
named Galetes — a lad of extraordinary virtues who be-
came king and extended his grandfather’s dominions.
He called his subjects after his own name Galatians and
his country Galatia. This is nonsense. Moreover
«Galatia» is Greek, and was applied by the Greeks, long
before the day of Diodorus, to the lands of a colony of
Keltic-speaking migrants who had settled on the coast
of Asia Minor, and became the Galatians to whom Paul
wrote one of his Epistles. The Greek word Galatai was,
however, a form of the earlier Keltai.
As has been said, what we call Savoy and France
were known to the Romans as Gallia, Gaul; but this term
had been familiar in Italy long before Caesar had estab-
lished Roman power over the great region between the
German forests and the sea that he tersely described as
Omnia Gallia; and it seems to have originated in the fol-
lowing way:
About i ioo B. C. two wild tribes, the Umbrians and
the Oscans, swept over the mountains from the northeast,
and took possession of northern Italy. These invaders
were Nordics, and used an antique form of Teutonic
speech. They were resisted, attacked, and finally over-
whelmed by the Etruscans, who about 800 B. C, when
Etruria was at the height of its power, extended their
rule to the Alps and the Umbrian State disappeared. In
the sixth century new hordes, calling themselves Kymri,
coming from the west, and speaking Keltic dialects,
swarmed into northern Italy from the present France.
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 43
The harried people north of the Po, themselves mostly
descendants of the earlier invasion, spoke of these raiders
by an old Teutonic epithet which the Romans heard and
wrote as Gall us, the meaning of which was «stranger» —
in this case «the enemy.»
The word G alius, Gaul or a Gaul, then, was an ancient
Teutonic epithet inherited by the Romans from the
Etruscans, and had in its origin no relation to gallns,
the lord of the poultry-yard. It is most likely, indeed,
that the term was given in contempt, as the Greeks called
foreigners «barbarians» because they spoke some language
which the Greeks did not understand; for the occupants
of the valley of the Po at that time were of truly Ger-
manic descent, and did not regard the round-headed,
Alpine «Kelts» as kin in any sense, but rather as ancient
foes. What the word on their lips actually was no one
knows; but it seems to have had a root gal or vol, inter-
changeable in the sound (to non-native ears) of its initial
letter, whence it appears that Galatai, Gael, Valais,
Walloon, and similar names connected with Keltic history
are allied in root-derivation. Wales, for example, to the
early Teutonic immigrants into Britain was the country
of the Wealas, i.e., the «foreigners» (who were Gaulish,
Keltic-speaking Kymri); and the English are not yet
quite free from that view of the Welsh.
The opportunity to pun with gallus, a cock, is evident,
just as was a bitter pun current in Martial’s time between
Gallia, a. female Gaul and gallia, a gall-nut; but in all this
there is nothing to answer the question why the pun of
which we are in search — if there was such a pun — has
endured so long. I think the answer lies in certain appear-
ances and customs of the Keltic warriors.
44
BIRDS IN LEGEND
Plutarch, in his biography of Caius Marius, describes
the Kymri fought by Marius, years before Caesar’s
campaigns, as wearing helmets surmounted by animal
effigies of various kinds, and many tall feathers.
Diodorus says the Gauls had red hair, and made it redder
by dyeing it with lime. This fierce and flowing red head-
dress must have appeared much like a cock’s comb, to
which the vainglorious strutting of the barbarians added
a most realistic touch in the eyes of the disciplined legion-
aries. Later, the Roman authorities in Gaul minted a coin
or coins bearing a curious representation of a Gaulish
helmet bearing a cock on its crest, illustrations of which
are printed by G. R. Rothery in his A B C of Heraldry.
Rothery also states that the bird appears on Gallo-Roman
sculptures. Another writer asserts that Julius Caesar
records that those Gauls that he encountered fought
under a cock-standard, which he regarded as associated
with a religious cult, but I have been unable to verify this
interesting reference. Caesar does mention in his Com-
mentaries that the Gauls were fierce fighters, and that
one of their methods in personal combat was skilful kick-
ing, like a game-cock’s use of its spurs — a trick still em-
ployed by French rowdies, and known as la savate. In
the Romance speech of the south of France chanticleer
is still gall.
The question arises here in the mind of the naturalist:
If the aboriginal Gauls really bore a «cock» on their
banners and wore its feathers in their helmets (as the
Alpine regiments in Italy now wear chanticleer’s tail-
plumes), what bird was it? They did not then possess
the Oriental domestic fowls to which the name properly
belongs, and had nothing among their wild birds re-
sembling it except grouse. One of these wild grouse is
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 45
the great black capercaille, a bold, handsome bird of
the mountain forests, noted for its habit in spring of
mounting a prominent tree and issuing a loud challenge to
all rivals; and one of its gaudy feathers is still the favor-
ite ornament for his hat of the Tyrolean mountaineer.
By the way, the cockade, that figured so extensively as
a badge in the period of the French Revolution was so
called because of its resemblance to a cock’s comb.
Now comes a break of several centuries in the record,
illuminated by only a brief note in La Rousse’s Encyclo-
pedic, that in 12 14, after the Dauphin du Viennois had
distinguished himself in combat with the English, an
order of knights was formed styled L’Ordre du Coq; and
that a white cock became an emblem of the dauphins of
the Viennois line.
The cock did not appear as a blazon when, after the
Crusades, national coats-of-arms were being devised;
nevertheless the le coq de France was not forgotten, for
it was engraved on a medal struck to celebrate the birth
of Louis XIII (1 60 1). Then came the Revolution, when
the old regime was overthrown; and in 1792 the First
Republic put the cock on its escutcheon and on fts flag
in place of the lilies of the fallen dynasty. When this
uprising of the people had been suppressed, and Napoleon
I had mounted the throne, in 1804, he substituted for it
the Roman eagle, which he had inherited from his con-
quests in Italy and Austria, and which was appropriate
to his ambitious designs for world domination. This re-
mained until Napoleon went to Elba, and then Louis
XVIII brought back for a short time the Bourbon lilies;
yet medals and cartoons of the early Napoleonic era
depict the Gallic cock chasing a runaway lion of Castile
or a fleeing Austrian eagle, showing plainly what was
46 BIRDS IN LEGEND
the accepted symbol of French power in the eyes of the
common folks of France. One medal bore the motto
Je veille pour le nation.
