No one bird known to Americans is so entangled with whatever witchcraft belongs to birds as is the raven, yet little of it is American besides Poe’s melodramatic mummery, whose raven was a borrowed piece of theatrical property. The shrewd people of this country pay little attention to signs and portents, yet some survive among us, for the extravagant notions popularly held as to the sagacity of our crow, with its “courts” and “consultations,” are no doubt traceable in some measure to the bird’s history in Old World superstition.

In Europe no bird, save possibly the cuckoo, is so laden with legends and superstitious veneration as the raven, chiefly, however, in the North, where it is not only most numerous and noticeable but seems to fit better than in the gladsome South. To the rough, virile Baltic man, or to the Himalayan mountaineer, worshipping force, careless of beauty, this sable bird of hard endurance, challenging cry and powerful wing, the “ravener,” tearer, was an admirable creature; while to the more esthetic dweller by the Mediterranean or on Ægean shores such qualities were repulsive, and the raven became a reminder of winter, when alone it was seen in the South, and of the savage forests and hated barbarians whence it came. Much the same antithesis belongs to this bird and its relatives in the minds of Orientals. To understand the impression the raven made on primitive men, and the symbolism and dread that have grown up about it, one must have some knowledge of the real Corvus corax.

The raven is the largest member of the ornithological family CorvidÆ, measuring two feet from beak to tail-tip. It is everywhere black, with steel-blue and purplish reflections, and is distinguished from its equally black cousins, the crows, by its stouter beak, somewhat hooked at the tip, and especially by the elongated and pointed feathers on the throat. It is powerful in flight, and is noted for performing queer antics in the air. Judged by its anatomy it stands high in the scale of classification, so that some ornithologists, considering also its intellect, have put it quite at the top of the scale—made it the true King of Birds. In its northern home this species is to be found right around the world, inhabiting Asia and Europe as far south as the great ridge of mountains that extends from Spain to Siberia, and also living in Asia Minor and Syria. It is native to all North America, where no arctic island is too remote to be visited by it in summer. Most of the ravens fly southward in winter from polar latitudes to kindlier regions, but those that stay in the far north become doubly conspicuous in a wilderness of snow, for they do not turn white in winter as do many arctic residents; therefore Goldsmith wasted much philosophy in explaining in his Animated Nature why they “become white.” The raven’s ordinary call-note is well enough described by the words “croak” and “caw,” but it has many variations. Nuttall quotes Porphyrius as declaring that no less than 64 different intonations of the raven’s cries were distinguished by the soothsayers of his day, and given appropriate significance. Some notes are indescribably queer.

Ravens have almost disappeared from thickly settled regions, in striking contrast to their near relatives the crows, rooks, choughs, magpies, jackdaws, and various related species in the Old World, which thrive and grow tame in the company of civilized humanity. Few pairs of ravens remain in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, except on the wilder parts of the Maine coast and about Lake Superior.

Readers of Charles Dickens’s novels will recall the impish specimen “Grip” that Barnaby Rudge used to carry about with him, and which became his fellow-prisoner in jail—and served him right, for he was always declaring “I’m a devil!”

This raven was modelled after an actual pet, named “Grip,” in the family of the novelist when he was writing Barnaby Rudge in 1841. It died in July of that year, and its body passed into the possession of Dr. R. T. Judd, an English collector of Dickens’ material. In 1922 this collection, including the stuffed skin of Grip, and its former cage, labelled with its owner’s name, was offered for sale at the Anderson Galleries in New York. It appears from accompanying letters that as the novel was originally written it contained no reference to the bird; but before the manuscript was completed it occurred to Mr. Dickens that he could make good use of the mischievous creature in the story, as is revealed in a letter to George Cattermole, dated January 28, 1841.

The raven may not only be tamed to the point of domestication, but will learn to speak a few words. Goldsmith asserted, apparently from experience, that it not only would speak but could “sing like a man.” Like all its thievish tribe it loves to pick up and hide objects that attract its quick eye, especially if they are bright, like a silver spoon or a bit of jewelry; and this acquisitive disposition has more than once involved in serious misfortune servants accused of purloining lost articles, as happened in the case of the Jackdaw of Rheims.

