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M««M»W»:fe»fWlft:iMttt«»«K!WJlJl

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FOR THE PEOPLE

FOR EDVCATION

FORSCIENCE

LIBRARY

OF

THE AMERICAN MUSEUM

OF

NATURAL HISTORY

LIBRARY

OF THfc;

AMEKICAN M'JSEUM

OF
NATURAL HISTORY

Copyright 1898

BY Charles de Kay

0.

TO THE MEMORY OF

JAMES ELLSWORTH DE KAY

AUTHOR OF

^^T^he Zoology of the State of Ne^xv York"'

PREFACE

17^ ARLY men endowed with keen faculties

-"-^ of observation found the regular return

of birds to their haunts mysterious. A closer

watch on their habits revealed a forethought,

a method, a genius for work, an industry that

astound the naturalists of our day ; certain

actions of birds gave the men of old warrant

to concede them powers of prophecy. To

vii

Preface

primitive men, and to men long after civili-
zation was strong, such traits and powers
suggested beings that need never die ; they
readily conceived of souls as birds and birds
as supernatural creatures.

In the study of man*s groping toward re-
ligious belief one factor has been much neg-
lected : the influence of birds and beasts on
what may be called prehistoric religion. Yet
in the daily life of primitive men and savages
these were and are as important as more strik-
ing objects in the sky, such as sun, moon and
stars, rainbow and northern light, dawn and
sunset, thunderstorm and the winds. Is it
not a fair question to ask, whether the primi-
tive mind did not first invest the world of
animals with mystery, because they are objects
near at hand, within their limited horizon, and
only afterward rise to the point of grasping
the heavenly bodies as beings endowed with

supernatural power ?

viii

Preface

In his work on the origin of mythology
(Berlin, i860) Dr. Schwartz contemplates the
movement as one from heaven to earth, as
if men worshipped the heavenly phenomena
first, then brought them to earth and personi-
fied them in animals. His favorite example
is the lightning, symbolized as dragon or
snake. Might not the movement have been
the other way ?

The tracks of the worship of birds and
beasts are much dimmer, more overlaid by
worship of larger things. The spirits and gods
perceived in celestial and atmospheric bodies
are of a loftier, more civilized sort, more truly
godlike ; while those that retained their bird-
like or animal characteristics have come down
to us very often in the lower form of demi-
gods or heroes. Adam of Bremen says that
the Lithuanians sacrificed unblemished slaves
to dragons and birds ; under dragon we find the
fire-breathing winged creature, a transition from

ix

Preface

the simple bird to a more complex creature
representing lightning, tempest and the sun.

Odd enough to arrest the attention, at least,
that many gods, goddesses, and demigods in
Greek and Roman mythology have certain
birds or beasts connected with them, without
obvious reason for such association ! And if
one looks at the mythology and religious sys-
tems, the epics and legends of other peoples,
not excepting the Judaeo-Christian, one finds
a similar condition of things, varying in degree
of clearness. Even Christianity retains the
dove associated with the Holy Ghost, the
eagle, bull and lion, emblems of evangelists ;
other instances will occur to readers of the
New Testament.

I wish to call attention to remains in the
early lore of Europe of a very extensive
connection of birds with gods, pointing to a
worship of the bird itself as the living repre-
sentative of a god, or else to such a position

Preface

of the bird toward a deity as to fairly permit
the inference that at a period still more remote
the bird itself was worshipped. One may only
guess how near the primitive Europeans of
that period were to the condi-
tion of the savage to-day who
worships the bird which is the
totem of his clan, and never
slays it save on certain occa-
sions when its death is accompanied by reli-
gious rites.

I follow in mythology and epic poetry and
legends the traces of certain birds, the eagle,
the swan, the woodpecker, the cuckoo, the
owl, the peacock, the dove, and try to show
how their peculiarities and habits, observed
by primitive man with the keenness of savages,
have laid the foundation for certain elements
in various religions and mythologies, and
sometimes furnished through the peculiarities
of the creature's habits or character the skele-

xi

Preface

ton plots on which a host of legends and
tragedies have been built by the imagination
of poet-priests and poet-historians of the early-
days.

I hope to have opened up some new vistas
into the meaning of various figures on classic
ground — Venus, Pan, Pallas Athene, Picus,
Kuknos, Sappho, Achilleus, Odysseus, Oidi-
pous, Orpheus, ^neas — and at the same time
thrown light on leading figures in the great
epics of the world — the Iliad and Odyssey, the
Mahabharata, the Shah Nameh, the Kalevala
and Kalevipoeg — and upon various characters
used by the playwrights of Greece in their
most famous dramas.

There seems ever more reason for a belief
which many scholars still shrink from accept-
ing, namely, that the living races of Europe
still contain in their compound the strains of
races now apparently remote or only found
in odd corners of the world. It becomes ever

xii

Preface

harder to believe the stories of old historians
about the eradication of subject races by con-
querors on any large scale ; flight on the part
of the vanquished must have been usually
followed by a speedy return, with consequent
readjustment of the population.

The Lapp, the Finn, the Turk, for example,
are not confined to northeastern Europe and
the lands by the Black Sea and Bosphorus ;
they are everywhere present as a strain in the
so-called Aryan races. The Kelt exists in
Germany, but Germanized ; the ancient Briton
is found in purest Anglo-Saxondom. Their
tongues are gone, leaving more or less traces
behind, which philology has not yet begun to
disentangle ; but they remain as important
parts of the ethnic mixtures which call them-
selves by various rough-and-ready names, like
English, German, French, Italian, Greek.
Myths and old beliefs reveal the influence of

non-Aryan races on Europe. Physical and

xiii

Preface

mental traits contribute to show that their
blood still prevails in their old habitats, whence
they were never totally expelled, where, on the
contrary, they remained, to gradually mingle
more or less completely with their conquerors,
or the people they conquered. For often,
as in the raids of the Huns, it was the ruder
race that overcame the more advanced. Their
presence is attested by place-names, and by
names of gods and heroes, as well as by other
words in living tongues which cannot be sat-
isfactorily explained by "Aryan" roots. In
some cases that presence is attested by gram-
matical peculiarities belonging to the non-
Aryan tongues.

Gubernatis says with great truth : "It is by
no means true that the ancient systems of my-
thology have ceased to exist ; they have only
been diffused and transformed." And he
quotes, from SpiegeFs edition of Rasavahini

of India, a passage which directly affirms the

xiv

Preface

worship of animals and assigns a reason for it :
"Even the beasts remember the services once
rendered them ; and when we implore them
they do not desert us, for they know what has
happened."

While drawing attention to the bird gods of
ancient Europe, I do not wish to be accused
of allowing one theory
to run away with me.
No one can be more con-
scious that many threads
unite in a god or popu-
lar hero. I do not con-
tend that all gods of old
were bird gods, nor even that the popular
conceptions of those here treated were built
solely from the traits of the bird in question.
Sometimes two birds of separate natures seem
to blend in one god or hero, as when he gets
his name from one bird, but some of his
traits from another.

XV

Preface

As soon as the bird or beast became hu-
manized, many other influences began their
play ; reactions took place which sometimes
ended in a total forgetfulness, on the part
of worshippers, as to the origin of the god
or hero, and the relegation of the bird to a
symbol, or adjunct, the meaning of which had
become completely lost. So remote might
the connection become, that near and obvi-
ous explanations were cast aside for strained,
fantastic etymologies. Such was the fate of
the hero-demigod Cuchullaind, a form of Fion
of Ireland and of Vainamoinen of Finland.
Amongst other curious developments in forms
like these I offer an explanation of that
strangest of fancies among savage and primi-
tive men, the couvade ; I am not aware that
its origin has ever been satisfactorily pointed
out before.

While a realization of the presence in the
ethnic mixtures of Europe and America of

xvi

Preface

races now despised may occasion some twinges
to the pride of the " Aryan " or the " Cauca-
sian " (obsolete term !) and while the certainty
that rehgions of the highest grade have passed
through lowly stages of growth is not favorable
to intellectual hauteur, nay, is painful to de-
vout believers, yet such conclusions may at
least have some compensation, by causing us
to feel the solidarity of mankind, by begetting
in us charity toward those who, by the widest
stretch of courtesy, cannot be included in the
aristocracy of the Aryan and the Semite.
After all, even those who are not heirs to
the religions of Moses, Buddha, Christ, or
Mohammed are men ! It can do no harm to
recall once more that our remote ancestors
were immersed in the same sea of superstitious
fears that make the life of lowly races a con-
stant struggle with nightmares and urge them
to crimes from which a natural kindly instinct

revolts.

xvii

Preface

Again, recollection of what our ancestors
thought of birds and beasts, of how at one
time they prized and idealized them, may-
induce in us, their descendants, some shame
at the extermination to which we are consign-
ing these lovable but helpless creatures, for
temporary gains or sheer brutal love of slaugh-
ter. The sordid men who swept from North
America the buffalo, the gentlemen who brag
of moose and elephants slain, the ladies who
demand birds for their hats and will not be
denied, the boys who torture poor feathered
singers and destroy their nests, are more ruth-
less than the primeval barbarians. The latter
stayed their hands at times through religious
scruples, even though their stomachs might
be empty. The marvellous tale of the share
birds have had in the making of myth, religion,
poetry and legend may do somewhat to soften
these flinty hearts and induce men to establish
and carry out laws to protect especially the
xviii

Preface

birds. Unless this is done, and done speedily,
the whole earth will soon become a desert
without melody, given over to the insect
world, like some lands about the Mediter-
ranean, where no wild animal can exist and
no gracious bird dares to raise its cheering
song.

XIX

Title-page i

Dedication »i

Half Title v

Preface. Head and Tail Pieces, two Vignettes vii

Contents, with Vignette xxi

List of Decorations, with Vignette .... xxiii

Heading, the Ringdove 3

Tailpiece and two Vignettes 24

Heading, the Woodpecker 25

Tailpiece, the Crow, and three Vignettes . . 52

Heading, the Cuckoo 5 3

Vignette, the Raven 81

Tailpiece, the Hoopoe, and two Vignettes . . 87

Heading, Pigeon and Pine-cones . . . 88

Vignette, the Vulture 103

Tailpiece, the Vulture-Demon, and two Vignettes 1 20

Heading, Paan the Peacock 121

Tailpiece and two Vignettes 148

Heading, the Owl 149

Vignette, the Cock 159

Vignette, the Owl 175

Tailpiece, and two Vignettes 178

Heading, the Swan 179

Vignette, the Heron 200

Tailpiece, the Stork, and two Vignettes . . 209

Heading, the Eagle 210

Vignette, the Peacock 220

Endpiece, and two Vignettes 229

Heading to Index 231

Tailpiece 249

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

CHAPTER I

" Then was the Douve with her Eyen Meeke **

I SHALL never forget the first wild pigeon
I shot. It was in a grove near Lenox
where I found the lovely bird, brave in its
nuptial plumage and ignorant of the ruthless-
ness of a boy with the first gun he ever called
his own in his hands. Against the dark trunk
of a pine-tree the pigeon was a shining mark
and it allowed me to come within gunshot
before showing signs of uneasiness. The beau-
tiful colors of its neck only made me more

3

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

eager to lay it low ; its musical plaint, as it
called to its mate, did not charm my savage
breast. I fired. As the creature fell like a
piece of clay, I bounded forward with a wild
joy at my prowess and picked up the still
quivering body from the carpet of pine-needles
where it lay.

Then I was sorry. Not that I at all realized
the enormity of the act. Not that I dreamed
that I should live to see this exquisite, inno-
cent, useful creature, and a hundred other
species of songsters, insect-eaters, warblers
gone from the woods and fields they enlivened
and benefited, massacred by thousands, netted,
their nests robbed and destroyed, their colonies
annihilated ! But for a moment I had a glim-
mer of the truth. Because it was thought by
other boys manly to have a gun and hit to
kill, because thousands of men boasted of the
" bags " they had made, I was doing the same
thing, destroying for the sake of slaughter
without the sting of necessity. Even then it

4

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

struck me that the bird I had seen the moment
before resplendent in the sun was no longer so
beautiful. Its feathers seemed to fall from the
limp body at a touch. Its eye, that was lustrous
when I pickled it up, was glassed and tarnished.
Had it not been for a silly pride which forbade
me going home empty-handed, I should have
dug a hole and covered up my bird, dimly
conscious that I had done a wrong.

Probably it was a clearer idea of what lay at
the bottom of this obscure repulsion that made
me indifferent to shooting, whilst liking nothing
in the world so much as haunting woods and
streams, watching wild beasts and birds and
reading books on natural history. But the
strain of life soon took hold on me and left
little leisure for such things. The old love for
animate creation followed me, however, among
ancient and outlandish languages. Perhaps
that is why I have found in strange corners
of mythology and philology various clews to
odd phenomena among ancient myths.

5

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Why, I asked myself, should certain birds
have been allotted to certain gods and god-
desses in the Greek and Roman mythology ?
Why should the eagle go with Zeus, the pea-
cock with Hera, the dove with Venus, the
swan with Apollo, the woodpecker with Ares,
the owl with Pallas Athene ?
It could not be mere chance
that so many gods and god-
desses had each their attendant
bird; the attribution was too
regular ; it was done too much on a system.
What was the original meaning of it all ?

Aphrodite, drawn in a chariot to which doves
are harnessed, is the goddess of spring, of that
season when the male dove shines in his finest
feather and makes himself even more ardent in
his courtship than before. She is the goddess
of love-making. Doves are forever making
love and caressing each other. Chaucer speaks
of " the wedded turtil with her hearte trewe."
The male struts and cooes and, unrebuffed by

6

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

her indifference, follows closely his beloved.
So the bird is by its nature and habits well
fitted to be the attendant and symbol of love
and the goddess of love — better fitted indeed
than the sparrow, which is sometimes given to
Venus, because of its demonstrative amative-
ness, but, owing to its quarrelsome disposition,
is much less appropriate than the dove. It is
the gentle disposition of the dove that may
have helped to influence the earliest Christians
to make use of the dove as a symbol of peace
and good-will to men, in contrast to the rapa-
cious bird of Jove and the sinister, bloodthirsty-
little attendant on Minerva. But neither the
early Christian use of the dove as an emblem,
nor the pagan way of placing it as a symbol
beside Venus, explains to satisfaction what such
an alliance meant.

There is mournfulness in the cry of the dove
and there was a funereal use of the dove as a
symbol of mourning, if not distinctly of the life
beyond the grave. Aphrodite herself and the

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

worship of Venus seem just the opposite of
death ; moreover it is very hazardous to imagine
that to any wide or popular extent among the
old peoples such an idea could find entrance
as that the giving of life includes the taking
away of life, and therefore that a goddess of
fertility includes the idea of a goddess of death.
Such abstract ideas were undoubtedly familiar
to philosophers at remote epochs, but what is
doubtful is the possibility of a general use of
any symbol representing such ideas among the
people.

Italy seems to have retained some of the
earliest ideas common to the myths of Greece,
Asia Minor and the ^Egean Islands, just as it
affords some of the earliest alphabets of the
^gean region which have disappeared from
the East. One might readily argue that before
the Greek tribes took possession of Greece and
the Etruscans of large parts of Italy the great
peninsulas which form those two countries,
together with most of the islands, were inhab-

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

ited by a race somewhat homogeneous. We
learn to call these earlier swarms the Pclas-
gians — a name wherein some old critics have
guessed, by the common interchange of r with
J, the word Pelargians, or the people of the
storks ; and they have given gratuitously the
explanation that the Pe-
lasgians were so called
because they were of
a roving nature and
came and went like the
storks.

However that might
have been — and the absolute impossibility
of the explanation will be greatly weakened
when we find bird names under many famous
names of gods — we know that a section of
the Pelasgians or Pelargians was in alliance
with Priam of Troy and that In the Greek
period many were still living in Epirus about
Dodona — the famous place for oracles deliv-
ered through the sounds of an oak grove and

9

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of doves sacred to Zeus, who was called Pe-
lasgic in consequence.

It is at Dodona that the dove appears in
human form and thus gives us one clew to its
connection with Venus.

The prophetesses at Dodona told Herodotus
that two black doves flew from Thebes in
Egypt ; one went to Libya, where it caused
the oracle of Jupiter Ammon to be founded ;
the other to Dodona. The latter settled in
an oak-tree and spoke with a human voice
" saying that it was necessary that a prophetic
seat of Zeus should be established in that
place.'* Herodotus would not believe this
crude legend ; he explains that the doves were
women of Egypt, sold by Phoenicians into
Libya and Epirus. They were called birds
by the natives, because they could not speak
the language ; but when they had learned the
speech of their captivity they were said to
have spoken with human tongues. " So long
as she spoke a barbarian tongue, she seemed

lO

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

to them to be uttering voice like a bird : for
if it had been really a dove, how could it
speak with a human voice ? '* Apparently Her-
odotus was ignorant of the fact that parrots
and ravens reproduce the articulate sounds of
men. We may be sure that his informants
were wrong in attributing the origin of Do-
dona, its oak and doves, to Egypt, for there
are too many analogies for just such things
in Asia and northern Europe.

Since Dodona was an ancient oracle of the
inhabitants of Epirus and Thessaly before the
Greeks, we may consider its legends Pelasgian
rather than Greek. The northern nations who
from time to time sent offerings wrapped in
wheaten straw to the fane of Apollo on Delos
caused their envoys to cross the Adriatic and
deliver up the gifts at Dodona. Thence they
were sent to the Maliac Gulf and passed from
city to city on to Delos. The stop at Dodona
shows a connection between the north of
Europe and the Pelasgians. Oracles were

II

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

given at Dodona not only from the sound in
the oak-tree but the voices of doves.

There can be little doubt that the grove
at Dodona was a primeval spot sacred to
divinities much ruder than Zeus and Aphrodite
his daughter. In the time of Herodotus it
was the fashion to trace everything to Egypt ;
we must look the other way for traces of sim-
ilar worship among the peoples of middle and
northern Europe, among the Hyperboreans,
as the Greeks called them. And so, if we
take the old Italian name of Aphrodite, Venus
male and Venus female (for Italy had both)
we discover among the Finnic nations on the
Baltic a legend in the Kalevala of the old god
Vaino, together with his female double Aino,
the young girl who spurns him, drowns her-
self—

*< Like a pretty song-bird perished *'

and becomes a teasing or mournful water-
sprite, according to the mood of the poet.
After she has returned to Aphrodite's ele-

12

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

ment Vaino sets out to catch her with his
nets and fish lines ; she allows herself to be
caught in the shape of a fish ; but just as he
touches the fish with his knife, it springs over-
board and mocks him —

I am not a scaly sea-fish.
Not a trout of northland rivers.
Not a whiting from the waters.
Not a salmon of the northseas ;
I, a young and merry maiden.
Friend and sister of the fishes,
Youkahainen's youngest sister,
J, the one that thou dost fish for,
I am Aino, whom thou lovest.

{Rime V, Crawford's translation.)

Venus and Vaino are both of them born of
the sea, yet children of the great gods Zeus
and Ukko. We may be sure that the people
who founded the oracle at Dodona had a male
and female parallel to the male and female
Venus of Italy and the Vaino-Aino pair on
the Baltic. Later on I shall argue that this
god must have been Pan, shown by the parallel

13

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

between Pan-Syrinx and Vaino-Aino. Mean-
time the connection of the dove with Venus
may be found in Greek, where a name for the
dove is oinas — in all likelihood a word taken
up from the old non-Aryan peoples, a word
having nothing to do with wine (oinos), but
with the bird that at Dodona, and doubtless
at many another oak grove, was once identical
with a deity.

There is warrant for the ground that many
names of gods were assumed by the Greeks
proper from the older people of Greece, whom
they more or less perfectly subjected. After
stating that the Pelasgians had no special
names for gods, a statement of course impos-
sible, Herodotus says they first took their
god names from Egypt, but afterwards con-
sulted the oracle at Dodona, fearing lest they
had done wrong. " So when the Pelasgians
asked the oracle at Dodona whether they
should adopt the names which had come from
the barbarians, the oracle, in reply, bade them

14

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

make use of the names. From this time
they sacrificed, using the names of the gods ;
and from the Pelasgians the Hellenes after-
wards received them." It was natural that
Herodotus thought all mythological learning
came from Egypt, but we must doubt it. The
point to be noted is the tradition in Greece
handed down by him that god names came
from a non-Greek source.

This dove name oinas is found not only
in Venus but in the favorite son of Venus,
-^neas of Troy, not a Trojan but an ally of
Priam. i^neas is therefore the dove god
humanized and made a heroical, well-nigh a
historical figure, just as we shall see that
Achilleus is the eagle god. But we should
beware of thinking of these gods in their
relation to such heroes of romance, as if they
were the gods wrought out and sublimated to
the positions the Greeks gave Zeus and
Aphrodite. The stories of mythology branched
oflF long before the gods attained that grandeur

15

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

and continued until all memory of their original
connection was lost.

The other Greek word for pigeon or dove,
peleia, seems to be of Greek, not of Pelasgic
origin like oinas. We find a probable meaning
in the word pelemizo, to quake, quiver, tremble.
The peleia would be the bird that quakes, as
one sees the pigeon or wild dove quiver when
caught or while dying — a peculiarity that did
not escape the sharp eye of Audubon. This
is a better derivation than from pelos, dark,
dusky, ash-colored ; for we have no reason to
suppose that the rock pigeon or ringdove
would strike the eyes of early men as espe-
cially dusky or dark. And so the old King
Pelops, whose name adheres to the Pelopon-
nesus, is likelier to mean "Dove face'* than
" Dark face."

Venus of the lovely form, sweet voice and
enchanted necklace is therefore not merely
from the poetic standpoint symbolized by the
dove, the bird that draws her flower-studded

i6

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

chariot through the air. Venus was the dove
itself once upon a time, when people about
the Mediterranean were rising from the stage
when they could conceive of bloodthirsty
warrior-gods only, such as existed on the Bal-
tic down to the Middle Ages, into the concep-
tion of gods or goddesses with lovable traits,
such as Pallas Athene and Apollo and Aphro-
dite. The bird that the Greeks called the
" quaker " formed naturally the model for the
sweet love goddess who fled, trembling, before
the spear of Diomedes on the windy plains
of Troy. It was owing to his irreverent
treatment of Aphrodite that Diomedes lost
the love of his wife, and, on his voyage to
Italy to found a new colony, the services of
his men, whom the vindictive goddess turned
into birds. If i^neas, like his mother Venus,
seems to descend mythologically from the
dove, Diomedes, like his father Tydeus and
his patroness Pallas Athene, seems to de-
scend from some bird of prey whose war-

2 17

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

like nature shows in the name Tydeus, the
striker.

What more natural, considering the preva-
lence of bird worship in remote days, than the
offerings of doves in the Temple at Jerusalem
and the prominence of the dove at Hierapolis,
the vast temple of the Syrian goddess described
by Lucian ? The latter has left on record that
the dove was not eaten at Hierapolis ; it was
a sacred bird ; and he refers to a legend that
Semiramis was turned into a dove. So we find
the Indians of a clan that bears the name of a
bird or beast refusing to kill that bird or beast
except on certain occasions, when its sacrifice
becomes a religious rite and the harm done it
is neutralized by the ceremony and appropriate
prayers.

Venus retains in her later shape some bird-
characteristics, such as her capture in the golden
net made by her husband, who for contrast is
a sooty and lame god of the forge. The swan
and the sparrow have been assigned to her as

i8

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

chariot steeds by poets of antiquity ; but the
dove is evidently the true bird of Venus ;
other birds are the swallow, because of its inti-
mate connection with spring and flowers, and
the iynx, a magical bird used for one ingredient
of love-philtres and potions. And in her son
iEneas certain bird-traits occur, such as his
bearing his father Anchises on his back, which
resembles the carrying off by the phoenix of
his parent bird. The connection in the early
history of Latium between ^neas and the old
King Latinus, son of Faunus, must belong to
the most remote period, antedating the legends
about Troy ; because ^neas the dove hero and
Venus the dove goddess must have been Italian
as well as Pelasgian Greek.

We are not left without a description, such
as it is, of the dove god or goddess belong-
ing to the " Pelasgian " or non-Aryan and
probably non-Semitic peoples of Syria. In
Lucian's time the priests of the Syrian goddess
at Hierapolis preserved a golden image " com-

19

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

pounded of various forms '* which was taken
with great solemnity twice a year to the sea-
shore, probably to be given a ritual bath ; at
any rate it accompanied the priests, who went
to fetch sea water twice a year. Its barbarous
form, which Lucian seems to hesitate to de-
scribe, is noteworthy enough ; but what is more
interesting yet is the fact that it bore on its
head the figure of a pigeon. Composite gods
with birds on their heads were dug up in the
last century in Mecklenburg on the Baltic
near the traditional site of a pagan temple.
But the bird was not the dove.

We are safe in concluding that Dodona was
one of many sacred groves seized on by the
Greeks when they conquered Greece and made
over into their own, before Zeus was evolved
and had taken the place of the old god similar
to Vaino of the Finns — before Aphrodite the
seaborn had dispossessed a goddess similar to
the Finnic Aino and the nymph Syrinx. Vaino
himself is like Venus in his double character of

20

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

minstrel who sings the joys of the marriage
festival and the lamentations for the dead; Plu-
tarch says that Venus presided over birth and
death. Hence the use of doves in two such
opposite scenes as marriage and funeral feasts.
The Longobards placed over the graves of their
people wooden slabs with doves carved on top.
In England the pigeon was a death-bird and
portent of the grave ; the sick man who had
a desire to eat of a pigeon was supposed to
foretell his own demise. Yet the pigeon also
brings good luck. In Russia it was once
sacred to Perun the god of thunder, and had
some occult power to extinguish fires ; but if
one should fly in at a window the portent was
just the other way ; a fire might be expected.
Living pigeons used to be placed on the head
of a dying man in order to attract the pain.

Pan of Greece, the male Venus of Italy and
Vaino of the Finnic tribes have a represen-
tative among the German nations who was
still fresh enough in the memory of the people

21

Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

during the Middle Ages to have found his way
into the German poets of the thirteenth cen-
tury. This is the nature god Wunsch, often
mentioned by Hartmann in a way to prove
that he was conceived as a deity like Vaino,
who created and invented things, especially
grain, plants and flowers, beauty in women
and children, power and magical strength in
men. He often appears where we might
translate his name by Nature or Providence
or God, but more specifically he is a god of
love and happiness who gives to men what
they desire, a god of fortune, as the female
Venus and Aphrodite were. In throwing dice
the Venus cast was the lucky cast. To say
that a woman had the figure or feet of
Wunsch was exactly as if one said of Venus.
Yet Wunsch is always spoken of as masculine.
It is sad to think that the boy learning to
shoot, the feather hunter and the pot hunter
are fast rendering our woods, fields and gardens
tuneless and given over to insects destructive

22

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of vegetables, fruits and flowers. The Labra-
dor duck, of which large flocks were to be
seen in winter on Long Island Sound twenty
years ago, is an extinct bird, although protected
for most of the year by its habitat on the open
waters. We shall soon come to catching the
remnants of our commonest songbirds to place
them in aviaries, before they too go the way of
the Great Auk and the Labrador duck. And
we know how truly Chaucer wrote in the "Tale
of the Crow " as to the bird that is caged :

Take any bird and put it in a cage.

And do all thine intent and thy courage

To foster it tenderly with meat and drink

Of all the dainties that thou canst bethink.

And keep it all so cleanly as thou may — •

Although his cage of gold be ne'er so gay.

Yet had this bird by twenty-thousand-fold

Gone eat (of) worms and such (like) wretchedness.

Forever this bird will done his business

To escape out of his cage, if he may.

We are indeed sinking fast into the condition
of Italy, where myriads of birds, neither large

23

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

enough nor toothsome enough to serve as food,
are slaughtered wherever and whenever they
venture to rest on their migrations between
Africa and northern Europe. The men who
have rooted the beautiful white egret out of
Florida are pursuing it into Venezuela and
Brazil. If some stop is not put to them, they
will in a few years destroy this bird from the
face of the earth, as they have banished it from
the United States.

24

CHAPTER II

Picus the Woodpecker

NOT many miles from Berlin, I was lying
in a grove with my back propped
against an oak, when I heard a laugh, a quick,
cackling laugh overhead. I knew at once it
was a woodpecker. I could hear through the
back of my head how his claws rattled against
the bark as he made his way up the trunk and

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

along the larger branches ; my mind's eye was
aware how his amazing Httle serpent of a
tongue was darting through dark, involved bur-
rows deep in the wood to ferret out grubs and
beetles. Presently he came in sight on an
overhanging limb. He scuttled along below
the branch like a fly on a ceiling. Brave in his
blood-red hood and mottled back, he turned his
bright red eye sharply this way and that. Sud-
denly he laughed again; an echo seemed to
return it. Then he paused. Had he caught
sight of me and recognized man, the universal
policeman, tyrant, murderer ? At any rate he
moved on. In short rapid ups and downs of
flight he made for a dead tree across the glade
and slipped round the trunk to peep at me
from the other side.

I have heard Germans say that the wood-
pecker bores into a branch and then scuttles
round on the opposite side to see if the hole
has gone quite through ! Lucky little one, to
find a dead tree at all, considering the fanaticism

26

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of the nativ^e forester, the fury with which he
hacks down any tree that looks decayed, and
thus deprives Mr. and Mrs. Woodpecker of a
spot in which to feed, to chisel a cave for their
nest, to make famous music !