Napoleon soon returned from Elba only to be extin-
guished at Waterloo, after which, during the regime of
Louis Philippe, the figure of the Gallic cock was again
mounted on the top of the regimental flagstaffs in place
of the gilded eagle; an illustration of this finial is given
in Armories et Drapeaux Frangais. Louis Philippe could
do this legitimately, according to Rothery and others,
because this bird was the crest of his family — the Bour-
bons — in their early history in the south of France. The
Gallic cock continued to perch on the banner-poles until
the foundation of the second Empire under Louis
Napoleon in 1852. Since then the «tricolor,» originating
in 1789 as the flag of the National Guard, and dispensing
with all devices, has waved over France. Officially bold
chanticleer was thus dethroned; but in the late World
War, as in all previous periods of public excitement, the
ancient image of French nationality has been revived, as
the illustrated periodicals and books of the time show;
and, much as they revere the tricolor, the soldiers still feel
that it is le coq Gaulois that in 19 18 again struck down
the black eagles of their ancient foes.
Juvenal’s sixth Satire, in which he castigates the
Roman women of his day for their sins and follies, con-
tains a line, thrown in as a mere side-remark —
Rara avis in terris, negroque similima cygno —
which has become the most memorable line in the whole
homily. It has been variously translated, most literally,
perhaps, by Madan: «A rare bird in the earth, and very
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 47
like a black swan.» The comparison was meant to indi-
cate something improbable to the point of absurdity; and
in that sense has rara avis been used ever since.
For more than fifteen hundred years Juvenal’s expres-
sion for extreme rarity held good; but on January 6,
1697, tri e Dutch navigator Willem de Vlaming, visiting
the southwestern coast of Australia, sent two boats ashore
to explore the present harbor of Perth. «There their
crews first saw two and then more black swans, of which
they caught four, taking two of them alive to Batavia;
and Valentyne, who several years later recounted this
voyage, gives in his work a plate representing the ship,
boats and birds at the mouth of what is now known from
this circumstance as Swan River, the most important
stream of the thriving colony now State of Western
Australia, which has adopted this very bird as its armorial
symbol.»
Another Australian bird, that, like the black swan, has
obtained a picturesque immortality in a coat-of-arms;
and on postage stamps, is the beautiful lyre-bird, first dis-
covered in New South Wales in 1789, and now a feature
in the armorial bearings of that State in the Australian
Commonwealth. New Zealand’s stamps show the apteryx
(kiwi) and emeu.
One might extend this chapter by remarking on various
birds popularly identified with certain countries, as the
ibis with Egypt, the nightingale with England and Persia,
the condor with Peru, the red grouse with Scotland, the
ptarmigan with Newfoundland, and so on. Then might
be given a list of birds w T hose feathers belonged ex-
clusively to chieftanship, and so had a sort of tribal sig-
nificance. Thus in Hawaii a honeysucker, the mamo,
furnished for the adornment of chiefs alone the rich
48 BIRDS IN LEGEND
yellow feathers of which «royal» cloaks were made; the
Inca «emperors» of Peru, before the Spanish conquest, re-
served to themselves the rose-tinted plumage of an
Andean water-bird; an African chief affected the long
tail-plumes of the widowbird — and so forth.
Only one of these locally revered birds entices me to
linger a moment — the nightingale, beloved of English
poets, whose oriental equivalent is the Persian bulbul.
The mingled tragedies of the nightingale and the swallow
form the theme of one of the most famous as well as
sentimental legends of Greek mythology. These myths,
strangely confused by different narrators, have been un-
ravelled by the scholarly skill of Miss Margaret Verrall
in her Mythology of Ancient Athens; 108 and her analysis
throws light on the way the Greek imagination, from pre-
historic bards down to the vase-decorators of the classic
era, and to the dramatists Sophocles, ^Eschylus, and
Aristophanes, dealt with birds — a very curious study.
Miss Verrall reminds us that a word is necessary as to
the names of the Attic tale. «We are accustomed, bur-
dened as we are with Ovidian association, to think of
Philomela as the nightingale. Such was not the version
of Apollodorus, nor, so far as I know, of any earlier
Greek writer. According to Apollodorus, Procne became
the nightingale (’a^Swv) and Philomela the swallow (x^8cov)
It was Philomela who had her tongue cut out, a tale that
would never have been told of the nightingale, but which
fitted well with the short restless chirp of the swallow.
To speak a barbarian tongue was ’to mutter like a
swallow.»»
But there has arisen in Persia a literature of the night-
ingale, or «bulbul,» springing from a pathetic legend —
if it is not simply poetic fancy — that as the bird pours
forth its song «in a continuous strain of melody» it is
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 49
pressing its breast against a rose-thorn to ease its heart’s
pain. Giles Fletcher, who had been attached to one of
Queen Elizabeth’s missions to Russia, and perhaps in that
way picked up the suggestion, used it in one of his love-
poems in a stanza that is a very queer mixture of two
distinct fancies and a wrong sex, for the thrush that
sings is not the one that has any occasion to weep about
virginity:
So Philomel, perched on an aspen sprig,
Weeps all the night her lost virginity,
And sings her sad tale to the merry twig,
That dances at such joyful mystery.
Ne ever lets sweet rest invade her eye,
But leaning on a thorn her dainty chest
For fear soft sleep should steal into her breast
Expresses in her song grief not to be expressed.