The tradition on which Barham’s Ingoldsby Legend is embroidered is a very old one, the earliest statement of which, probably, is that in Mignie’s Patrologia Latinia, compiled by a monk of Clairvaux. The narrative is that of an incident in the time of Frederick Barbarossa (12th century) when the monastery of Corvey was ruled by a prince-bishop named Conrad. One day he left his episcopal ring lying on the dining-table, and it disappeared. The bishop blamed the servants and suspected his guests, and finally issued a decree of excommunication toward any one who had stolen it. Thereupon the bishop’s pet jackdaw “began to sicken little by little, to loathe his food, to cease more and more from his droll croakings and irrational follies whereby he was wont to delight the minds of fools who neglect to fear God.”

At this dreadful stage it occurred to some bright genius that this portentous change in the bird was the effect of the curse, and that it was the sought-for thief. Its nest was searched, the precious ring was found, the curse was taken off, and the jackdaw recovered its plumage and good spirits.

Where ravens can get other food plentifully they seldom attack living animals. Bendire frequently saw them feeding among his chickens without harming them, yet undoubtedly they are occasionally guilty in our West of killing young lambs, game-birds, and poultry, sins of which they are much accused in Europe. Certainly they rob wild birds of eggs and fledglings, but these evil deeds are done mainly in spring, in providing their own nestlings with soft food. During most of the year the food of the raven consists of carrion, grasshoppers, worms, mussels and other shellfish (the larger kinds of which they lift high in the air and then drop to break their shells), and of ground-squirrels and young rabbits when they can get hold of them.

When a raven alights on a dead animal its first act is to pluck out the eyes. One of the barbarities in the ancient East was to throw the bodies of executed criminals out to be devoured by beasts and birds of prey—a custom of which the Parsee Towers of Silence is a modified relic. The popular knowledge of this gave great force to Solomon’s warning (Proverbs xxx, 17): “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out”—that is, so bad a boy would end on the gallows.

Although ravens were regarded by the ancient Zoroastrians as “pure,” because they were considered necessary to remove pollution from the face of the earth, the Jews classed this creature as “unclean” for the same reason—it ate carrion. In view of this the Biblical legend that the Prophet Elijah, when he hid by the brook Kerith from the wrath of Ahab, was fed by ravens at command of the Lord, is so unnatural that commentators have done their best to explain it away. To this day the Moors regard ravens as belonging to Satan. In Chapter V of the Koran, where the killing of Cain by his brother is described, we read: “And God sent a raven which scratched the earth to show him how he should hide the shame [that is, the corpse] of his brother, and he said ‘Woe is me! am I to be like this raven?’ ... and he became one of those who repent.” This is from Sale’s edition, Philadelphia, 1868; and the editor adds a note that this legend was derived from the Jews, but that in their version the raven appears not to Cain but to Adam, who thereupon buried Abel.

That a bird black as night and its mysteries, a familiar of the lightning-riven pine and the storm-beaten crag, a ghoulish attendant of battling men and feasting on their slain, muttering strange soliloquies, and diabolically cunning withal—that such a creature should have appealed to the rough mariners of the North is far from surprising. The supreme Norse god was Odin, an impersonation of force and intellect—an apotheosis, indeed, of the Viking himself; and his ministers were two ravens, Hugin and Munin, i.e., Reflection and Memory. “They sit upon his shoulders and whisper in his ears,” says history. “He sends them out at daybreak to fly over the world, and they come back at eve, toward meal-time.” Hence it is that Odin knows so much, and is called Rafnagud, Raven-god. Most solicitously does Odin express himself about these ministers in Grunner’s lay in the Elder Edda:

Again, in Odin’s fierce Raven Song, Hugin goes “to explore the heavens.” Jupiter’s two eagles, sent east and west, will be recalled by readers of classic tales.

As the eagle of Jove became the standard of the Roman legions, so Odin’s bird was inscribed on the shields and the banners of his warrior sons. You may see such banners illustrated in the Bayeux tapestry. The Dane called his standard landeyda (land-waster), and had faith in its miraculous virtues. The original ensign, that is, the one brought to England by the first invaders, is described in St. Neot’s biographical Chronicles (9th century). In 878, it records, a wild Danish rover named Hubba came with twenty-three ships on a raid into Devon: but the people rose and killed or drove away all the vikings.