As I watched him and he watched me, a
reminiscence of the puzzle and maze of old
Italian myths connected
itself with this bright lit-
tle chap in my mind.
The bird of Mars,
why .? Naturally, be-
cause of his blood-red
hood and eye like the
planet Mars. Also was he the bird that
played the part of raven to the infant Romu-
lus, that son of Mavors, when the mother wolf
could no longer supply milk to him and his
brother. And then I recalled that obscure old
god Picus, son of Saturn, father of Faunus,
grandfather of Latinus. To be sure ! Here
he was, or at least the symbol, totem, animal

27

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

representative of him. But why, oh, why
did the ancient Italiots choose just this bird,
and place him in a line of ancestry that vied
with and perchance claimed precedence of
Jove ?

After all, I reasoned, what do we really know
about Greek and Latin mythology, despite the
centuries during which we have been pretend-
ing to study the classics and nothing but the
classics, seeing it, as we still do see it, through
the spectacles of ancient writers who lacked the
wide sweep of the world's Hteratures and the
world's humbler races to obtain materials ex-
tensive enough from which to make compari-
sons that throw light? Although the men of
religion in their day were not so hot to throttle
knowledge as they have been since, perhaps
because they were not so deadly sure that they
knew it all, and that theirs was the only way to
save mankind, nevertheless, the heathen too
were influenced by fear of oflFending the pious.
Some have broken their confidences regarding

28

Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

myths short off at the most interesting point,
with the express statement that they are forbid
or do not wish to tell more. Herodotus the
peerless is one of the most 'exasperating, be-
cause he tells so much concerning the world
of his day and its beliefs that one can scarce
reconcile one's self to the fact that he refrained
purposely from telling more. Pausanias is an-
other. The Eleusinian, the Orphic mysteries
— why not have thrown a few rays into them ?
Doubtless they were simple enough : doubt-
less it was the very homely simplicity of the
ideas they divulged which made them uncom-
municable, lest the priestly fabrics overhead
should by that simplicity appear feeble and
vain.

So here was the prophetic bird beneath
whose graven image the Sabines asked for
answers from the gods ! There he clung at
end of a dead branch, as if carved against a
wooden column, like the pillar Ovid mentions
with a picus atop, or like the soapstone birds

29

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

that Bent found in the ruins of Mashonaland,
even as at Matiena in Italy the enemies and
allies of the Romans figured him. And then
for the first time I perceived why he had been
selected to represent the god of thunder-clouds,
before the Latins knew of Zeus and other
Greekish gods. In some way that I could
not make out he was using the branch as a
drum and rolling out a peal that must have
been heard a mile.

Since then I have learned from better, more
patient observers how the woodpecker accom-
plishes his martial music. By quick, vigorous
blows of his beak the dead branch is set in
vibration ; then he lays his hollow beak against
the vibrating wood to add resonance to the
peal. A true performer on the xylophone,
he varies his drumming by springing from
one branch to another and thus gets a change
of note. The rolling naturally suggested
thunder, the more so because the ancients
thought he drummed before the rain, as indeed

30

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

may be the case, because the coming rain may
lure insects out and abundance of food may
make the bird liveHer in his efforts to please
himself and his mate. Whence, to regard him
as a capital bird of prophecy and place him at
a remote epoch as the visible sign of a god of
thunder, was but a step. The epoch, we must
suppose, was prior to that in which the aris-
tocracy of gods on Olympus had turned itself
into the exclusive set it afterwards became.

According to the sounding of this nature's
drum, the auspex, Druid, Velleda, rainmaker
of the past argued what was to be the turn
of the weather and what were the chances of
chase and war. Till well down to present
times the magicians of the Lapps, far to the
north, and in earlier days those of the Finns
and Esthonians, used the magic drum or tam-
bourine to foretell pleasure or pain, luck or
evil, with a very distinct recognition, I believe,
of the analogies between drum, woodpecker
and thunder god. In this century the Lapps,

31

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

like the Samoyeds and other tribes of Siberia,
not only used the drum for incantations, but
foretold coming events by drawing figures on
the stretched hide of the drum and then watch-
ing the course taken by a ring laid loosely on
the hide, as the vibration of the drumming
carried it toward one figure or the other. The
probability is, that before Jupiter was known
in Italy by that name, the worshippers of the
great god Picus, living in their wicker huts
lives not so very unlike those of Lapps and
Finns, used the tambourine for magic and
prophecy, just as some of these Hyperboreans
used and still use their own small drum.

National vanity has made sad work of the
study of the past. Men of science, in whom
one ought never find that a blind patriotism
has made them pervert facts, have insisted on
the superiority of their own people's ancestry
and made havoc of history. German archae-
ologists have claimed Teutonism wherever
they learned or imagined that one nation of

32

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the past overcame another, or suspected that
some special virtue characterized a people.
The national claimant has been a scourge.
Englishmen have had the most absurd ideas of
the size, wisdom, valor and purity of Angles
and Saxons, ignoring the parts played by
Norman, Briton and yet earlier races. Welsh-
men, Scots and Irishmen will not listen if you
point to traces in their tongue, history and
legends of nationalities or races, at present
despised, who were in Great Britain and
Ireland before the Kelts. They have, it is
true, classic models ; they but follow in the
footsteps of the Romans, who concocted a
past that was full of magnificence, although
their history and legends show that they
sprang from a mixture of shepherds, robbers
and outcasts. Perhaps, after all, yonder wood-
pecker is wiser than we know, I pondered.
His droll gestures and bright eye seem to say
that he is aware how human beings have made
a thunder-bird of him. That may be the rea-
3 33

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

son why he bursts every now and then into a
cackle ; to think what fools these mortals be !
It was not the Italiots alone who used to wor-
ship Picus because of his antics, queer voice
and rolling drum. The Wotjaks still honor
him as a god. A few centuries ago the Estho-
nians and Finns, who, history says, were Chris-
tianized in the I2th and 13th centuries, were
seen to be Christians only out of fear, to be
still quietly worshipping their old idols. The
Esthonians kept their thunder god Pikker
or Pikne. Could we resurrect the temple
huts filled with idols, which they concealed in
lonely woods, we should certainly see wooden
images of a bird god, Pikker the woodpecker.
He is no other than our mysterious deity of
Italy, Picus the father of Faunus. This is
only one of many threads that connect the
Finnic peoples of Russia and Siberia with the
rustic classes, the ancient subject races of
Italy, ay, and of Greece, and of men eastward
beyond the iEgean, whose faded features may

34

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

be detected below the Aryan and Semitic
overfloods.

With these old bird gods we get so far back
into the past that the difference no longer
seems great between the populations of the
various continents. We are tempted to imagine
that myths and legends have migrated from
one people to another, because like myths,
like legends, are found in countries far apart.
Even across the Atlantic the magic drum, the
worship of beasts and birds, such as the bear,
and a similar woodpecker with a scarlet hood ;
the belief that stones have life and that spirits
can inhabit rocks, suggest at first a connection
by communication.

Sacrifice of beasts, torture, hanging and
burning of men, head-hunting, human sacri-
fices and occasional cannibalism assimilate the
red man to the old peoples of Europe and
bring them close to those inflated moderns
whose ancestors, regarded curiously, are seen
to have indulged in all these pleasing vaga-

35

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

rles of the human soul within historic times.
Yetj physically, the red man is certainly far
removed from the European ; his legends and
myths are practically untouched by those of
any other continent. We must get out of the
habit of supposing that if a legend or fairy-
tale almost exactly like one from Greek or
Latin appears in northern or western Europe,
it was therefore brought from Greece or Italy.
More easily could it have gone the other way,
from the barbarian to the more cultivated,
curious, book-writing nations on the Mediter-
ranean. But for the most part we may be sure
that myths and legends did not move about
Europe to any great extent, but were produced
by similar strains of mankind independently,
to meet the needs of a similar state of culture.
And since all nature, the beasts and birds
about them were pretty much the same, the
gods who partook of similar characteristics
sprang naturally from similar observations and
were credited with similar lives.

36

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Take the woodpecker as an instance.
When we picture to ourselves the European
savage, noble ancestor of our puffed-up race,
finding it a matter of deep thought how to
keep a roof over his head, loving murder, a
bloody tyrant to the weak, cringing before
power, subject to periodical famines because
of his sloth and ignorance, to disease because
of his laziness and filthy habits, we can under-
stand his envy and admiration of a bird which,
in addition to various marvellous, superhuman
traits, has the practical side so developed that
it can chisel for itself in a few hours a neat,
dry cave in the bole of a tree — a bird ever
brave and gay of heart that seems to find
nourishment where no green thing grows,
right under its busy beak.

Mr. Woodpecker was thought to know the
whereabouts of hidden treasures ; wherefore
is he a special creation of the high god Ukko
of the Finns and has a mysterious afiinity to
fire, also a rain and thunder god. Writing

37

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

in 1644 Johann Gutsloff gives the prayer of
an old Esthonian farmer : " Beloved Picker,
we will sacrifice to thee an ox with two horns
and four hoofs, and want to beg you as to our
ploughing and sowing that our straw shall be
red as copper and our grain as yellow as gold.
Send elsewhither all black thick clouds over
great swamps, high woods and wide wastes !
But give to us ploughmen and sowers a fertile
season and sweet rain."

In Finnish and Esthonian pikker is no
longer used to designate the woodpecker, per-
haps because when a word is once used for
a god it becomes dangerous and is gradually
dropped in its ordinary meaning. At present
tikka holds its place. Or else in the course of
time the initial p has given place to /, as we
shall find that the Greeks seem to have re-
ceived the foreign name of the peacock with
that bird and changed the initial from p to /.

In the Kalevala the god of the woods Tapio
IS the old bird god represented by, perhaps

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

once worshipped under, the woodpecker ; his
name contains our word to tap, strike, and the
German word tapfer, brave. In that epic our
friend the woodpecker is not directly named,
perhaps because he was so very sacred ; but
the minor wood god Nyyrikki, upon whom
Lemminkainen calls in his distress to help
him track the magic elk, is, like his father
Tapio, evidently a survival of Pikker. We
can see that from his red cap and blue mantle
and the prayer addressed to him that he shall
blaze a path through the woody wilds.

O Nyyrikki, mountain hero.

Son of Tapio of forests.

Hero with the scarlet headgear.

Notches make along the pathway.

Landmarks upward on the mountain.

That the hunter may not wander.

{Rune XIV, Cra^vford's translation)

In German legends the woodpecker appears
as a magic bird that knows where the spring-
wurzel grows, a flower we have reason to

39

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

identify with some species of the peony, the
plant of Pan and the sun, that plant which
will open concealed doors of rock and permit
the lucky possessor to enter the Venusberg
and lift treasure. The way to beguile this
bird is to stop up tightly the mouth of the
hole where its young are ; the bird returns,
and, after seeing what is wrong, flies off to
fetch a plant which will dis-
lodge the obstruction. If the
treasure-seeker gives a shout
at the right moment, the
woodpecker drops the spray
and flies away. Near Rauen in the Mark-
grafenstein is a princess who guards a treasure.
She can only be released and the treasure lifted
by some one who shall come at midnight of a
Friday, carrying a white woodpecker. She is
the descendant of Frau Venus in the Venus-
berg, with whom, like Ulysses in the island
of Kalypso, the knight Tannhauser passed
days of happiness and remorse.

40

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

We know from Pliny what great store the
auspexes ot Rome set by the woodpecker
*' known by his cognomen of Mars " and
from mediaeval German writers that a wood-
pecker flying to the right was an omen of
good luck, Picus the god was figured as a
youth with this bird on his head. Though
Pikker or Pikne is still familiar to Finns and
Esthonians in fairy stories, where he is known
as the son of thunder, he seems to have lost
all his birdlike qualities. The object with
which he strikes his enemies, it is true, is con-
ceived of as a musical instrument, but neither
drum nor tambourine ; it is the ancient instru-
ment of the Scotch and Irish — the bagpipes.
In one story found in Esthland the son of
thunder saves himself from the power of an
evil genius by stealing the thunderclap in the
shape of bagpipes from his father Kou and
giving them up as a ransom. When Old
Horny has them locked up in hell no rain
falls and the earth dries up. In another folk-

41

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

tale it is Pikne who is thunder god and owner
of the pipes, and it is the devil himself, plainly
at an earlier date some goblin not so malignant
as Satan, who steals and makes off with them.

Pikker is a word found again in German
Specht, woodpecker. Finnic tribes find it
inconvenient to pronounce s and jp together.
The word Spickgans, smoked goose, appears
in Esthonian as pikk-hani.

The Kelts seem to have applied a word like
picus and Pikker to the raven, with a change
of initial p to f; since Irish has fiach (feek)
for that wily bird of magic and prophecy. It
is a bird with human traits, for although the
woodpecker laughs, the raven can be taught
to speak. Beside Picus the ancient Italians
had pica, the magpie — another wise, uncanny
bird. The Greeks called the woodpecker with
circumlocutions the tree-chiseller, or else
pelekas, the hewer with an axe, as if his
ordinary name had become too sacred to pro-
nounce. Aristophanes called him oak-striker;

42

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

when he spoke of the poikilis or " speckled "
bird that eats the eggs of the lark he probably
referred to the magpie.

The importance of the woodpecker in the
eyes of Roman soothsayers can hardly be over-
estimated. I have a seal, scarab-like in form,
wrought in the old Italiot way of rounds con-
nected by grooves, which I obtained at Flor-
ence. It belongs to the sort called Etruscan.
The seal shows a man seated with a bird be-
fore him, which he appears to be teaching a
trick. As usual in these rude seals, it is not
easy to fix the species of the bird ; but it seems
a woodpecker to which the provincial seal-
cutter has given a somewhat longer tail than
nature allows Mr. Picus. That the man is an
auspex or soothsayer is reasonably certain from
the fact that he wears the conical cap seen on
the little statuette with Etruscan inscription
in the Vatican Museum, a statuette generally
allowed to be that of an Etruscan augur or
diviner.

43

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

One may recall here the classic story of
i^lius the praetor, chief of a famous family of
Rome at the time of Hannibal's entrance into
Italy. As he sat on his chair a woodpecker
flew down and settled on his head. All was
excitement and alarm at the prodigy ! The
bird was caught and the augurs called in.
These declared that its coming meant disaster,
but whether to ^lius and his clan or to the
republic depended on circumstances. Should
the woodpecker be freed unharmed, great pros-
perity would result to ^lius and his family,
but disaster would come to the republic.
Should the bird be killed, then the republic
would prosper, but the ^lian family would
meet with ruin.

In a dilemma of this sort the hero always
prefers his fatherland to his family, otherwise
the story would not be told, ^"lius killed the
living symbol of the god Picus and at the bat-
tle of Cannae, which occurred soon after, he lost
seventeen members of his clan.

44

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Doubtless this is the bird of popuhir super-
stition in White Russia which is described with
eyes of fire and a fiery beard, a guardian of
treasures, and probably not the demon repre-
senting the underground gods of wealth, Pluto
or Kuveras, which Gubernatis suggests. In
one of the stories of the Pentameron a fairy
in bird-form stops the king who is about to
kill Pontiella. In order that Pontiella and
her child shall not die of starvation, the bird
picks a hole in the tower where she is confined
and gives them food. Here we have the
magic woodpecker again.

Ravens and crows were greater favorites with
the augurs, since their wide flight and distinct
voices made them convenient for divination.
That was a strange tale of Valerius Corvus,
who accepted the challenge of a huge Gaul to
single combat during the invasion of Lower
Italy by the Kelts under Bran the "raven" or
Brennus. During the duel he was aided by a
crow that attacked the Gaul's face with beak

45

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

and wing and so confused him that Valerius
made his foe an easy prey, whence Valerius
was also Corvus thereafter. Here was a crow-
counsellor, like the ravens Hugin and Mugin
that whispered advice in the ears of the Norse
god Odin. Note that the famous Gaulish con-
queror of Rome had a name meaning a bird.

A closer analogy is found in Wales to the
legend of Valerius Corvus : in a Mabinogi the
hero Owein son of Urien is accompanied by
an army of ravens, which attack his enemies
like so many Stymphalian birds. Woden's
ravens have their parallel in Ireland. The
hero Cuchullaind had two magic ravens that
announced to him the coming of his foes and
were attacked by them for that reason. In
Japan there is a special kind of demon or
goblin called Karaku-Tengu " crow-demon,"
having wings and the beak of a crow in place
of nose. I have an egg-shaped talisman, used
as a button, carved of hard wood, which shows
delightfully the birth of a Karaku-Tengu. The

46

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

little fellow has just chipped the shell ; his
beak, wing and three-fingered hands are visible
where the egg-shell has been broken by his
efforts.

It is not strange that birds fascinated the
ancient peoples ; they fascinate modern men
who think they know
everything and for the
most part are too ab-
sorbed by the struggle
for life in cities to look
long and closely at nature. In Rhode Island
I have watched on Conanicut cliffs a row of
sea-birds perching in a recess of the rock near
Horse's Head. About sundown, one after the
other, these birds would fly far out over the
swirling sea to the big black Kettle Rock
opposite Castle Hill, turn and return to its
perch. When the last had performed this
solemn rite, all went to sleep ; it was a fare-
well to the sun. And indeed, when one
thinks of the tailor-birds that weave, and the

47

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

rails that hold dancing-parties, and those birds
that build bowers to sport in and deck them
with shining objects ; when one thinks of the
preternatural cunning of the magpie, and recol-
lects how prone birds are, even dull domestic
fowl, to make sudden, inexplicable calls and
rushes ; when one notes the clock-like regu-
larity of the return of migratory birds to their
old haunts and their supernatural gift of find-
ing a way by night and fog — it is no wonder
that not only poets, but tiresome, humdrum
persons believed in their magical power at
the earliest epochs.

What schoolboy has not marvelled at that
strange story of Philomela and Procne, daugh-
ters of Pandion king of Athens ? According
to the legend Pandion's son-in-law Tereus was
changed to a hoopoe or a hawk, Philomela to a
nightingale, Procne to a swallow. The wicked
king of Thessaly who wooed and won Philo-
mela bears in his name (Tereus the piercer,
borer) the most notable trait of our little friend

48

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

woodpecker. Pandion " Pan the god" was, as
presently we shall see, alternately the eagle,
peacock or cuckoo.

Tereus Woodpecker first marries Philomela
Nightingale, and then, tiring of her, persuades
Pandion (his father-in-law) and Procne Swal-
low (his sister-in-law) that Philomela is dead ;
whereupon he gets also Swallow to wife. On
the journey home Woodpecker cuts out Swal-
low's tongue so that she may never tell of his
crime when she discovers that her sister is still
alive. Whence it followed that the swallow
from that time forth could only make twitter-
ing noises like barbarians — the Greeks said
that barbarians did not speak, they twittered.

When we consider Lemminkainen and II-
marinen in the poetry of Finiand we find this
story again, with the cuckoo, not the wood-
pecker, as the villain of the play.

The wondersmith Ilmarinen, whose first wife
was slain through the malice of Kullervo, goes
again to Pohjola to woo her sister. But the
4 49

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

sister fears the same fate and refuses him ;
whereupon he seizes her and, placing her in his
magic sleigh, carries her off. As she gives
him none but bitter words and constantly wails
and complains, he loses patience and turns her
into a gull ; whence it is that the gull fre-
quents lonely seas and shores and never ceases
to complain. Finally we must not forget a
parallel of Picus of Italy and Pikker of Estho-
nia among the Old Prussians, a Slavic race pro-
bably mixed with Finnic tribes. They had an
idol to which human beings were sacrificed.
When pleased, this idol was heard to laugh !
Its name was Picollus ! " der olle Pikker"?

•But before turning to other bird gods I may
say that the expression the Greeks used for a
foreign tongue " twitter " has always seemed
to me to point to a Slavonic language as the
first which suggested the idea. If one listens
to Polish or Vendish, without understanding it,
there is a peculiarly soft twittering quality to
be remarked in the utterance, probably due to

50

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the comparative infrequency of broad vowels,
the softening of consonants and vowels with /,
and the constant use of the soft sh. Geo-
graphically, too, the idea that to Greeks a Slav
tongue was the nearest and commonest of bar-
barian languages has everything to recommend
it.

Notwithstanding the horror with which the
crime of Tereus was regarded by antiquity he
was worshipped after death, another proof that
we have in him a god whose story is myth
become history. Pausanias mentions his tomb
in his description of Attika. According to
the Megarians he was a king of the district of
Pagai in their land. It will be remembered
that to punish him his wife slew their son
Itys and served him at a banquet ; but Tereus
was not able to avenge the crime on the
vengeful woman he had wronged. He died
In Megara by his own hand, reports Pausa-
nias, and as soon as he was dead they built
a cairn over his grave and worshipped him

51

Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

every year. But instead of scattering grains
of barley, they scattered little pebbles on his
tomb.

Such wonderful tales were invented by the
Greeks to explain the remnants of a worship
of the woodpecker found among the earlier
denizens of Greece.

52

The Cuckoo Gods

CHAPTER III

THOUGH I had often heard the cry of
the cuckoo on a visit to Europe as a
child, the first cuckoo I ever saw was in the
west of Ireland long after. A brownish bird
the size of a pigeon, looking somewhat like
a hawk, flew across the road, and, settling in a
field, hopped or rather scrambled about in a
rather hawk-like way. I did not recognize
him ; but when my driver told me who he
was I descended with alacrity and was amused
at the clumsiness on foot of a bird that seemed
ready enough on the wing.

53

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

" The awkward gawk ! " I murmured, re-
membering the common term for him ; and as
I beheld his labored gait and bethought me of
certain old heroes of Ireland, whose curious
traits and adventures have never been explained,
I fell to thinking —

Of elders of olde time and their awke dedys.

At last I had clapped eyes on a bird whose
peculiar ways and life had given me a clew
to legends woven about various mighty men
of yore, though his familiar name of gawk
among the English, Gauch among the Ger-
mans, is considered more suggestive of clown-
ishness and stupidity than of heroism. For
he is the unlucky, left-handed, gauche bird,
whose name has enriched the French language
with terms for the left hand and lack of dex-
terity. The good and bad in him seems to
have impressed men and been carried by the
old peoples to extremes.

Since then I have often heard and sometimes
54

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

seen the cuckoo in his favorite haunts — some
country neighborhood where trees and shrubs
are abundant enough to give him rests in his
short flights and supply the smaller song-
sters with convenient nesting-places, which
the cuckoo-mother can use in her way. One
hears them to the right and left as one punts
about the canals of the upper Spree in that odd
little country of the Vends, where the old Vend-
ish tongue still lingers among the rustics. What
a softness, what a dreaminess, yet what alert-
ness, in their call ! Very difl^erent is the sound
of the American cuckoo — a smaller bird with
a louder, hastier, longer note, and a family life
that does not lend itself to the grievous charges
made against its European cousin.

Difficult to distinguish whence it comes, the
call of the old-world cuckoo baffles the listener
like the voice of a ventriloquist, as indeed it is.
There 's your uncanny bird, if ever there was
one ! And the country people, not content
with charging against it the actual tricks and

55

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

misdeeds it plays on other birds in its deter-
mination to escape the hardest part of the rear-
ing of its young, have saddled the cuckoo with
all sorts of gratuitous crimes. It is said to live
in lawless love, like the cowbird of America.
It is accused of killing the young in the nest
of the little bird where it has placed its own
egg to be hatched. It is charged with desert-
ing its own offspring forever, out of pure
laziness and hardness of heart, nay, even of
devouring its foster-parents !

But some careful observers have maintained
that cuckoos pair for life and are steadfast
mates, do not directly kill the young of the
foster-birds nor break their eggs; yet they
acknowledge that the female cuckoo removes
the eggs of the foster-mother after its own
child is hatched. The mother keeps her eye
on each nest where one of her eggs has been
placed, watches over the growth of her off-
spring, and, when the latter is ready to fly,
takes possession of it, and presumably begins

56

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

at once to point out to it the advantage of
being a parasite, teaching it how to profit by
the kindliness of similar hosts thereafter.

Such refinements of observation can scarcely
be expected from the ancients, nor in the pres-
ent from rustics. To the ancients the cuckoo
was a darling of crime whose knavery endeared
him to them, whose supposed wickedness struck
them with the horrified admiration that peasants
often show for brazen criminals. Was not the
ancient chief or Druid or rainmaker or medi-
cine-man a person who lived on his wits
through the credulity of his less clever fellows ?
How could hv" pil tc admire a bird that showed
its '' smcatness " by shoving on the shoulders
of others the trouble of child-rearing .^ Foster-
age of children, a custom found particularly
rife in Ireland, may well have had its vogue
through imitation of this bird.

The ancients believed that cuckoos took no
further care of their young put out to nurse.
Thanks to ceaseless vigils on the part of men

57

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

like Baldamus, we know that this is not the
case. Believing as they did, they proceeded to
argue thus : the young cuckoo must grow up
ignorant of father, mother, brother and sister ;
when it comes to mate, what is to prevent it
from pairing with a near relative ? A tragedy
is always possible. Here is the clew to many

a fairy story which has
come down from some
legend of a heathen god,
whose living symbol was
the cuckoo, to more than
one great drama, and to
numberless strange tales,
revolting to modern decency, otherwise inexpli-
cable in their seemingly gratuitous immorality
— tales that were repeated in the inglenook as
of historical personages, tales —

Of elders of olde time and their avvke dedys.

I am not aware that this provenance of
many folk-tales, epical songs, ballads, legends

58

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

and myths has ever been pointed out before ;
bird gods seem to have attracted little atten-
tion ; but the truth of that provenance can, I
believe, be substantiated from the mythology
and legends of Greece and Rome in the light
of those of Ireland and Scotland, Wales, Nor-
way, Finland, Prussia, Esthonia and Russia,
— countries where the old traits have received
less rubbing, the old tints a thinner varnish of
late colors, than is the case with countries like
France and Germany, Holland and Belgium.

The Kalevala of the Finns, fitted together
into an epic by Elias Lonnrot, the epic that
gave Longfellow his impulse for " Hiawatha,"
is crammed with remnants of old bird-lore —
divine bird-lore, once common to Europe and
Asia. With their connections by language to
Esths, Lapps, Samoyeds, Turks, Hungarians,
Etruscans and the ancient peoples of the
Euphrates, the Finns seem the most poetical
survivors of a race that once covered the face
of Europe, before the Kelts grew numerous

59

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

enough to root them out in this quarter and
absorb them in that. Their Kalevala and the
ballads and fairy stories which failed to be
woven into that epic, are not only admirable as
poetry, but are mines from which we can draw
in order to repair the gaps in the myths and
folk-lore of more than one famous race —
Greek, Latin, Keltic, Scandinavian.

The Rigveda of the old Indians speaks of
the cuckoo in such a way that we see at once
it must have been a god to earlier inhabitants.
The kokila, as he is called in Sanskrit, is
there said to be a bird who knows all things,
not only what has happened, but what shall
happen. To the inhabitants of India, as well
as to Europeans, is he a prophetic bird. The
same is true of two species of cuckoos in New
Guinea. In Germany he foretold riches or
poverty for the rest of the year, also the
number of years the listener had to live, also
the time that must elapse before marriage.
Goethe has used these ideas in his verses

60

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

"Friihlings-Orakel.'* Hesiod taught the Greek
farmer to look out for three days of rain
when he first heard the cuckoo's note. On
the other hand it has been observed that
the Indians of CaHfornia and Mexico show
great terror when they hear the voice of the
cuckoo. This is all the more surprising
because the American cuckoo rarely if ever
interferes with the nests of other birds ; there-
fore their fear must have some other cause.

In England of the thirteenth century the
cuckoo's treachery to his foster-parents must
have been an article of faith, or Chaucer in his
Parlement of Foules would not have caused
the merlin to exclaim in answer to the cuckoo :

Thou murtherer of the hedge-sparr'w on the branch
That brought thee forth! thou ruthfiil-less glutton.
Live thou alone, worme (of) corruption!

The Kalevipoeg, too, the epic of the Estho-
nians, is full of bird-mention. But let us keep
for the present to the cuckoo gods.

Lemminkainen (from lemmin, love) is a
6i

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

male god of love, like the male Venus of Italy,
and has his female counterpart in Lemmetar.
It is from this word that old English got
" leman " female lover. A closer parallel still
to the male and female Venuses of Italy are
Vaino and Aino in the Kalevala, brother and
sister demigods, and the old Italiot deities of
agriculture called Pales, also brother and
sister. Venus and Vaino are indeed the same
word. In his form of Ilmarinen, air god,
Vaino has the attributes of Vulcan, and just
as Vulcan is unable to please Venus, so Vaino
is not fortunate with Aino.

No stated bird is given to Lemminkainen
in the Kalevala ; but his nickname Kauko
and the general looseness of his morals point
to the cuckoo. Nor is it expressly said that
Vaino the old singer, half bard, half demiurge,
who is the chief actor of divine and human
parts in that epic, has a particular bird as-
signed him. Rather are all birds obedient to
him and he understands through his magic

62

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the language of all, like unto Solomon. When
he plays the harp all birds gather and the
beasts, too, and even the fishes swim to the
shore to listen to his minstrelsy, even as they
came to hear Saint Francis preach. He and
Orpheus are the same, bird gods both, as we
shall see. If any, it is the eagle that favors
old Vaino, that lover ever luckless — who is
in that respect in sharp contrast to Lemmin-
kainen, whom too many women adore — and
next to the eagle, the cuckoo.

And good reason is assigned for the love
that eagles and cuckoos give to Vaino, for
when he cleared the primeval forests of Vain-
ola he left a tree for the birds to perch on
(mark this, ye all-too-zealous foresters !) :

Down from heaven came the eagle.
Through the air he came aflying.
That he might this thing consider.
And he spoke the words that follow:
" Wherefore, ancient Wainamoinen,
Hast thou left the slender birch-tree.
Left the birch-tree only standing ? ' *

63

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Wainamoinen thus made answer :
*' Therefore is the birch left standing
That the birds may rest within it.
That the eagle there may rest him.
There may sing the sacred cuckoo."
Spoke the eagle, thus replying :
'* Good indeed thy hero judgment
That the birch- tree thou hast left us.
Left the sacred birch-tree standing
As a resting place for eagles
And for birds of every feather."