The poetic vision over which Hafiz and others have
sighed and sung in the fragrant gardens of Shiraz seems
to owe nothing to the Greek tale, and to them the plain-
tive note in the bird’s melody is not an expression of
bitter woe, but only bespeaks regret whenever a rose is
plucked. They will tell you tearfully that the bulbul will
hover about a rosebush in spring, till, overpowered by
the sweetness of its blossoms, the distracted bird falls
senseless to the ground. The rose is supposed to burst
into flower at the opening song of its winged lover. You
may place a handful of fragrant herbs and flowers before
the nightingale, say the Persian poets, yet he wishes not
in his constant and faithful heart for more than the
sweet breath of his beloved rose —
Though rich the spot
With every flower the earth has got,
What is it to the nightingale
If there his darling rose is not.
50 BIRDS IN LEGEND
But romantic stories of the association of the queen of
flowers with the prince of birds are many, and the reader
may easily find more of them. In a legend told by the
Persian poet Attarall the birds once appeared before
King Solomon and complained that they could not sleep
because of the nightly wailings of the bulbul, who ex-
cused himself on the plea that his love for the rose was
the cause of irrepressible grief. This is the tradition to
which Byron alludes in The Giaour:
The rose o’er crag or vale,
Sultana of the nightingale,
The maid for whom his melody,
His thousand songs, are heard on high,
Blooms blushing to her lover’s tale —
His queen, the garden queen, the rose,
Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows.
CHAPTER III
AN ORNITHOLOGICAL COMEDY OF ERRORS
tMONG the many proverbial expressions relating to
r\ birds, none, perhaps, is more often on the tongue
than that which implies that the ostrich has the
habit of sticking its head in the sand and regarding itself
as thus made invisible. The oldest written authority
known to me for this notion is the Historical Library of
Diodorus Siculus. Describing Arabia and its products
Diodorus writes:
It produces likewise Beasts of a double nature and mixt
Shape; amongst whom are those that are called Strathocameli,
who have the Shape both of a Camel and an Ostrich… so that
this creature seems both terrestrial and volatile, a Land-Beast
and a Bird: But being not able to fly by reason of the Bulk
of her body, she runs upon the Ground as Swift as if she flew
in the air; and when she is pursued by Horsemen with her Feet she
hurls the Stones that are under her, and many times kills the
Pursuers with the Blows and Strokes they receive. When she
is near being taken, she thrusts her Head under a Shrub or
some such like Cover; not (as some suppose) through Folly or
Blockishness, as if she would not see or be seen by them, but
because her head is the tenderest Part of her Body. 109
It would appear from this that Diodorus was anticipat-
ing me by quoting an ancient legend only to show how
erroneous it was; but the notion has survived his expla-
nation, and supplies a figure of speech most useful to
polemic editors and orators, nor does anyone seem to care
whether or not it expresses a truth. The only founda-
52 BIRDS IN LEGEND
tion I can find or imagine for the origin of this so persis-
tent and popular error in ornithology is that when the
bird is brooding or resting it usually stretches its head
and neck along the ground, and is likely to keep this pros-
trate position in cautious stillness as long as it thinks it
has not been observed by whatever it fears. The futile
trick of hiding its head alone has been attributed to var-
ious other birds equally innocent.
Ostriches in ancient times roamed the deserts of the
East from the Atlas to the Indus, and they came to hold
a very sinister position in the estimation of the early in-
habitants of Mesopotamia, as we learn from the seals and
tablets of Babylonia. There the eagle had become the
type of the principle of Good in the universe, as is else-
where described; and a composite monster, to which the
general term «dragon» is applied, represented the prin-
ciple of Evil. The earliest rude conception of this
monster gave it a beast’s body (sometimes a crocodile’s
but usually a lion’s), always with a bird’s wings, tail, etc.
«From conceiving of the dragon as a monster having a
bird’s head as well as wings and tail, and feathers over
the body, the transition,“ as Dr. Ward 23 remarks, „was
not difficult to regard it entirely as a -bird. But for this
the favorite form was that of an ostrich… the largest
bird known, a mysterious inhabitant of the deserts, swift
to escape and dangerous to attack. No other bird was
so aptly the emblem of power for mischief…. Ac-
cordingly, in the period of about the eighth to the seventh
centuries, B. C, the contest of Marduk, representing
Good in the form of a human hero or sometimes as an
eagle, with an ostrich, or often a pair of them, repre-
senting the evil demon Tiamat, was a favorite subject
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 53
with Babylonian artists in the valleys of the Tigris and
Euphrates.»
In view of their inheritance of these ideas it is no
wonder that Oriental writers far more recent told strange
tales about this bird, especially as to its domestic habits,
as is reflected in the book of Job, where a versified render-
ing of one passage (xxxix, 15, 16) runs thus:
Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks?
Or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?
Which leaveth her eggs in the earth,
And warmeth them in the dust,
And forgetteth that the foot may crush them,
Or that the wild beast may break them?
She is hardened against her young ones
As though they were not hers:
Because God hath deprived her of wisdom,
Neither hath he imparted to her understanding.
This was more elegant than exact, for ostriches are ex-
ceedingly watchful and patient parents, as they have need
to be, considering the perilous exposure of their nests on
the ground, and the great number of enemies to which
both eggs and young are exposed in the wilderness.
Major S. Hamilton, 110 than whom there is no better au-
thority, testifies to this. «The hen-bird,» he says, «sits
on the eggs by day and the cock relieves her at night,
so that the eggs are never left unguarded during incuba-
tion.» The chicks are able to take care of themselves
after a day or two, and there is no more foundation in
fact for the Biblical charge of cruelty than for that other
Oriental fable that this bird hatches its eggs not by brood-
ing but by the rays of warmth and light from her eyes.
«Both birds are employed,» the fable reads, «for if the
gaze is suspended for only one moment the eggs are
54 BIRDS IN LEGEND
addled, whereupon these bad ones are at once broken.»
It is to this fiction that Southey refers in Thalaba, the
Destroyer:
With such a look as fables say
The mother ostrich fixes on her eggs,
Till that intense affection
Kindle its light of life.
Hence, as Burnaby tells us, ostrich eggs were hung in
some Mohammedan mosques as a reminder that «God
will break evil-doers as the ostrich her worthless eggs.»
