Flight from Grace: A Cultural History of Humans and Birds 9780228013709

Table of contents :
Cover
FLIGHT FROM GRACE
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART ONE | SACRED BIRDS
1 Divine Implications: Telltale Evidence
2 Animism and the Sacred
3 Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art
4 Birds in Palaeolithic Portable Art
5 Birds in Neolithic Art: Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, and Europe
6 Sacred Birds of Mesopotamia and Egypt
7 Sacred Birds of Peru
8 Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World
PART TWO | THE IMITATION OF BIRDS
9 Gods as Birds: The Magic of Flight
10 Sacred Music: The Ecstasy of Birdsong
11 Birds Betrayed: Sapiens at Its Worst
12 What Went Wrong?
13 What Is to Be Done?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

FLIGHT FROM GRACE

FLIGHT FROM GRACE A Cultural History of Humans and Birds RICHARD POPE

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021

ISBN 978-0-2280-0530-8 (cloth) Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Flight from grace : a cultural history of humans and birds / Richard Pope. Names: Pope, Richard, 1941– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20200392085 | ISBN 9780228005308 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH : Birds—Social aspects—History. | LCSH : Birds in art. | LCSH: Human-animal relationships. | LCSH: Human ecology. Classification: LCC QL 676 .P 57 2021 | DDC 304.2/7—dc23

Set in 11.25/14.5 Garamond Premier Pro with Magdelin Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

For the birds and, as always, for my wife

O suffering mankind, lives of twilight, race feeble and fleeting, like the leaves scattered! Pale generations, creatures of clay, the wingless, the fading! Unhappy mortals, shadows in time, flickering dreams! Hear us now, the ever-living Birds, the undying, the ageless ones, scholars of eternity. – from the address of the birds to the humans in Aristophanes, The Birds (414 BCE), 50

CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments

xiii

Part One | Sacred BirdS

1 Divine Implications: Telltale Evidence

3

2 Animism and the Sacred 16 3 Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art 23 4 Birds in Palaeolithic Portable Art

41

5 Birds in Neolithic Art: Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, and Europe 51 6 Sacred Birds of Mesopotamia and Egypt

73

7 Sacred Birds of Peru 98 8 Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World Part twO | the imitatiOn Of BirdS

9 Gods as Birds: The Magic of Flight 135 10 Sacred Music: The Ecstasy of Birdsong 164

108

Part three | Our Betrayal Of BirdS

11 Birds Betrayed: Sapiens at Its Worst 187 12 What Went Wrong?

205

13 What Is to Be Done? 225 Notes 249 Bibliography

Contents

Index 283

viii

271

Auspicio ergo sum. I birdwatch; therefore, I am.

PREFACE This book is a meditation about birds and their meaning for human beings. Why do birds play such a large role in human life? Why are they so ubiquitous in art and culture from prehistoric times to the present? What really accounts for our attraction to birds and what makes birding by far the fastest-growing pastime in North America and Great Britain? In 2009 in my book The Reluctant Twitcher, I reported that birding “is the fastest growing pastime in the Western world with well over fifty million participants in Canada and the United States alone.”1 The figures have only increased since then. The latest estimates of the number of bird enthusiasts place us anywhere between 20 and 25 per cent of the North American population – or 55 million to 70 million people – almost one out of four. The National Audubon Society in the United States has over 600,000 members, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Britain has over 1 million members. The bird feed industry is massive. What is the attraction? Why birds? Why not stamps or coins? Why not orchids, dragonflies, moths, or even butterflies? Why not slime moulds, slugs, or tapirs, for that matter? If it were just the challenge and difficulty of identification or the desire to collect, insects would do nicely. Although many birds are extremely beautiful and aesthetics play an important role, it is not merely a question of beauty. Shoebills and marabou storks put paid to that idea; and the better the birders, the more they prefer nondescript little brown jobs. It is also worth remembering that birds have been killed for their beauty as much as admired over the millennia. And it is not just because

Preface

FIGURE 0.1 Marabou stork. | Copyright Nadia Leskovskaya, Shutterstock.com.

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birds are warm-blooded, good at pest control and the spreading of seeds, and providers of down and feathers for clothing and bedding. There also has to be more to it than the taste of roast chicken. Interest has always been there. Aristotle includes a discussion of birds in four books of The History of Animals (Historia animalium, ca. 350 BCE). Pliny the Elder devotes almost the whole of book 10 – “The Nature of Birds” – of Natural History (Historia naturalis, 79 CE ) to the subject, and although Natural History is a mélange of observed fact and wild fancy, birds were obviously interesting enough to merit a whole book in this huge opus. And this interest has never waned, as thousands of books about birds attest. The last time that I Googled “birds,” I got about 2.8 billion results. In his book Shakespeare (2009), Bill Bryson laments the almost ludicrous amount of ink devoted to his subject: “The Library of Congress in Washington contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare – twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day.”2

Preface

Bryson does not know how lucky he is. In my case, if I researched for, say, just ten years, I would have to read about 280 million items a year, which comes to about 767,123 a day, unless, of course, I took off Christmas and had to read 769,231 each day to keep up. This output is what is called an embarrassment of riches. I thought about reading all this material, but then I thought … But what drives this interest in birds? The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “bird” as “a feathered vertebrate with a beak, with two wings and two feet, egg-laying, and usually able to fly.” This account does little to explain what generates the magic of our relationship with birds. I shall avoid this simplistic approach, just as Diogenes the Cynic rejected Plato’s literal definition of humans. Once, Plato defined humans as featherless, two-legged animals and was applauded. The next day, Diogenes, who loved to irritate and embarrass Plato, arrived at Plato’s Academy with a plucked chicken in hand and said, “Here is Plato’s man.”3 Diogenes’s point is that such definitions are overly reductive and misleadingly simplistic. Both Oxford and Plato ignore the aesthetic and spiritual dimension of birds and humans in a world in desperate need of re-enchantment. I have tried to dig deeper. The deeper I went, the more evidence I found of a special relationship that humans have with birds – more profound and much older than with any other animals. Take a walk, for example, through the sections devoted to Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Louvre, and look for wings – on birds, animals, monsters, humans, gods and goddesses, whatever – and you will be staggered and swimming in a sea of feathers. We shall take a close look at the long history of humans revering and actually worshipping birds, examine the magic of flight and humans’ efforts to render their anthropomorphic gods sacred by making them birdlike and by giving them wings, and then plumb the visceral human response to birdsong, including the attempts to imitate it and to read meaning into it. Much of the evidence for my argument comes either from material culture, such as cave art, stone sculpture, figurines, pottery, and tomb paintings, or from literature, such as myth, hymns, accounts of saints’ lives, epics, and poetry. At this point, however, we have to tackle an obvious but burning question: why is bird-watching and the age-old human love for birds growing so rapidly precisely at a time when maximum damage is being done to birds and when they are disappearing largely at our own hands? We are driving them to extinction at a furious pace; one in ten species is severely endangered. We are destroying what we love and wish to preserve. I try to

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Preface

account for this paradox. We shall review the many terrible things that we have done and continue to do to birds and take a close look at the reasons for our regrettable behaviour, which is driving them to extinction at such an alarming rate. How can we stand to betray them? Lastly, I address the question of what is to be done. Can a healthy relationship between humans and other animals be restored? Here, I open the purview of the book to include all of nature. I pay attention throughout this book to human religious and cultural beliefs. Whether you believe with the Jains that all life is sacrosanct and must be treated as such or cleave to the Old Testament biblical view that nature is simply there for humans to use as they see fit, religion has always been a powerful determinant of people’s attitudes toward nature and the world around them. Can humans transcend the view ingrained in them for more than two millennia that they have dominion over nature? The question burns because if even the plight of birds is ignored, what hope is there that humans will move to protect the rest of nature? The problem is one of morality. Make no mistake about it. There is a right and a wrong way to act on this issue. Since the lives of humans, birds, and other animals are interrelated, mutually advantageous symbiosis is the only thing that makes sense. Living as if other creatures do not matter is nonsensical, if not suicidal. We are bound to take other creatures seriously. In this book, I take birds seriously. Birds matter. Much has been written about the human predicament; this book examines the position of animals. Birds and our treatment of them serve as an overarching metaphor for the betrayal of trust and duty that has led to the degradation of nature that we face today. Birds are the canary in the coal mine and are offering us an urgent warning.4 The book is meant to stimulate thought about birds in the context of human behaviour because birds need to be thought about more than ever as they rapidly dwindle before our eyes and as the biosphere becomes ever more deeply compromised. Any mistakes are, of course, my own. I confessed in the dedication, after all, that this book is for the birds. My enemies will slyly assert that this is indeed so – but away with them!

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are a number of people who must be thanked. First and foremost is my wife, who served as a springboard for ideas, offered museological advice, and never so much as raised an eyebrow, let alone screamed in frustration, whenever I maundered on about birds, gods, and the “last days,” which was not seldom. Khadija Coxon of McGill-Queen’s University Press championed the book from the get-go and carefully piloted it past the obstacles that stand in the way of publishing such a manuscript. Don Hitchcock of Don’s Maps made research for this book much easier with his marvellous and invaluable websites, which hugely facilitate the study of Palaeolithic cave art. His generosity and quick responses to calls for help, as well as his practice of allowing all to use his materials as needed, were greatly appreciated. Would that there were more like him. Marg Anne Morrison provided invaluable help in tracking down and obtaining illustrations and various permissions. Margaret Bain read the manuscript and made myriad judicious comments and recommendations. Hugh Currie shared his awesome proof-reading abilities and attention to detail. My former student Nirmal Dass furnished advice and Internet expertise – nay, wizardry – tracking down the texts of all kinds of arcane articles, as well as email addresses, that I could not otherwise have located. His help was unstinting and indispensable. Mark Peck continuously helped out by sending me articles from hard-to-find journals.

Writer and ornithologist Bridget Stutchbury, the first of my colleagues to read the manuscript, gave me a careful opinion. The three referees who read and commented upon the manuscript for McGill-Queen’s University Press all made useful and insightful comments and suggestions. One of my sons-in-law, Oliver Burgel, explained to me the full significance of consciousness in cuttlefish and octopi and was very helpful in finding images from the German Neolithic. The other, Dr Gary Fausone, explained to me the significance of dopamine in connection with birdsong. Mary Newberry compiled the careful index for the book and did yeoman service in a difficult time frame. Last, but far from least, I consider myself extremely lucky to have had Robert Lewis as my copy editor. He gave the manuscript a meticulous edit and proved a tenacious fact-checker. I envy him his skills. Special thanks, Robert.

Acknowledgments

help with illustrations

xiv

I am grateful to numerous people and institutions for helping me to find and obtain permission for various images. The Metropolitan Museum of Art not only houses an extraordinary collection but also has an unusually generous and enlightened policy of placing all of its images in the public domain! The Hellenic Republic Ministry of Culture and Sports provided many of the Greek images for free. Giannina Bardales at the wonderful Larco Museum in Lima shared her scholarly expertise and helped to identify images. Her kindness and determination in finding what I wanted, even when I did not have the required museum number, are greatly appreciated. At the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Zhanna Il’inichna Etsina went out of her way to help, and Deputy General Director Svetlana Adaxina gave me permission to use one of the museum’s images for free. Spasibo. Sherwood McLernon helped with some images and shared his awesome scanning abilities, which proved invaluable in the few cases where images could not be obtained otherwise. Thanks also to Estelle Bougard, Irmgard Braun, Lee Clare, Jean Clottes, Ian Hodder, Saskia Hucklenbruck, Shumon Tobias Hussain, Stefan Kozlowski, Joseph Maran, Alan Mellaart, Shabnam Moshfegh Nia,

Martin Novak, Martin Oliva, Bogdan Patryliak, David Sabel, Euangelia Stamelou, Arni Stinnissen, Danielle Stordeur, Antero Topp, and Jeany Weisheit. If I have inadvertently overlooked anybody, please forgive me.

Poetry copyrights I am grateful to the publishers for the following permissions. Excerpts from Levels of Life by Julian Barnes, copyright 2013 Julian Barnes. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Canada/Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House Canada Limited for permission. Excerpts from The Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated by Horace Gregory, translation copyright 1958 by Penguin Random House LLC ; copyright renewed 1986 by Patrick Bolton Gregory. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC . All rights reserved. All efforts were made to obtain permission to reproduce the poems cited in this volume. If any have been overlooked, I am happy to include acknowledgments in a later edition.

Acknowledgments

xv

I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven. – Emily Dickinson to Eugenia Hall, 1876, in The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958), vol. 2, 550

PART ONE

SACRED BIRDS

1 Divine Implications: Telltale Evidence In part 1 of this book, I attempt to wrest secrets from both prehistoric and historic art, examining it on the assumption that early modern humans, and their descendants from the Upper Palaeolithic (ca. 48,000– 10,000  BCE ) onward, revered birds, endowed them with supernatural knowledge and power, held them to be sacred because of this power, idolized them as incarnations of gods, and even worshipped some of them, such as eagles, owls, vultures, and condors, as divine beings – in short, gods.1 In this latter case, worship of the birds as gods seems to have come first, preceding worship of anthropomorphic gods with bird features or worship of birds as avatars of gods, both of which were secondary phenomena – developments of the original bird gods, from which they derived their power and magic. Yet some scholars, pooh-poohing folklorist James Frazer and his school, say that there were no animal gods. Near the end of his scrupulous and thorough study of birds in Classical Greece and Rome, where he clearly establishes the ubiquity of birds in Classical Greek and Roman life and thought, Jeremy Mynott unexpectedly writes that “birds were never actually thought of as gods nor became the object of cults in the sense Frazer supposed.”2 This view surprised me. He seems to be in agreement with Emma Aston, who, writing in The Oxford Handbook of Animals in

Sacred BirdS

4

Classical Thought and Life (2014), rejects the idea of animal gods outright: “The animal god, as an idea, is dead.”3 The genesis of this thinking appears to be a complete rejection of James Frazer and his school for, admittedly all too often, seeing primary animal gods and their cults behind all kinds of later references to animals, particularly in Greek drama. Although Frazer and his school frequently overshot the mark, it does not follow that one has to reject the whole notion of animism and humans worshipping animals as gods. To the contrary, as the religious philosopher Wendy Doniger points out, “most mythologies assume that animals, rather than humans, are the image of god.”4 Doniger is right, and many field anthropologists (if not theoretical ones) would agree. As we shall see, many of the archaeologists studying the Neolithic (10,000–ca. 1700 BCE ) assume the existence of bird gods and cults with no anthropomorphic entity behind the birds. The vulture, for example, is widely seen as a bird deity associated with death at a time when death did not have some human form like the Grim Reaper. The human form came later. Aston and Mynott seem to base their rejection of the possibility of bird and other animal gods on Classical Greek and Roman materials starting with Homer (800–700 BCE ), not even taking into account Crete and Mycenaean Greece, as though Classical Greece were the ancient world, whereas a look at the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic traditions, such as at Göbekli Tepe and Çatal Hüyük, to say nothing of in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Peru, leads us straight to the likelihood of bird and other animal deities held to be sacred and having their own cults.5 It is impossible, for example, to dismiss animal gods in Egypt with their own cults, like the bull god, Apis, the crocodile god, Sobek, and even Horus and Nekhbet, who almost certainly began as falcon and vulture gods. These deities were not anthropomorphic gods manifesting themselves as animals; the animals were initially gods, and these gods only gradually became animal-human hybrids.6 Even within the Greek tradition, the progression from animal god to anthropomorphic god with animal features can be seen in gods like the sometimes winged Athena, whose “name and … association with birds (even with the owl) reach far back into the prehistoric past.”7 Are we to believe that this Greek anthropomorphic goddess who is associated with the owl predates the owl as a deity of wisdom and simply attracted the owl as her symbol because she was wise and all-seeing? It is much more likely that an ancient owl deity – whose cult is hinted at as early as 32,000 BCE in the Chauvet Cave and 25,000 BCE at Dolní Věstonice – morphed into

Divine Implications

Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Why should we assume that the owl was chosen to represent Athena rather than assume that Athena developed as the anthropomorphic representation of the wise owl? In the Upper Palaeolithic, alongside carvings representing bird and other animal spirits and carvings of humans like the Palaeolithic Venuses, we see carvings of human-animal hybrids (or theriomorphs), such as the Löwenmensch (38,000 BCE ), a part-lion and part-human figurine found in the Stadel Cave. Theriomorphs also turn up in cave art. In a painting of a hunting scene discovered in 2017 in the cave Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 on the island of Sulawesi – dating from 41,900 BCE ! – the hunters seem to be supernatural hybrid figures, humanlike in form but with animal features, at least several appearing to be bird-headed and to have beaks, which implies belief in the ability to harness the powers of birds and other animals and their spirits/gods.8 These theriomorphs suggest that the tendency to anthropomorphize the supernatural and to conceptualize the gods not just as animal but also as part human and part animal began very early, although the magical power of the images still lay in the animal part of the conception. Indeed, the presence of theriomorphs in an Asian picture of such great age – it predates our oldest known Western animal-human hybrid, the Löwenmensch, by several millenia – implies that fully formed beliefs in the divinity of birds and other animals were brought to Europe and Asia from Africa by early modern humans, a suggestion that we shall see borne out repeatedly. It thus seems that from the appearance of early modern humans in Europe around 38,000 BCE , animal spirits/gods and hybrid human-animal gods coexisted in the human mind, all playing some role in a complex religio-cultural worldview. We still find the same mixture at the beginning of the Neolithic (10,000–9000 BCE ), although at Göbekli Tepe – our oldest known religious site, pre-dating Classical Greece by almost 9,000 years – bird and other animal representations far outnumber anthropomorphic ones. Even though we witness a slow drift over the millennia toward purely anthropomorphic deities, with the animal and hybrid deities eventually relegated to the fringes, there is no reason to take animal gods out of the equation. People in the Western tradition have an antipathy to thinking that we humans are animals and have worshipped and still worship other animals. This Western reluctance to countenance animal gods is a reflection of the strength of the Judeo-Christian assumption that God must look like a human because humans are made in his image. It is interesting that this reluctance does not apply to human worship of inanimate objects; people

5

Sacred BirdS

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seem quite willing to accept the idea that early humans worshipped tree spirits, river gods, corn gods, and the like but not true animal gods, although the evidence for both is widespread. The very idea of animal worship infuriated Moses. In Exodus 32: 20, when he came back with the tablets from Mount Sinai and found his people worshipping an animal, the golden calf, his anger waxed hot, and “he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water.” Moses knew idolatry when he saw it.9 The refusal in the present day to admit human worship of animals ignores the fact that many Indigenous peoples all over the globe did and continue to worship animal gods, and over 1 billion Hindus worship various animals today. I shall not, of course, argue that all birds were held to be actual gods; most sacred birds were simply associated with the gods as avatars, messengers, intermediaries, possessors of divine knowledge, or totems representing the gods, although there is a very thin line between worshipping a god through its animal avatar and worshipping the actual animal itself – a slippery slope. A few birds, however, seem to have been revered as gods from the start. The eagle and the owl appear to have been revered first as deities and only later came to be conceived anthropomorphically as hybrid bird-human deities or as mere emblems or representations of various gods. The raven, vulture, and condor also seem originally to have been seen as gods and then remained so, resisting anthropomorphosis throughout the ages. In actual fact, however, it does not matter for my argument in this book whether birds were worshipped as gods or demigods or gods’ familiars or whether they were objects of cult veneration or simply considered to have divine knowledge and to be messengers of the gods. The association with divinity and the supernatural from earliest times remains paramount, no matter the exact situation. Birds were obviously associated with the magical and in close association with the divine and as a result were revered widely. The tight relationship between birds and humans was not one between equals but one of reverent worship by humans of birds held to be sacred and magical. This reverence was the reason for the longstanding special relationship between humans and birds that we will see betrayed. I made my initial assumption about the sacredness and worship of birds on the basis of certain telltale evidence that implied my assumption and only later gathered the extensive literary and material evidence that confirmed my assumption. Let us examine five of these telltale signs.

The Greek playwright Aristophanes (446–386 BCE ) bears interesting testimony to the central role of birds as gods in prehistoric religion. Part of the jest for Aristophanes lay in having sport with what he considered an absurd belief, even though it could still be widely found among the rural folk of his day. By the fifth century BCE in ancient Greece, the gods themselves, at least to Aristophanes, were a joke and material for satire and belly laughs. They were already merely mythological. In his play The Birds (414 BCE), Aristophanes makes great sport of the gods in his satirical attack on Athenian social and political life. The two jaded Athenian “heroes” approach the birds about founding a new state, Cloudcuckooland, which will be far superior to Athens. As a bait or incentive, they suggest that the birds put the Johnny-come-lately gods and “old has-been Zeus” back in their proper place and re-establish themselves as the original gods that they once were. Pisthetairos, the Athenian, says to the bird leader, Koryphaios, Unhappy Birds, I grieve for you, you who once were kings … Kings of everything. Kings of creation … Kings of king Zeus. More ancient than Kronos. Older than Titans. Older than Earth … The Age of the Birds! Primal lords of creation! Absolute masters of man! But the gods are mere upstarts and usurpers of very recent date.10

Divine Implications

He advises the birds to “reclaim your sceptre from Zeus.”11 What is interesting here for us is not that the downgrading of the birds from gods had already happened well before Aristophanes’s time but that Aristophanes was still aware of the idea that the birds were the original gods for human beings and that the Classical Zeus, Athena, and company appeared much later and already in anthropomorphic form, even though they still flew about and often assumed avian shape. Indeed, in many creation stories, including those of many North and South American Indigenous peoples, the birds existed not only before humankind but also before the very earth, and they often played a role in the creation of the earth. A potent reflection of the original status of birds as sacred and divine is the extremely widespread belief in ornithomancy – augury and divination

7

by birds – the idea being that birds have divine knowledge and can provide it to humans under the right circumstances. This phenomenon is, as Plutarch tells us in “The Cleverness of Animals” (100 CE ), “no small or ignoble division of divination, but a great and very ancient one, which takes its name from birds.”12 The use of birds to glean crucial information is evident in the ancient Sumerian text The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1800 BCE ), the world’s oldest epic, which dates from more than a millennium before Homer and the Old Testament. Utanapishtim, a survivor of the great flood, tells Gilgamesh, the hero-king, the story of the flood. He relates how after being stuck on his boat on a mountain for six days, he released three birds to bring him knowledge of land. He explains that after the dove and then the swallow had flown away and returned without having found a landing place,

Sacred BirdS

I brought out a raven and set it free, The raven went off and saw the ebbing of the waters. It ate, preened, left droppings, did not turn back.13

8

Here, we see an early instance of the use of birds to gain knowledge not otherwise given to humans. It is no accident that the raven, so ubiquitous in world folklore, is the bird able to impart the desired knowledge. We find later versions of the same reliance on birds in the Greek myth of Deucalion and in Genesis with the story of Noah. Deucalion, son of Prometheus and a righteous man, built an ark to escape the great flood released by Zeus to destroy humankind, and as Plutarch tells us, he released a dove, which kept returning to the ark until it flew away for good, which was taken as a sign of fair weather.14 In Genesis 8: 7–12, when the floodwaters recede and Noah is stuck on Mount Ararat, he releases a raven, “which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from the earth.” The raven does not impart any knowledge to Noah, so he releases a dove. On its first flight, the dove finds no land and has to come back. Seven days later, Noah sends the dove forth again, “[a]nd the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.” Seven days later, he sends the dove out again, and it does not come back, so Noah knows that the going is good once again on a dry earth. It is interesting that the positive role here has been transferred from the black raven, later so often associated with evil (think Edgar Allen Poe), to the

harmless dove – a bird destined to play a large role in Christian iconography. Edward Armstrong is undoubtedly right, however, in suggesting that both “the Babylonian and Hebrew Deluge myths may conceal an early Creation myth” where the birds fetch the land rather than merely find it.15 We see a reflection of the ancient belief that birds were actual gods able to control human life in the Rig Veda, a collection of Sanskrit hymns and a sacred text of Hinduism. One of our oldest texts, it dates back to the Late Bronze Age, sometime between 1500 and 1200 BCE , and is addressed to various divine beings. Both hymns 42 and 43 of book 2 of the Rig Veda are addressed to the Kapinjala bird, considered by some to be a partridge and apparently some kind of deity. In hymn 43, the speaker says, Even as a vigorous horse when he comes near the mare, announces to us good fortune, Bird, on every side, proclaim in all directions happy luck, O Bird. When singing here, O Bird. Announce good luck to us, and when thou sittest still think on us with kind thoughts.16 Obviously, good luck and fortune are the bird’s to dispense or withhold as it sees fit. It could, after all, think on the supplicant with unkind thoughts. There is no suggestion that the bird is merely a messenger of some god; nor does the supplicant ask the bird to intercede with some god or to impart knowledge learned from the gods. The bird is asked to think kindly of the petitioner and to provide good fortune – surely the role of a god. The situation is slightly different in hymn 42, where the speaker asks the bird to predict good fortune: O bird, be ominous of happy fortune, from no side may calamity befall thee. … speak here auspicious, bearing joyful tidings. Bring good tidings, bird of happy omen.17 Divine Implications

Although still closely associated with the gods, the bird here is cast in the role of divine messenger, and it is in this role that the bird appears in most later Classical and post-Classical texts. Plutarch explains this well in “The Cleverness of Animals”: “[The birds’] quickness of apprehension

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and their habit of responding to any manifestation … serves as an instrument for the god, who directs their movements, their calls or cries, and their formations which are sometimes contrary, sometimes favouring, as winds are … It is for this reason that Euripides calls birds in general ‘heralds of the gods’; and, in particular, Socrates says that he considers himself a ‘fellow-slave of the swans.’”18 Divination according to the sounds and flight of birds, particularly birds of prey, was widespread in ancient Greece. The two best-known seers were Tiresias and Kalchas, and both were specialists in birds. Each was an oionopolos – a person “observing the flight and cries of birds.”19 The word oionos in Greek refers to birds of omen but especially to birds such as vultures and eagles. The ability to interpret the birds was a gift of the gods; Tiresias received his ability to understand the language of the birds from Athena, and Kalchas received his from Apollo. Homer introduces Kalchas in the first scene of book 1 of The Iliad, written around 800–700 BCE . The Achaians (Greeks) need to find out why the god Apollo is raging against them and making their lives a misery. They realize that they need to consult a seer, not any old seer, but Kalchas, “most excellent by far of augurs,”20 who soon sorts things out. The birds are obviously privy to the knowledge of the gods. In the “Hymn to Hermes,” one of the so-called Homeric hymns, dating from 700–600 BCE , there is a discussion of soothsaying and birds of omen, which voice the will of the gods. Apollo denies Hermes the gift of prophecy and knowledge of the mind of Zeus, and then Apollo tells Hermes how it is to be with men: “He will enjoy my voice, whoever heeds the cry of true omen birds; he will enjoy my voice and I will not deceive him. But whoever trusts in false omen birds and wishes to seek prophecy contrary to my will, to know more than the everliving gods, his journey will be in vain, though I will take his gifts.”21 In The Birds, Aristophanes refers to the birds giving humans early warning of seasonal change and such things. The birds remind the humans that “[w]e mark your seasons off ” and that “Birds are your signs, and all your omens are governed by Birds.”22 Addressing the birds that have come to befoul the Temple of Apollo, which he has to keep clean, Ion, in Euripides’s play of the same name, says, “Loth were I to slaughter such as ye, which bear unto mortals the augury of the Gods.”23 Divination according to the sounds and flight of birds was widespread not only in ancient Greece but in almost all cultures. In the Middle East, for example, as Martin Litchfield West tells us, “Bird omens were

Divine Implications

attended to especially in Assyria, Syria, and Hatti [in central Anatolia]. Hittite sources speak of a diviner called a ‘bird-keeper,’ who apparently kept his own birds for divinatory purposes, and of a ‘bird-watcher’ or ‘bird-operator’ who observed and interpreted movements of birds in great detail … Various texts mention omens drawn from the observation of birds in flight.”24 In ancient Rome, special functionaries or priests existed who were able to observe and decipher the messages of birds better than lay people; hence the auspex – from aus/avis (bird) plus spex, infinitive specere (to observe or behold) – who was literally an observer of birds or bird-watcher and would perform the auspicium or auspices to see whether things were auspicious or favourable. Actions would be recommended only with aves admittant (the birds allowing). A similar religious official was the augur, whose name appears to come from avis plus gar, infinitive garrire (to talk). The auspex or augur could not only read the songs and flight patterns of the birds but even find meaning in the twitching guts, particularly the liver, of dead chickens and in the eating patterns of specially kept sacred chickens tended by an official pullarius. Plutarch tells us that the Romans paid particular attention to the vulture. After deciding to build Rome, Romulus and Remus each chose a favourite place, but they could not decide which was better. Plutarch explains how they chose in his “Romulus” (75 CE ): “Concluding at last to decide the contest by a divination from a flight of birds, and placing themselves apart at some distance, Remus, they say, saw six vultures, and Romulus double that number … Hence it is that the Romans, in their divinations from birds, chiefly regard the vulture, though Herodorus Ponticus relates that Hercules was always very joyful when a vulture appeared to him upon any action … [T]heir rarity and infrequency has raised a strange opinion in some, that they come to us from some other world.”25 It was believed that vultures could predict when and where wars would break out and even who might be victorious.26 If you were a general and noted that the vultures were congregating above your side, it was a good idea to call off the battle. Birds, it seems, were always, and to some degree still are, believed to be possessors of arcane and godly knowledge. That is certainly how they are still viewed by the Bribri (population about 14,000) of Costa Rica.27 They are birds of omen. The Greek word ornis, in fact, can mean not just “bird” but also “bird of omen” or just “omen.” Birds possess the knowledge of the gods, to whose number they once belonged, and the divine connection is paramount.

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Bird-shaped pestle from Papua New Guinea, 6000–2000 BCE. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London.

FIGURE 1.1

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These ancient beliefs in the power of birds persisted for millennia. The medieval Slavs divined according to a forbidden book routinely found on the Index librorum prohibitorum (1564) called Voronograi (The Croaking of Ravens), probably ultimately of Byzantine provenance. Vestiges of these beliefs still exist today. You can probably think of your own examples. My Nova Scotian great-grandmother, an awesome repository of superstitions, used to say, “One crow sorrow, two crows joy, three crows a wedding, four crows a boy, five crows silver, six crows gold, seven crows a secret never to be told.” In Haliburton, Ontario, the flight call of the loon is still thought to presage rain – a nice example combining augury by sound and flight. How do I know such things? “A little bird told me.” Those birds – they know things. Oh, yes, and do not forget to make a wish next time you pull a wishbone. As an example of material evidence suggesting the sacredness of birds, I have chosen two artifacts from radically different places and different times – one from Neolithic New Guinea and one from Bronze Age Greece. The first artifact is a bird-shaped pestle made of stone from Papua New Guinea (fig. 1.1), conservatively dated to 6000–2000 BCE , but Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum, tells us, “We think it’s about 8,000 years old.”28 The handle of the pestle takes the form of a bird with wings, a short tail, and a long, thin neck ending in a stylized head. This delicately carved artifact looks fragile, as though it might easily break under heavy use. Both MacGregor and the museum catalogue draw the inferred conclusion that this pestle was probably used only on ritual occasions.29 I expect that it was used to prepare special concoctions for dances, feasts, and other religious festivals. What is interesting for us is that a pestle connected with ritual is topped with a bird. The choice can hardly be frivolous. This bird is carved from hard stone using only stone tools. When making a ritual object, one naturally seeks to connect it with a deity, a deity’s familiar, or some symbol of a deity, thereby giving it sacred meaning and empowering it with the deity’s magic. A Christian chalice, for example, might feature a dove or a lamb or the crucified body of God’s son. The choice of a bird by our carver strongly suggests that the bird was a revered, sacred animal and endows the pestle with the bird’s magical power. The museum catalogue concludes that the bird’s presence indicates “the persistence of the cultural importance of birds, which were to become persuasive in Pacific myth and cosmology.”30 So our artifact points toward a sacred role for birds.

Bronze Age silver band with a bird figure driving a sun-disc chariot, Cycladic culture, ca. 2500 bce. | Copyright University of Chicago Press. FIGURE 1.2

Terracotta cult (or votive) chariot from Dupljaja with a bird figure as charioteer, 1500–1200 bce. | Copyright Erich Lessing, Art Resource, New York.

FIGURE 1.3

Divine Implications

The second artifact is a lovely fragment of a silver band, or diadem (fig. 1.2), found in a grave at Chalandriani on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea southeast of Athens. This Bronze Age artifact of the Cycladic culture dates from around 2500 BCE . The design punched out on this band includes a horse (best guess) with a collar, followed by a sun disc and an upright figure. It appears to represent the sun being driven across the sky by a charioteer – a widespread myth distantly reflected both in the Old Testament story of Elijah and the fiery chariot31 and in the conflation of Elijah and the sun god in Slavic mythology. The figure that appears to be the driver of the solar disc is described by Arthur Bernard Cook as “a bird-like human figure (?)”;32 by Emily T. Vermeule as a “bird goddess … standing like a bird”;33 and by Walter Burkert as the “figure of a Bird Goddess standing upright but apparently provided with a beak and

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wings.”34 There are no features other than uprightness that suggest the human – male or female. Vermeule and Burkert probably see it as a goddess because of similarities to earlier Neolithic figurines of bird goddesses. In any case, the bird figure here appears to control the very source of all life – the sun – a godlike function if ever there was one. Compare this to the marvellous bird wagon of Dupljaja (fig. 1.3) in modern-day Serbia, a Late Bronze Age cult wagon, where we find the same bird-sun symbolism, typical of the whole of central Europe. The standing bird deity, maybe female judging by the dress, is driving a three-wheeled chariot pulled by three waterbirds, classic symbols of fertility, and is decorated with concentric circles symbolic of the sun, as indeed are the wheels. Again, a cult interpretation seems inescapable.35 I regard the silver band as cultic and having religious significance. Cook, however, writes that we cannot be certain that the band is “solar”; it “may be merely decorative.”36 But even if we suppose that it was just decorative, this function does not change my interpretation. The artist, working around 2500 BCE , obviously chose the subject from religious ideas that were well known to his viewers, just as Renaissance artists chose Christian subjects for so many of their works. In the prehistoric Greek mind, who but a sun god would be driving a horse-drawn sun chariot across the sky? The artist here appears to have thought that the sun god was a bird and represented it as a standing bird. It is also possible that the artist may have considered the bird a symbol of the sun god or the god’s familiar. But what if the figure is meant to be part bird and part human? Perhaps in the artist’s culture the sun god was imagined as a bird with a human torso like many Mesopotamian and Egyptian gods. But perhaps also the artist thought of the figure as a human dressed as a bird. What is depicted may be a priest dressed in avian garb. Even if so, the question remains: why a bird? Priests of pagan cults often dressed as the animal they worshipped. Whether the bird here represents a bird god/goddess or a sun god in fully avian form, a deity in anthropomorphic form with a bird’s head and wings, or a human figure/priest dressed as the sun deity in the costume of his avian familiar, it is clear that the artist’s choice of a bird can scarcely have been simply random or comic, and the key point remains that the artifact reflects a period when birds were sacred and deeply connected with the divine and the celestial. As a last piece of telltale evidence, let me adduce the ancient settlement Göbekli Tepe. At the end of the twentieth century, a stunning site was uncovered in Anatolia (Turkey). This site, Göbekli Tepe, dates from

about 9500 BCE . In the absence of written sources, Göbekli Tepe offers a telling indication not only of the capabilities of Neolithic people but also of their thoughts and beliefs. Among the many extraordinary things about this site, two stand out. First, it was built by hunter-gatherers before the advent of agriculture. Second, it has no utilitarian purpose, seeming rather to represent a place of worship. Before the discovery of this site, few thought that organized worship of the gods preceded domestication, farming, and urban life. The site preserves a lot of carving in stone, the religious intent of which seems inescapable. And what were these people worshipping? As we shall see in chapter 5, birds – vultures, cranes, and ducks – feature large among the many representations of sacred objects carved on monumental pillars at the site. I will argue that Göbekli Tepe represents a stage in a continuum – a spectacular stage, no doubt about it, but hardly the beginning of human worship of animals. For now, suffice it to say that these carvings represent our earliest concrete connection between birds and religion. Aristophanes, augury, artifacts like the pestle and silver band, and ancient settlements like Göbekli Tepe all reflect beliefs that birds were sacred and revered as divine in the Upper Palaeolithic. An obvious question arises here: how far back in the prehistory of early modern humans can we trace the role of the bird as sacred and divine? What evidence of bird worship do we find in the Upper Palaeolithic?

Divine Implications

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2 Animism and the Sacred Let us proceed with our assumption that birds were revered by early modern humans. Where to begin the story? About 6 million years ago in Africa, a bunch of apes – for whatever reason, and many have been proposed – decided to give up living in trees, come down to the savannah, and give walking upright a try. The move away from the arboreal life, although it had its advantages, made them totally earthbound (the beginning of bird envy, no doubt) and slower and more vulnerable than before. Although we know quite a bit about their anatomy, cranial size, and habits, we have almost no idea what they were thinking. One of the ironies of prehistory is that “[m]ore can be known of burials than of life itself.”1 But are we to believe that having long been just another animal among many, they suddenly ceased perceiving themselves as just animals and discovered a full-blown religion with a single creator who ceded them special status? No, we are not. All we can be sure of is that as the brain’s neocortex began to grow exponentially, these evolving ape-people began to try to work out a way of life that eventually included a way of making sense of life and upping their chances of survival among their fellow animals. Instead of proceeding year by year – it would make for a longish book – let us leap ahead 5,965,000 years or so and begin our narrative with Homo sapiens, rather newly arrived in southwestern Europe from Africa via the Middle East, Turkey, and eastern Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic,

Animism and the Sacred

say around 35,000 BCE . These animals, who already knew how to shape stone and fashion blades by knapping flint and obsidian, still lived in small, scattered groups and survived by hunting, fishing, gathering, and scavenging with the help of stone tools and spears. Although they spread to the east much earlier, these humans arrived in southwestern Europe only around 38,000 BCE , just in time to help push the sparse population of Neanderthals over the brink of extinction and to start killing off the megafauna. After the demise of the Neanderthals, Homo sapiens represented the only humans left on earth; everyone who remained was like everyone else.2 Most experts agree that the small but growing population of all of Europe at the time would have been under 10,000 individuals. This figure suggests that the population of southern France and Spain was very small indeed, probably about 5,000 people.3 We do not know a lot about these early modern humans, but we do know that they were the same as us, with the same brains and bodies and the same, although as yet undeveloped, potential to think. But even though we do not know much about what they were thinking, we can make educated guesses from the archaeological and artistic record if we work back from the things believed by later humans like the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Greeks around 3000 BCE and by surviving hunter-gather societies. The ubiquity of birds and the central role that they play in Old World post-Neolithic cultures, such as in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, is mirrored by the role that they play in the world’s Indigenous cultures, most of which have ancient roots. Recorded myths and religious rituals, neither of which came out of nothing, often reflect earlier beliefs – sometimes quite conservatively.4 To deny this history is to lose a valuable resource. So what do we know? In the Upper Palaeolithic, early modern humans – a species of large mammal – lived surrounded by other animals and probably did not see themselves as separate from the nature that surrounded them. But they must have had a developing sense of their own specialness and an awareness of their difference from all other animals. That is why some refer to the species as Homo sapiens sapiens – the species that knows it knows, that thinks about thinking. That they buried their dead, for example, shows that they were already aware of and thinking about their own mortality in a way that no other animal was after the demise of the Neanderthals. Death cults and rituals are based on some sense of an afterlife and of the needs of the body after death, in turn leading to ancestral cults. One of the great benefits of the improved neocortex is being able to worry

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oneself sick about afterlife and the death of loved ones as well as yourself. As Richard Dawkins points out, “We are alone among animals in foreseeing our end.”5 Perhaps William Butler Yeats said it best in his poem “Death” (1929):

Sacred BirdS

Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all.6

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And what other animals were knapping flint, making clever tools and weapons, sewing clothing, carving figurines and flutes, dancing, making music, painting pictures, and developing language? These abilities must have given them some sense of their specialness – a specialness that led to religious beliefs and rituals as well as art. In a sense, these beliefs and practices were the beginning of a slow but steady attempt to move away from the confines of nature. But it is important to understand that awareness of difference and specialness did not – at least at first – mean that these humans felt outside of or above the surrounding nature of which they were an integral part. Early modern humans’ awareness of specialness was not yet accompanied by a sense of privilege or entitlement and by a sense of being intrinsically superior to other animals in the scheme of things. That would come later and gradually as humans drifted toward anthropomorphic gods and “civilizations.” Like many later North American hunter-gatherers, early modern humans recognized that other animals had spirits. They revered and communed with these spirits when seeking such things as a successful hunt, and they offered thanks and homage to the animals that they had slain. All creatures were in the same boat – with no one privileged by the gods. Humans, too, were hunted and eaten by other predators. Early modern humans’ perception of the world seems to have been totally animistic. All of nature, even rocks and trees, was alive – the word for stone or rock in modern Ojibwe, asin, is animate, as is the word for tree, mitig – and in a tight relationship with humans. When we knock on wood today, we no longer think of ourselves as trying to scare off the spirit of the nearby tree that might be listening and take it into its head to queer our hopes or desires, but that is the origin of the gesture and the reason that it does not work so well when one knocks on formica table tops.

Animism and the Sacred

Anima comes from the Indo-European root meaning “to blow” or “to breathe,” and it contains the notions of wind, air, breath, vital life force, and even soul. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines animism as “the attribution of a living soul to plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena.” Animism functions as a religion, a belief in a supernatural controlling power that can be approached, allowing one to make some sense of existence and to have some measure, however tenuous, of control over life. This idea should not be unfamiliar to us because animism survives widely into the present in the world’s Indigenous societies. “The central tenet of indigenous knowledge is connectivity, where all elements may be infused with spirit and where human life is not superior to other elements.”7 It is very frightening to perceive the world as entirely meaningless and random and, worse still, uncontrollable. Hence humans have long attempted to instill some sense into it and to gain some measure of control over nature and the other animals and thus over their own future. There had to be a supernatural or all was meaningless, chaos reigned, and one was entirely on one’s own in a terrifying world of storms, thunder, lightning, and hostile beasts. Our need for cosmos (or order) and our age-old fear of chaos are well reflected in our earliest written texts. For example, in Genesis 1: 1–2, we read, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Then God spends the rest of the chapter, verses 3–31, busily creating form and order and banishing the void. We see here a reflection of the attempt to establish control over raw nature. Chaos will not do. The last thing that early modern humans needed at this stage was what John Lewis has called “the austerity of monotheism.” Insecure beings “want more concrete and immediate help than can be obtained from a remote universal spirit.”8 A single god with a long list of strict admonitions prohibiting practically everything you can think of to help you survive would have been of little help. If, however, long before the appearance of monotheism, the world was perceived as alive and there was a world spirit of which everything was a manifestation, how was one to tap into this spirit and render life more orderly and less random? Well, if thunder were alive and had a spirit – like an eagle, for example – you could try to placate that spirit somehow, perhaps by sacrifice, and to persuade it to do you no harm. Think how meaningful it would be if all natural things had spirits that could be contacted and wooed. We know that early humans revered such things as bogs, fens, springs, caves, cliffs, forests, and rivers, as well as

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the creatures, real and imaginary – be they elves, water sprites, or fairies – that inhabited these places. Revering such things as deities renders them far less dangerous and gets some of their power on your side. The god or spirit behind each species of animal, the spirit of the species, which was often represented by a totem, could protect these animals and punish those who would hurt them or, with the right approach, could be persuaded to sacrifice one of them as food in the hunt. Thus the result was a religion of animal spirits who seem to have crowded out the earliest gods of weather – storm, thunder, lightning, and wind – even though the latter would reappear off and on as Indra in the Rig Veda, Zeus, Jupiter, Yahweh, thunderbirds, and the like.9 Among the animal spirits in this animistic religion were various birds. Many birds were considered sacred and revered. As we shall see, the main sacred birds were either waterbirds such as grebes, loons, ducks, geese, cranes, and ibises, land birds such as crows and ravens, or birds of prey such as vultures, owls, eagles, and falcons. At least some of these bird cults must have come north from Africa with early modern humans. When I say that certain birds were originally revered as deities, this idea may strike a modern Western reader from the Judeo-Christian culture as odd or an exaggeration, but it would seem far from unusual to anyone who practised a polytheistic religion, like, say, Hinduism. Well over 1 billion people in the Hindu world today worship the elephant-headed god Ganesh as well as the cobra, the monkey (Hanuman), and the cow. These beliefs are deadly serious and represent simultaneous worship of many animal gods, although they may also function as manifestations of a single animating spirit. So when I say that many birds were regarded as sacred and worshipped, I mean just that. These bird and other animal spirits have powers beyond simply their response to sympathetic magic and sacrifice. Gods in nature can help us, hinder us, heal us, kill us, and give us arcane knowledge, as in augury. The bird spirit could be both harmful and helpful depending on the circumstances. Thinkers of the Christian era tried to make sense of this ambiguity by sorting the bird spirit’s various manifestations into good and bad categories. Doves, for example, particularly white ones, were considered good. A bird like the cormorant, black with a snakelike neck, was considered evil.10 Ravens, which are also black and smack of death, were generally considered bad and to be feared in the Christian tradition. But that this was not always the case can be seen even in the Old Testament in the story of Elijah’s ravens, found in 1 Kings 17: 1–6. After Elijah the Tishbite tells King Ahab that “there shall not be dew nor rain these years,” God

Animism and the Sacred

tells Elijah to hide himself by the brook Cherith, “[a]nd it shall be, that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have commanded the ravens to feed thee there.” Elijah does as God advises, “[a]nd the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening.” Like many bird deities, the raven originally could be an agent of good or evil – a deity that was not typecast and was at home in many belief systems.11 If everything has a spirit and is capable of encountering you for good or for ill – and spirits can be quite capricious – you need some kind of methodology to counter the caprice. What if the spirit or god in question is a trickster who might randomly decide to help or harm and could easily take umbrage? How do you appease an angry god? How can a poor human win over and get control of such spirits and move to thwart life’s fearfulness, cruelty, and chaos? What form could one’s reverence or worship take in order to propitiate a spirit and harness its power for good rather than evil? What are the rituals to which one could turn to help one cope? One of the best-known rituals, of course, is sacrifice, through which you either appease or nourish the deity. You give the god or spirit something that it wants and that you value. The more highly you value the object of sacrifice, the more likely the spirit is to be won over to your side – hence human sacrifice. Another ritual to which one could turn to influence the course of events and gain some measure of control over nature is sympathetic magic. Take hunting magic, for example. Imagine yourself for a moment in the position of an early hunter-gatherer in hard times, utterly dependent on hunting success for survival; all will die without it. The bison suddenly just disappear, and caribou or reindeer for some reason do not come either, yet you have to eat. What might you do? You have to encourage the animals to come somehow; you cannot just remain passive, subject to nature’s whims, and wait to die. Well, for starters, you could sacrifice to the bison god in an attempt to get on the god’s good side and to show that there is something in it for the god. Then you could don a bison mask or robe and take to the dancing floor, dancing yourself to exhaustion in the bison spirit’s honour. On the morrow, the bison god may well be willing to sacrifice one or more of its own. You could also accompany your sacrifice and your dancing with songs of honour and respect, just as later Neolithic humans did to encourage rain because of their dependence on agriculture. Lastly, you could make promises to treat the dead animal with great reverence after the kill, which might not only do the trick but also give you a better chance of success on the subsequent hunts. Here, we see the beginning of an enduring pattern of persuading

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a god to sacrifice itself for its worshippers – a pattern that should not be unfamiliar to most of us. In addition to sacrifice, song, and dance, along with proper respect, there is yet another way of accessing the power of the various animal spirits, which is of particular interest to us: representation. Dudley Young writes, “Let us agree that man begins his serious quest for control over Nature and himself with representation, with symbols that are actually thought to embody what they stand for.”12 Let us stay with the example of hunting magic, where by sculpting, etching, or painting a realistic or symbolic representation of the animal sought, one can summon forth the spirit in question and perhaps win its favour. A good representation today may lure the animal itself to you tomorrow. Or the proper sacrifice or dance or prayer before an already existing image in a sacred spot may do the job. If the god or spirit is a powerful one, many things other than hunting success can be sought, such as help with love, fertility, health, rain, food, or something else. Again, the god could be approached through its image, which is actually felt to represent and even be the god. This is why the worship of “graven images” is so violently opposed by some later religions. It smacks of idolatry – and with excellent reason. Surviving Palaeolithic representations can be seen as manifestations of the spiritual condition and beliefs of early modern humans. Their art is our best and perhaps our only entrance into their minds. This art represents a response to the supernatural and a way to commune with the gods and win them over. The art of the Upper Palaeolithic reflects the emergence of the religious and aesthetic consciousness of these people and is shocking for its brilliance. Sacrifice, song, dance, and prayer are ephemeral and left few traces in the prehistoric record, but much art endured. Although what has survived and been discovered is only the tip of the iceberg, we are incredibly lucky to have it. There are two basic types of Palaeolithic art: parietal art, which I shall call cave wall art; and portable art. The next two chapters examine the bird in both contexts, beginning with cave art.

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3 Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art The fact that from time immemorial human beings have seen birds not just as fellow animals but also as objects of reverence and worship is reflected in Palaeolithic cave wall art, by which I mean the paintings and etchings or engravings done by early modern humans in southwestern Europe between 35,000 and 10,000 BCE . These early humans, as we know, were not just at one with nature but actually felt themselves to be part of the local fauna, even if a newish and rather thinly spread addition to the area. And the caves that they chose as their art galleries – some 350 of them, although more should show up – were not at all like the caves that they occasionally lived in. The caves used for art were vast, hidden power sites deep underground in the forbidden realm of powerful spirits. They were the churches and cathedrals of the Palaeolithic, ideal spots for vision quests, rituals, and magic. Joseph Campbell calls them “vast underground natural temples.”1 They remind me of geodes – plain and unprepossessing from outside but repositories of stunning beauty inside. We are not sure who the artists were, but many of them were obviously people with real artistic skill, some of whom were probably also shamans. Although it is true that some of this art is casual and perhaps done by children,2 much of it is neither childlike nor naive and is done by people of talent. When you first enter the Hall of Bulls in the Lascaux Cave, naive is not an adjective that springs to mind; masterful, accomplished, stunning,

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yes, but not naive. Not just anyone can draw this way.3 It is abundantly clear, however, that what interested the people who made this art was animals, other animals, not humans. At that time, there were a lot more animals than now, especially big animals, at least some of which were new to people with roots in Africa and the Near East. The overwhelming preponderance of subject matter in cave art is animals, particularly the animals that surrounded the artists, shared their turf and killed or were killed by them, and provided their food and clothing. Here, we have humans simply as one player among many just trying to survive on a level playing field. “The life being worshipped here is animal not human, the religion theriomorphic,” Young writes.4 It would be a long time before humans invented a god that looked just like them and who would cede them dominion over all the other animals. These artists painted animals with a sense of awe and appreciation that can still be felt today. The relatively few depictions of humans on cave walls tend to be crudely drawn or mere stick figures like the Birdman of Lascaux. Drawing themselves as anything other than crude figures must have been a taboo or superstition. It certainly does not carry even a hint of a sense of human superiority. In cave art, it is awe of the surrounding animal world that is palpable, as well as fear, in the sense that we use the word in the expression “fear of the Lord.” It is impossible to know for sure what these paintings and etchings mean and what is behind them. Various scholars have proposed that they reflect hunting magic, fertility rituals, totemism and clans, the illustration of myths, you name it. All theories have been attacked vigorously, but all keep being revisited. It seems to me that all these explanations have potential validity and can be usefully considered when trying to formulate our interpretation of various drawings – such as the Birdman of Lascaux, as we shall see below. Two things seem certain, however. First, cave art smacks of the sacred. Cave art is not public art like rock art or pictographs but an art hidden for initiates. One senses the belief that great power is concealed deep underground that can perhaps be used to one’s advantage. People believed that the birds and other animals were sacred and needed to be addressed. Young points out that although the origins of cave painting may well lie in sympathetic magic, the bulk of them aim far higher – “to dream the dream of cosmic energy, and through art, myth, and ritual, find man’s place.”5 Second, these drawings were not done lightly. This is not art for art’s sake. In cave art, we sense symbolic intent and the presence of the divine

Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art

made manifest. The animals on the walls are often theriomorphic deities – gods in animal form. Young sees cave art as “our earliest (extant) religious statement.”6 Steven Mithin puts it well: “The paintings and carvings had never been mere decoration; nor had they been the inevitable expression of an inherent human creative urge. They had been much more than this – a tool for survival, one as essential as tools of stone, clothes of fur, and the fires that crackled within the caves.”7 Cave art appears to answer an imperative. Campbell points out, “The painted or incised surfaces of the cave walls were so little regarded as fields of aesthetic interest that the animals frequently overlap each other in great tangles.”8 Although the quality is often high – sometimes superb – the intent was clearly not merely aesthetic. Many of the drawings were defaced by such things as spears thrown at them, and many were drawn over repeatedly. We are in the realm of religion and magic here, not just art. It was extraordinarily dangerous even to get into many of these caves. They cannot be entered without trepidation. You hear air rushing as well as water dripping from different heights and making odd sounds in various notes. The Chauvet Cave was discovered in 1994 because three exploring spelunkers passed by a draught of cool air by a ridge and realized that there must be a cave below. Some caves seem to breathe as though alive – the trou soufflant. This impression must have been awe-inspiring in the days when there was little understanding of the dynamics of caves. Imagine what it must have been like for a human who believed in all kinds of spirits, some malignant, to descend into the netherworld under the surface of the earth with only a guttering torch. And spirits were not the only problem. There was always the possibility of meeting a cave bear. Over 190 bear skulls were found in Chauvet alone, even if many of them were brought there, and the floor of Chauvet is pock-marked with bear scrapes. And cave bears were huge – much bigger than our grizzlies and even Kodiaks – with obscenely large jaws. True, they were herbivores, but you would not want to corner one deep in a cave and put it to the test. Caves are not for the timid. The actual descent was often nightmarish.9 I do not know about you, but sadly I am never going to see the auks painted with charcoal in Cosquer about 17,000–16,000 BCE , which are probably great auks like the ones we exterminated in the mid-nineteenth century. The entrance to this cave is through a very narrow tunnel that is some 574 feet (175 metres) long and about 120 feet (37 metres) below the surface of the Mediterranean not far from Marseille. Mine would not

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be the first body of a panicked diver taken out of the tunnel. Even the redoubtable Jean Clottes got stuck the first time that he tried it – at age fifty-eight! – and he had to be helped by professional divers.10 The probable great auk engraved in the Spanish cave of El Pendo about 20,000– 18,000 BCE “is hidden away at the end of a winding fissure” and not for the faint of heart.11 It can be seen only by special permission since it is dangerous to get to. A number of the caves have rooms or chambers well over a kilometre from the entryway, with long, torturous paths and tunnels to reach them. As Young says, “Even today with good torches and no danger of getting lost in the labyrinthine maze of alleys and dead ends, the journey unsettles all but the utterly insensitive.”12 Campbell describes the dark as “cosmic” and says that in such dark “the milleniums drop away.”13 It is thrilling to know that primitive humans descended deep into these cold, dripping, pitch-black caves with guttering torches, carrying stone lamps with animal fat for fuel, quantities of firewood to illuminate and warm the great underground chambers – as attested by remnants of hearths and fireplaces often found in these caves – some food, votive objects for sacrificial purposes, and ochre and charcoal paints, along with wood for scaffolding, to paint things like families of owls on ceilings and walls. Think of how important it must have been for them to take such risks. They must have believed that what they were doing was not only worthwhile but also essential to pleasing the gods and spirits in order to ensure the quality of their lives. Not unexpectedly, the more difficult the access to the drawings and the farther they are from the entrance, the more sacred and magical they tend to be. Most agree that position in the cave suggests relative importance; paintings placed deepest in the cave are more special for the artist and for the viewer, who had to cover an arduous course and experience the whole cave cumulatively to get to them. Birds were not common in cave art. That is probably because this art was mainly an art connected through magic with the hunt for large animals, which held special significance for the artists.14 Michèle Crémades and colleagues, for example, say that there are “moins d’une vingtaine de figurations” of birds on cave walls.15 By comparison to game animals, birds on cave walls are scarce.16 Therefore, when we do find illustrations of birds, as at Chauvet, Trois Frères, and Lascaux, they deserve special attention – the more so because the drawings of birds that we shall examine in these three caves are all to be found in the deepest parts.

chauvet

Etching of an owl in the Chauvet Cave, ca. 30,000 bce. | Courtesy of Jean Clottes.

FIGURE 3.1

Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art

As recently as 1994, a cave was discovered in southern France – the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, named after one of its three discoverers, JeanMarie Chauvet. It was a stunning discovery because it contains the oldest and best preserved Palaeolithic cave art yet found. Dating from about 32,000–30,000 BCE , it is roughly twice as old as the art at Altamira and Lascaux, so old that it dates from a time when Neanderthals had been absent from the scene for only a few thousand years, if that. It is thought that the cave was untouched for over 22,000 years before its discovery. In Chauvet’s various chambers, there are hundreds of paintings of animals, covering nearly 400,000 square feet (37,161 square metres) of cave. One is immediately struck by their excellence and by how similar they are to all other cave paintings, including much later ones like those at Lascaux. We see one remarkably consistent style in use. It is hard to believe that the tradition was so conservative for almost 20,000 years, but it was.17 Many of the subjects are rather unusual in cave art, such as lions, bears, and hyenas as opposed to the usual horses and bovines. There are also a few birds; in the so-called Chapel of the Lioness, for example, below the rear paws of one of the lions, “[t]here is a peculiar, elongated bird with an immense beak,”18 and the gallery also has two bird heads. Getting into the depths of the Chauvet Cave is not easy today and was even harder 32,000 years ago without caving equipment and dependable lighting. One descends precipitously into a total darkness to which the eye never becomes accustomed. One can only imagine the terror that would have ensued if early aspirants had somehow lost their fiery torch. Yet about 32,000 years ago, someone made it to the farthest reaches of the lower depths of the Chauvet Cave, smoothed the surface of a soft limestone wall, and working by firelight with a pointed tool (or possibly a fingernail), made an excellent etching of an owl about 13 inches (33 centimetres) high – white lines incised into the yellow ochre of the wall. It is the oldest known drawing of a bird (fig. 3.1). Although we cannot positively identify it to species, the Chauvet owl has been identified either as a great horned owl, a long-eared owl, or a Eurasian eagle-owl. The Eurasian (or common) scops owl is also a candidate, I should think; it perches upright and shows ear tufts.19 The long-eared owl and Eurasian scops owl are definitely possible, but I favour the Eurasian eagle-owl – rather closely related to the great horned owl – both because this owl is a top predator of impressive size and fierceness, perhaps the

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largest owl in the world, and because it is known to frequent and even to nest in caves in mountainous areas like this one. Indeed, owl bones are often found in limestone caves, and it is highly likely that the Chauvet Cave was inhabited by eagle-owls. One of the main reasons why owls have been worshipped and revered surely has to do with the fact that they have distinguishable faces – more so than most other birds. Many owls have round or oval facial discs accentuating their facial features. Desmond Morris writes, “Like human beings the owl has a wide, rounded head, with a flat face and a pair of large, wide-set, staring eyes. This gives it an unusually human quality that no other bird can match and in ancient times it was sometimes referred to as the human-headed bird.”20 Jeremy Mynott points out that owls are frequently attributed “expressions” and in some bird guides “are distinguished partly by the different human emotions they seem to be revealing.”21 Just as bears achieved cult status all over the world because they resemble humans when they walk on their hind legs, so too are owls revered and even considered wise for their humanlike traits. When an owl stares straight at you – and owls are watchful – you know you are being looked at. Moreover, without shifting its body, the owl can and often does turn its head to look at you, even if you are standing right behind it; they have fixed eyes that do not move side to side. It is always impressive to see an owl turn its head 180 degrees to watch you as you move around the bird. This is something else that makes owls unique and magical and must have added to the sense that the owl was special among birds. Owls see all. It is not surprising, then, that the Chauvet artist chose to draw this owl not only with its back and folded wings facing us but also with its full face twisted at a 180 degree angle to look straight at us over its back – a classic pose to be repeated routinely throughout history and one that underscored the owl’s specialness, as we shall see.22 I make much of this drawing because it can scarcely have been casual. It is one of the only birds in the cave. Can you imagine working your way deep into such a dark, scary cave, finally reaching the holy of holies, and then deciding to doodle a bird just for the hell of it? “Ho hum. What shall I draw today? A bison? Naw, did that yesterday, and everybody’s drawing them. A horse? A bit pedestrian. What about – let me think – I’ve got it: an owl.” It cannot have been like that. If someone had simply wanted to draw, there were far more accessible places to do so than here! This owl must have ritual significance, and although we cannot be sure of its exact meaning, we can take an educated guess.

The terrifying descent into the chamber containing this owl suggests a trip into the powerful spirit domain of the netherworld. Here, we find the owl spirit. One senses the spirit’s power and the belief that it could perhaps be used to one’s advantage. An early modern human would not risk such a trip to draw or visit this owl out of a modern sense of aesthetic satisfaction but to gain help from a powerful spirit. Here, we are in the realm of strong magic. This owl, in a most sacrosanct part of the cave, was a bird deity with power and capabilities, one who could surely be importuned and asked for favours or knowledge of the future. Although it is not certain that clans existed in Upper Palaeolithic times, many scholars, like art historian Max Raphael, think that they did, and Raphael sees a battle of clans as the basis for much of the art.23 It seems likely to me that someone, probably a member of an owl clan, risked the dangers involved to draw an owl in Chauvet because it was a revered bird whose powers could be invoked in times of need and to whom it was advisable to show proper respect at all times. And anyone – a member of the clan or not – who believed that the owl had the power to aid and bring succour could show good faith by hazarding the descent, praying, and leaving an offering.

trois frères

The ground is damp and slimy … [W]e have to be very careful not to slip off the rocky way. It goes up and down, then comes a very narrow passage about ten yards long through which you

Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art

The Trois Frères Cave, so called because it was discovered in 1914 by three brothers, is also to be found in southwestern France. Like Chauvet, it is a marvellous cave chock full of drawings, which Joseph Campbell describes as “Alice’s Wonderland.”24 The drawings date from about 13,000 BCE . This is a highly spiritual cave exuding magical power. As Campbell puts it, “Whatever was done in this cave had as little to do with an urge to self-expression as the activity of the Pope in Rome celebrating a Pontifical Mass.”25 The famous, owl-eyed sorcerer is here, 15 feet (4.5 metres) above all the other engravings, seemingly keeping watch – the only picture with black paint, all the others being engravings. And again, like Chauvet, this cave is very difficult to access. I would give anything, well, almost anything, to see the owls, but I would be terrified. Here is prehistorian Herbert Kühn’s description of his descent into Trois Frères in 1926:

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Engraving of a family of three snowy owls in the Trois Frères Cave, ca. 13,000 BCE. | Copyright Field Museum, Chicago, CSA62002. FIGURE 3.2

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have to creep on all fours. And then again there come great halls and more narrow passages. The soft drop of water can be heard, dripping from the ceiling. There is no other sound and nothing moves … The gallery is large and long and then there comes a very low tunnel. We placed our lamp on the ground and pushed it into the hole. The tunnel is not much broader than my shoulders, nor higher … [W]ith our arms pressed close to our sides we wriggle forward on our stomachs like snakes. The passage, in places, is hardly a foot high, so that you have to lay your face right on the earth. I felt as though I were creeping through a coffin. You cannot lift your head; you cannot breathe … And so, yard by yard, one struggles on: some forty-odd yards in all. Nobody talks. The lamps are inched along … It is terrible to have the roof so close to one’s head. … Will this thing never end? Then, suddenly, we are through … The hall in which we are now standing is gigantic.26

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Among the many engravings in this hall and others, on a rock ledge in the so-called Galerie des Chouettes, Kühn sees an engraving of three snowy owls (fig. 3.2). Since only a handful of the 350 engraved figures are of birds, the owls stand out. So it was that about 18,000 years after our artist etched the owl in Chauvet, another artist made the tortuous descent into the Trois Frères Cave and, again choosing a room in the farthest depths of the inner sanctum, made an etching of a family of snowy owls that appear to be standing

Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art

on open tundra – two adults framing a well-grown chick. This etching is unusual and suggests special significance for at least three reasons: because of its location in the cave; because Palaeolithic cave art features adult animals almost exclusively, young animals almost never being drawn; and because birds are comparatively uncommon in cave art in general.27 Of course, it is pure speculation to imply a motive to an unknown, Palaeolithic artist, but we can guess. Mark Cocker says of these owls that “a common assumption is that the birds, like other animals whose images appear in cave paintings, were eaten during the last ice age,” as they were in the Arctic by Inuit.28 We know this to be true from countless middens. Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy wonder whether these owls were “particularly valued by hunters” and considered a delicacy.29 They may have been, but I reject the implication that their desirability as a food source may account for the drawing. Not that snowy owls, like all the other animals in cave art, were not eaten. But to assume that these three owls were etched where they are because they were desired as food is to reject all the deeper, religious meaning of cave art. And remember that Palaeolithic artists tended not to draw common food items like rabbits and small game. Wheye and Kennedy point out that “Snowy Owl families could represent devoted parental care,”30 and that is how I understand the etching. It seems to me that the little family speaks of domesticity, parenting, and protection of one’s own – all values worthy of emulation by humans. Why else did the artist take the unusual step of including the chick? This etching appears to teach a lesson that humans would do well to note. This is a drawing that one could pray to for one’s family and solicit help from in times of duress – especially if one were a member of an owl clan. Revering a bird species for such a reason is not without analogue; the Maori of New Zealand, for example, appear to have highly revered the now extinct huia “because their foraging behaviour came to represent extreme fidelity, devotion and faithfulness.”31 Owls are magical birds. Perhaps that is why they are probably the most painted and sculpted of all birds. As anyone who has ever taken people out on bird walks knows, finding an owl is a big thing. People are always thrilled and enjoy the owl more than all the other birds, even when you find some rare ones. Of the many birds singled out for worship by humans, owls are among the most ubiquitous and enduring, and right to the present day, they figure large in the religious and folk imagination. Any creature like the owl that was feared and revered and seen as having the power to harm or help us had to be treated with due respect

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and reverence. That is why we find owls in the most sacred parts of the Palaeolithic caves. Owls, it is assumed, know things. Even when drowsing, they notice things. Author Beatrix Potter’s Old Brown was not as torpid and slow as the smart alec Squirrel Nutkin thought or Nutkin would not have ended up in Old Brown’s pocket! And if Julius Caesar had listened up and paid more attention when the owl gave him a warning in the marketplace before his death, he might have escaped assassination.

