Traditions Relating to Birds and Animals

Certain traditions relating to birds and beasts are only explicable on the supposition that they were once objects of divination or worship. The old Germans, we know from Tacitus, used white horses, as the Romans used chickens, for purposes of augury, and divined future events from the different intonations of neighings. Hence it probably is that the discovery of a horse-shoe is so universally thought lucky, some of the feelings that once attached to the animal itself still surviving round the iron of its hoof. For horses, like dogs or birds, were invariably accredited with a greater insight into futurity than man himself, and the many superstitions connected with the flight and voice of birds resolve themselves into the fancy, not inconceivable among men surrounded on all sides by unintelligible tongues, that birds were the bearers of messages and warnings to men, which skill and observation might hope to interpret.

Why is the robin's life and nest sacred, and why does an injury to either bring about bloody milk, lightning, or rain? The Christian legend says that it extracted a thorn from the crown of Christ, or that it daily bears to hell a drop of water to put out the flames, and accounts in either way for the red dye on its breast. But this is evidently a mediaeval gloss to some heathen belief, like the reason for the unluckiness of the magpie, that it would not enter the ark, but sat jabbering outside over the drowned world, or like the idea of the aspen still trembling at the part it played in the crucifixion. It has been suggested that the robin, on account of its color, was once sacred to Thor, the god of lightning; yet, is it not possible that its red breast singled it out for worship from other birds, just as its red berries the rowan from among trees, long before its worshipers had arrived at any ideas of abstract divinities?

All over the world there is a regard for things red. In the Highlands women tie some red thread around the cows' tails before turning them out to grass in spring, and tie red silk around their own fingers to keep off the witches; and, just as in Esthonia mothers put some red thread in their babies' cradles, so in China they tie some round their children's waists, and teach them to regard red as the best known safeguard against evil spirits. Indeed, one of the chief lessons of comparative folk-lore is a caution against the theory which deduces popular traditions from Aryan and other mythology.

We have already alluded to the fact that in parts of China the same feelings prevail about the swallow as in England or Germany. But there are yet other analogies between the East and West. A crowing hen is an object of universal dislike in England and Brittany, and few families in China will keep a crowing hen. The owl's voice is ominous of death or other calamity in England and Germany, as it was in Greece (except at Athens); but in the Celestial Empire also it presages death, and is regarded as the bird which calls for the soul. And the crow, also, is in China a bird of ill omen.

Is it not, therefore, likely that all popular fancies about birds and animals have begun in the same way, among the same or different races of the globe, and were subsequently adopted, but never originated, by mythology? May it not be that certain birds or animals became prominent in mythology because they had already been prominent in tradition, rather than that they became prominent in tradition because they had been prominent in mythology? For instance, instead of tracing a dog's howling as a death omen to an Aryan belief that the dog guided the soul from its earthly tenement to its abode in heaven, may we not suppose that the myth arose from an already existing omen, and that the latter arose, as omens still do, from a coincidence which suggested a connection subsequently sustained by superficial observation? The St. Swithin lunacy, which arose within historical memory and still holds its ground in an age of scientific observation, well illustrates how one striking coincidence may grow into a belief, which no amount of later evidence can weaken or destroy. Just so, if it happened that a dog howled shortly before some calamity occurred to our Aryan forefathers, thousands and thousands of years ago, long before they had attained to any thoughts of soul or heaven, we can well imagine that the dog, which already betokened death, should, when they came to frame the myth, be conceived as the guide which was waiting for the soul to take it to heaven, and that the belief thus perpetuated by the myth might survive to the latest ages. It, at all events, militates against the exclusively Aryan nature of the belief, and exemplifies the extraordinary coincidence of ideas among different people, that the Esquimaux lay a dog's head by the grave of a child, for 'the soul of a dog can find its way everywhere, and will show the ignorant babe the way to the land of souls.'