CHAPTER II.

THE HAWK, THE EAGLE, THE VULTURE, THE PHOENIX, THE HARPY, THE STRIX, THE BAT, THE GRIFFON, AND THE SIREN.

SUMMARY.

The bird of prey the most heroic of birds.--Indras as a hawk.--The hawk and the ambrosia; the ambrosia as sperm.--The bird of prey and the serpent.--Agnis, the Açvinâu, and the Marutas as hawks.--The place of sacrifice has the form of an eagle.--The two sons of Vinatâ.--Garudas, the bird of Vishnus; he fights against the monsters.--Genealogy of the vultures.--Gâtâyus and Sampatis.--The king or the young hero who offers himself up to be devoured by the hawk or the eagle.--The grateful hawk or eagle.--Çyena and Çaena; Simurg; the feather of the bird of prey.--The birds as clouds.--The eagles as winds; Aquila and Aquilo.--The hawks as luminous birds; the eagles as demoniacal ones.--Accipiter.--The hawk as an emblem of nobility.--The hawk as the ensign of Attila.--The hawk in Hellenic antiquity.--The kite among the stars; it discharges its body upon the image of the god.--The beetle, the eagle, and Zeus.--The eagle as the thunderbolt or sceptre of Zeus.--The eagle presages supreme power and fertility; the eagle and the laurel.--The eagle carries off the robes of Aphroditê.--The eagle takes away the slippers of Rhodopê.--The eagle kills Æschilos.--Nisos and Scylla.--The vulture in ancient classical authors.--The vultures in hell.--The learned vulture.--Voracity of the vulture.--Imaginary birds.--The sun as a phoenix.--The demoniacal harpies or Furiæ, canes Jovis.--Strix and striges; they suck blood.--Proca and Crane.--Bats and vampires.--The Stymphalian birds.--The birds of Seleucia.--The Gryphes and the Arimaspi.--The griffons sacred to Nemesis; the hypogriff, gryphos, logogriph, griffonage.--The Siren now as a bird, now as a fish.--Circe; a lunar myth.

The most heroic of birds is the bird of prey; the strength of its beak, wings, and claws, its size and swiftness, caused it to be regarded as a swift celestial messenger, carrier, and warrior.

The hawk, the eagle, and the vulture, three powerful birds of prey, generally play the same part in myths and legends; the creators of myths having from the first observed their general resemblance, without paying any regard to their specific differences.

The bird of prey, in mythology, is the sun, which now shines in its splendour, and now shows itself in the cloud or darkness by sending forth flashes of lightning, thunderbolts, and sunbeams. The flash, the thunderbolt, and the sunbeam are now the beak, now the claw of the bird of prey, and now, the part being sometimes taken for the whole, even the entire bird.

In the _Rigvedas_, the god Indras often appears in the form of a hawk or çyenas. Indras is like a hawk that flies swiftly over the other hawks, and, being well-winged, carries to men the food tasted by the gods.[289] He is enclosed in a hundred iron fortresses; nevertheless, with swiftness, he succeeds in coming out of them;[290] while flying away, he carries in his claw the beautiful, virgin, luminous ambrosia, by means of which life is prolonged and the dead brought to life again[291] (the rain, which is also confounded with the ambrosial humour of the moon. In the first strophe of the same hymn, Indus is also called ambrosia).[292] The hawk with iron claws kills the hostile demons,[293] has great power of breathing, and draws from afar the chariot with a hundred wheels.[294] However, while the hawk carries the ambrosia through the air, he trembles for fear of the archer Kriçânus,[295] who, in fact, shot off one of his claws (of which the hedgehog was born, according to the _Âitareya Br._,[296] and according to the Vedic hymn,[297] one of his feathers which, falling on the earth, afterwards became a tree). After the victory gained over Ahis, the serpent-demon, Indras flees like a terrified hawk.[298] This is the first trace of the legendary and proverbial enmity between the bird of prey and the serpent. In the third book of the _Râmâyanam_, Râvanas says that he will carry off Sîtâ as the well-winged one (carries off) the serpent (suparnah pannagamiva).