“And there got they [that is, the Devon men] no small spoil, wherein they took, moreover, that banner which men call the Raven. For they say that the three sisters of Ingwar and Hubba, the daughters, sooth to say, of Lodbrock, wove that banner, and made it all wholly ready between morn and night of a single day. They say, too, that in every fight wherein that flag went before them, if they were to win the raven in the midst thereof seemed to flutter, as if it were alive, but were their doom to be worsted, then it would droop, still and lifeless.”

Britain came to know well that portentous flag—

as Thomson laments. Finally Harold hurled the power of Canute from England’s shores forever, and Tennyson sings Harold’s paean:

“The crow and the raven,” MacBain^[71] announces, “are constantly connected in the Northern mythologies with battle-deities. ‘How is it with you, Ravens?’ says the Norse Raven Song. ‘Whence are you come with gory beak at the dawning of the day.... You lodged last night, I ween, where ye knew the corses were lying.’ The ravens also assist and protect heroes both in Irish and Norse myth. It was a lucky sign if a raven followed a warrior.”

But the bold Norse sailors made a more practical use also of this knowing bird, for in those days, before the compass, they used to take ravens with them in their adventurous voyages on the fog-bound northern seas, and trust the birds to show them the way back to land. A notable instance was Floki’s voyage to Iceland in 864 A. D., a few years after that island’s discovery; and the French historian Mallet^[30] narrates it thus:

We are told that Floki, previous to setting out on his expedition, performed a great sacrifice, and having consecrated three ravens to the gods took them with him to guide him on his voyage. After touching at the Shetland and FaroË islands he steered northwest, and when he was fairly out at sea, let loose one of his ravens, which, after rising to a considerable elevation, directed its flight to the land they had quitted.... The second bird, after being some time on the wing, returned to the ship, a sign that the land was too far distant to be descried even by a raven hovering in the sky. Floki therefore continued his course, and shortly afterwards let loose his third raven, which he followed in its flight until he reached the eastern coast of Iceland.

This is a somewhat poetic account, I imagine, of what perhaps was a more prosaic custom of seamanship, for doubtless it was usual at that time to carry several birds on such voyages, and to let them fly from time to time that they might learn and indicate to the voyagers whether land was near, and in what direction, as did old Captain Noah, master of the good ship Ark. Berthold Lauffer^[52] treats of this point with his customary thoroughness in his pamphlet Bird Divination:

Indian Hindoo navigators kept birds on board ship for the purpose of despatching them in search of land. In the Baveru-Jataka it is “a crow serving to direct navigators in the four quarters”.... Pliny relates that the seafarers of Taprobane (Ceylon) did not observe the stars for the purpose of navigation, but carried birds out to sea, which they sent off from time to time and then followed the course of the birds’ flying in the direction of the land. The connection of this practice with that described in the Babylonian and Hebraic traditions of the deluge was long ago recognized.... When the people of Thera, an island in the Ægean Sea emigrated to Libya, ravens flew along with them ahead of the ships to show the way. According to Justin ... it was by the flight of birds that the Gauls who invaded Illyricum were guided. Emperor Jimmu of Japan (7th century) engaged in a war expedition and marched under the guidance of a gold-colored raven.

Mr. Lauffer might have added that Callisthenes relates that two heaven-sent ravens led the expedition of Alexander across the trackless desert from the Mediterranean coast to the oasis of Ammon (Siwah), recalling stragglers now and then by hoarse croaking.

The folklore of northern Europe is full of the cunning and exploits of this bird and its congeners, which it would be a weary task to disentangle from pure myth. In Germany there is, or was, a stone gibbet called, with gruesome memories, Ravenstone, to which Byron alludes in Werner—

We read that the old Welsh king Owein, son of Urien, had in his army three hundred doughty ravens, constituting an irresistible force; perhaps they were only human “shock” troops who bore this device on their targes. Cuchulain, the savage hero of Irish fables, had, like Odin, two magic ravens that advised him of the approach of foes. Old-fashioned Germans believe that Frederick I (Barbarossa) is sleeping under Raven’s Hill at Kaiserlauten, ready to come forth in the last emergency of his country. There in his grotto-palace a shepherd found him sleeping. Barbarossa awoke and asked: “Are the ravens still flying around the hill?” The shepherd answered that they were. “Then,” sighed the king, “I must sleep another hundred years.”

