Finally, they are masters of travel, mysterious appearance and disappearance, astonishing migrations.

Yet they are kin to the earthbound, cold-blooded reptiles, egg-layers with scaly legs and toothless mouths. In flight they wheel in synchrony, as though keyed to some central mind. Living or moving together, cooperating, roosting in great murmuring flocks, they are among the most social of animals. Their plumage is like costume: put off and changed in different seasons, repaired and replaced when tattered, the feathers together and individually beautiful to behold. Many dance and sing in formal, almost ritualistic, fashion. Individuals in many species share food as a social bond in courtship and care for nestlings. Bird life is a highly visible, poetic analogy to human life. Many qualities touch them with such powerful magic-flight, migration, song, eggs and nests, seasonality-that even the ideologies of transcendence retained them as angels. THE BIRDS were among the numina longest to survive. Our modern perception of animals as automatons denies the significance of augury as a marvel fraught with sacred presence. Priests began to look beyond nature for truth, and the spiritual apostles and deities of Western religions became human in form and otherwordly in orientation. While the whole animal represents the cosmos, the sheep's stomach, liver, or entrails are the tacit parts, as pregnant with meaning as the womb is with new life.Īs the old, preclassical, Mediterranean world declined, the holy connections of animals went with it. The cow, to those who see it as a microcosm, does not flash across the earth but remains to be studied out, not as a fugitive bit of the whole, but a contraction of it. Augury is less pretentious than prophecy and often depends on reference to animals.Īmong animals the bird is seen as part of a greater system through which it moves, rather like time itself, a fleeting signature taken in at a glance. It lays a matter open by disclosure rather than depending on inspiration, as among oracles and prophets. It portends through a net of relationships. It is a form of divination that signifies rather than pronounces. 'Prophets'-individually unique, often chosen, and itinerant-are part of biblical tradition.''Augury' depends on natural signs, or omens, which need interpretation. Oracles traditionally inhabit sacred places, especially caves, and have a perennial, almost timeless, existence. 'Oracle' refers to dike, the Greek notion of judged fate, a deserved destiny. The abundance of terms is a measure of the importance of such ideas in history. There are many synonyms for such foretelling. The natural world is rich in signs-as when dogs and other animals foretell earthquakes by sensing the first pulses of earth movement, or a zoologist, reading the chemical signatures in the viscera of a hare or a sea lion, can anticipate the imminent death of large numbers of mammals and a windfall for the scavengers of their bodies, followed by hard times for the predators, including humans. With the exception of popular astrology, no rite today seems more suspect or remote than trying to assess the future by scrutinizing the flights of birds, as did the ancient Greeks and as do modern Navajo Indians, the colors of cows, as did the Egyptians and as do the modern Nuer, or the livers of sheep, as did the Mesopotamians and as do modern pathologists.īoth the old and the modern practices necessitate watching animals closely, studying the details of organic form and structure as they relate to some larger whole, for there are subtle connections between the behavior of animals and earth events, between the color of an organ or the texture of a mammal's pelage and the universe. Even in a world of daily weather forecasts, predictions of freeway traffic, imminent volcanic eruptions, and the newspaper horoscope, nothing seems further from modern taste than 'superstitions,' wherein the call of a frog foretells the future, or seems more repulsive than the close examination of warm liver or small intestines, taken still steaming from the body of a sheep. WH E N S T U D E N T S in my class on animals and culture consider oracles, augury, omens, or divination, the effect at first is silence. Shepard_birds From Paul Shepard's The Others

Woodpecker spiritual meaning