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And yesterday the bird of night did sit Even at noon-day upon the marketplace, Hooting and shrieking.32

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Casca, the speaker, tells us of this omen at the beginning of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (ca. 1599), and he knows that it is “portentous.” The ancient Romans, like many Indigenous peoples today, believed that hearing an owl presaged death. In Virgil’s The Aeneid (19 BCE ), Dido hears an owl hooting as she prepares to kill herself, and at the end of the story, the death of Turnus is presaged by one of the goddesses of fury in the form of an owl fluttering against his shield.33 Lady Macbeth too believed that owls knew things, calling the owl “the fatal bellman.”34 The association of owls with wisdom and knowledge is an ancient one.35 The Greek goddess Athena, formerly an owl herself, had a little owl as her emblem because of its connection to wisdom. Morris and Cocker go to some pains to establish the enduring dual symbolic roles of the owl as wise, on the one hand, and evil and/or stupid, on the other.36 This duality should not surprise us because, as we know, in the Upper Palaeolithic all animals had the capacities to help or harm us at will. North American Indigenous practices reflect the dual possibilities traditionally assigned to the owl. Many of them associate the owl with death and fear it; others revere it and carve it onto totem poles. As Morris asserts, “it was rare for a North American Indian to know no spirit owl at all.”37 Given the Old Testament view of the owl – “There are sixteen mentions of owls in the Old Testament, most of them unkind”38 – the negative Christian tradition, and the negative medieval tradition, it is nice that today once again the owl is often seen as positive, at least in most Western countries. Owls are never approached neutrally and disinterestedly. People have visceral reactions to them. The owl has always had strong magic in all of

its manifestations, from elf owls to Eurasian eagle-owls. Their presence in Chauvet and Trois Frères is not to be wondered at.

lascaux Lascaux, which Joseph Campbell calls a “Stone Age cathedral of hunting magic,”39 is perhaps the most famous painted cave of all, and like so many others, it is to be found in southwestern France, where it is located in the Dordogne region. Its paintings date from around 17,000–15,000 BCE . Most people, when they think of cave art, have a picture from Lascaux’s famous Hall of Bulls in mind – one of the bulls, horses, or stags. We, however, are interested in Lascaux’s famous Birdman (fig. 3.3). He stands out because humans in general are rare in cave art; of almost 2,000 depictions in Lascaux, this is the only human. The Birdman of Lascaux is unusual in many ways. First, although it is conceivable that the Birdman is meant to stand alone, it seems almost certain that he is part of a dramatic painting that tells some kind of a story involving a man with a bird’s head, a grievously wounded bison, and a bird’s head on top of a pole – the whole painted in black on yellowish

The Birdman of Lascaux, 17,000–15,000 BCE. | Copyright Universal History Archive, Universal Images Group, Bridgeman Images.

FIGURE 3.3

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FIGURE 3.4 (opposite left)

Abbé Henri Breuil’s ca. 1905 sketch of a birdman from the ceiling of the Altamira Cave, 17,000–14,000 BCE. | Copyright Emile Cartailhac and Henri Breuil, La caverne d’Altamira à Santillane près Santander (Espagne) (Monaco: Imprimerie de Monaco, 1906), 58, fig. 43. FIGURE 3.5 (opposite right)

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Dancers in bird masks in the Addaura Cave, ca. 11,000 BCE. | Copyright Bjs, “Palermo-MuseoArcheologico-bjs-11.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

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rock.40 Most of the pictures in Lascaux and other caves are representational rather than narrative. This picture appears to have ritual significance and smacks of the sacred. The narrative in my opinion concerns the man, the bird, and the bison. Second, the Birdman himself has a human body (although the hands resemble a bird’s feet) and a bird head. I do not think that he is meant to be a chimera – a monster or an anthropomorphic hybrid god – but rather a man, most likely a shaman, wearing a mask. In Lascaux one senses that we are dealing with an entirely animistic culture, where the gods are still animals, not humans with animal heads. The Birdman’s head is simply a mask. But remember, as Campbell points out, a mask is “revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mythological being it represents.”41 The wearer is not only a conduit or vehicle of the power of the god; he actually becomes the god. Third, the Birdman is a stickman. He appears as stick figures do in later pictographs – such as Ojibwe and North African rock wall paintings and the rock drawings in Columbia’s Chiribiquete National Park – and in children’s art. The mastery displayed in the realistic depiction of the other animals in the cave makes it clear that the stickman is symbolic. He is not a stickman because the artist could not draw a real likeness. In Palaeolithic art, female figures, the bodies in the various “dying man” pictures, the sorcerer at Trois Frères, and even other birdmen are rendered as full figures. However, I think that drawing humans realistically in spiritual narratives must have been taboo, which is why such stick figures endure right up into Ojibwe rock art of the past few centuries. Many hunter-gatherer societies fear realistic depiction to this day and even fear being photographed – as though the soul is at stake. Fourth, as noted, two birds are represented in this picture – the Birdman’s head and the bird on the pole. I interpret this pole as a shaman’s staff, similar to the many bird-topped shaman staffs we find millennia later among groups such as Alaskan Eskimos, Siberian Yakuts, the Tungusic peoples, and various tribes in Africa and South America. As Robert Ryan points out, “The bird-topped staff is an extremely widespread shamanic emblem,”42 and Mircea Eliade writes that “it is certain that the motif ‘bird perched on a post’ is extremely archaic.”43 The bird on the pole bears some similarity to the birds that often adorned Palaeolithic spearthrowers, or atlatls, perhaps in the hope that the bird god would lend accuracy to the thrower. Like the shaman’s head, however, the bird on our staff is generic and cannot be identified by species. Neither bird is meant to look like a real bird. Yet we know from Chauvet and Trois Frères that

Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art

Palaeolithic artists could render birds in a most lifelike manner. Like the stick figure rendering of the Birdman’s body, these birds are intentionally abstract and meant to be symbolic of the power of birds, not representational. The meaning of the narrative is what is important, not the quality of the depiction. Fifth and last, the Birdman is ithyphallic, sporting a very significant erection. Birdmen with erections are not unknown in Upper Palaeolithic cave art. There are seven birdmen – almost certainly shamans44 – on the great ceiling of the Altamira Cave (17,000–14,000 BCE ), two with evident penises (not of the stick type), at least one of which is definitely erect (fig.  3.4). They appear to be dancing, no mean feat with a sustained erection. In the Addaura Cave in Sicily near Palermo, there is a wall engraving (ca. 11,000 BCE ) of naked men dancing in full bird masks

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FIGURE 3.6 a (opposite left)

Egyptian rock art drawing of an ostrich surrounded by a bowman and a dancer in a bird mask, 4000–3000 bce. | Courtesy of David Sabel, Qubbet el-Hawa Project, University of Bonn, Germany. FIGURE 3.6 b (opposite right)

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Interpretative overlay of the outlines of figure 3.6a for the untrained eye. | Courtesy of David Sabel, Qubbet el-Hawa Project, University of Bonn, Germany.

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(fig. 3.5). Although some either lack penises or have flaccid ones, at least two of them appear to have erections. This engraving has been interpreted variously as erotic dancing, gay sex, a puberty ritual, human sacrifice, and acrobats at play, but the bottom line is that we have men in bird masks with erections. So the Birdman of Lascaux is not unique in having a bird mask and an erection. But the figures in Altamira and Addaura are upright and dancing, and they are not stickmen; nor are they part of a narrative featuring animals. They smack of the erotic, whereas our ithyphallic stickman in Lascaux is anything but erotic and appears to be lying down in a trance. The common bond seems to be the suggestion of power and vitality signified by the erections. The Birdman composite drawing at Lascaux is unquestionably enigmatic, and there has been little agreement as to its meaning,45 but here is what we have to work with: the tableau represents a dramatic narrative connected with shamanism; its logic is symbolic and spiritual and connected with power; and what was important in the artist’s mind was the meaning of the narrative, not the artistic quality. It seems clear that we are dealing with hunting magic here. The Birdman, who appears to be floating in space at a backward angle to underscore the symbolic element, is a shaman wearing a bird mask and calling up a successful future bison hunt. A prayer or sacrifice to this drawing or a dance in front of it would make future success hunting bison more likely. What makes our Birdman tableau so intensely interesting is that the virile stickman, with an erection pointing right at the bison, has a bird on his head and that there is a bird on the nearby pole – birds not bisons. Why is the Birdman not wearing a bison mask? The famous Bison Dancer in the sanctuary at Trois Frères is a man – a small penis is visible – wearing a full bison cape.46 Just as reindeer hunters drape deer hides over their heads to stalk reindeer, so bison hunters wear bison robes. In a rock art picture near Aswan, Egypt, discovered in 2015 by Egyptologists from the University of Bonn and dating from 4000–3000 BCE , we see an ostrich beside a man with raised arms who is presumably wearing an ostrich mask and apparently dancing, and next to them is a hunter armed with a bow (figs 3.6a and 3.6b). This scene is obviously connected with ostrich hunting, as the man with the bow makes clear. But like the Birdman tableau, it is not a simple depiction of an actual hunt, as the presence of the dancing man with the bird mask makes clear. We are dealing with hunting magic here, as seen with a buffalo dance. The dancer (shaman?) is convincing the ostrich spirit to allow a successful hunt. Here, the power of a bird deity is conjured in connection with a bird hunt, just as the bison deity is

Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art

normally conjured for a bison hunt. In our Birdman tableau, however, the spirit conjured for a successful bison hunt is a bird deity, which speaks to the overarching power of birds. That we are confronted with power and magic in the Birdman tableau is further suggested by the location of the painting. It is not in the main part of the cave, which is of relatively easy access, but down a shaft – a deep perpendicular hole, the deepest part of the whole cave – in the darkest and least accessible place, which, as we know, is usually reserved for the most sacred things in Palaeolithic caves. Only after descending the ladder that is now in the shaft, and turning back to look up, is one struck by this painting. The Birdman is in the sanctum sanctorum, the most spiritually significant place in the cave. Gregory Curtis calls the shaft “the most mysterious and moving place in Lascaux.”47 The unusual number of stone tools, artifacts, spear points, and objects of shell jewellery found down the shaft further suggests sanctity since they were almost certainly dropped in as offerings like the coins in a wishing well. It seems to me that this whole tableau is redolent of strong magic. That the power of the bird deity has prevailed is clear from the fact that the bison is dying, whereas the life forces are obviously throbbing in the birdmasked shaman, who is being watched over by the bird deity on the pole in the foreground. The picture is religious in nature and is about power – the spiritual power found in birds. The shaman is symbolically interceding

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Aviform “Placard” sign above a red-ochre, possibly bird-headed man wounded by spears in the Pech Merle Cave, ca. 18,000 BCE. | Copyright Wendel Collection, SW290113, Neanderthal Museum, Mettmann, Germany. FIGURE 3.7

FIGURE 3.8 (opposite)

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The death of Procris on a redfigured vase, 460–430 BCE. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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for his clan and channelling the power of a bird god to help deliver a dangerous adversary – the bison – that is absolutely necessary for food and clothing. The drawing represents the desire of humans to acquire power over random life – the power to influence nature, in this case the bison hunt, with divine help. We see here a reflection of the power of the bird harnessed to the hunting of big game. The key to deciphering this drawing is the power of the bird spirit. Before leaving cave wall bird representations,48 we must consider the aviform signs, sometimes known as “Placard” signs (fig. 3.7), that can be found in a number of French caves, including Placard with seven, Pech Merle with three, Cougnac with eleven, and Cosquer with possibly one. As Paul G. Bahn points out, these signs “are too complex to be caused by independent invention and must be linked.”49 They are sometimes painted and sometimes engraved and appear to date from about 18,000 BCE. They are symbolic rather than representational and carry the sacred punch that we associate with the bird in the Palaeolithic. It cannot, for example, be accidental that this abstract bird form appears right above the powerful, red-ochre Wounded Man drawing in Pech Merle, which shows a man with spears in him, who may even be bird-headed, although it is hard to tell now. There are two equally plausible interpretations of the Wounded Man and bird drawing, each based on a common myth of the soul. The first is that the bird represents a psychopomp, or guide for the soul upon

Birds in Palaeolithic Cave Wall Art

39

Sacred BirdS

death – from Greek psukhe (soul) and pompós (guide, escort). The second interpretation is that we have here a representation of the soul leaving the body in the form of a bird – an ancient and extremely widespread belief.50 According to James Frazer, “Often the soul is conceived as a bird ready to take flight. This conception has probably left traces in most languages, and it lingers as a metaphor in poetry.”51 There is a nice, if later, visual example of the soul as a bird on one of the ends of the famous Cretan Hagia Triada sarcophagus (14,000–13,000 BCE ), where we find a goddess – represented in the side panels as a bird – being driven in a chariot pulled by two griffins with the soul of the deceased hovering above as a bird. In the depiction of the death of Procris on a red-figured vase dating from about 460–430 BCE , we see a soul-bird escaping her body as she is about to expire, having been struck by her husband’s spear when he thought that he was throwing it at an animal (fig. 3.8).52 No matter which interpretation we prefer, the religious function of the bird and its spiritual power are paramount. It would make an interesting study to try to correlate all the “Placard” signs with the subjects around which they cluster.

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4 Birds in Palaeolithic Portable Art Portable art, which includes carvings, figurines, and engravings on ivory, stone, bone, and antler, is found often, but not exclusively, in caves. Bird representations are not uncommon in this art, particularly in the Magdalenian period (15,000–10,000 BCE ). In French Palaeolithic art alone, out of 121 possible bird representations, Dominique Buisson and Geneviève Pinçon accept 81 as certain.1 Of these 81 sure bird representations, 15 (19 per cent) are on cave walls and 67 (81 per cent) are portable. Birds are much more common in portable art everywhere during the Palaeolithic. It is also striking that of the 81 sure French birds, almost half of which are not identifiable to species (47.6 per cent), 37 per cent represent either web-footed birds like ducks, geese, and swans or crane-like waders, and 10 per cent are raptors.2 The popularity of these waterbirds and raptors is also attested throughout Palaeolithic bird art in general. R. Dale Guthrie is right to point out that not all of these representations are masterpieces.3 Often carved in difficult materials, they range from the relatively crude to the superb. The artistic quality of these birds would not, however, have affected their function as amulets, pendants, charms, and ex-votos. At the mention of mammoth-ivory sculpture of the Palaeolithic, one’s first thought is of the numerous figurines of plump females – the so-called Palaeolithic Venuses – found from Spain right across to Lake Baikal in

Flying waterbird found in the Hohle Fels Cave, ca. 28,000 BCE. | Courtesy of Urgeschichtliches Museum Blaubeuren, Germany.

Sacred BirdS

FIGURE 4.1

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eastern Siberia. What is interesting for us, however, is the common association of these Venuses with carvings of birds. Although these early Venuses are never bird-headed, as they often are in the Neolithic, these cult objects are often found in association with bird figurines and pendants. The Palaeolithic Venuses are thought by many to be figures with cult significance, and I believe that the bird figurines generally reflect the same cult status and represent various early forms of bird worship. Perhaps our oldest known bird sculpture, dating from at least 28,000 BCE, is a mammoth-ivory carving found in the Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura mountain range in Germany – a charming representation of a flying waterbird, thought by some (not birders, I suspect) to be a cormorant but almost certainly some kind of duck (fig. 4.1).4 You can even see the feathers carved on the bird’s side. The only representation of a bird that is older is the Chauvet engraved owl and perhaps a partridge/quail engraving on a flint flake, discussed below.

Birds in Palaeolithic Portable Art

Before considering this bird’s significance, it is interesting to note what else was found in the Hohle Fels Cave in the period dating from before or around 30,000 BCE . There is an ivory Löwenmensch similar to, although less exquisite and smaller than, the famous one found in the Stadel Cave, which is known to date from about 38,000 BCE . Significantly, these Löwenmensch figurines are not carvings of humans wearing lion masks but of human figures with lion heads.5 They are monstrous hybrids that could exist only in the human imagination but must have been part of the local belief structure, as we can deduce from the fact that we have two such figurines from two different caves in the Swabian Jura, where one of the earliest settlements of human beings in Europe took place. Our oldest Palaeolithic Venus, possibly a pendant, was unearthed here in 2008 and found to be at least 37,000 years old; fragments of a second one were discovered in 2015. Although it seems slightly younger, dating from about 26,000 BCE , we also have a carved stone phallus measuring nearly 8 inches (20 centimetres), almost certainly associated with some kind of ritual or ceremony concerning procreation and fertility, as are the Palaeolithic Venuses. A stunning find, discussed in chapter 10, was a fivehole flute made from the wing bone of a griffon vulture dating from about 33,000 BCE  – an object suggestive of the dance floor, which is so closely connected to the origins of the sacred. Lastly, dating from about 28,000 BCE, there is a carving of the head of a horse, notably not a major food item for these humans, that is reminiscent of the horses in cave wall art. Clearly, this cave was some kind of sanctuary where religious beliefs were manifested. So, although we can never know the meaning of any Palaeolithic work of art for certain, the fact that the bird carving was found in the same cave as carvings of naked women, a Löwenmensch, a phallus, a horse, and a flute suggests that something more than art classes was taking place in this early cave and that our bird very likely had some kind of cult importance in the belief structure of these early humans. We also have a number of exquisite flying-bird pendants (and three that are not flying) from the incredible Mal’ta site in Siberia northwest of Lake Baikal, excavated by the Russian archaeologist Mikhail Mikhaylovich Gerasimov (fig. 4.2). Most of them were found in connection with hearths, and cult status is nearly certain. Several of them were found in the famous grave of a four-year-old child, the same child who clinched the genetic link between the Mal’ta-Buret’ people and North American Indigenous peoples. These mammoth-ivory flying-bird pendants were originally thought to date from 23,000–19,000 BCE , although more recent radiocarbon dating has suggested a somewhat later Magdalenian date around 15,000 BCE .

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Mammoth-ivory flying-bird pendants found at Mal’ta, ca. 15,000 BCE or older. | Photo by Leonard Kheifets, courtesy of State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.

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FIGURE 4.2

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Most of the Mal’ta bird figurines represent flying waterfowl, probably swans judging by the long necks. Thirteen of them are very similar in shape and are both phallic and snakelike in form, suggesting connections between the bird deity and two other potent symbols of the sacred. In western Europe, echoing Mal’ta, we again find representations of waterfowl: a carving of waterfowl with young at the Mas d’Azil Cave,6 a swan engraved on stone at the Gourdan Cave7 and one at the Teyjat Cave,8 a duck/goose engraved on horn at Gourdan (fig. 4.3) and one at the Caves of Nerja,9 and a duck engraved on stone at the Cave of Espélugues in Lourdes. Michèle Crémades and colleagues illustrate several ducks from the Parapalló and Escabasses Caves and geese from the Labastide and Gourdan Caves.10 Waterbirds, such as grebes, loons, ducks, geese, and swans, were sacred to subsistence-hunting peoples in the Palaeolithic and still revered in the Neolithic and historic periods. Diving birds, like the zhingibis (grebe)

and the maang (loon), still play an important role to this day in Ojibwe trickster stories and creation legends, as well as in the Ojibwe clan system, where we find Crane, Loon, Black Duck, and Goose among the totems.11 You might well ask, why diving birds? But think about it: grebes, loons, and diving ducks are perhaps the only creatures that are at home in the murky depths of lakes and rivers, nest on dry land, and are at home in the sky, being strong migratory fliers. The ability to survive in all three elements makes them obvious candidates for magical status. Equally important, ducks, geese, swans, and cranes are markers of the retreat and reappearance of winter; they are among the last to leave in autumn and the first to arrive in spring. Migration must have been very mysterious and seemed magical, like eclipses and solstices; birds, the sun, and the seasons disappear and then, hopefully, reappear – a source of major anxiety. Wherever did these mysterious beings go? What if they did not reappear? Hence the reverence for waterbirds, the sun, and the spring, along with the need to devise rituals in order to ensure their return. And last but not least, ducks, geese, and swans were a crucial food source for the people who hunted them, collected their eggs, and reaped them in great numbers during the flightless period of the moult. It is natural to revere

Duck/goose engraved on horn found in the Gourdan Cave, 17,000– 10,000 BCE. | Courtesy of Don Hitchcock. FIGURE 4.3

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fellow creatures that you rely on for food. These are birds you would not want to offend lest they abandon you. Perhaps indicative of their power is the touching, late-Neolithic burial at Vedbaek in Denmark of a tiny baby boy next to its young mother, the baby cradled in a whooper swan’s wing. The swan may have been meant to escort the child to the other world. It is interesting to note that this waterfowl cult persisted in various societies throughout the Neolithic until modern times. In Russia and Siberia, Margarita Aleksandrovna Kiriyak tells us, “[b]irds are a widespread subject of rock drawings in the Neolithic art of north Eurasian tribes. Both waterfowl and birds of prey are encountered among the images.”12 There are also many carvings. She provides us with a photograph of a beautifully carved, upright goose made of smoky obsidian that is sitting with its neck stretched up, found at the Neolithic Tytyl’ IV site in western Chukhotka. Joseph Campbell points out that “early Russian missionaries and voyagers in Siberia … found among the tribes numerous images of geese with extended wings.”13 Steven Mithin reminds us that, “[a]mong the nineteenth-century Saami people of northern Europe, swans and waterfowl were the messengers of the gods.”14 The Canadian High Arctic was peopled by immigrants from Siberia, so we are not surprised to find Palaeo-Eskimo carvings of birds, such as waterbirds, cranes, and falcons, like the carvings of the Dorset (Tuniit) culture (500 BCE –ca. 1200 CE ), which long preceded the later Inuit culture.15 Coastal-dwelling peoples who made their living from the sea revered the seabirds, which were so crucial to their existence. Newfoundland’s Beothuks, for example, appear to have had such “birds at the centre of their belief system.”16 Beothuks were buried in seaside graves with the feet of actual birds – guillemots – attached to their leggings and with various carved and engraved ivory and bone pendants, of which over 400 have been found,17 all plausibly identified as representing seabirds’ feet, seabirds’ primary wing feathers, or the tails of Arctic terns in flight. Since one equips the dead with precisely those items needed for the journey to the afterlife, which in this case entailed flight over water to an island paradise, these birds were doubtless crucial helpers serving in their classic role as psychopomps. In his Folklore of Birds (1958), Edward Armstrong devotes three whole chapters to the ubiquitous cult of waterfowl – geese, swans, and loons in particular – that survives in later, worldwide folklore. This was a tenacious tradition!18 Among the long-legged waders, cranes are well attested in Palaeolithic art. Jean-Jacques Cleyet-Merle and Stéphane Madelaine, after careful study of a Magdalenian engraving on a perforated stick of reindeer antler

from Laugerie-Basse in the Dordogne region, convincingly established that the engraved wader was a common crane by cleverly fitting two separate pieces back together.19 They say that there is a striking similarity between this bird and the two engraved on the piece of schist found in the Labastide Cave, which they take to be cranes as well.20 Crémades and colleagues illustrate a crane-like wader found in the Gargas Cave in the Pyrenees and add three recently discovered engraved cranes, one on a spear point, from Magdalenian sites in the Pyrenees.21 In the Belvis Cave, there is an engraving on bone of a very odd, horizontal wading bird – longnecked like a crane or heron.22 In the Morín Cave, there is an engraving on a rib fragment of what appear to be five overlapping bird heads; although Don Hitchcock thinks that they are ducks or swans, I think that they look more like large, long-billed waders – cranes or herons.23 In any case, this edible, upright, dancing bird, which marked off the seasons by its migration, was obviously very special for early modern humans. It is not surprising, then, that among the special dances performed in ancient Greek sanctuaries was the Crane Dance, performed “with tortuous, labyrinthian movements.”24 After the owls in the Chauvet and Trois Fréres Caves, it will come as no surprise that owls figure in Palaeolithic portable art as well. We have at least four very old owl representations dating from about 25,000 BCE at the sites of Dolní Věstonice and Pavlov in Moravia in the Czech Republic. Two are owl pendants (fig. 4.4), which were probably worn either for clan reasons or as amulets offering protection by a deity, just as one might wear a Saint Christopher medal or a cross around one’s neck today or hang a Magnetic Mary in the car. The other two are baked-clay figurines of owls (fig. 4.5), neither of which are earless, making them perhaps Eurasian eagle-owls.25 There is also an Upper Palaeolithic owl carved from an animal tooth that was found in the Mas d’Azil Cave, which is quite similar to the Dolní Věstonice figurines.26 Lastly, we have a handle of some sort with a carved face of an owl found at the Russian site of Avdeevo dating from about 19,000–18,000 BCE .27 Waterbirds and owls do not exhaust our list of birds in Palaeolithic portable art. In Mezin, a Magdalenian settlement near Kiev, six little mammoth-ivory figurines of birds were found dating from about 15,000– 13,000 BCE . They are beautifully and delicately carved with fat bodies and flat tails and incised with delicate patterns of lines presenting our earliest known example of the meander pattern (fig. 4.6). Some are flying birds and some are not, and none of them seem to be waterfowl. They appear to represent plump, edible birds, and judging by their fat bodies

Owl pendant found at Pavlov, ca. 25,000 BCE. | Photo by Martin Frouz, courtesy of Martin Novák, Institute of Archaeology, Czech Academy of Science, Brno, Czech Republic.

FIGURE 4.4

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Baked-clay figurine of an owl ( front, profile, back, and top) found at Dolní Věstonice, ca. 25,000 BCE. | Courtesy of Martin Oliva, copyright Anthropos Studies 38, n.s., no. 30 (2015), Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic.

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FIGURE 4.5

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and longish, flat tails, my best guess is that they represent some kind of a grouse, partridge, or ptarmigan. They are linked to the goddess motif by the etched pubic triangles – vulva symbols – on their backs.28 Ptarmigan will continue to be an important theme in art when we move into the Neolithic. In far northeastern Russia in Chukhotka, among the many small stone bird carvings, we find a number of ptarmigan. It is noteworthy that grouse and ptarmigan were also revered in western Europe. There is a detailed carving of a grouse, with the head missing, on the end of an atlatl, or spear-thrower, made of antler that was found in Mas d’Azil. The Gönnersdorf Cave, an Upper Palaeolithic site on the Middle Rhine with over 150 engravings of animals on slate, also has a few lifelike bird engravings from around 15,000 BCE , one of which is a ptarmigan. A bird that Armstrong, probably rightly, takes to be a ptarmigan engraved on a reindeer antler was found in the Isturitz Cave.29 There is an engraving on a limestone pebble from Laugerie-Basse that is either a corvid – scavenging bird – or a capercaillie.30

There is a bird engraved using the sunken relief method on a flint flake found at the open-air site Cantalouette II in the Dordogne region. It is interesting because of the sunken relief technique and its Aurignacian origins (33,000–29,000 BCE ). It is one of our oldest pieces of Palaeolithic bird art – along with the Hohle Fels waterbird and the Chauvet owl – and it may be a grey partridge or a common quail.31 The grouse/ptarmigan can hardly have been a fortuitous choice for carvers; to assume that it is just a pretty design is an anachronistic assumption. Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic artists did not work that way; this crucial winter food source was probably chosen for clan and totem reasons or because the carvings were seen as fetishes and carried with one to please and appease the grouse spirit. These carvings were not baubles. There seem to be few Palaeolithic representations of birds other than waterbirds, birds of prey, namely owls, and birds of the grouse type in our early portable art. There is a bird pendant carved from a cave bear’s canine tooth that was found in the Solutrean layer (20,000–15,000 BCE ) of the Buxu Cave in Spain. It is thought to be some kind of crake or other member of the Rallidae family, although that is doubtful.32 There are a few bustards, like the two from the Gourdan Cave,33 one from LaugerieBasse,34 and one from Abri de la Madeleine,35 although they can be hard to tell from geese. There is a bird, together with a bison, engraved on sandstone in the Cave of Puy-de-Lacan,36 and it is usually thought to be

Mammoth-ivory bird figurine found at Mezin, 15,000–13,000 BCE. | Copyright National Museum of the History of Ukraine, Kiev. FIGURE 4.6

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a long-legged duck or goose, although it is much more likely a bustard.37 Apart from these edible birds, there are hardly any others.38 The great tradition of Palaeolithic art came to an end around 9500 BCE after at least 25,000 years, “perhaps the greatest art tradition humankind has ever known.”39 The uniformity of subjects and techniques over so long a period is astounding. What we see in these bird drawings, figurines, pendants, and engravings is a 20,000-year continuum of representations of various birds that demonstrates the persistence of the bird as cult object and sacred amulet throughout the Palaeolithic. It is not accidental that birds, snakes, Venuses, and penises turn up so regularly in this animistic culture, where humans need all the help that they can get to survive. It will not be surprising if earlier finds from the Middle Palaeolithic (298,000–48,000 BCE ) turn up, and if they do, we can bet that among them there will be birds. As we prepare with regret to leave the Palaeolithic and enter the PrePottery Neolithic (10,000–6500 BCE ), what can we conclude about the role of birds in human eyes up to this time? Any thought that birds were just pretty or edible creatures that could serve as the subjects of objets d’art must be banished. As Armstrong puts it, “to man in the Old Stone Age [or Palaeolithic] birds were not merely acceptable as food but symbolized mysterious powers which pervaded the wilderness in which he hungered, hunted and wove strange dreams.”40 Birds, in various forms, from diving birds to owls and grouse, were sacred and thought to have spirits whose help was sought for coping with life and death. Birds were carved from mammoth ivory, bone, antler, and stone, depicted on atlatls, worn on the body as pendants, buried in the grave with children, carried as fetishes, or simply kept as cult representations deep in caves, where they were painted or etched on the walls of inner sanctum rooms in positions of honour that reflected the degree of sacredness imputed to these feathered deities. From our earliest Upper Palaeolithic finds at Hohle Fels and Chauvet to our youngest ones at Lascaux and Mas d’Azil, the importance of birds for humans remains paramount.

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5 Birds in Neolithic Art: Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, and Europe We know that the transition from hunting and gathering to domestication and farming was a gradual affair as game diminished and life became more sedentary at the end of the Upper Palaeolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic. Gathering slowly became more important and led to farming and the domestication of both grains and animals, but hunting long remained an important food source for Neolithic villages. This slow transition can clearly be seen in Mesopotamia and all over the Near East. Just as Palaeolithic hunting and gathering practices continued and underwent only a gradual metamorphosis, the social and religious practices that grew up around hunting also, naturally, remained in force and only slowly underwent change and development. There was no sudden rejection of Palaeolithic worship of animal spirits. Indeed, whereas in some areas the animal deities slowly became anthropomorphic, in others the animal gods held their own as animals. The animal gods of the Palaeolithic found a way to endure.1 We find a marked increase in bird representation in Neolithic art as compared to Upper Palaeolithic art – particularly waterbirds, cranes, and various raptors, which, as we have seen, all appear in the art of the Upper Palaeolithic. This increase is a reflection of the fact that more data have

Halaf period potsherd with an ostrich found at Tell Brak, 5600– 5000 BCE. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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FIGURE 5.1

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been preserved and discovered on the approach to historical times. Bird deities hold their own, but now the case for their divinity becomes more obvious. This is not to say, of course, that all reflections of birds in the art of the period have ritual significance. Some, such as the birds painted on the lovely, glazed pottery of the late-Neolithic Halaf period (6500–5500 BCE), may be purely decorative (fig. 5.1). We cannot be sure. But there is abundant evidence of the sacred status of birds throughout the Neolithic, and we shall concentrate on this evidence. We cannot look at everything – the Neolithic offers an embarrassment of riches – but we shall begin with a look at six sites of southwestern Asia located in Anatolia (Turkey), Iraq, and Syria and then look at the picture in Neolithic Europe (ca. 7000–1700 BCE ).

Göbekli tepe

Birds in Neolithic Art

Göbekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill) is an astounding, very early Neolithic site in southeastern Turkey that dates from about 9600 BCE , predating all of our Neolithic sites in Europe. It is an artificially constructed mound on a hilltop visible from afar – a striking landmark. As the excavation is ongoing, new things keep turning up. The site shows few signs of having been inhabited and appears to have been entirely religious in nature – a centre of worship where people gathered who held a shared set of beliefs. Remember that the painted cave “cathedrals” in France and Spain were not lived in either but kept separate for ritual purposes. Most of the buildings were sanctuaries. The presence of human bones in the fill suggests burial rituals. The site is important for us because the richness of its animal depictions – stone figurines, sculptures, and engravings on limestone pillars – illustrates “the prominent role animals played in the spiritual world of PPN [Pre-Pottery Neolithic] human groups frequenting the site.”2 This art reflects the worldview of hunter-gatherers moving toward sedentary life before the domestication of animals and prior to the discovery of agriculture – settlement before agriculture! The site was built by huntergatherers, formerly thought incapable of such sustained and difficult construction, and the religion that it reflects is not some new religion produced by people about to become agriculturalists but a direct continuation and brilliant reflection of the religious views of the Upper Palaeolithic. One cannot agree with Charles Mann, who titles his 2011 article on Göbekli Tepe in National Geographic “The Birth of Religion” and writes of the animals on the stone pillars as “emissaries from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.”3 Just as the brilliant cave art at Chauvet, our oldest cave art, can scarcely represent the beginning of a tradition, so the accomplished sculptural display at Göbekli Tepe, our oldest monumental sculpture, can hardly reflect the beginning of any spiritual tradition. Among the animal representations, we find at least five large birds, some of which are cranes, probably the common crane, which, as we know, was well attested in Palaeolithic portable art (fig. 5.2). Part of the crane’s magical appeal may stem from its upright stance, as is the case with those shaggy, standing humans – bears. As well as being seasonal messengers, these cranes may also have been village or clan protectors, totems, and/or connected with hunting magic.4 There could even be a connection with fertility, as in the case of the stork right to this day. Cranes are still

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FIGURE 5.2 (opposite)

Two cranes carved on a stone pillar at Göbekli Tepe, ca. 9600 BCE. | Copyright Irmgard Wagner, Göbekli Tepe Project, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin, Germany. Carved stone figurine of a vulture head found at Göbekli Tepe in filling debris, ca. 9600 BCE. | Copyright Vincent J. Musi, National Geographic Creative.

FIGURE 5.3

Birds in Neolithic Art

worshipped in parts of India, and the ajijaak (crane) survives as a totem of the Ojibwe people. The crane’s connection with the sacred is longstanding. Ostriches are also depicted, as are ducks parading around the base of a pillar, but possibly only for their value as food items and as part of the hunt, although it is usually an error to assume that any of this artistic subject matter was randomly chosen simply for aesthetic purposes. Another bird deeply connected with the spiritual at Göbekli Tepe is the vulture. One of the most exquisite carved stone figurines found at Göbekli is that of a vulture head (fig. 5.3). Vultures also appear on the carved bas-reliefs on the T-shaped limestone pillars. The large, T-shaped pillars – of which there are several hundred, some weighing up to 10 tons and standing as high as 20 feet (6 metres) – may represent “stone statues of human-like beings” with some higher, religious symbolic meaning.5 It seems that we might have here an early example of humans conceiving of the gods as anthropomorphic. The animal reliefs, however, with which many of the pillars are richly decorated, appear to represent “part of a mythological world which we have already encountered in cave painting.”6 One senses the development of a continuum and an established mythology. On one of the T-shaped pillars, in the middle panel, we find a vulture in profile with its wings held open, one of which appears to be cradling an oval-shaped object that could well represent a human head (fig. 5.4). Three other vultures – although the top two could possibly be cranes – appear beside it.7 At the bottom of the pillar, which is partly damaged,

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Carved T-shaped pillar with vultures at Göbekli Tepe, ca. 9600 BCE. | Copyright Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe Project, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin, Germany.

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FIGURE 5.4

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we find another vulture8 beside a headless male with a small, but erect phallus, similar to some seen in ithyphallic figurines. Was this someone recently put to death showing a morbid erection,9 or was it an illustration of the power to overcome death through the agency of the vulture? One cannot be sure, but the connection between the vulture and death seems certain. It is even possible that the head of the headless human is the

object cradled by the vulture – a motif that we will find echoed at Nevali Çori, discussed below. In 2010 a fragment of a pillar was unearthed that shows a standing vulture with outstretched wings beside a hyena.10 Is it accidental that these two carrion eaters and “defleshers” are shown together? Without the rest of the pillar, we cannot be sure – although we can surmise that their association with death links them. Why the prominence of the vulture? We know that early modern humans, like the Neanderthals before them, were concerned about death and the treatment of the human body after death. Even the very early people connected with the Rising Star Cave in South Africa appear to have placed bodies in the cave after death. If you were an early modern human, what would you have observed about nature’s way of disposing of dead bodies? You would have seen that the primary agents of defleshing were raptors, particularly the carrion eaters like the vulture. You would have observed vultures mysteriously appear, deflesh a body, and then fly off into the sky with the flesh inside them and disappear. Many creation myths dealing with being and nonbeing feature gods who live somewhere up in the sky. Stories about returning to the sky after life on earth are human commonplaces. The association of vultures with death, I believe, is the underlying rationale for the cult of vultures that we find in early southwestern Asia. The vulture was directly identified with the cult of the dead and with funeral ritual and the return of the body whence it came. To assure proper disposal of the body, one counted on vultures to clean the body and ferry it to the other world. Referring to the ancient Iranians and Zoroastrians, Thom van Dooren tells us that “the dead were taken to barren places in the hills to be exposed” to vultures.11 This practice was widespread among North American Indigenous peoples in the form of tree burials and is still carried on in parts of India, Tibet, and Africa. We should expect to find vultures at other Neolithic sites.

Zawi chemi Shanidar Village

Birds in Neolithic Art

Evidence of the early connection between vultures and sacred ritual was uncovered by archaeologists Ralph and Rose Solecki during their work in the early second half of the twentieth century on the village site at Zawi Chemi Shanidar (Field Close to Shanidar) in Kurdistan in modern-day Iraq, some 250 miles (400 kilometres) north of Baghdad, a very old site dating from 10,000–9000 BCE . As at Göbekli Tepe, at Shanidar we are dealing with humans on the very threshold of the Neolithic.

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In their excavations, the Soleckis unearthed a “very specialized collection” of at least fifteen goat/sheep skulls and the bones of at least seventeen birds, 90 per cent of which are wing bones that were “still in articulation when discarded.” The bones come mainly from vultures and eagles – four bearded vultures and one griffon vulture along with seven white-tailed eagles and four smaller eagles, also carrion eaters – “suggesting some sort of special ritual” and certainly not the remains of a feast.12 Indeed, under microscopic examination, the wings appear to have been carefully sliced from the bodies with a flint knife.13 It was Rose Solecki’s feeling that the wings were probably used as part of ritual costumes, perhaps for dancing, and in this context she mentions the human figure dressed in a vulture skin found at Çatal Hüyük, discussed below, as “just such a ritual scene, i.e., a human figure dressed in a vulture costume partaking in what seems to be a burial rite.”14 She concludes, “The Zawi Chemi people must have endowed these great raptorial birds with special powers, and the faunal remains we have described for the site must represent ritual paraphernalia.”15 If she had known at the time of writing about the vulture finds at Göbekli Tepe, she would doubtless have expanded her argument.

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nemrik

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At Nemrik, another site of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (10,000–6500 BCE), again in northern Iraq, we find a settlement with an actual graveyard. The earliest find dates from about 9600 BCE .16 Among the objects found there, which date from about 8000–6500 BCE , are “sixteen excellent stone sculptures representing bird heads, Felidae [or cats] and human beings … The figures are a sign of an original local cult.”17 Roger Matthews refers to the bird heads as “the most exquisite” of the sculptures.18 What interests us, of course, is that several of the bird heads are vultures (figs 5.5a and 5.5b) and very similar to the Göbekli Tepe vulture-head figurine. We can guess what the “local cult” was, even if it was not entirely “original.” Matthews writes, “These sculptures, perhaps to be interpreted as domestic deities, continue the tradition of ritual involving large birds attested in previous centuries at Zawi Chemi Shanidar.”19 They also echo the vulture theme at Göbekli and, as we shall see, our next three sites. We have an unusual demonstration of the value of these sculptures furnished by a striking find at Nemrik House 2A , which had burned down. Under the collapsed roof was a badly burned skeleton that appears to have been clutching a burned vulture statuette. In the opinion of

Stefan Kozlowski, the chief excavator of the project, the burned human was trying to save the vulture statuette from the burning house when the roof suddenly collapsed. This provides a telling example of the degree to which bird and other animal gods were revered by Neolithic peoples. As Kozlowski puts it, “Can you imagine the value of this sacrifice?”20

FIGURES 5.5 a and b

Vulture heads sculpted in stone at Nemrik, ca. 8000 bce. | Courtesy of Stefan Kozlowski and Institute of Archaeology, Warsaw University, Poland.

nevali Çori

Birds in Neolithic Art

Birds, particularly vultures, figure large in the cultural and spiritual legacy of Nevali Çori, another Pre-Pottery Neolithic site, this time a village settlement in southeastern Anatolia in Turkey, near Göbekli Tepe, now under water because of a dam on the Euphrates. The site dates from 8500– 8000 BCE and features monumental art like Göbekli that appears to have ritual value.21 Buried in the podium of what Harald Hauptmann calls a “cult building,” and perhaps once fastened to a wall, was a large limestone sculpture of a “vulture-like” bird 1.6 feet (0.5 metres) long.22 Although it is rather primitive and the wing is broken, it may have been an effort to sculpt a bird in flight. One of the limestone statuettes, referred to as the Bird Man, appears to be a hybrid creature in “the shape of a bird with the head of a man with strongly stylized features.”23 Viewed from the side, it appears to be a

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standing bird with long wings. It has been speculated that this represents a “human dressed as a bird, or a bird with a human head in its mouth.”24 Is this an anthropomorphic rendering of a bird god or a representation of the connection between birds, human heads, and death? There is a small limestone torso with the head and arms broken off with what could be a beak at the top end. In Hauptmann’s opinion, this is a “nose-like projection that would look better completed with a bird’s head than with that of a human.”25 This creature, too, may have been some kind of a hybrid with the attributes of man and bird. There are several pillar fragments – thought to be like totem poles – with composite motifs that once belonged to free-standing sculptures. What is probably the middle fragment of one limestone pillar “displays a large, presumably female head apparently in the clutches of a bird’s talons.”26 It is hard to tell because the bird’s head is missing, but according to Klaus Schmidt, the bird is probably a vulture, which the body does suggest.27 If so, this motif echoes the vulture and round object (head?) relief from Göbekli Tepe. Perhaps the most interesting pillar fragment for us is actually reconstructed from a number of smaller fragments that fit together like a totem pole with human heads and birds (figs 5.6a and 5.6b). The bottom fragment shows two vultures seated facing each other. Ian Hodder and Lynn Meskell describe the four upper fragments as “a bird perche[d] on two human heads whose hair is detailed in a cross-hatched pattern,”28 and they concur with Schmidt and Hauptmann that the bird appears to be grasping one of the human heads with its feet. The falling hair, perhaps bound in hairnets, and the female sexual attributes suggest that the heads belong to women, who are back to back. Schmidt has given us a tentative reconstruction of what this “totem pole” once may have looked like. Once again, we have a vulture with a human head in its claws, and the two basal vultures supporting the pole speak of life and death and of the link between them. Lastly, some of the stone figurines found at Nevali Çori were theriomorphic, and “vultures were represented”29 among them, which echoes what we found at Göbekli Tepe and Nemrik. The art found at Nevali Çori once again involves birds – specifically vultures – associated with human heads, which smacks of death rituals and ancestor cults and of people flying up as birds after death or being carried to another realm by birds in their role as psychopomps. Vultures continue to play a key role with cult value.

Fragment of a totem pole with a bird perched on a human head at Nevali Çori, 8500–8000 bce. | Copyright Salwa Hamza-Hauptmann.

FIGURE 5.6 a

Klaus Schmidt’s reconstruction of the totem pole with a bird perched on a human head at Nevali Çori, 2010. | Copyright Klaus Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe – The Stone Age Sanctuaries: New Results of Ongoing Excavations with a Special Focus on Sculptures and High Reliefs,” Documenta Praehistorica 37 (2010): 248.

FIGURE 5.6 b

Jerf el ahmar

Birds in Neolithic Art

Jerf el Ahmar is an early Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in northern Syria on the Euphrates that, like Nevali Çori, is now under water because of a dam. Dating from 9500–8700 BCE , it is a hunter-gatherer site in transition to agriculture. Scholars have done analysis of the faunal remains of a number of similar sites, but the study of this one by Lionel Gourichon is particularly interesting. Gourichon found over 2,000 bird specimens, most of which were birds used for food, like geese, partridges, and cranes. Among them, however, were griffon vultures. From the analysis of the bones, Gourichon noticed that the griffon vulture, unlike the geese and others, “appears to have been exploited only for its feet and feathers, as well as bone as a raw material.”30 It was clear that the vulture had not been exploited for food: “The rarity of the pectoral elements and the proximal parts of the wings of the vultures, together with the butchering pattern, suggests that the carcasses were processed exclusively for the removal of

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skin, feathers and claws, and possibly used for some ritual purposes.”31 This community obviously had some special interest in vultures, similar to the situation at Zawi Chemi Shanidar. Once again, an educated guess is that the vulture parts were used by priests or shamans for costumes worn in rituals that were connected with the dead and that expedited the journey of the deceased to another world after death. I suspect that similar analysis of faunal remains at some other sites would show the same thing. Of great interest for us at Jerf el Ahmar is a flat potsherd from a vase made of chlorite – a greenish stone similar to basalt – dating from about 9300 BCE on which is engraved a vulture with spread wings above what appear to be a fox, two snakes, and an arrow, also potent Neolithic sacred symbols, the suggestion being that this is some kind of pictograph (fig. 5.7). What is surprising, however, is that the vulture seems to have the body and legs of a man, although it has a vulture’s wings and head. One cannot help but suspect that we see here a human dressed in a full vulture costume for ritual purpose. Remarkably, there is a bright-red wall painting in the Romanian cave Gaura Chindiei II that is rather similar and dates from around the same early Neolithic time of 10,000–8000 BCE . This could argue for a vulture cult existing in Europe at the same time. These two drawings are echoed in the vulture drawings at Çatal Hüyük, discussed below, although the latter more often show bird legs with claws. Interestingly, there is a second grooved stone, found side by side on the same floor with the engraved stone described above, that has the same basic pictograph, except that the vulture, fox, and snakes are more abstract and stylized and there are additional lines. Does the existence of two such stones suggest a meaningful, symbolic narrative, perhaps of some spiritual import? Among the stone figurines found at Jerf el Ahmar were two depicting birds of prey. Danielle Stordeur thinks that whereas “one would seem to be an eagle as seen in profile, the other in chalk could be an owl when viewed from the front.”32 I think that the one thought to be an eagle may be a vulture (fig. 5.8), especially when compared with the other finds above and given the regional vulture cult. Lastly, one of two somewhat damaged limestone pillars, or stelae, about 3 feet (1 metre) high appears to have a carving of some kind of raptor, which Stordeur, I think correctly, takes to be a vulture and calls the Vulture Stela. It was found in an undivided communal building “richly adorned with engraved flagstones and sculpted stelae.” The presence of so much complex decoration “suggests a ceremonial usage for this type

Engraving of a vulture on a grooved stone potsherd from a chlorite vase found at Jerf el Ahmar, ca. 9300 BCE. | Copyright D. Stordeur, Mission Permanente MPK du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, France. FIGURE 5.7

FIGURE 5.8 A little stone bird (vulture?) figurine found at Jerf el Ahmar, 9300–8700 BCE. | Copyright D. Stordeur, Mission Permanente MPK du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, France.

of building.”33 Again, we have the suggestion of ceremonies or rituals and a cult concerning vultures. Given the combined evidence at Jerf el Ahmar, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some kind of a vulture cult is in evidence.

Çatal hüyük

Birds in Neolithic Art

Çatal Hüyük (Fork Mound) is a slightly later site in Turkey dating from 7400–6000 BCE . It reflects an unusually large and well-preserved Neolithic village populated by farmers and herders where, in contrast to Göbekli Tepe, the numerous wall paintings tend to be in mud-brick houses rather than in temples. Among the birds in these paintings, we find a lovely picture of two dancing cranes, although our interest here is in another sacred bird – the vulture.34 Three of the houses contain wall paintings of stylized vultures (fig. 5.9) reminiscent of Ojibwe drawings and paintings by Norval Morisseau. Originally, at least some of them were “painted in a fine reddish-brown paint on a dead-white background”35 and must have been very striking, indeed. Even as they have come down to us, they are spectacular. In one house – James Mellaart’s VII. 8 – “a great frieze showed not less than seven

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A painting from the vulture frieze at Çatal Hüyük, 7400–6000 BCE. Note the feathered neck crests and the claws of the griffon vultures. | Photo Arlette Mellaart, courtesy of Alan Mellaart.

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FIGURE 5.9

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vultures with outspread wings making a feast of six small headless human beings.”36 Two of the vultures have impressive wingspans of almost 5 feet (1.5 metres). All the vultures in the various paintings appear to be either hovering in front of headless human stick figures or standing, wings outstretched, in front of corpses presumably about to be defleshed. Following Mellaart,37 Steven Mithin and others see these as “pictures of great black vultures viciously attacking headless people.”38 Although one hates to disagree with such scholars, I think that the pictures are more benign. The vultures are part of a welcome ritual – excarnation of the body before secondary

burial; the heads were dealt with separately, and house VII .21, for example, has four human skulls under the vulture paintings. Even in the picture with a man seemingly whirling a sling over his head and, according to Mellaart, warding off vulture attacks,39 the man may be calling in the vultures, not dispelling them – perhaps swinging a dismembering tool rather than a sling.40 These wall paintings of vultures and headless human bodies appear to display funeral rituals and defleshing, such as is still practised in India and Tibet and in parts of Central Asia. Although there is no widespread evidence of funerary excarnation in the rest of Çatal Hüyük, it would seem that at least some of the population practised it. It is possible that some of the vultures are meant to be humans – priests or shamans – dressed in vulture skins, as we saw at Jerf el Ahmar. Mellaart points out that in several murals in what he calls the Second Vulture Shrine, we see vultures “provided with human legs” that he feels could be “priestesses or priests in disguise.”41 This interpretation could mean that some of the pictures at Çatal Hüyük present the vultures as sacred objects, whereas others present cult functionaries dressed to emulate the revered objects. Alain Testart has argued that the vulture pictures have nothing to do with the cult of the dead but reflect warlike practices and the humiliation of prisoners of war. He sees these pictures as “headless corpses of vanquished enemies left to feed the vultures.”42 Certainly, by the time we get to Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, vultures feeding on dead enemies is a battlefield cliché, but I do not think that this is the case here at all. Testart

Plaster woman’s breasts that contained vulture heads with protruding beaks on a house wall at Çatal Hüyük, 7400–6000 BCE. | Photo Arlette Mellaart, courtesy of Alan Mellaart.

FIGURE 5.10

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does not really explain the fact that in addition to the drawings of vultures, “[v]ulture skulls themselves were also inserted into the house walls at Çatal Hüyük, plastered over into a lump, with the beaks protruding.”43 Mellaart describes two of these plastered heads in house VI. 10: “[A] pair of woman’s breasts each contained the head of a Griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus), the beak of which protruded from the open red-painted nipples” (fig. 5.10).44 Mithin writes, “Both nipples are split apart and peering from within are the skulls of vultures.”45 This yoking of vultures and the feminine would be macabre in the absence of a vulture cult. Was there ever a more obvious linking of life (as the breasts) and death (as the vultures) in the cycle of life? There is a small, carefully carved white-marble figure that seems to represent a vulture found together with a kneeling “goddess” statuette that Mellaart takes for a grim-faced “goddess of death.”46 The vulture skulls, the vulture statuette, and the various paintings, together with what we know from all the other sites, tip the argument strongly back toward rituals connected with death. The vulture paintings reflect the cult of a revered bird with an intimate connection to death and to the rituals that follow it – an interpretation that works whether the vultures represent birds or whether they represent priests dressed as birds. No matter how one interprets them, “the wall-paintings at Çatal Hüyük were not art for art’s sake, but had a ritual meaning.”47 What do these six southwestern Asian sites tell us about the role of the vulture in the transition from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Neolithic? They tell us that the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic continued a tradition worked out over the preceding eons. From earliest times in Africa, hominins had used vultures as “beacons for meat” to locate downed animals and much-needed and relatively easy meat, and as they penetrated north, they brought this knowledge with them.48 Vultures offered humans a kind of lifeline. “The archaeological evidence from the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic onwards suggests that Neanderthals … were using vultures in cultural practices.”49 In a careful and exhaustive study of bird remains in a large number of Neanderthal sites, many before the arrival of early modern humans in Europe, Clive Finlayson and colleagues found evidence of widespread and systematic extraction of large flight feathers of raptors and corvids (or scavenging birds), especially eagles and vultures, seemingly for both ornamental and symbolic use.50 There is increasing evidence of this practice. Inclusion of birds in cultural practice by hominins was natural and doubtless occurred in Africa before emerging in the diaspora.

Chalk figurine of an owl found at Jerf el Ahmar, ca. 9300 bce. | Copyright D. Stordeur, Mission Permanente MPK du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, France FIGURE 5.11

Birds in Neolithic Art

A cautious lot, not overquick to draw conclusions, the archaeologists are careful not to take their conclusions about the vulture in the Neolithic too far, although they all suspect serious cult status – which seems to me a given. This cult status must have been inherited from the Palaeolithic, although we have no evidence, unless we see the bird on the top of the baton found in the Trois Frères Cave as a vulture and an early indication of a cult about to blossom.51 The cult continued to grow during the Neolithic with the arrival of sedentarism, farming, and communal life, where the hygienic role of vultures in disposing of carcasses and their pathogens came to the fore. The prominence of bones of birds of prey, particularly vultures, in Neolithic garbage heaps, together with the fact that the bones usually show that they were not butchered and eaten, suggests cult value. Mithin concludes, “These are unlikely to have been hunted for food: fox fur, talons, elegant wing and tail feathers may all have been crucial items of body adornment.”52 One has to agree with Mithin that “there can be little doubt that birds of prey [namely eagles and vultures] were held in high esteem throughout the Fertile Crescent, most likely having profound symbolic and religious significance.”53 Although we concentrate on vultures in this section, it should be noted that human interest in owls did not flag during the Neolithic. Among the figurines found at Jerf el Ahmar was a little chalk figure dating from about 9300 BCE that looks a lot like an owl when seen from the front (fig. 5.11).54 Although it is doubtful, Jacques Cauvin sees a stylized owl on one of the engraved stones at Jerf el Ahmar, also dating from about 9300 BCE .55 Stordeur tells us of an owl representation “très naturaliste” at Mureybet, which dates from about 8000 BCE .56 At the Tytyl’ V site in Chukhotka, which dates from about 8000 BCE , Margarita Aleksandrovna Kiriyak found a number of small stone figurines that represent owls.57 At Çatal Hüyük, we know that Mellaart found a goddess figurine in house VI .A .25 together with a stone vulture. He refers to her as a “grim owl-faced deity” who represents “yet another aspect of the goddess.”58 We shall meet owls soon at Knowth in Ireland dating from 4000–3000 BCE .59 Bird deities, at least vultures (and surely cranes and owls), remained alive and well in southwestern Asia during the Neolithic. Basing himself on Çatal Hüyük, Mellaart concludes that Neolithic humans did not worship animals but saw them as symbolic of their gods, which they conceived in human form.60 At some point, of course, animal deities become anthropomorphic deities tied to particular animal familiars, which symbolize them. But Mellaart notwithstanding, at Çatal Hüyük and our other sites, at least in the case of the vulture, the bird itself appears to have

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FIGURE 5.12 (opposite left)

Bird goddess found in a temple at Achilleion, ca. 6000 bce. | Antiquities Ephorate of Larissa, Diachronic Museum of Larissa, copyright Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500– 3500 bc: Myths and Cult Images, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), frontispiece, reproduced with permission of Copyright Clearance Center, Danvers, Massachusetts. FIGURE 5.13 (opposite centre)

Bird-headed goddess found at Tirnavos, Sesklo culture, ca. 6000 bce. Note the incised chevrons indicating feathers on the arm/wing supporting the breasts. | Courtesy of Archaeological Museum of Volos, Greece, M 5337. FIGURE 5.14 (opposite right)

Bird goddess with duck’s head found at a Vinča site, ca. 4500 bce. | Copyright Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500–3500 bc: Myths and Cult Images, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 139, top right, reproduced with permission of Copyright Clearance Center, Danvers, Massachusetts.

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been worshipped and regarded as a deity by Neolithic humans and was therefore drawn, sculpted, carved, and engraved both in dwellings and at religious sites. The vulture was held to be a conduit between life and death and to ferry the humans after death to the other world, probably in the sky. To facilitate this role, priests or shamans dressed as vultures and wore vulture masks to perform rituals, probably while the vultures themselves performed the duty of disposing of the flesh of the dead human. It seems natural for early humans to have revered a bird that was obviously an agent in the mysterious scheme of life and death and to have assumed that a bird that ate dead bodies and then flew off in the sky was an agent of the supernatural connected with the end of life.

neolithic europe As is surely the case with Neolithic western Asia, the art of Neolithic Europe (ca. 7000–1700 BCE ), brought to light in no small part by the redoubtable Marija Gimbutas, also presents an unbroken continuity with that of Upper Palaeolithic cave painting and carved figurines. The very common vases and figurines of birds and bird-human hybrids, often found as altar groups in temples, provide perhaps the best example of this continuity. Gimbutas points out the connection with finger-painted Palaeolithic drawings of a “Bird Goddess” with the same prominent breasts: “Black coal drawings from Pech Merle, Magdalenian culture, show naked women with pendulous breasts, little wings, and bird masks.”61 The breasts associate this “Bird Goddess” with life, regeneration, and fertility, not just death. Numerous clay models of temples, often found buried beneath altars or in graves and dating from as early as 7000–6000 BCE , feature attributes of a bird deity and were “predominantly related to worship of the Bird Goddess.”62 A number of these miniatures featured round holes, suggesting that they were used as bird houses – the idea being that the deity could go and come from the temple in the form of a bird – indicating that the bird deity was originally a temple or household deity. Whatever one thinks of Gimbutas’s famous Great Mother Goddess theory – and it is widely disputed nowadays – sacred birds and bird deities are widespread in the spiritual tapestry of the European Neolithic. The bird deities are usually female and represented by a variety of birdhuman hybrid goddesses. True, it is sometimes hard to decide whether some of the goddess figurines are bird goddesses or just goddesses with strange pinched noses, but the recent desire to refute Gimbutas should not blind us to the fact that many goddess figurines do seem to be bird-human

Birds in Neolithic Art

hybrid goddesses. Gimbutas describes them collectively: “The Bird Goddess appears as a bird with a beak or a pinched nose, a long neck, female breasts that are sometimes exaggerated, wings or wing-like projections, and protruding female buttocks outlined in the shape of a duck, a swan or an egg.”63 Of the many southern European figurines that depict bird-human deities, my two favourites come from the Sesklo culture in Thessaly, Greece, and date from about 6000 BCE . The first was found in a temple at Achilleion (fig. 5.12). I like the woman’s cap-like, or bun-shaped, coiffure with the hair parted in the centre but also the “coffee-bean” eyes, the long neck, and the ample breasts (not shown) in the reconstruction. But most of all, I like the enormous beak, especially when viewed from the front. It is remarkably like that of our old friend the vulture. Could this figurine even be a reflection of the vulture deity found so widely to the east? The second one is a charming terracotta bust of a bird goddess found at Tirnavos that features the long, “phallic” neck, the same kind of haircap or bun, and the same prominent breasts, but this time the beak and face suggest a waterbird, most likely a duck, not surprising given what we know about the reverence for waterbirds in the Palaeolithic (fig. 5.13). Note the incised chevrons on the lower arm, clearly meant to represent feathers. Perhaps the most bizarre of the human-bird deities are the Vinça

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FIGURE 5.15 Bird-shaped cult vase known as the Hyde Vase found at a Vinča site, ca. 4500 BCE. | Copyright Erich Lessing, Art Resource, New York.

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figurines, some of which appear to be more reptilian than avian and are often seen by New Age types on the Internet as convincing proof of extraterrestrials. Many of them have obvious bird heads, sometimes grossly exaggerated, as in the case of the duck-headed ones (fig. 5.14). The bird goddess in the Neolithic takes many different forms – sometimes bizarre – but it is always the bird head that gives it the magical clout. After the appearance of ceramics about 6500 BCE , ornithomorphic (or bird-shaped) vases and pots became widespread, usually used for ritual purposes. One of the most lovely Neolithic cult vases is the so-called Hyde Vase (fig. 5.15), a hollow, terracotta vase in the form of a waterbird dating from about 4500 BCE and found at the Vinča site just southeast of Belgrade, where, as Gimbutas points out, “the primary divinity worshiped … was the Bird Goddess.”64 The hole at the tail indicates that this object was used for pouring liquid. The head is generally thought to have

Birds in Neolithic Art

human features, as well as those of a duck-like bird, and is considered by Gimbutas and others to be wearing a crown.65 It is obvious that the vase is modelled after a waterbird, but I do not think that it is a duck with a crown. Nor do I think that the two crown protuberances “may be seen as representing a special coiffure.”66 The answer, to a birdwatcher like me, is that we have here a stylization of a great crested grebe in breeding plumage with its crest raised – a rather spectacular bird, I might add. This interpretation seems the more likely since we know that waterbirds, including the grebe, were revered from the Palaeolithic onward and, therefore, would be quite appropriate for such a cult vessel. Whether connected with life, regeneration, or death, bird deities remain basically positive, inasmuch as death itself is conceived as an integral part of life and a simple return of the human life to the world from which it came. Leaving bodies out to be defleshed by birds was practised in western Europe, as it was in western Asia during the Neolithic. As in Anatolia, so too in Neolithic Europe, the main bird deity representing death and gathering the remains of the dead was the vulture, although sometimes the owl, crow, or some bird of prey. Gimbutas writes, “Skeletons of birds of prey, especially their wings, are found buried in Palaeolithic and Neolithic sites. It is not surprising, then, that the main manifestations of the Neolithic Death Goddess became the vulture and the owl, found in temples and graveyards.”67 It is also not surprising that as we get north of the Mediterranean and out of vulture territory, we find owls and eagles replacing the vulture as sacred birds representing death. In Orkney, for example, in the Tomb of the Eagles, a major Neolithic ossuary dating from around 3200 BCE , one chamber was found to contain a mixture of human bones and those of the white-tailed eagle. Such sea eagle bones were then found elsewhere in the tomb, around 641 of them, in fact. Whether placed there originally or sometime later – a possibility indicated by radiocarbon dating that suggests that the eagle remains might date from only 2500–2000 BCE – the connection of sea eagles to the tomb strongly implies special ritual importance. Like the vultures in the south, so too were the sea eagles in the north agents of defleshing of the bones. In his book Raptor: A Journey through Birds (2016), James Macdonald Lockhart tells us, “The human bones, in contrast to the eagle and other animal bones in the cairn, were found to be in poor condition, noticeably bleached and weathered. This weathering suggests that the human dead were excarnated, given ‘sky

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burials,’ their bodies exposed to the elements on raised platforms to be cleaned by natural decay and carrion feeders like the sea eagle.”68 Lockhart goes on to say that “sea eagles have a great propensity for carrion and the birds … were often observed cleaning up the aftermath of Anglo-Saxon battlefields, rehoming the souls of the dead.”69 It seems that eagles in the north occupied the niche filled by vultures in the south. In addition to their vulture-like role, however, totem and clan significance may also explain their presence in the tomb. In Ireland the bird deity associated with death takes the form of an owl, like the one we find engraved on a stela (or standing stone) in the Irish tomb of Knowth West in the Boyne Valley dating from around 3500 BCE . This engraving, almost 19 inches (48 centimetres) high, clearly shows the general shape and the eyes of an owl, and it has the classic vulva mark of the goddess in the centre. Owl eyes alone decorate many items found in northern European tombs of the period. Gimbutas shows an example of a wooden pole some 6.5 feet (2 metres) high bearing a carved human head with owl features from northern Lithuania, dating from around 3000 BCE, as well as six owl standing stones from graves in Portugal, Spain, and southern France dating from 4000–2000 BCE .70 Whereas the bird itself was the deity in Palaeolithic cave art, bird deities of the Neolithic are often partially anthropomorphic and combine the bird head and wings with human female features. These hybrid bird deities developed naturally from pure bird deities, slowly acquiring human traits as human cultures became more anthropocentric. Only later did they become completely human in form, with the birds simply as avatars of the deities. This is much easier to believe than the idea that these were deities conceived from the start as human in form and then for some reason awarded various bird features and made into bizarre hybrids. In any case, this anthropomorphic bird deity would persist for millenia to come and be predominant in the religious thinking of the cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. What is important to note is that it is the bird head and wings, not the human body, that make these figures sacred and special and that carry the magic. Just as in the Palaeolithic, so too in the Neolithic did birds remain crucial in the religious imagination of humans and central to their notions of the sacred.