(Rune II, Crawford^ s translation^

The cuckoo also asks Vaino why he has
left the birch-tree and gets the same answer.
Wherefore, out of gratitude, the eagle brings
fire from heaven, wherewith the forests can be
overcome.

Lemminkainen's bird especial, the harbinger
of spring — sui-linda or summer bird, as the
Esthonians call it — the cuckoo is even more
pronouncedly a sacred, auspicious creature
than the woodpecker. In some parts of
Germany the people still believe that when
you hear his call for the first time in spring

64

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

you can learn the number of years you have
to live. All you do is to count the calls.
Good luck or the reverse is prophesied by the
direction from which the sounds come — if
from the right, good ; if from the left, bad
luck.

In Sweden and Denmark they have formu-
las for listening to the cuckoo, which fix good
or bad luck to the points of the compass.
The words that rhyme with north, south,
east, west, being easily kept in memory, the
Swedish peasant has his rule always ready ;
thus (gok being our ominous bird the gawk) :

North : norr-gok, sorg-gok ! (sorrow-bird)

South : sdr-gok, smor-gok ! (butter-bird)

East : oster-gok, troste-gok ! (consolation-bird)

West: vester-gok, basta-gok ! (best of birds)

Flat sweet cakes were baked in spring,
shaped rudely like the cuckoo and eaten in
dim remembrance of some heathen ceremonial.
In Old England a special ale was brewed,
called cuckoo-ale, and drunk out of doors.
5 65

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Apparently Finns and Esths were in the
habit of decking out the tall yokes about
their horses' necks, as well as their sledges,
with copper or brass cuckoos when they
wished to be particularly fine, as when they
went a-wooing or drove to a wedding. When
Ilmarinen, son of the air and wondersmith,
starts for Pohjola to secure the fair maid of
the North for his bride, knowing that sly old
Vaino is bound on the same errand, he does
everything to make himself acceptable to the
girl and her covetous mother by indicating
his own wealth. Thus he orders his best
sleigh with all its decorations —

Take the fleetest of my racers.
Put the gray steed in the harness.
Hitch him to my sledge of magic ;
Place six cuckoos on the break-board.
Seven bluebirds on the crossbow.
Thus to charm the northland maidens,
Thus to make them look and listen
As the cuckoos call and echo.

{Rtme XV J II, Crawford's translation^

66

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Here the crossbow means the bow above
the yoke and " bluebirds " are not the sweet
spring warblers known by that name in
America, but another designation for the
cuckoo. The repetition six and seven does
not indicate different objects, as one might
readily suppose ; it is a peculiarity of Finnish
poetry to repeat the same thing in successive
verses with a larger numeral in each verse.
" Golden " is the usual adjective for the
cuckoo, but " blue " is often added, the one
adjective being poetic exaggeration for the
bluish-brown back, the other for the gray
sides of the cuckoo. As the sleigh he orders
out is his " sledge of magic " and as he was
the Vulcan of the Finnic tribes, we must
suppose that these six or seven birds were
automata of metal that imitated the cuckoo's
voice like our clocks and sang when the
sleigh moved — a superior sort of sleighbells.

The cuckoo was a marriage bird and yet
a sinister bird of crime ; he was addressed as

67

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

" golden " and " beauty " also with other
terms of admiration; but he seems to have
been also feared. Perhaps because he is so
" awke " on the ground, his name is often
the synonym for lubberliness and stupidity.
Zeus took the form of a cuckoo to approach
Hera, at once his sister and his wife, and a
bass-relief shows the cuckoo on the sceptres
he and she carry in a marriage procession.
"Why the cuckoo myth can be detected even
among the haughtiest gods of Olympus will
be seen when we come to speak of Pan.

The birds carved in soapstone found by
Bent in the ruins of Zmbabwe, Mashonaland,
which were left there by some as yet unde-
termined race of intruders and gold miners,
may prove to be rude attempts to portray
the cuckoo, rather than the woodpecker.

When we recall the superstitions as to birds
that still live in Europe — as, for example,
that a bird flying into a house Is unlucky, a
stork deserting a homestead portends death, a

68

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

hen crowing at a wedding augurs that the wife
will wear the breeches, swallows building on
a house bring good luck, gulls inland bode
a storm — we begin to realize what a body
of religious belief must have once existed in
Europe with respect to birds alone, since these
are merely fragments, survivals down to his-
torical times, remnants of a vast bird lore,
bird religion. Consider that in order to have
birds to augur from, as they picked up the
sacred food, or as they were slaughtered and
inspected, the Romans took the trouble to
carry pullets about with them in war (auguria
pullaria) and assigned them a special place in
their entrenched camps. The auspex (avi-
spex, bird seer) presided at the founding of
Rome, Latins and Sabines having found that
birds were interpreters of the future long before
Rome was. The Etruscans, whose mastery
in religion the Romans acknowledged, were
adepts in reading the signs of the bird and
annually furnished Rome with bird-readers.

69

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

The amount of this bird worship was so
great and its existence so universal that it
seems illogical to suppose the transfer of a
bird myth from Greece to Italy, or from Italy
to Finland or Ireland, because we find the
same framework of the myth in those several
lands. Why could not the same story have
grown in each ? It is more logical to deduce
from such resemblances a similarity of race and
cultivation in prehistoric times, especially if
other proofs exist that in remote epochs there
was far less diversity among the populations
of Europe than in later days.

The Finns, now for the most part Russian
subjects, live on the Baltic north and east of
the gulf of Finland; while their cousins the
Esthonians, also Russian, dwell to the south of
the gulf. The Lapps to the northward have
always seemed to supply the Finns with an
ideal of what magicians, wind-wise sooth-
sayers and conjurers should be ; but, for the
Esths, the Finns were quite good enough in

70

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

that lire. In the Kalevala of the Finns the
demi-gods Vaino, Ilmarinen and Lemmin-
kainen go northward, as if to Lapland, to beat
the toothless hag of Pohjola at magic, win her
daughters for wives, or rob them, if necessary,
and especially to carry off the sampo — that fruit,
flock and riches-giving talisman, now conceived
of realistically as a mill, again thought of as a
constellation, or the rainbow, or the sun's face
itself In the Kalevipoeg, an epic of Esthland
drawn together like the Kalevala from ballads
scattered and conflicting at times, the sorcerer
of most note is a Finn, and the demi-god of
the Esths swims northward from Esthonia to
avenge on him the loss of a mother. As Vaino
and Lemminkainen defeat by magic the Hag
of the North, so Kalevipoeg the giant rudely
pulverizes the magician of Finland, who, as we
shall see, stands to him in a relation peculiar to
cuckoo gods.

Bird lore is even more frequently mentioned
in the Esthonian than the Finnish epic. The

71

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

£rst canto of Kalevipoeg opens with the in-
vocation —

Steer, O bard of honied accents.
Steer the shallop of your ballads.
Of your song the slender shallop.
Turn it deftly to the seacoast.
Where the eagle, golden proverbs —
Where the raven, silver stories —
Swans, their hero-lays of copper
Have from ancient days kept hidden.
That were formerly outspoken.
Cry it forth, ye birds of wisdom.
Utter it, ye ocean billows.
And, ye winds, the secret publish —
Where may lie the Kalev's cradle.
Where the homestead of the heroes !

The birds here mentioned are valued in de-
scending scale by the adjectives golden, silver,
copper ; which reminds one of the South
American legend of the origin of chiefs, nobles
and people from three celestial eggs, of gold,
silver and copper respectively. The eagle and
raven are favorites of mythology; the swan
is of that Siberian variety which makes rich

72

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

melody and does literally sing its death-song
when it is caught by the ice of a freezing
night and cannot loose itself from the spot
to which it has been frozen.

Kalev the father of Kalevipoeg, whose name
is also found in Kalevala, was of the race of
giants or demi-gods. A widow finds a pullet,
a starving crow and partridge egg ; she brings
them home and puts them in her locker. The
pullet broods the egg and hatches out a girl,
Linda, whose name means bird ; the pullet
herself turns into another girl Salme ; and
the starved crow becomes a domestic drudge.
What could be more redskin than such a
legend ? Linda is wooed successively by the
sun, the moon, the winds, the water and the
son of the richest king of the North — all in
vain ! She will take none but Kalev. Their
son Kalevipoeg " Kalev's boy " is a bird of a
boy, as the expression runs — born, be it noted,
after the death of his father — a hero of enor-
mous eating and drinking powers, of colossal

73

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

strength, lazy, but not good-for-nothing, fated
to misfortune, while yet a lawgiver and ruler
of his people.

Throughout his life, at critical moments,
birds are ever at hand to warn and pilot him
through the dangers that beset him. As Scan-
dinavian Siegfried is led by birds, so is also
Kalev's boy ; as Siegfried has a wondersword
forged and kills the forge mas-
ter, so Kalev's boy, and he
kills the smith's son. But the
crime that the latter commits
with this sword, and the story
of the sword as the avenger on its own mas-
ter of that crime, are finer touches than any-
thing in Siegfried's tale. Again, the adventure
of Siegfried with the martial Brunhild, and that
of the prince in the fairy-tale with the sleeping
beauty, are echoes of the cuckoo myth based
on the heroic cuckoo that rouses the blossom
— that enchanted maid of spring — from her
long winter sleep. We shall find this idea,

74

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

now happy, now tragic, concealed under the
history of other heroes in very distant lands.

The parallel with Siegfried goes much
farther, if, as we can do in all these old tales,
we put Siegfried's father for himself; since it is
the commonest of all traits in mythology to
find the same plot under the life history of
father and son, or under that of earlier and later
folk-hero.

It will be remembered that Sigurd dishonors
his own sister ; Kalevipoeg also ruins his sister,
but does not know her at the time. As soon
as she learns who he is, she throws herself into
the water, and in later versions he passes on
through life unwedded, and, though boister-
ously jovial, yet a prey to remorse.

The very same story occurs as an episode
about a subordinate personage in the Kalevala
of the Finns. The brother is an unlucky
youth of giant strength named Kullervo, over
whose birth the poet seems intentionally
obscure, if not contradictory. When the sister

75

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

learns who he is, she laments the mistake and
casts herself into the stream.

Scarcely had the maiden spoken

When she bounded from the snow-sledge.

Rushed upon the rolling river.

To the cataract's commotion.

To the fiery stream and whirlpool.

Thus Kullervo's lovely sister

Hastened to her own destruction.

To her death by fire and water.

Found her peace in Tuonela,

In the sacred stream of Mana.

{Rime XXXV, Crawford's translation.)

The account of KuUervo's birth is strangely-
muddled, like those of many other heroes —
Kalevipoeg, Cuchullaind of Ireland, Gwalchmei
or Gawayne of Britain. His race is obliterated
by an envious uncle, Untamo by name ; yet
later he finds father, mother, brothers and
other sisters, beside the one who drowned her-
self. It is as if he found them again in the under-
world ; but if so, they scorn him still for his
crime. One reads between the lines that he is

76

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the son of Untamo, his mother being Untamo's
niece; he is the child of relatives in a pro-
hibited degree and as such is fated to the same
crime. In fact Kullervo, like Sigurd, Kalevi-
poeg and, as we shall see, Conchobar of Ire-
land, are variants of the same story, and that
story is drawn from the life of the cuckoo, the
bird whose young are brought up, not only
apart from each other, but, so it was hitherto
believed, unknown to their parents.

Singular, how often this cuckoo trait ap-
pears in classical mythology ! Take the
ancestry and descendants of Picus, the Italiot
god, the woodpecker, which we have been
lately considering. Janus and Saturn, to
begin with ! Janus married his own sister
Camesa ; he was the old war god, god of the
year, the "janitor" or "opener" of the year,
after whom the month of January was named.
Saturn, a god of agriculture, supposed to have
come to Italy in Janus's age, married his own
sister Rhea and devoured his children by her

77

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

— a foible explained by the belief that the
mother cuckoo lays her eggs in another bird's
nest to hide their offspring from a cannibal
father.

Picus son of Saturn is an exception ; he
marries a daughter of Janus named Canens,
whose name and whose fame for singing in-
dicate a bird. But here mythology distin-
guishes. The woodpecker cannot have the
character of a cuckoo. But when in this
genealogy we descend to Faunus the son of
PicuSj the cuckoo crime returns. He mar-
ried his own sister Fauna and was a sun and
forest god like Pan, bearing indeed a name
with the same root as Pan.

The unlucky, awkward character attributed
to the cuckoo has left a trace in many lan-
guages. We have seen how gowk and gawk
come into English from the shorter name for
the bird ; to this we may add old English
" awke " " awkward " from the same word.
The hard g must have softened intoj)', as we

78

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

find it in Irish and in dialects of German
like that in the Mark of Brandenburg ; later
still, even the y sound has disappeared. We
can thus replace with a simple etymology
that labored and unconvincing one found in
the dictionaries. In French again the word
"gauche" left hand, put M. Littre to his
trumps. Here is our grayish-brown friend
again, the gawk, German Gauch, with the
guttural ch softened down to French utter-
ance. Hence in the dialect of Craven we
have gauk-handed for left-handed. This un-
lucky, because criminal, bird was identified
with that quarter from which cold winds come,
or into which the sun plunges and perishes ; it
was identified with the side turned to the north
or the west — which came about in this way.

The early European, who was taught to
regard the sunrise as the quarter toward which
to face in prayer to higher beings, found the
cold-bringing north winds on his left, the
flower-bringing south winds on his right.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

And later, if the lucky, favorable ideas at first
associated with the south and the right hand
caused him to turn with his face to the north,
in order to have favorable sunrise on his right
hand, still, the left would be unlucky, because
there dies the sun, there dwell the dark gods.
The notion that cuckoos do not retire to
the south, but hibernate in hollow trees,
sprang up from observing several facts and put-
ting wrong constructions on them. Cuckoos
do not band together, like swifts, swallows,
storks and cranes, just before migrating to
warmer lands; they are stealthy birds and
after ceasing to call, still lurk about, and then
are gradually missed from their haunts without
any action to show what they intend. The
mystery was solved to the satisfaction of coun-
try people by the frequent finding of cuckoos
in full feather in the hollows of old trees,
especially of willow-trees. What else brought
them there, except it were to sleep out the
winter, like flies and many insects ? It was

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

not observed that in all such cases the cuckoo
did not get out because it could not. In
other words, it was a pris-
oner owing to the stupid-
ity of its parent.

The mother cuckoo
prefers sheltered nests of
other birds for her furtive
laying, and often cannot
get into the nest, or is too
sharply watched by the lit-
tle birds to allow her the
time. She then lays her
egg on the ground, takes
it delicately in her beak,
watches the propitious moment and deposits it
in the nest. Often this nest is in the hollow
of an old willow and has been chosen by the
little birds because of its narrow entrance. This
is an additional safeguard against intruders. In
her hurry to commit her beguilement Madam
Cuckoo does not reason that if the entrance
6 8i

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

is too small for her to enter by, it will be too
small for the full-fledged young cuckoo to
issue from. The egg is deposited ; later on
she returns and removes the eggs of her host.
Foster-father and foster-mother wear out their
wings and beaks in bringing the young cor-
morant food ; it grows bigger and bigger ;
one fine day it tries to get out of the nest, and
finds that the hole is too small !

This frequent tragedy in bird-life accounts
for the discovery of dead cuckoos in hollows
of trees, for the firm belief still cherished by
rustics in parts of Europe that the cuckoo
hibernates, and for the further vilification of
the poor bird, as slothful, slumbering, torpid
— a view naturally reinforced by the observa-
tion that the cuckoo seems t^o lazy to build
its own nest and rear its own chicks.

As a matter of fact the European cuckoo
lays her eggs at such long intervals apart, from
a week to ten days, that she would have great
difficulty in rearing a brood. The first chick

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

would certainly kill the others, as they suc-
cessively appeared, merely by its own weight.
The mother cuckoo is not to be whitewashed
entirely; but she is not the heartless volup-
tuary she has been supposed. She is actively
on the watch over six or seven young ones
entrusted to the care of as many nurses, and
stands by to take charge of a squab which some
foster-parent of uncommonly sharp understand-
ing, or uncommonly sharp temper, has thrown
out of the nest, for the devil's bantling it is !

The old English song of spring registers the
belief that the cuckoo never bothers itself with
labor (swik) —

Wei singes thu cuccu,
Ne swik thou naver nu.
Sing cuccu, cuccu —

and Middleton has left on record the con-
tempt of Englishmen for Welshmen, or
perhaps Frenchmen, in the phrase "Welsh
ambassador " as applied to the cuckoo, either
because Welshmen came down in spring from

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the hills of Wales during the months of the
cuckoo's appearance to raid or to work in
the fields, or because under "Welsh" we are to
understand French and foreigners generally,
and the cuckoo was observed reaching Great
Britain from France. Among the famous
fools in Great Britain are cited the "cuckoo-
penners" of Somerset, who believed they could
prolong the summer by caging cuckoos.

The lazy trait of the cuckoo appears very
strongly expressed in the Esthonian hero,
Kalev's boy. He is so abnormally lazy that
at times he will not even rouse himself when
invaders from the north — the steel-clad hosts
with icicles for spears — fall upon and devas-
tate Esthland. So with Kullervo. That Fin-
nish oaf and luckless one, his laziness as well
as his bird origin, appear in a Finnish fairy-
tale related of a youth of enormous power and
ruinous strength. He is not called Kullervo,
but Munnapoika, which means the egg's boy,
the Son of the Egg.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

In Wales, too, we have the cuckoo traits in
the family of King Arthur, who in Mallory's
tales was by no means the chaste monarch
Tennyson makes him. King Arthur's parent-
age was unknown. One day a handsome queen
arrives from the Orkneys ; she is the wife of
King Lot. King Arthur succumbs to her
charms. Two children are born to them,
Gwalchmei, who becomes Gawayne or Gauvain
in the later tales, and Modred, who destroys
Arthur and his knights. Merlin foretells to
Arthur that this shall be his fate and the reason
given is the startling one — that the wife of
King Lot is no other than Arthur's sister! The
cuckoo crime has occurred, because cuckoos
cannot recognize their own brothers and sisters.

Whatever " Modred " may mean, we can
now explain the name of Gwalchmei. Accord-
ing to Professor J. Rhys, Gwalchmei means the
" Hawk of May " ; but he seems not to under-
stand why Gawayne should be so termed.
Yet for a cuckoo god such a term is thoroughly

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

a Welsh, or, for the matter of that, Scandi-
navian circumlocution for the typical bird of
May, the cuckoo. The cuckoo is slightly
hawk-like in appearance, especially when on
the wing ; so that there has always been a
widespread idea in Europe that cuckoos turn
to hawks in August. Now the cuckoo clew
here given makes things clear. It was said
of Gwalchmei the Good that his strength in-
creased till midday and decreased till sunset ;
the idea seems borrowed from the sun ; but it
may allude to the ceasing of the cuckoo's call
in midsummer.

How persistent the cuckoo idea was in
Greece and Italy is seen from the forbidden
relationship of the gods already mentioned.
From Pausanias we learn that, in order to
obtain his sister Hera for his wife, Zeus turned
himself into a cuckoo and flew near Hera,
who caught and played with him. And while
Pausanias protests that he does not believe
such tales, he describes a statue of Hera in the

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Heraion, not far from Mykenal, and notes that
she carries in one hand a sceptre on which
perches a cuckoo, in memory of the stratagem
of Zeus. Such is the power of religion ! Acts
reprobated by the Greeks were pubHcly insisted
upon, dwelt upon in their monuments, merely
because the remote, barbarous past had mar-
velled at the strange acts of birds and made
them their gods.

TheCburade in Ireland & Persia^

CHAPTER IV

IT was observed by the explorers of South
America that certain Indian tribes had a
most singular custom, one which has hitherto
failed to be explained. When a child was
born to an Indian of note, the father was
put to bed and tended with as much care as
if he were the mother. This went so far that
the mother was neglected, whilst her lord
and master assumed all the airs of the real
sufferer. Certain Tupi tribes still practise this
custom and the startling fact has since been
observed that the odd habit once existed among
the Basques of Spain. It is less generally

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

known that the couvade, or brooding, existed
among the ancient inhabitants of Ireland, where
I have discov^ered it through the old legends.
Traces of the same thing, as I shall show,
exist in Persia also among the stories of the
Shah Nameh.

The couvade has been sought to be ex-
plained through psychology, as if it were
a superstitious belief in the transfer of the
mother's identity to that of the father ; but
for the most part writers have been content
to chronicle the extraordinary freak without
looking for more obvious reasons close at
hand, namely, in the keen observation of the
habits of birds on the part of primitive men
and in consequence a childlike imitation on
their part of the actions of birds.

The cuckoo is one of those birds which
deserve the special protection of men ; because
it not only does no harm to crops, but spends
its entire time, unbothered by family cares, in
reducing the foes of agriculture and forestry.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

It is a bird that devours vast quantities of
hairy caterpillars, which are rejected by most
insect-eating creatures. It may be doubted,
however, whether this good trait had much
to do with the admiration for the cuckoo
among early men.

In Ireland, as in Finland and Esthland,
there were cuckoo demigods. They are not
only of preternatural strength and agility, but
subject to periods of apathy, attributed either
to fairy blight, or — what tells the story of the
meaning of these things the plainest — the
" couvade." In the discovery of the im-
portance of the bird gods in the eyes of early
peoples and in the connection of the "couvade"
with demigods and heroes, clearly birdlike in
their main traits, we have the long-sought
clew to the mystery. We may guess that it
began with the observation that male birds
assisted in the brooding of the eggs. After
a stage in which the father was treated like
the mother before the birth, it came to the

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

stage in which we find it, namely, treatment
of the father like the mother after the birth
in connection with festivities in honor of the
little stranger.

Yet, one may say, the cuckoo does not
brood its eggs. Here the kindly traits of
most birds became blended with the unnatural
conduct of cuckoos, and were applied to the
same bird god, whom we find as a hero in
the old ballads.

The Irish have regarded Fion and Cuchul-
laind as historical characters, which is not sur-
prising, when one sees the way in which the
old Irish historians provided them with plausi-
ble ancestors and dates. But those whom dates
would not convince are still loath to give up
the actuality of heroes about whom so much
that is possible to man has been handed down,
and relegate them, as mere abstractions, to the
status of survivals from old gods. It is clear,
however, that the cycle of stories about Fion
and Oisin — the Ossianic heroes, as Macpher-

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

son called them — and the cycle of stories about
Conchobar and Cuchullaind are at bottom the
same ; composed at different periods, they
naturally show great variations. The Fion
cycle is more chivalrous, less crammed with
unnecessary bloodshed ; while that of Cuchul-
laind is wilder and more savage. In the Fion
cycle, again, the traits of Diarmuid are some-
what hke those of Cuchullaind. We have
something like the same distinction in the
Kalevala between Vainamoinen and Lemmin-
kainen. Old Vaino, the minstrel, is more the
savior and helper of his people ; Lemmin-
kainen, the loose lover, is a headstrong young
fighter and magician, like Cuchullaind.

Not only does Cuchullaind bear obvious in
his name his origin as a cuckoo god, but his
birth, exploits and death are those of a cuckoo.
Yet the Irish labored to avoid the plain in-
ference from the sound of his name, and a
legend grew up to help them. The boy was
originally Setanta by name, said they, and

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Cuchullaind was a nickname obtained after
this wise : One night when he followed his
" uncle *' Conchobar to the house of Culann,
a smith, the gates were locked and a ferocious
dog lay in watch. The boy killed the hound
out of hand, as Herakles overcame Cerberus,
and Kalevipoeg, the watchdog of hell ; and
when the smith lamented his loss, Setanta said
" I will be your cu (dog) until another is
grown large enough to guard your house,"
whence Setanta was called Cuchullaind, hound
of Culann.

The legend is the result of a forgetting or
intentional ignoring of the cuckoo, perhaps
owing to its evil repute, and also of the high
opinion the Irish had of dogs, which they bred
very well and for which they were famous long
ago. Cu, hound, was an honor-name for a
champion. The name Setanta may be ex-
plained through the Finnish, like many names
in Ireland for divisions and streams. It is
evident from such parallels that, before the

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Kelts, the population was of a stock similar to
Esthonian, Finnish, etc. Now Setanta may be
explained by Finnish for uncle, seta (genitive
-dan) and may have meant " son of his uncle "
for reasons about to be explained. But the
curious word Cuchullaind is explained by
Esthonian Kukkulind "cuckoo bird." With-
out doubt he is a survival of a bird god of the
Finnic tribes in Ireland conquered by the Kelts.
The word "lint" for bird remains in the Suf-
folk dialect of England in lint-white, a local
name for the lark.

The accepted description of CuchuUaind^s
birth shows his bird origin very clearly ; no
other cuckoo demigod is so plainly a bird.
His mother was Dechtire, who was sister of
King Conchobar of Ulster and also his char-
ioteer. One legend says that there were griev-
ous scandals regarding Conchobar and his
car-driving sister. But a more veiled account
is as follows : One day Dechtire and her maids
disappear and soon after news is brought to

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Conchobar that wonderful birds with gold
chains about their necks have been seen in
the land. He sets out to hunt them, is led
to a palace he has never seen before, where
is a beautiful woman with attendant maids,
whom he does not recognize. He demands
that she shall be his wife, but she says she is
about to become a mother ; and that same
night Setanta or Cuchullaind is born, with
features like Conchobar !

Throughout his career this child of doubtful
origin shows the cuckoo or bird characteristics,
not once or twice, but a dozen times. The
dates of his taking arms, his first adventure
and his death confirm it, if we put weeks for
years in the account we receive. Thus, at seven
weeks, the end of May or beginning of June, a
young cuckoo is fledge : at seven years young
Setanta induced his " uncle " to grant him
weapons and harness, or, as the men of the later
Middle Ages would say, he was made a knight.
At seventeen weeks, the end of July or begin-

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

ning of August, the cuckoo has deserted its
foster-parents : at seventeen years Setanta or
Cuchullaind defended Ulster single-handed
against an army. At twenty-seven weeks, or
September, the cuckoo disappears into hollow

trees, or is turned to a
hawk ; at twenty-seven
years Cuchullaind was
slain by the magic of the
sons of Cailletin.

His origin is as mys-
terious and veiledly crimi-
nal as that of Arthur in Wales or of Kullervo
in the Kalevala. Like Kalevipoeg, who was
born of Linda, the bird, long after his re-
puted father Kalev's death, and took the
heritage from his elder brothers by beating
them at hurling the stone, Cuchullaind thrashes
and completely drives off fifty boy-princes in
the royal school to which he comes at a tender
age. These feats are echoes of the young
cuckooes exploits in ridding the nest of such

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

foster-brothers as may have escaped the vigi-
lance of Madam Cuckoo and grown up to be
rivals for food and the attention of his foster-
parents.

In looseness of morals Cuchullaind almost
equals Lemminkainen, who, as we have seen,
was a god of love. Although he has a serious
love affair and a wife, yet, whilst he is be-
trothed to the woman he afterward marries, he
has a second love affair in Scotland. More-
over he was said to have a taboo or prohibition
laid on him not to wed ; and cuckoos were
falsely thought to have no regular mate.

In the stress of single combat Cuchullaind
showed his bird traits with singular clearness.
He had a very disagreeable way of changing in
size, becoming diasthartha, as a bird ruffles up
its feathers in fighting and appears twice its
normal size. He leapt in the heat of combat
on to the rim of his opponent's shield. In his
fight with the giant GoU he soared up and
alighted on the shield of Goll " like any bird
7 97

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of the air" says the story. In that with Eocho
the Blue-Green, Cuchullaind is thrice blown
off Eocho's shield into the sea before he is able
to overcome that huge monster. The same
cuckoo will, if possible, hold the same district
year after year and challenge all comers. The
combat that Cuchullaind undertakes for Ulster
is the war that a cuckoo makes against rivals
who invade the district the bird has seized
as its own.

In Cuchullaind's trip to Scotland to learn
the military art from Scatach *' the Shadowy,"
an Amazon who kept a military school, we
have the annual disappearance of cuckoos, no
very good long-distance fliers, across the Irish
Sea where it is narrowest. He lands on Can-
tire, and, proceeding to the school, has a love
adventure with Aoife, the daughter of Scatach,
who bears him Conlaech, but after he has re-
turned to Ireland. Like Oidipous, and like
the hero Sohrab of Persia, Conlaech has never
seen his father ; so the son when he comes of

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

age goes to Ireland and fights with his father,
because it was supposed that neither male nor
female cuckoo took any heed of their off-
spring and therefore the latter must approach
its real parents as a total stranger.

Another, more poetic, tale of Cuchullaind
represents the cuckoo as the bringer of spring.
Along with other heroes he goes to the Isle
of Man — an island named after Mananan of
the Sea, a god of the under-world of waters,
like Mana in the Kalevala — and storms a
city in which dwells the beautiful Blathmaid
" Blossom." He loves Blathmaid and she
loves him, but King Curoi, a wizard of Kerry,
takes her from him as his share in the spoils
— as Agamemnon took Briseis away from
Achilleus — and carries her off to his for-
tress in the southwest of Ireland, leaving
Cuchullaind bound and shorn of his long
hair.

The lovers communicate ; the sign for
Cuchullaind to attack the fortress and carry

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

off Blathmaid is given by the latter, who
pours milk into the stream that passes the
castle. The plot succeeds and Curoi is killed,
while Cuchullaind goes off with Blossom as if
he had no wife to grieve over his fickleness.
In this fine allegory Curoi is winter, Blathmaid
the flowers of spring and Cuchullaind the bird
whose notes chase winter off and deliver the
flowers from their icy bondage. Perhaps the
milk in the stream is the ice floating down in
sign of the approaching summer.

