Owl Read online

  It is not surprising therefore that, in its ceramic representations it appears in two guises – as itself in an attractive naturalistic form, and as a sinister human wearing an owl mask and a cloak in the form of owl-wings. Sometimes the masked figure is shown holding a large club and sometimes a human head and a knife, for this is the warrior owl, the predator, the killer. In one example the owl carries a man on its wing, interpreted as a sacrificial victim being taken off to the other world following a ritual slaughter.7

  So, for the great ancient civilizations, the owl already played an important role in myth and legend. From Babylon and Egypt in the Middle East, to Greece and Rome in early Europe, and as far away as China and South America, images of the owl were being laboriously forged, carved and moulded and its name was being indelibly embedded in local folklore. Following on from this it is almost inevitable that, for the deeply superstitious, the body parts of this iconic bird should have been thought to contain magical powers, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  3 Medicinal Owls

  In earlier centuries, before scientific medical testing was introduced, many animals suffered useless deaths at the hands of quack doctors who believed that certain parts of the bodies of these unfortunate creatures would cure assorted human ailments. The owl was no exception and the range of afflictions that its body parts were supposed to cure beggars belief. Even William Shakespeare (1564–1616) contributes to this folly. The infamous witches who cook up a magic brew in the opening scene of Macbeth cry out:

  Eye of newt, and toe of frog,

  Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,

  Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting

  Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing.

  Shakespeare’s great rival, Ben Jonson (1572–1637), was not going to be left out. When he wanted a potion concocted, he suggested:

  The screech owl’s eggs and the feathers black,

  The blood of the frog and the bone of his back.

  A little earlier, in the fifteenth-century compendium of medical and biological knowledge the Hortus Sanitatis, it is recorded that a treatment for madness included the placing of an owl’s ashes on the lunatic’s eyes. This attempted cure was doubtless based on the principle that the owl’s wise vision could, in this way, be infused into the madman’s wildly distorted vision. In India a related belief saw the eating of owls’ eggs as a way of improving night vision. Cherokee Indians preferred to bathe their children’s eyes with water containing owl feathers, as a way of giving them the ability to stay awake all night.

  One of the strangest medical beliefs, and one that lasted for centuries, was that eating the raw eggs of owls would cure a person of drunkenness. In his seventeenth-century Speculum Mundi John Swan comments, ‘Some say that the egges of an owl broken and put into the cups of a drunkard, or one desirous to follow drinking, will so work with him, that he will suddenly lothe his good liquor and be displeased with drinking.’1 This belief presumably came into being because the owl is such a studious, solemn-looking bird that it was felt to epitomize sobriety and therefore to lay sobering eggs. The puzzle with all such quack remedies is what kept them going for so long when they had no merit, unless, of course, the power of suggestion was at work. A variation on the owl-eggs-for-curing-drunkards theme saw the eggs administered repeatedly in glasses of wine. At first glance there appears to be a basic flaw in this version of the treatment but then again, perhaps the eggs made the wine taste so vile that even this method eventually worked.

  If the drunkard had over-indulged to the point where he also happened to be suffering from gout, he could cure this painful complaint, it was claimed, by plucking all the feathers from an owl’s body, salting it for a week, then placing it in a pot, closing the lid and baking it in an oven to mummify it. This mummified owl was then ground down to a fine powder and mixed with boar’s grease to make an ointment. If applied to the ‘grieved place’ on the gout sufferer’s body, this ointment would soon make him well again. As someone once said, fortunate is the animal that has no medicinal value.

  Boiled owl-fat is also useful, it was said, for ridding the body of sores. And a paralytic human face, massaged with warm owl’s blood, or a warm owl’s heart, will soon be cured. Owl’s blood in oil will get rid of head lice. Dried and pounded owl’s crop will cure the colic. Owl’s bile will stop bed-wetting. Owl’s bone marrow in oil, dropped into the nose, will stop migraines. And so it goes on. It is a wonder that owls were not rendered extinct by all these pointless treatments.

  There is more. An even stranger recommendation was that you should kill an owl, pluck out its heart and place it on the left breast of a sleeping woman. In this context the heart would act as a truth drug and would make the woman disclose her darkest secrets. Alternatively, you could take an owl’s heart to war with you and it would make you stronger in battle. Or, if you burnt an owl’s feet along with the herb plumbago, this would protect you from venomous snake bites. Pliny mentions all these supposed cures in AD 77, but also takes the trouble to dismiss them as monstrous lies.

  In England, Yorkshire folk used to make up an owl soup to treat whooping cough. This was based on the idea that if an owl can keep on whooping without suffering any harm, then the special goodness in the owl soup would, by a process of sympathetic magic, take away the sufferer’s pain. Elsewhere, owl egg soup, made while the moon is waning, was thought to cure epilepsy. As owls are so calm and composed and usually sit so still it was believed that the frenzied movements of epileptic fits would be stilled by inbibing their essence.

  Perhaps the most bizarre of all owl-based medications is one from Germany that says you can avoid being bitten by a mad dog and contracting rabies if you place the heart and right foot of an owl under your left armpit. With this medical gem we have entered the world of Monty Python, but this is only the beginning.

