Ernest Ingersoll

“ 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. ”

“ Raven—or the raven—was the mythical ancestor or culture hero, as ethnologists would say, of the foremost clan of the Tlingit tribe, whose territory was in southern Alaska. He was present at the making of the world and its people, and did many marvellous things. While he was at Sitka arranging affairs in the new world he assigned to all the birds, one by one, the place of their resort and their habits, and his good nature is shown by the fact that to the robin and the hummingbird he assigned the duty of giving pleasure to men, the former by its song and the latter by its beauty. ”

“ It was an ancient opinion of the idolatrous Arabs that the departing spirit flitted from man’s brainpan as a wandering fowl, complaining thenceforward in perpetual thirst her unavenged wrong; friends, therefore, to avenge the friend’s soul-bird, poured upon the grave their pious libations of wine. ”

“ When, in 1825, Guatemala declared its independence 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 influence in their ancient history and the most hopeful suggestion for the future. ”

“ The Mandans, a Dakotan tribe, say that the thunder-bird has two toes on each foot—one before and one behind; and the Algonquian Blackfeet represent it on their medicine-lodges by simply drawing four black bird-claws on a yellow shank. When it flies softly, as is usually its way, according to the Mandans, it is not heard by mankind, but when it flaps its wings violently a roaring noise is produced. It breaks through the clouds to force a way for the rain, and the glance of its fiery eyes appears in the lightnings. ”

“ 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 ... ”

“ A very curious feature of this delicate romance, which reminds one of the love-story of the Nightingale and the Rose, is the transposition of sex. To our minds it would seem natural that the bird, as the most active of the two characters, should take the male part and the leaf the other; and it is false to fact that Red Bird, as a female, should sing. The Indians must have known that this was unnatural, yet their poetic sense arranged it otherwise, just as the poets have pictured the nightingale pressing her breast against a thorn, yet singing, as only male birds do! ”

“ BLACK FEATHERS MAKE BLACK BIRDS No one bird known to Americans is so entangled with whatever witchcraft belongs to birds as is the raven, yet little of it is American besides Poe’s melodramatic mummery, whose raven was a borrowed piece of theatrical property. The shrewd people of this country pay little attention to signs and portents, yet some survive among us, for the extravagant notions popularly held as to the sagacity of our crow, with its “courts” and “consultations,” are no doubt traceable in some measure to the bird’s history in Old World superstition. ”

“ Almost every country has some particular “rain-bird” whose cry is supposed to foretell showers. In England it is the green woodpecker, or yaffle; in Malaya a broadbill; in some parts of this country the spotted sandpiper, or tipup; but everywhere some sort of cuckoo is called “rain-bird” or “rain-crow,” although the various cuckoos of America, Europe, and the Orient, differ widely in appearance, habits and voice.
Why should peoples so dissimilar and widely scattered attribute to this very diverse cuckoo family the quality of “rain-birds” more than to another family? ”

“ The white men there told them it was only a bird’s crying, but they insisted the noise was that of spirits. Said they: “Birds don’t talk in the night; they talk in the daytime.” “But,” asked Russell, “how can you tell that it is the memelose tillicums, or dead people? They can’t talk.” “No,” replied the savage, “it is true they can’t talk as we do, but they whistle through their teeth. You are a white man and do not understand what they say, but Indians know.”
This bit of untainted savage philosophy recalls the queer British superstition of the Seven Whistlers. ”

“ The Paris Figaro, in October, 1872, describing the ceremonies at the death of a gipsy in that city, mentioned that a bird was held close to the mouth of the dying girl, ready to receive her expired soul. This is not an illogical idea, if the conception of a person’s soul as a distinct entity is conceded; for if it is to fly away to Paradise it must have something in the nature of wings, and a bird, or the semblance of a real bird, is inevitably suggested, the wings of a bat being too repulsive—reserved, in fact, for representations of Satan and his emissaries. ”

“ Nevertheless, on Easter Day in Rome, when the pope is borne in magnificent state into St. Peter’s, he waves over the heads of the reverent worshippers assembled there a fan (flabellum) of ostrich feathers on which have been sewn the eye-spots from peacock plumes, the latter, we are told, signifying the all-seeing vigilance of the Church—against foolishness as well as downright evil, let us hope!
No bird is more often employed symbolically in Christian art than the pelican, which, like the peacock became a representative of salvation through the self-sacrifice of Christ. ”