Waterton^[73] tells us that a tradition was once current throughout the whole of Great Britain that King Arthur was changed into a raven (some say a chough) by the art of witchcraft; and that in due time he would be restored to human form, and return with crown and sceptre. In Brittany, where Arthur and his knights are much more real than even in Cornwall, the sailor-peasants will assure you that he was buried on the little isle of Avalon, just off the foreshore of Tregastel, but they will add very seriously that he is not dead. If you inquire how that can be, they will explain that the great king was conveyed thither magically by Morgan le Fay, and he and she dwell there in an underground palace. They are invisible now to all human eyes, and when Arthur wants to go out into the air his companion turns him into a raven; and perchance, in proof, your boatman may point your gaze toward a real raven sitting on the rocks of the islet.

Ravens figure in many monkish legends, too, usually in a beneficent attitude, in remembrance of their friendly offices toward Elijah. Saint Cuthbert and several lesser saints and hermits were fed by these or similar birds. One hermit subsisted many years on a daily ration of half a loaf of bread brought him by a raven, and one time, when another saint visited him, the bird provided a whole loaf! Fish was frequently brought: and once when a certain eremite was ill, the bird furnished the fish already cooked, and fed it to the patient bit by bit. Miss Walker^[39] shows that as a companion of saints this bird has had a wide and beneficent experience, which may be set against the more conspicuous pages of misdeeds in his highly variegated record. Thus we learn that St. Benedict’s raven saved his life by bearing away the poisoned loaf sent to this saint by a jealous priest. “After his torture and death at Saragossa, when the body of St. Vincent was thrown to the wild beasts it was rescued by ravens and borne to his brothers at Valencia, where it reposed in a tomb till the Christians of that place were expelled by the Moors. The remains of the saint were ... again placed in a tomb [at Cape St. Vincent] to be guarded forever more by the faithful ravens.” Have you doubts about this story? Go to that wild headland, where Portugal sets a firm foot against the Atlantic, watch the ravens hovering above it, and be convinced! And to many other holy men did these noble birds render substantial service—to St. Meinrad especially, as is affirmed by no less an authority than the great Jerome.

“In some parts of Germany,” Miss Walker records, “these birds are believed to hold the souls of the damned, while in other sections wicked priests only are supposed to be so re-incarnated. In Sweden the ravens croaking at night in the swamps are said to be the ghosts of murdered persons who have been denied Christian burial.” A local and humorous touch is given to this conception by the Irish in Kerry, who allege that the rooks there are the ghosts of bad old landlords, because they steal vegetables from the peasants’ gardens—“Always robbin’ the poor!”

This eerie feeling is of long descent. The supreme war-goddess of the Gaels, as Squire^[74] explains, was Morrigu, the Red Woman or war-goddess, who figures in the adventures of Cuchulain, and whose favorite disguise was to change herself into a carrion-crow, the “hoodie-crow” of the Scotch. She had assistants who revelled among the slain on a battlefield. “These grim creatures of the savage mind had immense vitality ... indeed, they may be said to survive still in the superstitious dislike and suspicion shown in all Keltic-speaking countries for their avatar—the hoodie crow.”

In Pennant’s Tour in Scotland (1771) is described a curious ceremony in which offerings were made by Scottish herdsmen to the hooded crow, eagle and other enemies of sheep to induce them to spare the flocks. A Morayshire saying in old times ran thus:

(The guil, Swann explains, is an obnoxious weed, the Gordon refers to the thieving propensities of a neighboring clan, and the crow killed lambs and annoyed sickly sheep.) “It is interesting,” says Wentz,^[62] “to observe that this Irish war-goddess Morrigu, the bodb or babd,... has survived to our own day in the fairy-lore of the chief Celtic countries. In Ireland the survival in the popular and still almost general belief among the peasantry that the fairies often exercise their magical powers under the form of royston crows; and for this reason these birds are always greatly dreaded and avoided. The resting of one of them on a peasant’s cottage may signify many things, but often it means the death of one of the family or some great misfortune, the bird in such case playing the part of a bean-sidhe (banshee).” In the western Highlands “the hoody crow plays the same rÔle; and in Brittany fairies assume the form of the magpie.”