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6 Sacred Birds of Mesopotamia and Egypt mesopotamia Our first historic civilization with written records and actual cities arises in Mesopotamia around 4000–3500 BCE – slightly earlier than in Egypt.1 At first Sumerian, and then later Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian, this civilization had its own culture, art, and polytheistic religion, the latter featuring numerous gods and goddesses worshipped in imposing temples built on top of ziggurats and filled with carved stone idols and reliefs. Birds are widely reflected in the art of this ancient, Bronze Age culture, where “[e]verything that happened on earth was related to the gods.”2 Since they had their own cuneiform writing system, many documents, texts, and stories have come down to us, including the famous ancient Sumerian text The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1800 BCE ). In this epic about Gilgamesh, the hero-king, we find a reflection of the extremely widespread ancient belief that the soul takes the form of a bird after death and lives on. Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu tells him how in a prophetic dream he was transformed into a bird by a birdman in the Land of the Dead. “My friend,” says Enkidu, “what a dream I had last night!” He goes on to describe how he met a man with a face like the monster-bird Anzu, “whose fingernails were the talons of an eagle.” Upon knocking him down, the

Shell bird (dove?) pendant, Sumerian culture, 2900–2350 BCE. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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FIGURE 6.1

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man turned Enkidu into a dove and took him down to hell, whose dwellers “are dressed like birds in feather garments.”3 It is not surprising that, in a society with such a belief, people in Mesopotamia had protective bird amulets and wore bird pendants as charms, just as they did in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic. A number of carved bird pendants survive from the Uruk and Jemdet Nasr Periods (4000–2900 BCE), usually drilled through and worn around the neck as talismans. At least some of them appear to be doves (fig. 6.1). The dove, as we saw in our discussion of augury and arcane knowledge in chapter 1, also appears in the flood story in The Epic of Gilgamesh – obviously a special, sacred bird. One particularly pleasing pendant represents a duck,4 not surprising when we think back to the sacred role of ducks and waterfowl in the Paleaeolithic and the Neolithic. The popularity of ducks is further attested by many lovely stone duck carvings, most of which served as weights. These beautifully polished, fat ducks usually appear to be sleeping peacefully with their necks along their backs in a very lifelike pose. Some are tiny and exquisite; others are huge, like the grey granite one from southern Iraq in the British Museum, which weighs about 134 pounds (60 kilograms) and

measures 19.5 inches (49.5 centimetres) in length and 12 inches (30.5 centimetres) in width.5 Some oil lamps also had the form of a duck. Although these weights and lamps may not have had any cult or ritual value, it might be anachronistic to think that they were purely decorative. One should not be too quick to reach such a conclusion, particularly when waterfowl are involved. Here, for example, is what Annie Caubet of the Louvre has to say about a lovely, duck-shaped powder box dating from about 1300–1200 BCE (fig. 6.2) and found in a tomb in Ugarit, Syria: “Because they migrate, ducks and other waterbirds symbolize the passing of time and the return of the new year, and thus represent the promise of rebirth and new life in the hereafter. Like doves, ducks are also associated with the great goddess of fertility. This meant that this box, used to enhance a woman’s powers of seduction, was considered as enjoying divine protection.”6 This duck was probably not without cult significance, as is often the case. It is also not surprising that bird-animal hybrids, or chimeras, are typical of this culture. Many of them are various lions and griffins with

FIGURE 6.2 Hippo-ivory box for face powder in the form of a duck, Syria, 1300–1200 BCE. | Musée du Louvre, RMN–Grand Palais, Paris, copyright Mathieu Rabeau, Art Resource, New York.

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Three terracotta owl-headed goddess figurines, Syria, ca. 2000 BCE. | Copyright Photo 12, Alamy Stock Photo.

FIGURE 6.3

Terracotta statuette of a woman with a bird face holding an infant, Cyprus (likely Syrian in origin), 1450–1200 BCE. Note the apparent feathering of the hands, the bird face, the accented pubic triangle and breasts, the enormous beaklike nose, and the side-facing eyes. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. FIGURE 6.4

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animal bodies and bird wings, such as the so-called Lamassu, a protective spirit in the form of a winged bull with a human head, but there are also many bird-human combinations that echo earlier Neolithic representations. Owl-headed goddesses, often with breasts, were not uncommon in the form of terracotta figurines in Syria around 2000 BCE (fig. 6.3).7 Anthropomorphic female figurines with nonspecific, stylized bird heads were also very widespread (fig. 6.4), and their popularity extended to surrounding areas such as the nearby island of Cyprus, which lies off the Syrian coast, and Mycenaean Greece, where they were mass-produced. The figurines that became so popular in Cyprus from about 1450–1200  BCE are what the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a nice collection of these figurines, describes as “terracotta statuettes of women with bird faces.”8 These figurines recall the ones found by Gimbutas around altars in southern Europe; they have similar beaks, long necks, breasts, and marked pubic triangles, and they sometimes show what could be feathering instead of fingers at the end of the arms. Their eyes are usually on the sides of their heads, as is typical of birds. Often these figures are clutching babies or small birds and are quite likely votive pieces that carry a plea for fertility, suggesting the connection with birth and fertility that we saw back in the Neolithic.

Ceramic beaked female votive figure, Egypt, 6000–4500 BCE. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London. FIGURE 6.5

Terracotta goddess statuette (psi-type), Mycenaean culture, 1340–1190 BCE. Note the upswept wings/arms. | Copyright Daderot, “Psi-Figurine, Greek, Mycenaean, Late Helladic IIIB, c. 1340–1190 BC, Painted Terracotta – Middlebury College Museum of Art – Middlebury, VT – DSC08003.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 6.6

Sacred Birds of Mesopotamia and Egypt

Admittedly, some of these very numerous, birdlike, female figurines may simply represent stylized women and/or goddesses with poorly executed pinched noses that resemble beaks. Many, however, have such birdlike faces that the question arises of why the sculptors would have made these faces look so much like birds if they did not intend to. It certainly was not because they were unable to do human female faces at the time. Many contemporary female figurines that do not have bird faces show rather fine human features.9 The existence of numerous figurines with fine human facial features suggests that the bird-faced representations are of a different order altogether and may well descend from some Neolithic bird goddess. That these figurines are to be found in other cultures, such as Egyptian and Greek, also suggests a common ancestor. See, for example, the seated “limestone female votive figure” with a “beak-like face and hands to breasts” from the early (6000 BCE ) to middle (4500 BCE ) PreDynastic Period in Egypt, which is in the British Museum (fig. 6.5). This painted figurine has an unmistakably birdlike face and arms that seem added around stylized wings. The type that became so popular in Mycenaean Greece around 1400–1200 BCE features a clothed, female figure who has a large, beak-like, pinched nose and is wearing a long skirt and

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Eye goddess (or idol) figurine, Tell Brak, 3300–3000 bce. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. FIGURE 6.7

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FIGURE 6.8 Little carved plaque from Jerf el Ahmar with two pronounced circles that look like owl eyes, ca. 9300 bce. | Copyright D. Stordeur, Mission Permanente MPK du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, France.

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a flat headdress (fig. 6.6). Many museums have these terracotta goddess figurines in a form known as the psi-type, so called because their shape is similar to the Greek letter psi (ψ). Depending on how you interpret these figurines, they have either robed arms upswept in prayer or raised wings. The beaked faces and apparent raised wings make these common idols distinctly birdlike. That they were often found in burials and shrines suggests cult value of the kind associated with the Neolithic bird deities. All the various beaked female figurines appear to descend from more ancient roots, and the birdlike attributes must have added to their potency. The famous Mesopotamian eye goddesses, or spectacle idols, some from as early as 4000–3000 BCE , also need mentioning here because of the disputed, but quite possible, connection to birds – the owl in particular (fig. 6.7). Although many see no connection to owls, it is also difficult to support the claim that they are entirely anthropomorphic. Thousands of these popular pieces, which were doubtless votive pieces, came down to us from the so-called Eye Temple at Tell Brak, an ancient city that flourished from 4000–3000 BCE in modern northeastern Syria and one of the biggest cities in the north of Mesopotamia. Many of these tiny idols, which average only a couple of inches in height, were excavated by writer Agatha Christie and her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan. Some look very much like owls, some less so, some not at all. Perhaps they became progressively stylized and more abstract. Many appear to be anthropomorphic statues with stylized owl heads. These pieces may

Sacred Birds of Mesopotamia and Egypt

represent a direct continuation of the pronounced reverence for owls that we have seen in the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic. If we compare them to Neolithic owl carvings, they look similar, although some are more owllike than others. Jacques Cauvin even sees a connection between the Tell Brak idols and a grooved stone carving from Jerf el Ahmar dating from 9300 BCE , discussed in chapter 5. He sees this little carved plaque as containing “a small owl” as well as a serpent and a probable ant (fig. 6.8).10 If we do have an owl here, it is certainly highly stylized, but the two circles atop a streaked body do look like the eyes we find at Tell Brak. If Cauvin is right, and nobody has made a better suggestion, it would provide an ancient lineage for the eye idols and connect them with probable ritual use. We know that the most striking feature of the humanlike owl face is the staring eyes. The ancient role of owls as wise seers with connections to the other world could explain their popularity in Tell Brak around 3500–3000 BCE , as well as the popularity of owl-headed goddess figurines around 2000 BCE . Bird-human combinations feature large in the wonderful reliefs of the period. One striking Neo-Assyrian relief dating from 875–860 BCE on a wall in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud shows a winged figure with a human body and a bird head, obviously the head of an eagle, which appears to be carrying a purse or seed-bag (or perhaps a holy water container) and using a sprinkler to water a sacred tree, thought to be the tree of life (fig. 6.9). This god or demigod appears in a number of other reliefs here at Nimrud but also features in various contemporary Hittite reliefs and in Hittite cylinder seals.11 Sometimes the big beak is open and sometimes closed, sometimes the figure has two wings and sometimes four, and sometimes it has small animal ears and sometimes not, but overall the deity is uniform. It was obviously some kind of a protective, guardian spirit associated with life and agriculture and having the power represented by the eagle. Here, we see another step on the way to anthropomorphizing the deities. The body in every way appears human, although the head is still that of a bird, as are the wings. There does not seem to be any hint of shamanic masks here; rather, this is a magical deity with life-giving power. The bird – here, the eagle – still possesses the power even as the gods become more and more human in form. Similar figures can be found in South American Indian art. Winged, bird-headed spirits and minor deities are not uncommon in Hittite cylinder seals of the period. William Hayes Ward shows a seal depicting a naked deity with a long feathered crest at the back of her bird head who is kneeling under a winged-disc symbol and presumably paying

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Eagle-headed winged deity on a wallpanel relief in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, Iraq, 875–860 BCE. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London. FIGURE 6.9

FIGURE 6.10 (opposite)

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The Burney Relief with a winged and clawed goddess flanked by owls, ca. 1800 BCE. | Copyright Marie-Lan Nguyen, “Queen of the Night BM ME 2003-7-18.1 n01.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

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homage to an important deity that does not have a bird’s head.12 Ward also shows a seal with two bird-headed, winged protective spirits, again with crest feathers, in the same posture of homage, although this time fully clad.13 These seals probably reflect the cult of the goddess Ishtar, who together with her earlier counterpart, Inanna, features in some of

the most striking representations of Mesopotamian art. We shall examine three of these bird-human amalgams connected with these goddesses. First, let us examine, from the Old Babylonian Period (2000–1600 BCE), the famous terracotta Burney Relief – an astounding piece – dating from about 1800 BCE and now in the British Museum, where it is called Queen of the Night (fig. 6.10). Such full-front reliefs were usually found over the altars of small shrines.14 Here, we appear to be dealing with a very powerful goddess of the bird goddess type, possibly Inanna or her legacy, Ishtar.

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The bird connection is inescapable, and it seems likely that our goddess descends from the Palaeolithic and Neolithic owl goddess. True, she has a human body, which is completely nude and shows fully formed breasts – the love and fertility angle – but what else do we note? Below the knees, she has some kind of birdlike spurs and bird’s feet with talons that mirror the feet of the two stylized, upright owls on either side of her, and she has lowered wings very similar to the wings of the owls. The owls are the more interesting because they are the only owls we have in Mesopotamian iconography; their presence echoes the popular owl statuettes of the period and establishes the connection to the owl deity. A very important early Mesopotamian goddess, perhaps the foremost female deity, Inanna was associated with love and fertility, on the one hand, but with war, on the other – an odd but not unusual combination. It is worth remembering that Inanna made a descent into the underworld,15 and we know from Enkidu’s dream in The Epic of Gilgamesh that the underworld had bird-human figures whose “fingernails were the talons of an eagle.” Could our goddess in the Burney Relief, then, be Inanna, with the tableau reflecting her trip to the underworld? A version of the same goddess, winged and clawed but without the spurs and the surrounding owls, must have been popular; the British Museum has one plaque from about 1750 BCE as well as an actual baked-clay mould for producing the figure.16 As Henri Frankfort points out, “It is in keeping with the somber mood of Mesopotamian religion that so sinister a figure should receive a cult.”17 Second, let us look at the terracotta Ishtar Vase, dating from about 2000–1600 BCE and currently in the Louvre (fig. 6.11). Again, we have the figure of a naked woman – this time Ishtar, Inanna’s legacy, and again a goddess of love and war – but with less obvious breasts than in the Burney Relief, although a more accentuated pubic triangle, and again the association with birds is dominant. Although the figure is basically human, the godlike power is transmitted in the wings and the feet, to some degree, because they mirror the feet of the bird above. It is no accident that among the animals that surround her, we have a large bird right above her head. Although the connection with the owl has not survived here, the bird deity has still put its sacred imprint on this representation. This image was not unique and survived elsewhere; we have, for example, a winged Ishtar in a Hittite relief from Carcemish, although this time the capped goddess is cupping her breasts in her hands and her wings are raised.18 The third and last example that we shall look at, dating from 2300 BCE, is the Adda Seal, a little engraved greenstone cylinder of Akkadian

The terracotta Ishtar Vase, 2000–1600 BCE. | Copyright Marie-Lan Nguyen, “Ishtar Vase Louvre AO17000.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 6.11

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FIGURE 6.12 A winged Ishtar on the greenstone Adda Seal, Akkadian culture, ca. 2300 BCE. The bird beside her appears to be an eagle – a bird of war. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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provenance for rolling out an impression on something like soft clay (fig. 6.12). Among the representations on the seal, we find the goddess Ishtar standing on a hill beside a small tree, weapons rising from her shoulders – she is a goddess of war – and holding what appears to be a bunch of dates over the head of a rising sun god, who is holding a serrated blade. Unlike the two goddesses above, she is fully clad and appears to have normal feet. Her horned headdress is typical of deities, but it is her wings that imply her magical power and suggest the connection with Neolithic bird goddesses. Although we have owls in terracotta figurines, in connection with Inanna, and possibly reflected in the eye idols at Tell Brak, vultures do not seem to occur often in Mesopotamian art, but they do play the role that we would expect. This scarcity is odd given their prominence in Neolithic Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, as well as their ubiquity in Egyptian art, as we shall soon see. There are, however, a number of depictions, some of which must be mentioned. In 2007–08 a large number of clay seals were recovered from rubbish deposits at Tell Brak dating from 3900–3600 BCE .19 Ninety-nine of these seals included vultures in various positions, often feeding on various animal carcasses, and a few of them include vultures linked with winged shaman figures.20 One suspects that this use of vultures reflects the role of the vulture as a cult bird in the Neolithic in adjacent areas.21 The Stele of Vultures, now in the Louvre, is a limestone slab relief with battle scenes from about 2450–2400 BCE (fig. 6.13). One of the seven surviving fragments shows vultures flying with human heads in their

beaks – doubtless the heads of the defeated enemies of King Eannatum of the First Dynasty of Lagash (2500–2270 BCE ), whose victories are celebrated here in cuneiform. Although much more realistic than the stylized vultures of Çatal Hüyük, they resonate with them because of the human heads. It appears that the vultures are already carting off the dead to the afterlife, as we would expect. There is a Victory Stele, also in the Louvre, celebrating the success of Sargon, the Akkadian conquerer of Sumer in 2350 BCE and then most of Mesopotamia. One very gory fragment shows vultures – one of which is carrying off a human leg – and dogs viciously attacking bodies. In a well-known Neo-Assyrian gypsum wall relief from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, dating from about 728 BCE and on display in the British Museum,22 we see two Assyrian horsemen with spears bearing down on fleeing enemies. Behind them above an inverted human body, a

FIGURE 6.13 The Stele of Vultures (detail) on a fragment of a limestone slab, Sumerian culture, ca. 2400 BCE. | Musée du Louvre, Paris, copyright Erich Lessing, Art Resource, New York.

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vulture is flying with what appears to be a piece of intestine in its beak and a pile of guts in its claws. It is impossible to know whether these vultures carry cult meaning here or are simply present as a commonplace of the battlefield, but the similarity of these representations to Egyptian vulture representations, where cult value rules supreme, makes cult meaning seem plausible. Just as in Palaeolithic and Neolithic iconography, so too in Mesopotamian art do birds, as we would expect, retain their value as sacred objects of worship. In Egyptian culture of the time, bird worship, as we shall see, was even more ubiquitous.

egypt Surprisingly, in 1962–63 a rather well-preserved rock art site dating from about 13,000 BCE was discovered by a Canadian expedition near the village of Qurta on the east bank of the Nile in Egypt, although its great age and significance were established by a Belgian team only in the early twenty-first century. I say surprisingly because most examples of Upper Palaeolithic art in Africa have long been effaced by sun, wind, and sand. Unsurprisingly, the drawings are mostly of birds and other animals – the preferred subjects of Palaeolithic art – and are very similar in style to contemporary Magdalenian cave art in France and Spain. The site, somewhat hyperbolically, has even been referred to as Lascaux along the Nile. Although the possibility of European influence has been raised,23 it seems almost certain to me that these drawings, like those of Lascaux and Altamira, represent the end of the development of an art brought from Africa to Europe by early modern humans. There are six definite birds, all waterfowl, including one rather large greylag goose.24 I suspect cult status, as the goose was a sacred bird in later Egyptian religion. It is immediately evident that the drawings have little in common artistically with the later highly stylized and idiosyncratic Egyptian art to which we now turn our attention, perhaps the one shared element being the preponderance of birds and other animals as subject matter. Egyptian civilization, dating from roughly 3100 BCE to the end of the New Kingdom in 1070 BCE , predates Classical Greek civilization by several millennia and in many ways continues the Neolithic civilizations that preceded it, although it is even richer in art. Egyptian art is a reflection of a polytheistic religion that featured a number of bird gods among its oldest deities. It is a religion fixated on death and the afterlife and on how to prepare for the latter. Belief in life

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The Meidum Geese wall painting found in the tomb of the Egyptian prince Nefermaat and his wife, Atet, depicting bean geese, white-fronted geese, and redbreasted geese, 2600–2550 BCE. | Egyptian Museum, Cairo, copyright A. Dagli Orti, De Agostini Picture Library, Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 6.14

after death was extremely well established, which is why it was so important to preserve the body so that the soul or spirit could inhabit it after death. Of course, particular gods and goddesses were necessary to ensure this passage to the afterlife. Birds simply abound in Egyptian art. There is scarcely a painting, relief, or sculpture that does not feature at least one bird. Waterbirds of all kinds are everywhere – even herons like the Bennu, a sun and creation deity that was linked with rebirth and had a phoenix-like ability to renew itself. This was the bird that flew over chaos, screamed, and broke silence to begin the world – reminiscent of the bird hovering over the waters in Genesis 1: 1. Cranes, ibises, ducks – particularly pintails – and geese (fig. 6.14) feature large, and raptors are especially popular, particularly falcons and vultures. Vultures, in fact, are ubiquitous from the ceilings of the temples at Thebes to the wall paintings in myriad tombs. Many of the hieroglyphs are birds; the vulture, for example, is a glyph with a number of forms, one of which represents both a sound and the word “mother.” The owl glyph (fig. 6.15), which provides the sound for the letter m, is interesting because, whereas other birds and other animals used as hieroglyphs are shown in profile, the owl is shown not simply in profile but with its head turned to face the viewer, just like the snowy owl depictions at the Trois Frères Cave. The ba, similar to our concept of the soul or the human spirit, is depicted as a bird with a human head, often shown hovering over a mummy, suggesting the ability to leave the body in order to fly to the other world after death and then return to the body, which houses it and, therefore, must be preserved.25 Rather than risk drowning in the sea of Egyptian bird data, we shall concentrate on the vulture goddess as a direct follow-up on our discussion of the Neolithic and then look briefly at the falcon god Horus and at the ibis god Thoth. As Desmond Morris points out, “There is surprisingly no Egyptian Owl God,”26 and owls were only very occasionally mummified.

FIGURE 6.15 Owl hieroglyph from the Obelisk of Theodosius, ca. 1425 BCE. | Copyright Dosseman, “Obelisk of Theodosius 220.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

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Perhaps you still harbour the suspicion that no one could actually worship a bird as ugly and with as many negative connotations as the vulture. Well, suppose you are an artist, a court artist, and one of the best. You are living a pampered life in ancient Egypt, and the pharaoh’s wife dies. The pharaoh is very upset. The pharaoh and the high priest charge you with the task of painting the late queen on a wall in her tomb. You think about how to do this. You paint the young queen with a vulture draped right over her head, long wings stretching down to her shoulders, feet stuck out on either side of her hair, and the face and head right over her eyes in the middle of her forehead (fig. 6.16). The high priest and his cohorts bring the grief-stricken pharaoh and his royal entourage into the tomb to view your work. The pharaoh looks at it. What does the pharaoh do? Does he fly into a towering rage? No. He smiles and weeps with joy. He sees the protective vulture goddess mantling the queen and seeing her safely to another world. The queen is safe in the loving embrace of the vulture deity.

FIGURE 6.16 Painting of the dead queen Nefertari, wife of Ramses II and beloved of the vulture goddess Mut, wearing a full-vulture headdress, found in the famous Tomb of Nefertari in the Valley of Queens, ca. 1250 BCE. | Copyright Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, the Yorck Project (2002), “Maler der Grabkammer der Nefertari 004.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 6.17 Painted terracotta Bird Lady found at Ma’mariya, Egypt, ca. 3500 BCE. | Copyright Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 07.447.505, Brooklyn Museum, New York.

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FIGURE 6.18 Lapis lazuli vulture amulet, Egypt, 664–332 BCE. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Although the vulture is the emblem of Upper Egypt, this artist chose the vulture to signify that the queen was under the protection of the vulture goddess Mut. The pharaoh is richly pleased and deeply touched, and the high priest gives you the high sign and you are much feted. Perhaps the earliest work of truly Egyptian pottery is the Bird Lady found at Ma’mariya, a female figurine dating from around 3500 BCE during the Pre-Dynastic Period (6000–3150 BCE ) (fig. 6.17). This terracotta figurine, now in the Brooklyn Museum, is extraordinarily graceful and elegant. Her appearance will not be a surprise to anyone with a knowledge of the Neolithic bird deities from which she is directly descended. She has a woman’s body – the top half of which is painted red – obvious breasts, and a vulture-like head. Although the Brooklyn Museum tells us that the “bird-like faces” of such “figurines probably represent human noses,”27 I think it looks like a beak and is meant to be one. Where she differs from the classic Neolithic bird deities is in her long, thin, graceful, wing-like arms, which end in what are described as fingered hands but look to me like primary wing feathers.28 It is no coincidence that our Bird Lady was found in a grave. She is, in my opinion, the vulture goddess integral to the death cult of ancient Egypt. We have other more or less contemporary artifacts that reflect this vulture cult. In the British Museum, we have a seated vulture figurine from Abydos that is carefully wrought in clay and shows close attention to the details of the wings, neck, and head. This is a typical votive figurine of the type found around altars and placed there by those seeking the personal protection of a god or goddess.29 Many Egyptian vulture amulets have survived, from the earliest period to the latest. These amulets were worn as pendants, again by people seeking protection and favour from the vulture goddess. There are several from the Pre-Dynastic Period in the British Museum,30 as well as a number of later ones in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my favourite of which is a little amulet dating from 700–600 BCE made from lapis lazuli and measuring just under 1 inch (2.2 centimetres) (fig. 6.18). So popular were these vulture amulets that we even have some of the moulds used for making them!31 One of the earliest Egyptian goddesses, belonging to a very ancient cult that predates the Early Dynastic Period (3150–2686 BCE ), is Nekhbet. She is the major patron deity of Upper Egypt and was originally connected with the town of Nekheb. She is usually depicted as a vulture (even in hieroglyphs) or as a woman with a vulture’s head. She is beautifully depicted as a vulture goddess in the stunning carved and painted fresco on the wall of the Mortuary Temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu on the

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FIGURE 6.19 The goddess Nekhbet in the Mortuary Temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu, 1187–1155 BCE. | Copyright Art Directors & TRIP, Alamy Stock Photo.

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west bank of the Nile at Luxor, where her secondary wing feathers are coloured in red (fig. 6.19). She is equally stunning in the fresco in the Temple of Deir El-Bahri. She is the vulture goddess who, as well as being the tutelary spirit of Upper Egypt, is the goddess who breaches the gap between life and death and who husbands the soul after life – a classic psychopomp. It is Nekhbet who appears front and centre in the most celebrated image of ancient Egypt, King Tutankhamun’s famous death mask (fig. 6.20), where she sits right above the king’s eyes and next to the cobra, the snake god, who is the symbol of Lower Egypt – the two serving to show that King Tut ruled over both parts of Egypt. Apart from the coloured-glass beak, she is solid gold. It is also Nekhbet in full-vulture form that King Tut had around his neck as a protective pendant, found between the eleventh and twelfth layers of bandages on his mummy (fig. 6.21). And it is she who hovers in the air, huge wings fully extended, behind King Tut in the battle scene painted on the lid of a box found in his tomb. Nekhbet in vulture form is, as Mark Cocker points out, “omnipresent in ancient Egyptian funerary artifacts.”32

King Tutankhamun’s funeral mask, ca. 1323 BCE. Note the vulture head above the king’s eyes and the falcon head on the shoulder. | Copyright Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 6.20

FIGURE 6.21 The vulture pendant representing Nekhbet found around King Tutankhamun’s neck, 1567– 1320 BCE. | Egyptian Museum, Cairo, copyright B. O’Kane, Alamy Stock Photo.

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Wall painting of the goddess Isis in the Tomb of Seti in the Valley of Kings, 1290s–1279 BCE. Note the feathered arms. | Copyright Erich Charrier, agefotostock.

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FIGURE 6.22

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Another very old and major goddess with her own well-established cult is Isis, wife of her brother, Osiris. She plays a central role in the rites of the dead and, as the mother of Horus, is connected with the cult of motherhood. The very ancient Egyptian goddess of motherhood was Mut, whose name actually means “mother” in Old Egyptian. Mut’s hieroglyph, as we know, like the hieroglyph for the word “mother,” was a vulture. Like Mut, Isis is usually depicted as a vulture or as a woman wearing the vulture headdress and having outstretched wings. In a wall painting in the Tomb of Seti dating from the Nineteenth Dynasty (1292–1189 BCE ), one notes Isis’s heavily feathered arms outstretched as wings as well as the owl and vulture glyphs above her head (fig. 6.22). Other goddesses, like Nephthys, the sister of Isis – an important figure in funeral rites – are also shown with vulture wings, as seen in the second gilt shrine encasing the sarcophagus of King Tut. The vulture deity survived the Neolithic to thrive in ancient Egypt in the forms of a vulture and a human-vulture hybrid. Horus, the son of Isis, was also a major god in ancient Egypt. Originally a celestial god, he too is of very ancient origin and came to be considered the god of the sun and of war and the hunt, among other things. He was a falcon – the falcon god – either a peregrine or a saker. Even

in the Pre-Dynastic Period, people wore little falcon amulets or charms representing this god. He can be seen in falcon form in the very ancient, pre-dynastic Narmer Palette, one of our oldest representations of Horus. In another equally old palette, the Lion Hunt Palette, we again see Horus as a falcon perched on a standard carried by the hunters.33 In the statue of King Chefren (or Khafra), who built the second pyramid at Giza during the Old Kingdom (2686–2181 BCE ), we see Horus as a falcon mantling the king from behind, which signifies his symbolic protection of the king, to whom he offers his power (fig. 6.23). There is also a statue of Horus as a huge falcon protecting King Nectanebo II (360–343 BCE ), whom he literally dwarfs (fig. 6.24). And what is that on the side of King Tut’s golden death mask? It is a falcon’s head of gold, obsidian, and glass. It is Horus. He appears on the collar of the mask at each shoulder. Think about why the death mask of the world’s most powerful man would have a vulture, a falcon, and a snake on it.34 These three central deities from the Palaeolithic were still deeply revered and considered sacred protectors in the religion of later Egypt.35 Although shown simply as a falcon right through the various periods, Horus is also frequently shown as a human with a falcon’s head (fig. 6.25), as is Seker (or Sokar), another ancient falcon god of the dead, who would

FIGURE 6.23 Horus mantling Pharaoh Khafra, Giza, 2472– 2250 BCE. | Copyright Andrej Privizer, Shutterstock.com.

Horus the falcon god protecting King Nectanebo II, whom he dwarfs, 359–341 BCE. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

FIGURE 6.24

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Horus with falcon head and human body in the Tomb of Horemheb in the Valley of Kings, 1567–1320 BCE. | Copyright Valley of the Kings, Thebes, Egypt, Bridgeman Images.

FIGURE 6.25

FIGURE 6.26 Pharaoh Taharqa offering wine to the falcon god Hemen, who holds a rearing cobra, 690–664 BCE. | Musée du Louvre, RMN–Grand Palais, Paris, copyright Christian Decamps, Art Resource, New York. FIGURE 6.27 (opposite)

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The ibis god Thoth in blue faience, 332–30 BCE. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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become associated with Osiris, likewise a god of the dead. It is from him that Europe’s saker falcon gets its name. There is a telling statuette of Pharaoh Taharqa, who ruled from 690 to 664 BCE during the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, on his knees before the lesserknown falcon god Hemen, to whom he is offering wine in thanks for sending a flood in answer to his prayers for the end of a terrible drought and famine (fig. 6.26). It would be almost impossible not to interpret this statue as a human kneeling in worship before a bird god. Among the millions of mummified animals in the various Egyptian necropolises, like Saqqara, we find hundreds of thousands of ritually slaughtered, mummified falcons serving as votive objects for the god Horus.36 Sacred falcons were ubiquitous in ancient Egypt. The last bird deity that we shall examine is the ibis, a name based on the old Egyptian word for this bird. The ibis is worshipped as the god Thoth, god of the moon, wisdom, and writing. Deified as Thoth incarnate, the ibis serves as Thoth’s hieroglyph (fig. 6.27). Ibises are everywhere in Egyptian art, two of my favourites being the elegant ibis relief in the Old Kingdom tomb of the vizier and wise man Ptahhotep and the lovely ibis mummy coffin in the Brooklyn Museum (fig. 6.28). As the ibis was a revered and sacred bird, the penalty for killing one in ancient Egypt, according to Herodotus, writing in the fourth century BCE , was severe: “[W]hoever kills an ibis or a hawk, no matter whether it was intentional or not, is sentenced to death.”37 Ibises – the African sacred ibis has now ironically been extirpated in Egypt – were widely mummified, sealed in pottery jars, and buried as votive objects in tombs to honour Thoth.38 Cocker gives us some idea of the scope of this cult practice:

Sacred Birds of Mesopotamia and Egypt

Ibises were treated in this fashion at various important temple complexes, including the necropolis at Saqqara (just south of Cairo), Abydos and Thebes (near Luxor), and Tuna al-Gebel … These animal cemeteries were nothing short of astonishing. Sanctioned by pharaonic decree, an endless procession of mummified ibises flowed from all over Egypt to the administrative centre at Hermopolis. Beneath the surface temples, and branching off from a series of underground causeways, was a vast complex of subterranean galleries … [I]nto these darkened cavities, for more than 700 years, the priests carried ceramic pots filled with ibis remains, embalmed in linen bandages and often smelling of resinous unguents … [T]here are still hundreds of thousands of embalmed

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Egyptian ibis coffin with an ibis mummy inside, 330–305 BCE. | Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 49.48a-b, Brooklyn Museum, New York, copyright Gavin Ashworth.

FIGURE 6.28

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ibises beneath the ground at Tuna al-Gebel. In the animal cemetery at Saqqara to the north there are probably more than 1.5 million mummified birds.39

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The people who paid for these votive objects obviously had high hopes for special consideration from Thoth in life and/or after death. Fortunately, these ibises were raised by priests in special ibis nurseries, so the native population was not wiped out. The falcons were not so lucky. Why would people worship ibises of all birds? In book 8 of his Natural History (Historia naturalis, 79 CE ), having just discussed how hippopotamuses “unburden” their bodies by letting blood out of self-inflicted

Sacred Birds of Mesopotamia and Egypt

wounds, Pliny the Elder goes on to say, “A somewhat similar display has been made in the same country of Egypt by the bird called the ibis, which makes use of the curve of its beak to purge itself through the part by which it is most conducive to health for the heavy residue of foodstuffs to be excreted.”40 Speculating about how the bird came to be venerated, Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy seem to give some credence to the role of this legend that the bird “used its bill to self-administer a water enema.”41 In spite of the popularity of enemas then and now, however, this seems thin grounds on which to found a god cult. Wood storks, as is widely known, defecate on their legs to cool off in hot spells, but this too seems unconnected to divinity. Some speculate that the ibis was venerated as an eater of snakes, again basing themselves on Herodotus, who says that the ibis was revered because it ate “winged serpents” that invaded Egypt from Arabia each spring.42 This account seems unlikely in a country that considered the snake ultra-sacred and that had the cobra as one of its two key symbols – to say nothing of the fact that snakes eat the same vermin as ibises. I think that the answer lies in the ibis’s curved beak. Originally a moon god, the ibis god Thoth is frequently depicted with a human body and the head of an ibis and is usually shown under an inverted crescent moon, similar in shape to the bird’s beak. The ibis’s curved bill was seen as a moon symbol and sign of the god. The ibis and the moon represent the same power.43 The great age and potency of the symbol make it the most likely reason for adopting the sickle-billed African sacred ibis as a moon deity and then associating it with Thoth. Just as in the Neolithic, so too in ancient Egypt do we find actual birds like the vulture, the falcon, and the ibis as deities – worshipped, protected, and often mummified. Here, we have the old, original belief that the bird was the god. But we also see the quickening of the tendency toward the anthropomorphic that we saw in the Neolithic. Egyptian art is full of birds with human bodies – bird-headed beings – that are seen as gods. Even though in some drawings we see priests wearing bird and other animal masks, our bird-headed gods are not masked humans, and their divinity lies in the avian, not the human, side of things. The bird head makes these anthropomorphic gods more than merely human in spite of their human bodies. It is not that the gods were simply symbolized by birds; that came later with the corruption of the tradition, when gods were assumed to have human form. Birds were inextricably tangled with religion in ancient Egypt.

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7 Sacred Birds of Peru If the spiritual beliefs of the Eurasian and European Neolithic and the major ensuing civilizations in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt have their origin in a shared Palaeolithic past ultimately traceable to Africa before the diaspora, then we should expect to find similar beliefs reflected in the civilizations that arose in the New World among the people who migrated east to the Americas toward the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. Early migrants doubtless came in dribs and drabs and made their way down the Pacific Coast by boat and/or on foot with perhaps the occasional direct transpacific immigration by boat – some of this as early as 18,000 BCE , possibly earlier, although the evidence is scant.1 What seems certain is that humans arrived in much greater numbers across the Bering Land Bridge near the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, sometime around 10,000 BCE (give or take a thousand years), before the glaciers melted and submerged the land bridge entirely. Following the ice-free corridor into North America, these early modern humans quickly spread throughout the continent and into South America, soon reaching Tierra del Fuego, its southern tip. It seems inconceivable that these various peoples would not have brought with them their Old World, Upper Palaeolithic religious and cultural beliefs. In the first civilizations that sprang up in the New World, we would, therefore, expect to find worship of theriomorphic deities and human-animal hybrid deities, a reverence for birds

Design with cat and two birds on textile, possibly Chimú culture, 900–1470 CE. | Amano Pre-Columbian Textile Museum, Lima, Peru, copyright Felicity Pope. FIGURE 7.1

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in general but for waterbirds, owls, eagles, and falcons in particular, and perhaps some kind of a vulture cult. Thousands of individual artifacts suggest that this is the case. To test our hypothesis, we shall take the oldest American civilization – that of ancient Peru – as our example and examine some of its deities and the role of birds in the earliest manifestations of its cultural-religious fabric. Note that we are talking about a period roughly contemporaneous with Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture and some 5,000 years before the Johnny-come-lately Incas, whose culture appears just before the Spanish Conquest of the 1500s. Like their counterparts in the Old World, the Ancient Peruvians counted animals among their major deities. The bird, the cat, and the snake are three of the main sacred animals of Ancient Peru, and they show up everywhere (fig. 7.1); one cannot help but see the bird and the snake as survivals of the Old World Upper Palaeolithic. We often find Peruvian representations of a powerful hybrid god with features of all three animals (fig. 7.2). In ancient Peruvian culture, ancestor cults and the cult of the dead played a central role, and the bird and the snake, as we might expect, were two of the main representatives of this cult. We see their importance reflected in the artifacts of the earliest period and all throughout the socalled Formative Period (ca. 1250 BCE –1 CE ) and later, particularly in the textiles of the Paracas culture (ca. 800–200 BCE ) and in the ceramics of both the Cupisnique culture (ca. 1250–200 BCE ) and the Moche culture (1–800 CE ). Birds are everywhere in ancient Peruvian art and feature large in ceramics, textiles, and silver and gold. Viewing the rich ceramic depository of the Larco Museum in Lima, much of which was found in tombs, one is immediately struck by the pervasive presence of birds. The shelves of Vicus and Cupisnique ceramics from the Early Formative Period (2000– 1250 BCE ) abound with birds such as owls (fig. 7.3) and waterfowl. In one part of the depository, there are six large glass cases, each ten shelves high, containing nothing but bird-shaped ceramics; one case has just raptors and condors, one has just parrots, one has just ducks, one has just seabirds, and owls take up one and a half cases. Many other kinds of birds can be found in smaller numbers, such as hummingbirds, ibises, and pelicans. The early Peruvians were obviously obsessed with birds. Birds feature as a dominant theme in the fabulous textile art of Peru from the earliest pre-ceramic period right up until the Conquest. In the Museum of Anthropology and Archeology in Lima, there is a newish section devoted to Paracas fabrics, most of which are from elaborately

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Funerary mantle, Paracas culture, 100 BCE to 200 CE. Each feline has two legs like a bird and a long snakelike body. The Larco Museum catalogue tells us, “The feline represents the earthly plane where humans live and reproduce, but has bird legs which also link it to the upper world; it also features an elongated snake body, animal linked to the inner world.” | Copyright Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, ML600068. FIGURE 7.2

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wrapped mummies stored in high, dry places. The fabrics and their woven designs tend to be beautifully preserved, especially the inner portions of the great lengths of cloth – some over 100 feet (30 metres) long – used in the wrappings. Many of the birds cannot be identified to species beyond, for example, owls, falcons, and seabirds, but generic birds abound, often together with felines (fig. 7.4). The thing that strikes one most, however, is the number of birdlike humans or humanlike birds – birds with anthropomorphic features and humans with wings. Some of the figures remind one of what we took to be human figures, namely priests, dressed as vultures at Çatal Hüyük, especially in the technique of drawing wings; others show the insides of birds in a manner similar to that made famous by Ojibwe artist Norval Morisseau. Could such echoes be the result of mere happenstance, or are they ancient shared designs? In most early Peruvian cultures, rulers were clad in feathers and bird parts, as they were in so many cultures like the Hawaiian and Papuan. If birds were gods and rulers were personifications of gods, it makes perfect sense. We noted the European and Eurasian tendency to slowly anthropomorphize the bird gods and then to give the rulers and priests

Container featuring a double-owl chamber joined by the classic stirrup handle, Cupisnique culture, 800–200 BCE. | Copyright Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, ML015443a. FIGURE 7.3

FIGURE 7.4 Fringed textile fragment with a double-headed bird motif, Paracas culture, 1–500 CE. The head is feline and the body is human. The doubleheaded bird is in the body cavity between the head and the legs. Note the dangling trophy human heads. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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Mosaic earplugs with a bird-headed figure in gold, turquoise, and quartz, Moche culture, 200–700 CE. | Copyright Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, ML100849 and ML100850. FIGURE 7.5

FIGURE 7.6 (opposite left)

Jug with a bird warrior or winged god, Moche culture, 1–800 CE. The body, hands, and feet are human, but the figure has a bird’s face, wings, and tail. The shield also has a bird’s head and tail. | Copyright Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, ML005242. FIGURE 7.7 (opposite right)

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Painted ceramic bottle showing a deceased dignitary in ceremonial garb being carried to the tomb in an enclosed litter and escorted by birds, Moche culture, 1–800 CE. | Copyright Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, ML004115r1.

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bird features, so in the end one cannot tell whether one is looking at a humanlike bird or a birdlike human. We find the same in Peru, where bird and human are often indissolubly linked. The bird warriors of the Moche culture during the Florescent Period (1–800 CE ) present a good example of this occurrence. The Larco Museum has an exquisite pair of Moche mosaic earplugs (200–700 CE ) from the tomb of an important warrior showing a bird-headed warrior figure – god or human (fig. 7.5). Winged and armed gods existed in the culture, so if you were a warrior, why not clad yourself in the sacred, protective garb of the gods, thereby gaining some of their power (fig. 7.6)? Ritual combat between Moche warriors is thought to have been connected with human sacrifice to the gods, the battle being a means of choosing an appropriate victim. Another common theme in the Moche art of the Florescent Period is the bean race, which featured runners carrying bags of beans and sticks in their hands and wearing gold birds’ beaks. This practice may have been connected with sun worship since the bird was believed to be the only creature that could reach the sun and, therefore, was thought to invest the runner with sacred power. Just as in Old World cultures, so too in Ancient Peru do we find birds that are integrally connected to the cult of the dead and that function as psychopomps by guiding the dead into the celestial afterlife. There is a beautiful Moche painted ceramic bottle depicting an enclosed litter with the deceased inside in ceremonial garb being escorted to the tomb by birds (fig. 7.7). The funerary crowns and headdresses of rulers and priests were very often representations of birds and formed with feathers and

plumes, transforming the wearers into birds for entrance into the world of the dead. Speaking of the cult of the dead, what about vultures in ancient Peru? As expected, in ancient Peruvian culture we find theriomorphic gods, human-animal hybrid gods, and a general reverence for birds, particularly owls and waterbirds, mirroring what we found in Eurasia. But was there a corresponding vulture cult? Not surprisingly, the magnificent Andean condor, the largest of the American vultures and the largest flying bird on earth, was widely revered.2 Condors are ubiquitous in ancient Peruvian art. The rock art in the Toquepala Caves may be the oldest in Peru, dating from around 8000–6000 BCE or perhaps earlier, and among the cave drawings, we find a condor head. The textiles that were found at the pre-ceramic site of Huaca Prieta are among the earliest found in South America, some of them dating to as early as 4000 BCE .3 One very early, stunning piece (3000–2500 BCE ), found by Junius Bird in Huaca Prieta, features a

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Woven textile fragment showing a spreadwinged male condor with a snake in the stomach, Huaca Prieta, 3000–2500 BCE. Note the caruncle, or fleshy excrescence, on the upper side of the bill. | Courtesy of Division of Anthropology, 41.2/1501, American Museum of Natural History, New York.

FIGURE 7.8

FIGURE 7.9 (opposite)

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Funerary shirt, Lambayeque culture, 800–1300 CE. Each section of the pattern of this sleeveless shirt worn by the dead has two condors on top of a stylized tree. | Copyright Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, ML600141.

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spread-winged male condor, strikingly similar to the North American thunderbird motif (fig. 7.8).4 Woven into Huaca Prieta textiles, we find condor representations ranging from heads to full figures with outstretched wings. Condors are also widespread in Paracas funerary textiles (fig. 7.9). In the ceramics of the Vicus and Cupisnique cultures, both dating from the so-called Formative Period (1250–1 BCE ), we find many examples of condors in various positions. The condor and its divine counterpart, the Horrible Bird, are also well represented in the spirit world depicted in Nazca ceramics (100 BCE –700 CE ). As mentioned, there is one whole case in the Larco Museum containing just ceramic condors and other raptors. The Larco also has a wonderful Moche gold headdress (200–700 CE) in which we see two condors surrounding a feline head, again linking two of the most powerful gods in one piece. On the hook of a Moche spear-thrower is a little golden condor with lapis lazuli eyes, which seems to be busily feeding on a human corpse that is lying on its back (fig. 7.10). This spear-thrower is highly reminiscent of the famous, Upper Palaeolithic Mas d’Azil spear-thrower with a grouse on its hook, discussed in chapter 4. In the Amano Textile Museum, we have a beautiful woven condor with a human head hanging from its beak. In the Cleveland Museum of Art, there is a ceramic vessel featuring a male condor perched upon and pecking a human head (fig. 7.11). This linking of condors and human heads, which is common in the art of the period and reflects a cult of the dead, reminds us of the art of Göbekli Tepe, among other sites. In her study of the Paracas mummy-bundle textiles, Mary Frame reveals a narrative about the transformation of people who have just died

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Spear-thrower with a condor feeding on a dead human, Moche culture, 200–700 CE. | Copyright Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, ML100186. FIGURE 7.10

Ceramic vessel with a condor atop a human head, Tiwanaku culture, 400– 1000 CE. | Courtesy of Norweb Collection, 1949.558, Cleveland Museum of Art.

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FIGURE 7.11

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into ancestor spirits, both human and animal.5 The embroidered figures are deeply connected with the cult of the dead, and not surprisingly, vultures and especially condors play an important role. Condors, as we might expect, function both as defleshing agents and as helpers of the dead, but they also appear to be ancestor deities in their own right. This book is not the place to pursue a New World vulture-condor cult connected with the dead, but a student of the Eurasian Neolithic is not surprised by what we find in ancient Peruvian culture.6 And what about owls? We would expect a bird so special in Eurasian cultures to be present in the spiritual galaxy of the New World, just as the condor and vulture were. Indeed, owls feature large in ancient Peruvian religious practices, which can be seen particularly clearly in Cupisnique and Moche ceramics. An anthropomorphic owl god dressed as a warrior is a frequent figure and seems to be connected with the war god;7 he often appears as a sacrificer of captives with a knife in one hand and a human head in the other,8 and he is certainly connected with death. Elsewhere, on many Cupisnique ceramics, the owl seems to represent a link to shamanic activity and the other world;9 a Cupisnique bottle with two very unusual, matte-finish owl heads may offer an example of this connection

(fig. 7.12). There are a number of Moche effigy vessels that feature “a small, nude human figure … tied to the back of a giant owl, who is probably carrying the figure to the other world.”10 Here, we have a good example of a bird as a psychopomp leading souls to the afterlife. The association of the owl with death and the afterlife in ancient Peruvian culture reflects the role of the owl established in Eurasian cultures, as we might expect. Thus the earliest Peruvian cultures attest, as did Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures, to the same central role of birds as representatives of the sacred that we noted in the Old World, Upper Palaeolithic, and Neolithic cultures. Worship of birds came east to the Americas with the first peoples and endured in many American cultures.11 The sacredness of birds is an enduring, universal theme.

Bottle with two owl heads, Cupisnique culture, 1200–200 BCE. Note the large, black and red, circular eyes and the unfeathered heads with small bumps. The geometric designs are thought to represent a snake and a sacred mountain. | Copyright Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, ML 040330. FIGURE 7.12

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8 Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World Birds are present everywhere in Classical Greek and Roman life, thought, and art. Few cultures trump Greek culture in this respect.1 Of course, many Greek birds and bird depictions have no cult or religious value. The exquisite bluebird and partridge frescoes at Knossos, for example, may be purely decorative. As usual, however, one must not be too quick to jump to this conclusion in any particular case. For example, the lovely stylized birds on early Cycladic jugs and on later Cypriot jugs dating from 800–600 BCE appear at first glance to be purely artistic motifs and to belong only to the history of art (fig. 8.1). When looked at a second time, however, these birds can be seen to contain a large egg, a reflection of the cosmic or world egg from which the universe or its creator emerges and life begins – a common Neolithic motif featured in the mythology of a great many cultures.2 When one finds similar birds on funeral urns, one starts to suspect possible spiritual significance. The exquisite little Minoan owl pendants attached to the two sets of large gold earrings found as part of the Late Bronze Age Aegina Treasure on the island of Aegina may be purely decorative, but I would not bet on it given the history of the owl as a sacred bird (fig. 8.2). The urge to dissociate early works of art from

Terracotta jug 10.5 inches (26.8 centimetres) high with a stylized bird seemingly holding a fish in its bill, Cyprus, 750–600 BCE. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

FIGURE 8.1

griffins – front half eagle, back half lion sphinxes – head of a human, body of a lion, and wings of a bird hippogriffs – griffins with the body of a horse; Harry Potter, anyone? hippalektryons – part horse and part rooster phoenixes – birds that burn themselves up and then rise from their own ashes

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

religious meaning, although sometimes warranted, should not be yielded to lightly. Greek and Roman paganism swarms with birds and birdlike creatures, which are magical and tied to cult, ritual, and myth, such as:

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FIGURE 8.2 Earring with owl pendants, Minoan culture, 1850– 1550 BCE. | Copyright Einsamer Schütze, “Aegina Treasure 01.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

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sirens – birdlike, winged women who lure sailors to their deaths3 harpies – head of a woman, body, wings, and talons of an eaglelike bird, none more terrifying than those in the underworld in Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials (1995–2000) As we might expect, in the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000 BCE ) when the Greek myths were taking shape, the barrier between the gods, humans, and other animals was fluid and indistinct. Birds became humans and humans became birds routinely. This is clearly reflected in Ovid’s The

Metamorphoses (8 CE ), which draws on many earlier written and oral sources, which themselves descend directly from Neolithic and probably Palaeolithic oral sources. Imagine what the fireside stories were like in the Neolithic before writing, such as at Göbekli Tepe. The earlier animistic worldview is still reflected in our oldest written Greek sources, like Homer and Hesiod, and continues in our Classical texts. The core of myths tends to be conservative, and although cultural details shift, the central story remains relatively steady, as can be seen in the creation myths of nearly all peoples, so many of which share the same basic core. Thus Ovid’s The Metamorphoses presents us with a reflection of the animistic worldview inherited by the early Greeks. The Greek imagination teems with birds that connect humans with the supernatural world and reveal connections between humans and their gods. The back and forth between animal, bird, and human form in Ovid’s aptly named book pervades the entire text, and the original avian forms of the gods are far from forgotten. Ovid tells us how grieving King Cygnus left his throne to wander along the bank of the Po, wailing and sighing:

Ovid lets the crow, once a beautiful princess, tell us how she narrowly escaped being raped by Neptune. Athena, the virgin goddess, rescued her and the princess became a bird. And as I lifted up My arms to heaven I saw them grow like Shadows of whitest feathers in the air, And as I turned to toss my stole aside My feathered shoulders were a pair of wings And feathers struck their roots within my flesh, Nor could I beat my naked breasts with hands, For both had vanished.5

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

There as he walked his voice grew thin and shrill, White feathers sprouted through his hair, his neck Arched high above his collarbone and webbed Membrane grew thick between his rose-tipped fingers, Wings fell across his sides, and where his lips were Came a blunt beak, and Cycnus [sic] was a new Thing called a swan.4

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The crow, turned from white to black as punishment for reporting tales, which were none of her business, complains bitterly that she has lost her place as Athena’s (or Minerva’s) bird to a woman turned into an owl:

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But what is this to me if Nyctimene, Changed to an owl for her dark sins, has taken My place of honour at Minerva’s court? You heard what things were said of her at Lesbos – That Nyctimene shared her father’s bed? And though she is all owl she still remembers Her guilt, her lust, and in her darkness flies From sight of men and from the light of day.6

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Here, we have a story of a human to bird metamorphosis that is based on the crow’s chattering and cawing, and we are given an explanation of how the crow became black and of how the owl became Athena’s bird and acquired dark secrets. In these stories, we find the ambiguity that is commonly associated with crows and ravens in world folklore – where they are sometimes birds of darkness and evil but always knowing, all-seeing birds that little escapes. Like the trickster demigods that they so often become, they are capable of both good and evil and can help or hinder, often shooting themselves in the foot. Elsewhere in The Metamorphoses, Ovid tells stories of how crows were actually once garrulous chattering girls who dared to challenge the Muses in storytelling and lost,7 of how King Ceyx’s wife, Alcyone, became a kingfisher and brought us halcyon days,8 of how the love-struck Aesacus became a merganser,9 of how Pygmy’s queen was turned into a crane,10 of how Juno changed Antigone into a “stork, dressed in white feathers, snapping a great long yellow bill,”11 and of how Boreas, the god of the north wind, caused storms when he “raised his wings and with their beating / Clapped a great blast on the earth and tipped wide ocean; / He trailed his cloak across high-peakèd mountains, / And swept the ground.”12 A dark passage describes Medea preparing a black magic potion that includes two birds often linked with magic: she includes the “wings of the weird scritch-owl and his torn breast” and the “battered head of a crow that outlived / eight generations.”13 When Greek soldiers come to capture Anius’s daughters “with chains to weight their arms,” Bacchus saves them: “They lost their girlish looks – how, I don’t know, / But suddenly their

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

bodies grew white feathers, / And they were snow-white birds, like doves of Venus.”14 Picus, who had the temerity to spurn the witch Circe, paid the price and was turned into a woodpecker.15 Some of these stories by Ovid are about nemesis and karma, when a person gets their just desserts, others show the randomness of fate or the whim of the gods, and still others present etymologies of words or explanations of origins, but all of them illustrate the closeness of humans and birds in the Greek mind and the magical nature of the relationship. By the time the Greek myths were recorded, the gods themselves seem to have been mainly anthropomorphic, continuing and surpassing the trend that we noted in Egyptian religion away from animal gods. We have already noted the popularity in the Mycenaean period (1400–1200 BCE ) of the little, birdlike female idols with their beaked faces and arms like raised wings but with human torsos, discussed in chapter 6. But in spite of moving toward completely anthropomorphic form, the Greek gods still maintain the ability to take on animal and bird form, usually the form with which they were originally associated. That many Greek gods are intimately tied to birds is hardly surprising when you consider that at least some of them once were birds, even if by Classical times they had morphed into humans who had birds as their familiars.16 Zeus himself is usually associated with the eagle – a common association for a thunder god, from the Indian Indra and the Roman Jupiter Tonans to the thunderbirds of many North American Natives. He pursues the Titan goddess Asteria in the form of an eagle, and she takes the form of a quail to try to escape him.17 When he wishes to punish Prometheus for his good deed in giving fire to humans, it is his eagle familiar that Zeus sends to tear out Prometheus’s liver daily. It is in the form of “a flashing, warlike eagle” that the amorous Zeus abducts the beautiful young boy Ganymede to be his cupbearer – and then some, the word “catamite,” for a boy kept by a pederast, coming from the name Ganymede (fig. 8.3).18 Even though by Classical times the gods were largely imagined in human form, the image of Zeus as an eagle usurps the pictorial frame of this god so that we cannot readily summon him up as a man the way that we can, say, Michelangelo’s God in the Sistine Chapel. As the most powerful god, Zeus, although human in form, is the eagle, a bird associated with divine power since the Palaeolithic. The eagle image is widespread in Classical Greece and appears as early as 500–400 BCE on Greek coins. But lascivious old Zeus, master of duplicity, is capable of taking other bird forms when warranted. Although swans are often a symbol of purity

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Nicolas Beatrizet’s engraving The Rape of Ganymede by Zeus (1542), after Michelangelo’s chalk drawing of 1533. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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FIGURE 8.3

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and womanly beauty and perform such noble duties as pulling the chariot of Apollo, it is the sensuous, long-necked form of the swan that Zeus chooses for his rape of the unsuspecting Leda (fig. 8.4). For once, the trusty Ovid provides few details. Describing the images woven by Arachne in her contest with Athena, he simply writes of “Leda

Cornelis Bos’s engraving Leda and the Swan (1544–66), after the lost original by Michelangelo of 1520. The original was burnt for licentiousness. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

FIGURE 8.4

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

on her back beneath the swan.”19 But we know, of course, why she was beneath the swan and that the swan was Zeus. We frequently note a sexuality underlying the bird-human connection in Greek myth. The phallic nature of a swan’s neck may escape some, but the sexual core of the phallus bird is self-evident in depictions of its gooselike body and long neck ending in a penis, sometimes eyed and sometimes not, sometimes erect and sometimes not (figs 8.5a and 8.5b). It is commonly displayed on pots and vases with women or satyrs. When it is coupled with a satyr, the fundamental sexual power of the bird is emphasized. When accompanying women, the bird can be seen as a figure in subjugation to the women, who have tamed the phallus, or conversely, as a dominating male keeping guard over the women. But no matter how one interprets the phallus bird, it represents the same fundamental sexuality as all those Palaeolithic Venuses and penises. What is interesting for us is that sexuality here is embodied and displayed by an animal with a history of sacred power – the waterbird, whether goose or swan, a form that even the supremely powerful Zeus was wont on occasion to take. Here, sexuality, even more than fertility, is the common bond between human and bird, and the bond is a close one. Rather than risk drowning in Greek mythology and religion, which are so rich in birds and where birds, humans, and gods all are so tightly

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Damaged redfigured skyphos showing phallus birds, Greece, ca. 470 BCE. The side depicted here has a phallus bird with wings extended; the other side has a small phallus bird standing behind a defecating satyr and seemingly preparing for entry. Both birds are ejaculating, although that is now hard to see. | Copyright Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Edward Perry Warren, RES.08.31c. FIGURE 8.5a

FIGURE 8.5b Terracotta globular cup showing a phallus bird with spread wings among other birds, Etruria, 600–575 BCE. There is a phallus bird on each side, but the side depicted here also has a small bird perched on the phallus. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

interconnected, let us just revisit our old friend the owl as a last example of what happens to a bird deity in this milieu. The owl, as we might expect from so rich a tradition, has no one simple representation in Greek myth. We see the frightening, deathly side of the owl in the story of the informer Ascalaphus’s rightful punishment for his tale-telling. Zeus agrees to let Proserpine ascend to Heaven if she refrains from eating anything in Hades. Proserpine, as we know, ate seven

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pomegranate seeds – a deed witnessed by Ascalaphus. Did Ascalaphus shut up about this? No. The boy’s malicious gossip worked its ill Preventing Proserpina’s step to earth; Then the young queen of Erebus in rage Changed her betrayer to an obscene bird: She splashed his face with fires of Phlegethon Which gave him beak and wings and great round eyes; Unlike himself he walked in yellow feathers, Half head, half body and long crooked claws, Yet barely stirred his heavy wings that once Were arms and hands: he was that hated creature, Scritch-owl of fatal omen to all men.20

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

Here, we see the owl as a hated, “obscene” bird that is capable of dealing death to all humans. The beak, heavy wings, and long, crooked claws remind us of the features of the Mesopotamian goddess on the Burney Relief (fig. 6.10). Ascalaphus was turned into an owl and became Hades’s familiar, forever associated with the underworld and death. This owl was not a bird on whose bad side one would want to be. We see an entirely different, much more positive owl in the tradition associated with Athena and her counterpart, the Roman Minerva. Athena’s owl, to be sure, is a different species – not a screech-owl, associated with death, but a little owl, representative of wisdom and knowledge (fig. 8.6). Although the forerunner of Athena in Minoan Crete was associated with the dove, the connection between Athena and the little owl is an old one and hinted at by the gold owl, dating from 1500–1400 BCE , found in a Mycenaean tomb in Pylos (fig. 8.7).21 In Classical times, Athena’s sacred bird, the little owl, appeared on the Athenian tetradrachma silver coin (as it does on the modern 1 euro coin), popular from about 515 BCE , and the coin was simply known as an “owl.” Athena, who gave her name to Athens, is an archaic goddess with ancient roots and was once a Neolithic bird goddess. Marija Gimbutas describes her thus: “Athena, the descendant of the prehistoric Bird Goddess, is frequently associated with birds: the sea hawk, sea-gull, duck, diver bird, swallow, dove, owl, and vulture.”22 Of the later Athena, Gimbutas writes, “The Bird Goddess herself appears in the art of Ancient Greece as Athena; the bird-form has been shed but Athena is occasionally winged and the bird is her attribute.”23

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Athena as a little owl on the Athenian tetradrachma – four-drachma – silver coin, often just called a glaux (owl), 500–400 BCE (right), plus a modern 1 euro coin (left). | Copyright Bembo20, Shutterstock.com. FIGURE 8.6

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FIGURE 8.7 Gold plate cut-out with an owl in relief found in a tomb at Epano Englianos, Pylos, 1500–1400 BCE. Was this Athena’s owl? | Department of Prehistoric, Egyptian, Cypriot and Near Eastern Antiquities, NAM 7907, National Archaeological Museum, Athens, copyright Kostas Xenikakis, Archaeological Receipts Fund, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Greece.

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Desmond Morris writes that we do not really know the reason for the association between Athena and the owl,24 but I think we do. The allseeing owl goddess has ancient lineage, and Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, is simply its Classical Greek form. Mark Cocker thinks that it is the “long-standing, profound connection between one owl species and the Greek goddess of wisdom that has given rise in Western society to the (eventually) indiscriminate association of owls with intelligence.”25 I think that the opposite is more likely. It is the ancient connection between the owl and magical insight that gave rise to the owl goddess and led, in Greece, to Athena, originally an owl, who became, among other things, the goddess of wisdom, as was befitting of an owl. It would be surprising if the owl – as a powerful Palaeolithic and Neolithic divinity associated with, among other things, wisdom and arcane knowledge – had not shown up in both Mesopotamia and Greece, which are not all that far apart after all. That it did show up is another indication that bird deities almost certainly had African origins and came north with early modern humans. It is noteworthy that Athena’s owl image on the coin usually presents the same ancient profile and turned face as in Egyptian hieroglyphs and earlier Palaeolithic representations of owls like the snowy owl adults in the Trois Frères Cave and the owl silhouette in the Portel Cave. Even the figurines from Dolní Věstonice, dating from 25,000 BCE , show this configuration to a degree, as discussed in chapter 4. The owl’s seemingly magical ability to turn its head really grabbed human attention throughout the ages, starting with the owl in the Chauvet Cave.

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

As well as gracing the tetradrachm, Athena as an owl appeared elsewhere in Greek art. We see her represented in a particularly fetching little aryballos, or perfume container, from Corinth dating from about 640 BCE (fig. 8.8). But perhaps our best example is the beguiling owl cups. Skyphos in ancient Greek referred to a flagon or beaker, a drinking vessel. In fifth-century Athens, it referred specifically to ceramic drinking cups, usually with two handles projecting horizontally from the rim, often with a flanged base, usually decorated. One very popular type of ceramic skyphos was decorated with the owl of Athena and known as a glaux, from the Greek word glauks, meaning “owl,” which was derived from glaukos, meaning “gleaming,” and referred to the owl’s glaring eyes. It is used to describe the eyes of a lion. Homer frequently describes Athena as glaukoopis, meaning “with gleaming eyes.”26 There is another meaning of glaukos, which is associated with the colour pale-green or bluish-green and, when applied to the eyes, with the colour blue or grey – not the colour of a lion’s eyes, I might point out. Most translators refer to Athena as grey- or blueeyed, but I think that the original meaning of the word – certainly when applied to Athena – is owl-eyed, in reference to her knowing glare and that of the bird she once was. When Achilles first sees her in Homer’s The Iliad, written around 800–700 BCE , he recognizes her because she has frightening, flashing eyes.27 These are the eyes of an owl deity. Owl cups sometimes have one of the handles in a vertical position and feature the red-figure owl between olive sprigs from the sacred groves of Athena. The owl, as we would expect, is in profile with the head turned face on and with the large staring eyes outlined in black. These popular drinking cups helped to keep Athena’s profile high in Classical art, and many of them were found in the Acropolis, with its temples to Athena, underscoring the connection with the sacred. On a charming Corinthian cup, instead of the usual pleasing simplicity of the little owl, we find an owl with a somewhat ludicrous, crested helmet and seemingly inappropriate human arms carrying Athena’s spear and a shield, making the link to Athena as goddess of war visually manifest (fig. 8.9). Alexandre Mitchell goes so far as to consider this representation “humorous,” although I am not sure that humour was the original intent.28 Of this cup, Morris says, “Here, instead of being Athene’s owl, the bird has become the goddess herself.”29 The bird always was the goddess, I would say. By 500–400 BCE , although still capable of imagining the anthropomorphic gods as birds, and thinking of them in avian terms because of the weight of tradition passed on by their myths, at least some of the Greeks were well on the way to seeing the gods simply as reflections of humans,

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Owl oil/perfume container almost 2 inches (5 centimetres) high in the shape of an owl, Corinth, ca. 640 BCE. | Musée du Louvre, RMN–Grand Palais, Paris, copyright Hervé Lewandowski, Art Resource, New York. FIGURE 8.8

A red-figured skyphos showing a little owl in the warlike garb of Athena with a helmet, shield, and spear, Greece, 475–450 BCE. | Musée du Louvre, RMN–Grand Palais, Paris, copyright Hervé Lewandowski, Art Resource, New York.