Professor E. A. Grosvenor notes in his elaborate volumes
on Constantinople, that in the turbeh of Eyouk, the
holiest building and shrine in the Ottoman world, are
suspended «olive lamps and ostrich eggs, the latter sig-
nificant of patience and faith.» Their meanings or at
any rate the interpretations vary locally, but the shells
themselves are favorite mosque ornaments all over Islam,
and an extensive trans-Saharan caravan-trade in them
still exists. Ostrich eggs as well as feathers were im-
ported into ancient Egypt and Phoenicia from the Land
of Punt (Somaliland) and their shells have been re-
covered from early tombs, or sometimes clay models of
them, as at Hu, where Petrie found an example decorated
with an imitation of the network of cords by which it
could be carried about, just as is done to this day by the
Central-African negroes, who utilize these shells as water-
bottles, and carry a bundle of them in a netting bag.
Other examples were painted; and Wilkinson surmises
that these were suspended in the temples of the ancient
Egyptians as they now are in those of the Copts. The
Punic tombs about Carthage, and those of Mycenae, in
Greece, have yielded painted shells of these eggs; and
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 55
five were exhumed from an Etruscan tomb, ornamented
with bands of fantastic figures of animals either engraved
or painted on the shell, the incised lines filled with gold;
what purpose they served, or whether any religious sig-
nificance was attached to them, is not known. Eggs are
still to be found in many Spanish churches hanging near
the Altar: they are usually goose-eggs, but may be a
reflection of the former Moorish liking for those of the
ostrich in their houses of worship.
To return for a moment to the notion that the ostrich
breaks any eggs that become addled (by the way, how
could the bird know which were «gone bad»?), let me add
a preposterous variation of this, quoted from a German
source by Goldsmith 32 in relation to the rhea, the South
American cousin of the ostrich — all, of course, arrant
nonsense:
The male compels twenty or more females to lay their eggs
in one nest; he then, when they have done laying, chases them
away and places himself upon the eggs; however, he takes the
singular precaution of laying two of the number aside, which
he does not sit upon. When the young one comes forth these
two eggs are addled; which the male having foreseen, breaks
one and then the other, upon which multitudes of flies are
found to settle; and these supply the young brood with a
sufficiency of provision till they are able to shift for themselves.
Another popular saying is: «I have the digestion of
an ostrich!»
What does this mean? Ancient books went so far as
to say that ostriches subsisted on iron alone, although
they did not take the trouble to explain where in the
desert they could obtain this vigorous diet. A picture in
one of the Beast Books gives a recognizable sketch of
the bird with a great key in its bill and near by a horse-
56 BIRDS IN LEGEND
shoe for a second course. In heraldry, which is a
museum of antique notions, the ostrich, when used as a
bearing, is always depicted as holding in its mouth a
Passion-nail (emblem of the Church militant), or a horse-
shoe (reminder of knightly Prowess on horseback), or
a key (signifying religious and temporal power).
An amusing passage in Sir Thomas Browne’s famous
book, Common and Vulgar Errors 33 — which is a queer
combination of sagacity, ignorance, superstition and
credulity — is his solemn argument against the belief
prevalent in his day (1605—82) that ostriches ate iron;
but he quotes his predecessors from Aristotle down to
show how many philosophers have given it credence with-
out proof. The great misfortune of medieval thinkers
appears to have been that they were bound hand and foot
to the dead knowledge contained in ancient Greek and
Latin books — a sort of mental mortmain that blocked
any progress in science. They made of Aristotle,
especially, a sort of sacred fetish, whose statements and
conclusions must not be «checked» by any fresh observa-
tion or experiment. Browne was one of the first to ex-
hibit a little independence of judgment, and to suspect
that possibly, as Lowell puts it, «they didn’t know every-
thing down in Judee.»
«As for Pliny,» Sir Thomas informs us, «he saith
plainly that the ostrich concocteth whatever it eateth.
Now the Doctor acknowledgeth it eats iron: ergo, ac-
cording to Pliny it concocts iron. Africandus tells us
that it devours iron. Farnelius is so far from extenua-
ting the matter that he plainly confirms it, and shows that
this concoction is performed by the nature of its whole
essence. As for Riolanus, his denial without ground we
regard not. Albertus speaks not of iron but of stones
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 57
which it swallows and excludes again without nutriment.»
This is an excellent example of the way those old
fellows considered a matter of fact as if it were one of
opinion — as if the belief or non-belief of a bunch of
ancients, who knew little or nothing of the subject, made
a thing so or not so. Sir Thomas seems to have been
struggling out of this fog of metaphysics and shyly
squinting at the facts of nature; yet it is hard to follow
his logic to the conclusion that the allegation of iron-eat-
ing and «concocting» (by which I suppose digestion is
meant) is not true, but he was right. The poets, how-
ever, clung to the story. John Skelton (1460—1529) in
his long poem Phyllip Sparrow writes of
The estryge that wyll eate
An horshowe so great
In the stede of meate
Such feruent heat
His stomake doth freat [fret].
Ben Johnson makes one of his characters in Every Man
in his Humor assure another, who declares he could eat
the very sword-hilts for hunger, that this is evidence that
he has good digestive power — «You have an ostrich’s
stomach.» And in Shakespeare’s Henry VI is the re-
mark: «I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and
swallow my sword.»
Readers of Goldsmith’s Animated Nature, 32 published
more than a century later (1774) as a popular book of
instruction in natural history (about which he knew
nothing by practical observation outside of an Irish
county or two), learned that ostriches «will devour
leather, hair, glass, stones, anything that is given them,
but all metals lose a part of their weight and often the
58 BIRDS IN LEGEND
extremities of the figure.» That the people remembered
this is shown by the fact that zoological gardens have lost
many specimens of these birds, which seem to have a very
weak sense of taste, because of their swallowing copper
coins and other metallic objects fed to them by experi-
mental visitors, which they could neither assimilate nor
get rid of. It is quite likely that the bird’s reputation for
living on iron was derived from similarly feeding the cap-
tive specimens kept for show in Rome and various East-
ern cities, the fatal results of which were unnoticed by
the populace. The wild ostrich contents itself with tak-
ing into its gizzard a few small stones, perhaps picked
up and swallowed accidentally, which assist it in grinding
hard food, as is the habit of many ground-feeding fowls.