  It would be possible to fill a whole book with owl cures, all utterly useless but all fervently employed in earlier centuries. Reading them assembled together, as has been done here, makes one grateful for having been born in a scientific era where control tests must be carried out before any medicine can be made availabe to anxious sufferers. We are never more vulnerable to suggestions than when we are sick and in the past this vulnerability has been exploited by quacks and charlatans to an extent that is hard to believe. Owls, too, should be grateful to modern medicine for making their body parts less attractive. We may be cutting down their forests, but at least we have stopped placing bits of them under our armpits.

  4 Symbolic Owls

  THE EVIL OWL

  For thousands of years the owl has been viewed as an evil spirit that silently roams the night sky in search of human victims, intent on doing them harm. Its eerie cries have added to this impression and have often labelled it the herald of doom, destruction and death. Because it only comes out at night and even then remains strangely silent, it reminds us of a stealthy criminal, a thief or murderer who lurks in the darkness. As we have already seen, to the ancient Romans the owl’s way of life meant that it was viewed as a feared messenger of death. They were not alone in this totally unjustified, gloomy relationship with the harmless, innocent, pest-destroying owl. Many other cultures have felt the same way.

  The Bible is full of owl hatred. There are sixteen mentions of owls in the Old Testament, most of them unkind. For a start, the owl is considered to be unclean and must therefore not be eaten. In Deuteronomy 14 is the instruction ‘Thou shalt not eat any abominable thing’ and the owl comes into this category of abominations. Indeed, in the list of unclean birds the owl is singled out for special treatment: ‘And the owl, and the night-hawk, and the cuckoo, and the hawk after his kind. The little owl, the great owl, and the swan . . .’. It is as though the Bible, to make sure that there is no misunderstanding, adds the little owl and the great owl in case some hungry bird-eater might think that there was a loophole and that some kinds of owls were immune and could be served at table.

  In Isaiah 13 we find that when Babylon
is doomed to remain uninhabited, ‘wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.’ A little later, in Isaiah 34, we find the owl once again portrayed as the inevitable occupant of enemy land, land that ‘shall become burning pitch’. Once this land has been laid to waste ‘the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it . . . and it shall be a habitation for dragons, and a court for owls . . . the screech owl also shall rest here and find for herself a place of rest. There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and gather under her shadow . . .’.

  Owl, monkey and goat in The Luttrell Psalter, c. 1340, line drawing.

  These inauspicious beginnings for the Christian owl were to have a lasting effect on its image in the centuries that followed. In thirteenth-century Europe the owl was portrayed, along with the goat and the monkey, as one member of a demonic trio. In a fourteenth-century psalter, a book of psalms, hymns and prayers, there is a satirical drawing of a knight out falconing, with the three pagan animals replacing the noble lord, his steed and his bird. The picture shows a monkey with an owl on its gloved fist riding on a goat.

  The early bestiaries could not find a good word to say about the owl. In one, the screech owl was described as ‘a loathsome bird because its roost is filthy from its droppings, just as the sinner brings all who dwell with him into disrepute through the example of his dishonourable behaviour. It is . . . bound by heavy laziness, the same laziness which binds sinners who are inert and idle when it comes to doing good.’1The fact that in reality the owl was intensely active during the night ‘doing good’ for humanity as an efficient destroyer of rodent pests was clearly unknown to the author of these words.

  In medieval times certain Christian theologians employed the owl in an unusual way. They argued that, as a nocturnal being, the bird was a symbol of the Jews. This, they said, was because it was the Jews who had preferred the darkness of their own beliefs to the broad daylight of Christianity. The brains behind this kind of medieval anti-semitism were even cunning enough to use the mobbing of an owl as an example of a Jew being attacked by a righteous gathering of enlightened Christians.

  In sixteenth-century England our greatest dramatist played his part in keeping alive the owl’s bad reputation. In Macbeth Shakespeare has Lady Macbeth refer to the shrieking owl as ‘the fatal bellman which gives the sternest goodnight’. And in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck speaks of the screech owl, screeching loud, that ‘Puts the wretch that lies in woe, in remembrance of a shroud’. And he continues, ‘Now it is the time of night that graves, all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite, in the church-way paths to glide’, suggesting that, perhaps, the gliding sprites and the graveyard owls were one and the same and that owls, like predatory vampires, inhabited the tombs until the ‘witching hour’ when they flapped their Dracula-like wings and flew abroad.

  In Henry vii, Part iii there is a telling line where Shakespeare has the king speak like an ancient Roman: ‘The owl shriek’d at thy birth, an evil sign . . .’. In Julius Caesar he confirms his knowledge of the role of the owl in Roman legend, when he has Caesar say ‘yesterday the bird of night did sit, even at noon-day, upon the market-place, hooting and shrieking’, and Caesar concludes that these ‘are portentous things’.