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FIGURE 8.9

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with all their foibles and weaknesses. The myths, after all, are mainly about humans and all their various capacities, not about animals creating the earth and giving rise to human beings. The tricksters are no longer animals like the raven and the coyote but Hermes and Prometheus. From winds and storms to the sun and the moon, all have been taken over by various anthropomorphic gods. Unlike the Egyptians, who worshipped snakes, crocodiles, ibises, and the like, and later gave them human bodies but still retained the animal heads, the Greeks moved away from animal gods altogether and toward anthropomorphic ones. This movement, of course, was partly the result of the emergence of domestication and farming. As they changed from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists living in fixed settlements, the Greeks began to see themselves as ever more separate from animals and at the centre of the universe. Even as many Greek people began to live in larger settlements and cities, birds and other animals, as we have seen, continued to play a central role in people’s lives and retained a hold on the Greek imagination; they are often the vehicle used to express religious thought. Anthropomorphic the gods may be, but almost all of them are associated with particular birds or other animals, and the original animal forms of the gods can still be seen behind the new human facades. At a time when Greek philosophy and thought were celebrating reason and the intellect, the myths and art of the period reveal human

animality and the same connection to nature that we saw in the religion of early modern humans. The animal side of humans continues to ferment just under a veneer of reason. Behind the pantheon of the Greek gods, we see the existence of primitive beliefs going back through and beyond the Neolithic. The beliefs of the ancestral hunter-gatherers persist, as can be seen in the great importance of animal sacrifice, which was a Greek obsession. An animal or bird representing a god was killed by priests wearing animal masks and then eaten, and by this ritual, the power of the god was directly experienced, as in the Eucharist. We are not far from the Palaeolithic here. We are even closer to it in the Greek countryside, where a kind of dual religion existed that combined features of the old Neolithic beliefs and the newer anthropomorphic gods of the Indo-Europeans. Three miles (5 kilometres) into the countryside from Athens and Plato’s Academy, the Greek folk would still have had shrines to their various local gods, including the owl and the dove, and the old nature-based religion would have been alive and well alongside the newer beliefs.

Biblical tradition

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

The Judeo-Christian world, with its shift to monotheism, largely turned its back on the tradition of birds as sacred, sensing the pagan roots of any human-bird relationship. Still, the old animistic, Palaeolithic inheritance does manifest itself through birds under the surface of the Christian tradition. Saint Matthew is frequently depicted in Christian art as a man with wings, Saint Mark is a lion with wings, Saint Luke is a winged bull, and Saint John is an eagle. All four have wings but are humans, not angels. True, these New Testament images have roots in Ezekiel 1: 10 and Revelations 4: 7, but it is also clear that they have roots in the Neolithic and earlier. Although John is most often depicted beside an eagle, as in the book The Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany (1503–08 CE ), or under an eagle, as in the Lindisfarne Gospel (ca. 700 CE ), look at the image of him as an eagle-headed man in the eleventh-century Latin Gospel in Zagreb (fig. 8.10). Note the human body but also the long, claw-like fingers, the wings, and the odd, wing-like feet. Do we not have a direct continuation here of the pagan Neolithic gods and goddesses with human bodies and bird heads, just as we saw in Mesopotamian eagle-headed deities and in the Egyptian gods Horus and Thoth? This provenance should not surprise us. Where else would we look for Judeo-Christian roots but the Neolithic?

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Saint John as an eagle in the eleventh-century Latin Gospel in Zagreb. | Copyright unknown medieval monk, “Zagreb Gospel Book John.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

FIGURE 8.10

FIGURE 8.11 (opposite left)

Miniature pillar Shrine of the Dove Goddess, Old Palace of Knossos, Crete, Neopalatial period, ca. 1750–1500 BCE. | Courtesy of Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Archaeological Resources Fund, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Greece. FIGURE 8.12 (opposite right)

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Clay figurine of a dove goddess crowned with three doves, Karphi, Crete, 1100–1000 BCE. | Courtesy of Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Archaeological Resources Fund, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Greece.

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Animals are frequently the vehicle for the images and allegories used to make God’s thought clear in the New Testament. Not unexpectedly, most of the popular animals in pagan religion are more or less missing, like bulls, bears, and horses. The wolf and the pig take their place as the most commonly demonized animals. The two animals that are most often depicted in positive terms in the New Testament are birds (particularly the dove) and sheep (particularly the lamb) – both gentle animals toward which humans show compassion. The dove, of course, has potent roots not only in The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1800 BCE ) and the Old Testament but also in the Palaeolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze Age. It played a central role in the religion of Minoan Crete, for example, and then in Mycenaean Greece. The

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

remains of the Shrine of the Dove Goddess at Knossos, dating from the Neopalatial period (ca. 1750–1500 BCE ), contain three vertical columns, each with a dove perched on top (fig. 8.11). Whether the dove was still the actual goddess or by this time just a symbol of her presence is uncertain, but doves do feature large in shrines found all over Minoan Crete and later Mycenaean Greece, sometimes on their own, sometimes on the head of anthropomorphic goddess figurines (fig. 8.12), and sometimes just surrounding the goddess figure. A dove goddess is mentioned in the Linear B tablets found at Knossos and Pylos. Although unlikely the “Great Goddess,” as some have thought, this dove goddess was important in her own right, like the contemporary snake goddess, and was widely revered, likely as a household goddess ensuring fertility.30 The dove has always been

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known by humans for living beside human housing, for its fertility, and for its seeming amorousness. Not for nothing did the dove become the emblem of both Aphrodite and Venus – goddesses of love. Thus the dove does not appear without baggage in the gospels. Its role, however, is no longer that of a fertility symbol or even a vatic bird like the one Noah released from the ark but that of a bird of purity, gentleness, and peace. In Matthew 10: 16, Jesus charges his disciples, “Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” The divinity of the peaceful dove is clear in Jesus’s vision immediately after he emerges from the water following his baptism in Matthew 3: 16: “He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.”31 But note that Luke 3: 22 specifically says, “The Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove,” making clear we are not dealing merely with a simile.32 The Holy Ghost was a dove, not a shape-shifter like Zeus and certainly nothing like Michelangelo’s marvellous depiction of God as an older, bearded man. It should not surprise us that people of Jesus’s times perceived God in the form of a bird. The sanctity of the dove was such that it was chosen by Joseph and Mary as the appropriate sacrifice when they brought their son “to present him to the Lord.” In Luke 2: 24, they “offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.” The dove has a rich history in Christian iconography (as do many birds, real and imagined) and is frequently present in depictions of the Annunciation of the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin about her forthcoming conception, even though no dove is mentioned in the gospels in this instance (fig. 8.13). Of course, by now, the dove is no longer seen simply as a fertility symbol but also as either the agent of the Lord or the Lord himself. Rather than continue with such obvious Judeo-Christian connections with the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, let us pursue a less obvious theme here: the presence of an animistic compassion for nature, notably birds and other animals, that runs through Judeo-Christianity like an underground stream and can be found rather widely beneath the surface of Christian thought. This compassion is the true link between Christianity and the animistic thought of early modern humans. Alhough birds, especially the dove and the sparrow, have a positive role in the New Testament and play an allegorical role in Christian art, mainline Christianity is surprisingly little concerned with the welfare of birds.

El Greco’s Annunciation (1614). Note the white dove. | Copyright Fundación Banco Santander, “Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco – The Annunciation – Google Art Project.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 8.13

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

But there are Christian traditions – none of them mainstream – where birds do play the role that one might expect. In apparent contradiction to Genesis 1, where God creates the birds and other animals before humans, in Genesis 2 God makes humans first. Having finished his work with the heavens and the earth, God notes in

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verse 5 that “there was not a man to till the ground” – a situation that he speedily rectifies in verses 7–8: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. In verse 18, God realizes that “[i]t is not good that the man should be alone; I will make an help meet for him”; but before God creates her, he creates the animals in verses 19–20: And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. It is important to note that in this version God frets because Adam is lonely, and he creates the birds and other animals and brings them all to Adam so that he will not be alone. Adam was obviously pleased because he paid attention to all of them and named them. Here, we have a crucial covenant between humans and other animals. It is as though the animals are friends taken under his wing. The situation is not one of master and beast but one of mutual coexistence and even friendship, a relationship predating domestication in the Neolithic. This is the model of earthly paradise toward which humans have often aspired. It is the model to which we shall return, according to Isaiah 65: 25:

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The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock … They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.

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Humans longing for earthly paradise naturally wanted to know more about what it was really like. As in all cases where the Bible fails to provide sufficient information, apocryphal texts arose describing this paradise, some of them featuring a trip there and back by a living human. Of these texts, my favourite is the Byzantine apocalypse “The Narration of Our Father Agapios,” written sometime in the fifth to sixth centuries, which barely survives in the Greek tradition (only two manuscript copies

coming down), is unknown in the Latin tradition, but is widely copied throughout the Orthodox Slavic world, particularly Russia. This text tells us what paradise was really like, particularly what the birds were like. Father Agapios, led by an eagle, visited paradise on earth and returned to tell the tale. On his journey he came to [u]nknown places and found there various trees and various flowers blossoming and various fruits such as no one had ever seen before. In these trees were sitting birds with various plumages: some had golden plumage and others purple, some dark red and others dark blue and green, and they were adorned with different beauties and variegated plumages; others were white as snow. All their voices were different, and sitting, they would twitter to each other and sing different songs, some in a loud voice and others in a quiet voice, some in a delicate voice and song and others in a marvelous voice, for each one sang according to his station and as befit him. Their song was a great glory such as no one in this world has ever heard or will ever see.33

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

Next to a visit to Papua New Guinea, this account is as close to the birds of paradise as most of us are likely to get. The life that it depicts is worth striving for, a return to paradise not somewhere up in the sky but right here on earth – a New Jerusalem and a new Garden of Eden without strife, where “[t]hey shall not hurt nor destroy.” This paradise is a poignant manifestation of the longing of humankind for peace and spiritual consolation in nature – a return to the harmony between humans and beasts in Eden before the Fall. It is as close as we come in the Judeo-Christian tradition to the ancient tradition of ahimsa in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, featuring total respect for all living things and the avoidance of violence toward all living creatures both in thought and deed. It is highly likely that the Oriental doctrine of ahimsa influenced some Christian traditions, particularly the Christian mystics of the east such as Isaac the Syrian,34 who wrote that the true Christian “cannot bear to see … any suffering being inflicted upon a creature” and that the true Christian “experiences a kindling of the heart for all creation – for mankind, the birds, the animals, the demons, the whole creation … and whenever he thinks of them tears pour from his eyes because of the strong sympathy which possesses his heart.”35 For such Eastern mystics, God is manifest in nature and in all living creatures. It is an attractive model harking back directly to the animistic Palaeolithic.

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The first Western Christian tradition to be heavily influenced by the mystical Christian East, with its love for birds and other animals, was the Irish monastic tradition of the fifth to seventh centuries CE . Saints such as Kevin, Columban, and particularly Cuthbert were all protectors of animals. Saint Kevin, a sixth-century Irish monk, shown with his blackbird in an Irish miniature from around the ninth or tenth century, spent seven years as a hermit surrounded by birds. Seamus Heaney’s poem “St Kevin and the Blackbird” (1996) retells the story of how a blackbird made a nest in his immobile hand and raised its brood. Such was the saint’s compassion for birds that he could not bear to withdraw his hand. Sensing his great love for animals, birds would land on Saint Columban’s shoulders, a commonplace in saints’ lives to show their humility, gentleness, and love of God’s creatures. A raven that stole one of the saint’s gloves repents and returns the glove at the saint’s behest. “And do not wonder,” we are told in Life of St. Columban by the seventh-century monk Jonas, “that the beasts and birds thus obeyed the command of the man of God,” for he was often seen “calling the wild beasts and birds” and stroking them with his hand.36 Perhaps the most attractive of all these saints in the Celtic tradition was the seventh-century Northumbrian monk Saint Cuthbert, who did a stint as a hermit on the Farne Islands, a bleak set of rocky isles out in the North Sea. The common eider is also called the Cuddy duck or Saint Cuthbert’s duck because, according to legend, Saint Cuthbert became the personal protector of this species, which, at least on these islands, is still protected in his name today. It is commonly believed that Saint Cuthbert introduced laws protecting the eiders and other seabirds on the islands. While living there, Cuthbert saw local people come and steal the eggs of the eiders and take the odd bird as well, so he took action. Although not of Saint Cuthbert’s time – as there is no mention of eider ducks in the two oldest vitae – the legends of Cuthbert’s protection go back at least to the twelfth century.37 As Christian monasticism goes, Irish monasticism of the sixth to seventh centuries, with its love for and tolerance of birds and other animals, is one of the more benign forms. No wrath of God here, just love for fellow creatures and a return to the covenant forged in Genesis 2 – a close and reverent bond between humans and birds. Irish monasticism spread east all over Europe and influenced Italian monasticism in particular. The mystical reverence for creation of the Christian East via Ireland comes out powerfully in Saint Francis of Assisi

St. Francis lifted up his eyes, and saw on some trees by the wayside a great multitude of birds; and being much surprised, he said to his companions, ‘Wait for me here by the way, whilst I go and preach to my little sisters the birds’; and entering into the field, he began to preach to the birds which were on the ground, and suddenly all those also on the trees came around him, and all listened while St. Francis preached to them, and did not fly away until he had given them his blessing. And Brother Masseo related afterwards to

Sacred Birds of Greece and the Judeo-Christian World

in thirteenth-century Italy, when other monastic orders were concentrating on the accumulation of wealth and land or gearing up for the Inquisition and torture chambers. It is ironic that together with the Dominicans, the Franciscans (after Francis’s death) were major players in the Inquisition. Francis’s reverence for birds and other animals has a long lineage and roots in early Christianity. His affinity for the dove has deep roots in the New Testament, where it is the most sacred of birds. For Christians, God himself, as we have seen, is conceived as a dove. Saint Francis met a young man taking wild doves to be sold, and Francis, “who always felt a great compassion for such gentle animals,” persuaded the young man to surrender them to him. “Placing them in his bosom,” Francis addressed them, “O my little sisters the doves, so simple, so innocent, and so chaste, why did you allow yourselves to be caught?” He makes nests for them all, and they become “as familiar and as tame with St. Francis and the friars as if they had been hens brought up amongst them, nor did they ever go away until St. Francis had given them his blessing.”38 The intent of the story is to establish Saint Francis’s holiness, but we also note his deep compassion for his fellow animals – “my little sisters the doves” – a firm reflection of the covenant between humans and nature exemplified in paradise. The most famous example of Saint Francis’s love for birds, of course, is his sermon to the birds. There is biblical precedent for addressing the birds in Revelations 19: 17, where John of Patmos tells us, “And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves unto the supper of the great God.” Having received confirmation that the Lord intended him to preach, Francis began by “first ordering the swallows, who were calling, to keep silence until he had finished; and the swallows obeyed his voice.” While on his way after his sermon,

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Brother James of Massa how St. Francis went among them and even touched them with his garments, and how none of them moved.39 In his sermon, Francis tells the birds to sing God’s praises at all times because God takes care of them, provides for them, and loves them deeply.

Sacred BirdS

And as he said these words, all the birds began to open their beaks, to stretch their necks, to spread their wings, and reverently to bow their heads to the ground, endeavouring by their motions and by their songs to manifest their joy to St. Francis. And the saint rejoiced with them. He wondered to see such a multitude of birds, and was charmed with their beautiful variety, with their attention and familiarity, for all of which he devoutly gave thanks to the Creator.40

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In this episode of Francis’s vita, we hear strong echoes of the myth of an earthly paradise where humans and beasts lived in harmony and could understand each other. We note the parity between the saint and the birds and how the saint treats them as complete equals. Francis’s actions and his humility evoke a question that Jesus asks his followers in Luke 12: 24: “Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse or barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?”41 Francis’s actions make it very clear that we are not in any way better than the fowls and that it is foolish to think so; indeed, we may have much to learn from them.42 Birds and holiness are, as usual, deeply intertwined, and humans are not privileged. Although Saint Columban did go on a mission to the West Slavs, the tradition of loving animals came to medieval Russia directly from the Eastern mystics without Irish intervention, and it left a strong trace in Russian Orthodoxy, particularly in its folk variants. Saint Sergius, the patron saint of Muscovite Russia, was famous for taming fierce animals like the bear that eventually came to eat out of his hand. In “The Life of Yuliania Lazarevsky,” written in the seventeenth century, the holiness of a medieval Russian woman is made clear by the fact that little birds have no fear of her and flock around her.43 Perhaps the strongest echo of the earthly paradise theme, however, is to be found in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). In creating the figures of Father Zosima and his brother, Markel, Dostoevsky drew heavily on old, noncanonical strains of Russian religion abounding among the folk of the countryside and in certain monasteries.

In the subchapter “The Youth Who Was Elder Zosima’s Brother,”44 we see Markel, seventeen years old, become a kind of holy fool, or fool-inChrist, who comes to despise his earlier life as a mocking, free-thinking atheist who claimed “there is no such thing as God.” He falls mortally ill and undergoes a profound change during Holy Week at Easter “in the full fragrance of spring.” Zosima remembers him “gentle, smiling, and always looking cheerful despite his illness.” When his mother asks him how life can be such a joy to him, Markel answers, “Life is paradise; we all live in paradise, although we don’t want to see it. As soon as we are willing to recognize it, the whole world will become a paradise; it could happen tomorrow, any time.”45 Markel is a wise fool – a puer senex, the child with the wisdom of the aged. Violence and hatred are incomprehensible; love and compassion are all. Zosima continues, and note the time and setting:

Notice the garden image and the spring buds, the birds, and the trees. Markel becomes acutely aware that he has broken the age-old covenant between humans and nature. Symbolically, he asks the birds’ forgiveness for not having noticed them before and not having understood that God is everywhere. The message here, not without New Testament roots, is to open our eyes, remember our covenant with nature, and live accordingly, perhaps first by asking forgiveness of the birds. Never has the blame been laid on humans so squarely for breaking the covenant with nature and the bond between humans and other animals. As we shall see, this reverence for creation and this longing to resume one’s original place alongside the birds and other animals as in paradise

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The windows of my brother’s room gave onto our garden, which was full of shady old trees in which the young spring buds were swelling and the first spring birds were chirruping and singing. And as he watched and admired the little birds, he suddenly started to ask them, too, to forgive him: “God’s little birds, please forgive me, for I have sinned before you, too.” Now that was something nobody could really understand. But Markel lay there with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks. “Yes,” he explained, “I used to be surrounded by the glory of God – the birds and the trees and the fields and the sky – and I alone lived in degradation. I was the only one who was an insult to everything, and I didn’t even notice all the beauty and glory of the world.”

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would sadly fade before a harsher Christianity.46 Why did the views of the Eastern mystics, the early Irish saints, and Saint Francis never enter the mainstream of Christian thought? Why did birds lose their earlier sacred status? Whatever happened to the old holistic, animistic worldview that we had followed since the Palaeolithic? How did it get side-tracked and subverted? We shall return to these questions in part 3. In part 1, I have based my study on works produced by human beings and have looked for consistent themes throughout. This search has taken us into the realm of the artistic and the spiritual, which deeply interconnect in human culture. We have seen birds revered as sacred; worshipped as gods and idols, notably owls, vultures, and falcons; drawn on cave walls; carved in stone, bone, and antler; worn as pendants; placed as votive figurines in graves and on altars; carved as monumental temple and palace art at Göbekli Tepe and Assyria; painted on home walls at Çatal Hüyük and inside Egyptian tombs; and cast as pottery. We have also seen birds featured as major players in creation stories, myths, and sacred texts, imagined as top gods, whether Zeus as an eagle or the Holy Ghost as a dove, and cast as myriad minor deities. I hope that I have exposed and established the underpinnings of the ancient and deep connection between humans and birds and have demonstrated that from time immemorial birds have played an inordinately large role in the human psyche. It is impossible to believe that suddenly and simultaneously in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age humans living in areas as far apart as Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Greece, the Holy Land, and Peru all began independently to worship birds, bird-headed gods, and/or gods represented by birds. It seems far more likely that human traditions in all these areas simply presented different aspects of bird worship practised by the early modern humans who spread out of Africa. The reasons for the current human interest in birds go far beyond the aesthetic. We love birds because many of them are pretty, but that is not why humans relate to them so deeply. I have tried to tease out the early roots of the relationship. In part 1, we have noticed a number of reasons for human reverence for birds. Humans wanted to be on the good side of the bird spirits of valuable food species like waterbirds and grouse. Humans were in awe of migratory birds that mysteriously came and went at crucial times of the year. Birds knew the mysteries of the water, land, and air, and many were at home in all three elements. Some birds were felt to be connected to fertility, life, death, and ancestor cults. In part 2, I want to examine two additional, crucial reasons for reverence of birds: flight and song.

There is nothing better than a bird in the world. – Prince Myshkin in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (1869), part 1, ch. 6, 69

PART TWO

THE IMITATION OF BIRDS

Would that I were in the secret hiding-places of the high cliffs and that a god would make me a feathered bird among the flying flocks. – The Chorus, voicing Phaedra’s thoughts in Euripides, Hippolytus (428 BCE), 102, my translation

Oh that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away, and be at rest. – Psalm 55: 6

9 Gods as Birds: The Magic of Flight It is commonly assumed that the last shared ancestor of birds and humans lived about 300 million years ago, after which one line led to birds and flight via various feathered dinosaurs and archaeopteryx – whose small flight muscles suggest that it could not yet fly in spite of arms covered with primary and secondary flight feathers – and another to mammals, primates, and finally humans with big brains. As the “top” of a line, humans can do many things that even other primates cannot, but there are also things that other animals can do that humans cannot. What, for example, can birds do that we cannot? Fly. After splitting from our common ancestor in the early Cretaceous Period (145–115 million years ago), birds took to the air and mammals to the land, and most birds and mammals have remained in their chosen space. Flight really defines birds, even though there are a number who have lost the ability to fly and bats have also mastered it. Flight is to birds what intellect is to humans – the feature that sets them apart. Birds can break free from the confines of the earth. We humans may be brainy, but we are earthbound and just cannot fly. Of course, we can fly in aeroplanes, which are mechanically ingenious, but plane flight with engines is a mere surrogate for real, unassisted flight

A blizzard of redbilled queleas with an elephant near a watering hole. | Courtesy of Antero Topp.

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and is entirely lacking in magic. As any wingsuit flier will tell you, flight by plane does not qualify as human flight. Besides, aviation itself is still in its infancy. Watch a huge murmuration of starlings, or queleas, or sandpipers wheeling and diving wing tip to wing tip (fig. 9.1), and then imagine 30,000 jet fighters doing the same thing. We do not even fully understand how the bird on the extreme left and the one on the extreme right coordinate and move simultaneously, although according to Jennifer Ackerman, the latest theory is that “each bird is interacting with up to seven close neighbors” and making its own individual decisions according to their movements.1 For humans, flight is magical and sacred. It is miraculous and godlike. The ability to fly is perhaps the main thing that makes birds so special to us, and wings are its agent and symbol. The markers of divinity of many early gods are flight and wings. These attributes are what put them up in the sky, where the power was felt to be. Early modern humans chose their gods carefully. If one has to worship something, why not choose something with miraculous powers that humans do not have? And if one vaguely believes that there are some kind of divine powers up in the sky, why not worship birds, which spend a lot of time up there, where humans cannot go, and are quite at home in the

heavens? What could be more natural than imagining the first celestial weather gods as birds – the fierce-eyed, high-soaring eagle, for example, as the thunder god throwing bolts from on high. If the dark holds terrors for you because you cannot see what is moving around out there, why not revere something that fearlessly navigates the night sky like the owl? If visceral fears about death haunt you, why not revere the vulture as the god that could consume you and take you up to your afterlife in the sky? To go anywhere on foot as a human takes long days of arduous trekking, but birds just up and disappear into the sky. Sometimes they disappear for half a year before magically reappearing. Where do they go? Do they hibernate in the mud, as Aristotle thought? So many unanswered questions. Birds were mysterious beings – still are, actually. We still do not know where some birds go in migration. So a main reason for seeing birds as sacred was their ability to fly, and this ability was symbolized by wings. It also explains why there was no single bird deity. Many different birds were revered. Of these sacred birds, some were beautiful and some not, some were vital sources of food and some not, some sang beautifully whereas others did not, but they all had one thing in common – wings. Not for nothing do we find those disarticulated, ungnawed, avian wing bones in Neolithic middens.

flight worship Bird flight has been revered from time immemorial. We still find a reflection of this ancient belief at the beginning of the creation myth in Genesis 1: 1–2: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

Gods as Birds

The verb “moved” is interesting here. The same Hebrew verb stem appears in Deuteronomy 32: 11, where it applies to an eagle spreading her wings and fluttering above her young. The Complete Jewish Bible translates the verb in Genesis 1: 2 as “was hovering,”2 a meaning that it still has in modern Hebrew. The Greek translators rendered the verb as ἐπεφέρετο, which literally means “carried itself ” but could also be translated as “hovered” or even “flew.” The image is clearly that of a bird, probably a seabird. God as albatross? Think, for example, of the wandering albatross, the longest-

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FIGURE 9.2 A wandering albatross over the chaos of troubled waters. | Copyright Mike Hill, Stone Collection, via Getty Images.

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winged bird in the world (fig. 9.2); as Tim Low points out, “[w]ind over cold water is its medium.”3 An albatross can go for years without touching land. Seabirds certainly hover over the face of the water, and the hovering, avian spirit in Genesis might not even be an image – as the Genesis text does not say that the spirit hovered or moved like a bird but “was hovering upon the face of the waters.” Do we not have here a vestige of a powerful bird god? Psalm 29: 2–3 echoes this suggestion: “Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. The voice of the Lord is upon the waters … the Lord is upon many waters.” In the older tradition that the original Jewish authors inherited and drew upon, the gods often were birds. Siberian creation myths resemble the Jewish story in the depiction of their god as a bird. In the creation myth of the Buriats around Lake Baikal, the Great Spirit was moving over the waters when he saw a diving bird and asked him to dive down and bring him back earth and clay, which the bird did, and the Great Spirit created land from it. In the creation myth

Gods as Birds

of the Ostiaks of the Yenisei River region, “The Great Shaman Doh … was hovering over the waters with a company of swans, loons, and other waterfowl, finding nowhere to come down and rest, when he asked one of his diving birds to plunge and fetch a bit of earth from the bottom. The bird dove twice before it brought up even a grain; yet the Great Shaman Doh was able to make of this bit of mud an island in the sea.”4 In both stories, the Great Spirit or Great Shaman is flying over water as a bird and asks other waterbirds to assist him in the creation of the earth. The link between birds, flight, and creation in both stories is manifest. Birds, as we know, were often not merely like gods; sometimes they were gods. Also, many nonavian gods were imagined to be like birds and given the birdlike ability to fly; this made them divine. You put wings on old gods like bulls, lions, and snakes to keep them sacred. The same was true for gods in human form. When you slowly begin to anthropomorphize the gods and to imagine them as more and more human in form, what do you do to make them sacred and more than merely human? You associate them with birds and give them wings. We saw that in Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age, some deities were already imagined with human bodies but still retained eagle heads (fig. 6.9), whereas others, like the goddess in the Burney Relief (fig. 6.10), had big wings and bird feet. Bird-human hybrid gods were common. We also found such hybrids in Egypt in prominent gods like Horus and Thoth, with their falcon and ibis heads respectively on perfect human bodies. As the gods became more and more like humans, the bird features had to be retained in order to maintain the godlike and magical aspect. Wings, in particular, function widely as markers of divinity and the magical. In his second speech in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus (ca. 370 BCE ), referring to the soul’s wings, Socrates says, “The natural property of the wing is to raise that which is heavy and carry it aloft to the region where the gods dwell; and more than any other bodily part it shares in the divine nature, which is fair, wise and good, and possessed of all other such excellences.”5 On a Greek bell krater (or vase) dating from 500–400 BCE , there is a picture of a wheeled and winged magical chariot; it is clearly the wings that make it magical (fig. 9.3). We saw that the Mesopotamian Lamassu, a widespread protective spirit that guarded buildings, had the body of a bull (or sometimes a lion), the head of a human, and the wings of a bird, and the Egyptian Sphinx had the head of a human, the body of a lion, and often wings, especially in the Near Eastern and Greek versions. Cherubim – which only later, in Renaiassance times, became winged children through confusion with

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Red-figured bell krater showing a winged and wheeled magical chariot bearing a wreathed youth, 470–450 BCE. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London.

FIGURE 9.3

FIGURE 9.4 (opposite)

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Fragment of a red-figured krater showing a depiction of Pegasus attributed to the Painter of the Dublin Situlae, ca. 350 BCE. | Copyright Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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putti – are invariably winged creatures in Hebrew tradition and originally were much like sphinxes, having a lion’s body and a human head, although later they have feet and hands with an animal body. The griffin, with the body, tail, and hind legs of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, was a common magical creature in early post-Neolithic Egypt, Greece, Persia, and the Levant. Is the horse not magical enough for you anymore? Put wings on him, as with hippogriffs, unicorns, and Pegasus (fig. 9.4). The winged horse is a real survivor in world folklore. You could put wings on any kind of a supernatural being that needed more power. Humans assumed that the gods whom they imagined in fully human form could still revert at whim to the birds that they once were (e.g., Zeus as eagle or swan), which were kind of like alter egos. Many of the Greek gods and goddesses were imagined only in human form but with wings like Hermes or Eros. As Pisthetairos puts it in Aristophanes’s The Birds (414 BCE ), “Hermes is a god, isn’t he? / But he goes flapping around on wings. And so do loads of gods.”6 Hermes/Mercury is a god who travels freely back and forth between the heavens and earth, a messenger of the gods; he has winged sandals and a winged helmet. He plays the same role

as the birds themselves, who bring divine knowledge to mortals. Eros/ Cupid had to have wings; it is extremely difficult to swan around the sky visiting young lovers if you do not have wings. Wings are the marker of divinity. Greek goddesses are routinely winged in art. Let me further my case about wings as the marker of divinity with angels – messengers of the gods (from aggelos, meaning “messenger” in Greek). Do angels have wings? Bet you said yes. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines an angel as a messenger of God “in human form with wings.” But actually, they do not have wings. Or at least only two types of angels do – seraphim7 and cherubim8 – and they bear no resemblance to humans. Wings are a later development for most angels. Angels in the Bible are described ambiguously but never with wings. Even when it is clear that a visitor is an angel, as in Matthew 28: 2, when the angel of the Lord is described – “His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow” – there is no mention of wings. And usually angels, even the angel of the Lord, are quite unrecognizable and indistinguishable from humans. In Judges 13: 3–21, when the angel of the Lord visits Manoah’s wife, she does not recognize him as an angel but simply as “a man of God.” When Manoah himself then meets the angel, he asks him, “Art thou the man that spakest unto the woman?” It is only when the angel of the Lord ascends the flame of the altar, where Manoah is busy sacrificing

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a kid to the Lord, that he and his wife catch on. If the angel of the Lord had sported two great wings, Manoah would have caught on much earlier. In chapter 7 of his The Life and Miracles of St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindesfarne, written in the early eighth century, the Venerable Bede describes how Saint Cuthbert entertained an angel without knowing it. Cuthbert thought that he was entertaining a young person “whom he considered to be a man.” After leaving the young man with food, Cuthbert returns to find him gone, but there are no tracks in the fresh snow. Noticing a sweet odour and finding three unearthly loaves of bread, Cuthbert realizes that he has entertained an angel.9 Leo Tolstoy plays on this motif in his famous story “What Men Live By” (1885). The poor cobbler Simon and his wife, Matryona, are visited by an angel, Michael, sent to earth by God, and even though the angel ends up living with them, until the end of the story they have no idea that Michael is an angel because he appears entirely human. And since Simon first sees him naked and destitute, there can be no question of cleverly folded, concealed wings. Tolstoy is simply following biblical precedent. This winglessness put Christian artists in a bind. If you were illustrating angels anthropomorphically, how could you make it clear that the human form you were presenting was holy and superhuman? You could resort to a halo, but then that was used also for saints and holy men. If you really wanted to make your figure holy, you put wings on it! You called on that atavistic belief in the sacredness of birds and made your angels winged. From the fourth century onward, angels and archangels usually have wings in Christian iconography. In his third homily in On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, written in the fourth century, John Chrysostom explains the real purpose of angels’ wings: “Gabriel is shown as flying not because angels have wings but so that you may know that he comes to human beings from places which are lofty and from a way of life which is spent on high. Certainly in the case of the Angels and Archangels, their wings show no more than the loftiness of their nature. The wings, then, reveal the lofty natures of the powers above.”10 Chrysostom, of course, strives to make it clear that the wings have nothing to do with pagan beliefs in the sanctity of birds. By the time of the Qur’an in the seventh century, as we are told in surah 35, verse 1, wings were normal: “All praise to God, the maker of the heavens and the earth, who made the angels messengers with wings, two or three or four [pairs].” The Hebrews knew all about celestial beings with more than two wings. Isaiah 6: 2 describes seraphim, who were guardians of the heavenly throne, as follows: “Above it stood the serafims: each one

had six wings; with twain he covered his face; and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.” Can you imagine the archangels Gabriel and Michael in those marvellous Russian icons without wings (fig. 9.5)? How would they fight those great aerial battles depicted by John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667) without wings? Even fallen angels, like Dante’s Satan, have wings, which Dante uses to good advantage to suggest his fearsome power. When Virgil and Dante enter the frozen core of hell in The Inferno (1320) and finally see the monstrous, three-headed Satan, the poet notes his massive wings: Under each head two wings rose terribly, Their span proportioned to so gross a bird: I never saw such sails upon the sea. They were not feathers – their texture and their form Were like a bat’s wings – and he beat them so That three winds blew from him in one great storm.11 So, when the human form is presented as holy, this status is often signalled by wings. Wings allow holy creatures like angels, seraphim, and cherubim to fly like those other divine beings – birds. It should not surprise us that it is an association with birds – traditionally sacred beings – that denotes the supernatural and divine. As Joseph Campbell puts it, “Angels are but modified birds.”12 We also find anthropomorphic gods flying without wings; here, it is the act of flight itself that bestows holiness – the ability to get oneself closer to the heavens. Many gods, for example, can apparate, or teleport, moving themselves about by paranormal means. Here, we are talking about magical movement – the movement of a body from one place to another instantaneously and without laboured flight. Although this ability has been made popular by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books (1997– 2007) – where Harry has to learn not just how to ride a quiddich stick but also how to apparate if he wants to become a real magus – and by time travel in science fiction, it has been around for a long time. In Acts 1: 9–11, Paul tells the story of the ascension of Jesus, where forty days after the resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples and spoke to them, Gods as Birds

and when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight. And while

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Russian icon of the archangel Michael, Yaroslavl, late 1200s. | Copyright Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, “Saint Michael (Yaroslavl, 13th c., GTG).jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

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FIGURE 9.5

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they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?

Well, we know why they stood gazing up into heaven. In Acts 1: 12, we are told that the apostles had just seen Jesus levitate up into the sky from Bethany on the Mount of Olives and disappear through the clouds.13 This account sets the pattern for many similar levitations in Christian lore. The first to follow was Jesus’s mother, Mary. The Assumption or Dormition of the Virgin Mary – her body rising up into the sky – is perhaps not an example of true levitation since the ascent was powered by angels, but it establishes her more-than-human status. In Acts 8: 39, however, we have a good example of real teleporting – flight without wings – when Philip, after baptizing the eunuch, disappears: “And when they were come out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more.” Philip turns up in the next verse at Azotus, which is about 25 miles (40 kilometres) away. Thus we have a strong pattern set in the New Testament of bodies moving through the air in a manner that establishes their holiness. This becomes something of a commonplace in saints’ lives; for example, Francis of Assisi, Theresa of Avila, and Seraphim of Sarov, the latter levitating in front of numerous witnesses,14 all apparated. My favourite example is Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603–63) – a frequent flier (fig. 9.6):

FIGURE 9.6 (overleaf left)

Ludovico Mazzanti’s St. Joseph of Cupertino, eighteenth century. Note that he has no wings. | Copyright Basilica di San Giuseppe da Copertino, Osimo, Italy, “San Giuseppe da Copertino si eleva in volo alla vista della Basilica di Loreto.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 9.7 (overleaf right)

“The Death of Simon Magus” in Hartmann Schedel’s The Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). | “Death of Simon Magus.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

A witness describes his levitation as follows: “he rose into space, and, from the middle of the church, flew like a bird onto the high altar, where he embraced the tabernacle … Sometimes, too, he was seen to fly to the altar of St. Francis and of the Virgin of the Grotello” … Another time he flew into an olive tree, “and he remained kneeling for half an hour on a branch which was seen to sway as if a bird had perched on it.” In another ecstasy he flew, about seven feet above the ground, to an almond tree a hundred feet away.15

Gods as Birds

Some of Joseph’s religious superiors found this behaviour disconcerting. Teleporting is common in Indigenous beliefs, such as those connected with the Shaking Tent rite in the Cree and Ojibwe cultures. In his chapter on “Magical Flight,” Mircea Eliade points out that “Siberian, Eskimo, and North American shamans fly.”16 Shamans teleport, transporting themselves to far-away places and bringing back sought-after knowledge. The connection with birds here is not just implied but explicit. Since shamans fly in their trances, sometimes to the upper world, the bird is a natural familiar to assist in flight. To this day, Siberian shamans dress in feathered costumes as birds and are thought to take the form of birds when escorting the dead to the world above. Some shamans “are believed to

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have been conceived by their mothers from the descent of a bird,”17 as the Virgin Mary was by the dove and Helen of Troy by the swan. Flight becomes the maker or breaker for humans trying to be more than human, whether saints, sorcerers, witches, yogis, fakirs, or alchemists. Simon Magus sets the pattern. In Acts 8: 9, we learn that before his baptism by the apostle Philip, Simon “used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one.” Simon embraced Christianity, seeing little difference between it and the magic that he already practised. He was especially renowned for his ability to levitate. According to the Acts of Peter, written in the second century, Simon once levitated in front of a crowd in Rome, but when Peter asked Jesus Christ to put a stop to this flying, Simon crashed back to earth and badly broke his legs in three places, as Peter had specifically requested

(fig. 9.7).18 Compared to Icarus, Simon got off rather lightly here. In the version found in the Acts of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, written in the fourth century, Simon, to confound Peter and Paul publicly, flies from a high wooden tower constructed by the emperor Nero. All goes rather well at first, until Peter castigates the angels of Satan who were supporting Simon, and Simon immediately crashes, killing himself, and is “divided into four parts” by the fall.19 We are told that only the truly gifted can apparate and levitate as Jesus does while walking on water in Matthew 14: 22–33. However, saints, sorcerers, and witches have routinely flown on various objects. The Russian archbishop John of Novgorod flew to Jerusalem on the back of a devil. In Nikolai Gogol’s story “Christmas Eve” (1832), the pious blacksmith Vakula rides on a devil’s back all the way to Saint Petersburg to meet the tsarina. Witches ride everything from broomsticks to flying pigs – the latter motif brilliantly visited by Mikhail Bulgakov in his immortal novel The Master and Margarita (1967) when Margarita and her maid ride to the Devil’s ball. Flying like birds is both divine and magical, and it demonstrates supernatural power.

flight envy

Gods as Birds

Humans have long desperately wanted to fly like birds. This pursuit is part of the incredibly powerful, Promethean drive to acquire the power of the gods. Flight could truly make us godlike and give us divine power. Otherwise, we are poor, heavy-boned, lumbering creatures entirely subject to the iron laws of gravity. Scott Weidensaul refers to us as “stodgy, rooted creatures.”20 We cannot even climb trees decently anymore. Oh, we can still brachiate – “move by using the arms to swing from branch to branch”21 – but not very well, and we can hang by one arm but not for long. Try going against a gibbon for a quick hundred-yard dash through the treetops, and you will get my point. Brachiation in its most developed form is a thing of beauty as near to flying as we can get without wings. Dudley Young observes that gibbons “fling themselves from branch to branch with such speed and agility that they seem to be flying. Here is grace and mastery at play, as never before or since: the dream of becoming a bird (our oldest dream?) never so nearly realized.”22 “Ah, but we can jump,” you say. True, but the world record is about 8 feet (2.44 metres) off the ground. No matter how hard we try – and we try continually – we cannot get much higher under our own steam. With a pole, we can vault up about 20 feet (6 metres) while birds passing

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overhead look down in amazement and chuckle. There is nothing particularly godlike about seeing a pole-vaulter crash back to earth after a marvellous jump. For most of us, apparating is beyond our control, flying broomsticks are hard to come by, and no pigs have wings. Flying carpets are nowhere to be found. So what is an earthbound human to do when consumed by flight envy and dying to appropriate some of that enviable, sacred power? How can one break the bonds of gravity and fly like the birds and gods? Shamans, of course, have drug- or trance-induced flight, but no one sees them actually leave the ground. The Tower of Babel notwithstanding, pillar-sitting saints also become holier by being physically closer to God on top of their pillar, but they too do not actually lift off anywhere. It has long occurred to humans, however, that if one could don some kind of wings, then one could fly and become like a god, smashing the shackles that bind us to earth. Long have we had this dream! Wings! Oh, if only we humans had them, we too could fly and be divine and attain superpower or knowledge! The birds in the chorus of Aristophanes’s The Birds tell the humans, “Friends, you haven’t really lived till you’ve tried a set of FEATHERS ! / … Imagine yourselves with a pair of wings! / The sheer joy of it.”23 We see here the age-old flight envy and desire to be birds – a desire reflected elsewhere in Greek literature. As William Arrowsmith writes, “In play after play of Euripides, for instance, chorus and characters alike, when confronted by the anguish of tragic existence, cry out their longing to escape, to be a bird, a fact of which Aristophanes makes extensive use, shaping his play [The Birds] around the symptomatic mortal infatuation with the birds.”24 Referring to bird migration, Weidensaul writes, “Earthbound, we watch creatures whose lives are spent on the wind. It leaves us awestruck, wishing that we, too, had wings.”25 Many humans have imagined themselves with a pair of wings and in flight like birds. Most humans have dreams or nightmares about flying. Flight dreams are also common in the literary and mythological imagination. Although he did not use actual wings, the Chinese emperor Shun (2294–2184 BCE ) became “the first flyer recorded in history” and the first person “who made a successful descent in a parachute.”26 Shun used two large, conical, reed hats to fly down from the burning roof of a granary. Shun, of course, is legendary, but he is the earliest example of a birdman, which is a very familiar concept in Chinese mythology, where heavenly flights, winged chariots, and winged genies abound.27

Marc Chagall’s The Fall of Icarus (1974–77). | Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, copyright Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) and Société des Auteurs dans les Arts Graphiques et Plastiques (ADAGP) 2020, Chagall , and copyright Centre National des Arts du Cirque (CNAC)/Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM)/RMN–Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York. FIGURE 9.8

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Gods as Birds

Our earliest Western myths reveal humans’ insatiable desire to usurp the power of the gods and fly. Perhaps the best-known example is the Greek story of Daedalus and Icarus. In Ovid’s reworking of the myth in The Metamorphoses (8 CE ), flight is something not given to man. When the fisherman, the shepherd, and the dazed farmer, leaning on his plough, look up and see Daedalus and Icarus flying through the sky, they take them for gods and stand still in wonder. The power of flight makes the gods superhuman, and if any humans were to fly, they too would be godlike or even gods. What more could humans aspire to? But this aspiration is punished harshly. The gods do not take lightly to sharing their power. The wax fastening Icarus’s wings melts when he gets too near the sun, and he plunges to his death in the sea (fig. 9.8). The gods are envious and spiteful, although this disposition has not been enough to make humans desist. Flight envy is a powerful urge not to be denied.

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FIGURE 9.9 King Kay Kavus aloft on his eagle-powered throne, from a Persian manuscript of Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (ca. 977–1010), illustrated ca. 1674. Note the four legs of lamb. | Copyright Princeton University Library, New Jersey, Ms. 58 G, fol. 78, verso, “KavoosAir.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

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A popular theme in Indian and Near Eastern mythology is the birdassisted, celestial flight of thrones and the flight of kings. Indian rulers and deities routinely roam the skies in all manner of bejewelled thrones and flying contraptions throughout Indian history. One ancient Near Eastern story with roots in early Mesopotamian legend is best known in versions told of three different kings: the mythical King Kay Kavus of Persia, King Nimrud of Babylon, and Alexander the Great. The idea of the story is that if you cannot get your own wings, use birds. The best-known version of the story of King Kay Kavus can be found in the poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (977–1010 CE ). Kay Kavus is said to have ruled Persia for some 150 years from about 600–450 BCE . He was quite satisfied with himself as the ruler of a large kingdom until a div, or a djinn, or a devious djinn told him that any ruler worth his salt would rule not just the land but the sky as well. Kay Kavus gave orders to acquire a whole bunch of golden eagles and to determine which were the four strongest and fiercest and to feed them all winter and strengthen them on a special regimen. Then he gave orders for a special light-weight throne to be built, and he commanded that the throne be attached firmly to a square board platform. Next, the good Kay Kavus ordered that four perches, each with a golden chain, be attached to the four corners and that four high poles be placed vertically above each perch, the whole crowned with a canopy. He then ordered the throne platform to be brought out and placed in the centre of the main palace courtyard. The four famished eagles were brought forth and chained to the four perches. King Kay Kavus then sat on the throne, and four large, bloody joints of fresh lamb were fastened to the four poles. The famished eagles began to flap in a vain attempt to reach the mutton, and lo and behold, the throne slowly but surely began to rise up into the air (fig. 9.9). All went well up there until the eagles flagged and the whole thing crashed to the ground. Kay Kavus survived, although only just, but did not become godlike and acquire the secrets of the heavens for his efforts.28 The Babylonian king Nimrud, described in Genesis 10: 8 as “a mighty one in the earth,” also took to the skies. This is the king who, in a number of nonbiblical sources, is linked with the Tower of Babel, itself an attempt to “reach unto heaven.”29 Apparently, after the tower was laid low, Nimrud tried again for the heavens. Legend has him flying about in the sky trying to destroy his divine enemy, and in one version he tries to take heaven by storm in a bird-driven chariot. In a version similar to the Kay Kavus story, he ascends in a chest driven by four hungry eagles trying to get a piece of meat and crashes violently, although like Kavus, he is not killed.

In the Alexander Romance, composed sometime before 338 CE , Alexander the Great flies around the sky in a chariot or cage propelled by two starving griffins or two birds that are trying to reach a slab of meat dangling from a spear in front of them. In all three stories, we have a king without godlike power over nature seeking to usurp some of the power of the gods and attempting to fly up into the heavens. Here, we see once again humans trying to be more than merely human by conquering nature. If flight is divine, then it will bestow divinity on humans – if only.30 The theme of bird-assisted flight has been revisited often in literature and art. Perhaps the archetype for these stories is the flight of the powerful Indian god Vishnu, who is routinely described travelling on the back of Garuda, ruler of the birds, a huge celestial bird in human form with

FIGURE 9.10 A white-ground kylix (or drinking cup) showing Aphrodite riding side-saddle on a flying goose, ca. 460 BCE. Note the exquisite detail in the feathering. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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FIGURE 9.11 A cluster balloonist aloft under his coloured balloons, 2005. | Copyright omnibus, “Cluster Ballooning.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

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wings and an eagle’s beak. The Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, is shown flying on a goose on a Greek drinking cup dating from about 460 BCE (fig. 9.10). The seventeenth-century English bishop Francis Godwin wrote The Man in the Moone, or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger (1638), where Gonsales, abandoned on an island (like Daedalus), trains a large flock of swans, called gansas, to carry him aloft and eventually to the moon. Godwin’s book had many imitators, one being the immortal A Voyage to Cacklogallinia, published in 1727 under a pseudonym by Captain Samuel Brunt, also featuring a voyage to the moon, along with an island inhabited by huge, six-foot-tall, talking chickens living in a well-organized society. “I was as much surprised to hear Fowls speak, as they were to see such a Monster as I appeared to be,” says Brunt.31 It is not long before the hero is borne aloft by two of the fowl, who “took Wing together, and each of them laying hold on an Arm, lifted me about Thirty Foot from the Ground, and in four hours, alighted about a Quarter of a Mile distant from a very large Town.”32 Bird-assisted flight, although constantly dreamt of, has not turned out to be what it was cracked up to be. It is not the answer to humankind’s urge to fly and aspiration to the divine. You do not hear much about eagle-powered thrones these days. Nonetheless, taking off from earth and flying in a chair still seems to be in people’s minds (fig. 9.11). On 5 July 2015, recalling the original, oft-imitated flight of Lawnchair Larry Walters in 1982, “[a] Calgary man got more than he bargained for when he flew over the city in a lawn chair attached to [more than 100] helium balloons” – marvellous, multicoloured balloons at that. He took off more quickly than intended and was out of sight in the clouds in ten seconds. He planned to land in the middle of the Calgary Stampede but was quickly blown way off course over the city by fierce winds and had to parachute to safety.33 He was lucky. Kay Kavus did not have a parachute – but he would have understood. Sadly, the Calgary constabulary did not. But recall Icarus: he got off the ground under his own steam on his own wings. Could we not go back and build on his example? For thousands of years, humans have attempted just that; the powerful urge to shatter the bonds of earth by winged human flight still manifests itself on a regular basis. Note that we are not talking here about flight in planes or about flying among the birds in ultralights, or balloons, or gliders, or even hang gliders. I am talking about humans regularly strapping on wings, Icaruslike, and leaping off heights to soar like birds – or not to soar, as the case may be. These people are called wingsuit fliers. One adds surface area to one’s body under one’s arms and perhaps between one’s legs by donning

Gods as Birds

some kind of wings or wingsuit and then jumps out into space from a sufficiently lofty height. There are a number of written accounts of such human flight using bird wings. One of the earliest is Lucian of Samosata’s second-century satire Icaromenippus: An Aerial Expedition, in which the hero, Menippus, makes a series of flights to Olympus, where he speaks with Zeus, and even flies to the moon. Of interest to us is the wing choice and technique, which eschewed the wax that had betrayed Icarus: “It was pretty clear that I could not possibly develop feathers of my own. But if I were to wear vulture’s or eagle’s wings – the only kinds equal to a man’s weight – I might perhaps succeed. I caught the birds, and effectually amputated the eagle’s right, and the vulture’s left wing. These I fastened together, attached them to my shoulders with broad thick straps, and provided grips for my hands near the end of the quill-feathers.”34 Lucian tells us that this method worked a treat, but the account is fiction and intended to be such. Let us turn our attention to the history, or what purports to be the history, of humans trying to be like birds. Our earliest recorded, human-powered flights are historically murky and have mythical overtones like the flights of Daedalus and Icarus. There are many. Perhaps my favourite is the flight of Bladud, king of the Britons, sometime between 900 and 800 BCE , or possibly at another time, the sources being inexact on this detail.35 King Bladud’s real claim to fame was his attempted flight at what is now London. It was first recorded by the not terribly reliable Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of Kings of Britain, written in the twelfth century: “He never rested from performing wonders until, making himself wings, he attempted to fly through the upper sky, and fell onto the Temple of Apollo in Trinovantum [London], being smashed into many pieces.”36 The only problem with Bladud is that he is a legendary king; he did not exist. The Roman historian Suetonius’s account of the flight of an actor playing the role of Icarus at one of the emperor Nero’s feasts is also dubious. The actor is said to have attempted a death-defying flight with feathered wings, only sadly to find that death was not about to be defied. If this flight attempt did indeed happen, I doubt that it spoiled Nero’s appetite, even though the actor is said to have crashed very near Nero and covered him with blood. But the flight sounds apocryphal, even though recorded by Suetonius. Berthold Laufer seems to accept that it happened but disdainfully dismisses it as a mere “stage disaster,” not flight.37 Apparently – there again being no hard, historical data – in 852 CE a moor named Armen Firman jumped off a tower in Cordova wearing

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a wing-like garment and survived, although injured. He and Abbas Ibn Firnas (810–887), who made a dramatic attempt at flight in 875, may be one and the same. According to the seventeenth-century historian Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari, who is our only real source but wrote seven or eight centuries after the fact and drew on unknown sources, Ibn Firnas tried to fly: “He covered himself with feathers … attached a couple of wings to his body, and, getting on an eminence, flung himself down into the air, when, according to the testimony of several trustworthy writers who witnessed the performance, he flew a considerable distance, as if he had been a bird, but, in alighting again on the same place whence he had started, his back was very much hurt, for not knowing that birds when they alight come down upon their tails, he forgot to provide himself with one.”38 The pattern of partially successful flight with resulting injuries is established here. The next such flight we know of involves an English Benedictine monk named Eilmer of Malmesbury, who dove off the tower of Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire in about 1010, according to the single source, the Gesta Regum Anglorum (The Deeds of English Kings) by William of Malmesbury, a monk of the same abbey in the twelfth century. William tells us: “He had by some means, I scarcely know what, fastened wings to his hands and feet so that, mistaking fable for truth, he might fly like Daedalus, and, collecting the breeze upon the summit of a tower, flew for more than a furlong. But, agitated by the violence of the wind and the swirling of air, as well as by the awareness of his rashness, he fell, broke both his legs and was lame ever after. He himself used to say that the cause of his failure was his forgetting to put a tail on the back part.”39 Eilmer here managed a decent distance – about 220 yards (201 metres) – but like Ibn Firnas, came down rather precipitately and hurt himself badly. Again like Ibn Firnas, he believed that he should have made himself a tail. His abbot, for some reason, forbade any further attempts.40 Lynn Townsend White Jr accepts as fact the 1507 flight of the Italian Giovanni Damiani, aka John Damian, a favourite of King James IV of Scotland, who “garbed himself in wings made of feathers, took flight from the walls of Stirling Castle, plummeted, and broke his leg.”41 Again the legs. Damiani attributed his failure to the use of chicken feathers “since hens have more affinity for scratching in dunghills than for soaring to the heavens.”42 According to Laufer, this story was first recorded by Bishop John Lesley in 1578 in his History of Scotland – not exactly contemporary.43 In the seventeenth century, during the sultanate of Murad IV, an Ottoman named Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi is said to have made a phenomenal

Gods as Birds

flight on bird wings. “First, he practiced by flying over the pulpit of Okmeydani eight or nine times with eagle wings, using the force of the wind. Then … he flew from the very top of the Galata Tower (in contemporary Karaköy) and landed in the Doğancilar Square in Üsküdar, with the help of the south-west wind.”44 This brief account appears in our only contemporary historical source, a huge ten-volume work by one Evilyâ Çelebi, an eyewitness. It should be noted that the tower and the square are on opposite sides of the Bosphorus and that Çelebi’s flight would have been over 2 miles (3 kilometres)! It is touted as the first intercontinental flight! One of Istanbul’s three airports is named after him. All of these fliers from Icarus on have their fervent believers.45 I must be some kind of skeptic or cynic. I even have my doubts about Simon Magus’s flight! However, and this is the main point, regardless of whether or not any of these flights are actually historical, the various accounts illustrate the tenacity of the idea of human flight with wings. It was much on the human mind – a real obsession with flight. People really wanted to be able to fly like birds and usurp powers that humans were not given; they still do. Flight envy was no passing fancy but a constant and continuing human fixation. Such fliers were still hard at it in the twentieth century, as they are today, only now we have real documentation. We cannot begin to examine them all here. Franz Reichelt, the Flying Tailor, donned a proto-wingsuit, Icarus-style, and leapt from the Eiffel Tower on 4 February 1912 (fig. 9.12). The problem was that his wingsuit malfunctioned, and he went straight down headfirst, making a considerable hole in the ground even though it was frozen.46 The American Clements Sohn is among the more famous fliers. After many successful flights, he made a leap at Gatwick Aerodrome and was badly injured when he crashed into a taxi upon landing. Even this attempt was a success compared to his final jump in 1937 in France from a high-flying glider before 100,000 people, when his emergency parachutes did not open at all. Sohn was twenty-six. From what I can see, there are few wingsuit fliers on old-age pensions. The Frenchman Léo Valentin was no exception (fig. 9.13). He experimented, sometimes successfully, with various wings made of wood and canvas, but when he jumped out of a plane at 9,000 feet (2,743 metres) on 21 May 1956 at a huge airshow in Liverpool, he damaged one of his wings while leaving the plane and immediately plunged to his death when his parachute and its backup failed to deploy. He was thirty-seven.

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Franz Reichelt, the Flying Tailor, in his flying suit, 1912. | Copyright GL Archive, Alamy Stock Photo. FIGURE 9.12

FIGURE 9.13 Léo Valentin in one of his flying suits, mid1950s. | Copyright Carl Sutton, Picture Post Collection, via Getty Images.

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Like I said, the gods are jealous. Flight, in the end, is the bailiwick of birds and gods, and it seems that few incursions will be tolerated. In his short work “The Sin of Height” (2013), Julian Barnes puts it this way: “In the beginning, birds flew, and God made the birds. Angels flew, and God made the angels. Men and women had long legs and empty backs, and God had made them like that for a reason. To mess with flight was to mess with God. It was to prove a long struggle, full of instructive legends.”47 Humans lack the anatomy for wing-powered flight. We have neither the bird’s large pectoral muscles nor the big sternum to which to anchor them, yet we keep on trying. Base jumping, skydiving, hang gliding, and paragliding are incredibly popular activities. Although none of them involves the flapping of wings, they all feature humans defying gravity by taking to the air like birds. Base jumping involves leaping from a cliff or some tall structure with only a parachute, or with a wingsuit and a parachute, and flying about until eventually using a parachute to get back down safely. An early champion

Gods as Birds

of base jumping was Carl Boenish, who used only a parachute and who, after a successful jump in 1984 from the Troll Wall in Norway – the highest rock face in Europe – which got him into the Guinness Book of Records, tried to repeat the feat the next day and leapt to his death. The high number of fatalities led to a ban on base jumping from the Troll Wall in 1986, although it is still defied. Skydiving usually involves jumping from an aircraft with or without a wingsuit and using a parachute to break one’s fall. Hang gliding involves being suspended in a harness beneath a large-wing glider after a foot, boat, or plane launch and soaring on thermals at great heights, sometimes for hours. Paragliding is similar but involves a large, fabric canopy like a parachute with no rigid structure. Only in the past half-century or so have would-be fliers moved beyond such things as wood, canvas, silk, and whalebone to fashion suits from superior synthetic materials and strong light metals. All of these pastimes are inordinately popular. It is surprising how often one can find pictures in newspapers of human beings soaring around up in the sky like vultures. Obviously, none of these sports is without danger. While I was writing this book, a number of wingsuit fliers died. Mark Sutton, who became famous by parachuting into the stadium during the 2012 Summer Olympics as James Bond, was killed crashing into a ridge near the Swiss-French border on 14 August 2013. In June 2015 Gabriel Hubert, a specialist at diving off cliffs, buildings, and bridges, died when he jumped off Ha Ling Peak near Canmore, Alberta, and his parachute failed to deploy. In May 2015 Dean Potter and Graham Hunt died during a wingsuit leap from Taft Point in Yosemite National Park. Both men crashed into rock walls and neither had deployed his parachute. At the end of January 2017, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian wingsuiting daredevil died in China during a solo leap. Apparently, nothing could keep these experienced men from their love of floating in the air like birds. The primal urge to flight, it seems, must be satisfied at any cost. Joseph Glanvill, a seventeenth-century English thinker and philosopher with a keen interest in sciences, predicted that in the future it might become “as ordinary to buy a pair of wings to fly into remotest regions, as it then was to buy a pair of boots.”48 Although we have not quite reached this stage, humans are taking to the air more than ever before. The urge to fly with some kind of winged machine surfaces strongly among the medieval men of science. Roger Bacon, the thirteenth-century English philosopher and Franciscan monk known as Doctor Mirabilis,

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wrote about hypothetical flying machines with wings that flapped like a bird’s with a human in the centre: “It is possible that a device for flying shall be made such that a man sitting in the middle of it and turning a crank shall cause artificial wings to beat the air after the manner of a bird’s flight.”49 Bacon was quick to add that he himself had not seen such a machine and did not know anybody who had, although he did know a wise man who knew how to make such a machine. Note that he does not seem to have heard of Eilmer! Here, we see an advance from strapping wings onto one’s body to creating some kind of a human-propelled machine with wings that flapped like a bird’s. It was this model, several centuries later, that would obsess Leonardo da Vinci. Although it is documented only in much later seventeenth-century sources, one Giovanni Battista Danti, the Daedalus of Perugia, a mathematician and contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, is believed to have made a number of trial flights in the 1490s over Lake Trasimeno using feathers glued to his arms, which he flapped with great vigour. He is alleged to have made a later flight in 1503 in some kind of flying machine. Although we do not know what Danti’s flying machine looked like, he apparently soared off the tower of the church of Santa Maria delle Vergine in Perugia during a marriage feast, floated a bit, and then began to descend, only to have one of the machine’s wings get caught on a piece of stonework, upon which Danti precipitously plummeted toward earth. “Fortunately the wrecked machine landed on the roof of the church, and its inventor escaped with nothing worse than a broken leg.”50 Is it not odd that we have no contemporary sources for this incident? The model for all these flight attempts with machines is still, of course, bird flight. We know for a fact that Leonardo da Vinci loved to observe birds in flight, sketched them constantly, and wrote voluminously on bird flight – the most famous example being his Codex on the Flight of Birds, which dates from about 1505 – a time when Leonardo was particularly entranced with the flight of raptors in the hills around Fiesole, particularly Mount Ceceri. Leonardo was obsessed with the idea of human flight, even in the early stages of his career.51 All his life, he worked on various designs for human-powered flying machines with flapping wings (fig. 9.14), which he sometimes referred to as birds,52 as well as designs for human flight with some kind of wings. He was interested in everything from flapping and fixed wings to sailplanes (or gliders) and parachutes. Imitation of nature and actual birds was always at the centre of his designs.53 Leonardo certainly planned to test his flying machine. In Codex on the Flight of Birds, he writes: “The large bird’s first flight will be on the back

Working model of one of Leonardo da Vinci’s late-fifteenth-century flying machines. | Copyright Viktor Gladkov, Shutterstock.com.

FIGURE 9.14

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of the great Cècero, filling the universe with awe, filling all the writings with its fame and with eternal glory the nest from whence it was born.”54 Although many think that he did test it,55 I do not think so. He never mentions it. Even if an attempt had failed disastrously, surely he would mention it somewhere, but he never does. Although Leonardo never actually tested human flight himself, it is widely believed that he had one of his pupils try it. Even Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy seem to accept this notion: “A small tablet on a hill above Fiesole, overlooking Florence, marks the edge of the cliff from which Leonardo’s flying machine took off. It honours the designer but pays scant attention to the poor apprentice … who crashed and suffered

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serious, possibly mortal injury in the attempt to achieve flight.”56 The tablet notwithstanding, Leonardo never mentions such a flight anywhere.57 If we were to open the purview of human-powered flight to include such things as a look at Chinese kite flying, this book would soon acquire tome status. After all, although kites were unknown in the West until the seventeenth century, the Chinese were experimenting with them starting from about 400–300 BCE , including huge kites capable of taking a human up into the air, similar to the Cygnet, an enormous kite used by Alexander Graham Bell in 1907 to take Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge of the US Army aloft 168 feet (51 metres) over Lake Bras d’Or, Nova Scotia, for seven minutes. Although the kite crashed when the wind suddenly changed, Selfridge survived, only to be killed in 1908 on a flight in the Wright Flyer, piloted by Orville Wright, who was also badly injured. Among the related topics that I shall not examine in depth are balloons, fixed-wing gliders, ornithopters, human-propelled planes, and engine-powered aeroplanes. Balloons, although obviously connected to the human drive to the sky, are relatively young, being an invention of the eighteenth century, and lead us away from birds. Bell perhaps said it best in 1907. Rejecting balloons as a diversion from a more promising path to flight, he wrote, “Again, the birds are recognized as the true models of flight, and again men have put on wings, but this time with more promise of success.”58 Gliders were brought to public notice in the 1890s by the German design engineer Otto Lilienthal, who eventually broke his neck in a crash in August 1896. Like Leonardo and others before him, Lilienthal thought that the key to sustained flight was to be found in bird flight, which he studied assiduously – particularly the gliding flight of storks and gulls – and he published a book called Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst (Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation) in 1889. He made thousands of flights in heavier-than-air gliders, many with large birdlike wings, and worked on a design for an aircraft powered by flapping wings. He was much admired by the Wright brothers. Ornithopters – aircraft with flapping wings – have been on the human mind ever since Leonardo da Vinci’s terrifying design for a machine that he actually planned to test from the roof of the old court in Milan. Fortunately for posterity, he did not. In September 2010, Todd Reichert of the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies actually got off the ground in a human-powered ornithopter with flapping wings powered by pumping a bar with the feet to move wires attached to the wings. Snowbird, as it was called, stayed up for about twenty seconds.

