Avian spirits and totems, Part III

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
Having explored some New World peoples use of bird imagery in their religions and mythologies over the past two weeks, it seems impolite to leave out the Old World. It is, after all, where the religions and mythologies of most modern North Americans originate.

When I was in college, I spent a semester abroad in Denmark and took a course in Scandinavian mythology. I don’t have any Scandinavian heritage, as far as I know, but I have been interested in the culture since reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” as a kid. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and so studied the origins of early English literature in Scandinavia and Germany.

Many have noted the almost complete lack of overt religion in “The Lord of the Rings.” Instead reading the book is almost like being inside of a mythology. Tolkien’s description of the Middle Earth wizard Gandalf, for example, very closely follows many depictions of Odin, the head of the Norse pantheon, as he appeared in disguise when visiting Midgard.

Two of Odin’s associates were ravens named Huginn and Muninn (“thought” and “memory”). Odin gave them the ability to speak, and they were often depicted as sitting on his shoulders. The ravens were charged with flying over the world to bring information back to Odin. This is thought to be a figurative representation of Odin casting his own thought and mind out into the world, a part of shamanic practice. Austrian scholar Rudolph Simek disagrees, noting that the names of the ravens date only to the 9th century, and that Odin’s association with ravens is probably much older and part of broader tradition of raven symbolism in Germanic culture.

The fylgja (which goes by other names in other cultures) is a spirit that accompanies a person through life and represents their character and their fate. The Norse word “fylgja” means “afterbirth” because the spirit appears at a person’s birth and eats the afterbirth. Consequently these spirits often take the forms of predators or carrion eaters, like ravens.

J.K. Rowling incorporated this pagan tradition into her Harry Potter books. She gave the fylgja the Latinate name “Patronus,” but its purpose was the same. Harry’s Patronus was a stag, the same as his father, while his mother’s was a doe. Snape’s was also a doe, which symbolized his undying love for Harry’s mother.

Philip Pullman transmutes the fylgjur into his daemons, which accompany everyone in the alternative universe of “His Dark Materials.” Before they reach adolescence, people’s daemons change form at will. Asta, Malcolm Polstead’s daemon in Pullman’s “Book of Dust” frequently takes the form of a bird when he needs to fly and, like Odin’s ravens, to gather information.

Storks were once found all across Europe, but changing land-use practices and industrialization now limits them to part of the Iberian peninsula, Germany and eastern Europe. They have no fear of humans and frequently nest on buildings. Their ubiquity and large size caused them to find their way into folk mythologies across Eurasia. The association of storks and childbirth persists into the present day through cartoons and advertising, but the origins are very old.

The Greeks and the Romans thought of storks as paragons of parental devotion and the punishment for killing one in classical Greece was death. But it is the Germanic cultures that give us the storks-bringing-babies image. These are migratory birds, spending a relatively short time on their breeding grounds. The European population begin departing for Africa after the summer solstice, and they return nine months later. As it happens, in pagan northern Europe the summer solstice was a popular time to get married, hence the tendency of a large number of babies to be born the following spring… just as the storks returned.

In ancient Egypt, at least three gods had the head of a bird. Horus was traditionally depicted as having the head of a falcon. Horus was the sky god, so representing him in the form of a masterful flyer like the falcon makes sense.

There were two Horuses. Horus the Elder was one of the original five gods of the Egyptian pantheon, and many local and minor falcon gods became absorbed into his mythos. The elder Horus was associated with both the sky and the sun, sharing this duty with the god Ra (who is also depicted as falcon-headed). He is often depicted as moving across the sky in a barge, but he could take the form of a falcon and fly down from the sky and (in the now familiar role) bring information back to Ra or to bring comfort to people.

Horus the Younger was the son of Osiris (brother of Horus the Elder) and Isis. Osiris was deposed and murdered by his brother Set. In the struggle with Set to regain his father’s throne, Horus loses an eye (like Odin), but (unlike Odin) his eye is restored by Thoth. Thoth had the head of an ibis and was the god of writing, magic, wisdom, and — complementing Horus — of the moon. He was said to have been born of the seed of Horus (the Elder) from the forehead of Set. As such, he represented a balance between order and chaos. One myth has him — as an ibis — laying a cosmic egg that gives birth to all creation.

The sacred ibis, so venerated by the ancient Egyptians — and said to be the incarnation of Thoth on earth — is no longer found in Egypt. It was slaughtered by the thousands in connection with the veneration of Thoth, and they were raised in captivity for this purpose. It persisted in the wild throughout the Nile valley until the early 19th century, but it has not been seen there since.

Bill Chaisson, who has been a birdwatcher since age 11, is a former editor of the Eagle Times. He now works for the Town of Wilmot and lives in Sutton.