Under the influence of Christian teaching Odin gradually became identified throughout northern Europe with Satan: so the raven and all the Corvidae are now “Devil’s birds” in the folklore of the North. Even the magpie is said to have devils’ blood in its tongue, and its chattering is ominous of evil, requiring various rustic charms to counteract its harm—in fact, if the farmer-folk are correctly informed, virtually all the birds of this family was naturally tainted with deviltry. It is not surprising then to hear that European crows go down to hell once every year, when they must appear before Old Nick and give him a tribute of feathers. The time of this visit coincides with their moulting-season in midsummer, when the crows retire and remain inconspicuous and silent for a time—so maybe it’s true!

An extraordinary survival of this last notion—unless it be original—is found among the negroes of some of our Southern States, who say that the “jaybird” (bluejay) is never to be seen on Friday, because on that day he is carrying sticks to the Devil in hell; that in general this bird is the Devil’s messenger and spy; and that the reason he is so gay and noisy on Saturday is that he is so glad to get back to earth. An old Georgia darky explained the matter a follows:

“Some folks say Br’er Jay takes a piece er wood, des a splinter, down to de bad Place ev’y Friday fer ter help out Mister Devil, so’s to let him ’n’ his wife, ole Aunty Squatty, have good kindlin’ wood all de time.... But some folks tell de tale ’nother way. Dey say he make dat trip ever’ Friday ter tote down des a grit er dirt. He make de trip sho’. Ever’body knows dat. But for what he goes folks tells diffunt tales. You sho’ly can’t see a jay bird in dis worl’ on Friday fum twelve o’clock twel three—hit takes ’em des dat long ter make de trip.... Some folks say Bre’r Jay and all his fambly, his folks, his cousins, and his kin, does go dat way and d’rection, ev’y one totin’ dey grain o’ sand in der bill an’ drappin’ hit in—des one teeny weeny grit—wid de good hopes er fillin’ up dat awful place.”^[2]

Louisiana negroes are of the opinion that the jay is condemned to this weekly trip as a punishment for misbehavior at Christ’s crucifixion, but what dreadful deed he did has been forgotten. Every reader of “Uncle Remus,” or of the stories of Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart, Mr. Harry Stillwell Edwards, and other Southern writers, knows how largely the “jaybird” figures in the plantation-tales of the negroes, especially of the coastal districts, where the bluejay is one of the most conspicuous and interesting of resident birds.

The coming of Christianity, as has been said, swept away the images of Odin and of his Pagan familiars Hugin and Munin out of both Teutonic and Keltic Europe, but it did not sweep away the birds themselves, nor discolor their sable wings, nor silence the baleful croak; and the impression left by the old tales lingered long in the minds of the people. To the horror of the raven and his kind among the natives of Britain, as a symbol of the northern marauders from whom they had so long suffered, was now added the anathema of pious missionaries who condemned everything pagan as diabolic, and all things black—except their own robes—as typifying the powers of darkness. Truly, remarked St. Ambrose, all shamelessness and sin are dark and gloomy, and feed on the dead like the crow. A Chinese epithet for the raven is “Mongol’s coffin.”

The people were sincere enough in this, for behind them was not only the Devil-fearing superstition of the Middle Ages but a long line of parent myths and folklore that made the bird’s reputation as black as its plumage, and added to this was the new and terrifying idea of prophecy. You get a hint of the feeling in Gower’s Confessio Amantis:

In Greece and Italy ravens were sacred to Apollo, the great patron of augurs, who in a pet turned this bird from white to black—and an ill turn it was, for black feathers make black birds; and in this blackness of coat lies, in my opinion, the root of their sinister repute.