Much the same delusion exists with regard to the emeu.
If I were to repeat a tithe of the absurdities and
medical superstitions (or pure quackery) related of birds
in the «bestiaries,» as the books of the later medieval pe-
riod answering to our natural histories were named, the
reader would soon tire of my pages; but partly as a
sample, and partly because the pelican is not only
familiar in America but is constantly met in proverbs, in
heraldry, and in ecclesiastical art and legend, I think it
worth while to give some early explanations of the
curious notion expressed in the heraldic phrase «the
pelican in its piety.» It stands for a very ancient mis-
understanding of the action of a mother-pelican alight-
ing on her nest, and opening her beak so that her young
ones may pick from her pouch the predigested fish she
offers them within it. As the interior of her mouth is
reddish, she appeared to some imaginative observer long
ago to display a bleeding breast at which her nestlings
were plucking. Now observe how, according to Hazlitt, 84
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 59
that medieval nature- fakir, Philip de Thaum, who wrote
The Anglo-Norman Bestiary about 1120, embroiders his
ignorance to gratify the appetite of his age for marvels —
sensations, as we say nowadays — and so sell his book:
«Of such a nature it is,» he says of the pelican, «when it comes
to its young birds, and they are great and handsome, and it
will fondle them, cover them with its wings; the little birds
are fierce, take to pecking it — desire to eat it and pick out its
two eyes; then it pecks and takes them, and slays them with
torment; and thereupon leaves them — leaves them lying dead —
then returns on the third day, is grieved to find them dead, and
makes such lamentation, when it sees its little birds dead, that
with its beak it strikes its body that the blood issues forth; the
blood goes dropping, and falls on its young birds — the blood
has such quality that by it they come to life»
and so on, all in sober earnest. But he made a botch of
it, for earlier and better accounts show that the male
bird kills the youngsters because when they begin to grow
large they rebel at his control and provoke him; when the
mother returns she brings them to life by pouring over
them her blood. Moreover, there crept in a further cor-
ruption of the legend to the effect that the nestlings were
killed by snakes, as Drayton writes in his Noah’s Flood:
By them there sat the loving pellican
Whose young ones, poison’d by the serpent’s sting,
With her own blood again to life doth bring.
St. Jerome seems to have had this version in mind
when he made the Christian application, saying that as
the pelican’s young, «killed by serpents,» were saved by
the mother’s blood, so was the salvation by the Christ re-
lated to those dead in sin. This point is elaborated some-
what in my chapter on Symbolism.
60 BIRDS IN LEGEND
Before I leave this bird I want to quote a lovely para-
graph on pelican habits, far more modern than anything
«medieval,» for it is taken from the Arctic Zoology
(1784) of Thomas Pennant, who was a good naturalist,
but evidently a little credulous, although the first half of
the quotation does not overstrain our faith. He is speak-
ing of pelicans that he saw in Australia, and explains:
They feed upon fish, which they take sometimes by plunging
from a great height in the air and seizing like the
gannet; at other times they fish in concert, swimming
in flocks, and forming a large circle in the great rivers
which they gradually contract, beating the water with their
wings and feet in order to drive the fish into the centre; which
when they approach they open their vast mouths and fill their
pouches with their prey, then incline their bills to empty the
bag of the waters; after which they swim to shore and eat their
booty in quiet. … It is said that when they make their nests
in the dry deserts, they carry the water to their young in the
vast pouches, and that the lions and beasts of prey come there
to quench their thirst, sparing the young, the cause of this
salutary provision. Possibly on this account the Egyptians style
this bird the camel of the river — the Persians tacub, or water-
carrier.
Now let us look at the Trochilus legend, and trace how
an African plover became changed into an American
hummingbird. The story, first published by Herodotus,
that some sort of bird enters the mouth of a Nile crocodile
dozing on the sand with its jaws open, and picks bits of
food from the palate and teeth, apparently to the rep-
tile’s satisfaction, is not altogether untrue. The bird
alluded to is the Egyptian plover, which closely re-
sembles the common British lapwing; and there seems
to be no doubt that something of the sort does really
take place when crocodiles are lying with open mouth
on the Nile bank, as they often do. This lapwing has a
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 61
tall, pointed crest standing up like a spur on the top of
its head, and this fact gives «point,» in more senses than
one, to the extraordinary version of the Herodotus story
in one of the old plays, The White Devil, by John Web-
ster (1612), where an actor says:
«Stay, my lord! I’ll tell you a tale. The crocodile, which
lives in the river Nilus, hath a worm breeds i’ the teeth of ’t,
which puts it to extreme anguish: a little bird, no bigger than
a wren, is barber-surgeon to this crocodile; flies into the jaws
of ’t, picks out the worm, and brings present remedy. The fish,
glad of ease, but ingrateful to her that did it, that the bird may
not talk largely of her abroad for nonpayment, closeth her
chaps, intending to swallow her, and so put her to perpetual
silence. But nature, loathing such ingratitude, hath armed this
bird with a quill or prick on the head, top o’ the which wounds
the crocodile i’ the mouth, forceth her open her bloody prison,
and away flies the pretty tooth-picker from her cruel patient.»
A most curious series of mistakes has arisen around
this matter. Linguists tell us that the common name
among the ancient Greeks for a plover was trochilus
(rpoxtW), and that this is the word used by Herodotus for
his crocodile-bird. But in certain passages of his His-
tory of Animals Aristotle uses this word to designate a
wren; it has been supposed that this was a copyist’s error,
writing carelessly rpoxiAos for Vx i ^ 0?> but it was repeated
by Pliny in recounting what Herodotus had related, and
this naturally led to the statement by some medieval com-
pilers that the crocodile’s tooth-cleaner was a wren.