  The strong association between the owl and death inspired a seventeenth-century artist to create a haunting work in the vanitas genre, showing an owl perched on a human skull. Next to the skull is a candlestick in which the candle’s flame is symbolically dying. The term vanitas means emptiness, and paintings of this type were meant to emphasize the fleeting nature of vanity and of life itself. They usually included a skull accompanied by reminders of the certainty of death, such as decaying fruit, hour-glasses and insects. In this case the artist, whose name is unknown, made the scene even more sombre and sinister by perching a staring owl, the feared messenger of death, upon the skull.

  Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) continues this theme in his poem ‘Ancient Gaelic Melody’ (1819), in which he speaks of ‘Birds of omen dark and foul, Night-crow, raven, bat, and owl’, begging them to ‘Leave the sick man to his dream – All night long he heard you scream.’2

  In many images of the owl at this time there is a clear link between the owl and witchcraft. It is more common for that rival nocturnal killer, the cat, to act as the witch’s familiar, but occasionally the cat is displaced by the owl, sometimes depicted riding calmly on the handle of the witch’s broom as she flies through the night sky.

  ‘Owl, Skull and Candle’, an anonymous Dutch or German vanitas painting of the 17th century, oil on panel.

  As we move into modern times the evil owl begins to lose its power, but it still lurks in a few dark corners. What often happens when an ancient symbol of wickedness begins to go into decline is that it moves from serious belief to comic relief. Halloween is a good example of this. Originally a pagan celebration of the Celtic New Year, when the boundary between the living and the dead became blurred, the dead became dangerous for a brief while and the living defended themselves by mimicking the evil spirits to placate them. Today children use this as an excuse to dress up as ghouls or witches to frighten adults. The solemn ceremonies of yesterday have become little more than light-hearted pantomime. Among the imagery involved in these Halloween displays are all the ghosts, goblins, zombies, demons and other monsters of the modern horror genre. One of the wicked animals that accompany these evil spirits, acting as a witch’s familiar, is the owl.

  It is possible today to buy a witch’s hat so voluminous that it has enough room for an owl to set up a nest inside it. The owl’s face peers out of the hat and, in so doing, manages to keep alive the old tradition of the evil owl of ancient times. It may now be no more than a joke, but it is a joke with a long history behind it and shows that, although the wicked owl is no longer taken seriously as a harbinger of death and destruction, it has not been completely forgotten.

  THE OBSTINATE OWL

  In the seventeenth century a new kind of owl symbol became popular, that of the obstinate owl. It appears in 1602 and again in 1635 as an etching depicting the owl as the owner of eyesight that declines in efficiency as the intensity of the light increases. It shows the owl wearing spectacles and carrying flaming torches, one in each claw. In front of it stands a pair of candlesticks with brightly burning candles. In the sky, the sun shines down on the scene and the moral is that, if someone has a blind prejudice, no amount of enlightened reasoning will enable him to see the folly of his ways. In fact, the more reasoned argument is presented to him the more stubborn his prejudice will become. The epigram reads He that is blind will nothing see, What light so e’re about him be. The poem below the emblem begins:

  The owl as a symbol of blindness in the light: an etching from George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635).

  It is by some supposed that our Owls,

  By Day-time are no perfect sighted Fowls;

  And that the more you do augment the light,

  The more you shall deprive them of their sight.

  Nor candles, Torches, nor the sun at noon,

  Nor spectacles, nor all of these in one,

  Can make an Owlet in the day-time see,

  Though none, by night, hath better eyes than she.3

  A little later in the seventeenth century the obstinate owl reappears in a famous Dutch print showing Oliver Cromwell dismissing the English Parliament in 1653. Angered by their refusal to see the need for reforms, he entered the Chamber and hurled abuse at them calling them drunkards, whoremasters and corrupt and unjust men. Aided by forty musketeers, he had the members of Parliament driven from the chamber, some by force. In the Dutch print we see them being herded out and at their head is an owl wearing spectacles and a large iron collar on which there is a lighted candle. The use of the owl in this dramatic scene was meant to underline the fact that the members
of Parliament who were leaving the chamber had been blind to the need to make essential reforms, despite repeated requests that they should do so. Again the owl was being employed as a symbol of obstinacy and wilful blindness.

  THE OWL AS A VEHICLE

  In Asia in the Hindu religion the owl has a complex dualistic symbolism. Its primary role is as a vahana, a divine vehicle or mount, on which a goddess can ride. The deity in question is Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity, and her owl is called Uluka or Ulooka in Sanskrit. In spite of the owl’s association with the goddess it is still looked upon in an unfavourable light by Indians in general, who see it as a bird of ill omen and a messenger of bad luck. They believe that if an owl visits a house something evil will happen there.

  Owls are viewed as having an unusual lifestyle, involving loneliness, fear and isolation. In this respect they are said to be like the very rich, who shut themselves off from ordinary day-today living. So the presence of an owl as the carrier for the goddess Lakshmi is a constant reminder to her that although she represents great wealth she must at the same time guard against its pitfalls. She must represent generous wealth, or spiritual wealth, and avoid the selfishness of the lonely miser. When the goddess descends to earth to visit the poor, on one special night in the year, to take away the darkness of poverty, she rides on her great white owl because her steed, being a bird of the night, will know the darkest places to which it can carry her, and where she can therefore do the most good.