The “jumbie-bird,” or “big witch,” of the West Indian region, for example, is the dead-black ani, a kind of cuckoo. Spenser speaks of “the hoarse night-raven, trompe of doleful dreer,” but his “night-raven” was not a raven at all, but the bittern.

It is only in an earlier day and under a brighter sky that we find these corvine prophets taking a more cheerful view of the future. Of course they are among the “rain-birds”:

So the “foresight of a raven” became proverbial, as Waterton^[73] illustrates by an anecdote: “Good farmer Muckdrag’s wife, while jogging on with eggs to market, knew there was mischief brewing as soon as she had heard a raven croak on the unlucky side of the road:

“She had scarcely uttered this when down came her old stumbling mare to the ground. Her every egg was smashed to atoms; and whilst she lay sprawling ... she was perfectly convinced in her own mind that the raven had clearly foreseen her irreparable misadventure.”

If one alighted on a church-tower the whole parish trembled, and when a cottager saw one perched on his roof-tree he made his will; or if it happened that a man or woman was ill in his house the death of that person was regarded as certain. The more learned would quote for you how Tiberius, Plato, Cicero and other great men of the past had been similarly warned, and doubtless many a person has died in these circumstances of nervous fright and discouragement. It is to this dread that Marlowe refers in his Jew of Malta:

The last line contains a new and heinous calumny widely credited. So Shakespeare makes Caliban threaten Prospero and Ariel with

I wonder, by the way, who first spoke—the simile is, at any rate, as old as Chaucer’s time—of the wrinkles that gather about the corners of our eyes when we get on in life, as “crow’s feet”? Frederick Locker sings of his grandmother:

The expression of course is a suggestion of the radiating form of the wrinkles at the outer corner of the eye to a crow’s track; and this reminds us of the fact that when soon after the Norman conquest in England there was a vast popular interest in royal genealogy, people spoke of the branching form of a family tree, when drawn on paper, as a “crane’s foot” (pied de grue), whence our term pedigree.

Omens are deduced from the flight and cries of ravens, crows, magpies, and certain other corvine species, especially as regards their direction relative to the inquirer. Horace, for example, in his Ode to Galatea on her undertaking a journey, tells her that he, as a “provident augur,”

That is to say, Horace will make the raven, appearing or heard from the eastward (the lucky direction), over-rule the bad omen of the crow.

There is also grave meaning in the number visible at one time, as Matthew Lewis knew when he wrote the ballad Bill Jones:

Quoting Margaret Walker:^[39]

The belief in his power of divination was so general that knowledge of the whereabouts of the lost has come to be known as “raven’s knowledge.” To the Romans he was able to reveal the means of restoring lost eyesight even. In Germany he was able to tell not only where lost articles were, but could also make known to survivors where the souls of their lost friends were to be found. In Bohemia he was assigned the task usually performed by the stork in other lands, while in some parts of Germany witches were credited with riding upon his back instead of on the conventional broomstick.

Regular formulas regarding magpies are repeated in rural Britain, where magpies are numerous—they are common in our American West, also, but nobody is superstitious about them there—of which a common example runs:

Many variations of these formulas are on record, some carrying the rimes up to eight or nine pies seen at once; and folklore has many quaint ways of dissipating the evil effects feared from their presence.

Now all this is but the ragtag and bobtail, as it were, of the science of the ancient Oriental world that has come down to us in frayed and disconnected fragments, to be now a matter more of amusing research than of belief or practice among most of us. It was old even at the beginning of the Christian era, but all the ornithomancy of the Greek and Roman soothsayers was inherited in its principle, if not always in its forms, from the remotely antique “wisdom” of the East, in which the consultation of birds appears to be the basis of divination.

In the Far East the raven has been regarded from time immemorial with dread interest, and where that species was rare the crow—equally black, destructive, and cunning—took its place. To the primitive philosophers of Persia and India the raven was a divine bird, of celestial origin and supernatural abilities, and was the messenger who announced the will of the Deity. A German commentator on the Vedas, H. Oldenberg, concludes that the animals sent by the gods, as pictured in the myths, were those of a weird, demoniacal nature, and were for this reason themselves deified, but subsequently became mere stewards to divine mandators. “In the belief of the Persians,” says Lauffer, “the raven was sacred to the god of light and the sun.” Moncure D. Conway,^[56] when discussing the Biblical legend of the Deluge, suggests that the raven sent out of the Ark may typify the “darkness of the face of the deep,” and the dove the “spirit of God” that “moved upon the face of the waters.”