In his book on the poetry of the Finns the
Italian writer Comparetti lays great stress on
the low form of wizardry and magic shown by
the contests of Vainamoinen with Youkahai-
nen, and the preference of Lemminkainen as
well as Vainamoinen for conjuring over battle.
But the same traits appear in Cuchullaind.
On his voyage to Scotland he uses " sea
magic" like a Finnish wizard; in his contest
with Eocho Rond, as related in the " Feast of
Bricriu ** in which, like the Finnish conjurers,

lOO

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the prize is the hand of a maiden, Cuchullaind
and Eocho Rond use magic by turns in order
to ward off each other's weapons.

Cuchullaind is particularly expert with the
old weapon to bring down birds — with the
sling, David's weapon, the natural arm of
the shepherd. When proceeding against Ailill,
the fairy king of Connaught, just to give him
a taste of his quality, as the Irish say, he killed
with a cast from his sling a bird that was sit-
ting on Aiiill's shoulder. A very curious
weapon called the gaebolg, which was cast
with the foot along the surface of the water,
was the trump card of Cuchullaind when en-
gaged in the memorable struggle at the ford
with his old schoolmate and friend. In his
fight with the stranger who is his son he also
used the gaebolg. It is evidently a peculiar
contrivance to kill waterfowl similar to fowl-
ing spears used by Eskimos and Lapps. The
Irish legend particularly states that it came
" from the eastern parts of the world," which

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

usually means the Baltic, when the actual
direction is told. In Trinity College, Dublin,
is an Irish treatise on bird auguries which, so
far as I know, has not been translated.

Another bird trait, which he shares with
Vaino and other heroes of the Finns and
Esths, is that of understanding the speech of
birds ; it is his own language ! He is expert
in capturing birds. In one story he hits with
his sling two magic birds that turn into Liban
and Fand, daughters or wives of Mananan of
the Sea, who have fallen in love with him, and in
consequence drops into a stupor, becomes half
crazy and otherwise shows that the hibernating
cuckoo is the root of the story.

In fact we must regard Cuchullaind as the
cuckoo god pre-eminent, a typical descendant
in myth and legend from a deity whose traces
are found in nearly every part of the world.

That this is not an extravagant statement
appears when we examine the epic of the
Persians, the Shah Nameh, in which the old
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

bird gods are humanized as thoroughly as they
have been in Ireland's legendry. The hero
Sahm exposes his son Zal, when first born, on
the rocks of the Elburz
mountains, where the Si-
murg, a fabulous, griffin-
like bird, finds and fos-
ters him. Sahm sees Zal
standing in the Simurg's
nest and repents and
takes him back, when
he, or rather the young
cuckoo, is grown. Zal
marries Roodabeh and
calls the Simurg to her help when she is about
to be a mother. When I treat of the eagle the
reason for this office of the Simurg will appear.
Kai Kaiis, the Persian king of the same
mythical period, makes a campaign against
the deevs, or powers of darkness and winter,
whose king, the White Giant, overcomes the
invaders by magic and reduces them to that
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

impotent condition we meet so often in Ire-
land, where Conchobar or Fion is the victim,
or in Finland, where it is Lemminkainen or
Youkahainen. Rustem, the son of the Zal
who was nurtured by the Simurg, comes to
the assistance of his king and his heroes
and slays the White Deev, as Cuchullaind
rescues Conchobar or Fion. Now the reason
why the White Deev temporarily overcomes
the Persian king and heroes is the same
reason found in Ireland for the lethargy that
befalls Conchobar and the heroes of Ulster.
It is the woman's helplessness ; it is the cou-
vade ! I suspect the whole Kai dynasty of
Persia were bird heroes. Did not Kai Kaus
attach eagles to a car and attempt to reach
heaven by their aid ?

But much earlier bird-god literature existed
on the Euphrates among the Akkads. The
" sin of the god Zu " was the stealing of some
talisman from the high gods Anu, Bel and
Rimmon, perhaps the sun itself, or maybe
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

some wonder-working thing like the Kalevalan
Sampo ; for the tablets are too broken to per-
ceive clearly what it was. His bird character
appears in a fragment concerning a certain god
Lugal-turda, who, like KuUervo and other
cuckoo heroes, had neither father nor mother :

A turban be placed on his head

When from the nest of the god Zu he came,

and again in a phrase in the annals of Assur-
nazir-pal, " like the divine Zu bird upon them
darted/' The late George Smith very acutely
likened the Zu bird to the eagle or the wood-
pecker as they appear in the folk-lore of
Europe. As to Lugal-turda, whom I suspect
to have been the cuckoo, he translated :

No mother gave him life.

No father with him associated.

No noble knew him ;

Of the resolution of his heart, the resolution he changed not.

In his own heart the resolution he kept ;

Into the likeness of a bird was he transformed.

Into the likeness of the divine Zu bird was he transformed.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

But to return to the Shah Nameh : other
cuckoo and bird traits appear in the life of
Rustem, the child of Zal and Roodabeh. He
is not exposed or put away to foster, but he
has exactly Cuchullaind's adventures. During
a raid into Turan, Rustem loves Tehmineh,
and in parting tells her to send the son she may
bear into Persia to him. Sohrab their son
invades Persia — as Conlaech invades Ireland
— and after overcoming everybody else, suc-
cumbs to his unknown but invincible father.
Thus we have the same story, or fragments
of the same story, in Italy — Janus, Saturn,
Faunus ; in Persia, with Sahm, Zal, Rustem
and Sohrab ; in Wales, with Arthur and his
"nephew" or son Modred ; in Ireland, with
Conchobar, Cuchullaind and Conlaech ; in
Scandinavia, with Sigurd and his sister ; in
Esthland, with the Finnish magician and Kale-
vipoeg and the island maid ; and in Finland,
with Untamo, Kullervo and the latter's sister.
We shall presently see it in Greece also, but

io6

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

In a far completer state than the story of
Tereus and Philomela already mentioned in
the chapter on the woodpecker.

In Ireland it is not Cuchullaind alone who
IS a cuckoo god made man ; the cuckoo shows
in his ancestry. We have seen how his uncle,
who was also his father, has the cuckoo trait.
Now that same parent Conchobar robs his own
stepfather of his kingdom, as the young cuckoo
was thought to devour its foster-father. His
wife Meave elopes from him with another
chief, as the female cuckoo was supposed to
be inconstant ; and their daughter pursues
the same course with regard to her husband.
To cap the climax, in an aberration of mind,
Conchobar marries his own mother Nessa and
has a son by her, Cormac Conlingeas by name,
a famous warrior in his day !

These ghastly domestic tragedies can now
be understood as poetic changes and exag-
gerations in old legends, based on observation
of cuckoos, their actual deeds and attributed

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

moral traits. I venture to say that in almost
every legend in which we find a father fighting
with a son whom he does not recognize one
may detect from other traits that it is based on
a cuckoo plot, the root of which is the sin-
gular habit of the female cuckoo in Europe,
Asia and Africa of causing other birds to hatch
her eggs. Such are not only the Sohrab-
Rustem combats and the Cuchullaind-Con-
laech, but the Russian combat of Ilya of
Murom with his son Falcon, and the early
fragmentary German tale of Hildebrand fight-
ing with his son Hadubrand — nay, the epi-
sode in classical mythology of Saturn overcome
by his son Jupiter.

Hitherto no satisfactory explanation has
been given for the remarkable recurrence of
marriages between brother and sister in the
mythology and legends of many countries:
such as Saturn with Rhea, Zeus with Hera —
divine marriages which were undoubtedly taken
as precedents for the historical marriages of
1 08

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the same sort in royal houses, such as that of
Atossa of Persia and the Ptolemies of Egypt.
Surely it is worth while to discover that these
offensive features resolve themselves into
unions that might be possible in a family of
eccentric birds !

The evil imagined in the cuckoo has left its
trace in the vulgar speech of Germany. Hoi*
dich der Kuckuck ! Das weiss der Kuckuck !
Der Kuckuck hat ihn hergebracht — " The
deuce take you ! The Old Boy knows ! The
devil must have brought him ! " — show that
like other pagan gods the cuckoo god was
degraded to a devil. The hoopoe is called the
cuckoo's sexton or lackey, and the wryneck the
cuckoo's maiden, perhaps because the ancients
fancied that the bird was twisting its head
round to see its admired one, the cuckoo.

The blacker, more criminal idea of the
cuckoo has found its way into the great
dramas of the world with Oidipous — " Swell-
foot the Tyrant " — by Sophocles. The
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

swollen foot seems an echo of the feathered
legs of the cuckoo. The crimes of Oidipous
consisted of his slaying the father, who, be-
cause of a menacing prophecy, had sent him
away, and of his marriage to his own mother.
His fate includes the crime of Conchobar of
Ireland, who married his mother, and KuUervo
of Finland, who killed his father-uncle, perhaps,
also, Kalevipoeg of Esthland, if we regard the
Finnish magician as his real father. When
the mother of Oidipous discovers the situation,
she kills herself, just as Aino
drowns herself because of
Vaino, and the sisters of Kul-
lervo and Kalevipoeg throw
themselves into the water.
In connection with Oidipous we find the
sphinx, who puts each aspirant to the kingship
a question he cannot solve and kills him when
his ignorance is shown. Pausanias explains
that the sphinx, that four-footed creature with
head and breasts of a woman, was the daughter
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of Laius, the father of Oldipous. Her puzzle
was a family question that no one who was not
truly a son of Laius could answer ; thus she
kept false pretenders from the throne.

Having now the clew in the cuckoo to the
Laius-Jocasta-Oidipous legend, the question
arises what the sphinx might be. I think it
safe to say that the sphinx is a Greek em-
broidery upon the owl, her figure having been
suggested by the winged lions of the Euphrates
valley, familiar not only to Greek travellers,
but to all who purchased from the Phoenician
merchants those gold and copper vessels carved
with winged beasts which were made in Asia.
We get thus an explanation of the sphinxes
on the helmet of the great statue of Pallas
Athene in the Parthenon described by Pau-
sanias. They were merely more elegant and
artistic forms of the homely owl, the bird of
Minerva, whose history I shall try to trace
in the following chapter.

The Oidipous story entire has been found in
III

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Finland, but modernized. Two magicians who
can read the future stay the night at a farm-
house where the wife is about to become a
mother. They prophesy that the child will be
a boy who will kill his father and marry his
mother. It is a boy; and the father is for
kiUing him, but at the mother's prayer he
binds the baby to a plank and sets it adrift
on the river. The plank goes ashore near an
abbey ; the child is reared by the monks and
takes a place as farm hand with his own father.
He is ordered to watch a field of turnips at
night and kill any thieves ; his father forgets
his own order, goes out at night to gather
turnips and is killed. In time the widow
marries the farm hand, and one day, when the
young husband is bathing, discovers by a birth-
mark what she has done.

Many and most curious are the analogies
between the myths and the names of Ireland
on the one hand, Finland and Esthland on the
other. The name of the Shannon can be

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

explained as " dark-blue " from an Esthonian
word. Tara's hill in Meath with its royal
town, said to have been there in Saint Patrick's
day, is strangely like Taara's hill in Esthland,
where Kalev's son founded a city over the
tomb of his reputed father. The Tuatha de
Danann, that people of the misty Druidical
Irish past, famous for their knowledge of
metal- and magic-making, receive a lurid light
from the under-world when considered to
mean " Folk of the Dark Gods " not " Folk
of the Two Dananns." They are the Tonn,
Tonni of the Esthonians, spirits whose im-
ages were used in witchcraft, the Tonndi of
the Finns, kobolds and devils, denizens of
Tuonela the under-world. But their pleasant
traits show that they escaped the damning of
Christian teachers, who always sought to de-
grade the heathen upper gods to evil spirits
and the gods of the under-world to the
depths of brimstone and hell-fire. And the
Fir-bolgs, another mysterious race, over whose

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

origin and meaning the Irish have allowed
their fancy the widest range, may find their
analogy through the Finnish polkea, to over-
throw, oppress — the meaning being the op-
pressed tribes (palkkamies) namely the early
Finnic tribes subjugated and in part driven
westward into Connaught by their Keltic con-
querors. In Irish the pawns in chess, which
represent the lowest men in the social order,
are called ferbolg, as if one said serfs. And
when the Fir-bolgs are asked to move from
the west into Ulster the old Finnic hero
CuchuUaind takes them under his protection.
But they are badly treated and fly to Con-
naught once more.

There is a strong parallel between Lemmin-
kainen or Ahti, god of the waters — who is the
male god of love beside Lemmetar the Finn-
ish Aphrodite — and Fion of Ireland, at least
so far as certain of their exploits are concerned ;
in others it is CuchuUaind who furnishes the
analogies. Fion and Lemminkainen are both
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

deserted by their wives. One day Fion meets
a beautiful woman who is weeping for her ring
which has fallen into a deep lake ; gallantly he
dives for it, but when he brings it up he is an
old man, withered and old like Vaino. Lem-
minkainen tries for the hand of one of Louhi's
daughters — Louhi of Pohjola, the Hag of the
North. But he comes off worse than Fion.
He goes to Hades at the request of Louhi, is
killed and his body cut to pieces, like that of
Osiris of Egypt. Fion is restored to his own
shape and Lemminkainen's mother gathers up
his scattered members and brings him back
to life. Both derive from the cuckoo, which
has lost its life or its youth in autumn, but
returns in spring.

These parallels are such as to exclude the
idea that they are direct transplantations from
Finland to Ireland, or from Ireland to Fin-
land, since they vary from each other in too
many particulars. They testify to a common
origin which lies so very far back that we must
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

believe them survivals from a common stock,
belonging to a race whose language and ideas
at one time ruled Europe, and whose dialects,
where they happened to survive, differed at
that remote epoch comparatively little the one
from the other. Fionas cuckoo traits are seen
in the adventure of Oisin's captivity in a cave.
Oisin the son of Fion is caught by fairies in
a cave ; but he snips off a piece from the shaft
of his spear each day and casts it into a stream.
Fion, searching for his boy, sees the chip and
rescues him. This is the cuckoo reared in a
nest from which it cannot escape.

The Slavic nations, with whom in the past
as in the present Finns and Esths have been
in closest contact, were great favorers of the
cuckoo. The Poles called him Zezula ; in
heathen times they had a goddess Zywie
with a temple on Mount Zywiec, where they
prayed for health and long life. It recalls
the cuckoo-mount near Mases in Corinth
with its temple to Zeus, erected because Zeus
ii6

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

turned himself there into a cuckoo. This
goddess was thought to have turned herself
in like fashion into a cuckoo. When the
sound of the cuckoo call first strikes your ear
in spring, or even first in the morning, you
must have some gold or silver in your pocket,
if you hope to be rich for the rest of the year.
If you hear the call whilst hungry, you will
suffer for the year from a superabundance of
the " best sauce."

The latter idea gave rise to a habit which
has hygienic value, namely, that of always
eating a mouthful before going out in the
morning ; it is prettily expressed by a word
in Kalevipoeg, Canto XI, line 3, where linnu-
pete is found. Before he sets out to wade
across Lake Peipus, lazy giant, Kalev's boy
takes a linnupete. Linnu, lind, means bird,
pete deceit; linnupete means the bird deceiver;
something that defeats the magic of birds.
Wiedemann explains this word as : " Breakfast,
which is taken, through superstition, in spring
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

before going out, in order not to hear the
cuckoo on an empty stomach." Perhaps this
testifies more powerfully than the legends of
cuckoo heroes to the vast background of
belief in bird magic and bird prophecy, a faint
sketch of which I am trying to trace.

The Egyptians, too, had their stories which
point to the cuckoo as their visible starting-
point. There is that of Osiris and his sister
Isis, whose son was the hawk Horus. Osiris
is cut to pieces like Lemminkainen, and his
scattered limbs are found and collected by
his sister-wife, as Lemminkainen's by his
mother.

"It is this, the beneficent, the avenger of
her brother " says the Hymn to Osiris trans-
lated from the stele in the Bibliotheque Na-
tionale by M. Chabas ; " she unrepiningly
sought him : she went the round of the world
lamenting him ; she stopped not till she found
him. She shadowed with her wings ; her wings
caused wind, making the invocation of her
ii8

Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

brother's burial ; she raised the remains of the
god of the resting heart : she extracted his
essence : she had a child, she suckled the baby
in secret ; none knew where that happened.
The arm of the child has become strong in the
great dwelling of Seb."

Here Horus is the returning spring, the son
of the cuckoo that turns into a hawk, the
cuckoo whose death is as mysterious as his
birth.

A very curious story called " The Tale of
Setnau " seems to contain the cuckoo myth in
secondary form, that of the folk-tale, where
the crime of marriage between brother and
sister is made to entail disaster. So far as we
can see the marriage of Isis and Osiris did not
occasion the mutilation of the latter. But the
tale of Setnau found in a papyrus begins with
an enforced marriage between Ptah-Nefer-Ka
and his sister Ahura, although each desires to
marry some one else. Soon are developed the
avenging fates ! The brother insists on raising
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

a book of magic from the bottom of the sea ;
whereupon, first their child Merhu, then Ahura,
and finally Ptah-Nefer-Ka, plunge into the Nile
and are drowned. Egypt, we remember, is
the land where the royal family was condemned
to the closest interbreeding, even as late as the
Ptolemaic line. Such tales bear out the belief
that the bird heads seen on the sceptres of the
gods in Egyptian mural inscriptions are heads
of cuckoos.

120

Paan the- Pecueoek -^

CHAPTER V

THE peacock " with his aungelis clothis
bryghte " is a synonym for brainless-
ness ; the small size of its head, its harsh voice
and the ugliness of its legs have been con-
trasted in witty antithesis with the extraordi-

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

nary splendor of its crest, neck and long wing
coverts, and the haughtiness of its demeanor.
Those who have not seen the cock bird mak-
ing love to the demure hen have missed one
of the most curious sights. After strutting
for some time with his fan of gorgeous plumes
upright, he will approach his partner, and,
with a trembling in every plume well cal-
culated to bring each glister and glint of
color into play, and at the same time to pro-
duce a gentle humming sound, he will gradu-
ally curve the long feathers forward over
himself and her, until the two stand in a
green-gold bower of beauty.

Whether it was merely the superbness of
the feathers of the peacock, or also the fact
that the bird gives its calls before rain, and
in its native wilds issues a hoarse warning of
the presence of its foe, the tiger — at any rate
in its wild and half-tamed state in Ceylon
and South India it has always been a magic
bird, protected from extinction by the super-

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stition that to kill it was to offend a god.
Doubtless in earlier days and in its simpler
form this belief considered the peafowl as
the embodiment of some god of the forest
whose resentment it were wise not to rouse.
For several centuries at least it has been the
special companion of Subhramanya, a son of
Vishnu.

From Ceylon to Lapland seems a far cry,
but there are many instances of analogies be-
tween far separated ideas and things which
would seem improbable to us, if they were
not so familiar. Families in Scandinavia and
England bear the lion in their crests or coats ;
yet the lion is not known to have penetrated
Europe or central Asia. I do not mean to
say that the peacock reached Lapland as a
bird god or the animal emblem of a god ; yet,
being transportable, it did reach Europe, not-
withstanding the fact that it is not a native
and reached it to become the emblem of
various deities.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

The best known of these is Juno or Hera,
whom we have already spoken of as cuckoo-
like in her relation to Zeus. Her proud
chariot is drawn by peacocks, birds whose
introduction into Greece from India is as-
cribed to Alexander the Great, though their
attribution to Hera shows that they must have
been highly prized long before. Indeed Solo-
mon, that ruler of the demons and birds as
Mohammedans know him, imported peacocks
from India. If we place Solomon about 950
before Christ, the date is not far removed from
that at which, according to Terrien de la
Couperie, the Chinese first saw the Indian
bird. What store the Chinese set by its
feather we all know; its presence in a cap sig-
nifies a high rank. Europe must have had
plenty of time in which to have made certain
changes of fashion in the birds attached to cer-
tain deities before the Greeks arrived in
Greece, and, learning the use of the alphabet
from the Phoenicians, set down the attributes
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of the various gods in writing for the benefit
of Europe in after ages.

It is a characteristic of folk- tales and ballads
by the people's bards to ring the changes on
some few notes, to revamp the same plot, re-
tell with superficial variations the same story.
In the Finnish legends the doings of Vaino,
the old and the sage, of Ilma-
rinen, the inventive and firm-
spirited, of Lemminkainen and
Youkahainen, the young and
flighty, often overlap, so that
it is plain they are but variations on one origi-
nal godhead. Vaino has won the right to the
hand of Youkahainen's sister Aino by van-
quishing that young upstart of a Druid in
wizardry ; but Aino shows her relationship to
the various luckless sisters of cuckoo gods
by drowning herself rather than marry him.
In the ballads as we have them the reason is
no longer a discovery of unlawful closeness of
blood ; it is incompatibility of age. We have
"5

Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

in the first chapter noticed Aino after she
suffered a sea change ; here she is about to
take the leap.

The violence of Aino's grief betrays the fact
that something worse than merely marriage
with an old man lies behind her words. She
is the same person as Syrinx, the nymph who
flees from Pan and turns to a reed rather than
yield to his embraces. Vaino's bride exclaims :

Better had it been for Aino
Had she never seen the sunlight.
Or if born had died an infant,
Had not lived to be a maiden
In these days of sin and sorrow
Underneath a star so luckless !
Needed then but little linen.
Needed but a httle coffin
And a grave of smallest measure.

As Aino leaps into the water she addresses
her sister in words that bring the Finnish
nymph very close to Syrinx of Arcadia :

Sister dear, I sought the sea-side.

There to sport among the billows.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

With the stone of many colors

Sank poor Aino to the bottom

Of the deep and boundless blue-sea.

Like a pretty song-bird perished.

Never come to lave thine eyelids

In this rolling wave and seafoam.

Never during all thy lifetime.

As thou lovest sister Aino.

All the waters in the blue-sea.

All the fish that swim these waters.

Shall be Aino's flesh forever;

All the willows on the seaside

Shall be Aino*s ribs hereafter ;

All the seagrass on the margin

Will have grown from Aino's tresses.

[Kalevala, Rune IV, Crawford's iranslation.)

The separation of Vaino from Lemmin-
kainen and Ilmarinen, and the separation of
all three from Pikker must be very ancient ;
for as Pikker, the Finnish god of thunder,
leads back to Italy and discovers Picus, so
VaIno leads thither and discovers Faunus.
But Faunus Is no other than Pan of the old
Arcadians In Greece. VaIno, Faunus and Pan

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

have a Keltic namesake and parallel in Fion
of Ireland, whose troops were the Fianna or
Fenians. If the latter are not given the hairy
legs and horns of the Pans, Panisci, Fauni,
they were nevertheless creatures of the woods
who lived all summer in the open and only
quartered themselves in winter on the country
folk.

The variation of P into F, of F into V or
/F, is a matter of little moment ; these names
are the same, though they appear so far apart
and in so many differing tongues. What was
formerly called Finntraighe in Ireland is now
Ventry. The island of Ventotene, west of
Naples, is the ancient Pandataria. The name
of Pan was Phan in one part of Greece ; and
we may safely interpret the name of the bird
phoenix, and the name given by the Greeks to
the sea-faring inhabitants of Canaan, the Phoe-
nicians, as at root the same as the name of the
Arcadian god. The ideas of brightness and
redness we may hold to be of later invention,
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

after the tongues which might have explained
the root had disappeared from Greece.

Pan was a far older god on classic soil than
Zeus or Apollo or Hera or Mercury — gods
who usurped certain parts of him, gods who
show his attributes separated and differentiated.
In a language like Finnish the vowel in Pan
would be broken up into several, as we see by
his parallel, Vainamoinen. We see the same
in Pan's name in oldest Greece : Paian, Paieon.
The Greeks of Aryan blood, the intrusive
Greeks, did not ignore him entirely when they
dispossessed him from Olympus and enthroned
Zeus there, when they forced him to give
quarters to Apollo on Mount Lycaeus. Homer
speaks of him as Paian, or Paieon, the healing
god, as Welcker pointed out long ago. The
worshippers of Phoebus Apollo merely re-
peated his name when they shouted their
" paeans " and it is again the name of this old
god which we find in that of the Paiones,
tribes of Thessaly and Macedonia who spoke
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

quite another tongue from Greek and later
gave their name to Pannonia.

Pan, then, once the chief god of all that
part of Europe, has a parallel in Vaino among
the Finns. As the latter is always unfortunate
in love, as he pursues Aino till she drowns
herself, so Pan is rarely successful; in the
case of Syrinx he loses her on the borders
of the stream. Vaino invents the kantele ;
Pan, the pipes. The form we meet him in
among the Aryan Greeks is a mere fragment
of what he was : for he has parted with his
thunder to Zeus ; his eloquence and song and
sun traits and ill success with nymphs to
Apollo ; his magic to Mercury; his water
craft to Neptune. When Pan reaches out to
seize the lovely, fleeing Syrinx by the hair
and grasps the blades of the reeds, he consoles
himself with the pipes that he fashions from
them. Vaino is an "all-round" god who
fashions his harp from the head of a giant
sturgeon or pike, and while driving off his

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

own melancholy by music, is also intent on
improving his people by what he sings.

We only know Pan as the god of shepherds
and rustic Arcadians rebellious to the military
tyranny of the Laconians, a deity of the earlier
folk of Greece who retired before the Dorian
Greeks, conquerors of the Peloponnesus, into
their forests and hills. There is no reason to
believe that Pan, if he was portrayed by them,
was made to look like the shaggy goat god
we find him in classic art. That is but a Greek
way of expressing the rudeness of his effigies
and the clumsy barbarism of his devotees.
The Greek exercised his wit on the older
populace by lampooning their god. It was
not till after Marathon was fought that the
Athenians admitted Pan to a place among the
minor deities and dedicated a temple to him
on the acropolis. Yet he is a god who has
given his name, as just remarked, to several
great peoples of the past — the Phoenicians,
Paiones and Pannonians, the Venedae of the
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Baltic, the Veneti of the Adriatic, and to many-
cities including Vienna (the Vindobona of the
Romans) and to Venice. Pan is not dead.
As Finn mac Cool he lives in the fairy stories
and tales of giants told in Ireland; and as
Vaino he is still much more than a name in
song among the Finns.

We have seen that the eagle and the cuckoo
are birds that are often associated with Vaino
and doubtless these are the birds that the
earliest beliefs gave to him. But at a very
early period the splendor of the exotic peacock
made the ancient inhabitants of Greece asso-
ciate that bird with a representative of the
sun, such as Pan was. Later he had to part
with his eagle to Zeus and his peacock to
Hera ; but we can guess that the peacock
was first assigned to him, because in Europe,
with few exceptions, its name is a variant
on that of Pan and generally keeps the ini-
tial P, even when, as in Latin pavo, Esthonian
pabu, it drops the n, Catalonian has an odd
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

form pago ; Burgundian French had paivo ;
but the Berry dialect retains the n in pante,
peahen. The Irish call the peacock payal,
but write the word as if it had been padgal.
Identified through the gorgeousness of its
feathers and especially through the spots on
the long plumes, the eyes that suggest the
red-gold " eye of day," it could not fail to
obtain the name that referred to the sun, the
day and splendor, at the same time that it
meant a bird god honored throughout Europe
for his prophetic minstrelsy. Roman potters
often stamped a figure of the peacock with
plumes displayed on their little pottery hand
lamps.

We are told that the name of the peafowl
used by the Greeks came with the bird from
India, but was more immediately known to
them under the Persian form tawus; and this
form appears to have found lodgment in
Greece alone, where it appears as taos, geni-
tive taon. That means that the Greeks did

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

not carry the bird on, but the Phoenicians
did ; for the rest of Europe gave it names
that are similar to Esthonian paiva and paew,
the sun, the day. Such are Latin pavo,
pavonis, Irish payal, Vendish pawol, Esthonian
pabu-lind, German Pfau. It became the bird
of the healing god Paian, whose ancient half-
forgotten name the worshippers of Apollo
called upon when they cried " lo Paian ! " It
is the Greek bird god phaon, the shiner, and
though in the legend of the bird phoenix we
have astronomical ideas, yet is the creature on
which the phoenix was based the peacock !
Our word " pea " comes down through Anglo-
Saxon pawa from some original sun and day
term like the Finnish paivan-lintu " sun bird '*
and Esthonian pabu-lind " peacock." But
when we come to the eagle, we shall find him
the earliest phoenix of all.

A characteristic of the peacock, in which he
differs from many birds, is the humming noise
he makes with his long feathers when wooing

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

his mate. This may have been the starting-
point for the musical traits in Pan, Vaino, Fion
and the Fenians, of whom the latter indulged
in a very odd humming sound or chant called
the dordfhiann. Concerning Faunus of Italy
we know very little indeed ; but of Pan of
Greece, Vaino of Finland and Fion of Ireland
we know that they were unfortunate in love ;
their wives or chosen ones fled from them.
Perhaps we find the root of this in the be-
havior of the peahen, who seems not only
insensible to the strutting, the solar display,
the arch of plumes and low humming of her
pyrotechnical lover, but positively averse to
him. At least she pretends to disregard his
suit and constantly makes off, leaving her
lord and master apparently appalled at her
bad taste !

The bird of Juno seen on coins of Samos,

where it is depicted standing on the prow of

a galley, was all the more valued because it was

not a native of Europe or Asia ; it must have

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

been reckoned as a gift for princes from the
grayest dawn of history. As late as in his
day the Emperor Adrian presented to the
Heraion in the Corinthian district a magnifi-
cent peacock in honor of Hera. It was of
gold and jewels. But as early as barter ex-
isted specimens of the matchless bird must occa-
sionally have been brought from India by land
and by water. The pristine navigators of the
Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the Red
Sea, whom the Greeks named Phoinikoi and
the Latins Punici, must have brought, as well
to Europe as to King Solomon, the phaon or
phoenix natural, not astronomical ; and we may
well assume that they brought it with all its
religious honors thick upon it, calling it the
bird of their own high god. Otherwise the
old peoples of Greece and Italy would hardly
have named the bird after their own great god
of light and day.

