W. H. Gardner

“ In this age, our plane of thought is so far above that of our rude and ignorant ancestors that their superstitions and myths seem too puerile to merit notice; but when we study them attentively, with the light which comparative mythology is able to throw upon them, we find that what at first seemed only childish fables are really degraded fragments of the religion of our forefathers, and as such they are surely worthy of the attention of their descendants. ”

“ PERHAPS there are but few persons who have read Poe's "Raven," or Dickens's "Barnaby Rudge," who have not felt some curiosity to learn why ravens and crows, more than any other birds, should be invested with characters so ominous and demoniacal. And not only do these birds bear this ominous reputation in poetry and fiction, and in the legends and folklore of many of the nations of the earth, but by the unlearned they are still looked upon as too weird and uncanny for ordinary birds ”

“ We rarely discover in any one story so many of the mythological characteristics of the crow as are associated together here; the ill-omened gallows, the black night, the more than human wisdom of the crows, their knowledge of prophecy, and the healing art befitting Apollo's birds, their power of obtaining water, and lastly their malignant nature ”

“ And since to primeval man none of the powers of nature seemed so beneficent or worthy of adoration as the sun, heliolatry was one of the most widely spread of all the religions of antiquity, and the daily conflict between the sun-god and clouds and darkness a never-ending theme for poet and priest. ”

“ Moreover, since all metaphors depend upon some real or fancied resemblance of things less known to things better known, all of these deified powers of nature would be invested with forms and attributes similar to the animals and men with which they were already familiar, though in a magnified degree; and from this conception, by a very natural and usual transition of thought, the human or animal form, which had at first been sacred only as the eidolon of the god, would in a short time be thought to possess some intrinsic sanctity independent of that divine association. ”

“ In most of the myths herein cited, the cloud seems to be the more exact equivalent of the bird, though in the earlier Hindoo mythology the cloud and the night are often convertible. The crow, as the metaphoric name of the cloud, also explains the connection of these birds with water, which we find not only in legends of the deluge but in many others.
The first Greek myth given is a degraded version of one of the numerous Hindoo myths of the god Indra, who slays the black dragon that has shut up the fertilizing waters: the white raven is the fleecy cloud of summer that contains no moisture ”

“ There are many arguments in support of both of these theories, the chief objection being that either one alone is too exclusive to account for all the facts; for, while there can be no doubt that ancestor-worship was the primitive and only religion of many, possibly all, the tribes of the earth at the dawn of their civilization, yet it is also certain that when tribes had formed settled communities, and a higher grade of culture had been attained, ancestor-worship was supplemented or supplanted by a worship of nature. ”

“ It seems curious that the figments of extinct mythologies should come from the dim and misty past, down through the ages, and still exist in the enlightenment of the present day; and yet we know that the débris of these effete religions not only survive in the legends and folklore of all the lands now civilized, but to a certain extent adulterate their manners and customs, their laws, and even their forms of religion. ”

“ Aristotle, too, gravely informs us as a fact of natural history that "the crow and the owl also are enemies, for at mid-day the crow, taking advantage of the dim sight of the owl, secretly seizes and devours its eggs, and the owl eats those of the crow during the night." ”

“ In the Greek myth quoted from Ovid, we have another of those widely-spread myths of the sun and dawn. Koronis (κορωνις) is the beautiful (crown of light) Aurora, surprised by the morning cloud, the raven, in the embrace of another lover, the night.
In the Norse mythology the ravens that sit on Odin's shoulders are the clouds that are seen on either side of the rising sun. As the sun mounts higher and the heat increases, the clouds are dissipated, to return again in the evening when the air is cooler and the sun sinks into the western sea. ”

“ In one place it is a stone, in another a worm, and in yet another it is a plant. Their agreement, however, in the power to rend rocks and to discover hidden treasures shows the origin of the myth to have been the storm-cloud which carries the thunderbolt, and with it rends the hardest rocks. ”

“ In addition to the belief that the ghost of a dead ancestor or relative has the power to pass into the body of a beast, is the fact that the languages of the lower races of man are so imperfect that metaphorical names require to be interpreted literally, and consequently primitive speech is unable to transmit to posterity the slight shades of difference between an animal and a person named after that animal ”

“ After the examination of a great mass of facts bearing upon the subject, Herbert Spencer arrives at the conclusion that the first ideas of ghosts or other supernatural beings have arisen in the mind of primitive man through the agency of dreams, somnambulism, trance, catalepsy, and other analogous conditions; and that the same conditions are continually reproducing the same ideas in the minds of his more civilized descendants. This alter ego, which exists in the dreams and visions of the primitive man, he believes also exists during the sleep of death ”

“ In the Grecian mythology, at least as early as the days of Hesiod, the character of the crow or raven (κοραξ) , as a prophet of evil, had already been established (see ante, page 43) ; yet we find it here also sacred to the sun-god and usually associated with the same malignant animals as in the Hindoo mythology.
Our Hellenic myths say that, "once upon a time, Apollo sent his feathered attendant, the raven, who was then pure white, to bring water for sacrifice, but the raven, finding a fig-tree with fruit nearly ripe, waited until it should mature, and he could appease his hunger ”

“ As the vague notions of ghosts and spirits grow into definiteness by the corroborating testimony of other members of the tribe, there would naturally arise a desire to gain the favor or avert the displeasure of these powerful beings by gifts and offerings similar to what would have given pleasure during life; these offerings would usually be made at the grave, cave, or house where the dead body was laid, and thus the tomb would become an altar or temple, as we see the tomb and temple associated even in civilized communities. ”

“ Philosophers at various times have attempted to account for this peculiar veneration of animals, which by many of the nations of antiquity was heightened into worship, and which, among some of the rude and barbarous tribes of Africa and the South-Sea Islands, still exists as almost their only recognition of a religion. ”

“ On the other hand, the pantheistic theory assumes that whatever caused the sentiment of awe, wonder, or fear, in the mind of primitive man, would be deified and worshiped; that the first objects that would excite these emotions would be the sun, moon, and stars, clouds, wind, rain, thunder, lightning, etc. ”

“ Ælian says that in the temple of Apollo at Delphi was the statue of a wolf, and that the reason the wolf was sacred to this god was because he was born of Latona, or nursed by her, under this form. [28] It was doubtless a wolf of the same species that suckled the warlike twins of Silvia, at a later age, on the banks of the Tiber.
In both the Hindoo and the Greek mythologies we find the owl intimately associated with the crow—the owl, like the crow, being one of the demons of the night ”

“ Whether an observance of the habits of crows led to their being selected, in the first place, to represent the dark and evil principle, can not now be told, but it is very certain that their feeding upon dead bodies, frequenting battle-fields and plague-infested districts, would add to and intensify their ominous reputation, even if it did not originate it ”

“ In the course of a few generations these animals would be looked upon as the ancestors of respective tribes, and would be reverenced and sacrificed to as deities. Besides explaining animal gods, this hypothesis accounts for sundry anomalous beliefs, the divinities half-brute and half-human, the animals that talk and play active parts in human affairs, the doctrine of metempsychosis, etc. ”