Jolie Rouge
10-19-2003, 08:04 PM
As Halloween approaches, we'll see more spooky reminders of our superstitiousness. Graveyard scenes are standard, with at least one tombstone or crooked tree branch inhabited by a shadowy owl staring with eerie, catlike eyes.
In the folklore of cultures throughout the world, owls and other birds have long served as symbols or prognosticators of death and misery. In 1894, naturalist W.J. Broderip wrote of owls: "Their retired habits, the desolate places that are their favorite haunts, their hollow hootings, fearful shrieks, serpent-like hissings and coffin-maker snappings, have helped to give them a bad eminence." One hundred years later, on an episode of the '90s television hit "Northern Exposure," a great horned owl was shown hooting moments before a falling satellite squashed a protagonist's fiancée.
Owls aren't the only birds associated with superstitions. Brant geese were the Gabriel hounds, a night-flying pack baying to announce a coming funeral. For some, a songbird tapping on a window or a woodpecker tapping on a house predicted a death. In early American folklore, a bird flying into a house was carrying a message to the people inside. If it couldn't fly out again, it was a sign of death -- though the death was often the bird's.
Ancient Europeans believed swifts and ravens colluded with Satan. Edgar Allan Poe's raven was a "Prophet! Thing of evil!" For the English, the croakings of ravens predicted death and disaster. Even today the British government protects and fosters the ravens in the Tower of London rookery because of a myth that a horrible disaster would befall England if the ravens left.
In America's Deep South in the 1800s, many people believed that a raven relative, the blue jay, was Satan's messenger. People thought it was impossible to see a jay on Friday, the day blue jays carried sticks down to hell to Satan, along with gossip about the world. The jays returned from their devilish duties on Saturday, when they were said to be especially noisy in their relief to be back on earth once again.
Some bird superstitions have been a little less gloomy. While the call of a whippoorwill supposedly foretold a death, if you made a wish when you first heard a whippoorwill in spring, your wish would come true. Hearing that first whippoorwill also meant that you'd be in the same place doing the same thing at the same time the following year -- unless, presumably, your death was the one it was foretelling.
The European cuckoo's loud and distinctive call, exactly like a cuckoo clock, was strange enough to be thought to portend something, but no single myth won out about whether it was a sign of good or evil.
Pigeons feeding in a grain field portended evil, but the same birds showing up elsewhere were doves, believed to be harbingers of peace and good luck. If a bird crossed one's path from left to right, the person was headed for trouble, but if the bird crossed from right to left, happy times were ahead.
The word "auspicious" comes from "auspicium," the ancient practice of foretelling the future using bird entrails and other body parts. We may laugh about how people once believed that the folds in some poor dead bird's intestines gave information about the future, but many of us still tug at the wishbone when we eat a turkey.
And of course, one scary symbol of Halloween really does portend death. For many birds, an approaching black cat, or cat of any other color, is the last thing they'll ever see.
{{Thanks to our favorite M*I*B for the 411 ! }}
In the folklore of cultures throughout the world, owls and other birds have long served as symbols or prognosticators of death and misery. In 1894, naturalist W.J. Broderip wrote of owls: "Their retired habits, the desolate places that are their favorite haunts, their hollow hootings, fearful shrieks, serpent-like hissings and coffin-maker snappings, have helped to give them a bad eminence." One hundred years later, on an episode of the '90s television hit "Northern Exposure," a great horned owl was shown hooting moments before a falling satellite squashed a protagonist's fiancée.
Owls aren't the only birds associated with superstitions. Brant geese were the Gabriel hounds, a night-flying pack baying to announce a coming funeral. For some, a songbird tapping on a window or a woodpecker tapping on a house predicted a death. In early American folklore, a bird flying into a house was carrying a message to the people inside. If it couldn't fly out again, it was a sign of death -- though the death was often the bird's.
Ancient Europeans believed swifts and ravens colluded with Satan. Edgar Allan Poe's raven was a "Prophet! Thing of evil!" For the English, the croakings of ravens predicted death and disaster. Even today the British government protects and fosters the ravens in the Tower of London rookery because of a myth that a horrible disaster would befall England if the ravens left.
In America's Deep South in the 1800s, many people believed that a raven relative, the blue jay, was Satan's messenger. People thought it was impossible to see a jay on Friday, the day blue jays carried sticks down to hell to Satan, along with gossip about the world. The jays returned from their devilish duties on Saturday, when they were said to be especially noisy in their relief to be back on earth once again.
Some bird superstitions have been a little less gloomy. While the call of a whippoorwill supposedly foretold a death, if you made a wish when you first heard a whippoorwill in spring, your wish would come true. Hearing that first whippoorwill also meant that you'd be in the same place doing the same thing at the same time the following year -- unless, presumably, your death was the one it was foretelling.
The European cuckoo's loud and distinctive call, exactly like a cuckoo clock, was strange enough to be thought to portend something, but no single myth won out about whether it was a sign of good or evil.
Pigeons feeding in a grain field portended evil, but the same birds showing up elsewhere were doves, believed to be harbingers of peace and good luck. If a bird crossed one's path from left to right, the person was headed for trouble, but if the bird crossed from right to left, happy times were ahead.
The word "auspicious" comes from "auspicium," the ancient practice of foretelling the future using bird entrails and other body parts. We may laugh about how people once believed that the folds in some poor dead bird's intestines gave information about the future, but many of us still tug at the wishbone when we eat a turkey.
And of course, one scary symbol of Halloween really does portend death. For many birds, an approaching black cat, or cat of any other color, is the last thing they'll ever see.
{{Thanks to our favorite M*I*B for the 411 ! }}