Doubtless the Phccnicians merely trans-
mitted to Europe the fame that the bird en-
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

joyed in India as the warner against tigers,
foreteller of rain, visible emblem with its radi-
ate flaming wing coverts and its dark-blue neck
of the rainbow itself Associated as it was
with the close of the hot term in India and the
coming of the rain and the cool season, doubt-
less they found the Paiones of the ^Egean
and of Thessaly, worshippers of Paian, and
the devotees of Faunus, Vaino and Fion, as
well as the Pelasgian dwellers on the islands of
Samos and Lesbos, ready to name it after one
of their most notable gods, ready to replace
eagle or cuckoo in favor of the beautiful new-
comer.

In Crete there was localized a curious story
of Katreus (a name for the Indian peacock)
king of Crete. His son Althamenes (the
healer ?) discovered that he was fated to slay
his father, whereupon he fled to the island of
Rhodes and built a temple to Zeus. But he
could not escape his fate. All his other sons
having died, Katreus set sail for Rhodes,
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

landed, was attacked as an enemy and slain by
his son before explanations could be made.
Here we have the cuckoo story brought into
connection with the peacock under a name
that is probably not Greek at all, for in all
likelihood Katreus is not a Greek name.

How readily the peacock might find its tri-
umphant way about the world is seen in the
remains of a tomb of a Viking leader preserved
at Christiania. The galley of war was his
coffin ; his armor and weapons were buried
with him. And among his belongings one sees,
shining still bright after a rest of eight centuries,
the plumes of a peacock embedded in a mass of
charred stuff. In the Middle Ages the peacock,
stuffed and brought ceremoniously to table,
was a feature in various solemnities, oaths
being taken on the bird. These oaths, these
ceremonies, can have been no other thing than
survivals from the past when the bird was after
a fashion worshipped, if not as a bird, then as a
symbol.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

It was on the island of Samos that the pea-
cock became later specialized as the bird that
drew the car of Hera and decorated the prows
of her galleys. It was Lesbos, first inhabited
by Pelasgians, that produced one of the seven
wise men of Greece, also two of her greatest
poets. Alcaeus the poet and Sappho the poet-
ess, who gave their names to special rhythms
in verse ; Pittacus the wise, whom Alcaeus
satirized — these are called historical persons.
But their names cast a suspicion on the rest of
Greek history. Two bear the names of birds.
Alcaeus is the halcyon, the kingfisher, fabled
to cause the winds to cease until its eggs are
hatched in its floating nest ; Pittacus is psitta-
cus the parrot. Pythagoras, the mystic, far-
travelled philosopher, was born in Samos, and
though no well-defined bird traits are recorded
of him, he seems to have flitted bird-like about
the world — India, Crotona, Sicily — and cer-
tainly had the attributes of Vaino. He pre-
dicted storms and earthquakes, tamed with one
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Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

magic word the Daunian bear, taught the trans-
migration of souls, was said to have learned his
philosophy in " Scythia." And whatever may
lurk beneath the great name Sappho — perhaps
Shamas, the sun god, perhaps also the Sampo
of the Kalevala — it is a name associated with
that of Phaon, the peacock.

Phaon, it will be recalled, was a favorite of
Aphrodite. She presented him with an oint-
ment, by applying which to his person he
became the most beautiful of living men.
Sappho had a hopeless passion for him and
threw herself from the Leucadian Rock into
the sea, where Aphrodite was said to have
drowned herself for Adonis. The connection
of birds with Phaon and with the Leucadian
Rock is dimly felt through the story Strabo
tells of criminals being thrown from this rock
as a punishment. Their friends were allowed
to attach birds to them, and if, thus buoyed
up in the air, they reached the water alive,
they were picked up by boats in waiting and
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Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

allowed to depart into exile. Here we seem
to have a human sacrifice to a bird god analo-
gous to Pan (Phaon) for whose sake Sappho
herself was said to have taken the fatal leap.

Pan is indeed a mysterious and little-under-
stood deity. Were we to take only what the
Greeks have vouchsafed
to say of him, we would
not learn much. But
with the clew of bird
traits and bird origins in
our hand, we can find Pan
under many disguises.
The Greeks degraded him ; or perhaps it were
truer to say that they exalted other gods, their
own special gods, above him. Thus in the
career of Apollo we find fragments of the
career of Pan ; because, as we have seen,
Apollo ousted Pan and absorbed many of his
attributes, such as mastery in song, divination,
bowmanship, eloquence — even Pan's hard
luck in love.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

But we find Pan more clearly in a reputed
son of Apollo, the sweet singer Orpheus. If
we want to make a reasonable guess at the god-
lore taught to the intrusive Greeks by the sub-
ject Paiones, let us look at the doings and
beings of Orpheus. And then we find a bright
side-light thrown by Vaino of the Finns, whose
exploits were, in many ways, singularly like his.
Vaino and Orpheus had the same mysterious
birth ; both were teachers of the people and
founders of states. Both were charmers of
men and maids with music and song, nay, the
birds and beasts and inanimate objects —

All the beasts that haunt the woodland
Fall upon their knees and wonder
At the playing of the minstrel.
At his miracles of concord.
All the songsters of the forests
Perch upon the trembling branches.
Singing to the wondrous playing
Of the harp of Wainamoinen.
All the dwellers of the waters
Leave their beds and caves and grottoes,
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Swim against the shore and listen
To the playing of the minstrel.
To the harp of Wainamoinen.
All the little things in nature
Come and listen to the music.
To the notes of the enchanter.
To the songs of the magician.
To the harp of Wainamoinen.

{Kalevala, Rune XLIV, Crawford's translation^

The adventures of Vaino, Ilmarinen and
Lemminkainen while bringing back the Sampo
from Pohjola have dim resemblance to those
of Jason, Orpheus and the other heroes on
their trip to Colchis : notably the attack on the
Finnish heroes by Louhi in the shape of an
eagle bearing armed men resembles the attack
of the Stymphalian birds on the Greek heroes.

But we must beware of supposing that a
Greek poem like the Argonautica of ApoUonius
of Rhodes was imitated in the north. The
differences are too great. Each appears to
have grown spontaneously ; only a very remote
common origin can be imagined for both.
M3

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

These parallels do not suggest the derivation
of one god from the otherj nor of one legend
from the other, but a provenance from some
early universal stock. Vaino and Orpheus
visit the under-world, Vaino to obtain three
words of magic in the belly of Antero Vipunen
wherewith to build a boat — the Finnish Argo
perhaps. Orpheus made his ever-memorable
trip to hell to regain his wife, as Vaino and
Ilmarinen go to the shadow land to obtain
spouses. Like Vaino, Orpheus was soothsayer,
enchanter, instructor of his people, inventor of
the lyre ; and his name seems to come from the
notion of the father-and-motherless one, the
" orphan," in which respect he resembled not
Vaino alone, but Arthur, but Kullervo and
Kalevipoeg, Merlin the old Briton, Fion and
Cuchullaind of the Irish.

Vaino's intended wife went off with Ilma-
rinen ; the wife of Orpheus was pursued by
Aristaeus, another son of Apollo, until she
found refuge in Hades, under which form of
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the legend we see clearly enough the ill-luck
with women that followed Vaino and Fion
and Pan. No doubt in the earlier legends
she fled wittingly. Ev^en in that which we
have Orpheus completes his bad luck by
looking back and breaking the charm, where-
upon Eurydike flees down again into hell,
from which it may be she came with reluc-
tance. Orpheus comes to his death through
women who tear him to pieces, while Pan,
constantly teased and tormented by nyinphs,
was bewailed as dead ; while Fion of Ireland
is forced to see Grainne his sun-maiden elope
with Diarmuid the irresistible. Pan and Vaino
have also more serious adventures with wo-
men, as we have seen.

Pan's bird of grandeur was the eagle, but
that was so long ago that the earliest Euro-
peans must have been at the time in the same
stage of culture as American Indians. On the
west coast of America there is a belief in the
Eagle of the Zenith, a gigantic bird too high

10 145

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

up in the air to be visible, which yet perceives
all that exists and moves on earth and some-
times descends in some awful visitation of
nature. When he shakes his feathers, thunder
rolls, hail and snow fall. The phcEnix and the
peacock, for they are one and the same bird,
were used by the very early Christians to sym-
bolize the resurrection from the dead. But the
Christians of the Middle Ages did not copy
them, for they found a chance to moralize
about the bird and class it among the suspi-
cious adjuncts of heathen gods.

Perhaps with the relegation of Pan to the
devils by the Christians the peacock became
that synonym for the lusts of the flesh which
we find it in the Middle Ages. That must also
account for the idea that peacock feathers are
unlucky ; they were badges of the heathen
when Christianity was still fighting for its life
in northern Europe. The writer of Job seems
to have no such prejudice against the bird, for
God says scornfully to Job: "Gavest thou the
146

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

goodly wings unto the peacock, or wings and
feathers unto the ostrich ? '* and proceeds to
score the foolishness of the ostrich, but has no
word to say against the peacock. It remained
for the Middle Ages to cast odiousness upon
this magnificent creature and to exalt into a
favorite charge of coats of arms the " Pelican
in its piety" — as ugly and stupid a bird as
one can find on the Nile. Yet those men of
the Middle Ages who did not moralize es-
teemed the peacock scarcely less, since we
know that knights and esquires took an oath
on the king's peacock, which was called the
voeu du paon.

In these considerations of ancient bird gods
in Europe I do not wish to be understood to
confine the men and demigods noted to an
exclusively bird origin. I wish to call atten-
tion to a neglected field of mythology and folk-
lore, by studying which very many anecdotes
and actions, which otherwise must seem quite
arbitrary, if not foolish, take their places in

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

rational sequence. I am trying to show the
singular power of the imagination in taking
some one striking fact, like the drumming of
the woodpecker, the fosterage among cuckoos,
the radiance of the peacock, and evolving from
that simple cell the marvellously varied struc-
tures of mythology and fairy-tale, folk-lore,
epic and drama, to delight, startle, instruct and
awe the successive generations of men.

148

■mi

'lis nothing but aIittle<Jowny Owl"

CHAPTER VI

TT was near midnight ; the moon had laid the
^ Colosseum with broad sheets of white on
dark as I stood in the ancient arena and pon-
dered — how to be rid of a small Italian, a self-
imposed guide, who was keeping up a chatter
in German, French, English and Italian, each
bad of its kind and all impartially mixed.

Then up in the arches against the sky re-
sounded a strange, not altogether unfamiliar
sound — a screaming call that suggested the cry
of the whippoorwill.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

" I care nothing for the Colosseum and its
history, my small friend," said I, "but much
for that creature screaming up there ! What
is it?"

" O — that ? That is only a bruto uccello,
cattivo ! an ugly bad bird that comes to people
when they are sick and tells them they must
die!"

Passing through the streets of Rome next
day I came upon a seller of owls — poor little
fellows fastened securely to the top of a pole by
one foot. Every now and then one would fall
from the top and flutter helplessly, hanging by
the leg. In such guise they are in demand as
lures for small birds, which hate them so bit-
terly that as soon as they catch sight of them
they are readily inveigled into traps or on to
limed twigs. Otherwise owls are kept like
cats or tortoises to free gardens from small
vermin.

The owl as an evil omen and the owl as
a lure, these are the two phases under which a
150

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

harmless and most useful little bird is known
to most people, not only in Europe, but in
Asia and America. Its broad eyes that seem
at night to shine with an inner light, its big
head and high forehead, its mysterious feather-
light flight and the disconcerting harshness of
its cry have always given it an uncanny repute.
Why has the witch always been more feared
than the wizard, at least in historical times ?
For some reason the small owl has generally
been connected with the female sex. Not only
was it the bird of the Maiden Maid, patroness
of spinning, embroidery and the olive-orchard
among the greatest of mankind, the classic
Athenians, but it is still the woman's bird
among the lowest of races, the blacks of Aus-
tralia. Many of these tribes use " owl " as a
synonym for " woman " and believe that when
an owl is killed some woman's death is sure to
follow. The women on the other hand call
men " bats " ; the death of a bat, so they be-
lieve, portends the death of a black fellow.

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

The small owl is female in most languages
— Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Lusatian-Vendish,
German, French, Icelandic, Welsh, Hunga-
rian. In English, Finnish and Esthcnlcn the
sex is not distinguished; but I think that we
generally consider the little owl feminine, as we
do the cat, although Tennyson and Keats
make the great white owl masculine —

Alone and warming his five wits.
The white owl in the belfry sits —

and

The owl for all his feathers was acold.

This bird was in the Bible classed amongst
those to eat which was " abomination " ;
though why the owl, the cuckoo and the swan
should have been placed on the black list in
Leviticus has not been explained, nor will it
seem clear unless we allow for the connection
of each of these birds in the minds of the
ancient Hebrews with heathen gods who ori-
ginally were bird gods and dragged their
attendant birds after them into "abomination."
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Shakespeare must mean the owl when he
says In his mystical Phoenix and Turtle :

But thou, shrieking harbinger.
Foul pre-curser of the fiend.
Augur of the fever's end.
To this troop come thou not near !

And before him Chaucer remarked of the
owl that"wonde" or stayed all night on the
" balkes " or beams of the house, that it was
a foreteller of woe —

The owle al nyght aboute the balkes wonde.
That prophete ys of woo and of myschaunce.

The European form of Christianity has
been hard on birds, harder than Judaism.
Perhaps it is for that reason one sees so much
cruelty exercised toward birds in Italy, where
at the hands of a ruthless race of men Chris-
tianity has been perverted from its original
beauty. Like other heathen peoples the
Etruscans and Romans at least reverenced,
at least feared the birds whose cries and
devious flight seemed to foretell the future.
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

But the shocking form of religion evolved by
the wickedness of the Middle Ages allowed the
destruction and torture of hapless birds and
beasts without remorse and with scarcely a
rebuke.

In the island of Lesbos there existed a

legend like that of Lot and his daughters,

^^>^f^ come down to us through

I^^^^KB^^L ^^^^^ sources, in which

^^0^^tfhM^ was her father Opopeus
^'^S^^'^ with whom she sinned.
On learning what she had done, she fled to the
woods, where Pallas Athene took pity on her
and turned her into an owl. In Welsh legend
Blodeued the wife of Llew is turned by
Gwydion into an owl, because she betrayed
her husband to death. Pallas is thoroughly
mixed up with this bird, as we shall see; it
was no mere chance that gave her the owl.
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Nyctlmene (nux the night) evidently means
the night creature ; her father's name Opop-
eus is plainly that of the hoopoe (upupa) ;
therefore the legend itself is one more example
of bird myth humanized, like the crimes of
heroes and heroines already traced back to the
natural history of the cuckoo.

The fact that the owl is useful to husband-
men in ridding the grain fields of mice, which
often bring famines by a sudden vast increase
in their numbers, only confirmed the owl as
a symbol of the Immortal Maid. These little
screech-owls which are said to have been
always common about the acropolis may well
have protected other crops from mice beside
grain, the olive for instance, a branch of which
accompanies the owl on Attic coins. In
Germany its names are many : Kauz is the
commonest, but corpse-bird, corpse-hen, death-
owl, sorrowing mother, indicate the supersti-
tions to which its nocturnal habits and startling
cry have given rise. In Austria one of its
155

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

names is Wichtl, little wight, little kobold,
suggesting a certain fondness for it on the
part of the people. In Germany the Eulen-
flucht in barns is a triangular hole left in
the gable to permit owls to enter and destroy
mice.

The usefulness of the small hooter must
have been known to the ancients about the
Mediterranean ; it certainly is to the moderns.
In Austria, Greece and Italy it is commonly
tamed or turned loose in gardens with clipped
wings in order to keep down insects, slugs and
mice. Small birds and bats are its prey ; a
singular habit of bowing and swelling up its
feathers in a comical fashion makes it an
amusing pet. The lively way in which the
owl attacks and kills birds of its own size
must have aided in keeping it long as a
symbol of the warrior goddess ; for many
centuries it accompanied her head on Attic
coins. But these are merely minor matters
that confirmed its popularity in despite of a

156

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

sinister repute. More important was its posi-
tion as luctifer " sorrow-bringer." As a
haunter of moonlight and dusk it held its
own place among the gods and half-gods of
earliest Europe.

Who Pallas Athene herself was, is one of
the many puzzles of Greek mythology ; yet
it may be the little downy owl shall offer us
a clew.

Just why Pallas Athene should have had
the owl for her symbol the ancients never
satisfactorily explained, nor have the moderns
done so. Certainly it must have been for
reasons more cogent than the fanciful one that
the owl is a wise bird because it looks so
solemn and was therefore given to Pallas
because she was a wise goddess.

The owl is the glaux, glarer, with its round
yellow eyes ; Pallas is called glaukopis, glaux-
eyed, because — she could see in the dark like
an owl to carry off men's souls !

This was her office at the period when she
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

was the bride of Vulcan and did many things
her worshippers afterwards suppressed. Much
later must have been the epoch when the
classical Greeks, who hated ugly things more
than bad logic and inconsistency, raised her to
the severe beauty and serenity of the chaste,
warlike goddess, the Brunhild of Greece and
at the same time the goddess of the spindle
and of wisdom.

Pallas of Athens had other symbols among
living things, notably the serpent, which coils
about her altar in Attika as it does in an
Etruscan tomb-painting about the altar of
Minerva. Pausanias suggests that this ser-
pent is the symbol of the old King Erich-
thonius of the aborigines. But she had the
cock also, as one perceives from many a
beautiful old Greek vase whereon she is de-
picted standing in her stiffest hieratic attitude
between two columns, on each of which is a
game-cock. This is pre-eminently the bird
of the dawn and must have been assigned

158

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

to Pallas as soon as it was introduced from
the Orient, notwithstanding its masculine sex;
perhaps because at that early period the Maid
had not become so definitely not-male as later
on. The owl is not only the bird of dusk,
but of moonlight, and
as it is a European fowl,
not an importation, like
the cock, peacock and
pheasant, must be held
the earlier symbol of
the two. Some early
coins of Athens show a
crescent moon along with
owl and olive branch,
others, somewhat later,
three or four crescents with or without the
owl. Since such symbols are generally in
the nature of footnotes explanatory of the
meaning of a god, we may safely consider
that Pallas Athene was originally a deity of
the night, rather than the day. Since owl
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

and serpent infest caves of the rock, we may
consider her allied to the earth, that is to say,
of the race of the giants and of the powers
of darkness under the earth. We have seen
in the last chapter how the Greeks of the
time of Perikles placed the woman-headed
winged lion on her helmet instead of the owl.
This creature, like the eagle-headed lions or
griffons on the sides of the helmet, are sym-
bols of the power of Athene.

She is perhaps a form of Selene the moon
(Diana) and is own sister to Aurora the dawn.
She and Aurora have the same family connec-
tions. She got her name Pallas, according to
Greek tradition, from the giant Pallas, grand-
son of heaven and earth, cousin to Aurora.
Another version of him is humanized into a
son of Pandion, an ancient king of Arcadia,
who is no other than Pan, the great primitive
Turanian god. Pallas Athene is therefore
descended from Pan, and gets her epithet
Paionia from the older form of Pan's name,
1 60

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Paieon. Another epithet is Pandrosos "all-
dew " indicating once more a dusk and moon
divinity. In Italy the goddess Minerva's
name is explained by Isaac Taylor as Etrus-
can for " heavens-red/' She and Pallas repre-
sent a being like the daughter of Mana in
the Kalevala of the Finns — that dread spectre
of the under- wo rid — and it may well be that
the "Men" in Menrfa and the "Man" in
Manala are the same word.

Our goddess's miraculous birth should not
be forgot when we try to find her original
meaning below the surface of her worship in
classical Greece. Remembering that Pan was
before Zeus, not as the goat-foot, but sovereign
of the day, the sun and weather, the peculiar
circumstances of the birth of Pallas Athene
receive explanation. It will be remembered
that she sprang full-armed from the head of
her sire. So does the dawn rise above the
head of the sun, spring from its head, as it
approaches the horizon ; so does the moon
II i6i

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

take fire from — as it were spring from — the
head of the sun as the latter sinks to rest.
There is reason to believe that the primitive
peoples imagined one office of the moon and
the dawn to be the purely feminine one of
bathing and refreshing the sun during the
night after his toilsome, dusty passage across
the heavens, sending him cleansed and bright
next morning to run his course again.

By the time of the Homeric poems the
names of gods taken from peoples not origi-
nally Greek had become Greek property and
stories regarding these gods had branched off
into a hundred different versions with various
godlike persons in the title roll. The bards had
already exercised their wits in explaining the
names of gods and heroes from Greek roots,
just as in our epoch the Irish bards explained
non-Keltic names of gods and heroes through
Keltic roots. Take Ulysses for an example.
The Greeks called him Odusseus, explaining
the name as the " hated " one. But the
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Etruscans with Uluxe and the Silculians with
Oulixes retained the earlier pronunciation.
We have seen that iEneas the dove hero was
the son of Aphrodite and took his name from
oinas, dove. Throughout his Hfe Ulysses was
the pampered favorite of Pallas Athene the
owl goddess ; in his name Oulixes, Uluxe we
find the ululation of the owl !

This explanation of Ulysses will not seem so
hazardous if one take the trouble to recall his
relations with bird gods and remember certain
main lines in his life. His adventure in steal-
ing the Palladium from Troy was a night
affair ; so was his expedition from ^aea to
Hades a night expedition ; and as an owl god
his visit to the infernal regions was in
character. The slaughter of the suitors of
Penelope was like the vengeance the owl
takes on the birds its mockers when even-
ing comes ; and indeed Pallas Athene is with
him at the time in the shape of a bird.
He visits Kirke, the poisonmixer and witch
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of iEaea. Kirke means " she-hawk " ; she
was the daughter of King iEetes (eagle) of
Colchis. The universal cuckoo myth then
returns. After he leaves Kirke, she bears
his son Telegonos ("born-afar-off ") who when
grown up lands on Ithaka in search of his
father and kills him, not knowing who he is.

Penelope the weaver, the wife of owl-wise
Ulysses, is of bird origin too, a daughter of
Icarius, in whom one finds the wings of Icarus
again, and first cousin to Helen, the egg-born
daughter of Leda (swan) and of her mortal
father Tundareos, the woodpecker; therefore
first cousin likewise to Pollux, whose name, as
we shall see, means owl.

And speaking of weaving, I am minded of
the Maeonian nymph Arachne who contended
with Pallas Athene in that useful art and was
turned by her into arachne, a spider. In this
legend we are close upon the explanation of
that great puzzle for archaeologists on which
Max Miiller, d'Arviella and others have
164

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

written so learnedly, not to speak of Ameri-
cans like Thomas Wilson ("The Swastika":
Smithsonian Publications) namely the fylfot
or swastika or cross with bent ends. This
sign refers to weaving and was a short-hand
picture of the spider !

The discovery on ancient shell ornaments
from the American mounds of carvings of
spiders with a cross on their backs gives the
opening link in the chain. Schliemann's find
of innumerable spinning whorls and weights
of terra cotta and stone bearing the cross
symbol deep down in the strata of burned
cities at Hissarlik gives another link. The
beautiful American spiders with crosses on
their backs, the European and Asian cross-
marked spiders and the form of the central
webs of spiders all the world over give yet
another. The symbol of the cross has not
migrated from India, as Mr. Wilson suggests,
because the prophetic web-spinner is every-
where. Everywhere men have observed that

165

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the spider foretells clear weather or storm by
its peculiar ways of acting ; nearly everywhere
it is a symbol of luck. Spiders foretold their
fate to the Thebans when, on the death of
Philip of Macedon, they dared to revolt
against Alexander the Great. The spider can
make itself invisible by rapidly vibrating its
web. Its marvellous ingenuity, patience and
spirit ; its courage and powers of disappearance
and prophecy marked it from the earliest ages
as a symbol. Its most prominent marking,
the cross, must have become at remote epochs
a sign for the creature and for its wonderful
trait, spinning.

The shell gorgets in American mounds were
probably useful as well as decorative. Hence
the prevalence of the cross on early thread bob-
bins and spindle whorls round about the earth,
also on embroideries, woven and plaited cups,
dishes and baskets, useful objects that were
copied afterwards in pottery or stone, which
copies have come down to us in the lands
i66

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

about the Mediterranean as well as in the
United States, while the woven and plaited
originals themselves have perished. When
found on the breech clouts of ancient idols,
or the arms and legs of rude statues, the
swastika has generally no reference to the god,
but refers to weaving and merely represents a
decoration on the clothing of these figures.
Later, in America and Europe, it became a
symbol of the four points of the compass and
of rain and perhaps, still later, of the sun in
relation to the weather, not the sun as a wheel
or a chariot ; for the symbol of the spider's
cross, as we see from the American tribes who
knew nothing of wheels or of a revolving sun,
must antedate by many ages the discovery of
the wheel.

But from this digression on the cross-marked
spider as the origin of the fylfot or swastika
let us return to our owls.

It is noteworthy that in Rome a festival for
Minerva that lasted five days, the Minervalia,
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

should have been held in March ; it is then
that owls most cry and flit about, that being their
pairing season. Naturally people who watch
the sick hear the owls cry ; moreover the sick
die oftenest in the early morning. Hence the
cry of the owl became closely associated with
night and death and the bird attained in the
most remote epochs a lugubrious fame.

In the Rigveda the pious are urged to send
up prayers to death and the god of death when
they hear the owl call. At Rome where the
auspex had a most elaborate ritual to comply
with and minute rules to follow, he managed
to distinguish no less than nine different calls
of the owl. It is singular that the super-
stition which still ravages nurseries in Europe
and America regarding cats, namely, that cats
suck the breath of babies and strangle them,
should have existed in Italy with regard to
the owl. Pliny explains the name of the " in-
fanda, improba strix" by the verb stringere,
to throttle, because the evil bird throttles babes
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

in the cradle. This idea persisting in the
nursery while colleges of auspexes were suc-
ceeded by convents of Christian priests gives
an inkling of what that primitive thought may
have been which lies at the origin of Pallas
Athene and Minerva ; it measures the strength
of superstitions as to spiders, owls and such
small fry in surviving the crash of empires
and the downfall of vast religious systems.
Who would have thought
that Pallas Athene, the wise
and helpful virgin goddess,
could have been evolved
from a cruel owl god of in-
determinate sex, a murderous god, to whom
the slaughter of men was a joy ?

Long before wisdom was associated with the
deity or with the owl, Pallas Athene must
have been evolved from an owl into a soul
guide, into a kind of valkyr, softly flitting on
owlet's wings to carry off the souls of brave
men to the shades. At Orte in Central Italy
169

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

was found a small bronze Minerva showing
traces of wings and carrying an owl on her
hand. The wings show that to the Etruscans
she was a psychopompos, a soul guide ; the
owl indicates the realm of darkness. Did
not Ceres turn a son of Styx into an owl
because he blabbed the secret that she
had eaten seven grains of a pomegranate in
Hades? In the Kalevala, when Vaino goes
to hell to find three words of magic, he wisely
declines to eat or drink there, and thus man-
ages to escape the conjurations and copper
nets of Mana.

At Perugia there is an Etruscan tomb, on
the rear wall of which two owls and a serpent
are carved in relief Owls as well as serpents
are cliff aad cave dwellers, hermits of darkness,
and belong, if one may be allowed so grim a
bull, to the ordinary livestock of the realm of
death. In Florence and Rome I picked up
two Etruscan scarab-shaped seals bearing the
owl goddess — all owl save the head, which
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

has the points about it indicating a helmet.
On one the owl goddess stands in the middle,
flill front, flanked by a sphinx and a bird-
headed quadruped, both in profile and seated.
This trio of winged gods has a strong hieratic
look, not so suggestive of Egypt as Assyria,
like other Etruscan works of art. One thinks
of the bird-winged angels carrying souls, which
are found on the famous Harpy Tomb from
Lycia now in the British Museum. According
to the ancients the Etruscans came to Italy
from that part of the world.

Seals like these were in common use to
guard coffers and rooms from being opened,
or to mark an animal or object for sacrifice, to
identify objects or to certify ownership, or
else they were used as signatures in the way
common to the East ; they are found in great
numbers in old Etruscan strongholds like
Clusium. There can be little doubt that
winged figures on seals, such as griffons, bird-
headed human figures, human-headed beasts
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

and birds were talismans at the same time.
An impression placed the object sealed under
the protection of the god or demon repre-
sented. The owl seals tacitly invoked the
wrath of the moon goddess or valkyr on a
thief bold enough to break them.

The owl goddess of the Mediterranean had a
parallel on the Baltic in comparatively recent
times. Of the stone idols fashioned by the
heathen Lapps some centuries ago Niurenius
has stated that they were for the most part in
the shape of birds. A god worshipped in Livo-
nia is said to have flown in the shape of an owl
to the island of Oesel when Christian soldiers
appeared in his temple. This god was invoked
by tho^e going into battle. In 1219 priests
from Germany destroyed this temple and in
1225 the Esthonian inhabitants of Oesel are
said to have thrown out the idol at command
of the Christians. The name of the god was
Tarapilla, so we are told, but that name is the
Finnish word tarhapollo, which means the owl.
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

The old writer Adam of Bremen mentions the
worship of Tarapilla by the Esthonians and
says that slaves without blemish were bought
to be sacrificed to the owl god.