The MIT-built Daedalus 88 human-powered aircraft, 1988. | Copyright National Aeronautics and Space Administration – Beasley, “Daedalus-Human-PoweredAircraft.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 9.15

In 2013 Reichert did the same thing with a helicopter powered by madly pedalling a bicycle. Both of these feats can easily be found and watched on the Internet. The history of fixed-wing aircraft has been written about exhaustively elsewhere and does not need to be revisited here, but since it so clearly symbolizes our urge to fly like birds, it is perhaps worth calling attention to the flight of the Daedalus 88 in 1988, as it was a largely successful attempt by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to accomplish the feat attempted by Daedalus, namely a flight from Crete to Santorini (fig. 9.15). I say largely successful because, after 72 miles (115 kilometres),

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the aircraft crashed into the sea, so close to Santorini that the pilot, a furiously pedalling Greek cycling champion, was able to swim to shore. Even though it was a fixed-wing aircraft with a front propeller – and a wingspan of 112 feet (34 metres)! – it was human-powered and a stunning achievement. In her poem “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph” (1961), the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet Anne Sexton takes the view that it does not matter that Icarus crashed. He strove to reach the heights and the very sun itself. She stresses the inspiration and triumph of the miraculous achievement of flight. “Who cares that he fell back to the sea?” He achieved flight. “Think of the difference it made.”59 The same can be said of the flight of the Daedalus 88. It is the flight that counts. Ironically, the future of flight lay in fixed-wing aircraft powered by engines that provided enough speed to keep things aloft – the flying fish model. But even the Wright brothers, emulating Leonardo da Vinci and Otto Lilienthal, whom they enormously admired, saw the key to flight in birds and were absolutely mesmerized by bird flight. From a young age, they read widely on the flight of birds60 and became passionate observers of flying birds, particularly at Kitty Hawk.61 Here is an example of what Wilbur Wright wrote in his notebook at Kitty Hawk: Hawks are better soarers than buzzards but more often resort to flapping because they wish greater speed. A damp day is unfavorable for soaring unless there is a high wind. No bird soars in a calm.

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The object of the tail is to increase the spread of surface in the rear when the wings are moved forward in light winds and thus preserve the centre of pressure at about this same spot. It seems to be used as a rudder very little. In high winds it is folded up very narrow.62

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Close observation, indeed. It was bird flight that helped the Wrights to perfect the ultimate glider, which led them to motorized flight and the Wright Flyer. One thing is certain: the human urge to imitate birds – those sacred objects of our worship – and to fly runs throughout human history and is a ubiquitous obsession not to be quelled. Wilbur Wright intuited that. As he said after being awarded the Gold Medal by the Aéro-Club de France

in Paris in 1908, flying “is an ideal that has always impassioned mankind. I sometimes think that the desire to fly after the fashion of birds is an ideal handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.”63 Although we have now progressed to manned space flight, it all began with birds. From our earliest human records – remember those aviform “Placard-type” signs we saw on the walls of caves in the Palaeolithic? – we have seen humans thinking about flight and the power that it represented and doing everything possible to achieve such godlike power. Perhaps humans could fly after death; but how could one obtain such magic in life? One could emulate the birds and try to tap into their secret. In their perpetual yearning for flight and access to the heavens and their secrets, we see humans craving supernatural power not given to them and striving to approach the realms of divinity on high, thereby freeing themselves from the confines of the mundane and unshackling themselves from the bonds of earth. Birds, in their cohabitation with celestial powers, represented the divinity of those powers and were thereby revered by earthbound humans, who viewed them as deities or avatars of deities because of the miracle of flight. The human fixation on flight as a manifestation of the divine is a key feature of our relationship with birds. The bird on high was the very icon of the sacred. Gerard Manley Hopkins knew that. Let us give him the last word. In his much-loved poem “The Windhover” (1877), dedicated “To Christ our Lord,” Hopkins uses a falcon in flight as his representative of a deity, here Christ, to suggest this god’s mastery over the world: I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!64 Gods as Birds

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And what music, what grace do we not find in the natural, untaught warbling of birds. – Plutarch, “The Cleverness of Animals” (100 CE), 401

10 Sacred Music: The Ecstasy of Birdsong We have seen that one of the main reasons why humans worshipped birds was that we envied them their godlike access to the heavens and revered them for their flight. There is yet another compelling reason, however, for our reverence of birds – song. Birdsong tightly links humans and birds to each other and both of them to the divine. Song and music – shared almost exclusively by songbirds and humans – enhanced the close bond between the two. Aristotle was aware of this link: “Certain species of birds above all other animals, and next after man, possess the faculty of uttering articulate sounds.”1 Although there are other animals that sing – from mice to whales – none sing with the complexity, variety, and musicality of songbirds and humans. Not all birds sing, of course; some are simply hardwired to make calls and simple chirps. The turkey vulture lacks a voice box and is mute except for grunts and hisses. But most songbirds sing, and they account for almost half of all bird species – over 4,000.2 “Songbirds are the world’s most successful birds,”3 and humans are the dominant mammal. Thus the bond between humans and songbirds, these two makers of music, is not surprising. Early humans did not merely heed the alarm calls of birds or the advertisements of honeyguides. Humans are, and always have been, deeply attracted to the music of birds. Charles Darwin thought that “our enjoyment of the singing of birds” was a result of our similar tastes for the

beautiful: “On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have. This is shewn by our enjoyment of the singing of birds, and by our women, both civilized and savage, decking their heads with borrowed plumes.”4 It was not just the two fingers of rye on ice with a smidgen of water that took my mother outside on summer evenings in Muskoka in spite of the mosquitoes – it was to listen to the wood thrushes. There is something magical and somehow familiar, some echo of the distant past, that makes us relate to the wood thrush’s ethereal and haunting song. In his journal entry on 22 June 1853, Henry David Thoreau describes its effect well: As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination. It lifts and exhilarates me. It is inspiring. It is a medicative draught to my soul. It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of Creation, is the chief musician of my court … I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings.5

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We know that there was more to it than mere enjoyment. Music has been central to humans from time immemorial and is ubiquitous in human society. The assumption that music in general and birdsong in particular were divinely inspired is an ancient one; think of augury, the auspices, and the Kapinjala bird, discussed in chapter 1. “The use of music to communicate with the supernatural appears to be a universal feature of all historically documented and present-day societies.”6 Humans have always felt that the knowledge of the gods was there in birdsong to be understood. “In pre-Darwinian times the powerful, emotive effect of birdsong was the ultimate expression of God’s creative powers.”7 Not for nothing did the birds spend so much time up in the heavens near the gods. Birdsong smacks of the otherworldly. Our attraction to the music of birds, therefore, is not casual but ancient, visceral, and fraught with meaning. That is why the silencing of the songbirds is such a devastating prospect. Birdsong was around and fully established when the first humans emerged. Humans evolved listening to birdsong, and it is startling to realize that our ancestors heard almost the very same songs as we hear now.

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From earliest times, the first thing that humans and the various hominins that preceded them heard upon waking up, even before first light, was the pre-dawn chorus. The last thing that they heard before settling down for the night to sleep was the tuneful singing of the thrushes and other evening songsters. All night, they listened to owls and nightingales and during birds’ migrations heard them calling far overhead in the dark. It must have been comforting to hear birdsong and know that all was well. The relief in hearing the birds would have been similar to that felt when the sun was reborn after the winter solstice and it became clear that once again all was going to continue as it was. How unsettling it would be to wake up into a world where no birds sang. A world without birdsong would be like a world of permanent eclipse. The primacy of birdsong in the human mind is reflected in various creation myths, such as that of the Jicarilla Apaches of New Mexico. After Black Hactin creates the birds, they ask him to create a man as their companion. Hactin creates a man, and “when the birds saw what had been done they burst into song, as they do in the early morning.” After a woman partner is created, and the man and woman laugh and set off walking and running, “then once again the birds burst into song, so that the two should have pleasant music and not be lonesome.”8 Dudley Young explains the notable fellowship between humans and birds as a distancing of ourselves from our fellow mammals and a privileging of sight and sound: “Our fellow-feeling for birds is rooted in the fact that both birds and arboreal primates, because they left the earth where smells linger, relegated the primordial nose and moved predominantly into a world of sight and sound.”9 Richard Dawkins makes an even more startling assertion with an eye to John Keats and his “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819). Noting that Keats experienced the nightingale’s song as “some dull opiate,” Dawkins writes that the idea of birdsong working upon the poet as a drug is not so far-fetched. He points out that a male bird’s song certainly acts upon a female like an auditory drug, “ultimately designed to have a strong effect on the nervous system of another member of the species.” The song, he argues, acted in the same way upon Keats’s nervous system: “He was not a nightingale, but he was a vertebrate, and most drugs that work on humans have a comparable effect upon other vertebrates.”10 Since humans and birds shared a common ancestor 300 million years ago, it is not surprising that something shared remains that would account for our similar reaction and attachment to music and song. As Donald Kroodsma puts it, “the music of birds and humans (and whales) has its roots in the brains of our common ancestors, the reptiles.”11

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Although this account may take some of the poetry out of the equation, it explains the widespread response of humans, both poets and others, to birdsong. It is no accident that hermit thrushes and I both feel that the same sounds are beautiful. Songbirds (along with parrots and hummingbirds) and humans are also powerfully linked in the way that they learn sounds and songs – a way not known to be shared by any other animals, save perhaps whales and dolphins, and possibly elephants and bats.12 Birds and humans learn sounds and then create new phrases and songs, developing repertoires of their own; no other animals produce sounds that are as complex, varied, and musical. Birds learn sounds the same way humans do. “If we were looking for some kind of animal equivalent, wouldn’t we look to our closest relatives, the great apes?” asks the neurobiologist Johan Bolhuis. “But the odd thing is, so many aspects of human speech acquisition are similar to the way that songbirds acquire their songs. In the great apes, there’s no equivalent at all.”13 In our sound acquisition, we are closer to songbirds than to bonobos and chimpanzees. No apes learn to sing, although some are born with the ability.14 Ape vocalization is innately specified and fixed, and gibbon song is also biologically fixed at birth. But Aristotle knew that birds learn their songs. Citing the example of mother nightingales teaching their young how to sing, he draws the conclusion “that the song of the bird was not equally congenital with mere voice, but was something capable of modification and improvement.”15 Both birds and humans learn to make sounds, to sing, and to make music by listening, imitating, and practising until they have it right. Whereas many birds simply practise until they can match their parents’ song, others such as songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds, and lyrebirds create their own songs and can learn the songs of other nearby species heard in infancy. Aristotle also knew of this ability: “Of little birds, some sing a different note from the parent birds, if they have been removed from the nest and have heard other birds singing.”16 Françoise DowsettLemaire gives us the excellent example of the marsh warbler, which does not learn songs from its father but has to shape its own songs because “[m]any males even stop singing several days before they start feeding, and some stop as soon as they mate.”17 David Rothenberg puts it nicely: “Some birds are taught the way to do it by their elders, but others just listen to their whole environment as an exciting, pulsating soundscape to tease with.”18 This soundscape is surely the drive behind mimicry, practised by so many birds, because mimicry certainly does not fool other

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birds.19 Humans have always learned sound the same way that Albert’s lyrebird does – by listening and imitating. Paul Hess tells us that birds learn song and that humans learn speech because “[h]umans and birds share similar features of brain circuitry that enable individuals to imitate – thus, to learn – the appropriate vocalizations from their parents and from others of their kind.” The tested songbirds – zebra finches, hummingbirds, and parrots – “showed analogous human and avian neurological processes enabling them to imitate the vocalizations they hear from their parents or neighbors … [Andreas R.] Pfenning and his colleagues believe that vocal-learning ability evolved independently in birds and mammals since they diverged from a shared ancestor perhaps 310 million years ago. These parallel neurological pathways persist between the ancient avian learners and the human learners who eventually arose many millennia later.”20 Peter Slater points out that any similarity between human music and birdsong “is more likely to be by analogy than homology,” as humans do not share “a musical ancestor with other singing animals.”21 If such a common ancestor had existed, the great apes would not be so unmusical. He concludes that “elaborate singing behavior arose quite separately in different animal groups, and in our case this was in the relatively recent past, since the common ancestor that we shared with chimpanzees died about two million years ago.”22 Even though our ways of learning are the result of parallel evolution, we humans and birds are similar in how we learn sound and almost unique among animals. We share a special ability and follow similar evolutionary paths, although they have been separate for more than 300 million years. Hess goes on to discuss “a newly demonstrated example [2014] of avian and human musical similarity” discussed in the work of Emily Doolittle and colleagues, who “found that humans and Hermit Thrushes share a striking attribute of musicality” and “that Hermit Thrush songs embody the same mathematical principles of pitch, intervals, and harmonics that underlie Western and many non-Western human musical scales. They believe the similarity is fundamental, not accidental.” This finding suggests that “[m]uch of human music is not wholly driven by cultural creativity but also reflects ancient neurological similarities between birds and us.”23 One area of music usually thought to be absent from the bird world is rhythm. It has recently been discovered, however, that male palm cockatoos not only make drumsticks from small branches but also use them to beat out rhythmic patterns in order to attract mates. Even rhythm is not exclusive to humans and may have been present in the wiring of that common ancestor.

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Humans and songbirds not only create similarly but also sing for similar reasons, one of which is because they like to. There, I have said it. Birds sing because they like to. “Hold it right there,” you say. “I know the poets and romantics tell us that, but this has no scientific basis and is merely attributing human feeling to birds – impressionistic foolishness. There is no song for song’s sake. This is just anthropomorphism.” The battle lines have always been drawn between the scientists, on the one hand, and the poets, on the other, especially the Romantic poets like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley who felt intuitively that birds sing in ecstasy and for joy. Birds sing to establish territory and to keep off rival marauding males, the scientists say. There is no question that song is a keep-out signal to other males.24 That is true, but it is certainly not the only reason why birds sing. That it does not work very well in rebuffing rivals, given what we now know about extramarital copulation in the bird world, is beside the point. Scientists have also established that birds sing to attract mates. That, too, is true. Humans do the same thing; just ask Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger whether it works. And this use of song cuts both ways. We now know that females use male song to judge the suitability of the singer as a mate; the quality of the song influences sexual selection.25 The hormonal drive behind much birdsong is obvious. Birds certainly do not sing to ensure their immediate survival since the singing helps predators to pinpoint their location. Nor do they sing to improve their health. Some birds even sing to their own detriment, losing weight from all the singing and lack of foraging. Singing has its price, although it also has its obvious rewards. When discussing birdsong, the erudite scholar Edward Armstrong, writing as late as 1975, felt that he had to caution us: “Our forefathers, especially the poets among them, mistakenly assumed that because human beings express joy by singing, this must also be true of birds … We know so little about the emotions of birds that we are not justified in supposing that they experience the joy or sadness we feel as we listen to their songs.”26 We must be cautious in assigning human emotions to animals. In The Singing Life of Birds (2005), the intrepid scientist and researcher of birdsong Donald Kroodsma does not include singing for joy among his carefully supported reasons for birdsong. However, at three points, he does express a suspicion that he cannot back up with scientific data. Referring to the northern mockingbird, he admits, “I want to believe that he ‘enjoys’ singing.”27 Of his beloved brown thrasher, he writes, “I also have to consider the idea that this master of the largest song repertoire

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known among birds is somehow enjoying himself … It seems plausible to me that some endorphins or other bodily chemicals are released into the blood and synapses that make him ‘feel good’ as he sings.”28 Thinking of male songbirds in general, he tentatively asks, “Isn’t it also likely that the male could experience some pleasure, however primitive, at performing his skills? That pleasure need not be conscious, of course, just as much of our pleasure can be traced to simple chemical reactions in our bodies, but it does seem that there must be some measure of ‘joy’ in how he sings.”29 As we shall see, the intuitions of this hardcore field researcher were right on target. Birds do experience joy. The great Darwin knew it. Even in his day, he noted, “With birds the voice serves to express various emotions, such as distress, fear, anger, triumph, or mere happiness … Naturalists are much divided with respect to the object of the singing of birds.”30 He went on to note that “nothing is more common than for animals to take pleasure in practising whatever instinct they follow at other times for some real good … Hence it is not at all surprising that male birds should continue singing for their own amusement after the season of courtship is over.”31 Noting that in humans, music arouses “the gentler feelings of tenderness and love,” Darwin concludes that “it is probable that nearly the same emotions … are felt by birds when the male pours forth his full volume of song, in rivalry with other males, to captivate the female.”32 If birds can experience tenderness and love when singing, why not also joy? Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin’s great advocate Thomas Huxley and a fervent proponent of Darwinism, as well as being a keen birder, was also aware that there was more to birdsong than the purely functional. “Song,” he said, “is simply an outlet, and a pleasurable one,” adding that birds “sing in all moments of excitement or exaltation.”33 Various students of birdsong have noticed things that seemed inconsistent with mere territorial and sexual response. Konrad Lorenz noted, “It is certainly more beautiful than necessary.”34 Why the extra level of musicality in some song? And why is some birdsong so elaborate? Armstrong asks, “Does all this complexity serve merely utilitarian ends?”35 The marsh warbler is a superb mimic and learns all the songs of the other birds that it has been in contact with, including those on its wintering grounds in Africa and during migration. As Rothenberg tells us in his chapter on this bird, it is “the one bird in the world who can recount its migratory path as a kind of songline, where the journey is mapped into the music itself … [I]t takes over thirty minutes of continuous singing to get the full repertoire.”36 This is a song way more complicated than it needs to be for any purpose. The main student of this bird’s song, Dowsett-Lemaire,

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concluded that male marsh warblers must “enjoy singing and must realize in some way that music is fun. There is no doubt about that.”37 Dowsett-Lemaire noticed that small groups of marsh warblers would get together and sing peacefully while “off-duty.”38 Many observers have noticed that birds sometimes sing undirected song, presumably because they like to. David Rothenberg is a philosopher and musician so interested in birdsong that he and a friend actually jam with them – for example, with George, a famous Albert’s lyrebird, on his breeding grounds in Australia! In his book Why Birds Sing: A Journey through the Mystery of Bird Song (2005), Rothenberg comes dangerously close to saying that birds sing because they like to, for the joy of it, but is constantly brought up just short of this idea by scientists who insist that we cannot know that birds sing for pleasure. But François-Bernard Mâche, a composer as well as a musicologist, is in no doubt. Referring to what he calls “social singing,” he writes, “No definitive biological advantage can explain this behavior … With regard to autumnal singing, its utility is not clear either. I would rather suggest … there is also something like an intrinsic pleasure in singing.”39 Ironically, it is the scientists who have now finally proven what the poets and naturalists have always known – although no one seems to be eating crow. It turns out that there is a measurable reward when birds sing. They get a hormone rush that makes them feel good.40 The current state of research on birdsong, ongoing as of 2012, is summed up in a number of scientific articles. In “The Role of Motivation and Reward Neural Systems in Vocal Communication in Songbirds” (2012), Lauren V. Riters provides an overview, explaining that dopamine is a neurotransmitter or chemical messenger that plays a role in rewardmotivated behaviour and the brain’s pleasure centres. Opioids, such as morphine, are chemicals associated with decreased reaction to pain, and one of their side effects is a sense of euphoria. When a bird sings, its brain releases these chemicals, and it feels good and knows that this pleasure is one of the rewards for singing, thereby presenting a motivation for song. That is true of directed and undirected, or nonsexually motivated, song, the latter of which is common outside of the breeding season. “Distinct patterns of dopamine activity underlie the motivation to produce sexually-motivated and undirected song,” and “undirected communication is facilitated and rewarded by immediate opioid release linked to the act of singing.”41 Thus the consequences of song are rewarding. This is not to say that birds do not sing to attract mates and establish territory, but it is to say that they get a real rush when doing the singing. Even when singing undirected song, birds experience opioid release,

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which makes them feel good. It is noteworthy that this theory would also help to explain female bird singing, which has “a deep evolutionary history.”42 Until recently, the “men of science” have concentrated on male bird singing; Armstrong and Kroodsma, in their respective monographs on birdsong, each devote less than one chapter to female song. In their article “Elaborate Mimetic Vocal Displays by Female Superb Lyrebirds” (2016), Anastasia Dalziell and Justin Welbergen rightly argue that this research imbalance has hampered “a full understanding of the causes and consequences of avian vocal displays.”43 All birders have heard ovenbirds and red-eyed vireos singing in late summer when all the other birds have thrown in the towel, long after the breeding season when birds are already fattening up to head south, mates are disinterested or departed, and nobody even cares where the singer is. In his lovely poem “The Oven Bird” (1916), Robert Frost wrote about this occurrence: There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.44

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Although Frost does not see the bird as singing for joy, he knows that it is not seeking a mate and declaring territory. All that is past. For Frost, the bird is framing a question: “What to make of a diminished thing?” We now know that the bird was also singing because it experienced pleasure in singing. The same goes for Thomas Hardy’s thrush in the poem “The Darkling Thrush” (1900); it is as desolate a winter day as could be imagined, the land seems dead and every living thing without fervour, but then

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At once a voice burst forth among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small, In blast beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.45 The bird suddenly sang out not because it was trying to find a mate or to defend territory, not because it had gone mad or wished to alert predators to its location, and not because it was in utter despair but because a blast of song made it feel slightly better in a grim situation – just as humans sing to make themselves feel better when they are down. So Keats and Shelley were right all along. They did not know that it was all about dopamine and opioids and rewards connected with song, but they did know that birds, like humans, experience ecstasy and gladness when they sing and that this is a source of the magical attraction for humans. Shelley’s famous and widely loved poem “To a Sky-Lark” (1820) is an attempt to express the beauty and depth of the bird’s song as it pours forth its gladness “in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. Shelley attempts again and again in this poem to do justice to the song of the bird and ends by enviously asking the bird to teach him its joy and magic: Teach me half the gladness That thy brain must know, Such harmonious madness From my lips would flow The world should listen then – as I am listening now.46 Sacred Music

Keats wrote his poem “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) apparently in one morning when he was only twenty-three. He already had early tuberculosis, which, as a medically trained man, he must have known would kill

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him, as it did in 1821 at the age of twenty-five. As with Shelley’s skylark, it is the actual song of the nightingale that attracts the poet. It is a widely revered, beautiful song. In 1555 the French naturalist Pierre Belon asked of the song of the nightingale, “Could there be a man lacking judgement who would not have any admiration hearing such melody coming out of the throat of such a wild little bird?”47 Keats expresses his happiness that the bird In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. The poet goes on to speak of his desire “to leave the world unseen” and with the bird “fade away into the forest dim” because, unlike the happy bird, we humans know weariness, fever, sadness, and disease and live where beauty and love are short-lived. The whole poem is a meditation on the transience of life and certainty of death. If only the poet could fly to the bird “on the viewless wings of Poesy.” The poet speaks of the human envy of flight and birdsong, and in the pathetic sixth stanza, listening to the bird in the dark, the stricken twenty-three-year-old poet makes peace with death and even invites death to take him:

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Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!48

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In the seventh stanza, Keats calls the bird immortal, although it is the song that gives it immortality. For Keats, the magic and joy of birdsong defeat even death. Again, we have the connection between birds and the supernatural and magical, here expressed through song. The powerful grip of birds upon the human imagination is tightened by our shared appreciation of music. Birdsong, says Young, is “the simplest and almost certainly our oldest experience of the beautiful.”49 Unlike most other animals, we both make art. Anyone who doubts that birds make art need only listen to a marsh warbler, a nightingale, a brown thrasher, or a lyrebird, to name a few. These and many others, like European starlings and mockingbirds, improvise constantly. Tim Birkhead reminds us of “the almost legendary ability of bullfinches to learn any tune whistled to

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them by a human.”50 The northern mockingbird can sing for thirty minutes and lyrebirds perhaps longer. The brown thrasher has nearly 2,000 songs in its repertoire and is believed to have the greatest number of songs of any bird in the world.51 Art does not come easily; it takes the Albert’s lyrebird up to six years to master its song routine. There are those who would say that to compare bird music to human music is a travesty. I do not number among them and consider myself in good company with Immanuel Kant, who wrote in his Critique of Judgment (1790) that “a bird’s song, which we can reduce to no musical rule, seems to have more freedom in it … than the human voice singing in accordance with all the rules that the art of music prescribes.”52 In fact, an argument can be made for birdsong being the more complex. It is certainly much older. Jennifer Ackerman tells us that according to the evolutionary biologist Richard Prum, “the origin of song learning and culture in oscine songbirds occurred some 30 million or 40 million years ago.”53 She goes on to quote Prum: “Although human culture is possibly 100,000 years old, songbirds have been doing ‘aesthetic culture’ on a grand scale for tens of millions of years.”54 Birds have had a long time to work out their complex aesthetics. Mâche has studied many species of songbirds and found much in common with human music; for example, the blue-shouldered robin-chat “is not satisfied with enumerating the tones of its scale, but operates on it by building melodic motives as elaborate as many human achievements, and even sounding so close to them that one might be mistaken.”55 Both birds and humans exhibit certain universal musical features in their music. After splitting off from our common ancestor 300 million years ago, birds developed a syrinx and humans developed a special type of larynx, both of which allowed a surprising degree of vocal variance and resulted in songbirds and humans being the most musical of all animals. Just as we cannot truly imitate their flight, however, so too are we unable to sing like birds. Birds can do things with their voices that humans cannot. Luciano Pavarotti is good, very good; so were Feodor Chaliapin, Enrico Caruso, Maria Callas, and Renata Tebaldi. Not one of them could sing two notes simultaneously, however, let alone sing simultaneous harmony with themselves, which is exactly what the veery and many other birds do. It is stunning to listen to the song of the veery slowed down so that one can hear all the haunting harmonies and overtones. Birds can sing far more notes much faster than humans; the winter wren, for example, can sing thirty-six notes per second.56 The song of the winter wren

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or nightingale puts human song to shame in its complex musicality. And all male winter wrens and male nightingales can sing their songs, whereas few humans can learn to sing like Pavarotti.57 Unlike the great apes, however, at least we can sing and make music – a felicitous extra that came about because of bipedalism. When hominins began walking upright on two legs, the spinal cord evolved to enter the skull from below rather than from the rear, as is the case with apes. As Steven Mithin explains, “Because the spinal cord now had to enter the braincase from below rather than from behind … there was less space between the spinal cord and the mouth for the larynx … [C]onsequently, the larynx had to become positioned lower in the throat, which had the incidental effect of lengthening the vocal tract and increasing the diversity of possible sounds it could produce.”58 The lower position of the larynx, as compared to its higher position in the great apes, led to far greater possibilities for sound production. The move toward a diet of meat led to another key change in the human vocal tract: our teeth and tongues got much smaller and the tongue less thick and stiff. Again, Mithin explains it well: “The great apes, however, have far less throat to play with, owing to the relatively high position of their larynx. In addition, they have relatively inflexible mouth chambers, because of the substantial size of their teeth and relatively long, shallow tongues.”59 As sound production evolved, humans had the organs to produce sophisticated speech and song. So one of the reasons why both songbirds and humans make music is that we both can. In a case of convergent evolution, songbirds and humans gained the ability to make musical sound – in both cases in order to allow such things as better communication, attracting mates, establishing territory, and expressing emotions such as a sense of well-being and even joy. In his book The Singing Neanderthals (2006), Mithin makes a strong case for the role of musicality – rhythm, pitch, melody, repetition – in expressing emotion during nonverbal communication such as we find with human babies and in earlier hominins like Neanderthals. I think that we can add songbirds to the list. Since music can express and induce emotions, it has enormous value for animals in a pre-verbal state. The ability and desire to make music is a profound and key link between birds and humans. Music, which undoubtedly evolved on the dance floor and features gesture and rhythm as well as melodic sound, probably precedes speech in human development. Darwin certainly thought so, as does Mithin. In The Descent of Man (1875), Darwin writes that we must suppose that human speech is “derived from previously developed musical powers … [M]usical sounds afforded one of the bases

for the development of language.”60 Mithin makes a strong case for Darwin’s “previously developed musical powers,” a sort of innate musicality, as being crucial in the development of sophisticated communication in hominins and eventually speech. This account, of course, raises the question of what musical sounds humans heard that could have influenced their move toward music and eventually speech. They obviously could not hear whales and elephants. Kroodsma has no doubt that bird songs “guided my ancestors’ early music,”61 and I think that he is right. Greek myth also suggests that the link to music was birdsong. Ovid tells the story of how the hamadryad Syrinx, with her “birdlike voice … twittering and singing,” was turned into reed pipes to allow her to escape the unwanted advances of the lusty Pan. When Pan finally seized her, he found that he “held a sheaf of reeds,” which, when breathed upon, produced “a tender music of bird-calls that pleased his ear.”62 Writing in the first century BCE , the Roman poet Lucretius makes the connection explicit in his long poem “On the Nature of Things”: Through all the woods they heard the charming voice Of chirping birds, and tried to frame their voice And imitate. Thus birds instructed man, And taught him songs before his art began.63

Sacred Music

It is significant that the first known musical instrument capable of playing melody made by human beings is the pipe, an instrument that makes notes that sound like birdsong. Many of these earliest Palaeolithic pipes, which number over thirty,64 most of them dating from roughly 38,000–33,000 BCE , were actually made from bird bones, underscoring the connection. The famous Hohle Fels flute, a sort of pennywhistle, which has five finger holes, was made from a hollow wing bone of a griffon vulture (fig. 10.1). Two of the three flutes from the Geissenklösterle Cave were made from the wing bones of swans. The series of some twenty flutes found at Isturitz date from 35,000–10,000 BCE . Some of these flutes predate the earliest carved birds and drawings of birds in caves at the dawn of representational imagining – music before visual art. If the Divje Babe artifact from Slovenia, made from the bone of a cave bear, really is a flute,65 it would move the demonstrable origin of hominin music back two or three millennia and suggest that Neanderthals also had flutes. While interesting vis-à-vis Neanderthals, this timeline would say little about the origins of human music because it is difficult to believe that human music

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The Hohle Fels flute made from the wing bone of a griffon vulture, ca. 33,000 BCE. | Copyright Hannes Wiedemann, Urgeschichtliches Museum Blaubeuren, Germany, “Hohle Fels – Gänsegeierflöte©urmu 2019 – Foto Hannes Wiedemann.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons.

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was not brought north from Africa during the first large-scale migration of early modern humans. It is pleasing to think of some early modern human listening to a bird sing and then trying to imitate the sounds on one of these early flutes – a distant forerunner of Rothenberg and George, the Albert’s lyrebird. This idea is perhaps not far-fetched. Pointing out the lack of music in the quacks of ducks and in “the arguments of gulls or screeches of owls,” the monotony of cuckoos and kingfishers, the lack of complexity in the sounds of insects and frogs, and the moan-like songs of humpback whales, Tim Low states categorically, “All the sounds that resemble music come from songbirds. This is one way of saying that human tastes for sound are closer to those of songbirds than to anything else … One may ask whether human music would have reached the heights it has had that first songbird not sung in an Australian rainforest.”66 It was not only in its beginnings that human music was influenced by birdsong. Humans have always used birdsong as a kind of template,

Sacred Music

which is one of the reasons, together with convergent evolution, that “the similarities between human music and birdsong are far greater than those between human music and the calls/songs of non-human primates or, indeed, any other animal – with one possible exception: whales.”67 Stirred by the musicality of birds, many composers have paid careful attention to birdsong and tried to incorporate it into their music. As Rothenberg puts it, albeit in a rather flowery manner, “Musicians reverentially aspire to the innocent and tireless beauty of those leafy songs.”68 There is an embarrassment of riches from which to choose on the musical front; I have chosen five well-known composers as examples.69 Joseph Haydn, in his oratorio The Seasons (1801) – whose libretto was inspired by the English poet James Thomson’s “The Seasons” (1730) – strives to imitate birds singing at the end of part 2, set in summer after a storm. In Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (1808), scattered echoes of birdsong remind us of his love of nature, and near the end of the second movement in the famous “Scene by the Brook,” the flutes, oboes, and clarinets attempt to imitate the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo respectively. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was famously interested in birdsong, particularly the song of his beloved pet European starling, which he bought in a pet shop in 1784. When Mozart entered the pet shop, the bird suddenly sang a fragment of the final movement of his Piano Concerto No. 17 in G Major (1784). Mozart was the more astounded because he had only just finished the work and it was not yet publicly known. Perhaps Mozart or one of his pupils had gone to the shop beforehand and whistled this part of the melody, or perhaps the bird came up with it on its own! Possibly Mozart first heard the melody from the bird when in the store on an earlier occasion and had reproduced it subconsciously. In any case, the bird’s melody was slightly different from Mozart’s: “G natural was changed to G sharp, immediately making the tune sound centuries ahead of its time.”70 Needless to say, Mozart purchased the bird forthwith. Recording the bird’s song the day that he bought it, he wrote, “Das war schön” (That was beautiful). After the starling’s death and full funeral four years later – a death that Mozart seems to have taken harder than his father’s – Mozart wrote a musical imitation of the starling’s various songs. Even the great Mozart was fascinated by something that he heard in birdsong, although he would not have known that he was predisposed to do so. The scene with Siegfried and the Forest Bird in act 2, scene 2, of Richard Wagner’s Siegfried (1857) is magical. Siegfried stops to rest in the

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forest, and a bird sings sweetly above his head. Siegfried imagines that his mother is talking to him through the bird; longing to understand the bird, he mimics the bird’s song with a reed pipe but realizes that it does not sound right, so he gives the bird a few notes of his hunting horn, which brings the dragon, Fafner, out of its cave. After Siegfried slays the dragon, he touches the dragon’s blood, which is burning hot, and puts his fingers in his mouth; suddenly, he can understand the bird’s song and the bird’s advice to “[t]ake the helmet and the ring,” which prove vital to Siegfried’s ability to stay alive and find a bride, Brünnhilde. In this scene, Wagner takes full advantage of the beauty of birdsong, while also playing on the ancient idea of birdsong possessing arcane meaning – which is why the scene is so magical. One composer who not only utilized the beauties of birdsong in his works but actually tried to imitate and capture its untamed nature was the twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen. As Rothenberg puts it, he “took the real wildness of bird song most seriously.”71 In his famous Quartet for the End of Time (1941), completed in the German prison camp Stalag VIII -A , where it premiered, Olivier Messiaen made heavy use of the sounds of birds – “the true lost face of music” – which for him represented “our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song.”72 A serious student of birdsong, Messiaen produced “two sixhundred-page books … of detailed transcriptions of bird songs, most done in the field with no recording technology.”73 This undertaking resulted in such works as Le Merle noir (1952) for flute and piano, Réveil des oiseaux (1953), with its imitation of the dawn chorus for full orchestra, Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956–58), Des canyons aux étoiles (1971–74), and Saint François d’Assise (1975–83) – and it is not surprising that he was interested in this saint, for whom birds were so important. Messiaen was a composer who took inspiration from the rhythms, timbre, and dissonant harmonies of birdsong but who also attempted musical portraits of specific birds, slowing down their songs and pitching them lower so that our instruments could reproduce them. Never has the bond between birdsong and human music been plumbed so deeply and the connection between humans and birds so thoroughly underscored. The magic of birdsong and its resonance in the human psyche were also well understood by poets. Birds and their song are among the most frequent subjects of poems from the dawn of poetry to the present. The earliest such poem that I know of came down to us in Egyptian hieroglyphics on a papyrus dating from 1300–1200 BCE . Here is an excerpt from John A. Wilson’s translation:

The voice of the swallow calls and says: “It is daybreak – where are you going?” Oh, no, bird, you may not distract me! For I have found my darling on his bed. And my heart is more than happy.74 Rather than attempt to review the huge body of poetry devoted to birds, or even just the poetry assembled by Billy Collins in his Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds (2010), I shall concentrate on our theme of the interconnections between birdsong and human art. Poets famously love musicality – as the poet Paul Verlaine said in 1874, “De la musique avant toute chose”75 – and here we find another reflection of the idea that humans and birds share notions of what is pleasing and beautiful in sound. Let us take the example of repetition. Both composers and poets are aware that repetition of brief phrasings is pleasing. Many birds also feature repetition in their songs. In “The Bean-Field,” chapter 7 of his book Walden (1854), Thoreau notes this characteristic in the song of the brown thrasher, although this bird usually repeats its phrases only twice: “Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown thrasher … all the morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer’s field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he cries – ‘Drop it, drop it, – cover it up, cover it up, cover it up, – pull it up, pull it up, pull it up.’”76 In “The Throstle” (1889), Alfred Tennyson plays with repetition in his imitation of a song thrush, a bird known for repeating phrases: “Summer is coming, summer is coming. I know it, I know it, I know it. Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,” Yes, my wild little Poet … “Here again, here, here, here, happy year!” O warble unchidden, unbidden! Summer is coming, is coming, my dear, And all the winters are hidden.77 Sacred Music

No one understood the marriage of birdsong, music, and poetry, as well as the ability of birdsong to express meaning and human emotion, better than Walt Whitman. It was no accident that he chose two

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particular birds – the northern mockingbird and the hermit thrush – as his poetic vehicles. Whitman’s poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1859) is a poignant reminiscence by an older man about his loss of innocence as a boy and about the onset of his awareness of time and death, both of which the poet understood from the incessant singing of a male mockingbird whose mate had suddenly disappeared from the nest in the middle of breeding season. When a boy, the poet listens intently day and night all summer to what comes “[o]ut of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle.” He struggles to puzzle out the meaning that he so strongly feels is there in the song. He intuits that the bird, mad with love and absence, is imagining its mate “fluttering out among the breakers” and singing madly so that she will hear – but nothing is going to bring back the dead. In a passage imitating the mockingbird’s characteristic repetitious song, Whitman has the bird sing,

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O past! O happy life! O songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! Loved! But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more.78

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The bird’s song has unleashed love in the boy’s heart – now at last tumultuously bursting. Finally, the young boy, the “outsetting bard,” realizes that the bird was singing not just to its mate but also to him and that it has told him what he is really destined for. “A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die.” The boy is to be a poet. The bird was projecting the boy’s own feelings about life: “O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me.” The bird has left the boy forever aware of “the cries of unsatisfied love” – the anguish of love in the light of death and separation. He has heard the message of the anguish of living on, desperate with love for a mate who has been claimed by death, which is certain and everywhere. From this point on, the poet will sing in his own voice, “my own songs awaked from that hour.”79 As in the case of Siegfried, we find here the ancient idea of searching for and divining hidden knowledge from the singing of birds; here are augury and divination. Here is puzzling out vital knowledge about life from a bird, which has the knowledge and imparts it in a coded message not for all to understand – a message to be decoded by an oracle or poet. The magic of the poem lies in the imitation of the actual rhythms and

phrasing of the mockingbird to impart the crucial knowledge concealed in its song.80 Such is the bond between humans and birds that I think even someone unfamiliar with the song of the northern mockingbird must on a subliminal level intuit the poet’s imitation of the bird and enjoy the poem the more because of it. Although not famous for its repetitions like the northern mockingbird and brown thrasher, the hermit thrush is famous for the musicality of its song. We have seen Emily Doolittle’s comments on shared aspects of hermit thrush song and human music. Rothenberg cites the Hungarian musicologist Peter Szöke, who studied and analyzed the song of the hermit thrush and considered it “the highest summit in the evolution of animal music so far known to us … It is true micromusic.”81 It is to the hermit thrush that Whitman turns in his elegy on the death of Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” (1865).82 In the swamp in secluded recesses, A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song. Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song. Song of the bleeding throat … Sing on there in the swamp, O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call, I hear, I come presently, I understand you. The hermit thrush somehow captures the poet’s grief: Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song, Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe. O liquid and free and tender! O wild and loose to my soul – O wondrous singer!

Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,

Sacred Music

The poet goes to the swamp in grief, and the bird, upon receiving him, sings “the carol of death.” The poet now gives the bird’s song in seven four-line verses set in italics – using birdsong again to express ineffable thoughts. The bird seems to be saying,

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In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.

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The poet realizes that the hermit thrush is singing a dirge and mourning the passing of the great man, and the poet “interprets the song” in his own words of praise and mourning. The poet takes solace in the bird’s reminder that death comes to all sooner or later and has no sting. The poem becomes praise for the “fathomless universe” and “the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.” From the bird, we learn that it is the living who are suffering – whereas the dead are at peace. The mournful beauty of a bird’s song unleashes the poet’s thoughts as he struggles to make sense of such a tragic and senseless thing. So birdsong is central and crucial to two of Whitman’s greatest poems. Both are based on the ancient and time-honoured belief that birds have arcane knowledge, which they impart in their song – if only we can properly interpret it and understand it. Like Thoreau, Whitman ponders nature deeply. Significantly, it is to birdsong that this philosopher turns to make his deepest inner thoughts accessible to other humans. Birdsong deeply resonates in the human heart, and the resonance is more than aesthetic. We are, so to speak, hardwired to be able to appreciate the musicality of birdsong – hence its enormous appeal. It speaks to us directly and pleases us, but on a subliminal level, it seems pregnant with meaning – even magical. Birds speak the language of the gods. Through a shared ancestry with birds, birdsong links us to the spirit of the universe. We are better for having birdsong, which offers us a doorway to understanding. And understand we must. There is now a desperate urgency in birdsong; the birds are speaking to us, warning us, like the canary in the coal mine. It would behoove us to listen. Whereas in part 1 we explored human reverence for birds, in part 2 we have examined two of the main factors underpinning that reverence – flight and song. Access to the sky meant that birds could be gods in their own right, cause thunder and lightning, pull the sun across the sky, hobnob with the gods, serve as messengers of the gods, and carry our souls to the heavens. Their ability to sing musically meant that they could impart their arcane knowledge and help us to order our lives as well as touch our souls with the beauty of their song. Flight and song left humans in awe of birds and led us to see magic in them.

A world without birds would lay waste the human heart. – Mark Cocker, Birds and People (2013), 10

PART THREE

OUR BETRAyAL OF BIRDS

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper? – Genesis 4: 9

11 Birds Betrayed: Sapiens at Its Worst Given our deep and intense relationship to birds over the ages – a relationship occasioned by our reverence for them, our envy of their flight, and our love of their song – have we treated birds over the past few centuries as might be expected? In this chapter, I review a number of things – some well known and some not – that we have done to birds. I hope that, if cumulatively seen, they will shock us into action and not fall on deaf ears. Ironically, in spite of our veneration of birds, we humans have done terrible things to them. Adam Nicolson points out that our relationship has always been a double one and that “deep in our cultural consciousness, the root pattern is one of predation and reverence.”1 Having examined reverence, we shall now turn our attention to predation. Although many readers will be familiar with some of the facts presented in this chapter, it is still salutary to review them collectively and ponder our human behaviour. We have driven, and ruthlessly continue to drive, many species to extinction. The natural course of avian development has been severely disrupted by the far-reaching effects of human beings on the planet. It is further ironic that such a successful class of animals as birds should be brought low by one single primate species. According to one new theory advanced by researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum, birds survived the great extinction event that did in the dinosaurs and

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so many other animals 66 million years ago because their ancestors had beaks that allowed them to feed on nutrient-rich seeds when other food sources were destroyed. Another theory has it that birds survived because of their more complex brains and ability to solve problems.2 But even though they survived the fifth extinction, the sixth, human-engineered, extinction is doing many of them in. It is important to recognize that birds are not going extinct because they have suddenly become ill-suited to survival in the late Holocene – the epoch that we have been living in since the last ice age ended roughly 11,700 years ago. Most birds have shown themselves to be perfectly able to continue to survive in a world uncompromised by humans. It is human interference with the biosphere that is causing the decline. Take away things like habitat loss, global warming, insecticides, outdoor cats, high rises, and transmission towers, and most birds will continue to do just fine, as they have for millions of years. Among the first to be destroyed were the huge, flightless elephant birds of Madagascar – almost 12 feet (3.5 metres) tall and weighing up to half a ton (455 kilograms) – hence flightless. Marco Polo thought that they killed elephants by dropping them from great heights! Elephant birds lasted some 75 million years, but it took humans only a couple of centuries after their arrival on the island to exterminate them.3 The giant moa – another 12-footer – did not last long either after Polynesian settlers arrived in New Zealand sometime around 1200, give or take a century. Giant moas were gone by 1500. If you want to get some perspective on their size, go to your museum and ask to be shown a moa leg bone. They are massive! Perhaps our most famous extermination was the dodo, a huge, tasty pigeon – of all things! – about 3 feet (1 metre) tall. It lasted only eightyodd years from discovery to extinction. Those that were not killed directly by humans were killed by feral pigs released by sailors. Sadly, recent studies suggest that the bird was neither stupid nor as clumsy as was thought by sailors who noted their lack of fear of humans. Then there was the great auk, the “King of the Lost” (fig. 11.1).4 The bird existed in huge numbers in its various rookeries. On his first visit to Funk Island, Jacques Cartier tells us that “noz deux barques en chargèrent, en moins de demye heure, comme des pierres” (our two longboats were laden with them as with stones in less than half an hour),5 and after his second visit he wrote, “Quelle ysle est si très-plaine d’oiseaulz, que tous les navires de France y pourroyent facillement charger sans que on s’apperceust que l’on en eust tiré” (This island is so exceeding full of birds that

Great auks in the Cosquer Cave, 17,000– 16,000 BCE. | Copyright Fanny Broadcast, Collection Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images. FIGURE 11.1

Birds Betrayed

all the ships of France might load a cargo of them without one perceiving that any had been removed).6 But the great auk never had a chance; it was too easy to catch, and its oil and feathers were too useful. Harvesters used to march them on board their ships by means of gangplanks7 and even stretched-out sails.8 It was killed brutally. An English sailor had the following to say about collecting auk feathers: “[Y]ou do not give yourself the trouble of killing them, but lay hold of one and pluck the best of the feathers. You then turn the poor Penguin adrift, with his skin half naked and torn off, to perish at his leisure.”9 Oh, it was apparently great fun to kill them. One man recalls his father telling how men went to the Funk Islands, “built enclosures, lit fires, and burnt the birds to death for sheer mischief.”10 Our most mind-boggling and relatively recent extermination was the passenger pigeon – no mean feat and one that only humans could pull off. These birds were almost unbelievably numerous. One of the flights that Alexander Wilson witnessed was 240 miles (386 kilometres) long with over 2 billion birds,11 and the famous Niagara area flight of 1860 witnessed by William R. King, which took fourteen hours to pass in a milewide column, was estimated at 3.7 billion birds.12 It was not easy to drive this species to extinction – John James Audubon thought it impossible in spite of having witnessed mass destruction of the birds by 183913 – but it is a well-known story that does not need repeating here, although it should be noted that it was not overhunting but deforestation that did in these

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inveterate colony nesters.14 Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914.15 No story has been better told than that of the extermination of the Eskimo curlew in Fred Bodsworth’s much-loved book The Last of the Curlews (1954). I do not even mention the Labrador duck here because it was in trouble on its own, and all we did was help to finish it off. Such extinctions are manifold, ongoing, and increasing. Ninety-four species of parrot, for example, are currently at risk of extinction.16 In Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016), E.O. Wilson tells us, “As a consequence of human activity, it is believed that the current rate of extinction overall is between one hundred and one thousand times higher than it originally was.”17 Obviously, the extinction rate is shockingly high. As Elizabeth Kolbert reports, it is estimated that “a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion,”18 and I consider this number an underestimate based on my personal observations of grassland birds and insectivores over the past twenty years alone. Citing a 2014 report by the National Audubon Society, Jennifer Ackerman tells us that “half of the bird species in North America … are likely to go extinct in the next half century or so for one reason: because they can’t adapt to the rapid pace of human-induced change on our planet.”19 Can Europe and the rest of the world be far behind? But even North American insectivores are doing well compared to birds like vultures, whose decline over the past few decades, caused by diclofenac, a veterinary drug given to livestock, has been catastrophic – reaching 99.9 per cent for some species, such as the white-rumped vulture. If you are a Parsee, it is getting harder and harder to get consumed after death these days. Crows and black kites are not doing nearly as good a job. Indian vultures will not recover without large-scale intervention, which seems unlikely given that “almost all of the threats that vultures face today are a result of direct or indirect human actions.”20 Ironically, the vulture is having its revenge in India: with the huge increase in feral dogs and rats following the disastrous drop in vulture numbers, rabies from infected dog bites has soared. “The estimated cost of dealing with rabies in India … is now nearly $1.5 billion per year.”21 And with far more carcasses of cattle dead from anthrax, this disease is also becoming an increasing problem. Our human activities are causing extinction on a scale that dwarfs the few heartwarming stories about efforts to save species like the California condor and the whooping crane in North America or the bearded vulture in Europe. The California condor in the 1980s was down to a single wild breeding pair, and finally no birds at all were left in the wild.22 Huge sums of money have been spent in the attempt to save these birds – Thom van

Birds Betrayed

Dooren writes of a “$35 million captive breeding and reintroduction programme”23 – yet we still regularly lose released birds to poison baits and lead ingestion. The estimated cost for each bearded vulture released in the Alps is 100,000 euros per bird,24 and the overall cost of the combined conservation projects is about 95 million euros!25 Yet hunters and farmers still shoot some every year in Europe, just as they shoot our migrating whooping cranes in North America. No amount of money can ensure the safety of these birds. It is folly to wait until a species is teetering on the verge of extinction with a drastically reduced gene pool26 and only then to pour money into attempts to save it, but this dereliction often seems to be the story. Overall the picture is gloomy. All this extermination is very odd because in spite of our actions, we really do not want birds to go extinct and to have to live with the resulting guilt. We even live in hope that some birds are not really extinct – witness the occasional sightings of moas, Eskimo curlews, and ivory-billed woodpeckers. Mark Cocker, citing BirdLife International’s Threatened Birds of the World (2000), makes an interesting point: “Sometimes the acute contradictions between care for the imaginary bird and indifference to the real creature assume tragic proportions.” He notes, for example, that the Philippine eagle, the national bird present on all banknotes of the Philippines since 1995, is quickly being lost to deforestation, which “will drive the surviving population (350–670 birds) towards inevitable extinction, unless massive remedial efforts are taken soon.”27 We have maltreated birds in astounding ways over the ages. Humans have long used birds in war. The tenth-century Kievan princess Olga, for example, collected a tribute of doves from each household in a besieged town, fastened incendiary material to their legs, and then released them home. The enemy was duly defeated, but we are not told what happened to the doves upon combustion. Homing pigeons have long been used to their detriment. As Tim Low tells us, “Domestic pigeons were enlisted as message-bearers, historians say, by the Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians, Romans, the crusaders, and by Britain in two world wars.”28 Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy rather appropriately refer to these birds as the cellphones of former days.29 Perhaps their role is to be the same in the present day, as the Chinese have lately built a force of 10,000 homing pigeons to deliver military communications between troops stationed along their borders. And on it goes. Humans have abused birds sexually, indulging in interspecies copulation that would make Zeus blush. Once, in the 1970s in Saint Petersburg

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(then very much Leningrad) while in the manuscript room of the State Public Library, I came across a reference to pticheblondie in a thirteenthcentury monastic rule. Not sure what it meant, I mentioned it to an older Bulgarian colleague, blind in one eye from salt that got into it during an exorcism when he was a baby, and from what I learned, I realized that the word could perhaps be best translated, modestly, as “fornication with birds.” “Oh, my, chickens,” I said. “How horrible!” “Net, net, Reechard,” he said with a wag of the finger, “ne kuritsa. Indiuk!” (No, no, Richard, not chickens. Turkeys!) Turkeys it was in his day in the Rhodope Mountains, and he assured me, with much convincing information, that this had always been the case from medieval days on, perhaps earlier.30 Cockfighting – an ancient “entertainment” introduced into Europe from the East by the Athenian general Themistocles after a victory over the Persians in 480–479 BCE , if legend is to be believed, and still all too popular today – entails two specially bred roosters that are placed in a pit to fight, usually to the death or until the grievous wounding of one bird, the sharpened natural spurs frequently being augmented by razorsharp metal spurs. All the while, attendant humans cheer on the birds upon which they have placed a bet. This so-called “sport” is in the same category as quailfighting,31 dogfighting, bullfighting, and bearbaiting, and it is sickening even to think about, showing humans at their worst. As William Blake put it in his poem “Auguries of Innocence” (1863),

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The game-cock clipt and arm’d for fight Does the rising sun affright.32

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The illegal trade in caged birds has thrived for centuries, and birds are the most commonly smuggled animal. Many birds are threatened with extinction by this trade; the rarer the bird, the more it is sought after. Although southeastern Asia is the hub of the bird trade, it is a problem worldwide, with many wealthy buyers in Europe and North America. Caged birds are widely attested from antiquity, valued both for their beauty and their song. Wanting to hear birdsong is apparently justification enough to catch a bird and keep it in a cage. I am with Percy Bysshe Shelley in opposing this practice: Poor captive bird! Who, from thy narrow cage, Pourest such music, that it might assuage

The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee, Were they not deaf to all sweet melody.33 Perhaps Blake’s outrage in “Auguries of Innocence” captures it best: A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage.34 Blake may not even have known about the widespread use of blinding “[b]y the red-hot needle” to make songbirds sing better, a practice lamented by William Hogarth in his engraving First Stage of Cruelty (1751) and by Thomas Hardy in his poem “The Blinded Bird” (1916): So zestfully canst thou sing? And all this indignity, With God’s consent, on thee! Blinded ere yet a-wing By the red-hot needle thou, I stand and wonder how So zestfully thou canst sing! Resenting not such wrong, Thy grievous pain forgot, Eternal dark thy lot, Groping thy whole life long; After that stab of fire; Enjailed in pitiless wire; Resenting not such wrong!35

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Although still practised today, liming birds – catching birds alive on a sticky substance spread on branches – was well known in ancient Greece and before. Euripides, in his play Cyclops (408 BCE ), refers to the drunken Silenus, servant of Dionysus, with the following metaphor: “[C]aught … by the cup as if by bird-lime, he struggles with his wings.”36 Aristophanes, in The Birds (414 BCE ), refers to the hunters “lying in wait” for birds “with traps and nooses and nets / and little limed twigs and bait.”37 Desmond Morris illustrates and discusses a Greek black-figured amphora (or vase) dating from about 575 BCE showing the capture of birds in a limed tree above a tethered owl that the figures come in to mob38 – a practice mentioned by Aristotle in The History of Animals (ca. 350 BCE ).39

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Baiting, snaring, and netting birds are all well attested over the past 5,000 years. In The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1800 BCE ), when Enkidu is persuading Gilgamesh to slay the monster Humbaba, he makes a reference to bird snaring.40 In one of the Inanna texts, which dates to about 1800 BCE , we find a reference to these well-known ancient practices. The second of Inanna’s bridesmen is the fowler, and the goddess Inanna says that she will “send a messenger to the fowler whose bird-nets are spread out; Let him treat me to fine birds.”41 In another Inanna text, she is described as a “[c]lever fowler / no bird escapes / the fine-mesh nets she casts.”42 Clap netting for waterfowl in the Egyptian marshes was widespread and “frequently represented in tomb reliefs and paintings, especially those of the Old Kingdom.”43 Ovid tells us that Lycaeus takes revenge on the Thracian women for the death of Orpheus by capturing them, “[a]s birds are trapped by clever fowlers in a net, / Then flutter to get free, drawing the net still tighter / Round wings and claws.”44 In his article “Last Song for Migratory Birds” (2013), Jonathan Franzen gives us a good idea of the almost unbelievable number of birds that still fall to the old techniques of baiting, liming, and netting on the southern coast of the Mediterranean, particularly in Egypt.45 Countless birds have perished over the past two centuries due to egg and nest collecting. For examples close to home, remember the theft of the nest and eggs of a Ross’s gull in 1981 in Churchill, Manitoba, and the constant threat to the eggs of the Arctic peregrine falcon because of the incredibly lucrative smuggling business. I will not even mention the carnage resulting from the huge Asian market for bird’s nest soup, which is an actual industry. The bycatch of birds as a result of longline fishing, ocean netting, and trawl fisheries is horrendous; albatrosses (as well as petrels and shearwaters) frequently get hooked on the lines in longline fishing and are dragged under to drown; we lose up to 100,000 birds a year this way in spite of efforts in some quarters to reduce this bycatch. There are too many rogue fishing boats on the seas. Perhaps the saddest and most shocking story of all concerns the collection of down and feathers for the plume trade. The figures defy belief; the United Kingdom, for example, imported 2.2 million pounds (997,903 kilograms) of ornamental plumage from France in 1913 alone.46 The plume trade, although lethal for birds, had its frivolous side and an element of hyperbole and the absurd. In the eighteenth century, during Marie Antoinette’s time, for example, feathered coiffures “reached absurd proportions as women were reputedly forced to kneel on the floors of carriages

Fashionable Edwardian lady’s hat trimmed with a whole bird-of-paradise. | Copyright Daderot, “Edwardian Bird Hat – Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History – DSC06608.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 11.2

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or had to ride with their heads out of windows” so as not to spoil their elaborate hairdos.47 In North America, as is well known, the women’s hat trade led to the near extinction of white herons and egrets. Egret feathers were worth twice their weight in gold.48 It is difficult to stop something as lucrative as that. These birds were slaughtered in untold numbers all over the world to feed the trade, some estimates running as high as hundreds of millions. What the fashion in beaver hats had done to the beaver, the fashion in egret plumes did to the egret in a fraction of the time, starting in the nineteenth century and continuing through to the First World War. The trade, of course, was not restricted to egrets and other herons, and an astounding number of bird species were decimated – ostriches, pheasants, peacocks, and birds-of-paradise being among the hardest hit. The bird conservationist Frank Chapman noted in a letter to Forest and Stream in 1886 that on two afternoon walks in New York City he had counted 700 lady’s hats, of which 542 were decorated with feathers from forty different kinds of native birds.49 Many ladies’ hats had whole songbirds plunked on top (fig. 11.2), not just a few feathers! Owls’ heads and nesting hummingbirds were the height of fashion.50

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The indiscriminate slaughter of colourful birds – even hummingbirds and birds-of-paradise – for ceremonial clothing, capes, and headdresses by Hawaiian, Papuan, Amazonian, and other Indigenous peoples is legendary. Feathers from sacred birds were thought to bestow divine power upon those who donned them, and there was also an aesthetic dimension. Unfortunately for the birds, we humans share their same sense of beauty. Low makes the point well: “Papua New Guinea is the land of birds of paradise, and of men who wear their plumes and demonstrate in a shimmering, quivering, prancing sort of way how deeply shared, by birds and people, a sense of beauty can be.”51 David Attenborough attended one dance in Papua New Guinea where the costumes were comprised of the plumes of around 20,000 birds-of-paradise!52 It has been estimated that “80,000 Mamo [a now extinct Hawaiian honeycreeper] were killed to make a single cloak” for royalty.53 Think of the eagle-plume headdresses of North American Plains Indians. Think of the costumes made from macaw, resplendent quetzal, and hummingbird feathers in South America (fig. 11.3).

Hawaiian feather helmet presented to Captain James Cook sometime before he was eaten in 1779. The 10,000 or so red feathers are from i’iwis. | Copyright Geni, “Hawaiian Feather Helmet British Museum.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 11.3

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After reading Cocker on the myriad uses of the eggs, feathers, and plumes of ostriches in various societies, one wonders that there are any ostriches left at all.54 The only thing more unfortunate than having plumes valued as fashionable in various cultures is having some body part that is believed to give oldsters firmer erections and women greater fertility. For example, in the medieval European Epistula Vulturis (ca. 800 CE ), we find this recipe using vulture parts for erectile fatigue: “You dry and beat its little kidneys and testicles and give with wine, to him who is unable to have intercourse with his wife, and he will find remedy.”55 This treatment did nothing for the vultures’ numbers, I will tell you – nor did the use of vulture parts in Africa, particularly brains, heads, and feet, to tell the future and improve thinking.56 The cramming of poultry, which entails feeding the birds to excess in order to fatten them up, is a very old practice mentioned by Pliny the Elder and still going strong today.57 We find a good example of cramming in the production of foie gras; the confined ducks and geese are force-fed through metal tubes in a process called gavage until their livers are five or six times the normal size and take up a substantial part of the body cavity. Chickens are “the biggest single source of human protein on Earth,”58 and with other poultry, they represent around 70 per cent of the biomass of all the birds on earth,59 yet the modern means of mass-producing them in impossibly cramped conditions – check out debeaking! – leaves much to be desired, as does their slaughter. In the United States, because of the speed of the operation, “some 825,000 chickens a year … miss the stunning and decapitation and instead are scalded alive.”60 Ortolans – incidentally, a favourite of former French president François Mitterand – are crammed before they are drowned in Armagnac and eaten whole. Mitterand’s last feast on New Year’s Eve in 1995, shortly before he died on 8 January 1996, was two illegal ortolans – a seriously threatened bird. Seabirds have been treated particularly badly, as we saw with the great auk. Countless such birds were rendered for oil, their breeding colonies were destroyed for guano harvesting, and to top it off, humans introduced pigs, goats, rats, cats, and mongooses to many of the world’s islands, with disastrous, yet predictable, results – the classic example being near extermination over the centuries of the incredible seabird population of Easter Island, perhaps the richest colony in the world. In The Seabird’s Cry (2017), Nicolson establishes that “[o]ver the last sixty years, the world population of seabirds has dropped by over two-thirds,” which means a decline “of about 70 per cent in six decades.”61 Human responsibility for this devastation is a leitmotif of his book.

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Land birds have not fared any better. For example, after the unintentional introduction of the brown tree snake to the island of Guam, the bird population was destroyed, and now “the jungle is eerily silent because of the missing songbirds.”62 Colonization of the Pacific Islands led to catastrophic losses. “Two-thirds of the nonpasserine Pacific birds … close to one thousand species, were extinguished,” and “some ten percent of the bird species on earth were wiped out during a single episode of colonization by relatively small groups of people.”63 These were terrible things, and the list goes on: the eating of wild songbirds, even if rare and vulnerable; commercial hunting, which had reduced trumpeter swans to sixty-nine wild birds by 1932; the indiscriminate use of pesticides; and the intentional killing of birds that are considered agricultural pests, with up to 100 million red-billed queleas – grass, seed, and grain eaters – killed each year in South Africa alone, often by dynamiting the roost trees to protect grain crops.64 The red-billed quelea is the world’s most numerous wild bird, with a population of over 3 billion; but remember the passenger pigeon, with a population estimated at over 4 billion? Ha, doing well as a species are you? We’ll fix that! Perhaps the single most bizarre human folly of all time involving birds was the ill-fated Four Pests Campaign of 1958, an attempt by Mao Zedong and the Chinese during the so-called Great Leap Forward (1958–61) to wipe out the Eurasian tree sparrow – together with rats, flies, and mosquitoes – because of the crop damage that it was wreaking in China. Needless to say, the campaign was hugely successful in nearly eradicating sparrows, but the resulting proliferation of insect pests, including locusts, caused crop yields to plummet disastrously, resulting in the Great Famine and the loss of some 20 million lives. The great man stopped the campaign and went after bedbugs instead! Sparrows had to be imported from the Soviet Union! Su Rynard tells this story well in her documentary The Messenger (2015). It would be funny – all those people running around banging pots and pans while shouting “Death to the sparrows!” and waving flags to scare them away – if it had not ended so badly. It is a sad footnote to our folly that in the twentieth century, ultralite pilot Bill Lishman had to teach some species of geese and cranes something about flight and migration after we nearly exterminated them and then ended up re-establishing populations without the collective accumulated knowledge to enable migration. And what about science? Is there anything that we have not done in its name? In The History of Animals, we already find Aristotle writing about the removal of the gonads of animals and the resulting effects. “The fact

is that animals, if they be subjected to a modification in minute organs, are liable to immense modifications in their general configuration. This phenomenon may be observed in the case of gelded animals.”65 Humans have been castrating animals for millennia. Writing at the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovani – with Aristotle in mind – tells us, Among the ancients, roosters were castrated in a way quite different from ours. They used to burn with a hot iron the hind part of the bowels or loins or spurs: Roosters are castrated in the lower part of the bowels, which falls down when they have coition. If you burn this with two or three hot irons, you make a capon.66 Aldrovani goes on to explain how much better it was in his day, around 1600: Our farm wives pull out the testicles through the posterior parts after making a small incision [near the anus] with a knife. The wound is large enough to admit a finger above the genitals under the septum where the testicles adhere and is sufficient to draw them out one by one.67

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How wonderful that science has allowed us to make fatter birds for eating.68 Things were not much better for the birds in the twentieth century. Want to know what insect pests the birds eat? Dissect their stomachs and find out. One researcher described how he had harvested some 32,000 bird stomachs to classify the contents.69 Want to know how birds perceive light? Blind them and shine lights on them. If they can still perceive light via the pineal gland, try injecting India ink into their upper brains. When scientists did so, they found that “the blinded birds again did not know whether it was light or dark.”70 Surprise. Anything can be done to birds in the name of science. Untold numbers of birds have perished while being used by humans to explore scientific problems. In his discussion of avian endocrinology and the effects of light, Tim Birkhead tells us about the technology used in the 1950s and 1960s to establish how newly discovered hormones worked: “It involved killing birds in a particular state – breeding or non-breeding, for example, and attempting to measure the hormone content of their endocrine glands.”71 Kill the bird, take out its pituitary gland, and measure its content. We have also seen what was

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done to songbirds in order to make them sing better and to find out why they sing. To understand more about how the syrinx works, experiments have been carried out at City College in New York using the syrinxes of actual zebra finches; the problem is that the syrinxes have to be fresh, and they stay moist for only a few hours, so a new syrinx is needed every day. As one student put it, “I feel bad about killing these birds. We teach them songs, they sing, and then I kill them.”72 I imagine that the birds feel bad about it, too. Jim Robbins relates how Erich Jarvis of Rockefeller University in New York “goes into the field to gather up hummingbird brains,” and “if their brain is removed and examined quickly enough” after they have sung, “he can measure changes in their brain activated by the bird’s singing,” which could shed light on human brain circuitry.73 At Berkeley, young juncos, American robins, black-headed grosbeaks, and whitecrowned sparrows were deafened by using lightbulb wires to wrench out the cochlea of the inner ears, and – guess what? – they all “developed only raspy, buzzing, buglike sounds instead of their normally melodious songs.”74 The work on the brains of zebra finches and canaries, which involves dissection immediately after singing, is too disturbing to repeat here. I am with Robert Frost, not the scientists, on this one:

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And of course there must be something wrong In wanting to silence any song.75

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In The Genius of Birds (2016), Ackerman presents many experiments done on birds but never seems to question the ethics of these experiments. “To find out which season’s song produced more painkilling opioids,” researchers dip male starlings’ feet in hot water in spring and fall.76 To determine how homing pigeons navigate, researchers do such things as damaging part of the forebrain, severing the nerve that links a bird’s beak with its brain, severing the olfactory nerves, and removing their inner ears before displacing the birds.77 To determine how Cory’s shearwaters navigate the sea and unerringly return home, researchers washed their nostrils with zinc sulphate and massively displaced the birds; “those with neutralized noses were completely confused and meandered around the ocean for weeks. Some never returned to their islands.”78 We have learned something! And catbirds that were deprived of their sense of smell and displaced were unable to return home!79 To be sure that the calls of eastern phoebes were innate, not learned, Donald Kroodsma and a colleague simply removed the cochleas from the inner ear of some baby phoebes.80 So many more experiments to be done!