In China, Dr. Williams^[76] tells us, “the sun is signalized by the figure of a raven in a circle.” I have seen Chinese drawings of it in which the raven (or a crow) stood on three legs, as does the toad that the Taoists see in the moon—but why three legs? Mrs. Ball answers this question thus:

The crow—known in China as wuya, and in Japan as karasu—is most intimately related to the sun. Ch’un Ch’iu in an ancient poem says: “The spirit of the sun is a crow with three legs”; while again Hwai Nan Tse, an ancient philosopher, explains that this crow has three legs because the number three is the emblem of yang [light, good] of which the sun is the supreme essence.... The Chinese, it would appear, actually believed in the existence of a three-legged crow, for in the official history of the Wei dynasty—3d century A. D.—it is related that “more than thirty times, tributes consisting of three-legged crows were brought from the neighboring countries.... The principal of sun-worship [in Japan] was Amateresu no Ohokami, from whom the imperial family traces its descent. This divinity ... had as her messenger and attendant ... a red bird having three legs.”

Based on the fears and philosophy indicated above, the soothsayers of India contrived a most elaborate scheme of judging meanings from the actions of ravens and crows, for little attention seems to have been paid to ornithological distinctions; and this spread in very early times to China and Thibet. It is a wonderful monument of priestcraft, which has been elucidated by several students of early Oriental manuscripts; and I am indebted to a profoundly learned discourse on the subject by Dr. Berthold Lauffer.^[52] Briefly the scheme was as follows:

A table or chart was constructed containing ninety squares, each square holding an interpretation of one or another sound of a raven’s or crow’s voice; but his utterances were separated into five characters of sound, and the day divided into five “watches,” while the direction from which the bird’s voice came may be from any one of eight points of the compass, or from the zenith, making nine points in all. Multiplying these together gives the ninety squares of the mystic table, and the intersection of two conditions gives you the square where the appropriate interpretation or prophecy is written.

Thus if in the first watch (i.e., early in the morning) you hear a raven in the east say ka-ka, your wish to obtain more property will be fulfilled; but if in the fourth watch you hear a bird off in the southeast say da-da you may be sure that a storm will arise in seven days. Five different tones of the cawing were recognized as significant. Just where and what you see a raven do when you are travelling foretells some sort of a fortunate or unfortunate incident of the progress or outcome of your journey; yet these omens differ according to whether you are moving and the bird is stationary, or you are standing still and the bird is flying, or both or neither are motionless!

There was also a settled rule for taking prognostications from the nests of these birds. “When a crow has built its nest on a branch on the east side of a tree,” according to Donacila’s translation of a Thibetan manuscript, “a good year and rain will be the result of it. When it has built its nest on a southern branch the crops will then be bad. When it has built its nest on a branch in the middle of a tree, a great fright will then be the result of it. When it makes its nest below, fear of the army of one’s adversary will be the result of it. When it makes its nest on a wall, on the ground, or on a river, the [sick] king will be healed.”

Whenever it appears that the omen observed portends harm, offerings of food and so forth must be made to the bird in order to avert the evil, and these offerings vary according to prescribed rules. It is no wonder that an extensive priesthood was needed to aid in this intricate guarding against danger or the foretelling of benefits to come; and one suspects that the whole thing was a clever invention by the sacerdotal class to provide priests with a good living. Nor have the practices, and much less the superstitious notions behind them, become wholly obsolete, for not only in India and China are the movements of birds now watched with anxiety, and offerings made to them in the temples and individually by the peasantry, but similar ideas and practices prevail in all Malayan lands, as readers of such books as Skeat’s Malay Magic^[7] may learn.