In this connection we may recall what a
commentator on the Iliad states about the
Palladium, the talisman on which the safety
of Troy depended. It was not a statue of
Pallas Athene herself, but a small wooden
image of an animal. May it not have been
such a bird image, or more definitely such an
image of an owl as the Esthonians worshipped
on the Baltic ? It would not be in the least
peculiar if Lapps, Finns and Esths had pre-
served until recent times an ancient, rude
worship that represents the beginnings of the
worship of Pallas Athene in Attika. At the
period in question, the gods could not yet
have been organized on Olympus and Pan
rather than Zeus was the great god of the
sun and the thunderbolt. We may consider
this early Pallas a cruel god whose sex was
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

doubtful, a god of soldiers, to whom captives
and slaves were immolated, a deity of rapine
and darkness whose visible symbol was the
owl.

Concerning this god on the Baltic we have
a peculiarly rude trait. When represented as
a human deity he carried a long shaft of iron
in place of a spear and was said to have heated
one end of it red hot — not in order to chas-
tise men at all, but to keep the lower gods
and demons in order ! One thinks of Isvara,
one of the forms of Siva, who picked up a red-
hot iron his enemies the Rishis laid in his way
and used it as a sword or club.

One thinks of Charon, an infernal deity,
jeating the souls with his oar, or else, as he
is depicted on Etruscan coffins and ash-boxes,
brandishing with a frightful scowl an axe or
hammer. And one recalls the Japanese de-
mon queller who is so great a favorite with the
painters and carvers in ivory. Perhaps it was
the tyranny exercised by owls toward other
174

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

birds that suggested this to the old Finnic
peoples on the Baltic when they invested Tar-
hapollo with human form and a red-hot spear.

In this word tarha is merely an explana-
tory portion, polio alone
meaning owl. It has
a singular likeness to
Pallas. If we suppose
that the Aryan Greeks
ended by assuming va-
rious deities of a Tura-
nian subject-race, we can
easily account for the
true meaning of Pallas
in harmony with her attendant bird.

Remarkable are the contrasts in the char-
acter of Pallas Athene. We can explain them
only by supposing a blending of traits from
various supernatural beings, just as we find
that a very popular saint will sometimes absorb
legends and miracles originally not his, but the
property of less known martyrs. Why should
175

^hC

Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

this maid of Mars, who conquers Mars, this
blue stocking, be the patroness of spinning ?

In German popular songs the owl is often
spoken of as a weaver, perhaps because of the
odd movement of its head when disturbed.

Recall that Minerva was originally a moon
goddess and the daughter of the sun ; consider
how natural a simile it is to speak of the sun
or moonbeams as " weaving " or of their ap-
pearance as that of woven cloth of silver or
gold. Then read the Kalevala, where the
daughters of the sun and moon listen to Vaino,
the Turanian parallel of Pan-Orpheus, while
he entrances the whole animate and super-
natural world with his minstrelsy —

In their hands the Moon's fair daughters
Held their weaving-combs of silver.
In their hands the Sun's sweet maidens
Grasped the handles of their distaffs.
Weaving with their golden shuttles.
Spinning from their silver spindles
On the red rims of the cloudlets.
On the bow of many colors.
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

As they hear the minstrel playing.
Hear the harp of Wainamoinen,
Quick they drop their combs of silver.
Drop the spindles from their fingers
And the golden threads are broken.
Broken are the threads of silver.

{Kalevala, Rtme XLI, Crawford's translation.)

Here we find the origin of Pallas Athene's
prowess in weaving. And while we note that
in process of time she became the wisest and
most sedate of goddesses, her earlier career
was checkered with a number of contests with
other gods, notably with Poseidon for the pos-
session of Attika, but also with Ares, Hera,
Arachne and Aphrodite. In fact she was even
more than a shrew; she was a virago. This
suits well the character of the owl, which is
forever stirring the anger of other birds —
forever in hot water — and yet, by observing
a reserved and prudent conduct, manages
to live its life in philosophic repose. The
" mother of ruins " as it is called in Syria
seems not only to have given its commonest
12 177

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

name to Ulysses and its Turanian name
(polio) to Pallas and Pollux, but by its pecu-
liar ways to have done much to suggest the
characteristics of that great goddess — a singu-
lar outcome, indeed, when we reflect with
Shelley that "'Tis nothing but a little downy
owl 1"

/

178

1 Sxpear fey theStmn

CHAPTER VII

IT is recorded of King Edward the First of
England that on a certain solemn occasion
in the year 1304, his investiture as a knight,
two swans decorated with gold nets were
brought in, and he thereupon swore an oath
to the God of Heaven on these swans. The
heathen origin of this oath is plain enough;
it is like the oath on the king's peacock or

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

on the horse's head. It was an ancient pagan
oath in the north connected with the worship
of Freyr. But at first blush one would not
suppose that a bit of Yankee speech, found in
the United States among country people, re-
ferred to this very bird, if not exactly to the
same oath.

On the stage or in the funny corner of
the newspapers the ordinary Yankee from
the country uses an oath or affirmation
"I swan!" or "I swanny ! " or "Swan toe
man ! " This is called by the dictionaries an
attempt to disguise the word " swear," as
*' gosh " is used to soften, if not disguise, the
name of the deity. But the dictionaries are
at fault. "I swan" never meant exactly "I
swear " ; nor would there be any reason in
softening swear to swan, as God is softened
to "gosh."

Swan is just the bird ; and " I swan " or
"it swans to me" meant originally that the
speaker had a prophetic, all-overish feeling

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

that something was going to happen, and he
used the term by which he knew that particu-
lar fowl, because the swan has from time
immemorial been a bird of prophecy.

The same order of ideas regarding the swan
has enriched the German language with an
identical expression : Es schwanet mir (it
swans to me) means that a premonitory or
prophetic shudder is felt, such as is expressed
by the popular exclamation " Somebody 's
walking over my grave ! "

Let the priest in surplice white
That defunctive music can
Be the death-divining swan.
Lest the requiem lack his right.

{Phcenix and Turtle.)

In 1440 Frederick II of Brandenburg insti-
tuted an Order of the Swan, and at Cleves
there was also an order of Knighthood of the
Swan, showing that swan worship lingered in
ceremonies long after it had been ousted or
covered up by Christianity.
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Not the magnificence of the swan merely,
but this element of superstitious reverence
accounts for the frequency of the swan as a
crest and charge of coats of arms. Perhaps
the eagle alone surpassed the swan in popu-
larity for this purpose during the later Middle
Ages and the centuries nearer our time, when
heraldry began to affect the airs of an exact
science and most well-to-do people, whatso-
ever their birth and descent, thought it neces-
sary to set up a coat of arms. Thus in
heraldry does the swan run back through
heraldic devices to totemism. Among the
" oath birds " which the wizards of Lapland
called upon in their incantations the swan
often figured. The shaman would tell how
the saivo-lodde, or bird from the magic place
called saivo, carried him on its back to that
realm of mystery where he learned what is
hidden to ordinary mortals. Hardly less
potent than the eagle's feather was the feather
of a swan among his stock of talismans and
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

magical paraphernalia. In all the northern
and western part of Europe, in the marshy,
lake-strewn lands of Scandinavia, Russia and
Germany, as well as among the lake regions
of Greece and Turkestan, the swan was a
bird to conjure with.

The large white swan, domesticated in order
to grace ornamental waters, is very nearly
mute ; but the somewhat slenderer whistling
swan (Cygnus musicus) sings a great deal,
and indeed is particularly loquacious when
wounded or dying. Observations of the mute
swan caused people to assign the song of the
dying swan to the most fabulous of fables ;
but modern bird lovers have heard the swans
of Russia singing their own dirge in the north,
when, having lingered too long before migra-
tion, reduced in strength by lack of food and
frozen fast to the ice where they have rested
overnight, they clang their lives out, even as
the ancients said. Chaucer in "Anelyda and
Arcite" had good reason to sing —
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

But as the swan, I have herd seyd ful yore —
Ageyns his dethe shall singen his penaunce — So
singe I here the destinye or chaunce — How that
Arcite, etc.

Musical swans used to come in such flocks
to a lake near Liban that it was called the lake
of complaining — Klagesee.

In England the musical swan seems a rare
winter visitant now-a-days ; it is supposed
never to have bred there. Special provisions
for breeding swans seem to have come into
England with the Norman kings, who may
have Inherited their reverence for the bird
from the habits of chiefs and magnates in
Denmark and Norway, their northern ances-
tors. It was not by chance that Edward the
First, one of the greatest kings after the Con-
queror, swore an oath on the swan. Fattened
roast cygnet (a Norman word) Is still eaten in
England. By the time of Elizabeth the keep-
ing of swans had ceased to be a royal preroga-
tive and to-day the largest " game " of swans
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

is the property of Lord Ilchester, who owns
the great swannery of the Fleet on the coast
of Dorsetshire.

Swans were at one time considered for their
useful qualities as food, but it is doubtful if
birds so difficult to keep in domestication
would have been so carefully preserved in the
various royal and other swanneries of England
if sentiment and superstition had not worked
hand in hand for their preservation. Among
the ancients as well as in the twelfth century
it was great luck to meet a swan at sea. While
the Scandinavian tongues have the word swan
it is curious that in Icelandic and Old Norse
the name for the swan in common use is and
was practically identical with that for fairy.
Icelandic alptir, Norse elptr, elftr, swans, is
scarcely to be distinguished from Icelandic
alfar, albr, elves. It is true that the latter is
masculine, while the word for swan is femi-
nine ; but one is tempted to see a radical con-
nection of thought between the two.
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Legends and fairy stories abound, in which
men and women become swans for longer or
shorter periods. They are either permanently
swans or can change themselves for a time into
a bird that is at home in the water and the air,
a bird that fears neither darkness, nor cold, nor
the dizziest heights of the sky, nor the depths
of the sea ; that rejoices in snowy tracts of ice
and rears its young, like the halcyon of fable,
on masses of floating reeds. It may be that
the great river Elbe that springs from the
" sea-coast " of Bohemia, splits the realms of
Saxony and Prussia in two, and reaches ocean
in the ancient free commonwealth of Hamburg,
was first named from the magic bird whose
name was the same as elf Elb is still the
word for a fairy in German to-day, and Elb
or Elbschwan is the German name for a
variety of the bird, while in Northumberland
elk, Welsh elyrch, is a wild swan.

Indeed it might be well to give up the
attempt to explain the name of the river
i86

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Elbe from the Latin word albus, white, and
seek nearer home for a word formerly and still
used in northern Germany.

The swan is the sacred bird at the well of
Urda, the prophetess in the Edda. In the
Volundarquitha three magic women, seated on
the shore spinning flax, have by their sides
their alptar-hamir or skins of swan feathers.
When we come to speak of the Gralai, these
three swan women will emerge in quite another
land.

Not a little curious is it that certain small
rudely-cast idols found during the last cen-
tury in Mecklenburg should have a swan or
goose on their heads. They were said to
have been dug up on the site of a famous
Vendish town called Rhetra, which in the
Middle Ages lay on several hills surrounded
by water from the Baltic. The waters have
retired since, leaving the valleys dry. Here
according to old historians was a temple of
the Vends in a grove ; it was destroyed by
187

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

German armies ; and these remains certainly
show the action of fire. Among the idols
were some called those of Radigast, a historic
god of the old inhabitants of Mecklenburg,
carrying a bull's head (still the badge of
Mecklenburg) in the right hand, a battle axe
in the left and a swan on his head. In this
case the face of the idol is not human, but that
of a dog, bear or lion. A grille ornamented
with the figure of a swan was found in the
same hoard ; it was supposed to belong to the
service of the temple. All these objects were
rudely inscribed with names of gods in runic
letters, which may of course have been placed
on them by the finders in order to enhance
the value of the idols. The swan or goose,
however, would very well suit the coarsely
fashioned idol of a tribe of Vends among the
lakes and watercourses of Mecklenburg, since
it fits exactly the accounts we have of other
heathen idols about the Baltic, such as the
owl gods of the Livonians, whose last resort
188

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

was the island of Oesel, concerning which
mention is made in a former chapter.

Looked at in this way, it is not so strange
that swans at a very early epoch became as-
sociated with the night and moonlight, a con-
nection which was self-evident for the owl, for
instance, but not so readily seen to apply to
the swan. It may have been the noise that
migrating or resting swans of the vocal sort
(Cygnus musicus) make at night ; it may have
been the splendor of the swanks plumage on a
dark sea or against a night sky, which forced a
comparison with " that orbed maiden, with
white fire laden, whom mortals call the moon."
And when we consider the Baltic and the swan^
it is odd that the Greek and Latin names for
the swan, kuknos, cygnus, resemble strongly
Esthonian kukene, "little moon," and perhaps
do represent some very ancient reduplication
of kuu (" moon '* In Finnish and Esthonian)
which was used by the original inhabitants of
Greece and Italy. Perhaps this is the same
189

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

word from which grew the Latin name for the
stork, ciconia. The modern terms in Estho-
nian for swan are kuik and luig ; in Finnish
luiko and joutsen ; in Koibal and Karagash,
ku. Those parts of the globe which the musi-
cal wild swan still inhabits, Lapland, eastern
Siberia, Turkestan, are the same which from
primeval times have been the home of the
Finnic nations. In central Asia the swan is
still so sacred a bird that the Tatar who obtains
one rides with it to the nearest yurt, where his
neighbor gives him a horse in exchange for it ;
the neighbor then takes the swan and ex-
changes it for the horse of another, and so
on, until the poor bird is in such bad condi-
tion that no one is willing to swap a horse for
it more. Perhaps this may explain the use
of " swan " in an Early English poem quoted
by Halliwell (here modernized) —

Teach it forthwith throughout the land

One to the other that this book have now ** swan " —

that is to say, prophetic power.
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

The prevalence in Europe of the legends
an i fairy-tales just mentioned, in which chiefly
figure youths, princesses and maidens who
turn into swans, scarcely requires specification.
They are found in the Arabian Nights and in
Chinese tales. Usually the hero of the Euro-
pean tale catches the swan maidens bathing
in the same way as his Chinese semblant, and
by seizing one of the swanskin cloaks on the
shore obtains power over the magic woman.
Also he is incautious enough or sly enough in
later years to show his wife the swanskin,
whereupon she puts it on and flies out of the
window. Another German expression to in-
dicate uncanny knowledge is : Es wachsen mir
Schwan-federn " swan*s feathers are growing
on me."

The Chinese envoy Li Tung Yuan reported
from Lew Choo the legend of a swan woman
whom a peasant found bathing in his well.
He seized her and made her his wife for ten
years. Similar tales in Persian legend and
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Irish fairy-lore could be cited if we had the
space, and since the goose is often put for the
swan, it may be that our phrase " I feel goose-
flesh " may hark back to the time when that
shudder of awe which is accompanied by what
is vulgarly termed goose-flesh was assigned to

the presence of an elfin
being in the shape of
a bird. Of the swan
maiden sort in popular
thought was Berchta or
Bertha of the big feet,
that is, of the swan's or
goose's feet ; for she is pointed out in various
French cathedrals in the statue of a woman
who ends in the webbed feet of a water fowl.
She is la reine Pedauque, the mother of Charle-
magne. She and all swan maidens, it is well
known, are in fact Valkyrs, conductors of souls
to the land of shades, who have been taken out
of their ordinary rolls and given a fresh lease
of life as the wives of mortal king, prince or
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

lucky peasant. Such Is the beautiful Suometar
of Finland, of whom one reads In the Kantele-
tar or collection of Finnish poems. She was
born from the egg of a goose and was so attrac-
tive that the sun, the moon and the northstar
came down to earth to woo her for a wife.

Cygnus the swan appears In Greek myth-
ology again and again, oftenest under the name
of some ancient king named Kuknos. There
was the son of Stheneleus, a great musician
among the " LIgyes " far beyond the Po, in
fact on the Baltic, who mourned himself to
death over the fall of Phaeton from the sky,
whereupon Apollo turned him Into a swan.
The fable is well fitted to the northern land
where the sun disappears for months and
where peoples of the Finnic race live who call
the swan lulg.

In his description of Attlka the traveller
Pausanias has preserved the following testi-
mony to the repute of the swan as a bird of
prophecy :

13 193

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

" Not far from the Academe is a monument
of Plato to whom the god foretold his future
greatness in philosophy. He did it thus : In
the night before Plato was to become the
pupil of Sokrates, the latter in a dream saw
a swan take refuge in his bosom. Now the
swan has a reputation for music, because a man
who loved music very much, Kuknos, the king
of the Ligyes beyond the Eridanus, is said to
have ruled the land of the Kelts. People
relate concerning him that through the will
of Apollo he was changed after his death into
a swan. I am willing to believe that a man
who loved music may have ruled over the
Ligyes, but that a human being was turned
into a bird is a thing impossible for me to
believe."

Then there was Kuknos, a son of Mars
or Picus, whom Herakles killed in his father's
presence. When attacked by Mars, the demi-
god put the god to flight by a spear-thrust
through the thigh. And in fact the swan flies
194

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

before the lance of the sun god to his northern
breeding grounds. A third Kuknos was a son
of Neptune and an invulnerable hero at the
siege of Troy. He was choked to death by
Achilleus — a swan slain by an eagle ! True
to his name, Neptune turned him into a
swan.

This particular " historic " Kuknos betrays
his bird origin in another way. Having had
a son and daughter by a former wife, after her
death he marries Phylonome, who falls in love
with her step-son Tennes. Anger at his cool-
ness and fear of discovery cause her to slander
her step-son to his father, who places Tennes
and his sister Hemithea (demi-goddess) in a
chest, which floats ashore on the island
Leukophrys. Kuknos learns that his son is
safe and goes to Leukophrys prepared to take
him to his heart again, but the son rejects
his advances. This is the same story as that
of Kupselos, son of Eetion, who was placed
in a box and committed like Moses to the

195

Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

waters. The father Eetion is plainly Greek
aietos, eagle.

Doubtless these legends can be ultimately
based on the floating nests which swans some-
times build, and on the fact that parent birds
and their young will have nothing to do with
each other after they have once been separated
for any length of time.

A very singular trio in Greek mythology
is that of the Graiai, called the Phorcydes
because they were the daughters of Phorcus
and Keto. They were hoary or gray from
their birth, like the cygnets of the swan ; they
had swan shapes, but only one eye and one
tooth among them ! The single eye may
allude to a habit of gregarious creatures of
keeping one of their number ever on the alert
like a vedette, though Schwartz considers it the
lightning flash.

Their names suggest that in their case the
idea of the Valkyr or conductor of souls from
the body to the under-world was very near
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the surface. They are the guardians of the
Gorgons — notwithstanding their single eye !
and they have these disquieting names: Peph-
redo " horrifier/' Enyo " shaker " and Deino
" terrifier." Their swan nature is not ex-
pressed in music, as in the case of Kuknos,
nor can they be assigned to joyful themes
such as occupied the swan formerly on the
island of Riigen in the Baltic. There the
swan had the task that is elsewhere now-a-days
given to the stork, that of bringing the newly
born child to its parents.

Though the musical swan is not quite so
large or so graceful as the greater swan, it has
qualities that must have made a deep impres-
sion on the early peoples of Europe, Asia
and North Africa at a time when it was very
common because difficult to shoot with arrows.
In fact a very powerful shaft would be needed,
were it not to rebound from the strong feathers
of the bird. The Icelanders likened the " klee-
klee " and " ang " tones of this swan to the
197

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

sounds of a violin. Pallas the ornithologist
says they resemble silver bells and Olafsson
says that in the long Polar night it is delight-
ful to hear a flock passing overhead, the
mixture of sounds resembling trumpets and
violins. Another peculiarity of this swan that
could not escape observation is its tyrannical
nature ; it quarrels and fights with other birds
and is a nuisance when kept in captivity, if
other birds are present. Moreover it is a very
sly bird and keeps the sharpest watch on the
hunter, so that even with firearms it is hard
to approach within killing distance. Its ag-
gressiveness toward other birds, its apparent
wisdom and its known habit of flying by
night make it the natural rival of the owl as
a symbol of moon and night gods.

The gray color as of cygnets and the swan
shapes of the Graiai, as well as their terrifying
names and service as watchmen of the Gor-
gons, explain very well an allusion to the
" swan of hell" in the Kalevala in the episode
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of Lemminkalnen, demanding peremptorily the
daughter of Louhi the Hag of the North for
his wife :

Louhi, hostess of Pohjola,
Made this answer to the suitor :
** I will only give my daughter.
Give to thee my fairest virgin.
Bride of thine to be forever.
When for me the swan thou killest
In the river of Tuoni,
Swimming in the black death-river.
In the sacred stream and whirlpool ;
Thou canst try one cross-bow only.
But one arrow from thy quiver."

It is Lemminkainen's third trial. He has
caught the magic machine that looks like
a moose, the moose of Hiisi ; he has bridled
Hiisi's flaming horse as Jason bridled and
drove the fire-breathing oxen of ^^etes of
Colchis ; but this third venture fails because
he is shot from behind, like Balder and
Achilleus, falls into the coal-black current of
the stream of death and is chopped to pieces,
like Osiris. Singular that the swan, so closely
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

allied in the primitive religions with death and
the dead-land, should under Greek influence
rise to be the symbol of genial, art-loving
Apollo and rollicking Bacchus !

Among the curious statements regarding
Apollo is one that Alcaius,
a name corrupted from
that of the halcyon bird,
leads Apollo at midsum-
mer from the Hyperbo-
reans (the north) and that
Apollo is drawn along by
swans. This recalls the
swan-borne knight in the
story of the Graal which
has found its way into
modern opera. German local legends retain
the idea of the swan as an uncanny bird, pro-
phetic of death or the under-world.

Thus at Heiligensee (holy lake) a peasant
digging in his garden struck an iron chain that
seemed to have no end. Suddenly a black swan

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

rose up near him in the water. In his fright
he dropped the chain, when swan and chain
as suddenly vanished. At Kemnitz in the
Mark a nightwatchman averred that he could
always tell when some one in the village was
about to die. On such occasions, just before
he cried midnight, a white swan came up out
of Plessow lake and walked to the churchyard.
When he saw it he did not dare call the hour.
Once it appeared, went to the churchyard,
but passed on to the residence of the baron.
He ran home, roused his family and told them
of the portent. Sure enough, within the week
the baron died !

These superstitions belong to the old region
where Radigast was worshipped, the god whose
metal effigies found on the site of Rhetra bear
the swan on their heads. The Valkyrs lin-
gered down to this century as flying women
with ice-cold hands who plague men at night
and ride the fattest of the horses on farms
until they lose their appetites and flesh. A

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

man once caught such a " Walriderske " in
his house and made her his wife; but at last
he showed her the hole through which she
entered, whereupon she flew out and never
came again.

The swan very naturally appears in Irish
legends and especially in connection with the
cuckoo hero, Cuchullaind. Fand and Liban,
wives of Mananan of the sea, appear to Cu-
chullaind as two swans linked together by a
chain of gold ; when he strikes them with
his spear, he falls into that state of emaciation
and frenzy which was noted in the chapter on
the cuckoo. In another version he falls into
this condition when separated from Fand.
Professor Rhys derives Fand from the same
root as Latin unda ; she is the primitive
Undine of La Motte Fouque's fairy-tale.
On another adventure Cuchullaind finds a
princess exposed like Andromeda on the sea-
shore as tribute to the fog giants or pirates, the
Fomori. He kills the Fomori ; the rescued
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

princess and her maid-servant follow him in
the shape of swans. She was the daughter of
the King of Lochlan, the land of lakes, vari-
ously identified as Scotland or Norway, but
really the land under the sea, the under-
world.

The great roll played by birds in the old
Greek myths is particularly evident in the
story of Leda, the mother of Pollux (polio the
owl) and Helena (selene the moon). Leda is
the same as Linda, Esthonian for bird, the
mother of Kalevipoeg.

Jupiter approaching Leda in the form of a
male swan rouses disgust or laughter, as the
case may be ; but when we discover that such
stories are the natural result of confusion in
the Greek mind, owing to the variety of
materials and forgotten origin of the myths,
one ceases to wonder. Long before Christ
the ponderer on the meaning of gods, temple
ceremonials, legends and myths was the vic-
tim of lack of records. He was gazing back

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Bird Gods in Ancient Euro

pe

through a perspective that changed the sim-
plest things into the most complex. A rude
nature worship, akin to an Australian's for a
bird or beast, had been complicated by ex-
plaining that worship as one of heavenly con-
stellations, or of dawn, or of thunder, or of
night.

Then the humanizing tendency set in and
the gods of the sky were brought down to
earth and mixed up with earthly men whose
deeds historical were interpreted partially in a
superhuman way. So it came about that a
swan myth arose in which Pan, or later, Jupi-
ter as a swan demon begat on Leda a swan-
Valkyr the lady moon Selene
or Helena, as well as the war-
rior twins Castor and Pollux,
these three issuing from eggs
like the Karakutengu of the
Japanese. That this is the probable origin
of the Leda myth appears from what has been
in the present century learned from the bal-

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

lads of people embraced by Greeks and Ro-
mans under the general title of "folk beyond
the north wind/*

In the Kalevipoeg we read of three brothers
of the north, born of the gods, the youngest
of whom, Kalev, was carried by an eagle to
Esthonia and there founded a kingdom. A
widow of that land found in the fields a pullet,
the egg of a grouse and a young crow. The
pullet she placed in a brood-basket over the
Ggg* One day she found that pullet, egg and
crow had turned into three maidens — Salme,
Linda and an orphan girl or drudge. It is
Linda, whose name means " bird '' that Kalev
wins for his bride.

Sun, moon, ocean, wind and riches come to
woo Linda, but Kalev is the preferred one.
He represents the eagle, just as, though for
the time being a swan in the story of Leda,
Zeus-Pan is oftener represented by the eagle.
The time having come to break off the wed-
ding festival —

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Kalev their departure hastened.
Urging Linda to departure.
Grouse-child her good-bye to utter.
His fair swan to stop the party.

And on their sleigh-ride to the new home of
the bride Kalev remarks —

O my Linda, O my darling.
What at home have you forgotten f
Threefold things have you forgotten :
First the Moon before your dwelling
And he is your ancient Father ;
Next the Sun before the bath house
And he is your ancient Uncle ;
Then the birch-trees at your window
And they are your blossoming brothers.
Are your cousins from the woodland.

The allusion to birches refers to the birch-
grouse from whose egg Linda was born ; the
allusion to the moon as her father refers to
her poetical, mythological descent from a moon
god. If their son is the cuckoo, Linda may
be guessed a swan. Now with Leda, the

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

mother of Castor, Pollux and Helena, the
mixture of moon and bird is different in
arrangement, but the analogy is clear enough
to show that the Finnish-Esthonian and the
Greek myths sprang from some original root.
Leda's mortal husband is a bird too ; Tunda-
reos (from a root like that of Latin tundo, to
strike) is our old friend Picus the woodpecker.
Moreover the career of Castor and Pollux,
the Di-oscuri or darkness gods on whom
Greek and Roman soldiers called in battle,
show that they are male counterparts of the
Valkyrs or female conductors of the souls that
perish in war, true sons of the swan and moon
goddess Leda.

Leukippos (white horse) had two daughters,
Phoebe (brightness) and Ilaeira (joyfulness),
who were to marry Idas (sight) and Lynceus
(light) the sons of Aphareus (aphar swift).
But Castor and Pollux came to the wedding
and carried off the brides : the powers of night
defeated the sons of day.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

In the minds of the inhabitants of Greece
and Italy, before the Greeks and Latins held
sway a connection existed between the swan
and wine. We see that by the frequency of
swans on early jars and wine-cups. On what
is called the Anubis vase found at Clusium
there are swans behind the dog-headed deity
and behind the bearded god with wings who
stands next to the Gorgon. The handles of
bronze wine-strainers found in Etruscan tombs
often end in a swan's neck and head. In the
Etruscan Museum at Florence is a small
bronze group of a young man on whose
shoulders a teasing genius has alighted with
a wine-cup in his hand. This genius of wine
wears a most singular tall cap which is nothing
more nor less than the neck and head of a
swan. Here is a curious problem for archae-
ologist and myth interpreters.

Dionysos the wine god is by some myth-
ologists traced to a night god, and the wild
revel of his train by night with torches over
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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

hill and dale compared to the wild hunts-
man legends of the north of Europe. This
may be the point of contact between the swan
god and the wine god. But after all the
relation is as mysterious as that between the
owl and the opposite to drunkenness. For
it appears that owls* eggs were a sure cure for
that vice in the pharmacopoeia of the Middle
Ages. The owl is a thing of fear; and fear
sobers. There may lie the connection of
ideas.

14

209

Tlw Bird of fire

h:i<ghtm^^

CHAPTER VIII

RELENTLESS is the destruction of our
large birds of prey since the perfection
of firearms. In the Eastern and Central States
of America the eagle has become so rare a crea-
ture that he is often mistaken for osprey or
great hawk, if there is nothing near him to
show his greater size.

I remember a perfect day off Narragansett
Pier, the ocean dotted with graceful yachts,

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

a flotilla of huge steamboats, tugboats, sailing
craft of every sort assembled at the starting-
point to watch a race. With steady, superb
strokes came directly from the sea an eagle.
No one seemed to see him and he scorned to
notice anything. He deigned neither to swerve
aside nor rise far above ; but steered his level
way straight through the fleet on his path
toward Conanicut and the mountains beyond.
It was as if the last chief of the Indians of New
England had passed into that dusky brown
form and refused, even as a spirit, to recognize
the pale-faces whose ancestors did his race to
death with powder, ball and poisoned waters.
Perhaps he too has fallen ere this a prey to
the madness for slaughter which is one of the
charms of our civilization !