Nor is Indras alone a hawk in the _Rigvedas_, but Agnis too. Mâtariçvân and the hawk agitate, the one the heavenly fire, the other the ambrosia of the mountain.[299] The chariot of the Açvinâu is also sometimes drawn by hawks, as swift as heavenly vultures.[300] They are themselves compared to two vultures that hover round the tree where the treasure is[301] (we have seen in the preceding chapter that the tree is the sky). The Marutas are also called Gridhrâs or vultures (falcons according to Max Müller.[302]) In the _Rigvedas_, again, when the sun goes to the sea, he looks with a vulture's eye.[303] On account of this form of a bird of prey, often assumed by the solar god in the Vedic myths, we read in the _Âitareya Br._, that the place destined for the sacrifice had the same shape. In the _Râmâyanam_ we find, in the sacrifice of a horse, that the place of sacrifice has the form of the bird Garudas, the powerful mythical eagle of the Hindoos. In the 149th hymn of the tenth book of the _Rigvedas_, the ancient well-winged son of the sun Savitar is already named Garutman. The mythical bird is the equivalent of the winged solar horse, or hippogriff; indeed, the 118th hymn of the first book of the _Rigvedas_, soon after celebrating the hawks that draw the chariot of the Açvinâu, calls them beautiful flying horses (açvâ vapushah patamgâh). We have observed that of the two twins, or the two brothers, one prevails over the other. Thus of the two mythical vultures, of the two sons of Vinatâ, in the legend of the _Mahâbhâratam_,[304] their mother having broken the egg before the proper time, one, Arunas, is born imperfect, and curses his mother, condemning her to be the slave of her rival Kadrû for five thousand years, until her other son, the luminous, perfect, and powerful solar bird Garudas, comes to release her. Arunas becomes the charioteer of the sun; Garudas is, instead, the steed of the god Vishnus, the solar horse, the sun itself, victorious in all its splendour. No sooner are the two birds born, than the horse Uccâihçravas also appears, which again signifies that solar bird and solar horse are identical. Like the hawk Indras, or the hawk of Indras, Garudas, the bird of Vishnus, or Vishnus himself, is thirsty, drinks many rivers,[305] carries off from the serpents the ambrosia, protected (as in the _Rigvedas_) by a circle of iron. Like Vishnus, Garudas, from being very tall, makes himself very little, penetrates among the serpents, covers them with dust and blinds them; it is, indeed, on account of this feat that Vishnus adopts him for his celestial steed.[306] The god Vishnus goes on the back of the well-winged one to fight against the monsters;[307] indignant with them, he throws them to the ground with the flapping of his wings; the monsters aim their darts at him as another form of the hero, and he fights on his own account and for the hero.[308] When the bird Garudas appears, the fetters of the monsters, which compress like serpents the two brothers Râmas and Lakshmanas, are loosed, and the two young heroes rise more handsome and stronger than before.[309] The Nishâdâs come from their damp abodes, enter into the gaping jaws of Garudas in thousands, enveloped by the wind and the dust.[310] (The sun of morning and that of spring devour the black monsters of night and of winter.)

Hitherto we have seen the hawk, the eagle (as Garudas), and the vulture exchanged for each other; even the Hindoo mythical genealogy confirms this exchange. According to the _Râmâyanam_,[311] of Tâmrâ (properly the reddish one; she also gave birth to Krâunci, the mother of the herons) was born Çyenî (that is, the female hawk); of Çyenî was born Vinatâ. Vinatâ (properly the bent one) laid the egg whence Arunas and Garudas came forth (the two Dioskuroi also came, as is well known, out of the egg of Léda, united with the swan); Garudas was in his turn father of two immense vultures, Gâtâyus and Sampatis. In this genealogy the ascending movement of the sun appears to be described to us, like the myth of the sun Vishnus, who, from a dwarf, becomes a giant. The vulture Gâtâyus knows everything that has happened in the past, and everything that will come to pass in the future, inasmuch as, like the Vedic sun, he is viçvavedas, all-seeing, omniscient, and has traversed the whole earth. In the _Râmâyanam_ we read of the last fierce battle of the aged vulture Gâtâyus with the terrible monster Râvanas, who carries off the beautiful Sîtâ during the absence of her husband Râmas. Gâtâyus, although old in years, rises into the air to prevent the carrying off of Sîtâ by Râvanas in a chariot drawn by asses; the vulture breaks with his strong claws the bow and arrow of Râvanas, strikes and kills the asses, splits the chariot in two, throws the charioteer down, forces Râvanas to leap to the ground, and wounds him in a thousand ways; but at last the king of the monsters succeeds with his sword in cutting off the wings, feet, and sides of the faithful bird, who expires in pain and grief, whilst the demon carries the ravished woman into Lañkâ.

Thus far, therefore, we always find in the bird of prey a friend of the hero and the god. Such is also, in the _Râmâyanam_,[312] the immense vulture that comes to place itself, and to vomit blood upon the standard of the monster Kharas, to predict his misfortunes to him; and such is the elder brother of Gâtâyus, the vulture Sampatis, who, coming out of a cavern, informs the great monkey Hanumant where Sîtâ may be found. Sampatis, after having seen Hanumant, recovers his own wings, which had been burnt by the sun's rays, once when he had wished to defend his younger brother from them whilst they were flying together too high up in the regions of the sun[313] (a variety of the Hellenic legend of Dedalus and Icarus, of that of Hanumant who wished to fly after the sun in order to catch it, and of that of the two Açvinâu).