This, however, is not the limit of the confusion, for when
American hummingbirds became known in Europe, and
were placed by some naturalists of the 17th century in
the Linnaean genus (Trochilus) with the wrens, one
writer at least, Paul Lucas, 1774 (if Brewer’s Handbook
may be trusted), asserted that the hummingbird as well
62 BIRDS IN LEGEND
as the lapwing entered the jaws of Egyptian crocodiles —
and that he had seen them do it!
This curious tissue of right and wrong was still fur-
ther embroidered by somebody’s assertion that the
diminutive attendant’s kindly purpose was «to pick from
the teeth a little insect» that greatly annoyed the huge
reptile. Even Tom Moore knew no better than to write
in Lalla Rookh of
The puny bird that dares with pleasing hum
Within the crocodile’s stretched jaws to come.
The full humor of this will be perceived by those who
remember that hummingbirds are exclusively American —
not Oriental. Finally Linnaeus confirmed all this mixture
of mistakes by fastening the name Trochilidae on the
Hummingbird family.
Finally, John Josselyn, Gent., in his Rarities of Nezv
England, calls our American chimney-swift a «troculus,»
and describes its nesting absurdly thus :
The troculus — a small bird, black and white, no bigger than
a swallow, the points of whose feathers are sharp, which they
stick into the sides of the chymney (to rest themselves), their
legs being exceedingly short) where they breed in nests made
like a swallow’s nest, but of a glewy substance; and which is
not fastened to the chymney as a swallow’s nest, but hangs
down the chymney by a clew-like string a yard long. They
commonly have four or five young ones; and when they go
away, which is much about the time that swallows used to de-
part, they never fail to throw down one of their young birds
into the room by way of gratitude. I have more than once ob-
served, that, against the ruin of the family, these birds will
suddenly forsake the house, and come no more.
Another unfortunate but long-accepted designation in
systematic ornithology was attached by Linnaeus to the
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 63
great bird of paradise in naming this species Paradisca
apoda (footless); and it was done through an even worse
misunderstanding than in the case of Trochilus — or else
as a careless joke. It is true that at that time no perfect
specimen had been seen in Europe; yet it is hard to under-
stand Linne’s act, for he could not have put more faith
in the alleged natural footlessness of this bird than in the
many other marvelous qualities ascribed to it. Wallace
has recounted some of these myths in his Malay
Archipelago: 35
When the earliest European voyagers reached the Moluccas
in search of cloves and nutmegs, they were presented with the
dried skins of birds so strange and beautiful as to excite the
admiration even of those wealth-seeking rovers. The Malay
traders gave them the name of «manuk dewata,» or God’s birds;
and the Portuguese, finding they had no feet or wings, and being
unable to learn anything authentic about them, called them
«passares de sol» or birds of the sun; while the learned Dutch-
men, who wrote in Latin, called them avis paradeus or paradise-
bird. Jan van Linschoten gives these names in 1598, and tells
las that no one has seen these birds alive, for they live in the
air, always turning toward the sun, and never lighting on the
earth till they die; for they have neither feet nor wings, as he
adds, may be seen by the birds carried to India, and sometimes
to Holland, but being very costly they were rarely seen in
Europe. More than a hundred years later Mr. William Fennel,
who accompanied Dampier… saw specimens at Amboyna
and was told that they came to Banda to eat nutmegs, which in-
toxicated them, and made them fall senseless, when they were
killed by ants. [Tavernier explains that the ants ate away their
legs — thus accounting for the footlessness.]
It is to this nutmeg dissipation that Tom Moore alludes
in Lalla Rookh:
Those golden birds that in the spice time drop
About the gardens, drunk with that sweet fruit
Whose scent has lured them o’er the summer flood.
64 BIRDS IN LEGEND
The unromantic fact was that the natives of the Moluccas
then, as now, after skilfully shooting with arrows or
blow-guns and skinning the (male) birds, cut off the legs
and dusky wings and folded the prepared skin about a
stick run through the body and mouth, in which form
«paradise-birds» continued to come to millinery markets
in New York and London. A somewhat similar blunder
in respect to swallows (or swifts?) has given us in the
martlet, as a heraldic figure, a quaint perpetuation of an
error in natural history. «Even at the present day,»
remarks Fox Davies, 111 speaking of England, «it is popu-
larly believed that the swallow has no feet… at any
rate the heraldic swallow is never represented with feet,
the legs terminating with the feathers that cover the
shank.»
I do not know where Dryden got the information sug-
gesting his comparison, in Threnodia Augustalis, «like
birds of paradise that lived on mountain dew»; but the
idea is as fanciful as the modern Malay fiction that this
bird drops its egg, which bursts as it approaches the
earth, releasing a fully developed young bird. Another
account is that the hen lays her eggs on the back of her
mate. Both theories are wild guesses in satisfaction of
ignorance, for no one yet knows precisely the breeding-
habits of these shy forest-birds, the females of which are
rarely seen. Dryden may have read that in Mexico, as
a Spanish traveller reported, hummingbirds live on dew;
or he may have heard of the medieval notion that ravens
were left to be nourished by the dews of heaven, and,
with poetic license to disregard classification, transferred
the feat to the fruit-eating birds of paradise.
Next comes that old yarn about geese that grow on
trees. When or where it arose nobody knows, but some-
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 65
where in the Middle Ages, for Max Miiller quotes a car-
dinal of the nth century who represented the goslings
as bursting, fully fledged, from fruit resembling apples.
A century later (1187) Giraldus Cambrensis, an arch-
deacon reproving laxity among the priests in Ireland, con-
demns the practice of eating barnacle geese in Lent on
the plea that they are fish; and soon afterward Innocent
III forbade it by decree. Queer variants soon appeared.
A legend relating to Ireland inscribed on a Genoese
world-map, and described by Dr. Edward L. Stevenson
in a publication of The Hispanic Society (New York)
reads: «Certain of their trees bear fruit which, decaying
within, produces a worm which, as it subsequently de-
velops, becomes hairy and feathered, and, provided
wings, flies like a bird.»