If by his marvellous flight, audacity and
superb aloofness the eagle has so impressed the
modern world that his figure is the badge
chosen for five of the greatest nations of the
earth — Russia, Germany, Austria, France

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

and the United States — one may guess what
early men thought of a creature that was so
easily the king of birds. It was enough to see
a bearded eagle beat a chamois from the clifF
in order to feast on its carcass, or the golden
eagle rob the osprey of its fish. Who has ever
seen an eagle decrepit with old age, or found
an eagle's bones? No one. Well, then, the
story must be true. After a few hundred years
spent in domineering over the feathered and
furry tribes, the eagle merely ascends at mid-
day his spiral stair of air, until lost in the efful-
gence of the sun, whence he plunges down to
the sea a rejuvenated creature. Like Herakles
he Cx ^ers a second life through the purifying
effects of fire.

That is why in the Middle Ages the Welsh
bards wrote dialogues between the eagle and
King Arthur; why Charlemagne had above
his palace at Aachen a bronze eagle whose beak
was turned toward the nation about to be con-
quered ; why an eagle was pictured as one of

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the animal guardians of Walhalla, where the
gods of the Norse feasted ; why the symbols
in war round which the legions of Rome rallied
were called eagles, as a generic term, just as we
should say banners or flags.

Eagles not only renewed their own life
through fire, but began existence with a fire test ;
for the young eagle which could not look the
sun in the eye without blinking was said to be
killed by its parents as a creature unfitted for
the lofty career before it. Aetites or eagle
stones found in the eyry were still greatly
prized two centuries ago for a variety of virtues.
They are pebbles or roundish stones of clay,
rusty with oxide of iron, having loose stones or
crystals within their hollow hearts, and they
show plainly enough the action of fire. We
may guess the eagle was thought to bring these
wonder stones down from the sun or from some
volcano ; at any rate they cured diseases of the
eyes, aided women in labor, and, oddly enough,
detected thieves, perhaps because, coming from

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the sun, they shared the sun's power to reveal
secrets of darkness. The eagle was said to
bring them to his nest in order to cause the
eggs to hatch quickly ; another proof that heat
was associated with the stone.

The Simurg of Persia, as we have seen, was
a god-like bird that discussed predestination
with King Solomon, as the Eagle of Gwernabwy
held dialogues with King Arthur. When
Roodabeh is about to bear Rustem, this bird
is called in by Zal and helps the princess —
doubtless by bringing her an aetite stone.
The Simurg was a prophet of the good or bad
to come, lived for fifteen hundred years and
revived to live another fifteen centuries. This
poetic form of the eagle lived on the mountain
Kaf at the world's edge. He appears in India
as the garuda, the eternal foe of the naga or
serpent nymphs, whom he clutches in his talons
and carries off to his eyry, just as the dark-
colored swamp eagle seizes and feeds on ser-
pents. His connection with the sun is plain

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

enough ; for he and his brother Aruna were
born of an egg, like Castor, Pollux and
Helena ; but Aruna was the charioteer of the
sun god.

It has already been noted how Kalev the god
who gave his name to the land of Kalevala, the
reputed father, also, of the cuckoo hero Kale-
vipoeg, came on the eagle's back to his own
land and married Linda the swan. Kalev is
the eagle himself, but in the Kalevala the more
universal godVaino or Pan is the chief; Kalev
has become a mysterious giant seen in sheet
lightning and certain constellations, who gives
his name to the hero land.

Kalev has various analogues in Greek mytho-
logy, i^etes of Colchis, for instance, son of the
sun and ocean, who robbed the golden fleece
and was robbed of it in turn by the Argonauts.
His daughter Medea represents Louhi the
Hag of Pohjola, who also takes on eagle's
shape at will, while Medea used a chariot drawn
by dragons. The characters in the Argonaut

215

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

story and the Finnish legend of the robbing of
the Sampo do not exactly fit, but the two myths
are sufficiently close to prove a common origin
for Sampo and golden fleece. Kaleva, if it ever
stood for eagle in a Finnic dialect, has disap-
peared in favor of kotkas or kokko. Now
Achilleus seems to be a word which once had
the eagle or dragon meaning in Greek, but
through dislike to the use of a god's name
gradually fell out of vogue for the creature it-
self, just as Kaleva disappeared from Finnic.
In the chapter on the cuckoo we have seen
how grateful the eagle was to Vaino, that Pan
and Orpheus of the Finns, because when Vaino
cleared the land of woods he left the birch-tree
standing as a perch and nesting-place for birds ;
for this thoughtfulness the eagle brings fire
dov/n from heaven. Throughout the Kale-
vala the eagle is a favorite bird simile. Ilma-
rinen as a bridegroom is described as an eagle
which has broken into the castle of young
girls and seized the most beautiful of ducks.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

When he is asked by the Hag of Pohjola to
fetch from the river of Mana the giant pike,
before he can have her daughter for a wife,
he fashions an eagle of iron, steel and flame,
which at length grapples successfully with the
pike and lands it from the river of death.
"When he and Vaino steal
the Sampo, the Hag of
Pohjola transforms her-
self into a monster eagle
and bears armed men on
her back over the sea in
pursuit of the marauders.
One meets the eagle at every twist and turn.
When Lemminkainen fails to get an invita-
tion to the wedding of Ilmarinen and resolves
to know the reason why, the Hag tries to
place obstacles in his way; amongst others she
causes a fiery stream to appear across his path
with a fiery eagle that threatens to swallow
Lemminkainen. After he has reached Poh-
jola, defied its inhabitants and killed the son

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

of the Hag in a duel with swords, he flies
home in the shape of an eagle and is pursued
by a hawk, which is the spirit of the demon
he has just slain.

The kindred epic of the Esths, the Kalevi-
poeg, has much to say concerning eagles.
When the island maid learns who Kalevipoeg
is, she drowns herself; her parents rake the
bed of the sea for her, but bring up an old iron
helmet and an eagle's egg. The island mother
places this egg in the sun by day and warms it
in her bed by night, until the young eagle is
hatched, grows strong and escapes. Later she
finds it again — but a little man is lurking
under the eagle's wing, a dwarf who carries a
little axe. But the little man with his little
axe is able to fell the enormous tree which
shuts out the sunlight from the island — that
is to say, the primeval forest of Finland. He
is in fact Sampsa Pellerwoinen, whom we find
in the Kalevala as a little copper man doing
the same miracle. It is evident that he is a

218

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

parable for fire, which men used to carry about
in a copper tinder-box ; fire that like the
copper dwarf rises to a giant and does more
than giant's work. Fire must clear away the
forests before civilization can establish itself
So here again we have the eagle and fire
brought into close connection.

The great age ascribed to the eagle was
known to the Welsh; only one animal out-
ranked him, namely, the salmon of Llyn
Llyw. The Mabinogion tales place after this
salmon in order of longevity the eagle of
Gwernabwy, the owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, the stag
of Rhedynvre and the black bird of Kilgwri.
And Giraldus has preserved for us the dra-
matic figure of the Eagle of the Eagle Moun-
tain (now Snowdon) prophetic of wars " who,
perching on a fatal stone every fifth holiday,
in order to satiate her hunger with the car-
casses of the slain, is said to expect war on that
same day and to have almost perforated the
stone by cleaning and sharpening her beak" !

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

The phoenix was a symbol of the sun and
there needs no guess to identify the phoenix
with the eagle, especially since the eagle burns

§ itself into youth again
by contact with the sun.
Herodotus tells how its
picture, which he saw in
Egypt, had feathers of
outline and size was as
hundred years, when its
'"'"^ son brings its body from

Arabia to the temple of Helios in Sun-city on
the Nile.

Phoenix the fiery red was, as we have seen
when considering the peacock, a form of Pan,
but we find him fully humanized as Phoenix
the blind king whom the Argonauts found a
prey to the Harpies ; later Cheiron restored
his sight ; it was he according to Homer who

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

instructed Achilleus and went with him to
Troy ; after the death of that hero he re-
turned to Greece to fetch Pyrrhus (the fiery
one) the son of Achilleus.

This heroic descendant of a primitive eagle
god, who all through the Iliad shows his
eagle character by disputing over spoils, has
his northern namesake in Kalev, the giant
founder of Finland and the Esths. Nay, I
make bold to identify the name of Achilleus
not only with Kaleva the eagle god of Finland,
but with the Latin word aquila, eagle. He
was the son of Peleus the male pigeon (peleia)
and of Thetis, a nymph of the sea, just as
i^etes, the eagle of Colchis, was a son of the
sun born to a nymph of the ocean. All the
brothers born before Achilleus were submitted
to the fiery test of the young eagle ; they were
placed by Thetis in the flames to burn out
their mortal parts ; but they perished. Achil-
leus also was thrust by his mother into the
fire ; but his father pulled him out. The

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

great hero of the Iliad thus begins life like a
young eagle with the fire test and ends it with
a fire burial, not, it is true, on a pyre kindled
by his own hands, as Herakles did himself to
death, but one raised by the sorrowing sur-
vivors. The idea at bottom of his story is
that if he had endured the fire test at birth,
if his father had not plucked him prematurely
from the flames in which his mother Thetis
cast him, he would have been immortal like
the eagle or phoenix, needing only a period-
ical flame bath to " renew his youth like the
eagles."

We have no exact idea what the pre-Homeric
Achilleus was, whose name and part of whose
traits appear in the hero of the Trojan war.
But we are not left in the dark as to the exist-
ence of earlier beings of his name who are less
realistic and human, more shadowy and super-
natural. He appears as a son of Galatus re-
markable for the whiteness of his hair, as if in
allusion to the bald or white-headed eagle. In

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

this he suggests the white-haired, white-bearded
Vainamoinen. Again there was an Achilleus
the son of Zeus and Lamia, so beautiful that
Venus became frantic with jealousy. Pan was
called upon to judge in this pre-Homeric
beauty contest and because he cast his vote for
Achilleus the angry goddess changed Pan to a
hideous goat-footed creature and made him
fall in love with Echo, the nymph who ever
mocks and can never be found. There was
still another Achilleus who taught the Centaur
Cheiron, who in turn was the teacher of the
Homeric Achilleus. Finally there was a pris-
tine Achilleus, the son of Earth, a primeval
eagle of the cloudy firmament,
to whom Hera fled when Zeus
pursued her in the shape of a
cuckoo. This Achilleus per-
suaded Hera not to fly from
Zeus, who caught her as a cuckoo on the
Cuckoo Mountain. He was the eagle coun-
sellor of cuckoo gods.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

In his " Famous Islands " old Tommaso
Porcacchi tells of the island of Crete that there
are birds on it called caristi, which fly through
the fire without being at all harmed — senza
punto essere oflfesi volavano sopra la fiamma
del fuoco. Perhaps it is a reminiscence of the
phoenix that belonged especially to Arabia,
Egypt and Palestine. In the oldest tombs
discovered lately on the Upper Nile by Jacques
de Morgan and others the phoenix is seen ris-
ing from a bed of flames which may well mean
the funeral pyre of the defunct. The inscrip-
tions in question are so early that they belong
to the period when the ceremonial of the
mummy had not become universal in Egypt
and the conquerors of Egypt, probably a
swarm of metal-using foreigners from the val-
ley of the Euphrates who crossed Arabia and
the Red Sea, were still burning the bodies
of their chiefs and kings. The phoenix of
these inscriptions may indicate the soul of
the departed rising from its earthly dross, as

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

the soul of Herakles, according to the much
later legend in its Greek form, rose from his
funeral pyre to join the gods of Olympus.

Our own red Indians were not behind the
primitive Europeans and Asiatics in their
reverence for the eagle, as any picture of a
chief with eagles' feathers in his hair will
testify. A deluge myth of the Dakotah
Indians explains the origin of the red pipe-
stone in the Minnesota quarries, a region
sacred among red men, where the seekers after
pipe-stone laid aside their weapons. When
the waters rose, a mass of Indians who had fled
to a hilltop were overwhelmed and perished on
the spot ; it is their fossil flesh which gives the
pipe-stone its dark-red hue. But one woman
escaped. A great eagle, who was really her
father, swooped down before her and she
seized his foot, so that by his aid she reached
a lofty mountain. From the twins she bore
descend all the red men now on earth.

Thus in the earliest myths of Greece, as in
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those of America, of Italy and the Baltic we
find the bird gods acting their parts. Is it any
wonder that Zeus should have an attendant
eagle, whose divinity cannot be concealed, who
acts as messenger to bring Hebe or Gany-
medes to act as cup-bearer to the gods and
bears in its talons the dread thunderbolt?
When human gods were conceived of, the
animal gods were not dismissed, but became
their adjuncts. It is plain enough that Zeus
and his eagle were once the same, just as Picus
and his woodpecker, Athene and her owl.

Achilleus has a parallel in Wales in the
god Lieu " light " son of Arianrhod " silver
wheel " (a close parallel of " silver-footed "
Thetis) and the god Gwydion. Lieu cannot
be destroyed ; like Samson he is a sun god in
whose armor his foes can find no flaw. But he
has his Delilah and she tells them how to kill
Lieu. So Achilleus the invulnerable was said
to have been slain because he went to a tryst
he had made with Polyxena, daughter of Priam.

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Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

When Lieu is wounded, he utters a loud cry
and flies off in the shape of an eagle.
Achilleus, like Lieu, is the descendant of Zeus
and his sister Hera. Zeus undergoes the
couvade, when Typhon uses on Zeus the
sickle and cuts out his " tendons." This made
Zeus helpless like a woman — the couvade.
Here we see in Italy and Wales the traits of
eagle and cuckoo blent in one story. Achil-
leus is called purisoos " fiery " and ligyron
" shrill." The first syllables of his name sug-
gest Doric acha, " roar." At the court of
Lycomedes on the isle of Scyros, hidden
among girls, he was called Pyrrha from his
golden locks. He was educated by Phoenix
the sun hero, was hot-headed, violent and a
terrible fighter ; his sulking in his tent after
the death of Patroklos may be the survival of
the couvade. The contest with the river
Scamander shows his sun origin. Now though
Kalev does no deed like this, Kalevipoeg, his
reputed son, has a contest with Lake Peipus.

227

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

In such myths and legends we see an inti-
mate blending of an animal and a human god,
the bird representing that more archaic part of
the double which descended from a very remote
epoch, when the animal itself was worshipped
and the idea of divine beings in the shape of
man had not risen above the fear of the return-
ing spirit of a magician. It seems impossible
to believe that men who had once conceived
of a well-ordered community of human gods
on Olympus would have then evolved such
barbaric and often repulsive stories about bird
gods as we find in Greek mythology.

Everything points to such myths as sur-
vivals from a much ruder age. The parallel
which may be drawn between, on the one side,
Achilleus and his son Pyrrhus (fire) and, on
the other, the Finnish eagle that brings fire
from heaven, seems to demand the early exist-
ence in Greece of a people akin in mental
traits to Finnish tribes, a people that, so far
from being driven out or cut off by the

228

Bird Gods in Ancient Europe

Greeks, remained in the land and gave impor-
tant elements to Greek mythology. Similar
phenomena are found in Italy, Scandinavia,
Germany and the British islands ; we find them
also on the Nile and the Euphrates. They
represent an early movement of the mind
toward higher things. Their importance for a
correct understanding of the origins of religion
can hardly be overstated.

229

INDEX

ACHiLLEUS, son of Pelcus
and Thetis, xii ; "Achilleus"
once meant eagle, 216; in-
structed by Cheiron, 220; he-
roic descendant of an eagle
god, 220 ; his name same in
root as Kaleva and aquila,
220 ; son of male pigeon, his
mother thrusts him in flames,
220; ends as an eagle by be-
ing burned, 221 ; pre-Homeric
forms : a son of Galatus with
white hair; a son of Zeus
and Lamia, 222 ; another who
taught Cheiron ; a pristine
Achilleus, son of the Earth,
223 ; parallel to him in Lieu of

23

Welsh legends, 226 ; called
" fiery " and " shrill," violent
eagle traits, 227 ; fight with
Scamander has parallel in
Kalevipoeg, 227.

Adam of Bremen, on worship
of birds by heathen Lithua-
nians, ix ; on worship of Tara-
pilla, 172.

Adrian's gift of jewelled pea-
cock to the temple of Hera,
136.

iEaea, Island of Kirke, 163.

.-Eetes of Colchis, father of
Kirke, she-hawk, 164; his
name is Eagle, 164 ; fire-breath-
ing oxen, 199, 215, 221.

I

Index

JE\ius, the praetor, a wood-
pecker settled on his head,
44; averted danger from
Rome, 44.

jEneas, xii; from oinas dove,
is the dove god humanized,
15, 17; bird traits, 19; not a
Trojan, but ally of Priam, 15.

Aetites, eagle stones found in
eyries, help women in labor,
213, 214.

Ahti, god of waters, same as
Lemminkainen, old love god
of Finns, 114.

Aino, parallel of Syrinx and
female Venus, 12 ; mocks
Vaino, 13, 20; grief too great
for marriage with old man,
incest suggested, 126; parallel
of Syrinx sought by Pan,
126.

Alcaeus, the poet, his bird name,

139-

Alcaius, the halcyon, heralds
approach of Apollo in spring,
200.

Althamenes of Crete, fated to
kill his father Katreus (pea-
cock), 137.

Amazon of Scotland, Scatach
the " shadowy " keeps a mili-
tary school, 98.

American spiders, 165 ; suggest
swastika, 165; on shell gor-
gets, 166; Indians ignorant of
wheel, 167.

Andromeda, Cuchullaind finds a
princess exposed on seashore
to monsters, 202.

Anuljis vase from Clusium, 208.

23

Aoife, daughter of Scottish
Amazon Scatach, her love
affair with Cuchullaind, 98.
Aphareus, 207.

Aphrodite, Greek goddess of
love, her bird the dove, the
love bird, 6; but sometimes
the sparrow, 7; her place in
Italy filled by male and female
Venuses, 12; higher sphere
than that of old bird gods, 15 ;
her favorite Phaon, 140; she
was said to have mourned
Adonis by leaping from Leu-
cadian Rock, 140.
Apollo, swan given to him, 6;
turns Kuknos into swan, 192 ;
heralded by Alcaius and drawn
by swans, 200.
Arabian Nights, swan changes

in, 191.
Arachne, turned to spider by

Pallas Athene, 164.
Ares, woodpecker assigned to

him, 6.
Argonautica, not imitated in

Kalevala, 143.
Aristophanes' name for wood-
pecker, 42.
Arthur, his talks with the Eagle
of Gwernabwy, 214; his mys-
terious origin, 96.
Aruna, charioteer of Indra, was

born of an egg, 215.
Arviella, on the swastika, 164.
Aryans, the, xiii, xiv, xvii.
Atossa, queen of Persia, her
crime was that of bird gods,
especially cuckoo gods, 109.
Audubon, the sharp eye of, 16.

Index

Auk, great auk, exterminated,

22.

Aurora, sister of Pallas Athene,

1 60.
Auspex on Etruscan scarab

with bird, 43; with Roman

legions ; at founding of Rome,

69; Etruscan, 69.
Awke, awkward, English words

derived from gawk, cuckoo,

79-

Bacchus or Dionysos, 200 ; cu-
rious connection with swan,
208.

Balder, shot like Lemminkainen
and Achilleus, 199.

Bertha of the Big Feet, a Val-
kyr or swan maiden, 192.

Blathmaid, " blossom," taken
from Cuchullaind by Curoi,
who is slain in revenge, 100.

Briseis, captive taken from
Achilleus, parallel in Blath-
maid of Ireland, 99.

Britons, the ancient, xiii.

Buddha, xvii.

Buffalo, swept from North
America, xviii.

Camesa, wife and sister of Ja-
nus, shows cuckoo origin, 77.

Castor, son of Leda, 207, 215.

Ceres, turns son of Styx to
owl, 170.

Charon, on Etruscan coffins, 174.

Cheiron, restored sight to
Phoenix, 220.

Chinese, swan enchantment,
191.

Christ, xvii.

Christian soldiers destroy owl
temple, 172.

Ciconia, Latin word for stork,
derived from Esth kuik, 190.

Clusium, scarab seal found at,
171 ; Anubis vase, 20S.

Conanicut, 211.

Conchobar, an old Irish hero,
his life based on cuckoo's,
77, 92 ; robs kingdom from
his father and marries his
mother, 107.

Cormac Conlingeas, son of Con-
chobar by Nessa, 107.

Corpse-bird, corpse-hen, names
for owl, 155.

Corvus, Valerius Corvus helped
in duel by raven or crow, 46 ;
parallels in Wales and Ireland,
46.

Couvade, "brooding," custom of
nursing the father when a child
is born, xvi ; still existing
among Tupis, formerly among
Spanish Basques, 88; among
old Irish and Persians, 89 ;
explanation sought in psychol-
ogy, but really found in imita-
tion of birds, 90; explains
lethargy of Ulster heroes and
mutilation of Saturn, 108, 144.

Cuchullaind, xvi ; helped by
two speaking ravens, 46; his
doubtful birth, 76 ; regarded
as historical by the Irish, 91 ;
cuckoo in his name and ex-
ploits, 92 ; was a boy named
Setanta, 92 ; how he got his
second name, 93 ; survival in

233

Index

Ireland of Finnic "Kukku-
lind," cuckoo bird, 94 ; scan-
dalous birth of Cuchullaind,
95 ; cuckoo episodes and
dates in his life, 96 ; looseness
of his morals, 97; swells up
in anger like a bird, 97 ; visits
military school of Scatach, 98 ;
his son by Scatach's daughter
fights with and is slain by him,
99 ; adventure with " Blossom,"
99 ; uses " sea magic," 100 ;
expert with the sling, loi ;
his odd spear, the gaebolg,
loi ; understands speech of
birds and is great bird-catcher,
102 ; much to do with swans,
strikes two which turn to fairy
women, 202 ; rescues princess
from Fomori, and she follows
as swan, 202.
Cuckoo, xii, 6; called gowk and
gawk in England, Gauch in
German, 54, 79 ; gives word
gaiiche to French, 54, 79 ; dif-
ferent in size, voice, and habits
from American cuckoos, 55;
ventriloquist, 55; saddled
with crimes by old peoples,
56 ; mother bird lays in other
birds' nests, but does not en-
tirely desert her young, 56 ;
ancients admired its supposed
wickedness, 57 ; habits of
cuckoo and fosterage of chil-
dren in Ireland, 57 ; young ig-
norant of its parents and breth-
ren, possibilities of incest, 58 ;
in Indian Rigveda cuckoo
prophetic and omniscient, 60;

in Germany foretells fortune
for the year, 60; Chaucer's
denunciation, 61 ; converses
with Vaino, 64 ; Lemmin-
kainen's bird, 64 ; Scandina-
vian rhyme to foretell future
by cuckoo's cry, 65 ; cuckoo-
ale in England, 65 ; yokes of
horses carry cuckoo in Fin-
land, 66; colors of cuckoo,
67 ; synonym for awkwardness,
53 ; 68 ; form of cuckoo as-
sumed by Zeus to make Hera,
his sister, his wife, 68; bird
effigies in Mashonaland per-
haps cuckoos, 68 ; cuckoo's
ignorance of parents and fam-
ily the germ of stories of Sieg-
fried, KuUervo, Kalevipoeg.
75 ; Cuchullaind, Gwalchmei,
76 ; Conchobar, Janus and
Saturn, 77 ; Faunus, Italian
form of Pan, 78 ; hibernation
of cuckoos in trees, 80 ; rea-
sons for laying eggs in foreign
nests, 82 ; called Welsh ambas-
sador, 83; " cuckoo-penners
of Somerset," 84; cuckoo
trait in King Arthur who has
children by his sister, 85 ;
Gwalchmei, " hawk of May,"
means the cuckoo, 86 ; useful-
ness of cuckoo to man, 89 ;
cuckoo demigods of Ireland
and Finland, 90.

Curoi, King of Kerry, slain by
Cuchullaind, 99.

Cwm Cawlwyd, owl of, 219.

Cygnet, a Norman word, 184.

Cygnus musicus, Finnish ku-

234

Index

kene, little moon, 189; in
Greek myth, 193.

Dechtir6 of Ulster, sister and
wife of Conchobar, mother of
Cuchullaind, 96.

Deino, name of one of Graiai,
197.

Delos, Hyperboreans send gifts
to Apollo's shrine on, 11.

Diarmuid of Ireland, demigod
with some traits like Cuchul-
laind, 92.

Dionysos, wine god, is a night
god, 208 ; connection with the
swan, 209.

Di-oscuri, darkness gods, Castor
and Pollux, 207.

Dirge of the swan founded on
fact, 72)^ 183.

Dove, the douve with her
eyen meeke, 3 ; goes with
Venus, 6 ; doves draw
Aphrodite's chariot, 6 ; called
"wedded turtil"by Chaucer,
6; Christian use as symbol, 7 ;
both for marriages and fun-
erals, 8; prophetic doves at
Dodona, 10; old name for
rock pigeon in Greek is oinas,
same root as Venus, 14, 16 ; at
temple in Jerusalem, not
eaten at Hierapolis, 18 ;
iEneas from oinas, an old
dove god, 19; gold image
with dove on head at Hiera-
polis, 20; doves at marriages
and funerals, 21 ; on grave
slabs of Longobards, 21 ;
portents from, 21.

2

Druid, 31.

Drumming of woodpecker, 30 ;
Lapp use of magic drum, 31.

Duck, Labrador duck extermin-
ated in the United States, 23.

Diomedes, like father Tydeus
and patroness Pallas, descends
from an owl god, 17.

Dodona, oak grove and doves
gave prophetic oracles, 10 ;
prophetesses tell Herodotus a
tale, 10 ; an oracle place long
before Greeks, 1 1 j tributes
to Apollo from Hyperboreans
stopped there, 11 ; oracle told
Greeks to use old names of
gods, 14; dove offerings at
Jerusalem, 18; never eaten at
Hierapolis, Syria, 18 ; one of
many groves seized by Greeks,
20.

Eagle, at very early period bird
of Pan, 132, 145; given later
to Zeus, 132 ; Eagle of Zenith
of American tribes, 145; bird
of fire and lightning, 210 :
symbol of five great nations,
211 ; legends of immortality
of eagle, 212; dialogue be-
tween eagle and King Arthur,
212; Charlemagne's bronze
eagle, 212; a guardian of Wal-
halla, 213; Romans called
banners eagles, 213; stones
found in eyries cure disease
and help women in labor, 213 ;
Simurg of Persia discussed
predestination with Solomon,
214; eagle of Gwernabw^ and

5

Index

King Arthur, 214; the garuda
of India, 214; brings Kalev
to Esthonia, 215; Louhi
takes eagle shape, 215; Achil-
leus once had meaning of
eagle, 216; Louhi turns into
monstrous eagle, 217 ; Louhi
makes a fiery eagle to stop
Lemminkainen, 217 ; Lem-
minkainen flees home as an
eagle, 218; eagle's egg raked
up from sea, 218 ; copper mani-
kin appears under eagle's
wing, 218 ; parable for fire,
219; great age attributed to
eagle, 219; picture of phoenix
in Egypt was like an eagle's,
220 ; Achilleus, hero, descen-
dant of an eagle god, 221 ;
same root as Kalev and
aquila, 221 ; Achilleus, son of
Galatus, is the white or bald-
headed eagle, 222 ; earliest
Achilleus, an eagle to whom
Hera fled as cuckoo, 223 ;
North American Indians
revere eagle, 225 ; deluge
myth of Dakotahs, an eagle
saved the red race, 225; the
eagle of Zeus, 226; Lieu of
Welsh legend, when killed
flies off as eagle, 226; eagle
combined with ideas of flame,
227 ; eagle traits of Achilleus,
227.

Edward L of England, oath on
swan, 179.

Eetion, his son Kupselos ex-
posed in box, 195; Eetion
means eagle, 196.

2

Egret, white egret extirpated
from Florida, 23.

Elephants, slaughtered in Africa,
xviii.

Eleusinian mysteries, 29.

Enyo, name of one of Graiai,
197.

Eocho the Blue-green, monster
overcome by Cuchullaind, 98.

Eocho Rond, hero overcome by
Cuchullaind, 100, loi.

Esthonians, live as Russian sub-
jects on Baltic, 70; sacrificed
slaves to god Tarapilla, 172,
173; word for "little moon,"
like cygnus, kuknos, 189 ;
Kalev brought to Esthonia on
eagle's back, 205.

Etruscans ; Etruscan scarab with
figure of bird seer, 43 ; their
auspexes taught in Rome, 69;
Minerva was a soul guide,
169; tomb at Perugia, 170;
scarab seals, 170; old belief
of Lycian origin, 171; art
suggests Assyria, 171; wine-
strainers in tombs, 208 ;
museum at Florence, 208.

Fand, daughter of Mananan
mac Lir, 202.

Faunus, son of Picus the wood-
pecker, 27 ; shows cuckoo by
marrying his sister Fauna, 78 ;
parallel of Pan in Greece,
Vaino in Finland, Fion in
Ireland, male Venus in Italy,
Wunsch in Germany, 127;
very little known of Faunus,
135-

6

Index

Fenians of Ireland parallels of
Pans, Panisci and Fauni, 128.

Fiach, Irish for raven, 42.

Finn mac Cool, modern Irish
form of Pan, Vaino, Faunus,
etc., 132.

Finns, the,xiii; Russian subjects,
live on Baltic, 70 ; with Esths
worshipped owl gods, 173.

Fion of Ireland, xvi; regarded
as historical person, 91 ; dives
into lake and comes up an
aged man, 115; rescues Oisin
from fairies, 116, 144.

Firboigs, old subject race of
Ireland ; fly to Ulster and re-
turn to Connaught, 114; give
name to pawns in chess, 114.

Florence, 170, 208.

Florida, egret extirpated from,

23-
Fomori, fog and undersea giants

of Irish legend, 202.
Fylfot; origin of swastika, 165.