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Rarely in the scientific literature does one come across any thought about the ethics of the killing of birds. If the kind of work described by Birkhead can be justified by its application to human biology and saving lives, how does one justify the kind of experiments performed to find out how and why birds sing? And does the knowledge gained in discovering how birds do and do not navigate justify the number of birds sacrificed in the various experiments? We already have radar, satellites, and global positioning systems (GPS ). Do we have to know such things badly enough to justify the killing of myriad birds, or is it done just to satisfy human scientific curiosity? There seems to be a widely held belief that any experimentation upon birds is permissible if we can learn something of possible use about ourselves. It is as though the birds had no intrinsic value of their own. And then there is falconry, to which I give particular attention because of the mystifying popularity of Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk (2014). Falconry is an age-old practice, very popular in Elizabethan times. In William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (ca. 1597), Falstaff, who is interested in Mistress Ford, inquires of her, “But are you sure of your husband now?” Mistress Ford informs Sir John, “He’s a-birding, sweet Sir John.”81 Mistress Ford, of course, is referring to falconry, a typical pastime for a gentleman. Although admittedly a cut above bearbaiting and dressing chimpanzees in zoot suits, falconry is just another form of dominating, harnessing, diminishing, and exercising our “dominion” over the fowls of the earth.82 Although falconry may have made some sense thousands or even hundreds of years ago before shotguns and massive nets, now it seems a mere indulgence of the wealthy, a superfluous manifestation of humans’ lamentable desire to tame and control nature. Moreover, some falcons, like sakers, “are globally endangered as a result of the falcon trade.”83 It is not out of any love of birds that we capture, hood, and jess falcons and keep them in cages or attached to our arms. The northern goshawk in Macdonald’s book is a wonderful creature, but Macdonald is determined to “man” it. She uses the falconer’s term for taming – a telling verb. She likes the challenge because “[g]oshawks are famously difficult to tame”84 – no matter the distress that it causes the bird. “Brought up short by her jesses she [the newly acquired bird] twitters in high-pitched distress as the realization of her hateful circumstances strikes.”85 Why do we always have to do things to such wild, free, wonderful creatures that we envy so much? Why would one want to “man” a goshawk and beat the wild out of the bird? Why try to break an indomitable bird – or elephant, or mustang, or slave, for that matter? In Macdonald’s case, deeply wounded by the recent

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Egyptian tomb painting showing Nebamun standing in his boat in a marsh with a throw-stick in one hand and three decoy herons in the other, ca. 1350 BCE. Note that his cat has already caught three birds flushed from the reeds. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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death of her father, it seems to be part of her desire to “escape to the wild” in order to heal herself.86 It is too bad that she had to use an animal to do so. Throughout the book, which is basically about Macdonald, I was with the hawk. For a sympathetic account of goshawks and many other raptors, read James Macdonald Lockhart’s Raptor: A Journey through Birds (2016), after which all thoughts of doing further damage to these magical birds must be banished. Of the many potent threats to birds today, perhaps foremost is the loss of habitat to development, from tiny local patches – habitat fragmentation – to the cutting and burning of forests in the Amazon and Borneo, beside which the proliferation of lawns and golf courses seems piddling. The problem is only compounded by the high degree of site fidelity among many birds. Where do you go when your site has been compromised or destroyed? The slaughter of birds by cats can also hardly be overstated. Cats are instinctive bird killers. The ancient Egyptians knew of this instinct and used cats for bird hunting (fig. 11.4). Free-roaming cats, whether feral or pet, kill far more birds than we formerly thought. For example, if each of the 75 million cats in the United States, which is a very conservative estimate,

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killed only one bird a month, that would account for 900 million deaths a year, almost 1 billion, without adding in doomed orphaned nestlings. The best recent studies suggest that this estimate is low; between 1.3 billion and 4 billion is closer to the truth.87 In a breeding population of around 10 billion birds – 20 billion if you include spring and fall migrants – one wonders how our North American birds survive? We release huge numbers of this fine bird predator into the outdoors every day, and they follow their instincts; they cannot help what they do. Even if belled, declawed, defanged, and deballed, they still kill birds. Our birds are not instinctually prepared for this alien predator descended from the African wildcat. Cats in North America have been described as alien, undesirable pests comparable to zebra mussels.88 In their book Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer (2016), a thorough and dispassionate review of the problem, Peter Marra and Chris Santella make the point that cat predation is the only major cause of bird decline that is entirely preventable and that could be easily rectified. All people have to do is keep their cats inside and eliminate feral cats, of which there are 60 million to 100 million in the United States, by neutering and/or culling. Ironically, keeping them inside is better for the animals; indoor cats live an average of eight years longer than outdoor ones. Marra and Santella do not hold out much hope for this solution, and one must agree with them. People who love cats love them more than they do birds and other small animals. And, of course, I know that your cat does not kill birds anyway; no one’s does. Our tall buildings with their lit-up windows at night, combined with the light pollution that masks celestial signposts used for orientation, take a terrible toll on migrants, as any member of the Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP ) in Toronto will tell you. Thousands of new transmission towers, proliferating like cancer as I write, also take a great toll on birds. “The landscape,” Scott Weidensaul writes, “is bristling with antennas like a porcupine, a forest of deadly metal that seines migrants from the air.”89 Our often indiscriminate use of herbicides and pesticides – evidenced by the near extirpation of ospreys and bald eagles by DDT , only recently averted – is taking a terrible toll on birds, as is our habit of mowing hay right when the grassland birds are nesting. We all know that insectivores like swallows and martins as well as grassland birds like meadowlarks and bobolinks are in the steepest declines. Each of these threats is material for separate books, and they have been well described by writers like Bridget Stutchbury in The Silence of the Songbirds (2007). Climate change may be about to eclipse them all,

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providing the straw that breaks the camel’s back. But please note that all of these things – habitat destruction, pet cats, tall buildings, pesticides, and even climate change – are generated directly by humans and are not in this sense natural. In the North American Bird Conservation Initiative’s 2016 report, we learn that 37 per cent of all North American bird species are at high risk of extinction without urgent conservation action. Birds of the oceans (57 per cent), tropical and subtropical forests (56 per cent), arid and grasslands (55 per cent), and coasts (37 per cent) are at highest risk.90 In a study published in the journal Science in October 2019, we learn that between 1970 and 2018 in the United States and Canada, we lost around 3 billion birds overall, or 29 per cent of our avifauna – a decline that cannot fail to continue and accelerate without drastic action.91 The situation is as bad or worse on other continents. If you want to get really depressed, begin with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) back to back with Stutchbury’s The Silence of the Songbirds. If that does not do the trick, read Scott Weidensaul’s Living on the Wind (2000), and start off with the description of the huge kill-off of Swainson’s hawks in Argentina.92 Or read Jonathan Franzen’s “Last Song for Migratory Birds” (2013), where he describes how every year along the whole Mediterranean coast, “hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement.”93 If you want to feel still more poorly, finish off with Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014), and reach for the bottle. I now keep one on my desk. Suffice it to say that we have done terrible things to our birds – even though we love them. Audubon adored birds, but he killed all the birds that he drew, no matter how rare, and just could not resist shooting at chuck-will’s-widows and Mississippi kites.94 It is a wonder that we have any birds left at all. In fact, in director Su Rynard’s “SongbirdSOS ” (2015), an episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Nature of Things, Stutchbury tells us, “We have only half the birds now that we did back in the 1960s,” a claim that she reiterates in Rynard’s documentary The Messenger. Fifty per cent and dropping rapidly! We have a lot to answer for. Say, did I mention roadkill?

Let the fowls of the air multiply upon the earth. – Genesis 1: 22

12 What Went Wrong? A question naturally arises: how could we have done all these awful things to birds in spite of our longstanding reverence for them, the role that they play in our culture, and the closeness of our relationship to them? Even God said that we should let the birds multiply and thrive. What influenced our mindset to allow for such a travesty? Whatever gave us the idea that we have the right to treat birds and the natural world in this way? Whence this queer notion? This chapter attempts to answer this central question. Let us begin with another question: are we animals? The root of anima, as we know from chapter 2, means “to breathe” and contains the notions of breath, life, and even soul; and the adjective animalis, from which our word “animal” derives, means “having breath.” So an “animal” is something having breath or life. Not for nothing do we read in the early Judaic tradition, in Genesis 2: 7, that “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostril the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” As creatures “having breath” and endowed with life, it should seem obvious that we are indeed animals. Certainly, most zoologists consider us nothing more nor less than a species of animal. In terms of such things as sexual activity, childrearing, suckling, fighting, and feeding, we readily fit the category of primates. In his famous study of humans, The Naked Ape

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(1967), Desmond Morris gives a strictly zoological portrait of humans: “There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named homo sapiens … [which] has remained a naked ape … [I]n acquiring lofty new motives, he has lost none of the earthy old ones. This is frequently a cause of some embarrassment to him, but his old impulses have been with him for millions of years, his new ones only a few thousand at the most – and there is no hope of quickly shrugging off the accumulated genetic legacy of his whole evolutionary past.”1 Morris goes on to conclude that “[d]espite our grandiose ideas and our lofty conceits, we are still humble animals, subject to all the basic laws of animal behavior … [W]e tend to suffer from a strange complacency that … there is something special about us, that we are somehow above biological control. But we are not … Some feel … that our intelligence can dominate all our basic biological urges. I submit this is rubbish. Our raw, animal nature will never permit it.”2 Let us ponder for a moment what Morris calls the “strange complacency that … there is something special about us.” We can see a hint of this strange idea in The Consise Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the word “animal”: “an organized being endowed with life, sensation, and voluntary motion; other animal than man; quadruped; a brutish man.” By this definition, we humans are not animals, except for those of us who allow our animal side to come to the fore and who act as brutes. Obviously, over the centuries, the notion of animals simply as breathing matter has evolved. In a course that I used to teach on animals in literature, I would begin the first class by asking the students to name the animals that they considered best known and most representative. I would stand at the blackboard and record the named animals in rough groupings. When the board was covered, I would stand back and go over all the animals – dogs, cats, horses, lions, tigers, bears, pandas, elephants, and so on – and then I would ask whether anything was missing. Someone might say “giraffes” or “moose” or some such thing, but no one ever said “humans.” It is interesting that many modern humans no longer see themselves as animals, certainly not animals on the same level as all those named above. If in the ensuing conversation I was able to wrest the admission from the students that we were, after all, animals, it was always clear that in their minds we were very special animals, superior to all the others, even if we do share roughly 99 per cent of our DNA with chimps and bonobos. In this chapter, I work from the assumption that we are animals like any other, our developed neocortex notwithstanding.

Walt Whitman intuited the evolutionary connection. In “Song of Myself ” (1855), he writes insightfully about the perception of shared inheritance: [Animals] show their relations to me and I accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession. I wonder where they get these tokens, Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?3

What Went Wrong?

Seeing facets of himself in animals, Whitman wonders at the similarities and asks whether there was not some closer connection between him and them long, long ago. Charles Darwin was simultaneously wondering the same thing. Now that we know about evolution and know, for example, that humans and birds shared a common ancestor some 300 million years ago, it would be mystifying if there were no vestigial similarities between humans and birds. But whence the notion of our specialness? The idea that we are somehow special stems in part from the fact that, while not special from the zoological point of view, humans are different from all other animals in some ways. Humans, the argument goes, are smarter and have better brains, possess language and use tools, and are able to reason. Although all of these things are true, the differences that set us apart turn out not to be intrinsic but matters of degree: we are qualitatively different but not intrinsically different. Humans have “no single defining characteristic.”4 We have simply advanced farther from the reptile stem than any other of our animal relatives. Most of the things thought to set us apart and above other animals have recently come under fire, and our specialness has been qualified. Language, for example, was long thought to set us apart – to be the clincher. However, we now know that whales and elephants have elaborate communication skills – and far bigger brains than ours. It has also been discovered that some birds, like Japanese tits, use grammatical rules and compositional syntax in their calls,5 and even chickadees may also have syntax.6 Our use of language is just more sophisticated, our syntax better developed. The same applies to our ability to make and use tools. We now know that many other animals use tools, including chimpanzees, orangutans, and a number of birds, like crows and the woodpecker finch. A few other animals even make tools: chimps, orangutans, and the famous New Caledonian crow, which, incidentally, fashions tools far more sophisticated than those found ready-made by chimps and orangutans.

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Even our vaunted ability to think and reason has turned out to be far from unique. It was formerly held, and is indeed still widely thought, that not just humans but mammals in general are more intelligent than birds. It was assumed that golden retrievers and sheep are not only lovable but also great brain trusts compared to birdbrains. Even though we share a common ancestor with birds, people seem to think that when we all went off in different directions, all birds ended up less intelligent than all mammals – which, of course, has turned out to be nonsense. There are stupid birds and stupid mammals. Many birds are smarter than some mammals, and some mammals are smarter than many birds. This outcome was inevitable. We now know that “birds’ brains do possess neural structures … that resemble the mammalian neocortex and other areas associated with sophisticated thinking” and that birds like corvids and parrots “have neuronal densities that exceed those of mammals.”7 Some birds are not only way more intelligent than many mammals but even smarter than human young. We all know about Irene Pepperberg’s famous African grey parrot, Alex, who demonstrated more brains with his toes than many mammals possess and who made it clear that at least some birds are much smarter than a lot of mammals. Alex “demonstrated an intelligence comparable with the primate brain of chimpanzees or a four- or five-year-old child.”8 Parrots in the bird world are like humans in the mammal world, writes Tim Low. “The smartest parrots and songbirds outdo apes, dolphins and elephants on some tasks … In relative brain size and intelligence they match apes.”9 In the video “Bird Genius” (2014), it is somewhat daunting to see how quickly and easily a Goffin’s cockatoo figures out how to open the various locking devices on a box containing a treat. I watched it several times and am not sure that I could have figured it out.10 Crows are also notoriously intelligent. Plutarch mentions “the Libyan crows which, when they are thirsty, throw stones into a pot to fill it and raise the water until it is within their reach”11 – a theme found as early as Aesop’s fable “The Crow and the Pitcher” (620–564 BCE ). In Ernest Thompson Seton’s story “Silverspot: The Story of a Crow” (1898), Silverspot knew enough to fly up out of range when Seton was carrying a gun but flew on unperturbed when Seton had only a walking stick.12 American crows drop nuts and hard fruit onto roads to use vehicles as nutcrackers.13 “Of all birds, in fact, with the exception of some parrots, corvids have the largest relative forebrain size. This area of the brain as a whole is responsible for learning and memory.”14 In the video “Bird Genius,” there is a telling sequence where a French poodle and a raven are given the same

What Went Wrong?

problem to solve. They have to figure out how to open a cage and get out a sweetmeat. Itchy, the dog, stares at the cage in bewilderment, having no clue whatsoever what is expected of him, whereas Bran, the raven, quickly, almost nonchalantly, figures out the series of locks and consumes the treat – ho hum.15 In The Genius of Birds (2016), Jennifer Ackerman presents us with all the most recent findings about avian intelligence and vows never to use the term “bird brain” again. Her excellent chapter on the New Caledonian crow looks at its ability to make and streamline tools,16 and in a chapter called “The Mapping Mind,” she discusses why pigeons are far better at finding their way than humans.17 When one thinks of humans with their global positioning systems (GPS ), maps, and compasses, one wonders how a whimbrel can fly from Chesapeake Bay in Virginia to breeding grounds on the North Slope of Alaska, then over Alaska and across the Pacific to Washington State, and then due east across the Rocky Mountains heading for the Great Lakes and Virginia again. Some bristle-thighed curlews and bar-tailed godwits make simply stunning long-distance flights, over 5,000 miles (8,047 kilometres) nonstop for the curlew and 6,800 miles (10,944 kilometres) for the godwit.18 The greater shearwater navigates almost the entire Atlantic Ocean and “will cover more than 13,000 miles [20,921 kilometres] in about nine months.”19 “The short-tailed shearwater may cover more than 18,000 miles [28,968 kilometres] in a single year, carving a vast circuit on the Pacific … and yet they arrive back in Australia within the same eleven-day period each year.”20 Arctic terns fly more than 22,000 miles (35,406 kilometres) in a year, covering an enormous territory. Imagine the ever-changing problems to be grappled with by these birds on their routes – yet most complete their flights successfully. Kittiwakes are “not driven by mechanical instinct but by a mind that can prioritize and allocate different days’ flying and hunting to different purposes.”21 Do such things not posit superior intelligence as well as instinct? Chimpanzees and birds can reason, learn, and remember things and can even contemplate the future; we simply do it better – but not always. Take memory, for example. Clark’s nutcrackers and California scrub jays have phenomenal memories – far better than those of humans. The Clark’s nutcracker gathers more than 30,000 pine seeds in a summer, buries them in up to 5,000 caches, and can relocate them for up to nine months.22 Ever lost your glasses or pen in your own house? So we are far from unique in the animal world; we are just more intelligent in some ways than other animals. That our differences are often of degree rather than kind is to be expected. We are not as special as we like

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to think. As the foremost student of ravens, Heinrich Bernd, puts it, “We are finding that capabilities that we have prided ourselves on and used as a rationale for our superiority apply to other animals as well … A lot of people might not be able to accept that we are not the ultimate crown of creation, but that seems to be the case.”23 And, of course, a crucial question arises: what is our greater intelligence worth? Has it equipped us better than other animals for life on the planet? Are we more successful than birds, for example? When Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the third stanza of “To a Sky-Lark” (1820), there was little doubt in his mind that the answer was no:

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Yet if we could scorn Hate, and pride, and fear; If we were things born Not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.24

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The poet knows that humans are not born for simple joy, that we cannot master hate and fear, and that even if we could, we would be hard put to attain the joy that the skylark expresses in its singing. We surpass birds and other animals in abstract thought and expression of ideas, but our quickness to intellectualize hatred and racism and to enslave and kill each other compromises us in the end and makes us less successful overall. Sadly, our minds cannot compensate for our genes. So are we humans indeed more successful than birds? It is doubtful. So are we really not special at all? What about consciousness? Surely, the fact that we are conscious and sentient beings, aware and knowing, sets us neatly apart from other animals. No, it does not; again, it is simply a matter of degree. With our larger brain, we may be more aware of our position in life and of the things that do and could happen to us, but we now know that animals, too, are conscious beings and are aware of many of the same things that we are aware of. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, signed by a large group of leading neuroscientists on 7 July 2012, tells us that “[b]irds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought.”25

What Went Wrong?

“Near human-like levels of consciousness.” Well. Again, we are not special and not different from birds – just more advanced along the same lines. And here is what the declaration has to say about animals in general: “Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”26 Oh dear. Octopuses! This discovery is embarrassing. Moreover, octopuses – and to some degree, other cephalopods like cuttlefish and squid – although invertebrates, appear to have developed their elaborate neurological systems and high intelligence parallel to but quite independently of vertebrates like mammals and birds. The earliest common ancestor – possibly some small, multicelled sea worm with a rudimentary nervous system – goes back some 600 million years, compared to 6 million years for the common ancestor of humans and chimps. There is no reason that evolution should have produced the complex nervous systems and advanced brains that we find in birds and mammals only once. Octopuses show that it did so at least twice.27 We used to be told that it was anthropomorphic to attribute intelligence and feelings to animals. Now it is clear that it is anthropocentric to deny it. So we naked apes are really just animals, neither special nor above biological control. But where, then, does our doggedly persistent notion that we humans have some special status and special privilege come from? When did we decide to try to carve out a better deal for ourselves and put ourselves in a special position? The question merits examination because the ramifications of this notion of specialness are staggering, and the upshot is an outlook in the modern world that may prove untenable: the belief that we can do with the earth what we want. The roots of this anthropocentricism and notion of specialness seem to lie in the Neolithic. In the great civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, we noted the continuance of the reverence for birds seen in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic. But we also noted the strengthening of a tendency already seen in the Neolithic toward anthropomorphizing the bird and other animal gods and undermining their independence. In this tendency, we

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Master of Animals depicted in a sheet gold pendant from the Aegina Treasure, probably of Cretan workmanship, 1850–1550 BCE. Surrounded by lotus flowers, a human figure, god or not, but highly stylized in the Egyptian manner, is holding two geese by the necks, thereby demonstrating his control over the animals. | Copyright Trustees of the British Museum, London.

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FIGURE 12.1

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can see the beginning of a new attitude that would develop alongside the old animism and eventually displace it or marginalize it, slowly stifling and eventually silencing the nature gods by replacing them with humanlike gods. This attitude is perhaps most clearly reflected in the so-called Master/Mistress of Animals theme that begins to appear in Neolithic art and then comes on strongly in Mesopotamian and Egyptian art around 4000–3000 BCE , becoming progressively more common over time and spreading throughout Europe. Alastair Harden, writing about GraecoRoman art, goes so far as to say, “One theme that unites most Classical art is that of human dominion over the animal kingdom.”28 Typically – and there is great variation – the Master of Animals motif is represented by a picture of a male human or a god in human form standing between two birds or other animals confronting each other (fig. 12.1). The human figure has its arms stretched out and is holding the birds or other animals by the neck – clearly controlling them. I believe that this idea was unthinkable before domestication of animals during the Neolithic. The beginning of the loss of sacred status for birds and other animals is tied directly to domestication. How could you revere a tame animal that could no longer fend for itself if released back into the wild?

It is much easier to get the feeling that you control animals when you have begun to keep them in pens, feed them and breed them at will, and make them dependent – in short, to own them.29 No hunter-gatherers would have felt this ownership of birds and other animals, although they might have wished for it. Some speculate about a Palaeolithic god of the hunt to whom humans could appeal for help with the other animals, but there is no evidence for it, and I think that the closest thing to attempting control over the other animals in the Palaeolithic can be found in the various methods of appeal to the spirit of the animal itself, such as the bird or bear spirit: I will sacrifice for you and dance for you, even draw representations of you, if you will give me one of yours. It was only after the Palaeolithic that humans tried to wrest control from the animals and attain “dominion” over them. Here was humans’ sense of specialness coming to the fore and beginning to translate into a sense of superiority and privilege – humans above other animals and controlling nature – a theme that would blossom in Greek philosophy and in Genesis. Humans become masters of domesticated birds and other animals and then become masters of all animals and acquire rights over them.

FIGURE 12.2 Mistress of Animals depicted in a baked-clay figure of a naked woman with each hand on a feline, Çatal Hüyük, 7000–6000 BCE. | Photo Arlette Mellaart, courtesy of Alan Mellaart.

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Greek carvedivory votive relief from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia at Sparta showing Artemis as Potnia Theroon (Mistress of Animals) holding two birds with two more on each side of her shoulders, 700–600 BCE. | Collections of Vases, Metal and Minor Arts Artefacts, NAM 15502, National Archaeological Museum, Athens, copyright Kostas Xenikakis, Archaeological Receipts Fund, Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Greece.

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FIGURE 12.3

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There is also a well-known Mistress of Animals motif, perhaps even older than the Master motif, although this theme thrived only later, particularly in Greece. Our oldest representation of this motif – dating from 7000–6000 BCE , making it older than any representation of the Master of Animals motif that I know of – is the damaged, baked-clay figurine found in a grain bin in Çatal Hüyük showing a naked woman seated between two cats of some kind, which James Mellaart takes to be leopards (fig. 12.2).30 We also have a gold seal from Turkmenistan with a representation of the goddess Ishtar between two lions dating from around 2000 BCE . We have a lovely ex-voto dating from 700–600 BCE carved in ivory with a likeness of Artemis flanked by birds on either side of her shoulders and holding two ducks at her sides (fig. 12.3). Perhaps even the Burney Relief with Inanna between two owls could be considered a reflection of this theme. Our first written mention seems to be Homer’s reference to Potnia Theroon (Mistress of Animals) in The Iliad, written around 800–700 BCE , which is taken to refer to Artemis, goddess of the hunt and wild animals.31 With this motif, we seem to be dealing with humanlike goddesses, often winged, who control animals – probably all goddesses of the hunt, who can bring good luck with beasts – and who can be approached through prayer or sacrifice to cede some of that power to humans. One gets the feeling with the Master of Animals motif that we are already dealing with the next stage and looking at humans holding other animals and exerting their own control. But even if both the Mistress and the Master of Animals are gods, they are still anthropomorphic, still invented by humans, and still based on the idea of control over the other animals. Another very old written suggestion of this idea of human power over the other animals can be found in the “Hymn to Hermes,” which dates from around 700–600 BCE – the oldest stratum of Greek literature. In this hymn, Apollo tells Hermes to take “the twisted-horned cattle of the fields and care for the horses and drudging mules,”32 and he tells him that Zeus has decreed that “the glorious Hermes is to be master of all the birds of omen [οἰωνοῖσι] and fierce lions and white-tusked boars and dogs and sheep, which the wide earth nourishes, and all the flocks.”33 Zeus makes Hermes, his son, Master of Animals, bestowing on him a mandate not dissimilar to the one that God confers upon Adam in Genesis. Here, as imagined by humans, we have an anthropomorphic god, Zeus, giving a similarly anthropomorphic god, Hermes, dominion over all animals, wild and tame, suggesting the lines along which human thought was beginning to travel as it moved toward the idea that birds and other animals are

What Went Wrong?

controllable property. The implication that they should be controlled by humans will soon be expressed openly. Between 500 and 300 BCE , in the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, a radical change took place in Greek thought, heralded by the preSocratic sophist Protagoras, who challenged belief in the gods and held that “[m]an is the measure of all things.”34 The gods recede and the world becomes anthropocentric – human-centred. Humans take their place at the centre of the Greek worldview, with the rest of nature in hierarchical descendency below. Although Plato still believed in the transmission of souls between other animals and humans, he insisted on a hierarchical human-centred worldview. Plato’s student Aristotle was a naturalist and zoologist who wrote major treatises on natural history. The cosmos, for Aristotle, was a finite entity in which everything has a place, a reason, and a cause. Everything in nature has a role. In The History of Animals (ca. 350 BCE ), Aristotle speaks of an “upward scale” in nature and “a continuous scale of ascent.”35 Plants serve animals, animals serve people, and humans are right at the top of this ladder, or scala naturae. In book 1 of The Politics (ca. 350 BCE ), Aristotle makes clear that humans are special and meant for higher political association than all other animals. Aristotle reasons that humans alone are furnished with the faculty of language, that humans alone can declare what is just and unjust, and that humans alone possesses a perception of right and wrong, good and evil. Humans at their best – civilized and politicized – are the best of animals. Humans alone have an anima rationalis, and that is the source of their superiority. Aristotle concludes that “all animals must have been made by nature for the sake of men.”36 Quite a bold plan of thought for a man living in a period when priests were running around sacrificing bulls, people were praying to oracles and sybils and sacrificing to wells and bogs, maidens were dressing up as bears, and women were parading the streets yearly with huge imitation penises. Aristotle’s thoughts lead directly to the idea that humans have the right to be master of nature and therefore to exploit nature so that it will produce for them, as well as the concomitant idea that humans have no reciprocal obligation toward nature. Humans, if still an animal, are the best animal, with exclusive rights to do as they please. In Genesis, we find the same archly anthropocentric viewpoint. The Judeo-Christian worldview that originates in ancient Judaic thought complements Aristotle almost perfectly in this instance – providing a powerful double whammy. In Genesis 1: 20, God begins thus: “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and fowl

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that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” The attention, however, soon switches to humankind in Genesis 1: 27–8:

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So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

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No brotherhood with nor reverence for other animals here. This stance is a frontal attack on the pagan worldview held by all the Jews’ neighbours and probably by most Jews themselves, if the golden calf is anything to go by.37 People everywhere were still animists and worshipped birds and other animals. But Genesis 1 tries to break this old view and establish a new pattern: a human-centred earth where humankind worships only one god – who is not an animal god. How could one dispute humans’ importance when God himself made humans in his own image!38 And on top of that, God gave humans dominion over every other living thing. Dominion, no less – that is, sovereignty and control over all other creatures. Nothing ambiguous here. The other animals are given completely into the power of humans as instruments for their purposes, and the whole earth is theirs to “subdue.” This legitimizes the right of humans to kill other animals, exploit them, experiment with them, and even exterminate them if they get in the way. Not surprisingly, even some other Jews hesitated to go so far. As we saw in chapter 8 when discussing the earthly paradise theme, we find quite a different account in the creation story as it is told in Genesis 2, where God creates a man and then the other animals and brings them to him for naming – the footing here being more egalitarian. But it was Genesis 1 and the idea of dominion that took hold and jibed perfectly with Aristotelian thought. What could negate our animal features more completely and do more to make us special on earth? Lest there be any ambiguity about where God stands – dominion over animals as in Genesis 1 or brotherhood with animals as in Genesis 2 – God clears up the ambiguity in a new contract with Noah in Genesis 7–9. God becomes mightily disenchanted with his creation and decides to simply wipe it all out and cleanse the earth. Creation was all a mistake. Only the righteous Noah and his family does he decide to save. He commands 600-year-old Noah to build an ark and take breeding stock of all

the animals and fowls of the air on board with him. During a 150-day flood, God completely cleanses the earth. After the flood, Noah and all the breeding stock go forth from the ark. But how is Noah to treat other animals now after living together for so long? In Genesis 9: 2–3, lest there be any uncertainty in Noah’s mind about the relationship with other animals, God, never one to mince words in the Old Testament, makes it clear that we are sticking with Genesis 1: And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you.

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This dread and dominion business took root firmly. It is not surprising that it is rooted in Judaism, a patriarchal, monotheistic religion that developed among formerly nomadic agricultural people who had only recently domesticated animals and begun to live together in larger settlements. Keep the animals in their place. The last thing you want in a monotheistic religion is remnants of earlier gods competing with the one and only. Dominion means sovereignty, rule, and complete control. It accounts for our present-day assumption that everything on earth exists for our benefit and that we have the God-given right to exploit all of nature with impunity – attitudes that are leading us into ever more serious trouble. The idea of human dominion over the earth has done and continues to do much harm.39 It is as though God, in gratitude for recognition of himself as the only god and all-powerful, then cedes to humans complete sovereignty over the rest of creation and gives them carte blanche to do as they choose. That, at least, is what humans recorded in the book of Genesis. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Milan Kundera reminds us, “Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse,”40 recalling the Greek philosopher Xenophanes’s statement that “if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their feet, horses would draw the forms of god like horses.”41 What seems more likely than God granting humans dominion over other animals, Kundera continues, “is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.”42 Are we not devious? What an irony that development of one human organ, the brain, led to such nonsense.

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Christianity later took these Judaic views even further. Not only did God give us dominion over other animals, but he also gave us souls. God made us, and only us, in his own image and gave us immortal souls. It even says so in Genesis 2: 7: “the Lord God” made man “a living soul” – and not only a living one but an immortal one. We do not wholly die, not the whole hog anyway. God gave our souls life eternal. And God did not give the other animals immortal souls or, for that matter, souls of any kind. In the Christian worldview, humans are definitely transcendent, and the other animals are denied souls.43 Mainstream Christianity, as Barbara Noske puts it, has become “the most anthropocentric religion in the world”44 in its attempt to provide a moral basis for human supremacy by casting other animals and all other life as mere matter and soulless – which even Aristotle did not do – whereas it deems humans to be a reflection of God’s image and to have souls or spirits that are immortal and, therefore, not of this earth. Christian thinkers have not been willing to allow birds and other animals souls anything like those of humans. The Church Fathers have been rather consistent on this point. Neither the cerebral Saint Augustine nor the philosophical Thomas Aquinas were willing to allow birds and other animals souls anything like those of humans. In the Christian worldview, humans are definitely transcendent, whereas the other animals are denied souls. What a reflection of our growing sense of superiority. It is ironic that although we cannot imagine a bird having a soul, humans, as we know, often conceive of the soul as a bird. Both Greek and Christian thought conceive of the soul this way and use the bird as a symbol of the soul. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus (ca. 370 BCE ), Socrates, in his famous second speech, implicitly compares the soul to a bird and speaks at length of the soul as having wings: “When it is perfect and fully winged it mounts upward and governs the whole world; but the soul which has lost its wings is borne along until it gets hold of something solid.”45 The bird in the hand of the child in medieval paintings of the Madonna and Child represents the human soul. Gerard Manley Hopkins draws directly on this longstanding tradition in his poem “The Caged Skylark” (1877): As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells.46 The irritating thing about this Western view that only humans have souls is that it provides a moral basis, however shaky, for human ascend-

What Went Wrong?

ancy and mistreatment of other animals:47 animals and all other life are mere matter and soulless and therefore count less than humans, who have souls and spirits since they are immortal and not of this earth. It appears that the Western tradition invented God as part of a deal or strategy for coping with life and its fears: we will believe in you, but in return, you must relieve us of the stress and fear that we are going to die by making us the centre of life. The Judeo-Christian view predominated in Western thought throughout the Middle Ages until finally, in the first half of the seventeenth century, at the beginning of the Age of Reason, the French philosopher René Descartes took things one step further, laying the foundation of the modern “scientific” view and driving the last nail into the coffin of animistic thought. For Descartes, humans are special because they can use words to declare thought, whereas no other animal can. Thought is everything for Descartes. His famous cogito says as much: Cogito ergo sum (I think; therefore, I am). Humans are special because they are a thinking animal possessing mind and reason. This idea is the beginning of the deification of reason. No machine can ever equal humans, and animals are mere machines – bêtes machines. Other animals have no reason at all, and their nature is altogether different from and inferior to that of humans. Other animals are “thoughtless brutes.” All of nature, for that matter, is just one vast machine, complex like a clock, but only a machine. Humans, therefore, are meant to dominate their surroundings. This idea is the underpinning of Descartes’s purely mechanistic view of the world, a view holding that all things are natural phenomena admitting of mechanical explanation. Nature is a system of mutually adapted parts working together as a machine like a clock does. For Descartes, the role of humankind is that of master of the machine and possessor of nature, which humans will control and dominate with their minds through mathematics and science. Nature, particularly other animals, does not matter. Why should they when other animals cannot reason, express thoughts, or even feel?! They are mere automata incapable of feeling pain; Descartes, I believe, could never have had a dog. Stones, trees, and other animals are all the same. This assessment is the origin of the view existing even in our scientific community today that we can use and destroy other animals “ethically” at our will. Humans are deemed to be the measure of all things, and the nonhuman becomes progressively less valuable. The spiritual and metaphysical are simply irrelevant. Nature is demystified.

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Bêtes machines. What nonsense! Voltaire rightly attacked this idea in the entry on bêtes (beasts or animals) in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764): “How absurd, how platitudinous, to say that beasts are machines, devoid of knowledge and feeling, which perform their operations in the same manner, which learn nothing, which perfect nothing! What? This bird which makes a semi-circular nest when it builds against a wall, which builds in a quarter-circle in a corner, and in a full circle on a tree – this bird does everything in the same fashion? … Does the canary you teach an air repeat it immediately? Don’t you employ considerable time to teach it? Haven’t you seen it making mistakes and correcting itself ?”48 I share Alexander Pope’s anger and scorn at this anthropocentrism as expressed in epistle 3 of his famous poem “An Essay on Man” (1734):

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Has God, thou fool! Work’d solely for thy good? Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food? – Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings? Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings. Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat? Loves of his own and raptures swell the note. – Is thine alone the seed that strews the plain? The birds of heav’n shall vindicate their grain.49

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After Descartes – who claimed to be a staunch Roman Catholic! – and partly because of him, even God begins to recede from the equation over the following centuries, given a strong shove by Darwin in his theory of evolution and the origin of species. After Darwin, God, although not necessarily dismissed, is no longer felt to be necessary even as a creator. The origin of species, Darwin tells us, lies in a purely natural and random process of genetic selection that has no goal and no particular aim. There is no plan and therefore no meaning; the watchmaker, as Richard Dawkins has it, is blind.50 Humans are responsible to no one, and no hold is barred. Let the fit survive if they can. Aristotle, Genesis, and Descartes go a long way toward accounting for the view that lurks behind much of our social, political, scientific, and business thought today: that we have the right to use other animals and all nature for our own advantage without remorse or guilt. This positivist, scientific view allows for no involvement with the other animals, which are reduced to mere things from which human observers distance

What Went Wrong?

themselves totally. We need feel no guilt or responsibility for our role in the sixth extinction! It is all just “progress.” What is astounding and most regrettable is that our certainty of being special and having special rights and even ownership of nature – Godgiven or otherwise – is not accompanied by an equally strong sense of duties and obligations to our fellow animals and nature itself. Far from it. Our kinship with the other animals, which we see as inferior to us, does not seem to oblige us to help and protect them and view them as fellow travellers. This disregard for animals disgusted Arthur Schopenhauer, who commented in 1840, “[Animals] are said to have no rights, and there is the erroneous idea that our behavior to them is without moral significance, or, as it is said in the language of that morality, there are no duties to animals. All this is revoltingly cruel, a barbarism of the West.”51 Why does our specialness not bring along moral or ethical obligation to help our fellow inhabitants of the planet? Why does it not constrain us? One area where we actually are relatively superior is language. Birds and other animals do not have language as sophisticated as ours. It is language that allows us to profit from the insights of exceptional humans, record them, and teach them to each other so that all can benefit from isolated discoveries. One would think that this huge advantage would bestow upon us the moral imperative to take care of our fellow animals – because we can. But we do not seem to care. Does it matter that elephants – and maybe some birds, like California scrub jays – weep?52 Does it change things that animals are not bête machines but feel love, sorrow, and pain as well as think and fear and pine? Does it matter that anteaters love their children? Does it affect the picture that we and all other species are kin on this earth and the products of the same genetic and evolutionary process of natural selection? Jeffrey Masson, in his book When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (1995), puts the question this way: “What are the implications of finding that animals lead emotional lives? Must we change our relationship with them? Have we obligations to them? Is testing products for humans on animals defensible? Is experimentation on animals ethical? Can we confine them for our edification? Kill them to cover, sustain, and adorn ourselves? Should we cease eating animals who have complex social lives, are capable of passionate relations with one another, and desperately love their children?”53 If we believed that other animals love their young the same way that we do and grieve for them as we do, would we still take them for zoos or kill them? Would we not form a new covenant with birds and other animals

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and become better stewards of the planet? Apparently not, for now that we do know about consciousness in other animals, we continue to exploit nature almost entirely for our own benefit. What are we to think of ourselves? If other animals are kin and produced in exactly the same evolutionary process as ourselves, obviously we should treat them as such. If we are all part of one great organic system and interconnected world of plants and animals, we should treat them responsibly. But, of course, we do not. Our intellects have not freed us from our baser side at all. We have been betrayed by our intellects and become despoilers of life rather than architects with the best interests of all life in mind. Our sense of communality with birds and nature is shattered, and we have isolated ourselves. In the wonderful section of The Unbearable Lightness of Being titled “Karenin’s Smile,” Kundera has his heroine, Tereza, contemplate the thought that

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[e]ven though Genesis says that God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to man’s care. Man was not the planet’s master, merely its administrator, and therefore responsible for his administration … True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.54

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In his highly imaginative novel The Plague Dogs (1978), Richard Adams, the author of Watership Down (1972), lets Rowf, one of his two canine heroes, tell a creation story called “Rowf ’s Tale” – a rethinking of the creation myth from a dog’s point of view.55 The great dog up in the sky, called the “star dog,” created all the birds and other animals and then created earth as a place for them to live. Needing someone to take care of them all, he created “man” for the job and as a reward allowed him “reasonable use of the animals.” The star dog made things clear: “But I want you to remember all the time that if I’ve made you the most powerful animal it’s so that you can look after the others – help them to do the best they can for themselves, see they’re not wasted and so on. You’re in charge of the world. You must try to act with dignity, like me. Don’t do anything mean or senseless.”56

What Went Wrong?

But, of course, that is precisely what humankind did – baiting badgers, poisoning water with sewage, bullfighting, and blinding caged birds to make them sing – and when the star dog finds out, he curses humankind: “You are no longer fit to look after the animals.”57 Then he casts humankind out and washes his hands of the whole earth. Humans now live a solitary life, shunned by the animals, whom they torment. Rowf concludes his tale by saying, “It’s a bad world for animals now … for what good are men to animals?”58 The idea in these texts is that humans have reneged on a bargain and become selfish animals who challenge even the benevolence of God and as a result are cast out. The implication is that we must rethink our role on earth and abandon the whole dominion business. Rather than contemplating these questions and tempering our actions accordingly, however, we remain mired in the Aristotelian–Judeo-Christian–Cartesian paradigm and continue to wreak havoc on our fellow birds and other animals. It is small wonder that the birds are disappearing as I write. And not just the birds. Indeed, how could we think that we could remove something like birds and not affect the rest of nature. We have known since naturalist Alexander von Humbolt’s time that damaging one part of nature has far-reaching consequences for the rest of it. Writing in the early 1800s, Humbolt told us that nature is a “living whole” where everything is interconnected in a “net-like intricate fabric.”59 We have ignored this observation at our peril. Oh, what have we not done to our planet? In our three-pronged attack, we have acidified the oceans and treated them as cesspools and garbage dumps, we have fundamentally altered the surface of the planet through slashing and burning, clear-cutting, agriculture, mining, river damming, and the like – my favourite symbol of this tendency being Mount Rushmore, where for some reason we took a majestic mountain and carved the whole thing into human faces, the Lakota Sioux’s objections notwithstanding – and we have polluted the air to such a degree that in some cities it is now necessary to wear face masks in order to breathe. No other species has been capable of such folly. Our actions toward birds, other animals, and nature in general lack any moral basis. It is we humans who are engineering the sixth extinction, a stunning irony given the wondrous gene that allows us to think conceptually and ponder our lives and future. How ironic that this extinction may include ourselves – a high price indeed. At the beginning of this chapter, we asked how we can treat birds as badly as we do in spite of humans’ longstanding and rich cultural relationship with them. We have seen that the answer lies in the hubristic,

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anthropocentric belief that the earth exists solely for us humans and that we are not only somehow special and superior compared to all other life forms but are also not even really just animals, although zoologically this claim is simply not true. From an early stage, we humans convinced ourselves that we were masters of the other animals, and we soon claimed dominion over them – first in God’s name and then in our own – telling ourselves that we had no bond with or duties toward other beings. We convinced ourselves that only we matter and that the earth exists to be used by us for our own good. Indeed, we have the right to treat the natural world however we want – no holds barred. In an attempt to give ourselves some existential advantage, we humans usurped the role of the gods by first conceptualizing the gods as human in form and eventually casting ourselves in the role of the gods. It took a long time to fully abandon our animistic beliefs and convince ourselves that we were special, but eventually this anthropocentric belief prevailed. And never was humankind more exclusively focused on itself and less concerned about the rest of the world than during the COVID -19 crisis of 2020–21. The instinct for self-preservation at any cost clearly trumps any concerns for fellow animals and the biosphere in general. It is bitterly ironic that COVID -19 – a zoonotic disease – may reflect the revenge of the animal kingdom for human despoliation. This anthropocentrism, however, is now untenable and puts us in a fundamentally unethical position vis-à-vis our fellow travellers, one that is leading to the ruination of our biosphere as we know it. Can we turn things around?

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Destruction upon destruction is cried; For the whole land is spoiled: – I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, And all the birds of the heavens were fled. – Jeremiah 4: 20–5, where Jeremiah describes the desolation of Israel in his lamentation for the miseries of Judah

13 What Is to Be Done? We have examined our longstanding relationship with birds and seen how it has deteriorated and why. Let us now review our present situation and then try to answer three questions. First, should we establish a new, sympathetic relationship with birds and nature? Second, if the answer is yes, then can we? Third, if we can, then will we?

Our Present dilemma Early modern humans, as we have seen, needed ways to help themselves to survive in the competitive natural world – ways to tilt the playing field in their favour and enhance their chances of survival. One of these ways was to worship perceived gods and spirits who would in turn offer help. Among these gods, birds figured large, and the relationship between humans and birds was vital. After the Palaeolithic, during which animism reigned and the gods were theriomorphic, birds and other animals progressively lost their cult status as the gods became anthropomorphic, and then monotheistic religions like Judaism and Christianity appeared and silenced the animistic voice. With the domestication of grains and animals, the human population explosion, and the move to ever-larger urban centres, humans gradually lost touch with nature and the pulse of life. Many modern humans, particularly in the West, have either disposed of gods entirely or assumed

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that the gods mainly have human interests at heart. The spiritual tie to birds has been undone, and like the rest of nature, birds are treated as just another thing existing for human use and of no intrinsic importance. The human-bird relationship, such as it is, is no longer vital. Our survival is no longer thought to depend on birds; their survival, paradoxically, now depends on us. Our sense of reverence for and communality with birds, other animals, and nature as a whole is shattered, and we have isolated ourselves from all other life on a small planet. We are no longer fellow travellers with birds and other animals; we are going it alone. Having lost our roots in and contact with nature, we consequently have no respect for it at all. We have attacked nature head-on and walled ourselves off from it – literally and figuratively. Many of us see wild things only in zoos and see nature only in parks. Our understanding of our position in nature has become badly skewed. This situation will persist as long as humans continue to consider themselves the centre of existence. Our present human situation is dire. Our divorce from nature has left us anxious and uncertain. The price of the divorce has been high.1 Sigmund Freud, it seems, was right; much of our civilized behaviour is simply sublimation of our animal-sexual nature. Civilization represents a move toward the primacy of the intellect and away from animality and sexuality. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud argues that sublimation is a defence of a higher form of life against our residual animality. In this revolt against the body, we can see the beginnings of modern humans’ refusal to countenance their animal nature and the beginnings of existential unease.2 We are no longer able to see ourselves as organisms like any other, and in order to underscore our difference from other animals, we sublimate and disguise all things that remind us of our animality: for example, we cover our sex organs with fig leaves or clothing, we remove our bodily hair and variously shave our faces, armpits, and legs, we mask all bodily odours with perfumes, we have sex in the dark in private, and we occasionally even mortify our flesh with hair shirts, spiked belts, whips, and the like. We keep a sharp eye out for atavistic tendencies and reversion to type. In his novel Lord of the Flies (1954), William Golding shows us just how easy it is to revert to type when a group of stranded British schoolboys quickly yield to the savagery and bestiality that lurks just under the surface, soon sloughing their clothing, taking up hunting, and worshipping a pig’s head on a pole. As early as ancient Greece, thinkers tried hard to make the mind and intellect everything and to sublimate sexuality and carnality. In Greek art, the men often have tiny genitals, whereas other animals as well

Red-figured potbellied ceramic jug by the Perseus Painter showing a bird perched on an ithyphallic herm, ca. 460 BCE. The bird appears to be kissing Hermes while perched on his phallus, underscoring the connection between our sexuality and animality. | Copyright Zde, “Herma with Bird, Altar and Fire, Pelike, 460 BC, Perseus Painter, Berlin, F 2172, Alts39c. jpg,” Wikimedia Commons. FIGURE 13.1

What Is to Be Done?

as creatures that are half-human and half-animal, like satyrs and centaurs, are shown with enormous phalluses – an attempt to transfer sexuality onto subhuman creatures. The Greeks, of course, were fighting a hopeless battle against a view of the world characterized by what Walter Burkert calls “aggressive obscenity.”3 This was a society whose very mileposts were herms – carved stone figures with human heads and male genitals, often ithyphallic (fig. 13.1). The turn away from our legitimate place in nature has led to much anxiety. It is why, for example, the image of our old friend the vulture switched from a positive one in Neolithic and Egyptian cultures to a negative one in the Judeo-Christian culture, a switch lamented by Federico Morelli and colleagues: “It therefore seems somewhat unfair that ‘non-charismatic’ vultures, which have formed a mutualistic relationship with humans

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through evolution and have been revered by many cultures through much of history and to the present day (e.g., the Parsi), are blighted by such strong, negative emotions and poor cultural stereotypes.”4 Humans could no longer confront what Thom van Dooren felicitously refers to as “our own uncomfortable edibility” and the “radical equality of the flesh,”5 so we distanced ourselves from anything that reminded us of it. We will go to any lengths, from embalming to incense, to mask the smell of death and the smell of excrement. We hate to be reminded of our carnality, mortality, and mere animality. Yet we are still mortal and we do die. That is why the stinking of his beloved Father Zosima’s corpse after death was such a blow to young Alyosha’s faith in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880).6 One needs strong faith in human immortality to overcome the smell of death.7 Modern life, however, is punishing us for turning our backs on our animal origins. Aristotle writes that “it is natural and beneficial to the affective part of the soul that it should be ruled by the reason and the rational part.”8 The mind and reason, however, may have cost us our affective souls; we no longer belong. We can no longer hear the birds when they speak to us. Our world is entirely anthropocentric. We have entered a new geological era, the Anthropocene (or Epoch of Humans), distinguishable from the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago. Certainly, humans have changed the planet radically and fundamentally, and “we are now a key player in almost every ecosystem in the world.”9 The irony is that we have made it into a place to which we are ill-adapted, with a biosphere hobbling along on crutches, reeling from the blows of extraction, deforestation, development, and climate change. The situation is calamitous.

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Should we establish a new, Sympathetic relationship with Birds and nature?

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The answer to our first question, of course, is yes, mainly for two reasons: human spiritual well-being and ethics. We have known for a very long time that there would be a price to pay for our abandonment and betrayal of nature and that it would be a high one. Humans have been thinking about this price at least since 4000– 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia. It is a major theme, for example, in The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1800 BCE ). As a worthy companion for the obstreperous, young hero-king Gilgamesh, the goddess Aruru creates the valiant and shaggy Enkidu:

He knew neither people nor inhabited land, He dressed as animals do. He fed on grass with gazelles, With beasts he jostled at the water hole, With wildlife he drank his fill of water.10 Here is a man before domestication and civilization – a true child of nature. Gilgamesh arranges for the harlot Shamash, representing civilized life, to be sent to Enkidu in order to tame him. She does so with sex, and afterward Enkidu is no longer the same: After he had his fill of her delights, He set off towards his beasts. When they saw him, Enkidu, the gazelles shied off, The wild beasts of the steppe shunned his person. Enkidu had spent himself, his body was limp, His knees stood still, while his beasts went away. Enkidu was too slow, he could not run as before, But he had gained [reason] and expanded his understanding.11

What Is to Be Done?

Enkidu has traded his former happy state as part of nature for reason and understanding, as Adam and Eve did for knowledge of the tree of life. In both cases, woman and sex are the agents of the downfall, but the deeper meaning is not about sex, religions notwithstanding, but about the price paid for divorce from the natural world. Enkidu learns how to eat bread, to drink beer, and to dress and groom himself, and he begins to hunt lions and wolves, his former companions, which he had protected. He returns to the city of Uruk with Shamash, becomes the bosom companion of Gilgamesh, and is “civilized.” He and Gilgamesh set out to perform a great deed, significantly the felling of a mighty cedar tree protected by the monster Humbaba. They must subjugate nature, here represented by the tree. Gilgamesh, accompanied by Enkidu, slays Humbaba, the protector of the forest, and cuts down the giant cedar. Enkidu has helped to destroy the very nature that formerly he protected. Offended by Gilgamesh, princess Ishtar, daughter of the sky god Anu, persuades her father to send the Bull of Heaven against Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who together slay the animal. Humans, it seems, control nature utterly. But the gods decide that Enkidu must die for his part in the actions. Aware of death, Enkidu now regrets his life in civilization and curses the harlot Shamash, who seduced him away from his natural state. “May the

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screech-owl roost [in the ruins of your home].” He goes on to say, “[Y]ou diminished me, an innocent … [and] you wronged me in my steppe.”12 Shamash reminds him of all that he received for betraying nature – the bread, the beer, the garments, and glory with Gilgamesh – but these things are not enough. “Enkidu was sick at heart,”13 and soon he dies. We see Enkidu at first representing humanity at the animistic stage when humans and other animals were still brothers. What happens to him as he enters human society reflects the human loss of closeness to wild animals and nature that comes with domestication. This account seems to prefigure the much later text in Genesis, where Adam and Eve upon leaving the Garden of Eden lose the ability to commune with other animals – a younger reflection of the motif. Like Enkidu, Adam will never again be completely natural and is diminished. The Mesopotamians were already thinking about the price of civilization long before the Jews turned their attention to the problem in Genesis. Genesis plucks primitive humans from animistic ease and oneness with the world and plunges them into guilt, sin, sorrow, and unease with their surroundings, of which they are no longer a part. Humans have banished the anima mundi – the spirit of the world. Most humans no longer feel themselves to be integral parts of the natural world. No longer can we say with Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses, “I am a part of all that I have met.”14 For many, the natural world exists simply as a kind of backdrop or stage for human lives and actions, which are the epicentre and focus around which all else swirls. As was the case with Enkidu, this retreat from nature has not led to happiness. Modern humans now experience a profound sense of alienation from the world and find themselves adrift in a meaningless universe with no telos – no goal, no plan, no aim, no meaning. We are left in a world that is no longer earth-focused and in a universe that is no longer finite. We are masters of a soulless nature and a world without a spirit. We have isolated ourselves in a senseless world in a situation that is essentially absurd. Our new relationship with nature and raw life is schizoid, and we suffer profound unease, aware that death and random chaos still lurk in our darkness and dreams and uneasy that we have to face them alone. For this predicament, we have no one to blame but ourselves. It has been repeatedly shown that humans are happier and less anxious when in contact with nature. Even a brief walk in a park has tangible soothing benefits. We desperately need to re-establish the sense of belonging that we have destroyed and to find a way to feel at home on the planet. Obviously, we cannot go back to superstitious reverence or to a real spiritual alliance with nature, but we cannot find peace without forging a new

What Is to Be Done?

symbiotic relationship with our surroundings by recognizing that we are a part of nature and by making the stewardship of nature a priority. Our spiritual well-being depends on it. The knowledge that we as a species have the power to determine which of over 10,500 species of birds will continue to exist, to say nothing of other animals, is a terrible burden to bear. Ignoring it only increases our anxiety. We are responsible for them and for their demise, and it is simply unethical to continue to treat birds and other animals the way that we do. We know that we are surrounded by other sentient creatures, some of which possess “near human-like levels of consciousness,” as spelled out in The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012), discussed in chapter 12.15 We have an ethical obligation to coexist with and to help our fellow travellers. Make no mistake about it: the issue is one of morality. There is a right and a wrong way to act on this issue. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant rejected the notion that we humans have any duty to other animals, arguing that “[a]nimals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.”16 But Kant was wrong – dead wrong. If he had known what we now know about consciousness in animals, he doubtless would have thought otherwise. We do have duties to our fellow animals. Arthur Schopenhauer rejects Kant’s position, which he says is just a concealed theological one dependent on biblical ethics: “[G]enuine morality is outraged by the proposition … that beings devoid of reason (hence animals) are things and therefore should be treated merely as means that are not at the same time an end … I regard such propositions as revolting and abominable.”17 Schopenhauer writes, “Boundless compassion for all living beings is the firmest and surest guarantee of pure moral conduct.”18 He was right. Another German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, may serve as a model. As his servant tells us, “Herr von Leibniz never killed a fly, however much it inconvenienced him, because he thought it would be a misdeed to destroy so ingenious a mechanism.”19 Although we cannot all live like Leibniz, surely treating animals humanely as fellow earthlings and acting in their behalf is the correct moral position. In fact, as Schopenhauer points out, “[s]ince compassion for animals is so intimately associated with goodness of character, it may be confidently asserted whoever is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”20 In his novels and in his great three-volume compendium The Gulag Archipelago (1974), Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeatedly speaks of the ontological existence of evil and its unstoppable nature. What, he asks, is an individual to do in the face of evil? One may not be able to stop evil, he

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tells us, but each individual can act so as to ensure that it does not come about with his or her help. I think that we can proceed the same way in the face of the desecration of nature, surely a facet of evil. We may not be able to stop it, but we can refuse to abet it, and we can make it harder for our fellow humans to enrich themselves and better their position at the expense of birds and other animals. At the end of Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2016), E.O. Wilson offers a precept for humanity as a final guide that could be applied to each individual life: “Do no further harm to the biosphere.”21 Is it too much to ask? Anything that helps to slow the seemingly inexorable slide into a world without nature as we understand it must surely be worthwhile. For me, humankind, itself an animal, is unimaginable without birds and the rest of the surrounding natural world. Biodiversity makes life meaningful. As Marco Lambertini, director general of World Wildlife Fund International, puts it, “There cannot be a healthy, happy and prosperous future for people on a planet with a destabilized climate, depleted oceans and rivers, degraded land and empty forests, all stripped of biodiversity, the web of life that sustains us all.”22 It is time to listen to the proverbial canary before it dies. Even though the canary was placed in the coal mine solely to aid humans and no one gave a hoot about the bird itself, we should heed its warning because what is good for the canary is also good for humans and vice versa. Only a symbiotic relationship with nature makes sense.

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Can we establish a new, Sympathetic relationship with nature?

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Can we do what we should and establish a new, healthier relationship with nature? Before answering this question, we must address the elephant in the room: these may be the “last days” – in the apocalyptic sense, as promised by the apostle Paul in 2 Timothy 3: 1: “This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.” If the end is nigh, there is obviously little point in doing anything at all except to sit back and wait for the predicted, fast-approaching end. There are many both inside and outside the global-warming community who feel that the end is at hand and that we have endangered our own survival.23 Predictions, of course, are a mug’s game, but I do not believe that the world is about to end. Not, at least, through human agency. Barring a nuclear Armageddon or some erratic planetary event, we humans will

What Is to Be Done?

survive. A sudden catastrophe that kills off all life on the planet seems highly unlikely, although new viruses and superbugs could reduce the human population considerably. Even with severe global warming, we will endure, although for those living on many seacoasts and flood plains, life will seem catastrophic.24 Humans, of course, cannot hope to evolve quickly enough to adapt without technological advances, but we are archly resourceful. In his book Enlightenment Now (2019) and elsewhere, Stephen Pinker argues that in many ways humans have never been doing better than today, although the cost in pollution and habitat loss has been great. We have come up with things like vaccines, body-part replacements, superproductive ways of making more food, ways of controlling fertility, and ways of heating and cooling living spaces. We can influence the future and solve environmental problems; an abrupt switch to nuclear energy and perhaps fusion, for example, would make a huge and immediate dent in the production of greenhouse gases.25 We will use our minds and technological genius to find ways of coping with the rising seas, the melting of the Arctic, Antarctic, and Greenland, and the release of trapped carbon into the atmosphere. We will adapt to a warmer earth, just as animals did during earlier hotter periods. Remember, some mammals (admittedly small ones) and birds survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event and the extreme heat that did in the dinosaurs about 66.5 million years ago, and they survived the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum some 55.5 million years ago when the earth was ice-free and far hotter than it is now. We will survive because the same technology that is harming us will also provide ways, such as climate engineering, for us to survive coming change. We have obviously passed optimal pollution, but we have not yet fallen over the brink.26 In fact, here on earth in about half a century, things should start to improve significantly for our biosphere. Perhaps the main thing driving climate change and habitat destruction is the human population, which has increased so drastically over the past 200 years.27 We have rapidly altered the earth in attempts to feed ourselves, put roofs over our heads, and warm and cool ourselves. However, in about fifty years, the population of the planet should stabilize and begin to shrink, as it already has in much of the world. The effects of a much-reduced, viable population will be widespread and salutary. Big business will be curbed perforce by smaller global markets. Wilson is optimistic about the twenty-second century: “Not only will the world population decline afterward but the ecological footprint as well – perhaps precipitously.”28 The shrinking of

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the ecological footprint, however, should come much earlier. With fewer mouths to feed and greatly improved agricultural techniques, much rural land will return to trees and again be suitable habitat for surviving species. Far less fossil fuel will be needed both because there will be fewer homes to heat and new ways to produce energy and because many more people will live in dense conurbations, with all their efficiencies, not the least of which is public transportation. Automobiles, if still in existence, will not be run on fossil fuel. Air quality will improve, and ocean health should rebound as acidification diminishes and plastic pollution is curbed; even fish stocks should rebound. Thanks to science and technology, medicine, birth control, and a diminishing population driven by educated women’s hopes for better lives, humans will continue to soldier on in the long run. We are not doomed as a species. Having assumed human survival, let us now return to our question: can we establish a new, sympathetic relationship with nature? Yes, we can. In the “Preface” to this book, I posed a question: why is bird-watching and human love for birds growing so rapidly precisely when maximum damage is being done to birds and when they are disappearing before our eyes largely at our own hands? The answer partly lies in the lessening of the hold of religion and in a rejection of the old idea of our having dominion over other creatures, but there is more to it than that. Aware of having orphaned ourselves and abandoned something to which we once belonged, people are sensing the ancient bonds that formerly tied us and are becoming more aware of the residue of an earlier spirituality as Indigenous peoples reassert their beliefs. Our current dilemma is so dire that people consciously or subliminally are reawakening to the richness of nature now that it is under stress and are trying to redress the situation by re-establishing meaningful contact with nature using birds as an entrance. As birds disappear before our eyes, their plight is becoming more and more visible, and more and more is being written about their decline. Public sympathy is rising, and more people are aware of our ethical duty to do something to help them since we are a major factor in their decline. Unlike rhinos, elephants, gorillas, and orangutans, also iconic creatures, birds are a visible part of everyone’s lives every day, and it is harder not to notice their dwindling. With The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in mind, we could re-establish a holistic, animistic worldview, transcend anthropocentrism, and fundamentally reforge our relationship with nature. We could refashion our approach to the world based on the idea that humans and flora

and fauna, and even the gods, all have a similar, earthly origin and are all part of an indivisible whole. Surely, this idea obligates us to stewardship and succour of nature, which we still note in some contemporary Indigenous groups. We could rethink our role on the planet and our ideas of primacy and supremacy and definitively throw out the whole “dominion” idea.29 We could assume stewardship of the earth and try to behave responsibly to all our fellow travellers. We could yield to the pull of the paradise myth and renew our covenant with the other animals and try to negotiate a return to paradisus terrestris. The artistic-cultural vision, as opposed to the rational-scientific vision, has always suggested this possibility. It has told us that other animals are central to the human vision, whether we realize it or not, and that humankind is unimaginable without the surrounding animal world, except in the bleakest works of post-apocalyptic science fiction. “It is unthinkable,” writes Mary Midgley, “that any species should be an island.”30 She goes on to explain that “the other animal species which share our planet with us … are not just put there as a convenience for us, neither are they just an oppressed minority in human life. They are the group to which we belong. We are a small minority of them. It seems reasonable to suggest that we ought to take them seriously.”31 The way ahead is to recover the best of what we had. That is what Morris Berman suggests in his seminal study The Reenchantment of the World (1981). It is what the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi had in mind in the 1920s when he wrote of the need to re-establish “an animism that is no longer anthropomorphic.”32 The deep-seated longing to return to a simpler world and contact with nature is nicely expressed by Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself ” (1855): I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked. I am mad for it to be in contact with me.33

What Is to Be Done?

Symbolically, recontacting with nature can be achieved only if one becomes “undisguised and naked,” sloughing off the veneer of civilization – a lot to ask of modern humans. We could do all this. Just as Dostoevsky points out that life on earth could be paradise immediately if all humans simultaneously treated each other with love,34 so too could we rapidly make things better by returning to a more meaningful paradigm where we humans are part of an interrelated whole and where birds and other animals are our “brothers and sisters.”

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Yes, we could. In fact, there are some on this earth who never abandoned this paradigm. We have the ability to solve our dilemma. It is, after all, human beings who have broken the bond and wreaked the damage upon birds, other animals, and all of nature. The damage is not the result of some runaway, formless “progress” that cannot be controlled. It is us who have forged our own dilemma and who are out of control. We ourselves destroyed our meaningful relationship with nature and abandoned the stewardship role that made life worth living. We forget that we depend completely on the earth, whereas it owes us nothing.35 It is not too late to turn things around; we are still in the eleventh hour. Wilson is “convinced that only by setting aside half the planet in reserve, or more, can we save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.”36 He shows us convincingly how this transformation could still be brought about, even selecting the parts of the earth that are still nearly pristine or at least salvageable. We can make efforts to involve ever greater numbers of people and to educate them about the degradation of the biosphere and about the negative effects that it is having on our life, the life of other animals, and the life of the planet. Many people simply do not think about nature. One of the reasons why I wrote this book was to get people thinking the hard thoughts. We must get people – particularly young people – out into the field to see what we are asking them to help protect. If Whitman is right that “[a] mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,”37 think how many a golden-winged warbler (fig. 13.2) or a prothonotary warbler would stagger! Although not enough to stem the tide on its own, education at least represents a step in the right direction. If more people realized the usefulness of birds to humans, it would help. Birds, for example, punch above their weight in keeping the earth green. “By flying around with seeds encased in a little package of potent fertilizer, untold numbers of birds spread life around the world every day, in ways that no other animal comes close to.”38 Çağan H. Şekercioğlu has scrupulously summarized the usefulness of birds and their crucial role in our ecosystem, stressing in particular seed dispersal, pollination, predation and pest control, scavenging, nutrient deposition, birds’ role as environmental monitors, their entertainment value for vast numbers of people, and their value for ecotourism.39 It could not but help if these things were known more widely. We are, after all, a utilitarian society. The best way to get humans to act in order to save birds is to convince them that there is something in it for them other than aesthetic appreciation, hobby pursuit, and ethical

Goldenwinged warbler. | Copyright Arni Stinnissen, ArniWorks Photography.