An extensive clerical literature grew up in Europe in
discussion of the ethics of this matter, for the monks
liked good eating and their Lenten fare was miserably
scanty, and a great variety of explanations of the alleged
marine birth of these birds — ordinary geese (Branta
bernicla) when mature — were contrived. That some-
thing of the kind was true nobody in authority denied
down to the middle of the 17th century, when a German
Jesuit, Gaspar Schott, was bold enough to declare that
although the birth-place of this uncommon species of
goose was unknown (it is now believed to breed in
Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla), undoubtedly it was pro-
duced from incubated eggs like any other goose. Never-
theless the fable was reaffirmed in the Philosophical
Transactions of the Scottish Royal Society for 1677.
Henry Lee 38 recalls two versions of the absurd but preva-
lent theory. One is that certain trees, resembling willows,
and growing always close to the sea, produced at the ends
66 BIRDS IN LEGEND
of their branches fruits in the shape of apples, each con-
taining the embryo of a goose, which, when the fruit was
ripe, fell into the water and flew away. The other is that
the geese were bred from a fungus growing on rotten
timber floating at sea, and were first developed in the
form of worms in the substance of the wood.
It is plain that this fable sprang from the similitude
to the wings of tiny birds of the feathery arms that
sessile barnacles reach out from their shells to clutch from
the water their microscopic food, and also to the remote
likeness the naked heads and necks of young birds bear
to stalked or «whale» barnacles (Lepas). Both these
cirripeds are found attached to floating wood, and some-
times to tree-branches exposed to waves and to high tides.
The deception so agreeable to hungry churchmen was
abetted by the etymologies in the older dictionaries. Dr.
Murray, editor of The New Oxford Dictionary, asserts,
however, that the origin of the word «barnacle» is not
known, but that certainly it was applied to the mature
goose before its was given to the cirriped.
Speaking of geese, what is the probable source of the
warning «Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs»
beyond or behind the obvious moral of ^Esop’s familiar
fable? The only light on the subject that has come to
me is the following passage in Bayley’s 24 somewhat
esoteric book:
The Hindoos represent Brahma, the Breath of Life, as riding
upon a goose, and the Egyptians symbolized Seb, the father of
Osiris, as a goose…. According to the Hindoo theory of
creation the Supreme Spirit laid a golden egg resplendent as the
sun, and from the golden egg was born Brahma, the progenitor
of the Universe. The Egyptians had a similar story, and de-
scribed the sun as an egg laid by the primeval goose, in later
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 67
times said to be a god. It is probable that our fairy tale of
the goose that laid the golden egg is a relic of this very ancient
mythology.
These notions in India probably were the seed of a
Buddhist legend that comes a little nearer to our quest.
According to this legend the Buddha (to be) was born
a Brahmin, and after growing up was married and his
wife bore him three daughters. After his death he was
born again as a golden mallard (which is a duck), and
determined to give his golden feathers one by one for the
support of his former family. This beneficence went on,
the mallard-Bodhisat helping at intervals by a gift of a
feather. Then one day the mother proposed to pluck the
bird clean, and, despite the protests of the daughters, did
so. But at that instant the golden feathers ceased to be
golden. His wings grew again, but they were plain white.
It may be added that the Pali word for golden goose
is hansa, whence the Latin anser, goose, German gans,
the root, gan appearing in our words gander and gannet;
so that it appears that the «mallard» was a goose, after
all — and so was the woman!
This may not explain iEsop, for that fabulist told or
wrote his moral anecdotes a thousand years before Bud-
dhism was heard of; but it is permissible to suppose that
so simple a lesson in bad management might have been
taught in India ages before y£sop (several of whose
fables have been found in early Egyptian papyri), and
was only repeated, in a new dressing, by good Buddhists,
as often happens with stories having a universal appeal
to our sense of practical philosophy or of humor.
We have had occasion to speak of the eagle in many
different aspects, as the elected king of the birds, as an
emblem of empire, and so on, but there remain for use
68 BIRDS IN LEGEND
in this chapter some very curious attributes assigned to
the great bird by ancient wonder-mongers that long ago
would have been lost in the discarded rubbish of primi-
tive ideas — mental toys of the childhood of the world —
had they not been preserved for us in the undying pages
of literature. Poetry, especially, is a sort of museum
of antique inventions, preserving for us specimens —
often without labels — of speculative stages in the early
development of man’s comprehension of nature.
In the case of the eagle (as a genus, in the Old World
not always clearly distinguished from vultures and the
larger hawks) it is sometimes difficult to say whether
some of its legendary aspects are causes or effects of
others. Was its solar quality, for example, a cause or a
consequence of its supposed royalty in the bird tribe?
The predatory power, lofty flight, and haughty yet noble
mien of the true eagle, may account for both facts, to-
gether or separately. It would be diving too deeply into
the murky depths of mythology to show full proof, but
it may be accepted that everywhere, at least in the East,
the fountain of superstitions, the eagle typified the sun
in its divine aspect. This appears as a long-accepted con-
ception at the very dawn of history among the sun-wor-
shippers of the Euphrates Valley, and it persisted in art
and theology until Christianity remodelled such «heathen»
notions to suit the new trend of religious thought, and
transformed the «bird of fire» into a symbol of the
Omnipotent Spirit — an ascription which artists inter-
preted very liberally.
In Egypt a falcon replaced it in its religious signifi-
cance, true eagles being rare along the Nile, and «eagle-
hawks» were kept in the sun-gods’ temples, sacred to
Horus (represented with a hawk-head surmounted by a
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 69
sun-disk), Ra, Osiris, Seku, and other solar divinities.
«It was regarded,» as Mr. Cook explains in Zeus, 37 «as
the only bird that could look with unflinching gaze at
the sun, being itself filled with sunlight, and eventually
akin to fire.» Later, people made it the sacred bird of
Apollo, and Mithraic worshippers spoke of Helios as a
hawk, but crude superstitions among the populace were
mixed with this priestly reverence.