Garuda, Indian bird like Si-
murg and legendary eagles,
214.

Gauche, French, "left hand,"
"sinister" from Teutonic name
for cuckoo, 79.

Gawk and gowk, Gauch, gok,
English, German, and Swed-
ish terms for cuckoo, 79.

Giraldus Cambrensis on Eagle
of Snowdon, 219.

Goll, a giant killed by Cuchul-
laind, 97.

Graal, swan and knight of, recall
Apollo, 200.

23

Graiai, hoary at birth like cyg-
nets, 196; swans in shape,
one-eyed, Valkyrs, 196; their
terrible names, 197.

Greece, analysis of myths r&.
quires belief in early non-
Aryans akin to Finnic races
who gave elements to Greek
mythology, 228.

Goethe on cuckoo, 60.

Goose-flesh, to feel; its origin
suggested, 192.

Gorgons, watched by Graiai,
197, 208.

Gubernatis, xiv, 45.

Gwalchmei, Gawayneof Britain,
76 ; his name explained, 85.

Gwemabwy, the eagle of, its
great age, 219.

Harpies and Phoenix. 220.

Harpy Tomb, 171.

Helen, born of egg, 164; same
as Selene, moon, 203.

Hera, peacock assigned to her,
6; seduced by Zeus, her
brother, under form of cuckoo,
68, 86 ; carries a cuckoo on
her sceptre. Sy, 108.

Herakles kills Kuknos, son of
Mars, 194 ; burns himself free
of earth like eagle, 224.

Herodotus, his story of doves
that founded the oracles of
Dodona and Jupiter Ammon,
10; ignorant of speaking
parrots and ravens, 11 ; in his
time everything derived from
Egyi^t, 12, 15; silence on
mysteries, 29.

7

Index

Hierapolis, sacred city in Syria,
dove not eaten except in rites,
i8 ; golden image with pigeon
on its head, 20.

Hiisi, Finnish demon or god of
underworld ; Lemminkainen
catches his magic moose,
bridles his flame horse, 199.

Hildebrand- Hadubrand fight
paralleled by Cuchullaind,
Rustem, Ilya of Murom, 108.

Holy Ghost symbolized by
dove, X.

Hoopoe ; Tereus for his crime
turned into a hoopoe, 48 ;
called the cuckoo's lackey,
109.

Horus of Egypt, son of Isis by
Osiris, after the latter's death,
118; son of the cuckoo, he
turns into a hawk, 119.

Huns, the, xiv.

Hyperboreans, peoples of north-
ern Europe, 12; Apollo came
from them at midsummer,
200.

ICARius, father of Penelope, 164.

Icarus, his bird flight, 164.

Icelanders on voice of swan,
197.

Idas, 207.

Ilaeira, 207.

Iliad, the, xii.

Ilmarinen, the Vulcan of the
Finns, a form of Pan and
Vaino, turns his bride into a
sea-gull, 49, 127; Lemmin-
kainen not bidden to his wed-
ding, 217.

238

India, swastika not derived from*

165.

Irish; fosterage among, 57 ; soft-
ening of gutturals in, 79; cou-
vade among, 89; chroniclers
made gods into historical per-
sons, 91 ; treatise on bird
auguries, 102 ; swan in leg-
ends, 202 ; their term for pea-
cock, 133.

Isvara, form of Siva, picks up
red-hot iron, 174.

Italy, destruction of birds in, 23.

Ithaka, Telegonos lands on, 164.

Janus shows the cuckoo by
marrying his sister, 77.

Japanese demon queller, 174.

Jupiter approaches Hera as
cuckoo, 68, 86; approaches
Leda as swan, 203, 204.

Kaf, mountains where the
Simurg lives, 214.

Kai Kads, Persian king, his
campaign against the white
deevs, 103 ; bound eagles to a
car to scale the sky, 104; his
dynasty is a set of birds, 104.

Kalev, god who gave name to
Kaleva ; of the race of giants,
marries Linda, the bird, T}^ ;
father of Kalevipoeg, a post-
humous son, 73; carried to
Kalevala on back of an eagle,
205 ; Linda, born of an egg,
prefers him, 205 ; Kalev is
eagle, 215; Greek analogue in
^etes of Colchis, 215; Kaleva
old eagle god of Finland, 221 ;

Index

Kalev same in root as Achil-
leus and Latin aquila, 221.

Kaleva or Kalev not used now
in Finland for "eagle," 216.

Kaleva, the, xii; epic of the
Finns, quoted, 39; gave Long-
fellow impulse for " Hia-
watha," 59; on eagle and
cuckoo, 63, 64; cuckoos on
horse yokes, 66 ; shows that
Lapps were magicians for
Finns, 71 ; on fate of Aino,
126, 127; effects of Vaino's
harp, 142, 143.

Kalevipoeg, hero, reputed son
of Kalev the eagle, real son
of Linda the bird, 73; parallel
of Siegfried, 74 ; a cuckoo god,
he dishonors his sister who
drowns herself, 75; takes his
reputed father's heritage by
beating his brothers, 96.

Kalevipoeg, the, xii ; epic of the
Esths ; shows that Finns were
magicians for Esths, 71 ;
quoted for birds, 72 ; parallels
of metals and birds, 72.

Kalypso, parallel of Venus in
Tannhauser legend, 40.

Karagash, swan is ku in, 190.

Karaku-tengu, crow-demons of
Japan born of egg, 46, 47, 204.

Kemnitz in the Mark, swan
legend, 201.

Kilgwri, the blackbird of, its
great age, 219.

Kirke, meaning of her name,
"she-hawk," 164; daughter
of eagle, 164.

Koibal, swan is ku in, 190.

Kuknos, xii ; Esthonian kukene
"little moon," 189; king of
Ligurians, 193; a son of Mars
killed by llerakles, 194; a
son of Neptune strangled by
Achilleus, 195; legend of son
of this Kuknos, 195.

Kullervo, the boy of gigantic
strength in the Kalevala ;
destroys in revenge the wife
of his master Ilmarinen, 49:
obscurity of his birth, 75, 76;
a cuckoo origin to his story,
77 ; his laziness, 84, 144.

Kupselos, son of Eetion, set
afloat like Moses, 195 ; a son
of the eagle, 196.

Kuveras, god of subterranean
wealth, 45.

La Motte Fouqu6, Undine,
202.

Lapland, home of wild swan,
190; home of singing swan,
190.

Lapps, xiii; still use the conjur-
ing drum, 32 ; idols in shape
of birds, 172.

Leda, her bird marriage, 164;
mother of Helen, Castor and
Pollux, 203; same as Linda
(bird) of the Kalevipoeg,
203 ; Zeus approaches her as
swan, 203 ; difference from
Linda, 207.

Lemmetar, love goddess of
Finns, counterpart of Lem-
minkainen, 114.

Lemminkainen, demi-god of the
Kalevala, a loose lover, 92;

239

Index

originally a male god of love,
97 ; along with Lemmetar,
goddess of love, 114; sent
to hell by Louhi, he is cut
to pieces, 115; fails to get
invited to marriage feast,
attacks Pohjola and kills son
of Louhi, 217.

Lesbos, a centre for bird heroes
and birds associated with
gods, 139.

Leucadian Rock, bird worship
and human sacrifices attach-
ing to it, 140.

Leukippos, 207.

Leukophrys, island near Troad,

195-
Liban, daughter of Mananan

mac Lir, 202.

Libya, a dove-woman flies
thither from Egypt, 10.

Ligyes, Ligurians beyond the
Eridanus, 193 ; their king
Kuknos, swan, 194, 195.

Linda, born of an egg, she is
mother of Kalevipoeg and
wife of Kalev, the eagle,
73; Linda means bird, 73;
Linda same as Leda mother
of Pollux, 203 ; prefers Kalev
the eagle, 205 ; her father the
moon, uncle the sun, brothers
the birch-trees, 206 ; is a swan,
206, 215.

Linnupete, " bird deceiver," pre-
caution of Esthonians to
guard against magic of birds,
117.
Lithuanians sacrificed slaves to 1
birds, ix.

Lochlan, in Irish legends, Scot-
land or Norway, but really
the realm below the sea, 203.

Longobards used slabs carved
with doves for gravestones, 21.

Louhi of Pohjola sends Lem-
minkainen to Tuoni for swan
of hell, 199, 215, 216, 217.

Lucian, 19, 20.

Lugal-turda, bird god on the
Euphrates, probably a cuckoo
god, 105.

Luig, Finn and Esth term for
swan, 190; origin of name of
Ligyes, Ligurians, 193.

Lynceus, 207.

Mahabharata, the, xii.
Mana, king of under-world, 161,

217-
Mananan mac Lir, in Irish
legend fairy king of sea, 202 ;
his daughters or wives Fand
and Liban, 202.
Mars (Mavors), his bird was the
woodpecker, 27 ; his sons
Romulus and Remus saved by
woodpecker, 27 ; bird was
known by his name, 41 ; Pallas
Athene conquers him, 176.
i Mashonaland, bird effigies in
' ruins of Zimbabwe, 30.
Matiena, Sabine bird gods at, 30.
Meave, Irish form of Mab, fairy
I queen of Ulster, deserts her
I husband Conchobar, 107.
Mecklenburg, idols with birds
on heads found in, 20; Radi-
gast, god of heathens, 188 ;
bull's head in arms of, 186.

240

Index

Medea in Argonautica, parallel
of Louhi the Hag of Pohjola
in Kalevala, 216.

Megarians claim Tereus and
honor him as a god, 31.

Minerva, in Etruscan "heavens-
red," 160.

Minervalia, five-day festival in
IVrarch, 167.

Modred, a son of King Arthur,
106.

Mohammed, xvii.

Moses, xvii, 195.

MUUer, Max, on the swastika,
164.

Munnapoika, Finnish "son of
egg," a modern variant on
Kullervo, 84.

Narragansett Pier, 210.

Neptune turns Kuknos, his son,
into a swan, 195.

Nessa, queen of Ulster, has
Cormac Conlingeas by her
own son Conchobar, 107.

Niurenius, on bird idols of
Lapps, 172.

Nyyrikki, son of Tapio, Finnic '
god of forests, is the red-
headed woodpecker, 39.

Odusseus, xii; Greek etymology
for his name, 162 ; Etruscan
form, 163; Sikulian, 163;
meaning, 163; owl traits, 163;
cuckoo traits in his son by
Kirke, 164; his wife Penelope
a daughter and sister of birds,
164.

Odyssey, the, xii.

16 24

Oesel, island in Baltic, 172;
bird god and temple, 172, 189.

Oidipous, son of Laius and
Jocasta, xii; his crimes are
cuckoo crimes, no; accord-
ing to Pausanias he was half-
brother to the Sphinx, in;
his story in a modern E,stho-
nian folktale, 112.

Oinas, old word for rock pigeon
in Greek, 14; probably Pelas-
gian, 14 ; same root as Venus
and yEneas, 15, 16.

Oisin of Ireland, 91 ; kept by
fairies in cave, 116.

Orpheus, xii ; with other Argo-
nauts has dim resemblances to
heroes of Kalevala, 143 ;
especially Vaino, 144 ; ex-
plains through analogy of
Vaino the nature of Pan, 142,
144, 145, 216.

Orphic mysteries, 29.

Orte, bronze Minerva found at,
169.

Osiris, chopped to pieces like
Lemminkainen, 115, 199.

Ostrich, in Bible, 146.

Oulixes, Sikulian and early form
of Ulysses, 163.

Ovid on the woodpecker on a
pillar, 29,

Owl, Minerva's bird, xi ; and «p
Pallas Athene's, 6; sphinxes
of helmet of Pallas Athene in
Athens took the place of owl
figures, in; owls for sale in
Rome's streets, 150; small
owl generally called she, 151,
152; Australian blacks think

Index

owls women, 151 ; in the
Bible was abomination to eat,
152; Shakespeare denounces
owl, 153; Minerva turns
Nyctimene into an owl for
incest, 154; Blodeued became
owl for betraying her husband,
154; on Athenian coins, 155;
usefulness and ferocity, 156;
luctifer, 1 57 ; glaux, 1 57 ;
Miner valia an owl festival 167 ;
in Rigveda, 168 ; throttle
babies, 168; nine calls, 168;
Minerva early evolved from
owl, 169; Tarapilla, Baltic
owl-god on island of Oesel,
172; Palladium may have
been owl idol, 173; early
Pallas an owl, 173 ; owl gods
of Lapps, etc., 173; a weaver
in German ballads, 176; owl
gods of Livonians, 188; eggs
of owl stop drunkenness,
209 ; owl of Cwm Cawlwyd,
219.

Palladium, stolen from Troy,
163 ; shaped like an animal,

173-
Pallas Athene, xii ; owl is her
bird, 6; glaukopis, 157; wis-
dom, 157; her serpent, 158;
cock, 158 ; deity of night, 159;
ornaments of helmet, 160 ;
form of Selene, 160 ; sister of
Aurora, 160 ; origin of name
Pallas, 160 ; descent from
Pan, 160; epithets Paionia
and Pandrosos, 160 ; why
born of Jove's head, 161 ;

early worship like that of
Finns, 173; origin of fame as
weaver, 176; contrasts in her
worship, 175; quarrels with
Poseidon, Ares, Hera, Aphro-
dite, 177 ; owl traits, 177.

Pallas, giant prototype of Pallas
Athene, 173.

Pan, xii ; oracle at Dodona
originally his, 13; in Germany
his parallel was Wunsch, 22 ;
Pan in one part of Greece
called Phan, 128; root of
name in phoenix, Phoenicia,
128; older god in Greece
than Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Mer-
cury, 129; older Turanian
form is Paian, Paieon, healer
god in Iliad, 129; not neces-
sarily a goat-foot originally,
131, 161 ; Greek way of express-
ing rudeness of Arcadians, 131 ;
gave up his birds to Zeus and
Hera, 132; gave his name to
peacock, 132; in Old Ireland
represented by Fion, now Finn
mac Cool, 132 ; lo Paian in
Apollo's temples retained
Pan's name, 134; Phaon the
same as Pan, 141 ; mysterious
god, degraded by Greeks,

141 ; his character and ad-
ventures hid under Orpheus,

142 ; primitive Turanian god,
160.

Pandion, king of Arcadia and
Athens, 48 ; a human form of
Pan, 160.

Pausanias on the sphinx, no;
on serpent of Pallas, 158.
42

Index

Peacock, xi ; assigned to Hera,
6, 124; falsely said to have
reached Greece under Alexan-
der, Solomon imported them,
124; Chinese reverence for
them, 124; became bird of
Pan, taking its name from
him, 132; name in many lan-
guages means sun, 133, 137;
Greek name for peacock taken
from Persian tawus, 133 ;
humming noise of its feathers,
134; on coins of Samos, 135;
jewelled peacock offered to
Hera by Emperor Adrian,
136; katreus a name for
the peacock, also name of
a Cretan king, 137; peacocks
owned by Vikingers, 138,
180 ; oath on the peacock,
138 ; peacock became wicked
to Christians from connection
with heathen, 146; no such
prejudice in Old Testament,
146.

Pedauque, la Reine Pedauque,
a swan goddess, 192.

Pelasgians, general term for
races about the ^gean before
the Greek, 8 ; also Pelargians
as if the "stork people,"
9 ; oracle at Dodona was
Pelasgian, ii ; Herodotus
wrong in saying they had
no names for gods, 14 ; Pelas-
gian or non-Aryan race of
Syria, 19.

Peleia, male pigeon, the "qua-
ker," found in Pelops, " dove
face," and Peleus, 16.

Peleus, father of Achilleus, his
name means male pigeon
(peleia), 221.

Pelican, siupid bird taken up
for crests over coats of arms,
147.

Pelops, not from pelos dark, but
peleia male pigeon, his name
means " Dove Face," 16.

Penelope, bird origin of, 164.

Peony, plant of Pan and the
sun, a magic plant, 40.

Pephredo, name of one of the
Graiai, 197.

Persian heroes, 103, 104, 106;
legends of swan enchantments,
191.

Perugia, tomb with owls and
serpents, 170.

Perun, old Russian god o2 thun-
der, 21.

Philomela turned to nightingale,
48.

Phoebe, 207.

Phcenix, fabulous bird that
burned itself periodically, was
the eagle, description of
picture in Herodotus, 220; a
form of Pan, 220 ; humanized
as the blind king pursued by
harpies, 220.

Phoinikoi retain Pan's name,
136 ; brought the phcenix and
paan the peacock to Asia
Minor and Europe, 137.

Pica, the magpie, 42.

Picus, old Italian god, xii; was
the woodpecker, 25 ; his Italiot
worshippers like Lapps and
Finns, 32 ; figured as youth

243

Index

with woodpecker on head,
41 ; a Greek form was Tereus,
49, 51 ; in Old Prussia as
Picollus, 50 ; marries Canens
(singer) daughter of Janus,
78 ; his father Saturn and his
son Faunus show the cuckoo
crime, 78; son Kuknos killed
by Herakles, 194.

Pikker or Pikne, thunder god of
Esthonians, 34 ; parallel of
Picus in Italy, 34 ; prayer to
Pikker, 38 ; later views of
Pikker in Esthonian stories,
41 ; Prussian parallel in Picol-
lus, 50 ; early separation from
Vaino, Lemminkainen and
Ilmarinen, 127.

Pittacus, the philosopher, his
bird name, 139.

Plato, dreamt Sokrates fled to
his bosom as a swan, 194.

Pliny on the woodpecker as a
prophetic bird, 41 ; meaning
for strix, 168.

Polish sounds twitteringly, 50.

Pollux, his bird birth, 164, 215.

Priam of Troy, Pelasgians his
allies, 9.

Procne turned to swallow, 48.

Ptolemies, marriage of brother
and sister, result of bird god
worship, 109 ; cuckoo traits
in their line, 120.

Pythagoras, the mystic, his bird-
like traits, 139.

Radigast, god of old Slavonic
race, in Mecklenburg with
head of beast, 188; swan or

goose his bird, 188 ; his region
the swan's haunt, 201.
Rasavahini, his idea that beasts
remember former benefits,

XV.

Rauen, the princess in the rock
at, 40.

Raven, name of Gaul who
sacked Rome, 45 ; raven or
crow assists Valerius in com-
bat, 46 ; ravens Hugin and
Mugin, 46.

Rhea, sister and wife of Saturn
shows cuckoo origin, ']'], 108.

Rhedynvre, the stag of, its great
age, 219.

Rhetra, site of old Vendish tem-
ple, 187, 201.

Rhys, Professor, derives Fand
from Latin unda, 202.

Rigveda on the cuckoo, 60 ;
prayer at call of owl, 168.

Romulus and Remus saved by
woodpecker, 27.

Roodabeh, mother of Rustem,
her labor helped by the
Simurg, 214.

Riigen, island of Baltic, swan
brings babies from, like stork,
197.

Rustem, son of Zal, saves Per-
sian heroes from effect of
couvade, 104 ; his birth as-
sisted by the Simurg, 103,
214; has same adventures as
Cuchullaind, fights with his
own son, 106.

Sabines worshipped wood-
pecker, 29.

244

Index

Salme, in the Kalevipoeg, sister
to Linda the bird, turns
human from being a pullet,

73-

Samoyeds, their use of magic
tabor or drum, 32.

Sampo, a talisman and wonder-
working thing, 71 ; connection
with Sappho and Shamas
(sun), 140; Sampo at bottom
the same as the Golden
Fleece, 216, 217.

Sappho, xii ; suggestion of bird
in her legend, 140; perhaps
her name connected with
Shamas, sun god, and Sampo,
140 ; threw herself from Leu-
cadian Rock for Phaon's
sake, 140.

Saturn shows the cuckoo by
marrying his sister, yy, 108;
his mutilation explained
through couvade, 108.

Scatach, the " shadowy," Ama-
zon who keeps a military
school in Scotland, 98.

Schwan-federn, German expres-
sion, 191.

Schwartz on lightning symbo-
lized as dragon or snake, ix.

Selene, moon, 160.

Semite, the, xvii,

Setanta, originally the name of
CuchuUaind of Ireland, 92 ;
his prowess as a boy, 93.

Setnau, Egyptian tale of, story
of brother and sister forced to
many, 119.

Shah Nameh, the, xii ; bird and
cuckoo heroes in, 102, 106. '

Shannon River, name explained
through Finnic roots, 1 13.

Siberia, home of swan, 190.

Siegfried, parallel in Kalevipoeg,
74 ; dishonors his sister, 75 ; a
cuckoo god, 75.

Sigurd, his story repeated in
Siegfried, 75; is a cuckoo
god, 106.

Sikulian name for Ulysses, 163.

Simurg, fabulous bird in Persia,
fosters Zal, 103 ; is called in
to help Roodabeh in child-
birth, 103; argues with Solo-
mon, 214.

Slavic nations, favorers of
cuckoo, 116.

Snowdon, the Eagle of the
Eagle Mountains, 219.

Sokrates in dream flies as swan
into Plato's bosom, 194,

Solomon discusses predestina-
tion with the Simurg, 214.

Specht, German for woodpecker,
parallel of Pikker, name of
old bird god, 42.

Sphinx supposed by Pausanias
to be a monstrous child of
Laius, III ; used by Greeks
as decoration in place of owl,
III.

Spider; cross, a shorthand pic-
ture of spider, 165; on Indian
shell gorgets, 165 ; American,
European. Asian, 165 ; foretell
ruin of Thebes, 166; symbol
of weaving 166; cross on
back, origin of swastika, 167.

Spiegel, his edition of Rasava-
hini, xiv.

245

Index

Spinning whorls with swastika
marks, 165.

Stheneleus, father of Kuknos
king of the Ligurians, 193.

Stork, Latin ciconia from Finnic
kuik, 190 ; swan brings babies
instead of stork in Riigen,
197.

Subhramanya, son of Vishnu
of India, god attended by the
peacock, 123.

Suometar, Finnish swan maiden
193 ; born of goose egg, 193.

Swan, xi ; Apollo's bird, 6 ; often
mentioned in Kalevipoeg, 72 ;
one variety sings when dying,
73; oath on, 179; "I swan,"
180 ; Enghsh and German
phrase " it swans to me," 181 ;
Order of Swan, 181 ; favorite
in heraldry, 182 ; with sha-
mans, 182; feather is magical,
182 ; musical variety, 183 ;
"game" of swans, 184; Norse
words for swan and fairy simi-
lar, 185 ; Elbe River perhaps
named from swan, 186 ; sacred
bird in Edda, 187 ; swan on
head of idol Radigast, 188,
201 ; night and moon god,
189; kuik and luig in Estho-
nian, 190; sacred bird in Cen-
tral Asia, 190; swan maidens,
191; swan legends of Kuknos,
son of Neptune, 195; of the
Graiai, 196 ; in Riigen acts
like stork, 197 ; musical voices,
198; quarrelsome bird, 198;
night flier, i
in Kalevala,

Apollo and Bacchus, 200;
foretells death, 201 ; in Irish
legend, 202 ; Jupiter ap-
proaches Leda as, 203, 204,
205 ; genius of wine with
swan's head for cap, 208.

Swannery, a royal preroga-
tive, 184 ; Lord Ilchester's,
185.

"Swanny," exclamation, origin
shown, 180.

Swanskin found by swan maiden,
she flies away, 191, 202.

Swastika, its origin found in
cross on back of spiders, 165;
whence a sign for weaving
and woven things, 166 ; when
on figures of terra cotta, etc.
refers to clothing, 167.

Syrinx, 20.

Tapio, Finnish god of woods,
38 ; mentioned as Nyyrikki in
Kalevala, 39; he is a survival
of Pikker, 39.

Tara's hill in Ireland parallel
to Taara's hill in Esthland,

113-

Tarapilla means owl in Finnish,
172 ; god flew as owl to Oesel,
172 ; Adam of Bremen on wor-
ship of, 173; his red-hot iron
shaft, 174.

Tarhapollo, Finnish nam.e for
owl, 172; polio same root as
Pallas, 175.

Tatar, swapping of the swan,

190.
; swan of hell ' Tawus,Persian word for peacock,
98; symbol of: origin of Greek term, 133.

246

Index

Tereus changed to hoopoe or
hawk, 48 ; his name means
piercer, a form of Picus the
woodpecker, 48.

Tikka, modern Finnic term for
woodpecker, 38.

Tonn, tonndi, underground de-
mons of the Finns and Esths,

113-

Tuatha de Danann, mythical
magical early race in Ireland
means "Folk of the Dark
Gods," 113.

Tundareos, mortal father of
Helen, 164; the woodpecker,
164; from root like tundo to
strike, 207.

Tuoni, Finnish hell, swan of
Tuoni, 199.

Turanians, their gods assumed
by Greeks, 175 ; Vaino, Turan-
ian parallel of Pan-Orpheus,
176.

Turkestan, home of swan, 190.

Turks, the, xiii.

Ukko, Finnish and Esthonian
highest god similar to Zeus,
13; woodpecker was his
special creation, 37.

Uluxe, Etruscan and early Greek
form of Ulysses, 163.

Ulysses, his name in Etruscan,
162; in Sikulian, 163; named
from cry of owl, 163; his
adventures often nocturnal,

163 ; his wife of bird descent,

164 ; has a son by " she-hawk "
who like a cuckoo kills his
father, 164.

Unda, same root as Fand daugh-
ter Mananan mac Lir of Ire-
land, 202.

Undine, Fouque's tale of, same
as Irish Fand, 202.

Untamo, in the Kalevala the
uncle and father of Kullervo,
76, 77, 106.

Urda, well of, in Edda, 187.

Vaino or Vainamoinen, old god
of Kalevala, xvi ; parallel of
male Venus of Italy, catches
Aino as a fish, 13 ; born of the
sea like Venus, 13; like
Venus, double trait of mar-
riage and funeral celebrant, 20,
21 ; parallels with Orpheus,
142, 144; his adventures for
the Sampo dimly like Argo-
naut expedition, 143.

Valkyrs, swan maidens are
Valkyrs, 192 ; conductors of
souls, 192 ; Graiai were Val-
kyrs, 196 ; modern Valkyrs in
Mecklenburg, 201 ; Leda a
swan-valkyr, 207.

Velleda, a female wizard or
prophetess in Germany, 31.

Vendish sounds twitteringly, 50.

Venezuela, egret soon be extri-
pated there, 23.

Venus, xii ; her symbol the
dove, 6 ; sparrow also given
to her, 7 ; her worship only
apparently the opposite of
death, 8 ; male as well as
female Venus in Italy, 12;
parallel of male Venus is
Finnic Vaino, of female, Fin-

247

Index

nic Aino, 12 ; bom of sea, 13 ;
name explained through oinas
rock pigeon, 15; her favorite
son JEnezs a dove god hu-
manized, 15; some of her bird
traits, 18; swallow another
Venus bird, 19; Vaino of
Finland has her traits, 20;
male Venus, 21 ; in Germany
represented by Wunsch, 22 ;
"cast" of Venus was the
lucky cast, 22.
Vulcan, husband of Pallas, 1 58.

Walriderske, modern Val-
kyrs, 202.

Weavers, Pallas Athene, 164;
owl's movement, 176; daugh-
ters of sun and moon in Kale-
vala, 176.

Welsh, great age of certain
animals in legends, 219.

Wilson, Thomas, work on swas-
tika, 165.

Woodpecker, blood-red hood
and eye, 27 ; rescued Romulus
and Remus, 27 ; worshipped
by Italiots, 28; idol of Sa-
bines, 29 ; mentioned by Ovid,
29; drums on dead branch,
30; a thunder bird, 31 ; sound
imitated by Lapps on tabor,
32 ; Wotjaks worship wood-
pecker, 34 ; thunder god Pik-
ker of Esths parallel of Picus
in Italy, 34; similar worship
of woodpecker in America,
35 ; guardian of hidden treas-
ure, 39 ; modern Esth name
is tilcka, 38; Tapio, wood god,
2

is Pikker-Picus, 39 ; brings the
magic plant, 40 ; white wood-
pecker opens treasure rock,
40; Specht in German, fiach
(raven) in Irish, 42 ; on old
Etruscan scarab with an aus-
pex, 43 ; flew on head of
^lius the praetor, 44 ; in
White Russian superstition
and in the Pentameron, 45:
Tereus was a woodpecker god,
48 ; Old Prussian PicoUus pro-
bably a woodpecker, 50;
Tundareos, mortal father of
Leda the swan and Pollux the
owl is a woodpecker, 164, 207.

Wotjaks honor woodpecker, 34.

Wryneck called cuckoo's maiden,
109.

Wunsch, parallel in Germany
of Pan of Greece, Vaino of
Finland, Fion of Ireland,
Faunus and male Venus of
Italy, 22.

YouKAHAiNEN, young magi-
cian, brother of Aino the
suicide, 13 ; contends in
magic with Vaino, 100 ; prom-
ises Vaino his sister's hand,
125.

Zal exposed by his father,
nourished by the Simurg, 103,
104, 106; father of Rustem,
calls in Simurg to help on his
birth, 214.

Zeus, eagle goes with, 6; Do-
dona a seat of Zeus, like
Libyan temple of Ammon, 10 ;

48

Index

high place given him by
Greeks, 15; takes place of
Pan, 20 ; assumes form of
cuckoo to seduce his sister,
68, 86, ^j, 108; temple on
mount near Corinth erected in
memory of his trick, 116;
later than Pan, 161, 173 ; father
of Galatus, 202.
Zezula, Polish for cuckoo, 116.

Zimbabwe; carved stone birds
in ruins at, 68.

Zu, a god in the Euphrates
valley, 104; a bird god, 105;
George Smith on the zu bird,
105.

Zywie, old Polish cuckoo god-
dess with temple on Mount
Zywiec, 116; turned into a
cuckoo, 117.

249

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