“ Now we know that the story is a Semitic tradition, perhaps nothing more than a sun-myth in origin, although the actual occurrence of some extraordinary inundation may have got mixed with it and localized it. In fact, the belief in an all-submerging deluge, or, in what is its equivalent—namely, a time when the world was a plain of water with no land above its quiet surface—is a part of the mythology or theology, or both, of many diverse peoples in both hemispheres; and almost always birds are prominently associated with its incidents and the ensuing separation of land from water. ”

“ 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 cannot hurt the young without piercing through the body of the old one.... ”

“ This is, for natural reasons, a theatre of electric action, which the Chippeways accounted for by the fiction of a magic bird—quite as natural in its way as is the meteorology. At any rate the redmen feared to climb the mountain and prove their theory, for they said men had been struck by lightning there in impious attempts at investigating the bird-god—the old story of religious interference with scientific curiosity. These same people held that their thunder-bird sat on her eggs during fair weather, and hatched out her brood in the storm—which hatching was the storm. ”

“ Plunging into the thickets of comparative mythology, hoping to pluck a few fruity facts for our pains, we find that in Hindoo myths the cuckoo stands as a symbol of the sun when hidden behind clouds, that is, for a rainy condition of the sky; furthermore that this bird has a reputation for possessing exceeding wisdom surpassing that of other birds, all of which are fabled to be supernaturally wise: and that it knew not only things present but things to come. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 supposed 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. ”

“ A Baltimore folklorist warns every lady against letting birds build nests with the combings of her hair, as it will turn the unfortunate woman crazy. Any woman afraid of this should beware of that dear little sprite of our garden shrubbery, the chipping-sparrow, for it always lines its tiny nest with hair. This notion is another importation, for it has long been a saying in Europe that if a bird uses human hair in its nest the owner of the hair will have headaches and later baldness. ”

“ One need not accuse the Romans of merely copying the ancient monarchies of the East. If they thought of anything beyond the majestic appearance of the noble bird, it was to remember its association with their great god Jupiter—the counterpart of Zeus. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 remembered, takes account of living or supposed realities, not of mythical creatures. The most notable bit, perhaps, is the widely accepted notion that this bird is never killed by lightning ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ambrose, all shamelessness and sin are dark and gloomy, and feed on the dead like the crow. A Chinese epithet for the raven is “Mongol’s coffin.”
The people were sincere enough in this, for behind them was not only the Devil-fearing superstition of the Middle Ages but a long line of parent myths and folklore that made the bird’s reputation as black as its plumage, and added to this was the new and terrifying idea of prophecy. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 because 36the 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 aborigines, 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. ”

“ In the Far East the raven has been regarded from time immemorial with dread interest, and where that species was rare the crow—equally black, destructive, and cunning—took its place. To the primitive philosophers of Persia and India the raven was a divine bird, of celestial origin and supernatural abilities, and was the messenger who announced the will of the Deity. ”

“ In Europe no bird, save possibly the cuckoo, is so laden with legends and superstitious veneration as the raven, chiefly, however, in the North, where it is not only most numerous and noticeable but seems to fit better than in the gladsome South. ”

“ The mass of wondering and terrified people, however, could not think of the rush and noise and glare of stormy weather otherwise than as something produced by living beings of huge, mysterious and usually destructive power; and they were as real to them, although invisible, as are the electric currents and tremendous air-vibrations to us. Among the aboriginal Chinese electricity was represented as residing on the mountains in the form of birds, and their Thunder-god is pictured with a bird’s beak and claws, and armed with a drum and hammer. ”

“ Thus the words eagle and falcon convey to the listener the notion of nobility in power, while hawk simply means fierceness, with somewhat of prying, detective skill. Owl provokes in the imagination a rather smiling picture of solemn pretence of wisdom—a reputation, by the way, almost wholly due to the little European screech-owl’s accidental association with Pallas Athene. Swallow suggests spring all over the world; goose and gull connote easy credulity and foolishness; vulture and raven, rapine and cruelty ”

“ The Chinese, and after them the Japanese, had a phenix-like bird in their mythical aviary, which persists in the faith of the more simple-minded of their peoples, and as a fruitful motive in the decorative art of each. It was one of the four supernatural creatures that in ancient Chinese philosophy symbolized the four quarters of the heavens. The Taoists, whose religious ideas are older than Confucianism and prevailed especially among the humble and unlearned, called it the Scarlet Bird, and associated it with the element Fire, and with their mystic number 7. ”