It was universally believed of the eagle, that, as an old
writer said, «she can see into the great glowing sun»;
few if any were aware that she could veil her eyes by
drawing across the orbs that third eyelid which naturalists
term the nictitating membrane. Hence arose that fur-
ther belief, lasting well into the Middle Ages, that the
mother-bird proved her young by forcing them to gaze
upon the sun, and discarding those who shrank from the
fiery test — «Like Eaglets bred to Soar, Gazing on Starrs
at heaven’s mysterious Pow’r,» wrote an anonymous poet
in 1652. «Before that her little ones be feathered,» in the
words of an old compiler of marvels quoted by Hulme, 38
«she will beat and strike them with her wings, and thereby
force them to looke full against the sunbeams. Now if
she sees any one of them to winke, or their eies to water
at the raies of the sunne, she turns it with the head fore-
most out of the nest as a bastard.»
How many who now read the 103d Psalm, or that fine
figure of rhetoric in Milton’s Areopagitica, could explain
the full meaning of the comparison used? The passage
referred to is that in which Milton exclaims: «Methinks
I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing her-
self like a strong man after sleep…. Methinks I see
her renewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undaz-
zled eyes at the sun.» Milton evidently expected all his
7 o BIRDS IN LEGEND
readers to appreciate the value of his simile — to know
that eagles were credited with just this power of juvenes-
cence. «When,» in the words of an even older chronicler,
«an eagle hathe darkness and dimness in een, and heavi-
nesse in wings, against this disadvantage she is taught by
kinde to seek a well of springing water, and then she flieth
up into the aire as far as she may, till she be full hot by
heat of the air and by travaille of flight, and so then by
heat the pores being opened, and the feathers chafed, and
she f alleth sideingly into the well, and there the feathers
be chaunged and the dimness of her een is wiped away
and purged, and she taketh again her might and strength.»
Isn’t that a finely constructed tale? Spencer thought so
when he wrote:
As eagle fresh out of the ocean wave,
Where he hath left his plumes, all hoary gray,
And decks himself with feathers, youthful, gay.
Margaret C. Walker 39 elaborates the legend in her
excellent book, suggesting that it may have originated in
contemplation of the great age to which eagles are sup-
posed to live; but to my mind it grew out of the ancient
symbolism that made the eagle represent the sun, which
plunges into the western ocean every night, and rises,
its youth renewed every morning.
«It is related,,, says Miss Walker, «that when this bird feels
the season of youth is passing by, and when his young are still
in the nest, he leaves the aging earth and soars toward the
sun, the consumer of all that is harmful. Mounting upward to
the third region of the air — the region of meteors — he circles
and swings about under the great fiery ball in their midst, turn-
ing every feather to its scorching rays, then, with wings drawn
back, like a meteor himself, he drops into some cold spring or
into the ocean wave there to have the heat driven inward by
the soul-searching chill of its waters. Then flying to his eyrie
FABLE AND FOLKLORE 71
he nestles among his warm fledglings, till, starting into perspi-
ration, he throws off his age with his feathers. That his re-
juvenescence may be complete, as his sustenance must be of
youth, he makes prey of his young, feeding on the nestlings
that have warmed him. He is clothed anew and youth is again
his.»
Cruden’s Concordance B1 to the Bible, first published in
1737, contains under «Eagle» a fine lot of old Semitic
misinformation as to the habits of eagles, which Cruden
gives his clerical readers apparently in complete faith and
as profitable explanations of the biblical passages in which
that bird is mentioned. Allow me to quote some of these
as an addition to our collection, for I find them retained
without comment in the latest edition of this otherwise
admirable work:
It is said that when an eagle sees its young ones so well-
grown, as to venture upon flying, it hovers over their nest,
flutters with its wings, and excites them to imitate it, and take
their flight, and when it sees them weary or fearful it takes
them upon its back, and carries them so, that the fowlers can-
not hurt the young without piercing through the body of the
old one. … It is of great courage, so as to set on harts and
great beasts. And has no less subtility in taking them; for hav-
ing filled its wings with sand and dust, it sitteth on their horns,
and by its wings shaketh it in their eyes, whereby they become
an easy prey. … It goeth forth to prey about noon, when
men are gone home from the fields.
It hath a little eye, but a very quick sight, and discerns its
prey afar off, and beholds the sun with open eyes, Such of her
young as through weakness of sight cannot behold the sun, it
rejects as unnatural. It liveth long, nor dieth of age or sick-
ness, say some, but of hunger, for by age its bill grows so
hooked that it cannot feed. … It is said that it preserves its
nest from poison, by having therein a precious stone, named
Aetites (without which it is thought the eagle cannot lay her
eggs …) and keepeth it clean by the frequent use of the herb
maidenhair. Unless it be very hungry it devoureth not whole
prey, but leaveth part of it for other birds, which follow. Its
72 BIRDS IN LEGEND
feathers, or quills, are said to consume other quills that lie near
them. Between the eagle and dragon there is constant enmity,
the eagle seeking to kill it, and the dragon breaks all the
eagle’s eggs it can find.
If the Jewish eagles are as smart as that, my sympathies
are with the dragon!
The relations between Zeus, or Jupiter, and the eagle,
mostly reprehensible, belong to classic mythology; and
they have left little trace in folklore, which, be it re-
membered, takes account of living or supposed realities,
not of mythical creatures. The most notable bit, per-
haps, is the widely accepted notion that this bird is never
killed by lightning; is «secure from thunder and un-
harmed by Jove,» as Dryden phrases it. Certain common
poetic allusions explain themselves, for instance, that in
The Myrmidons of ^Eschylus:
So, in the Libyan fable it is told
That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
«With our own feathers, not by others’ hands
«Are we now smitten/
These little narratives, which are certainly interesting
if true — as they are not — are good examples of the
failure to exercise what may be called the common-sense
of science.
Бесплатный фрагмент закончился.
Купите книгу, чтобы продолжить чтение.