Perhaps learned students of ancient ways of thinking may be able to explain why the direction of a prophetic bird from the listener was an essential element in its message: for example, why is the cawing of a crow east of you a more favorable portent than cawing from the west? Lord Lytton studies this question briefly in the Notes to his translation of the Odes of Horace, who, in his Ode to Galatea, exclaims:

Why should “leftward” (lÆvus) signify ill-luck in this case, when the left was considered lucky by the Romans, although unlucky by the Greeks? “It is suggested,” is Lytton’s comment, “that the comparison may have arisen from the different practice of the Greeks and Romans in taking note of birds—the former facing north, the latter south [an attitude connected with migration?] I believe, however, it was the tap of the woodpecker, and not his flight, that was unlucky. It is so considered still in Italy, and corresponds to our superstitious fear of the beetle called the death-watch. If, therefore, heard on the left, or heart side, it directly menaced life.”

I leave the solution of the general problem of the value of direction in ancient ornithomancy to the Orientalists, advising them that a hint of subtile and half-forgotten reasons for such distinctions may be found in the ideas prevailing among the shamans, or “medicine men,” of our southwestern village-Indians; among the Hopi (miscalled Mokis), for example, North is represented in their mystical ceremonies by yellow, West by blue, South by red, and East by white.

Religious interest in black-hued birds is not confined to the Old World, as was tragically illustrated in that remarkable excitement among the Indians of the Upper Missouri region in 1890, known as the Ghost Dance, of which the crow was the honored symbol. James Mooney,^[77] of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, investigated this outburst of sentiment very thoroughly, and explained it at length in the 14th Annual Report of that Bureau, from which I extract the information as to the crow’s part in the matter. Dr. Mooney reminds us in advance that the crow was probably held sacred by all the tribes of the Algonquian race. Roger Williams, speaking of the New England tribes, says that although the crow did damage to the corn, hardly an Indian would kill one, because it was their tradition that this bird had brought them their first grain and vegetables, “carrying a grain of corn in one ear and a bean in the other from the field of their great god Cautantouwit in Sowwaniu, the Southwest, the happy spirit-world where dwelt the gods and the souls of the great and good.”

The so-called Ghost Dance meant to the Plains Indians generally a preparation for the coming of a superhuman Messiah who would restore the old order of things when the redman was supreme in the land, and free from the restraint of an alien and encroaching civilization; and primarily it contained no special hostility toward white neighbors.

Among the western redmen the eagle for its general superiority, the magpie (particularly by the Paiutes), the sagehen because connected with the country whence the Messiah was to come, and some other birds, were revered in certain subsidiary ceremonies; but the central bird-figure in this excitement was the crow, for it was regarded as the directing messenger from the spirit-world, because its color is a reminder of death and the shadow-land. I have seen the figures of two upward flying crows and two magpies in a “medicine shirt” made to be worn in the Ghost Dance. The raven shared in this devotional respect, but is rare on the northern plains, where its humbler relative was an abundant substitute. Some understanding of this supreme position of the crow in the Ghost-dancing—the equivalent of our “revival” meetings—may be had by examining the Arapahoe version of the belief on which the anticipated advent of a red Messiah was based. Dr. Mooney expounds it^[77] as follows:

In Arapahoe belief the spirit world is in the west, not on the same level with this earth of ours, but higher up, and separated also from it by a body of water.... The crow, as the messenger and leader of the spirits who had gone before [i.e. the dead] collected their armies on the other side and advanced at their head to the hither limit of the shadow-land. Then, looking over, they saw far below them a sea, and far out beyond it toward the east was the boundary of the earth, where lived the friends they were marching to rejoin. Taking up a pebble in his beak, the crow then dropped it into the water and it became a mountain towering up to the land of the dead. Down its rocky slope he brought his army until they halted at the edge of the water. Then taking some dust in his bill the crow flew out and dropped it into the water as he flew, and it became a solid arm of land stretching from the spirit world to the earth. He returned and flew out again, this time with some blades of grass, which he dropped upon the land thus made and at once it was covered with a green sod. Again he returned and again flew out, this time with some twigs in his bill, and dropping these also upon the new land, at once it was covered with a forest of trees. Again he flew back to the base of the mountain, and is now [that is, at the time of the Ghost dancing] coming on at the head of all the countless spirit-host.