FIGURE 13.2

What Is to Be Done?

duty. Humans might be quicker to act if it were widely realized that it is often precisely the most useful, specialized birds – scavenging vultures, rodent-eating raptors, and pest-eating grassland birds – that are most in danger of extinction. What effect might it have, for example, if you informed a farmer that barn owls eat over 11,000 mice in their lifespans?40 People will take favourable action on the ecological front if convinced that it would better the human situation; the ecological boost would be welcome collateral aid. Although education is of paramount importance, it is, in a way, putting the problem in the hands of future generations.41 What can we do as individuals in the here and now to help our fellow creatures in the short run? Roy Scranton has one answer: “If you really want to save the planet, you should die.”42 There is no better way than suicide to shrink our footprint. This tactic may seem a bit drastic for many and overly misanthropic. Alternatively, we could stop eating meat, stop driving, stop flying, refuse to heat our homes with fossil fuels, and forget about air conditioning.43 But abstinence on these fronts is simply not realistic. Only if billions of us were suddenly to make such sacrifices would we approach resolution of

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the problem, but that will not happen. We are not exactly uniting to fight a common threat. Some of us have taken halting steps in these directions, but to radically change our lifestyle, we would have to believe that our action would be effective in spite of population growth and the planetwide use of fossil fuels.44 India, for example, is still planning 370 new coal-fired generating stations,45 and Germany is moth-balling many of its nuclear energy plants, so what is the use of individual sacrifice? Even if all environmentalists did all of the above short of suicide, it would hardly make a dent, compared to something as substantial as leaving all fossil fuels in the ground worldwide, which nobody thinks is going to happen for a while. Unfortunately, as David Wallace-Wells so succinctly puts it, “the climate calculus is such that individual lifestyle choices do not add up to much, unless they are scaled by politics.”46 Jonathan Franzen makes the further point that although climate change is very important, an exclusive focus on global warming “can lead to indifference toward birds in the present.”47 Franzen sees climate change as a “secondary threat.” “Although you could demonstrably save the lives of the birds now colliding with your windows or being killed by your cats, reducing your carbon footprint even to zero saves nothing.”48 If lifestyle change is quixotic and ineffectual, what can we do now to actually help birds and other animals and to safeguard more of what is left? We cannot all practice ahimsa like the Jains, and few of us have it in ourselves to live like Saint Francis. Blaming ourselves for falling short of the saints is unproductive. But there are things that we can do to protect birds and other animals, and the very earth, from further harm. Habitat protection and environmental stewardship, to be sure, are at the top of the list, and the startling recovery of waterfowl populations proves that they work. If and when we bring global warming under control, it would be nice to have something left to protect.49 It may seem specious to list some of these well-known measures, but perhaps they cannot be pointed out too often:

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Try to protect those small pieces of land and woodlots that are disappearing all around us. Fight particularly to protect wetlands. Lobby for and financially support all attempts to preserve or create habitat since saving habitat means saving birds; remember that the passenger pigeon was done in by habitat destruction, not just overhunting, and remember that North American

waterfowl have made a stunning recovery over the past fifty years largely due to habitat preservation and creation. Lobby against frivolous attempts to convert habitat to human use; we may not save the Amazon this way, but every small success matters cumulatively. Support nature conservancies and land trusts like never before. Support organizations of our choice that are attempting to find ways to save birds and other animals, particularly species at risk. Do not vote for any politician of a political party that favours unthinking development over preservation; your vote is much more important than personal living choices, and although there are not yet enough of us to drive the political agenda, we can be a factor. Insist on ethical, “sustainable” investing. Support the expanded use of nuclear energy until we develop new, green energy solutions, such as power from hydrogen that will offer cleaner and cheaper energy and electricity; until then, nuclear energy is better than fossil fuels. Keep cats inside. Support fatal light awareness programs, and turn the lights out at night. Support citizen science projects that aid conservation efforts. Drink shade-grown coffee in support of natural ecology.

What Is to Be Done?

Although it is true that as individuals we are frustratingly powerless to stop deforestation and habitat destruction on a large scale, we can take many small actions to cumulatively slow the impoverishment of our biosphere. Although relatively few see it as their ethical duty to aid their fellow travellers, this perception is all the more reason for the committed few to be vigilant and active. Although we cannot reverse things, we can temper the situation and save what we can if we raise our voices continually. Our actions may amount only to holding a finger in the dyke, but they will have a moral basis. We must not let the natural world as we know it be ruined. We can slow down and even prevent some of this degradation, helping birds and other animals to survive and giving our own lives more meaning through ethical conduct and a closeness to our environment. If we do not change course but just continue to let things slide, the natural world as we know it will be gone forever, and we humans will live in a world of self-imposed impoverishment. Nobel Peace Prize

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winner Albert Schweitzer wrote, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”50 We must prove him wrong. The price is too high.

Will we establish a new, Sympathetic relationship with nature? It would have been nice to be able to end this book on a high note. But sadly we must return to our third question, will we as a species establish a new, fulfilling relationship with nature and become better stewards of the earth, or must those of us who care act only as individuals to assuage our own consciences as we go down collectively? It is an interesting and anomalous situation: how to do less damage to the biosphere, to save many species from extinction, and generally to make life better for birds and other animals, including ourselves, is not a problem or puzzle waiting to be solved. We already have the answers to the dilemma. The question is whether we have the will to act. We have noted that among many humans there has been a reaction to the destructiveness of our species and a growing love for birds, together with a concern for their continued existence. However, the hope that those of us with a deep-rooted relationship to birds and other animals will spur all humanity to thwart the bleak scenario facing us seems quixotic. There are too few of us as a percentage of the world’s population. The great majority of humans, if they think about nature at all, care only about what it can do for them. There is no universal moral imperative to cherish nature and value it for what it is. The intrinsic value of natural objects often does not even play a role in human decisions.51 Two powerful factors – violence and greed – further suggest that we will not take significant action in time, if at all.

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We are a violent, fractious species. Do not underestimate our capacity for destruction and propensity for violence. Remember that we spent 99.5  per cent of our time on earth in the Palaeolithic.52 We kill other animals for survival. After reviewing the numerous extinctions that followed in the wake of humans as they spread throughout the globe, Yuval Harari concludes that “the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer … We have the dubious distinction of being

What Is to Be Done?

the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”53 Violence has become ingrained in our nature, and now we do not seem able to curb it. It appears that our baser instincts, honed and ingrained over millions of years, will continue to drive our actions, reason notwithstanding. We share about 99 per cent of our DNA with chimps, from whom we diverged a mere 6 million years ago. It is always instructive to look at our nearest ancestors because they present a closer picture of what we were once like than we ourselves do since they have changed far less. In chimps, we see the “old” brain still at work, yet we share many behavioural patterns. As surely as chimps like to go on regular hunting sprees and kill other animals – particularly relatives like monkeys – and eat their brains, so do we like to kill. We kill other apes – our closest relatives. If I hang on for another twenty years, I expect to see the disappearance of the wild orangutans, perhaps the gorillas, and maybe even the chimps and bonobos – except for a few surviving in zoos and preserves of varying size, where one set of humans protects them from another. The human neocortex, or new mammalian brain, is not able to overrule the old palaeomammalian brain; bloodlust will out.54 We killed other hominins. I do not think the disappearance of the Neanderthals upon our arrival in Europe was just coincidence. I feel sure that we killed Neanderthals in close combat; these were the days before the bow and arrows. We probably killed them in groups and raped the women. That would account for the 1 to 4 per cent of our genetic material that we share with Neanderthals. Although some say that we shared a common ancestor, it seems much more likely that we were close enough to interbreed. We were close relatives. Yet still we killed them. And, of course, we kill other human beings. After the creation and earthly paradise stories, Genesis 4: 9 gets right down to the central problem of homicide. God asks Adam and Eve’s son Cain, “Where is Abel thy brother?” And Cain, who has just slain his brother, answers, “I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?” God then curses Cain and puts his mark upon him. Obviously, homicide was a recognized problem even then. The Latin proverb, with which Freud wholly concurred, has it right: homo homini lupus (man is a wolf to man). Oetzi the Iceman, dating from about 4000 BCE, had an arrowhead in his shoulder and died of serious wounds. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others thought that early modern humans lived peacefully as “noble savages.” Sadly, the situation among humans from the outset seems to have been more like that among chimps in the wild. Civilization, when it came, did nothing to curb this behaviour.

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Much of human history is the history of warfare, technology allowing us to kill each other in ever-increasing numbers. Defence of self, family, tribe or clan, and chosen living space seems to have been the norm from the beginning. Human survival depended on a hormonally driven instinct toward self-preservation, and we have not been able to transcend this instinct with reason, charity, and altruistic behaviour today. War makes no more sense in human terms than does violence on a personal level. It has even been shown that altruistic behaviour makes more sense as a life choice. But violence and war – over 100 million people died in war in the twentieth century alone – hardly seem to be easing up in the twenty-first century; nor will they as the population expands. Who would have bet 2 million years ago that one of the apes would become so dominant yet be unable to overcome the violent instincts that helped it come to the fore. There will be no return to the supposed earthly paradise of fellowship and nonviolence for us. It is sad that we developed our wonderful neocortex but cannot transcend our age-old instincts. We would be better off if the desire to kill birds and other animals were not imprinted in human DNA and if we could transcend them. Freud was right that we have to learn to control the dark, unconscious impulses of the id. We must find a way to counter 6 million years of genetic programming toward self-preservation and allow reason and ethics to play a more substantial role in our behaviour. Five thousand to ten thousand years of “civilization” have not yet begun to override our programming but have only intensified its negative aspects. Our propensity for violence argues against humans coming together for any universal preservation of nature. If we cannot curb our violence even against ourselves, what hope is there that we will handle birds and other animals gently? When they get in our way, we kill them. Saint Francis was still his brother’s keeper, and his family included the birds and other animals, but we modern humans are no longer the keepers of any of our fellow animals – quite the contrary. We are driving them to extinction ever more quickly and are killing our fellow human animals at a faster pace. More of this behaviour is on the horizon, not less. Steven Mithin writes darkly that “our modern world seems destined to become yet more violent as the impacts of renewed global warming are felt.”55 Worse, it takes a lot more natural resources to wage war than to live in peace, so despoliation of the planet will likely increase. We have to hope that researchers are wrong in signalling an upsweep of violence by 10 to 20 per cent for every half degree of planetary warming!56

Greed

What Is to Be Done?

We are greedy and care mainly for ourselves. In an edifying story entitled “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” (1886), Leo Tolstoy answers the question posed by the title. It seems that the Bashkirs are giving out land on the eastern steppes, and for a thousand rubles you can have as much land as you can run around between sunrise and sunset, although you must return to the starting point on the same day or your money is forfeit. The greedy peasant Pakhom, always dissatisfied no matter how much land he acquires, sets off running and keeps seeing attractive bits that he really must have – fertile bottom lands and the like. Running ever faster against the sinking sun, tired, parched, his heart pounding, he returns just in time before the sun goes down – only to collapse dead on the ground. It turns out that a person really needs only six feet of land for a grave.57 Tolstoy, of course, is satirizing human greed and the acquisitive instinct. How did we acquire this powerful, unpleasant, and selfish attitude that so drives us and results in such inequality? In Palaeolithic days, society, such as it was, seems to have been basically egalitarian. Sharing within the group made sense. To increase the odds of success, without which life was short, hunter-gatherers often had to hunt together; it is hard to kill megafauna with a spear by oneself. There were no grain bins or livestock to fall back on in times of emergency. This custom still held among such hunter-gatherers as the North American Ojibwe and Cree until the recent past. As hunter-gatherers began to live together in increasingly larger groups, sharing still remained an imperative. But as human populations began to increase with benevolent climate change and ever larger groups had to be consistently fed, the need to guarantee food became more urgent and led to the domestication of grains and animals – slowly at first and then ever more quickly.58 The appearance of farming spelled the end of egalitarian society. It also crystalized the human urge to exercise “dominion” over “the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth,” as commanded in Genesis 1: 26 – which clearly reflects a post-Neolithic mentality. Slowly divorcing themselves from the natural world, humans began to strive to harness it. Some people were better at farming than others, and not all parts of the earth were equally arable and attractive at any given time. Today’s fertile plain could be tomorrow’s desert, and today’s rich floodplain could be tomorrow’s swamp or lake. The rich Doggerland area connecting Great Britain and Europe, for example, had disappeared under the sea by about

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6500 BCE and is a fishing area today. Things change greatly over time. This inevitability meant that you might need to take away someone’s land tomorrow if yours became played out or proved insufficient. The better farmers always required more land and the better land to raise larger crops and to herd more livestock. Think of Tolstoy’s Pakhom and his thirst for land. And, of course, as they expanded, the better farmers needed people to work for them so that they could do even better. Richer and poorer people appeared in conjunction with social stratification. In our earliest civilizations, we note the uneven distribution of wealth and the rise of various individuals in status. These new ways can clearly be seen in the graves of important people who were buried with great opulence and surrounded by goods, including even slaves to help assure their position of prominence in the afterlife. Think of the pyramids! Think of “the King’s grave” in the Royal Cemetery at Ur, an early mass grave where over seventy people were buried alive alongside the king lest he need them in the afterlife.59 At the end of the Neolithic, with the rise of the first great “civilizations,” tribal leaders became warlords and kings with huge kingdoms, and already the Sumerians and Egyptians were constantly fighting wars against enemies and taking huge numbers of prisoners as slave labour. We see it reflected in their art. Here, we see that society had become severely hierarchical, with the privileged few at the top owning most of the wealth in life and death. Life became one of violent competition, and we never looked back. Sadly, this way of life became the norm in human societies that abandoned hunting and gathering. And it remains so today. Karl Marx, it seems, was right about the acquisitive nature of capitalist society and the greed that drives its leaders. Unfortunately, blinded by his desire to forge a more just and egalitarian society, Marx was wrong about the masses, whom he thought would be quick to share everything with each other once they got ahold of it and would proceed to treat one another like brothers. Jesus, too, hoped that we could all treat each other like brothers, but the old egalitarian ideal had been shattered in the Neolithic. Thus we have ended up in the twenty-first century with a supremely nonegalitarian society driven by a rapacious urge to colonize and “develop” the entire globe at any cost for our own benefit. There is no reason to suppose that humans will band together to slow resource extraction or to end slash-and-burn agriculture. Much of the Amazon and the remaining forests of Borneo, for example, seem doomed. So are the woodlots and strips of unploughed land on the verges of existing farm fields. Greed, fuelled by necessity among the growing number of have-nots and by the drive to get even richer among the haves, is leading to the domestication

What Is to Be Done?

of the planet. This outcome is one of the major themes in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), where mining interests want to strip-mine a tract of forest and take the top off an entire mountain in West Virginia in order to extract coal, even though this land is prime breeding habitat for the threatened cerulean warbler. Even if we win a few such battles, the overall picture is bleak. Humans as individuals seem largely unwilling to do without anything – no matter how frivolous – even if it is known to directly harm nature. The same is true collectively; the selfish interests of human corporations are deeply entrenched, making them a major threat to any progress. Collective altruism is almost unheard of. Does anyone, for example, really think that livestock interests are going to stop poisoning wolves and coyotes and agree to sacrifice a few farm animals in order to protect the California condor or the bearded vulture? Wait till they find a huge oil deposit under the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge or substantial gold and uranium deposits in the far reaches of Wood Buffalo National Park, and we will see how the whooping cranes fare. Because of our propensity for violence, our greed, and our selfishness, it is unlikely that we humans will act collectively and soon to halt the degradation of our biosphere. Although it is now clear that we are not as special as we thought, our lingering sense of our own specialness and our anthropocentric assumption that the planet exists for us and that nature is there to be exploited are so deeply ingrained that we are unlikely to make any real sacrifices in time to offer the biosphere a reprieve. Most people simply do not care and are quite unwilling to make any sacrifice for nature if it entails any degree of discomfort for themselves.60 Collectively, we lack a strong enough sense of duty of care for our fellow travellers. Roy Scranton points out that “[i]n order to stop emitting waste carbon dioxide completely within the next five or ten years, we would need to radically reorient all human economic and social production, a task that is scarcely imaginable, much less feasible.”61 Can one seriously hope to change the values and lifestyle of humans in time, particularly the famous wealthy 1 per cent? Without such change, actions can be only ineffectual. Our unfortunate pursuit of growth and “progress” is going to continue until our population begins to decline. The inertia of our focus on “progress” and development will drive mineral extraction and the harvest of natural resources like fossil fuels and forests for quite a few more decades. Fifty more years is a lot of global warming, habitat change, deforestation, acidification of oceans, and extinctions of animals. What will become of nature as it remains in the short run?

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Even if our current population of about 7.5 billion peaks at around 9 billion rather than the 11 billion estimated by the United Nations,62 1.5 billion more humans is a lot of consumers, and our collective biomass already far surpasses that of all other mammals on earth combined.63 Fossil fuels provide 86 per cent of the world’s energy, and they power almost everything, including most electricity plants.64 If overall population does not begin to decline for some forty to fifty years and if the world does not reach peak fossil fuel consumption until around 2040,65 the short-term need for greater food production, living space, and material goods will trump any hope of serious, long-term conservation. The sixth extinction will continue apace and probably accelerate while we dither and dream of ways to thwart it. In its 2018 Living Planet Report, the World Wildlife Fund points out that in the forty years between 1970 and 2014 (the most recent year with available data), there was a 60 per cent decline in the size of the world’s populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians.66 According to its Red List of Threatened Species (2020), the International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates that 26,500 species, or 27 per cent of the plants and animals examined so far, are threatened with extinction.67 E.O. Wilson expects half of all animal species to be extinct by 2100.68 Appropriate habitat is disappearing rapidly, and the earth’s surface in fifty years will be quite altered. Animals, alas, cannot be expected to adapt so fast. The future for most endangered species may well be hopeless. Although these are not the last days of the world and human life, they are the last days for many of our fellow travellers on the planet, some of which are its most exquisite creatures.69 These are the last days of the world as we have known it thus far. The biosphere is daily becoming less diverse and rich, and it is painful to watch the ongoing extinctions taking place due to our inaction. Global warming is intensifying, the polar ice caps are shrinking drastically, the acidification of the oceans is potentially catastrophic, and the sixth extinction is heartbreaking. The coral reefs are dying, and plastic in the oceans is working its way up the food chain – and we know why. The prime causes of the rapidly growing extinctions and planetary habitat destruction – food production, energy production, and fossil fuel extraction and use – are all human-driven. We are knowingly releasing a huge amount of carbon safely stored under the earth and causing our planet to heat up dangerously. Although things should be better for humans in half a century due to population decline, the next fifty years will be fatal for many birds and other forms of life.

What Is to Be Done?

In fifty years, when our population finally declines definitively, our natural world will have changed far more than it did over the preceding eons. The biosphere will be comparatively impoverished. Many exquisite creatures will have been lost. Children will be learning about many recent birds and other animals, well known to our generation, only virtually. The last male northern white rhino, for example, died in March 2018, and birds and other animals are disappearing as you read these lines. Not just the gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees, fellow primates for whom we have some sympathy, even if we kill them for bush meat and shrink their last habitat strongholds, but also thousands of less iconic birds and other animals are disappearing. Fish are disappearing quickly; by 2050 there may be more plastic in the oceans than fish.70 Many humans seem content to see virtual birds and other animals and do not miss the real things, which they neither know nor feel responsible for. It makes one desperate that one’s fellow humans are either unaware of or unconcerned by the disappearance of the birds and other life forms in our surroundings. It is awful to be a naturalist and watch the sixth extinction taking place before one’s eyes. If you love the world that you are in and its flora and fauna, it is painful to see it deteriorate at an accelerating rate. Nature will be much impoverished over the next fifty years, and that is not because it is too late or too costly to save it. The argument is often made that adequate conservation measures to preserve our biodiversity would be prohibitively expensive, yet one study published in Science in 2012 concludes that “the total required is less than 20% of annual global consumer spending on soft drinks.”71 And you wonder why I seem jaded. Sorry to be such a pessimist, but the present uncontrollable human population explosion, our instinct for violence even within our own species, and human greed and anthropocentrism almost guarantee an unhappy future for birds, other animals, and nature in general. What endures will represent a different kind of planet, not necessarily similar to those sterile dystopias so popular in science fiction and even belles lettres (think David Mitchell and Margaret Atwood, to name a few) but compromised and diminished. Wilson is optimistic about the twenty-second century: “Not only will the world population decline afterward but the ecological footprint as well – perhaps precipitously. The reason is that we are thinking organisms trying to understand how the world works. We will come awake.”72 Although the prediction is debatable, it is not the twenty-second century that I am worried about but the rest of the twenty-first.

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We are running out of time. The whistle was blown long ago. It is already too late to “return to nature” as we conceive of it – even if the desire were there. Nature has already been compromised. Perhaps one has to be a fool to think otherwise. But perhaps we should then act foolishly and try to help our planet even if our efforts are vain. Just as in 1 Corinthians 4: 10, the apostle Paul told his budding Christians, who faced a steep uphill battle, that “[w]e are all fools for Christ’s sake, but ye are wise in Christ,” so I say that we must become fools for nature’s sake and try to save our birds – the symbol I use for nature throughout this book – even if it seems hopeless. This desire may be foolish, but there is wisdom in this type of folly. True folly is to assume that we will not damage ourselves severely if we sit back and just watch as others recklessly damage the planet. Let us end by underscoring once again that there is a price to be paid by humans for harming nature and divorcing ourselves from it. Like The Epic of Gilgamesh, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) illustrates the sacrilege and price of harming nature. The Mariner slays the friendly albatross with his crossbow. The albatross was a bird of good omen and brought the ship fair winds. Nemesis soon strikes with foul weather and doldrums and the death of the entire crew, save the Mariner himself, who flirts with madness, before he is eventually brought home and saved, only to do penance for the rest of his wandering life. The Mariner in the end understands his folly and preaches that all God’s creatures, including the birds and beasts, are of equal value and that nature is not there just for humans to use as whim might move them. In Coleridge’s poem, the price paid for the reckless destruction of nature was madness and death. The price that we modern humans are going to pay for our destruction of nature will also be high. Too high. Aristophanes’s birds referred to us as “suffering mankind,” a “race feeble and fleeting … [u]nhappy mortals, shadows in time.”73 We should have listened to the birds. Like Siegfried after tasting the blood of Fafner the dragon in Richard Wagner’s Siegfried (1857), I now understand what the birds are singing as they disappear. They are telling us that Jeremiah was right: the absence of birds signals despair, desolation, and loneliness. Birdlessness is the world without joy. It does not have to be so, but it may well come to pass.

NOTES Preface

1 Pope, Reluctant Twitcher, 28. 2 Bryson, Shakespeare, 20. 3 Writing in the third century CE , Diogenes Laërtius tells the story in Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, book 6, 43. 4 In “Decline of North American Avifauna” (2019), Kenneth V. Rosenberg and colleagues stress that “[b]irds are excellent indicators of environmental health and ecosystem integrity, and our ability to monitor many species over vast spatial scales far exceeds that of any other animal group” (120). chaPter One

1 It should perhaps be stated here at the outset that I use the word “sacred” throughout this book in the meaning provided by The Concise Oxford Dictionary: “exclusively dedicated or appropriated (to a god or some religious purpose) … made holy by religious association … connected with religion; used for a religious purpose … safe-guarded or required by religion, reverence, or tradition.” 2 Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World, 308. 3 Aston, “Part-Animal Gods,” 366. Although she rejects animal gods, Aston has no problem with

divine hybridism and the worship of gods that were part animal and part human like Pan, with his human form but goat horns, legs, and feet. For her, it appears that such gods from the get-go were conceived in human form and then later were given animal parts commensurate with their nature. It is not clear why Aston’s interesting work on hybrid gods had to be predicated on a total rejection of the possibility of animal gods. 4 Doniger, “Reflections,” 100, original emphasis. 5 Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World, deals exclusively with the cultures of Classical Greece and Rome. 6 A flat-out rejection of the idea of animal gods sometimes leads us away from the most likely interpretation. For example, it seems most likely that Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god, began as a crocodile spirit – a representation of the terrifying, man-eating beast that frequented the Nile and had to be placated – and that he only later came to be thought of as anthropomorphic, which is why the earlier depictions show him as a crocodile and the later ones as a hybrid human-crocodile. It seems far less likely that he originated as an anthropomorphic god but was depicted for some reason as a crocodile first and then as a hybrid crocodile-human.

Notes to pages ix – 17

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7 Hawkes, Dawn of the Gods, 17, also 241–2. 8 Aubert et al., “Earliest Hunting Scene.” The authors claim that this is “the oldest known parietal art created by modern humans” (443). The panel, almost 15 feet (4.5 metres) long, seems to depict at least eight small humanlike figures hunting rather realistic pigs and dwarf buffalo (or anoas). One would not disguise oneself with bird masks to hunt buffalo. The picture reminds one of the Birdman tableau at Lascaux, discussed in chapter 3, although it is more than twice as old. As was often the case with Western cave art, this panel is in a cave otherwise uninhabited by humans and is in a place in the cave that is very difficult to access and redolent of the sacred. 9 Even back in Classical times, attempts were made to show that humans did not really worship animals at all, even in Egypt. In The Metamorphoses (8 CE ), Ovid retells the myth wherein the Greek gods took on animal form and fled to Egypt to escape the wrath of the giants (149). Diodorus of Sicily, a historian writing in the first century BCE , uses this story in his Library of History to refute the very idea of animal worship, which he finds abhorrent. Noting that the Egyptians seem to “venerate certain animals exceedingly” (283), Diodorus says that he will examine the reasons for this practice, although he finds the whole matter “astonishing and beyond belief ” (293). Referring to the gods who took on the forms of certain animals to elude the giants, he explains that, “afterwards, when they had established their power over all things in the universe, out of gratitude to the animals which had been responsible for their salvation at the outset, they made sacred those kinds whose form they had assumed, and instructed mankind to maintain them in a costly fashion while living and to bury them at death” (294–5). So, he implies, even the Egyptians did not really worship animals but were simply worshipping the gods in animal guise even after the gods retook their original, anthropomorphic form. For Greeks like Diodorus, the idea of humans worshipping animals was unsavory because the idea somehow belittled the notion that humans were the centre of everything in the uni-

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verse – an anthropocentric idea dear to Classical Greece and one that is responsible for a good deal of mischief right to the present day, as we shall see. Aristophanes, Birds, 38–9. Ibid., 42. Plutarch, “Cleverness of Animals,” 413. Epic of Gilgamesh, 89. The story occurs in tablet 11 of the epic in an Akkadian version compiled around 1700 BCE . Plutarch, “Cleverness of Animals,” 377. Armstrong, Folklore of Birds, 91–2. Hymns of the Rigveda, 124. Ibid. Plutarch, “Cleverness of Animals,” 413. Liddell and Scott, Lexicon. Homer, Iliad, 3. I translate this phrase as “by far the best of bird interpreters.” Rayor, trans., “Hermes,” 73, lines 543–9. The Homeric hymns were not actually written by Homer, although the metre and language recall him. Aristophanes, Birds, 52. Euripides, Ion, 157. West, East Face of Helicon, 47. Plutarch, “Romulus,” 35–6. van Dooren, Vulture, 80–4. See Sault, “Bird Messengers,” 293. MacGregor, History of the World, 34. Ibid., 36. British Museum, O c1908,0423.1. “[B]ehold, there appeared a chariot of fire … and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” 2 Kings 2: 11. Cook, Zeus, vol. 1, 334. Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age, 53. Burkert, Greek Religion, 15. Gimbutas, Bronze Age Cultures, 339–42. Cook, Zeus, vol. 1, 335. chaPter twO

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Burkert, Greek Religion, 40. Mithin, After the Ice, 506. Curtis, Cave Painters, 25. There are those who insist that we must not under any circumstances use surviving hunter-gatherer

and Indigenous religious views as clues to the interpretation of Palaeolithic thought and art. This idea appears to be nonsense to me. It is precisely here where we can glean useful clues to interpretation. In “The Mind in the Ice” (2019), Felipe FernándezArmesto correctly points out that “[b]y analogy with the rock paintings of hunter-gatherers of later periods, Ice Age art depicts an imagined world full of the spirits of animals that people needed and admired” (51–2). Many Indigenous beliefs and practices, including North American ones, for example, are very conservative and clearly echo Eurasian beliefs and practices that date from at least the Upper Palaeolithic. It would have been astonishing if the early migrants to the Americas had not brought Upper Palaeolithic and early Neolithic beliefs with them, including, of course, their animistic worldview. Just as Neolithic, non-Indo-Europeanized culture persisted on islands like Minoan Crete, whereas Indo-European ways from the East swamped the old culture on the mainland, so too did many ancient Eurasian cultural beliefs persist in the North American diaspora, particularly among the hunter-gatherer peoples like the Cree and Ojibwe who were still in the late Neolithic when contact with Europeans began. Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God (1959) demonstrates “the fundamental unity of the spiritual history of mankind” and the fact that all human beliefs and sacraments “have been built from one fund of mythological motifs” (vol. 1, 5, 4, passim). 5 Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, 313. 6 Yeats, “Death,” 130. In “Song of Myself ” (1855), 56–7, sec. 32, Walt Whitman tells us why he envies animals:

7 Tidemann, Chirgwin, and Sinclair, “Indigenous Knowledges,” 3–4. 8 Lewis, Anthropology Made Simple, 105. 9 There does not seem to have been any developed pantheon of anthropomorphic deities, celestial or otherwise, and there is no known hierarchy. Nor does there seem to be any hierarchy among the many animal spirits, although if there were one, bulls and eagles would be near the top. 10 In Paradise Lost (1667), book 4, 162, John Milton has Satan on the ground in the Garden of Eden, and Thence up he flew, and on the Tree of Life, The middle tree and highest there that grew, Sat like a Cormorant; yet not true life Thereby regained, but sat devising death To them that lived 11 The little bronze statue of a raven holding a pebble in its beak seems quite at home alongside castings of Jupiter, Minerva, Helios, and a household god (or Lar) in the “jumble of gods,” representing Roman and pre-Roman belief systems, found together in the same small Roman clay pot buried around 250 CE in Norfolk, England, as part of the Felmingham Hoard. MacGregor, Living with the Gods, 316–17; British Museum, 1925,0610.8. 12 Young, Origins of the Sacred, 221. chaPter three

1 Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 299. 2 Guthrie, Nature of Paleolithic Art, passim. 3 Since the caves seem to have been used by hunters and shamans and to be associated with hunting magic, vision quests, and probably puberty rituals, it is assumed that most of the artists were men, but since women, too, could be shamans, some of the artists may well have been women. 4 Young, Origins of the Sacred, 114. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto puts it in “The Mind in the Ice” (2019), we have here “a spirit world, imbedded

Notes to pages 18 – 24

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago.

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deep in the rocks, where gods and ancestors dwelt in the forms of the animals the painters admired” (52). Young, Origins of the Sacred, 118. The feeling of cosmic energy is beautifully captured by the composer David Braid in his composition Chauvet (2016) for piano and string quartet. Ibid., 195. Mithin, After the Ice, 148. Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 141. In a National Geographic article entitled “Mystery Man” (2015), Jamie Shreeve describes entry into the fabulous new fossil find in the Rising Star Cave in South Africa through Superman’s Crawl, so called “because most can fit through only by holding one arm tightly against the body and extending the other above the head, like the Man of Steel in flight,” and by then dropping down into the fossil chamber through a “narrow, vertical chute, in some places less than eight inches wide” (36). I will not be seeing this cave, and I would not attempt it even if they found a live remnant population of Pterodactyls and I could get one for my life list. I love the story about Abbé Henri Breuil and the English archaeologist retold by Curtis, Cave Painters, 74–5: Entering a cave in France with an archaeologist from England, Breuil insisted that they undress and stripped quickly to his beret and boots. When his companion had done the same, Breuil plunged ahead, lighting the way with an acetylene torch. Soon they encountered an underground stream and were in icy water up to their waists. They had to struggle to stay upright as their feet slid on rocks. Suddenly Breuil announced, “We have to dive. This is the siphon.” He dived headfirst and his light went out with a hiss. Eventually he resurfaced, snorting loudly, and shouted back for his friend to follow. The Englishman dived and discovered he had to go under a stalactite curtain below the surface of the water. He made it, but barely, and surfaced next to Breuil, who relit the lamp. Beaming, Breuil said, “The siphon. Something isn’t it?”

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Curtis, Cave Painters, 195. Armstrong, Folklore of Birds, 4. Young, Origins of the Sacred, 113. Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 306. Food alone was not the inspiration because there are few fish and few things like beaver or rabbits, which were key food items, and because there is little or no flora. No attempt was made to catalogue and record all the things that these people saw around them in nature. Crémades, Catalan, and Torti, “Nouvelles figurations d’oiseaux,” 371. Leroi-Gourhan, Dawn of European Art, knows of only three examples (49); Wheye and Kennedy, Humans, Nature, and Birds, know of “fewer than a dozen” (xxi). It appears that Braun, “Representations of Birds,” knows of more; he found 194 representations of birds in Eurasian ice-age art in general, of which there were “36% in cave art” (14). For a list, see Paillet and Man-Estier, “Oeuvres d’art méconnues de Laugerie-Basse,” 519. Compare this uniformity to the dizzying variety of art schools that we see in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in European art! The excellence of Chauvet – perhaps the pinnacle of cave art – makes a mockery of the Marxist notion of progress in art and culture. Here, the first and oldest is perhaps the best, making it a safe bet that this was not the beginning of a tradition and that cave art had been around for some time before Chauvet. Curtis, Cave Painters, 175. Morris, Owl, mentions only the great horned owl as a possibility and captions his reproduction thus (13–14). This conclusion is strange because elsewhere he points out that the great horned owl is a species of the New World (194). We must reject the great horned owl as a possibility. Ibid., 7. Mynott, Birdscapes, 282. Strangely, in Owl, Morris rejects the idea that the owl has its back to us. “This,” he says, would argue “that the prehistoric artists were such good observers that they had noticed that the owl can rotate its head through a wide angle … It is far more likely

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Houston, “Maori and the Huia,” 53. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 3. Virgil, Aeneid, book 4, 113, and book 12, 394. Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 2, scene 2. Ironically, owls are not actually all that bright. Parrots and corvids are a good deal more intelligent. As Morris explains in Owl, “Intelligence in animals is related to their way of life, with opportunists always being more intelligent than specialists” (56). Opportunists have to rely on their wits; owls are specialists – highly specialized and efficient killers of particular prey. Nonetheless, owls are widely considered wise. Morris, Owl, 8, passim; Cocker, Birds and People, 271–81. Morris, Owl, 102. Oddly, both Morris and Cocker say that the Ojibwe feared the owl and saw it as a symbol of evil and death. Morris, Owl, 101; Cocker, Birds and People, 274. I have never heard of such a thing, and my Ojibwe consultant, Alex Mackay, tells me that he, too, has never heard of this symbolism in Ojibwe stories. The Ojibwe owl, gookooko’oo, seems to have been named after the barred owl, and it is not feared. Morris, Owl, 39. Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 300. I do not think that the (possibly defecating) rhinoceros waking away to the left, tail raised, is part of the composite picture. Ibid., 21. Backing up the idea that the Birdman is a masked shaman is the fact that the famous sorcerer or shaman of the Trois Frères Cave, who also appears to be part human and part animal – a grotesque figure with a large, prominent penis, although flaccid – has owl eyes in his mask, again signifying the presence of the bird god in a drawing of obvious spiritual import. Ryan, Strong Eye of Shamanism, 127. Eliade, Shamanism, 481. Some do not agree that they are shamans, among them Groenen, “A l’aube de la métaphysique,” 14. Abbé Henri Breuil simply saw the drawing as a depiction of a hunting accident in which the bison, having just been gored by the nearby rhinoceros, in turn gored the man. See Curtis, Cave Painters, 117.

Notes to pages 29 – 36

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that, as with any child drawing an owl, the wings are shown like this, even when viewing the bird from the front, as a simple way of emphasizing this is a feathered creature” (14). Well, as a glance at the other drawings in this cave, to say nothing of many other caves, makes clear, the prehistoric artists were marvellous observers of the animals that surrounded them and could scarcely have failed to note that owls can rotate their heads. Moreover, there is nothing childlike about the drawing skills of the Chauvet artists. This art is not merely naive. Morris’s argument is unlikely; our bird is depicted in a common pose looking over its back. One could argue that the vertical lines represent the streaking on a Eurasian eagle-owl’s breast, but I do not think so. Any field birder knows that owls’ shoulders do not look like that from the front. The heavy betting is on a back view with the head twisted to confront the viewer. Cited in Curtis, Cave Painters, 125. Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 306. Ibid., 310–11. Cited in ibid., 307–8. In the Portel Cave, yet another cave in southwestern France, in the passageway after the entrance, there is a grouping of black-outlined figures – two bison, a horse, and an earless owl – dating from about 10,000 BCE . The owl, in profile with the head turned as expected, is a snowy owl very similar to the ones in the Trois Frères Cave. For a reproduction, see Morris, Owl, 16; and for a photo, see Braun, “Representations of Birds,” 15, fig. 3a. In the Morin Cave, there is an etching on a piece of pink sandstone that may be a snowy owl, although it could be anthropomorphic. The round head, the apparent beak, the raised, rounded shoulders, and the similarity to other snowy owl representations make me opt for the owl. It could even be looking over its back like the Chauvet owl. Many snowy owl bones have been found at the site. See Hitchcock, “Le Morin.” Cocker, Birds and People, 280. Wheye and Kennedy, Humans, Nature, and Birds, 43. Ibid.

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It has also been suggested that we are looking at the depiction of a memorable hunt featuring a masked hunter who stalked a bison, wounded it with a spear, and was knocked down in the charge – a famous hunt by a bird-clan hunter who lived to tell the tale thanks to his totem. But if this is a depiction of a hunt, why the erection? How often does one get knocked down naked by a charging bison and maintain a decent erection? We do find depictions of hunts in later rock art, such as the depiction of ostrich-netting by a man wearing an ostrich mask in a Libyan pictograph dating from 8,000 BCE. Wheye and Kennedy, Humans, Nature, and Birds, 18, plate 10. However, these renderings seem to be mainly illustrative of hunting practices. Curtis, Cave Painters, describes a second bison dancer in the same room at Trois Frères “with human thighs and a prominent penis” (182). There is also a bison dancer at Gabillou, again upright and dancing, although only the lower legs and the right foot give away that this is a dancer, not a monstrous bison on its hind legs. No Plains Indian in North America could fail to see that these are bison dancers who are dancing to honour the bison spirit as a way to bring it to sacrifice one or more of its number. Ibid., 111. There are, of course, a number of other Palaeolithic cave sites with bird depictions on the walls that we will not be examining. If more information were available, it would have been nice to include here a study of the geese engraved on the walls of the Cussac Cave, discovered in 2000, especially as they are rather old, dating from about 23,000 BCE , and are well executed, providing an early example of the connection of waterfowl to the sacred. Bahn and Vertut, Journey through the Ice Age, 168. Eliade, Shamanism, 479; Frazer, New Golden Bough, 123. Frazer, New Golden Bough, 88. In Christian legend, we are told that “the monks at a monastery in Nuria saw a dove issue from the mouth of their dying abbot and fly to heaven … St. Benedict saw the soul of his sister Scholastica

depart as a dove … and a dove issued from the mouth of St. Polycarp when he was slain.” Ibid., 124. chaPter fOur

1 Buisson and Pinçon, “Nouvelle lecture,” 79. 2 Ibid., 86. 3 Guthrie, Nature of Palaeolithic Art, passim. Guthrie provides drawings of many Palaeolithic representations of birds (9–10), as do Powers and Stringer, “Palaeolithic Cave Art Fauna,” 272–3, fig. 74. Both show a selection of mainly, although not exclusively, portable art. 4 Conard, “Palaeolithic Ivory Sculptures.” 5 Jill Cook, cited in MacGregor, Living with the Gods, 4. 6 Mithin, After the Ice, 144. 7 Buisson and Pinçon, “Nouvelle lecture,” 79. 8 Crémades, Catalan, and Torti, “Nouvelles figurations d’oiseaux,” 386. 9 Ibid., 384. 10 Ibid., 386. 11 Warren, History of the Ojibway People, 44–5. 12 Kiriyak, Early Art, 104. 13 Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 257. 14 Mithin, After the Ice, 181. 15 Among the carvings of swans, loons, and geese, we find one exquisite ivory carving of twinned swans from the Middle Dorset culture (1–500 CE ), which reminds one of the far older, long-necked Mal’ta flying swans – also pendants. Canadian Museum of History, J lG u-2:156. 16 Kristensen and Holly Jr, “Birds, Burials and Sacred Cosmology,” 41. 17 Ibid., 43. 18 Armstrong, Folklore of Birds, 25–7. 19 Cleyet-Merle and Madelaine, “A Propos d’une representation.” 20 Armstrong, “Crane in the British Isles,” 238, also takes them to be cranes. 21 Crémades, Catalan, and Torti, “Nouvelles figurations d’oiseaux,” 385. 22 For an illustration, see Hitchcock, “Le Morin.”

31 Ortega et al., “Naturalistic Bird Representation,” 205. For a colour picture, see “35,000-Year-Old Twitter Logo.” For reproductions of a number of grouse-like birds in Palaeolithic art, see Guthrie, Nature of Paleolithic Art, 10. 32 For a picture, see Hitchcock, “Buxu Cave.” 33 Buisson and Pinçon, “Nouvelle lecture,” passim; Crémades, Catalan, and Torti, “Nouvelles figurations d’oiseaux,” 385. 34 Illustrated in Buisson and Pinçon, “Nouvelle lecture,” 77, fig. 4a; and in Armstrong, Folklore of Birds, 16, fig. 18. 35 Crémades, Catalan, and Torti, “Nouvelles figurations d’oiseaux,” 385. 36 Kidder and Kidder, “Cave of Puy-de-Lacan,” 450, fig. 6 and plate 12. 37 Crémades, Catalan, and Torti, “Nouvelles figurations d’oiseaux,” 385; illustrated in Bahn and Vertut, Journey through the Ice Age, 90, fig. 7.3. 38 The Morin Cave has an engraving on a scapula of the upper body and head of a bird with the outline of a cap that looks vaguely woodpecker-like. See Hitchcock, “Le Morin.” One interesting carving, dating from the Upper Palaeolithic and found at Bol’shoi El’gakhchan I in Siberia, may be a swallow or swift of some kind. Kiriyak, Early Art, 57, 75, and 76, photo 8. However, it does not look like it to me. It is more probable that several of the birds illustrated at Laugerie-Basse are swallows. Guthrie, Nature of Paleolithic Art, 6. Kiriyak illustrates a number of small figurines, some of which are clearly ptarmigan and owls, but others may be songbirds. It is hard to tell. The two little birds on the emerging, ludicrously exaggerated, ibex turd (if turd it be) on the famous Mas d’Azil antler spear-thrower, of which we have some ten surviving contemporary likenesses, are not really identifiable to species, although some have speculated that they are woodpeckers. For illustrations, see Bahn and Vertut, Journey through the Ice Age, 98, figs 7.16 and 7.17; and Hitchcock, “Mas d’Azil Cave.” 39 Mithin, After the Ice, 142. 40 Armstrong, Folklore of Birds, 24.

Notes to pages 47 – 50

23 Ibid. 24 Burkert, Greek Religion, 102. 25 Both figurines are in the Moravian Museum in Brno in the Czech Republic. Estelle Bougard seems right to consider a third, damaged clay figurine (DV 28) to be a stylized owl. Estelle Bougard, personal communication with author, 23 April 2020. For this interpretation, see also Bougard, Use of Clay, 96–7, 227. In “Mammothsteppe-Life Mammoths, Owls, and Other Creatures” (2018), basing himself on the figurative presence of owls such as these ones, Shumon T. Hussain establishes the importance of the owl in the Early Gravettian Pavlovian culture of east central Europe (ca. 27,000–23,000 BCE ), where the owl appears as a “nonhuman agent of substantial importance” (97), and he goes so far as to speculate that “owls might have been seen as embodiments of already deceased humans” (100n13). 26 This owl carved from a tooth is illustrated in Morris, Owl, 16. 27 For an illustration of this handle, see Hitchcock, “Avdeevo.” 28 There is debate about these little carvings and their various markings. As a best guess, Paul G. Bahn says that “they may, in fact, be female symbols … engraved on phallic birds!” Bahn and Vertut, Journey through the Ice Age, 164. 29 Armstrong, Folklore of Birds, 18 and 13, fig. 12. Ptarmigan continue to be an important theme in art in the Russian Neolithic. We find a number of ptarmigan among the many small stone bird carvings in far northeastern Russia in Chukhotka. One lovely one, found at the Neolithic Tytyl’ V site, is carved on reddish slate. See Kiriyak, Early Art, 57, fig. 27 (lower double image). 30 Paillet and Man-Estier, “Oeuvres d’art méconnues de Laugerie-Basse,” 518. These researchers consulted ornithologists who made a good case for both types of bird. I think that the thick extended neck and the slight indication of a throat ruff argue for a capercaillie, although the bill is admittedly more corvid-like.

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Notes to pages 51 – 66

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1 Even in areas where certain individual gods eventually became more important than others, leading to monotheism and worship of single gods, the old polytheism and animal worship left their traces, as seen in Christianity with its triune god – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – where the latter would manifest itself as a dove. 2 Peters and Schmidt, “Animals in the Symbolic World,” 179. 3 Mann, “Birth of Religion,” 39. 4 Peters and Schmidt, “Animals in the Symbolic World,” 208–10. 5 Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe,” 244. 6 Ibid., 246. 7 Some regard three of these four birds as having “humanlike legs that extend out in front, making the creature appear to be in a sitting position.” Hodder and Meskell, “‘Curious and Sometimes a Trifle,’” 246. This interpretation suggests costumed priests, but I do not see it. 8 Some see it as a waterbird. Ibid., 247. 9 Baird, “Comments,” 252. 10 Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe,” 245. 11 van Dooren, Vulture, 62. 12 Solecki, Early Village Site, 5, 53–4. 13 Solecki, “Predatory Bird Rituals,” 44. 14 Solecki, Early Village Site, 54. 15 Solecki, “Predatory Bird Rituals,” 47. 16 Mithin, After the Ice, 428. 17 Kozlowski, “Nemrik 9,” 30. 18 Matthews, Early Prehistory of Mesopotamia, 39. 19 Ibid. 20 Stefan Kozlowski, personal communication with author, 5 June 2020. For a visual representation of the find, see Kozlowski, Nemrik, fig. 14. 21 “Large free-standing sculpture continued its importance at Nevali Çori, with both humans and animals, but what is new here is the combination of both on the same piece and often as humans with attributes of animals, such as ‘hybrid’ bird/ humans.” Rollefson, “Charming Lives,” 394. 22 Hauptmann, “Urfa Region,” 76.

23 Ibid. 24 Hodder and Meskell, “‘Curious and Sometimes a Trifle,’” 247. 25 Hauptmann, “Urfa Region,” 76. 26 Ibid. 27 Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe,” 248. 28 Hodder and Meskell, “‘Curious and Sometimes a Trifle,’” 247. 29 Hauptmann, “Urfa Region,” 77. 30 Gourichon, “Bird Remains,” 146. 31 Ibid., 150. 32 Stordeur et al., “Jerf el-Ahmar,” 1. 33 Stordeur, Le Village de Jerf el Ahmar, 353, my translation. 34 The cranes look far more like cranes than the seven large birds in the red-ochre wall frieze at late-Neolithic Bouqras (6400–5900 BCE ), which look more like ostriches but are often taken to be cranes. Matthews, Early Prehistory of Mesopotamia, 48; Mithin, After the Ice, 88. For the best picture, see Mellaart, “Excavations at Çatal Hüyük, 1965,” plates 62 and 63. See also Akkermans and Schwartz, Archaeology of Syria, 124, fig. 4.15; Russell and McGowan, “Dance of the Cranes,” 449, fig. 5; or Alamy Stock Image RY 9410. 35 Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 167. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 166. 38 Mithin, After the Ice, 93. 39 Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 166–7 and plate 46. 40 Peters and Schmidt, “Animals in the Symbolic World,” 213. 41 Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 94 and plate 46, also 167 and, for reconstructions of the Second Vulture Shrine murals, 82–3. 42 Testart, “Des crânes et des vautours,” 33, my translation. 43 Hodder and Meskell, “‘Curious and Sometimes a Trifle,’” 247. 44 Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 48 and plate 28, also 126. 45 Mithin, After the Ice, 93. 46 Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 183, 202, and plates 80 (female figure) and 82 (bird carving). For Mrs G. Huxtable’s drawings of the bird carving from

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merely ornamental. They appear to have been amulets, and many were worn as pendants. Since all of them have been found in graves, it appears likely that they are related to ancestor cults and that the choice of animal probably had totemic cult significance. Unfortunately, many of them lack provenance because they were removed by people who were not archaeologists. Others are fakes. Nonetheless, many are authentic and represent a late-Neolithic culture that featured zoomorphic carvings among which birds are particularly well represented. Owls are a common form among the Bronze Age artifacts of the late Shang dynasty (1300– 1046 BCE ), where we again find jade owl carvings. The most striking Shang artifacts, however, are zuns – bronze wine vessels – in the shape of standing owls that often have various owl decorations on the bodies. Morris, Owl, tells us that “these owls are thought to have been used during ceremonies of ancestor worship” (29), and he provides an illustration of one from his own collection (30). For a photo of a wonderful lidded, bronze ritual wine container in the shape of two owls back to back, dating from about 1200–1100 BCE , see Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, F1942.14a-b. This use of owl artifacts in burials and ritual suggests that the bird had special religious significance probably as a deity. The owl’s widespread presence in the cultures of Europe, the Middle East, and the East – China – suggests that its cult value came with early modern humans when they left Africa. Its widespread presence in New World cultures indicates that its cult value also accompanied modern humans when they left for the New World. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 181. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, 231. Ibid., 256. Ibid., 230. Gimbutas depicts many interesting examples of our highly variable, beaked “Bird Goddess” (230–36), but as she points out, “[i]n an overwhelming majority of cases, she is a hybrid having female buttocks outlined in the shape of

Notes to pages 66 – 9

various angles, see Mellaart, “Excavations at Çatal Hüyük, 1962,” 90, fig. 26. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 175. Morelli et al., “Vulture in the Sky,” 449. Ibid., 455. Finlayson et al., “Birds of a Feather,” passim. See also, Walter, “First Artists,” 56: “Cut marks recently found on bird-wing bones hint that Neanderthals used feathers for ornaments up to 50,000 years ago.” Ritual use of vulture feathers may have predated Zawi Chemi Shanidar by over 40,000 years. For the bird-topped baton fragment from the Trois Frères Cave, see Ryan, Strong Eye of Shamanism, 31, fig. 5. See also Guthrie, Nature of Paleolithic Art, 289. For a colour photo and for attribution to both the Enlène and Trois Frères Caves, see Hitchcock, “La Grotte d’Enlène.” Mithin, After the Ice, 61. Ibid., 422. Stordeur, “Jerf el Ahmar,” 52, fig. 10.2. Cauvin, Birth of the Gods, 46–7. See also my discussion of the ancient city of Tell Brak in chapter 6. Stordeur, “Jerf el Ahmar,” 50. Kiriyak, Early Art, 57, figs 28:1 and 28:2. For a photo of the Tytyl’ V figurine of an owl, see ibid., 104, right-hand column, second from the top. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 147 and plates 80 (female figure) and 82 (bird carving). Owls were an important bird in early Chinese culture and figure as a common motif in Chinese art from the late Neolithic – as evidenced by Wang, “Owl in Early Chinese Art.” From burials, we have a clay-pottery owl head and a three-legged vessel thought to be a standing owl from the Yangshao culture, which thrived along the Yellow River from roughly 5500–3500 BCE . For the clay owl head and the three-legged vessel, see ibid., figs 1 and 2. For a slightly different head on display at Peking University, see Chinasage, “Bird Symbolism.” Among the many jade carvings of the late-Neolithic Hongshan culture (4000–3000 BCE ), all unearthed from graves, there are a number of owls with front-facing eyes. It is obvious that they are not

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a bird’s body, female breasts, a bird’s beak, a long neck and either wings or arm stumps” (236). It is possible that we have an early Eastern representation of this “Bird Goddess” at Mureybet, south of Jerf el Ahmar, where a small group of baked-clay figurines was found dating from about 8000 BCE . Three figurines have the pinched nose, long neck, and breasts (nos 1 and 2) that later became central attributes of the Western Neolithic bird deity. For a picture, see Cauvin, “Les fouilles de Mureybet,” 34, fig. 15, nos 1, 2, and 4. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, 69. Nikolic and Vukovic, “Vinča Ritual Vessels,” 52; Gimbutas, Goddesses and Gods, 138. Nikolic and Vukovic, “Vinča Ritual Vessels,” 64. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, 238. Lockhart, Raptor, 26. Ibid., 115. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, 150.

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1 Successful irrigation and marsh reclamation practices of this fertile area meant rich farming, which led to rapid population increase, which in turn led to large, walled cities beautified by craftsmen and artists. 2 From a British Museum wall plaque. 3 Epic of Gilgamesh, 57–8. 4 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 62.70.67, 2700– 2600 BCE . 5 British Museum, 104724, 2121–2118 BCE . 6 Louvre, AO 14778. 7 Morris, Owl, 23. 8 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 74.51.1542. 9 See, for example, a small copper figurine of a woman dating from 2000–1750 BCE , probably the Mesopotamian personal protective goddess, Lama, as the horned headdress suggests. She has a wellformed human nose, mouth, eyes, and chin, and in no way does she recall the various common beaked goddesses. British Museum, 123040. 10 Cauvin, Birth of the Gods, 46–7. 11 Ward, “Hittite Gods,” 21, fig. 23, shows a cylinder seal with two eagle-headed, winged deities.

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Ibid., 28, fig. 36. Ibid., 32, fig. 45. Frankfort, Art and Architecture, 110. Echlin, Inanna, 124–49. British Museum, 1994,1001.1 and 103226. Frankfort, Art and Architecture, 110. Ward, “Hittite Gods,” 12–13, esp. fig. 12. McMahon, “Encultured Vulture,” 170. See, for example, ibid., 176, fig. 8. Noting that the role of the vulture became more prosaic in later usage, Augusta McMahon puts forth the interesting idea that the vulture images on these early seals bridge a gap between the “use of vultures as a positive ritually-associated symbol or totem” and the more common image in later Mesopotamian art of the vulture simply as a battlefield scavenger representing death and decay. Ibid., 179. British Museum, 118907. Huyge and Claes, “Art rupestre gravé paléolithique,” 27. Huyge and Ikram, “Animal Representations,” 162–4. For an image, see the Papyrus of Ani, dating from the Nineteenth Dynasty of the New Kingdom. British Museum, EA 10470,3. Morris, Owl, 19. Brooklyn Museum, “Female Figure.” Artists of the period and area were quite capable of fashioning normal human arms and hands, as we see, for example, in a headless terracotta figurine from the pre-dynastic Badarian culture of Upper Egypt that dates from 4500–4000 BCE , where the arms and hands, particularly the lower hand, are rather well executed. British Museum, EA59679. There is a beautiful jade carving from the nearly contemporary Hongshan jade culture (ca. 4000 BCE ) of a seated woman with breasts and a vulture-like head that recalls the Bird Lady from Ma’mariya. Food for thought. British Museum, EA 61915. British Museum, EA 57752 and 57753. See, for example, an Egyptian pottery mould especially for making vulture amulets dating from about 1390–1353 BCE . One can even make out

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the feathering. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 12.180.390. Cocker, Birds and People, 156. Horus appears on top of the staff of the hunter behind the leader in the Lion Palette (Hunters Palette), which dates from about 3100 BCE . Louvre, E 11254. Why, for that matter, would Quetzal Coatl, the great god of the Mayans and Aztecs, be a feathered serpent? The British Museum has a number of Horus amulets, such as EA 17278, 21909, and 13402. For a spooky two-minute video, see Museum Secrets, “Animal Necropolis.” Herodotus, Landmark Herodotus, 146. Wheye and Kennedy, Humans, Nature, and Birds, 57. Cocker, Birds and People, 128. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 3, book 8, ch. 41, 71. Wheye and Kennedy, Humans, Nature, and Birds, 57. Herodotus, Landmark Herodotus, 150. The association of a curved bill with the new moon can also be seen in the scientific name of that magical bird the Eurasian curlew – Numenius arquata. Mary Colwell points out that “[n]umenius is the Latinised version of two Greek words, neos for new and mene for moon.” Colwell, Curlew Moon, 5. The crescent moon, incidentally, was only recently associated with Islam and is a very ancient symbol connected with weather gods and celestial worship. It shows up historically as far back as early Mesopotamia. In the Sumerian and Babylonian cultures, it was a symbol of the lunar deities, just as later it was a symbol of the Hindu god Shiva. The association with the Virgin Mary came much later, although far before the association with Islam.

1 Among the first to arrive were those who came and lived in areas like the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon near the Alaska border. It is possible that they came as early as 23,000–18,000 BCE (the jury is still out)

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1 For a truly thorough discussion of birds in Classical Greek culture, see Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World. 2 Gimbutas, Goddesses and Gods, 101–7. 3 For a nice illustration, see the Siren Vase (480– 470 BCE ), an Attic red-figured vase attributed to the Siren Painter, which shows Odysseus lashed to the mast and the sirens overhead. British Museum, 1843,1103.31. 4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 67. 5 Ibid., 73–4.

Notes to pages 90 – 111

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and survived in the area until much later, when the ice-free corridor opened up and allowed them to move south. Cocker, Birds and People, 158. Some textiles show traces of an indigo-type dye almost two millennia earlier than we find it in Egypt. Splitstoser et al., “Early Pre-Hispanic Use.” Bird, Preceramic Excavations, 161–2, 164–5, figs 109–11. Frame, “Blood, Fertility, and Transformation.” A nice example was discovered in 2017 by the Tak’alik Ab’aj Archaeological Project in a very old Mayan royal tomb in the city of Waka’ in Guatemala. Among the many artifacts thought to date from around 300–350 CE , archaeologists found a small jade pendant, seemingly the centrepiece of a larger necklace, with a human body and a vulture’s head. The piece vividly recalls many Old World pieces of the Neolithic, such as the bird-headed Vinča deities. It probably represents an anthropomorphic god made sacred by the bird head and worn in death protectively, just as King Tut wore his vulture pendant. For pictures, see https://www.pinterest.ca/ pin/90494273733925894/?lp=true and https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/55450639133616848 /?lp=true. Benson, “Moche Art,” 46. Benson et al., “Catalogue of Objects,” 104. Burger, “Bottle with Two Owl Heads,” 82. Benson et al., “Catalogue of Objects,” 104.

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Ibid., 74. Ibid., 148–59. Ibid., 317–19. Ibid., 320–1. Ibid., 165. Ibid. Ibid., 183–4. Ibid., 195. Ibid., 370. Ibid., 395. It is interesting that way back in 1898, Charles de Kay, wondering why all the Greek and Roman gods were associated with various birds, conceived the idea that the birds were the original Greek gods. de Kay, Bird Gods, 6. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 166. Ibid., 278. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 155. Hawkes, Dawn of the Gods, 241. Gimbutas, Civilization of the Goddess, 235. Gimbutas, Goddesses and Gods, 147. Morris, Owl, 23. Cocker, Birds and People, 278. Liddell and Scott, Lexicon. Homer, Iliad, 7. Mitchell, Greek Vase-Painting, 134. Morris, Owl, 23. Hawkes, Dawn of the Gods, 139. See also Mark 1: 10; Luke 3: 22; and John 1: 32. “Kαὶ καταβῆναι τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον σωματικῷ εἴδει ὡς περιστερὰν ἐπ’ αὐτόν”; “et descendit Spiritus sanctus corporali specie sicut Columba in ipsum.” Pope, “Narration of Our Father Agapios,” 229–30. Armstrong, Saint Francis, 145. Ibid., 147, 170. Jonas of Bobbio, Life of St. Columban, 18, episode 30. The following miracle again recounts the close bond between Saint Columban and the birds. The birds sacrifice themselves for the beloved saint: In the meantime Columban and his companions experienced a time of great need … After their bodies had been exhausted by three days of fasting, they found so great an abundance

of birds, just as the quails formerly covered the camp of the children of Israel, that the whole country near there was filled with birds. The man of God knew that this food had been scattered on the ground for his own safety and that of his brethren, and that the birds had come only because he was there. He ordered his followers first to render grateful praises to the Creator, and then to take the birds as food. And it was a wonderful and stupendous miracle; for the birds were seized according to the father’s commands and did not attempt to fly away. The manna of birds remained for three days. On the fourth day, a priest from an adjacent city, warned by divine inspiration, sent a supply of grain to St. Columban. When the supply of grain arrived, the Omnipotent, who had furnished the winged food to those in want, immediately commanded the phalanxes of birds to depart. We learned this from Eustasius, who was present with the others, under the command of the servant of God. He said that no one of them remembered ever having seen birds of such a kind before; and the food was of so pleasant savor that it surpassed royal viands. Oh, wonderful gift of divine mercy! (32–3, episode 54) 37 For origins of the later legend, dating from about 1200 CE , see Alexander, Saints and Animals, 156– 60. The Venerable Bede, in his Life and Miracles of St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindesfarne, written in the early eighth century, tells us that Cuthbert was fed by an eagle (ch. 12), that he persuaded the birds not to attack his barley (ch. 19), and that the crows contritely apologized to him for stealing his thatch and brought him a gift of hog’s fat (ch. 20) – birds and a man living in harmony. 38 Brunforte, Little Flowers of St. Francis, 54. 39 Ibid., 39. 40 Ibid. 41 See also Matthew 6: 26. 42 Although the tradition of divine folly – which ultimately descends from Saint Paul’s “we are fools

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for Christ’s sake” in 1 Corinthians 4: 10 – was well known in Byzantium and Russia, it never really caught on in the West. In this tradition, the “wisdom of the spirit is true wisdom, whereas wisdom of the mind (sapentia) is in fact folly (stultitia).” Pope, “Fools and Folly,” 480. Here, we see Francis as a typical holy fool; in his foolishness lies deep wisdom. “In direct antithesis to the pious solemnity and ritual of the official church, the holy fool, like an Old Testament prophet, tries to awaken the indifferent to eternal truths by the shock value of his performance” (479). Zenkovsky, ed., Medieval Russia’s Epics, 391–9. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 344–9. The ecstatic expectation aside, he does have a point: although it is extremely unlikely to happen, if all people suddenly treated everyone else and all the birds and other animals with love, the earth would be like paradise; it could happen. It resurfaces here and there in modern thought, such as in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, and more recently in the poetry of the great Mary Oliver. To find it an enduring way of life, however, we would have to turn away from the Judeo-Christian tradition and move toward Indigenous religions and the cultures of hunter-gatherers, such as those of the Ojibwe and Cree, which have strong pre-Christian roots.

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Notes to pages 130 – 53

1 Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 30. For an interesting discussion of this phenomenon, see Robbins, Wonder of Birds, ch. 4. 2 Rosenberg, Complete Jewish Bible. 3 Low, Where Song Began, 240. 4 Cited in Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 275. 5 Plato, Plato’s Phaedrus, 70. 6 Aristophanes, Birds, 43. 7 Isaiah 6: 1–3. 8 Exodus 25: 20; Ezekiel 10; 1 Kings 6: 27. 9 Bede, Life and Miracles, ch. 7. 10 Chrysostom, On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, 107–8.

Dante, Inferno, 284, canto 34. Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 258. See also Luke 24: 50–1. Zander, St. Seraphim of Sarov, 79–81. Cited in Eliade, Shamanism, 482. Ibid., 477. Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 258. Elliott, ed., Acts of Peter, 331–2. Walker, trans., Acts of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, 483–4. Weidensaul, Living on the Wind, 10. Concise Oxford Dictionary. Young, Origins of the Sacred, 57. See also National Geographic, “Swinging Gibbon.” Aristophanes, Birds, 55. Arrowsmith, “Introduction,” 2. Weidensaul, Living on the Wind, 27. Laufer, Prehistory of Aviation, 14. Ibid., 15–16. I have taken details from various translations, but a good version can be found in Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, 184–5. Genesis 11: 4. You might think that after Kay Kavus and the others, the possibilities of eagle-assisted flight had been exhausted. But no. As recently as 1801, the worthy Jakob Kaiserer published a pamphlet in Vienna on his discovery of a technique to direct air-balloon flight using tame eagles. Titled “Ueber meine Erfindung einen Luftballon durch Adler zu regieren” (About My Discovery of How to Steer a Balloon by Means of Eagles), it is cited in Laufer, Prehistory of Aviation, 62. Kaiserer’s discovery did not win him fame and fortune. Brunt, Voyage to Cacklogallinia, 32. Ibid., 39. If you obtain the book, I fear that the turgidity of the writing might prevent you from fully appreciating the keen satire and wit. Canadian Press, “‘No Regrets.’” Lucian of Samosata, Icaromenippus, 131–2. From much later seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury sources, King Bladud is known for finding a cure for leprosy while working as a swineherd

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near the villages of Swineford and Hog’s Norton and for founding Bath. Cited in Clark, “Bladud of Bath,” 40. Laufer, Prehistory of Aviation, 92. Cited in White, “Eilmer of Malmesbury,” 100. Cited in ibid., 98. The American historian Lynn Townsend White Jr, who writes of the case in “Eilmer of Malmesbury,” believes the story because he considers William of Malmesbury to be “the best informed and most reliable historian in twelfth-century England” (98), everything Geoffrey of Monmouth was not. The hundred-year gap between Eilmer’s deed and William’s recording does not seem to bother him. White also accepts Ibn Firnas as “the first man to fly successfully,” ceding him priority over Eilmer, “although the evidence is slender” (101). Ibid., 104. Ibid. Laufer, Prehistory of Aviation, 68. “Hezârfen Ahmed Çelebi.” A number of historians of flight actually accept some or all of these flights as facts. Even the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of the Wrights, David McCullough, for example, accepts Firnas’s flight: “One savant in Spain in the year 875 is known to have covered himself with feathers in the attempt.” McCullough, Wright Brothers, 1. Richard P. Hallion, formerly the US Air Force historian, accepts the flights of both Firnas and Eilmer. He even thinks that stories like the one about Daedalus and Icarus “must stem from actual flying attempts.” Hallion, Taking Flight, 7. Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 17–18, also seems to accept the flights of both Firnas and Eilmer. It was recorded all too well on camera. The Internet is a marvel – no doubt about it. But like all things miraculous, there is a downside, and the magic comes with a price. You can find things on the Internet that you do not want to know about or see. When I was playing around checking out modern fliers, I came across a video of Reichelt’s attempted flight on YouTube. Since I had no idea that the actual flight was filmed, I did not realize

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what I was about to see when I opened the clip. Since it lasts only a minute or so, I had no time to turn it off; besides, I was spellbound. There was Reichelt in his flimsy bird suit out on a girder having bribed his way past the guard. Several times, he went to jump but could not. It was awful and reminded me of jumping off garages in people’s back yards when I was a boy. I felt for Reichelt at that moment, and then he jumped, and the suit immediately wrapped itself around him, and he plummeted – while someone filmed him! Barnes, “Sin of Height,” 11. Laufer, Prehistory of Aviation, 13. Roger Bacon, Roger Bacon’s Letter, 27. Vallentin, Leonardo da Vinci, 316. Laurenza, Leonardo on Flight, 7–21. Ibid., 63. Ironically, he might have done better if he had concentrated on the fixed-wing flight of flying fish. Cited in Laurenza, Leonardo on Flight, 64. See, for example, Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 19. Wheye and Kennedy, Humans, Nature, and Birds, 35. Nonetheless, apocryphal stories abound – particularly concerning his pupil Tomasso Masini, also known as Zoroaster. Masini is supposed to have tested one of Leonardo’s flying machines in 1506, taking off from a quarry wall at Fiesole – now in Mount Ceceri Park – and ending up badly injured in a crash with two broken legs, not unlike Eilmer. Cited in Laufer, Prehistory of Aviation, 13. Sexton, “To a Friend,” 51. McCullough, Wright Brothers, 28–37. Ibid., 51–3, 124–5. McCullough, Wright Brothers, manuscript page in photo 32. Cited in ibid., 207–8. Hopkins, “Windhover,” 45. chaPter ten

1 Aristotle, History of Animals, book 2, part 12. 2 Kroodsma, Singing Life of Birds, 48. 3 Low, Where Song Began, 206.

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Armstrong, Study of Bird Song, 231. Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 96. Cited in ibid., 97. Cited in ibid. Mâche, “Necessity of and Problem,” 438. I know of this phenomenon because I mentioned Rothenberg’s book to my son-in-law, Dr Gary Fausone, and said that it was too bad that we could not actually prove that birds sometimes sing just because they feel like it. He responded, “We can prove it.” “We can?” I asked. “Sure. Dopamine.” “What do you mean, ‘dopamine’?” “Everything is for dopamine.” Not the least bit categorical, my son-in-law. “Okay, but can you prove that?” “Sure, but I’ll need five minutes on your computer.” “Be my guest,” I said. He was wrong. He didn’t need five minutes on my computer. He needed only two minutes and came up with a whole list of scientific articles (written after Rothenberg’s 2005 book) that examine birdsong and link it to dopamine and opioids. Riters, “Role of Motivation,” 194. Dalziell and Welbergen, “Elaborate Mimetic Vocal Displays,” in the section “General Implications for Elaborate Vocalization in Female Songbirds.” Ibid., concluding statement. Frost, “Oven Bird,” 139. Hardy, “Darkling Thrush,” 26. Shelley, “To a Sky-Lark,” 471, 477. Cited in Birkhead, Wisdom of Birds, 258. Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” 236–7. Young, Origins of the Sacred, 193. Birkhead, Wisdom of Birds, 239. Kroodsma, Singing Life of Birds, 196–7. Cited in Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 23. Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 261. Cited in ibid. Mâche, “Necessity of and Problem,” 477. Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 143. The syrinx offers some real advantages. It is a two-sided, symmetrical song organ, and both sides

Notes to pages 165 – 76

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Darwin, Descent of Man, 359. Thoreau, Journals, 290–1. Mithin, Singing Neanderthals, 271. Birkhead, Wisdom of Birds, 258. Cited in Campbell, Masks of God, vol. 1, 236. The clay-colored thrush cannot be eaten by the Bribri of Costa Rica because “it contributed to the dance of Creation by singing.” Sault, “Bird Messengers,” 297. Young, Origins of the Sacred, 57–8. Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, 79–81. Kroodsma, Singing Life of Birds, 267. We know relatively little about elephant vocal communication because much of it is in the range of infrasound and well below human hearing, although birds hear infrasound well and use it as a navigational tool. Weidensaul, Living on the Wind, 64. Cited in Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 139. Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 146. Aristotle, History of Animals, book 4, part 9. Ibid. Cited in Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 114. Ibid. Ibid., 179. Hess, “News and Notes,” 23. Slater, “Birdsong Repertoires,” 59. Ibid. Hess, “News and Notes,” 23. Doolittle, who got her doctorate from Princeton University in 2007, is not just casually interested in the relationship between birdsong and human music but is also a composer who writes music inspired by bird songs. Birkhead, Wisdom of Birds, 270. Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 166–7. Armstrong, Life and Lore, 33–4. Kroodsma, Singing Life of Birds, 76. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 276. Darwin, Descent of Man, 368. Ibid., 382, italics mine. Ibid., 592. Cited in Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 119. Cited in ibid., 17.

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can produce sound at the same time, which is why birds can sing harmony with themselves. The syrinx produces sound without vocal cords by vibration of two membranes – one on either side – caused by airflow through the organ. Muscles change the tension in the two membranes and amount of airflow, which varies the sound. Songbirds have five or more pairs of muscles to work their syrinx, rather than three or fewer pairs, as in other birds. The result is that songbirds can sing far more complex songs than humans and at far higher speeds. Mithin, Singing Neanderthals, 146. Ibid., 116. Darwin, Descent of Man, 572. Kroodsma, Singing Life of Birds, 22. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 51. Cited in Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 15. Bahn and Vertut, Journey through the Ice Age, 84. Mithin, Singing Neanderthals, 244, and others think that it is just a case of chance resemblance. Low, Where Song Began, 77. Mithin, Singing Neanderthals, 285. Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 9. My wife, who is English, is unhappy that I did not choose Vaughan Williams and “The Lark Ascending” (1914). But then I also omitted such classics as Franz Liszt’s “St. Francis Preaching to the Birds” (1823) and Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Goldfinch” (1729). Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 189. Ibid., 217. Cited in ibid., 194–5. Ibid., 195. Cited in Hatto, ed., Eos, 105. Verlaine, “Art poétique,” 122. Thoreau, Walden, 158. Tennyson, “Throstle,” 215. Whitman, “Out of the Cradle,” 69. Ibid., 70. Consider the following verses in ibid., 68: Soothe! soothe! soothe! Close on its wave soothes the wave behind, And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close, But again my love soothes not me, not me …

Loud! Loud! Loud! Loud I call to you, my love! High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves. Surely you must know who is here, is here. You must know who I am, my love. 81 Cited in Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 84. 82 Whitman, “When Lilacs Last,” 71–6. chaPter eleVen

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Nicolson, Seabird’s Cry, 46. See Reilly, Ascent of Birds, 24. Cocker, Birds and People, 26–7. Nicolson, Seabird’s Cry, 274–8. Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 7. Ibid., 95. G. Cartwright (1792), cited in Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 6n2. Hore in “The Voyage of Master Hore” (1536–37), cited in Cartier, Voyages of Jacques Cartier, 274. “They drave a great number of the foules into their boats upon their sailes.” Cited in Kolbert, Sixth Extinction, 60. See also Nicolson, Seabird’s Cry, 283–4. Armstrong, Life and Lore, 178. Riley, Once and Future, 112. Ibid. John James Audubon, The Birds of North America (1839), cited in Armstrong, Life and Lore, 253–5. Stutchbury, Bird Detective, 212–13. For good recent accounts, see Graham Gibson’s excerpt from his novel Perpetual Motion (1982) in Gibson, Bedside Book of Birds, 243–5; and Riley, Once and Future, 111–13, 146–7, passim. Cocker, Birds and People, 246. Wilson, Half-Earth, 54. See also Reilly, Ascent of Birds, 269. Kolbert, Sixth Extinction, 17–18. Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 14, 260. van Dooren, Vulture, 127. Morelli et al., “Vulture in the Sky,” 458. I saw a wild one just in time in 1979 in the hills east of Santa Barbara. It cut across the valley through the other lazily soaring vultures and eagles like a B-52.

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56 Ibid., 119–20. I am hoping that Viagra and the like will help to remedy this nonsense and save the rhinos and other creatures at the same time. In Half-Earth, E.O. Wilson points out the bitter irony: “[R]hinos are being driven to extinction even though their horn has no more medicinal value than a human fingernail” (30). 57 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, vol. 3, book 10, ch. 71, 381–3. 58 Cocker, Birds and People, 9. 59 Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo, “Biomass Distribution on Earth,” 6508. 60 Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 87. 61 Nicolson, Seabird’s Cry, 336, also 15. See also Franzen, “Lost at Sea,” 124. 62 Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 126. 63 Wilson, Half-Earth, 38–9. See also Nicolson, Seabird’s Cry, 273. 64 Low, Where Song Began, 211. 65 Aristotle, History of Animals, book 8, part 2. 66 Cited in Birkhead, Wisdom of Birds, 278. Aldrovani had in mind book 9, part 50, of Aristotle’s History of Animals (ca. 350 BCE ). 67 Cited in Birkhead, Wisdom of Birds, 278. 68 If you have not read much about tongue mutilation and castration to improve song, see Birkhead, Wisdom of Birds, 250–7. 69 Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 221–2. 70 Nicolson, Seabird’s Cry, 62. 71 Birkhead, Wisdom of Birds, 193. 72 Cited in Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 171. 73 Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 173. 74 Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing, 146. 75 Frost, “Minor Bird,” 142. 76 Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 168. 77 Ibid., 208, 225, 228, 209. 78 Ibid., 232. 79 Ibid., 233. 80 Kroodsma, Singing Life of Birds, 87. 81 Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, act 4, scene 2. 82 I know that this assessment is going to get me into trouble; like the National Rifle Association, falconry has enthusiastic supporters.

Notes to pages 191 – 201

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van Dooren, Vulture, 136. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 152. See Reilly, Ascent of Birds, 267. Cocker, Birds and People, 156. Low, Where Song Began, 189. Wheye and Kennedy, Humans, Nature, and Birds, 25. See also the excerpt from Azar Nafisi’s memoir Reading Lolita in Teheran (2003) in Gibson, Bedside Book of Birds, 258–9; and then turn to the ancients. See Armstrong, Life and Lore, 108–9. Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” 601. Shelley, “Epipsychidion,” 661. Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” 600. Hardy, “Blinded Bird.” Euripides, Cyclops, 189, lines 433–4. Aristophanes, Birds, 41. Morris, Owl, 166–8. Aristotle, History of Animals, book 9, part 1. Epic of Gilgamesh, 43. Echlin, Inanna, 89. Ibid., 208. H.M. Herget in Carpenter and Herget, Everyday Life in Ancient Times, 100. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 301. Franzen, “Last Song for Migratory Birds.” Doughty, Feather Fashions, 25. Ibid., 1. Cocker, Birds and People, 132. Cited in Doughty, Feather Fashions, 16. For a transcript of Chapman’s letter, see Mynott, Birdscapes, appendix 2, 310–11. There are two very good summaries of the trade, one in Cocker, Birds and People, 131–3, and the other in Armstrong, Life and Lore, 150–73. For the classic full treatment, see Doughty, Feather Fashions. Low, Where Song Began, 88. In Jones, dir., “Birds of the Gods.” Houston, “Impact of Red Feather Currency,” 65. Cocker, Birds and People, 13–18. Cited in van Dooren, Vulture, 109.

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83 Whelan, Şekercioğlu, and Wenny, “Bird Ecosystem Services,” 8. 84 Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 56. 85 Ibid., 66. 86 Ibid., 38. 87 Marra and Santella, Cat Wars, 68. 88 Rynard, dir., Messenger. 89 Weidensaul, Living on the Wind, 339. 90 North American Bird Conservation Initiative, State of North America’s Birds 2016. 91 Rosenberg et al., “Decline of North American Avifauna.” This impressive synthetic study, which evaluated population change for 529 species of birds, presents really trustworthy data with conservative estimates, and the methodology is sound. Not surprisingly, grassland birds showed “the largest proportional loss (53%),” and shorebirds “are experiencing consistent, steep population loss (37%),” but population loss also “includes many widespread and common species” (120). The study goes on to point out rather ominously, “Given that birds are one of the best monitored animal groups, birds may also foreshadow a much larger problem” (122). 92 Weidensaul, Living on the Wind, 173–85. 93 Franzen, “Last Song for Migratory Birds,” 66. 94 Doughty, Feather Fashions, 38.

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Morris, Naked Ape, 9. Ibid., 240–1. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 57, sec. 32. Gosler with Buehler and Castillo, “Broader Significance of Ethno-Ornithology,” 32. Suzuki, Wheatcroft, and Griesser, “Experimental Evidence.” Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 40. On chickadees, see also Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 180–2. Morell, “Bird Brainiacs,” 115, 125. Cocker, Birds and People, 252. Low, Where Song Began, 111. Russell, dir., “Bird Genius.” Plutarch, “Cleverness of Animals,” 365.

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Seton, “Silverspot,” 36–7. Tombach, “Seed Dispersal,” 198. Cocker, Birds and People, 392. Russell, dir., “Bird Genius.” Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 63–98. See also, Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 154–8. Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 195–237. Weidensaul, Living on the Wind, 13–16. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 10. Nicolson, Seabird’s Cry, 104. Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 211. Cited in Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 167. Shelley, “To a Sky-Lark,” 476. Low, Cambridge Declaration. Ibid. Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds, passim. Harden, “Animals in Classical Art,” 57. We see a reflection of this position among the Indigenous groups of modern Kenya; huntergatherer communities who depend on natural biological resources “relate to birds much more than do agriculturalists.” Muiruri and Maundu, “Birds, People and Conservation,” 282. Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük, 181, 184. Homer, Iliad, 396. Evelyn-White, trans., “Hymn to Hermes,” 404 (Greek text), lines 267–8, my translation; for Evelyn-White’s translation, see 405. Ibid., lines 568–71, my translation; for EvelynWhite’s translation, see 405. Plato, Theaetetus, 39. Plato cites Socrates citing Protagoras. Aristotle, History of Animals, book 8, part 1. Aristotle, Politics of Aristotle, book 1, ch. 8, 23. For the few dissenters among Greek thinkers, see Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World, 182. In Deuteronomy 9: 9–10, no sooner does Moses go off to Mount Sinai, where he receives the two stone tablets from God with his testimony “written with the finger of God,” than the people pool their gold, melt it down, and fashion animal gods like the golden calf. In Exodus 32: 4, saying “[t]hese be thy gods, O Israel,” they immediately commence to

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way as men do.” Aristotle, History of Animals, book 9, part 7. See also Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World, 237. Pope, “Essay on Man,” 434, epistle 3. Dawkins, Blind Watchmaker. Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, 175. Ackerman, Genius of Birds, 132–5. Masson, When Elephants Weep, 226. Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 288–9. Adams, Plague Dogs, 154–62. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 161. Cited in Wulf, Invention of Nature, 290. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Father Zosima explains this view of nature to his listeners: For everything is like the ocean, all things flow and are indirectly linked together, and if you push here, something will move at the other end of the world. It may be madness to beg the birds for forgiveness, but things would be easier for the birds, for the child, and for every animal if you were nobler than you are – yes, they would be easier, even if only by a little. Understand that everything is like the ocean. Then, consumed by eternal love, you will pray to the birds, too. In a state of fervor you will pray them to forgive your sins. And you must treasure that fervor, absurd though it may seem to others. (387) chaPter thirteen

1 At the end of his brilliant book After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC (2004), Steven Mithin questions the price in terms of the blessings of civilization: “Are the delights of the microscope, the thoughts of Darwin, the poetry of Shakespeare and the advances of medical science, sufficient recompense for the environmental degradation, social conflict, and human suffering that ultimately derive from the origin of farming

Notes to pages 216 – 26

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worship them. Moses and God are not happy. God comes close to wiping humans out again. It is only much later in France that Montesquieu mocks this idea in his Persian Letters (1721): “It has been very well said, that if triangles were to make to themselves gods, they would give them three sides” (letter 59). Sensing this harm, Pope Francis (who took his name from Saint Francis of Assisi), in his encyclical Laudato si’, laments the damage that we have done to our earth by acting as “lords and masters” and plundering it at will. In section 67, he writes, “Nowadays we must forcibly reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute dominion over other creatures.” The Bible, he says, argues for mutual responsibility between human beings and nature. In section 82, he states categorically that “it is mistaken to view other living beings as mere objects subjected to arbitrary human domination.” Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 286. Cited in Doniger, “Reflections,” 101. See also Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World, 221–2. Kundera, Unbearable Lightness of Being, 286. Mary Oliver challenges this assumption sharply in her poem “Some Questions You Might Ask” (1992). Of the soul, she asks why she should have one but not the anteater that loves its children, or the camel, or things like maple trees, irises, stones, roses, and lemons, or even the grass. Noske, Humans and Other Animals, 46. Plato, Plato’s Phaedrus, 51, secs 246b and 246c. Hopkins, “Caged Skylark,” 43. The Eastern viewpoint is different. Hinduism and other Eastern religions assume that animals have souls, which after death may be interchangeable with our own. The immortal human soul may just be an invention to allow us to cope with the stresses caused by our higher intelligence. If this invention is the benefit of the advanced neocortex, one wonders whether birds are not better off. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 112. Aristotle too saw nest building as an example of birds’ intelligence, the swallow building her nest in “the same

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10,000 years ago?” (510). The irony is that, if not for our destructive natures, the recompense could have been so much higher. In his introduction to The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal (1967), Desmond Morris points out that man “spends a good deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones. He is proud that he has the biggest brain of all the primates, but attempts to conceal the fact that he also has the biggest penis, preferring to accord this honour falsely to the mighty gorilla” (9). Burkert, Greek Religion, 104. Morelli et al., “Vulture in the Sky,” 459. van Dooren, Vulture, 58, 59. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 395–408. The same is true of the smell of excrement. The ever-witty Jonathan Swift used human excrement as his metaphor for our less than divine humanness. Swift’s young hero Cassinus, a “college Soph” and great wit, was horrified to learn that the feminine object of his desires was merely of this world: “Nor wonder how I lost my Wits; Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia sh—.” Swift, “Cassinus and Peter,” 620. Aristotle, Politics of Aristotle, book 1, ch. 5, 16. Stutchbury, Bird Detective, 208. Epic of Gilgamesh, 6. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 56. Ibid., 57. Tennyson, “Ulysses,” 86. Low, Cambridge Declaration. Kant, “Duties Towards Animals,” 239. Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, 95–6. Ibid., 172. Cited in Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 46. Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, 179. Wilson, Half-Earth, 212. Lambertini, “Foreword,” 4. Roy Scranton’s 2018 book, for example, is entitled We’re Doomed. Now What? And David WallaceWells’s 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth paints a very grim picture, indeed. His opening sentence reads, “It’s worse, much worse, than you think” (3).

24 As Wallace-Wells puts it, “That the sea will become a killer is a given.” Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 59. We could say the same for fire. 25 Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 146–9. 26 Even if the human race is unable to continue on earth, Stephen Hawking tells us that we could avoid obliteration from an extinction event caused by anything from global warming to an asteroid strike by distributing ourselves as soon as possible on the moon, then on Mars, and eventually on other suitable planets like Proxima Centauri b in nearby solar systems! See Knapton, “Human Race Is Doomed.” Wallace-Wells realistically points out that “a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might hack out of the dry red soil of Mars.” Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 176. 27 Bricker and Ibbitson, Empty Planet, 28. 28 Wilson, Half-Earth, 205. 29 There is still a surprisingly large number of fundamentalists of various stripes who accept this idea as the word of God. 30 Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter, 24. 31 Ibid., 145. 32 Cited in Brown, Life against Death, 315. 33 Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 44, sec. 2. 34 Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 346, 361. 35 See, Gosler with Buehler and Castillo, “Broader Significance of Ethno-Ornithology,” 37. 36 Wilson, Half-Earth, 3. 37 Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 56, sec. 31. 38 Robbins, Wonder of Birds, 114. 39 Şekercioğlu, “Foreword.” Most of these topics are given in-depth treatment in the anthology Why Birds Matter: Avian Ecological Function and Ecosystem Services (2016), edited by Çağan H. Şekercioğlu, Daniel G. Wenny, and Christopher G. Whelan. 40 Şekercioğlu, “Foreword,” 39. 41 Roy Scranton is very pessimistic about the value of education: “Alerting people to the problem and educating broad audiences has proven ineffective against deliberately sown confusion, deep scientific ignorance, widespread apathy, and outright hostility.” Scranton, We’re Doomed, 76. On educating

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and summer tanagers. Great blue herons, brooding condors” (195). See also Gibson, Bedside Book of Birds, 263. For some reason, the Aztecs were not as keen as hoped by Cortés to be overrun, pillaged, and conquered, and they kicked up their heels and ran the Spanish out of town. Cortés was furious and commenced the siege of Tenochtitlan. In a bid to make the Aztecs sue for peace and surrender, Cortés slaughtered civilians enthusiastically and fired the city’s great palaces. Then, in a fit of pique, on 16 June 1521, Cortés ordered the burning of Montezuma’s famous aviaries. What was he thinking? He must have thought that it would teach the Aztecs a lesson and break their spirit. It was a vindictive act of little military value. Why would these people not surrender their town to the overseas invaders? What was the matter with them? One thing is for certain, the actual lives of the birds counted for nothing with Cortés. They were just things. The value that they had for the Aztecs meant that they could serve as part of their punishment. The idea that they might have some intrinsic value or rights to existence never even crossed his mind. So he torched them. Wright, Illustrated Short History, 18. Harari, Sapiens, 74, 82. Young, Origins of the Sacred, 50–1. Mithin, After the Ice, 506. See Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 124–5. Tolstoy, “How Much Land?” In After the Ice, Steven Mithin makes clear how central a role climate change played in the development of human life between 20,000 and 5000 BCE . Wright, Illustrated Short History, 94–9. Even a serious thinker like David Wallace-Wells, who is deeply concerned about climate change, has little interest in what it means for animals. His concern is for humans: “I may be in the minority in feeling that the world could lose much of what we think of as ‘nature,’ as far as I cared, so long as we could go on living as we have in the world left behind. The problem is, we can’t.” Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 36. Sadly, I do not think that he is in any minority.

Notes to pages 237 – 45

children, he writes, “Off-loading responsibility for the world onto the future is ethically inexcusable” (328). Ibid., 325. Meat alternatives, electric cars, and a move toward electricity not generated by fossil fuels will soon preclude such actions anyway. Scranton is very pessimistic on this front: “The odds are … basically zero that I, personally, will ever be able to do anything to stop or even slow down global climate change.” Scranton, We’re Doomed, 69. Bricker and Ibbitson, Empty Planet, 230. Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 34. Franzen, “Save What You Love,” 44. Ibid., 47. Although Franzen may have overstated his case, the criticism he took for this stand was unfair, and he has a point. Modern technology allows us to pinpoint exactly what habitat should be preserved to help birds year-round and in transit. Since many such places are not already protected in parks and nature reserves, we know what to focus on and to protect. The work of scientists like Richard Schuster is of crucial importance. See, for example, Schuster et al., “Optimizing the Conservation.” In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson used this quotation as her epigraph. Hernán Cortés serves as an example of this disregard for nature. The old Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was known for its canals, gardens, and wonderful aviaries, with which Cortés himself was quite taken. As a source of feathers for the fabulous headdresses and capes worn by the Aztecs, who once presented Cortés with a cape made of resplendent quetzal feathers, they naturally contained quantities of all the most colourful tropical birds in Mexico. In “The Passing Wisdom of Birds” (1985), Barry Lopez describes them as places “where thousands of birds – white egrets, energetic wrens and thrushes, fierce accipiters, brilliantly colored parrots – were housed and tended. They were as captivating, as fabulous, as the displays of flowers: vermilion flycatchers, copper[y]-tailed trogons, green jays, blue-throated hummingbirds,

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Notes to pages 245 – 8

61 Scranton, We’re Doomed, 320. 62 Bricker and Ibbitson, Empty Planet, 193. 63 Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo, “Biomass Distribution on Earth,” 6508. 64 Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 137. 65 Bricker and Ibbitson, Empty Planet, 230. 66 World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2018, 10, passim. 67 International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN Red List, 1. 68 Cited in Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 150. 69 Speaking at the Starmus Festival in Trondheim, Norway, in June 2017, Stephen Hawking speculated that when humans colonize the moon, Mars, or some other suitable planets, they will have to take along a sort of Noah’s ark of animals, plants, fungi,

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bacteria, and insects. See Knapton, “Human Race Is Doomed.” He did not point out that many of our animals and plants will no longer exist when the time comes to leave earth. It will be impossible to recreate our biosphere as it is today. Given what we have done to the earth’s biosphere, I already feel sorry for the moon, Mars, and the other planets. Wallace-Wells, Uninhabitable Earth, 106. There is already far too much plastic in our oceans and lakes. As a dweller on the shore of Lake Ontario, for example, I was horrified to learn that “in one square mile of water near Toronto, 3.4 million microplastic particles were recently trawled” (105). McCarthy, “Financial Costs,” 949. Wilson, Half-Earth, 205. Aristophanes, Birds, 50.

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INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Ackerman, Jennifer: Genius of Birds, 136, 175, 190, 200, 209 Adams, Richard: The Plague Dogs, 222–3 Adda Seal, 82, 84, 84 Addaura Cave, 34–5, 35–6 ahimsa, 127–8, 238. See also nature, compassion for aircraft, fixed wing, 161–3 Aldrovani, Ulisse, 199 Alexander the Great, 151 al-Maqqari, Ahmed Mohammed, 153–4 Altamira Cave, 34–5, 35–6 Anatolia, Göbekli Tepe, 4, 5, 14–15, 53–7, 54–6 angels, 121, 141–3, 144, 145 anima, 19, 205; anima mundi, 230; anima rationalis, 215 animal gods. See gods, birds and animals as animism and the sacred: compassion for nature, 124–5, 127–8; definitions, 19; early modern humans, 18–19; human need for control, 19–20; need to re-establish, 235; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 111–13; revered birds, 20; science and, 219. See also human as animal; sacredness and worship of birds anthropocentrism, 72, 211, 215–18, 220, 224, 228, 245, 247, 250n9; consciousness to combat, 234–5. See also gods, birds and animals as

anthropomorphism: angels, 141–3, 144; bird and animal gods and, 4–6, 14, 139, 249n6 (chap. 1), 251n9; dove goddesses, 123, 123–4; in Egypt, 97; in Europe, 72, 100, 102; in Greek myths, 113, 119–21, 139–41; Mesopotamia, 76, 76; in Neolithic, 55, 60, 72; in Peru, 100, 101–3, 102–3, 106–7, 107, 259n6; winged gods, 139–41 Aristophanes: The Birds, 7, 10, 140, 148, 193, 248 Aristotle: History of Animals, x, 164, 167, 193, 198–9, 267n48; Politics, 215, 228 Armstrong, Edward, 9, 48, 169, 170, 172; Folklore of Birds, 46 Arrowsmith, William, 148 Aston, Emma, 249n3 (chap. 1); Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life, 3–4 Athena (ancient Greece), 4–5, 7, 10, 32, 111–12, 114, 117–19, 118, 120 Attenborough, David, 196 Audubon, John James, 189, 204 augury and divination (ornithomancy), 7–12, 9, 165 Avdeevo site, Russia, 47 Bacon, Roger (Doctor Mirabilis), 157–8 Bahn, Paul G., 38, 255n28 balloonists, 152, 152, 160, 261n30 Barnes, Julian: “The Sin of Height,” 156

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base jumping and jumpers, 156–7 Beatrizet, Nicolas: The Rape of Ganymede by Zeus, 113, 114 Beethoven, Ludwig van: Pastoral Symphony, 179 Bell, Alexander Graham, 160 Belon, Pierre, 174 Belvis Cave, 47 Beothuks, 46 Berman, Morris: Reenchantment of the World, 235 Bernd, Heinrich, 210 Bible and related texts: Acts, 143–5; Acts of Peter, 146–7; 1 Corinthians, 248; Deuteronomy, 137; Exodus, 6; Genesis (see Genesis); Judges, 141–2; Luke, 124, 130; Matthew, 124, 141, 147; “The Narration of Our Father Agapios,” 126–7; Old Testament, 20–1, 32; Psalms, 135, 138; Revelations, 129. See also Christian iconography; Judeo-Christian traditions Bird, Junius, 103 birding and birders, ix–x, xi–xii, 234 Bird Lady, Ma’mariya, 88, 89 birdmen, 24, 33, 33–8, 59–60, 73, 148, 253n41 birds mentioned: albatrosses, 137–8, 138, 194, 248; auks, 25–6, 188–9, 189; birds-of-paradise, 195, 195–6; bobolinks, 203; bullfinches, 174–5; bustards, 49–50; chickadees, 207; chickens, xi, 11, 152, 154, 197; Clark’s nutcracker, 209; cockatoos, 168, 208; crakes, 49; curlews, 190, 209, 259n43; diving birds, 44; dodo, 188; egrets, 195, 269n51; elephant birds of Madagascar, 188; finches, 168, 174–5, 200; giant moas, 188; godwits, 209; goshawk, 201–2; grassland birds, 190, 203–4, 237, 266n91; great auk, 188–9, 189; grebes, 20, 44–5, 70, 70–1; grouse, 48–9, 50, 104, 132; herons, 47, 87, 195, 202; ibises, 20, 87, 95–6, 95–7, 99; insectivores, 190, 203; jays, California scrub, 209, 221; kingfisher, 112; kittiwakes, 209; larks, 173–4; loons, 12, 20, 139; lyrebirds, 167, 168, 171, 172, 174, 175, 178; meadowlarks, 203; mockingbirds, 169, 174, 182–3; nightingales, 165, 167, 173–4, 176; ortolans, 197; ostriches, 36, 36, 52, 55, 195, 196; ovenbirds, 172; parrots, 99, 167, 168, 190, 208, 210; partridges and quails, 9, 49, 61; petrels, 194; pigeons, 188, 189–90, 191, 209; ptarmigan, 48, 255n29; queleas, red-billed, 136, 136, 198; robin-chat, blue-shouldered, 175; Ross’s gull, 194; shearwaters, 194, 200, 209; shoebills, ix;

sparrows, Eurasian, 198; starlings, 174, 179; storks, ix, x, 53, 112; swallows, 8, 117, 129, 181, 203, 255n38; terns, 209; thrasher, brown, 169–70, 174, 181; tits, Japanese, 207; veeries, 175; vireos, 172; warblers, 167, 170–1, 174, 236, 237, 245; whimbrels, 209; woodpecker finches, 207; woodpeckers, 113; wrens, winter, 175–6. See also condors; cranes; crows; doves; ducks; eagles; falcons; geese; hummingbirds; owls; raptors; ravens; seabirds; swans; thrushes; vultures; waterbirds birdsong: birds learning of, 167–8; as divinely inspired, 9, 165; female birdsong, 172; how birds sing, 175, 200, 263n57; link between humans and birds, 176–9, 184; musicians inspired by, 179–80, 264n69; overview, 164–6, 184; poets inspired by, 180–4; reason for singing, 169–75, 263n40; rhythm, 168 bird warriors, 102 Birkhead, Tim, 174–5, 199, 201 Bladud, king of the Britons, 153, 261n35 Blake, William: “Auguries of Innocence,” 192, 193 Bodsworth, Fred: The Last of the Curlews, 190 Bolhuis, Johan, 167 Bos, Cornelis: Leda and the Swan, 115 Bribri, Costa Rica, 11 Bronze Age silver band, 13, 13 Brunt, Samuel: A Voyage to Cacklogallinia, 152 Buisson, Dominique, 41 Burkert, Walter, 13–14, 227 Burney Relief (Old Babylonian Period), 81, 81–2, 139, 214 caged birds, 192–3 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, 210, 231, 234–5 Campbell, Joseph, 23, 25–6, 29, 33–4, 46, 250n4 Çatal Hüyük, Turkey, 4, 58, 62, 63–8, 64–5, 67, 100, 213, 214 cats: in ancient Egypt, 202; Neolithic, 58; in Peru, 99–100, 100, 101, 104; role in destruction of birds, 202, 202–3, 238, 239 Caubet, Annie, 75 Cauvin, Jacques, 67, 79 cave art. See Palaeolithic cave art Çelebi, Hezârfen Ahmed, 154–5 Chagall, Marc: The Fall of Icarus, 149 Chapman, Frank, 195

cults and rituals: ancestor and death cults, 99, 106; battlefields, 86; bird figurines, 42, 43, 67; burial rites and death cults, 17–18, 21–2, 57, 58, 60, 67–8, 89–92, 95–6; clothing/costume of, 14, 58, 61–2, 65–6, 257n50; of the dead, Peru, 102–3; folklore of waterfowl, 46; Greek and Roman paganism, 109–10; sacrifice, 21–2. See also sacredness and worship of birds cult wagon/chariot, Late Bronze Age, 13, 14 Curtis, Gregory, 37 Cuthbert, Saint, 128, 142, 260n37 Cyprus, 76, 76 Daedalus 88, 161, 161–2 Daedalus and Icarus, 149, 149, 152–3, 162, 262n45 Dalziell, Anastasia, 172 Damiani, Giovanni ( John Damian), 154 dancing birds, 35–6, 47, 63 Dante: The Inferno, 143 Danti, Giovanni Battista, 158 Darwin, Charles: Descent of Man, 164–5, 170, 176–7, 207, 220 Dawkins, Richard, 18, 166, 220 death: bird associations with, 4, 56–7, 60, 71–2; burial rites and death cults, 17–18, 21–2, 57, 58–9, 64–8, 89–92, 95–6; modern distance from, 228. See also cults and rituals Descartes, René, 219–20, 223 destruction and extinctions of birds: birding popularity and, xi–xii, 240; castration of birds, 198–9; extinctions, 188–91, 198; in fifty years, 247–8; greed of humans, 245–6, 269n51; loss of habitat, 202–4; mistreatments of, 191–4, 197–8, 265n56; overview, 187–8, 204, 266n91; plume trade, 194–6, 195–6; scientific research, 199–201; violence of humans, 242, 269n51. See also climate change and global warming; environmental degradation and habitat loss; nature, compassion for Deucalion, myth of, 8 divination and augury (ornithomancy), 7–12, 165 Dolní Věstonice site, Moravia, Czech Republic, 4–5, 47, 48 Doniger, Wendy, 4 Doolittle, Emily, 168, 263n23

Index

Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, 4–5, 25, 26–9 cherubim, 139–40, 141, 143 China, 148, 160, 191, 198, 257n59 Christian iconography: angels with wings, 141–3, 144; bird-like saints, 121–2, 122; doves, 8–9, 122, 124, 129, 146, 254n52, 256n1; eagles in, 127; earthly paradise, 127, 130–2, 261n45; Francis’s sermon to the birds, 129–30, 132; owls, 32; souls in, 218–19 (see also soul as a bird). See also Bible and related texts; JudeoChristian traditions Chrysostom, John: On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, 142 civilization, 229–30, 242 clan systems: Palaeolithic, 29, 31, 37–8 Cleyet-Merle, Jean-Jacques, 46–7 climate change and global warming, 204, 228, 232–3, 238, 269n44, 269n58, 269n60; greed and, 245–6; violence and, 242. See also environmental degradation and habitat loss Clottes, Jean, 26 Cocker, Mark, 31, 32, 90, 95–6, 118, 185, 191, 197, 253n37 cockfighting, 192 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 248 Collins, Billy: Bright Wings, 181 Columban, Saint, 128, 130, 260n36 condors: ancient gods, 6; California, 190–1, 245, 264n22; in Peru, 99, 103–4, 104–6. See also vultures consciousness in animals, 210–11, 221–2, 231, 234–5 Cook, Arthur Bernard, 13, 14 cormorants, 20, 42, 251n10 Cortés, Hernán, 269n51 corvids (scavenging birds), 48, 66, 208, 237. See also vultures Cosquer Cave, 25–6, 38, 163, 189 COVID-19, 224 cranes: in Egyptian art, 87; in Neolithic, 15, 51–2, 53–5, 56, 61, 63, 67, 256n34; Ojibwe significance, 44–5; in Palaeolithic, 20, 41, 46–7; whooping, 191 creation myths, 7, 9, 57, 87, 138–9, 166, 263n8. See also Genesis Crémades, Michèle, 26, 44, 47 Cretan Hagia Triada sarcophagus, 40 crows, 12, 20, 111–12, 207, 208, 209

285

Index

Dordogne region, 46–7, 49 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Brothers Karamazov, 130–1, 228, 235, 267n59; The Idiot, 133 doves: Christian iconography, 8–9, 12, 20, 122, 124, 129, 146, 254n52, 256n1; imparting knowledge, 8–9; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 113; Sumerian, 73–4, 74; used in war, 191 Dowsett-Lemaire, Françoise, 167, 170–1 ducks: common eider, 128; early modern humans and, 20, 41, 44, 45, 47, 49; in Egyptian art, 87; force feeding of, 197; Mesopotamia, 74–5, 75; in Neolithic, 15, 55, 68, 69–71, 70; in Peru, 99 Dupljaja, Serbia: bird wagon, 13, 14

286

eagles: ancient gods, 6; assisting humans to fly, 150–2, 261n30; in Christian iconography, 127; DDT and, 203; early modern humans and, 20; feathers for headdresses, 196; in Mesopotamia, 79, 80, 150, 150; in Neolithic, 58, 62, 71; Philippine, 191; thunder gods, 113, 137 early modern humans. See Upper Palaeolithic Eastern mystics, 127–8, 130–2 education, role of, 236–7, 268n41 egg and nest collecting, 194 Egypt: animal gods of, 4, 97, 250n9, 258n28; Aswan rock art, 36, 36; clap netting of birds, 194; decoy herons, 202; falcon gods, 4, 87, 92–3, 92–5, 93–4, 94–5, 95, 259n33; female votive figure, 77, 77; hieroglyphs, 87, 89, 92, 95, 118, 180–1; ibis gods, 95–6, 95–7; Master/Mistress of Animals theme, 212, 212–13; Palaeolithic cave art, 86; vulture gods and goddesses, 87–90, 88–91, 258n31 El Greco: Annunciation, 125 Eliade, Mircea, 34, 145 El Pendo Spanish cave, 26 environmental degradation and habitat loss, 223, 231–4, 238, 249n4 (pref.), 267n1, 270n70; measures to combat, 238–40, 269n49. See also climate change and global warming; destruction and extinctions of birds Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumerian text), 8, 73–4, 82, 194, 228–30. See also Mesopotamia Eros/Cupid, 140–1 Euripides, 10, 135, 148, 193

Europe: cave art and artifacts, 44; Neolithic, 62, 68, 68–72, 70; saker falcon, 93, 95 extinctions of birds. See destruction and extinctions of birds falcons: early modern humans and, 20; Egyptian art and gods, 4, 87, 92–5, 94–5; falconry, 201–2, 265n82; saker, 93, 95; smuggling of, 194; “The Windhover” (Hopkins), 163 feathers and down trade, 194–6, 195–6 Felmingham Hoard, 251n11 Ferdowsi, Abolqasem: Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, 150, 150 Ferenczi, Sándor, 235 fertility, bird associations, 75, 76, 82, 123–4, 132. See also sexual associations Finlayson, Clive, 66 flight from a human perspective: angels, with and without wings, 141–3, 144; bird-assisted, 150–3, 151, 261n30; envy of, 147–9, 155–6, 174, 187, 201; fixedwing aircraft, 161–3; levitations, 143–7, 146; overview, 135–6; “The Windhover” (Hopkins), 163; various human attempts, 156–61, 262n45; wingsuit fliers, 152–5, 156, 262n45 folklore, 46, 140 food birds: extinctions, 188–90; human reverence for, 132; mistreatment of, 197, 198–9; in Neolithic, 61; in Palaeolithic, 45–6, 49–50 Frame, Mary, 104, 106 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 128–30, 145, 180, 260n42 Frankfort, Henri, 82 Franzen, Jonathan: Freedom, 245; “Last Song for Migratory Birds,” 194; “Save What You Love,” 238, 269n48 Frazer, James, 3–4, 40 Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and Its Discontents, 226, 241–2 Frost, Robert: “A Minor Bird,” 200; “The Oven Bird,” 172 Gargas Cave, 47 Gaura Chindiei II, Romania, 62 geese: Aphrodite and, 151, 152; early modern humans and, 20, 41, 44, 45, 50, 86; in Egyptian art, 87, 87;

habitat loss. See environmental degradation and habitat loss Harari, Yuval, 240–1 Harden, Alastair, 212 Hardy, Thomas: “The Blinded Bird,” 193; “The Darkling Thrush,” 172–3 Hauptmann, Harald, 59–60 Hawaiian feather helmet, 196 Haydn, Joseph: The Seasons, 179 Heaney, Seamus: “St Kevin and the Blackbird,” 128 Hemen (Egyptian falcon god), 94, 95 Hermes/Mercury, 140–1 Herodotus, 97 Hesiod, 111 Hess, Paul, 168 Hinduism: animal gods, 6, 20; Rig Veda (Sanskrit hymns), 9; souls for animals, 267n47 Hitchcock, Don, 45, 47 Hittite, Anatolia, 11, 79, 82 Hodder, Ian, 60 Hogarth, William: First Stage of Cruelty, 193 Hohle Fels Cave and flute, 41, 42–3, 177, 178 Homer, 4, 111; “Hymn to Hermes,” 10, 214–15; Iliad, 10, 119, 214 Homo sapiens, 16–17, 205–6, 240. See also human as animal; Upper Palaeolithic Hopkins, Gerard Manley: “The Caged Skylark,” 218; “The Windhover,” 163 Horus (Egyptian falcon god), 4, 92, 93–4, 139, 259n33 human and bird relationship: greed and, 242–7; overview, xi–xii; price of abandoning, 228–30; as shattered, 226; violence and, 240–2. See also birdsong; destruction and extinctions of birds; flight from a human perspective; human as animal; Judeo-Christian traditions; sacredness and worship of birds human-animal hybrids (theriomorphs): bird goddesses, 68–71, 69, 257n63; birdmen, 24–5, 33, 33–8, 59–60, 253n41; in Egypt, 93, 94–5; Greek and Roman paganism, 109–10; Löwenmensch, 5, 43; in Mesopotamia, 75–7, 76–7, 79–84, 80–1, 83–4; in Neolithic, 60, 72, 256n21; overview, 5, 139, 225; in Peru, 98, 103; as winged, 139–43, 141, 144. See also anthropomorphism; Palaeolithic cave art

Index

force feeding of, 197; in Neolithic, 46, 61; Ojibwe significance, 44–5 Geissenklösterle Cave, 177 Genesis: Adam and Eve, 230; brother’s keeper, 187; Cain and Abel, 241; creation, 19, 87, 125–7, 128, 137–8, 205; dominion over animals, 213, 215–17, 222, 243; Nimrud, 150; Noah, 8, 124, 216–17. See also Bible and related texts Geoffrey of Monmouth, 153, 262n40 Gerasimov, Mikhail Mikhaylovich, 43 Gimbutas, Marija, 68–9, 71, 76, 117, 257n63 Glanvill, Joseph, 157 global warming. See climate change and global warming Göbekli Tepe, Anatolia, 4, 5, 14–15, 53–7, 54–6 gods, birds and animals as: Bird Goddess, 68, 68–71, 70, 117, 119, 257n63; dove goddesses, 123, 123–4; in Egypt, 4, 87–90, 88–91, 92–7, 94–6, 258n28; evidence of, 6–11; flight and, 136–47; goddess motif, 48, 66, 67, 76–7, 76–7, 78, 78–9, 117, 214; history and rejection of, 3–6, 249n3 (chap. 1), 249n6, 250n9; Ishtar and Inanna goddesses, 80–4, 83–4; in Mesopotamia, 76–9, 258n21; Neolithic, 52, 66–8; overview, 4–5; in Peru, 102; polytheistic religion, 86–7; as winged, 139–40. See also anthropocentrism; sacredness and worship of birds Godwin, Francis: The Man in the Moone, 152 Golding, William: Lord of the Flies, 226 Gönnersdorf Cave, 48 Gourdan Cave, 44, 45 Gourichon, Lionel, 61 Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, 121 Greece (ancient): anthropocentrism, 215–17; bird and animal gods, 7, 111–13, 119–21, 260n16; birds as source of music, 177; doves, 123, 123–4; flight in literature and bird-assisted, 148–9, 151, 152; liming birds, 193–4; Master/Mistress of Animals theme, 212–14, 212–14; Mycenaean, 77, 77–8; myth of Deucalion, 8; overview, 4, 7, 9–11, 108–10, 250n9; owls in, 116–19, 118, 120; phallus birds, 115, 116; sexuality, 226–7, 227; winged chariot, 139, 140; winged gods, 139–41; Zeus’s bird forms, 113–14 greed of humans, 242–7. See also destruction and extinctions of birds Guthrie, R. Dale, 41

287

Index

288

human as animal: alienation from nature, 230–2; bêtes machines, 219–20; definitions, xi, 206; dominion over animals concept, 212–14, 212–18, 223–4, 228–30, 267n39; intelligence and specialness, 206–7, 209–12, 215, 219–21, 245, 267n38; kinship and responsibility, 221–4, 231, 235–8, 245, 267n59, 269n60; overview, xi, 205–6, 211; violence and, 240–2. See also animism and the sacred human representations: in cave art, 33–8; as control over nature, 22; Neolithic, 55–7; Palaeolithic Venuses, 5, 41–2. See also human-animal hybrids; Palaeolithic cave art Humbolt, Alexander von, 223 hummingbirds, 99, 167, 168, 195–6, 200 hunter-gatherer societies: in ancient Greece, 120–1; as egalitarian, 243; human representations, 34; hunting magic, 22–5, 33, 36–8, 53; integral part of nature, 18, 213, 266n29; overview, 16–17, 51, 250n4; settlement pre-agriculture, 53, 61. See also Göbekli Tepe, Anatolia; Upper Palaeolithic Huxley, Julian, 170 Hyde Vase (Vinča site), 69–71, 70 “Hymn to Hermes” (Greek), 10, 214–15

Judeo-Christian traditions: animal gods and, 5–6, 266n37; compassion for nature, 124–5, 127–30; dominion over animals, 215–19, 223–4, 230, 267n39; formation of humans, 205; gods as birds, 137–8, 139– 40; harmony with nature, 130–2, 260n36, 260n42, 261n46; levitations, 143–7, 146; monotheism, 121; souls for humans, 218–19, 267n43; vultures in, 227–8; winged celestial beings, 142–3. See also Bible and related texts; Christian iconography

Icarus, 149, 149, 152–3, 162, 262n45 Inanna, 80–2, 84, 194, 214 India and Near East, 150, 150–2, 190 Indigenous traditions: animal gods, 6; birds’ role in creation, 7, 166; bison dancers, 254n46; connectivity, 19; contemporary and ancient, 250n4; feathers from sacred birds, 196; owl spirits, 31, 32; shamans teleporting in, 145–6 intelligence of birds, 208–9, 267n48 Iraq, 57–9, 59 Ireland, 72; monastic traditions, 128–9 Isaac the Syrian, 127 Ishtar Vase, 82, 83 Isis (Egyptian goddess), 92, 92 Isturitz Cave, 48 Italian monastic traditions, 128–9, 132 ithyphallic art: birdmen, 33, 35, 35–6, 253n41; herms, 227, 227; Neolithic, 56. See also sexual associations

Labastide Cave, 44, 47 Lambertini, Marco, 232 language: of animals, 207; Egyptian hieroglyphs, 87, 89, 92, 95, 118, 180–1; of flight in Bible, 137–8; human specialness and, 207, 215, 219, 221 Lascaux Cave, 23–4, 26, 33, 33–8, 34, 253n41 Laugerie-Basse Cave, 48 Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, 5, 250n8 Leibniz, Gottfried, 231 Leonardo da Vinci: Codex on the Flight of Birds, 158–60, 159, 162 levitations, 143–7, 146 Lewis, John, 19 Lilienthal, Otto: Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, 160 Lindisfarne Gospel, 121 Lishman, Bill, 198 literature: flight in, 148–9, 151–2 Lockhart, James Macdonald: Raptor: A Journey through Birds, 71–2, 202 Lorenz, Konrad, 170 Löwenmensch, 5, 43

Jerf el Ahmar, Syria, 61–3, 63, 67, 67, 78, 79 Joseph of Cupertino, Saint, 145, 146

Kant, Immanuel, 175, 231 Kapinjala bird, 9, 165 Keats, John: “Ode to a Nightingale,” 166, 173–4 Kennedy, Donald, 31, 97, 158–9, 191 Kevin, Saint, 128 Kiriyak, Margarita Aleksandrovna, 46, 67 Kolbert, Elizabeth, 190, 204 Kozlowski, Stefan, 58–9 Kroodsma, Donald: Singing Life of Birds, 166, 169, 172, 177, 200 Kühn, Herbert, 29–30 Kundera, Milan: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 217, 222

Low, Tim, 138, 178, 196, 208 Lucian of Samosata: Icaromenippus, 153 Lucretius: “On the Nature of Things,” 177

nature, Christian tradition of harmony with, 130–2, 260n36, 260n42, 261n46; human alienation from, 230–2 nature, compassion for: link of animism and Christianity, 124–5, 127–8; saints’ demonstrations of, 128–30, 131–2. See also destruction and extinctions of birds Neanderthals, 17, 57, 66, 176, 177–8, 241, 257n50 Nekhbet (Egyptian vulture god), 4, 89–90, 90–1 Nemrik (Iraq), 58–9, 59 Neolithic art and traditions: bird and animal gods, 4, 5, 117–18; cranes in, 15, 51–2, 53–5, 56, 61, 63, 67, 256n34; dominion over animals, 212–13, 212–13, 243–4; egg shape, 108; Europe, 68, 68–72, 70; Göbekli Tepe, 4, 5, 14–15, 53–7, 54–6; human-animal hybrids, 72, 89, 92, 256n21; Judeo-Christian roots in, 121–2; overview, 51–2, 66–7, 68, 255n29; owls in, 62, 67, 67, 71–2, 117–18, 257n59; vultures in, 15, 55–68, 69, 71–2; waterfowl cult, 46 Nevali Çori, Anatolia, 57, 59–60, 61 Nicolson, Adam: The Seabird’s Cry, 187, 197 Noske, Barbara, 218 Ojibwe traditions, 18–19, 34, 44, 55, 63, 243, 253n37 Orkney, Tomb of the Eagles, 71 Ornithopters, 160–1 Ovid: Metamorphoses, 110–13, 116–17, 149, 177, 194, 250n9 owls: Athena association with, 4–5, 32; death, wisdom, and knowledge, 32, 72, 79, 106–7, 117–18, 229–30, 253n35; early modern humans and, 20, 27, 27–9, 49, 137, 255n25; in Egyptian art, 87, 87; goddesses, 76, 76, 78, 78–9, 81, 82, 117; Greek art and religion, 108–9, 110; hats made from, 195; in Neolithic, 62, 67, 67, 71–2, 257n59; as objects of worship, 28–9,

Index

Macdonald, Helen: H Is for Hawk, 201–2 MacGregor, Neil, 12 Mâche, François-Bernard, 171, 175 Mackay, Alex, 253n37 Madelaine, Stéphane, 46–7 Magdalenian sites, 41, 43, 46–7 Malmesbury Abbey, 154, 262n40 Mal’ta site, Siberia, 43–4, 44 Mann, Charles: “The Birth of Religion,” 53 Marra, Peter: Cat Wars, 203 Marx, Karl, 244, 252n17 Mas d’Azil Cave, 44, 47, 48 Masson, Jeffrey: When Elephants Weep, 221 Master/Mistress of Animals theme, 212–13, 212–13. See also anthropocentrism Matthews, Roger, 58 Mazzanti, Ludovico: St. Joseph of Cupertino, 146 medieval traditions, 12, 32, 218 Mellaart, James, 63–6, 67, 214 Meskell, Lynn, 60 Mesopotamia: doves, 73–4; ducks, 74–5, 75; Epic of Gilgamesh, 8, 73–4, 82, 194, 228–30; flight legends, 150, 150; Ishtar and Inanna goddesses, 80–4, 83–4, 214; Master/Mistress of Animals theme, 212, 212–13, 214; overview, 73, 139, 258n1; owl-headed and eye goddesses, 76, 76, 78, 78–9, 118; soul as a bird, 73–4; vultures, 84–6, 85, 258n1 messengers, birds as, 9–10, 46, 140–2, 184, 191, 194 Messiaen, Olivier: Quartet for the End of Time, 180 Mezin, Magdalenian settlement near Kiev, 47, 49 Midgley, Mary, 235 migration: early modern humans and, 45, 47; long distance of, 209; mystery of, 75, 132, 137, 148 Milton, John: Paradise Lost, 143, 251n10 Mitchell, Alexandre, 119 Mithin, Steven: After the Ice, 25, 46, 64, 66, 67, 242, 267n1, 269n58; Singing Neanderthals, 176–7 Moche culture, Peru, 99, 102, 102–3, 104, 106–7 Morelli, Federico, 227–8 Morín Cave, 47, 255n38 Morisseau, Norval, 63, 100

Morris, Desmond: The Naked Ape, 205–6, 268n2; Owl, 28, 32, 87, 118, 119, 193, 252n19, 252n22, 253n35, 253n37 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 179 murmurations, 136, 136 music: bird and human music compared, 175–9; early musical instruments, 177–8, 178; inspired by birdsong, 179–80, 264n69; reason for human music, 176–8, 184. See also birdsong Mynott, Jeremy, 3, 4, 28

289

31–2; Ojibwe symbolism, 253n37; overview, 4–5, 6; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 112, 116–17; Palaeolithic portable art, 47, 47–8; in Peru, 99, 101, 103, 106–7, 107; snowy owls, 30, 30–3, 252n15, 253n27; usefulness of, 237

Index

Pacific Islands, 198 Palaeo-Eskimo carvings of birds, 46 Palaeolithic cave art: artists’ identity, 23, 251n3; aviform “Placard-type” signs, 38, 38, 163; bird and animal gods and, 4–5, 250n8; Birdman of Lascaux, 24, 33, 33–8, 253n41; birdmen, 33–5, 33–8; birds of various caves, 26–9, 27, 29–33, 30, 86, 252n15, 253n27, 254n48; consistency of, 27, 50, 252n17; experience of, 25–6, 27, 28, 29–30, 252n9; great auk, 189; humans in, 33–8; meanings, 24–5, 28–9, 31, 36, 37–9, 251n4 (chap. 3), 252n14, 253nn44–5; overview, 22, 23; subject matter, 23–4, 252n14; Wounded Man, Pech Merle, 38, 38, 40. See also Upper Palaeolithic Palaeolithic portable art: flying waterbird, 42; mammoth-ivory flying-bird pendants, 43–4, 44; musical pipes and flutes, 177–8, 178; overview, 5, 41, 50; owls, 47, 47–8, 255n25; various bird representations, 47–50, 49; waterfowl at various caves, 44, 45 Palaeolithic Venuses, 5, 41–2 Papua New Guinea, 12, 12, 127, 196 Parapalló and Escabasses Caves, 44 parietal art. See Palaeolithic cave art Pavlov site, Moravia, Czech Republic, 47, 47 Pech Merle Cave, 38, 38, 40 Pegasus, 140, 140 Pepperberg, Irene, 208 Persia, 150, 150, 192 Peru (ancient): bird, cat, and/or snake combinations, 99–100, 100–1, 104, 107; cave art, 103; condors/vultures in, 99, 103–4, 104–6, 259n6; overview, 98–9; owls in, 99, 101, 103, 106–7, 107; textiles, 99–100, 100, 101, 103–4, 104–5, 259n3 (chap. 3) pestle from Papua New Guinea, 12, 12 phallus bird, 44, 69, 115, 116. See also sexual associations Pinçon, Geneviève, 41 Pinker, Stephen: Enlightenment Now, 233 “Placard-type” signs, 38, 38, 163

290

Plato: definition of human, xi, 121, 215; Phaedrus, 139, 218 Pliny the Elder: Natural History, 96–7, 196; “The Nature of Birds,” x plume trade, 194–6, 195–6 Plutarch, 7, 8, 9–10, 11, 208 poetry: inspired by birdsong, 180–4, 210. See also individual poets polytheistic religion, 86–7. See also gods, birds and animals as Pope, Alexander: “An Essay on Man,” 220 Potter, Beatrix, 32 Procris, death of, 39, 40 Protagoras, 215 Prum, Richard, 175 psychopomps. See soul as a bird Pullman, Philip: His Dark Materials, 110 Qur’an, 142 Qurta cave, Egypt, 86 Raphael, Max, 29 raptors (birds of prey): early modern humans and, 20, 41; in Egyptian art, 87; mistreatment and destruction of, 202, 203; in Neolithic, 46, 51–2, 58, 71; in Peru, 99; usefulness of, 237 ravens: ancient gods, 6; Christian iconography, 20–1, 128, 130; early modern humans and, 20; Felmingham Hoard, 251n11; imparting knowledge, 8–9; intelligence of, 208–9, 210 Red List of Threatened Species, 246 Reichelt, Franz, 155, 156, 262n46 Reichert, Todd, 160–1 representation/art as control over nature, 22 Rig Veda (Sanskrit hymns), 9 Rising Star Cave, South Africa, 57 Riters, Lauren V., 171 rituals. See cults and rituals Robbins, Jim, 200 Rome (ancient), 4, 11, 153, 177, 197. See also Greece Rothenberg, David, 179, 180, 183; Why Birds Sing, 167, 170–1 Rowling, J.K.: Harry Potter books, 143

Russia: Christian Orthodoxy, 130–1; icons of angels, 143, 144; Neolithic waterfowl figures, 46; Siberian creation myths, 138–9; stories of people flying, 147 Ryan, Robert, 34 Rynard, Su: The Messenger, 198, 204 sacredness and worship of birds: augury, 6–12; birds as gods, 3–6, 107; birdsong, 164–5, 184 (see also birdsong); in Egypt, 97 (see also Egypt; Mesopotamia); in Greece, 108–10 (see also Greece); material evidence of, 12, 12–15, 13; meanings in cave art, 24–5 (see also Palaeolithic cave art; Palaeolithic portable art); myth of the soul, 38, 40 (see also soul as a bird); in Neolithic, 53–5, 58–9, 61–3, 65–6 (see also Neolithic art and traditions); terminology, 249n1 (chap. 1). See also animism and the sacred; cults and rituals; gods, birds and animals as; Judeo-Christian traditions Santella, Chris: Cat Wars, 203 Schedel, Hartmann: “The Death of Simon Magus,” 146 Schmidt, Klaus, 60 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 221, 231 Schweitzer, Albert, 239–40 scientific research, 199–201 Scranton, Roy, 237, 245, 268n41 seabirds: biblical, 137–8, 138; destruction of, 197; fishing bycatch of, 194; migrations of, 209; in Peru, 99; research mistreatment, 200 Şekercioğlu, Çağan H., 236 seraphim, 141, 143 Sergius, Saint, 130 Sesklo culture in Thessaly, Greece, 69, 69 Sexton, Anne: “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph,” 162 sexual associations: castration of birds, 198–9; fertility and birds, 75, 76, 82, 123–4; fornication with birds, 191–2; harvesting of bird body parts, 197, 265n56; humans as different from animals, 226–7; ithyphallic birdmen, 33, 35, 35–6, 253n41; Neolithic ithyphallic art, 56; Palaeolithic Venuses, 5, 41–2; phallus birds, 44, 69, 115, 116 Shakespeare, William: Julius Caesar, 32; Macbeth, 32; Merry Wives of Windsor, 201

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 192–3; “To a Sky-Lark,” 173–4, 210 Siberian creation myths, 138–9 silver band, Bronze Age, 13, 13 Simon Magus, 145–7, 146, 155 skydiving and hang gliding, 157 Slater, Peter, 168 Slavs and Slavic world, 12, 13, 13, 127, 130, 177 smuggling of birds, 192, 194 snakes: Egypt, 90, 93, 97; Neolithic, 62; Palaeolithic, 20, 44, 50; in Peru, 99–100, 100, 107 Socrates, 10, 139, 215, 218 Solecki, Ralph and Rose, 57–8 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander: The Gulag Archipelago, 231–2 soul as a bird (psychopomps), 38–40, 39, 46, 60, 73–4, 90, 102–3, 107, 218; ba (Egyptian), 87; soul exclusive to humans, 218–19, 228 Stadel Cave, 5, 43 Stordeur, Danielle, 62, 67 Stutchbury, Bridget: Silence of the Songbirds, 203–4 Swabian Jura caves, 43 swans: in creation myths, 139; early modern humans and, 41, 47, 254n15; mammoth-ivory flying-bird pendants, 43–4, 44; Neolithic figures, 45–6; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 111, 114–15; phallus birds, 44, 69, 115; Socrates and, 10; Zeus’s rape of Leda, 114–15, 115, 146 Syria, 61–3, 63, 67, 67, 75, 75, 76, 76, 78, 79 Szöke, Peter, 183 teleporting, 145–6 Tell Brak, 52, 78, 78, 79, 84 Tennyson, Alfred: “The Throstle,” 181; “Ulysses,” 230 Testart, Alain, 65–6 Teyjat Cave, 44 theriomorphs. See human-animal hybrids Thoreau, Henry David, 165; Walden, 181 Thoth (Egyptian ibis god), 95–6, 95–7, 139, 259n43 Threatened Birds of the World (BirdLife International), 191 thrushes: clay-colored, 263n8; “The Darkling Thrush” (Hardy), 172–3; hermit, 167, 168, 183–4; song, 181; wood, 165 Index

291

Tolstoy, Leo: “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” 243, 244; “What Men Live By,” 142 Toquepala Caves, Peru, 103 Trois Frères Cave, 26, 29–33, 30, 253n41, 254n46 Tutankhamun, King, 90, 91, 92 Upper Palaeolithic (early modern humans): animal spirits/gods, 5, 69, 118; death cults and rituals, 17–18, 21–2, 57 (see also cults and rituals); as egalitarian, 243; flight and gods, 136–7; Göbekli Tepe connections, 53, 55; Homo sapiens’ arrival, 17; migration to Americas, 98–9, 259n1 (chap. 7); overview, 4–5, 15, 16–17, 51, 66–7, 68, 86, 225, 255n38. See also Palaeolithic cave art; Palaeolithic portable art

Index

van Dooren, Thom, 57, 190–1, 228 Vedbaek, Denmark, 46 Verlaine, Paul, 181 Vermeule, Emily T., 13–14 Vinča site, 68, 69–71, 70 violence of humans, 240–2. See also destruction and extinctions of birds Virgil: Aeneid, 32 Vishnu, 151–2 Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary, 220 Voronograi (The Croaking of Ravens), 12 vultures (corvids): augury and, 11; death association, 4, 56–7, 60, 64–8, 71–2; early modern humans and, 20, 48, 137; Egyptian art and gods, 4, 87–90, 88–91; flute made from bone of, 43; human destruction of, 190–1, 245; intelligence of, 208; in Mesopotamia, 84–6, 85, 258n21; negative view of, 227–8; in Neolithic, 15, 55–6, 55–68, 59, 63–5, 69, 71–2; overview, 6; in Peru,

292

103–4, 104–6, 259n6; ritual costumes, 257n50; turkey vultures, 164; usefulness of, 237 Wagner, Richard: Siegfried, 179–80, 248 Wallace-Wells, David, 238 war, use of birds in, 191 Ward, William Hayes, 79–80 waterbirds: in creation myths, 139; early modern humans and, 20, 41–7, 49–50, 69; in Egyptian art, 87, 87; flying figures, 41, 42, 42–4, 44; in Neolithic, 46, 51–2, 71; in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 112; in Peru, 99, 103; recovery of populations, 238; symbolism of, 75 Weidensaul, Scott, 147, 203, 263n12 Welbergen, Justin, 172 West, Martin Litchfield, 10–11 Wheye, Darryl, 31, 97, 158–9, 191 Whitman, Walt: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” 181–3, 264n80; “Song of Myself,” 207, 235, 236, 251n6; “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” 183–4 Wilson, E.O.: Half-Earth, 190, 232, 233, 246, 247, 265n56 wingsuit fliers, 152–5, 156, 262n45 World Wildlife Fund, 232, 246 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 160, 162–3 Xenophanes, 217 Yeats, William Butler: “Death,” 18 Young, Dudley, 22, 24–6, 147, 166, 174 Zagreb, Latin Gospel in, 121, 122 Zawi Chemi Shanidar (Iraq), 57–8