When, in the very popular Hindoo legend of the Buddhist king who sacrifices himself instead of the dove that had looked for hospitality from him, the hawk appears as the persecutor of the dove, this apparent persecution is only a trial that Indras, the hawk, and Agnis, the dove, wish to make of the king's virtue. No sooner does the hawk see that the king offers himself up to be devoured by the hawk, who complains that the king has taken his prey, the dove, from him, than both hawk and dove reassume their divine form, and cover the holy king with benedictions.[314] Indras and Agnis, united together, are also themselves a form of the two Açvinâu, like the two faithful doves that sacrifice themselves in the third book of _Pancatantram_.

The wise çaena of the _Avesta_ has a character nearly resembling the Vedic bird çyenas. According to the _Bundehesh_, two çaenas stay at the gates of hell, which correspond to the two crepuscular hawks or vultures of the Vedâs. The bird with wings that strike, into which the hero Thraetaona is transformed in the _Khorda Avesta_, whilst it reminds us of the Hindoo warrior vulture, can serve as a link to join together the Zendic çaena and the Persian Simurg. The bird Simurg has its marvellous nest upon Mount Alburs, upon a peak that touches the sky, and which no man has ever yet seen. The child Sal is exposed upon this mountain; he is hungry and cold, and cries out; the bird Simurg passes by, hears his cry, takes pity upon him, and carries the child to its solitary peak. A mysterious voice blesses the glorious bird, who nourishes the boy, instructs, protects, and strengthens him, and, when he lets him go, gives him one of his own feathers, saying that when he is in danger he must throw this feather into the fire, and he will come at once to assist him,[315] and take him back into the kingdom. He only asks him never to forget his faithful and loving preserver. He then carries the young hero to his father's palace. The king praises the divine bird in the following words:--"O king of birds! Heaven has given thee strength and wisdom; thou art the assister of the needy, propitious to the good and the consoler of the afflicted; may evil be dispersed before thee, and may thy greatness last for ever." In the fifth adventure of Isfendiar, in _Firdusi_, the gigantic bird Simurg appears, on the contrary, as demoniacal as he that dims the sunbeams with his wings (in the _Birds_ of Aristophanes, when a great number of birds appear, the spectators cry out, "O Apollo, the clouds!") Isfendiar fights with him, and cuts him to pieces.

In Scandinavian and German mythology, while the hawk is generally a luminous shape, preferred by the heroes, and by Freya, the eagle is a gloomy form preferred by demons, or at least by the hero or god (like Odin)[316] hidden in the gloomy night or in the windy cloud. The _Edda_ tells us that the winds are produced by the shaking of the wings of a giant, who sits in the form of an eagle at the extremity of the sky; the aquila and the wind called aquilo by the Latins, as they correspond etymologically, seem also to be mythically identical. I have observed on a previous occasion that in the _Edda_ the witch rides upon a wolf, using eagles as reins. In the _Nibelungen_, Krimhilt sees in a dream his beloved hawk strangled by two eagles.

On the other hand, the swallows sing to Sigurd in the _Edda_, predicting to him his meeting with the beautiful warrior maiden who, coming forth from the battles, rides upon an eagle. But this warlike girl was, however, destined to cause the death of Sigurd.

In the chapter on the elephant, we saw how the bird Garudas transported into the air an elephant, a tortoise, a bough of a tree, and hermits. In the Greek variety of the same myth, we have the eagle instead of Garudas. In the _Edda_, three Ases (Odin, Loki, and Hönir) are cooking an ox under a tree; but from the summit of the tree, an eagle interrupts the cooking of the meat, because it wishes to have a share. The Ases consent; the eagle carries off nearly every thing, upon which Loki, indignant, wounds the eagle with a stake; but whilst one end of the stake remains attached to the eagle, the other is fastened to Loki's hand, and the eagle carries him up into the air. Loki feels his arms break, and implores the eagle to have compassion upon him; the gigantic bird lets him go, on condition of obtaining, instead of him, Iduna and her apples.[317] In the twenty-third story of the fifth book of _Afanassieff_, the eagle, after having been benefited by a peasant, eats up his sheep. The name of eagles was given during the Middle Ages to certain demons which were said to appear in the form of an eagle, especially on account of their rapacious expression, and aquiline nose.[318]

The hawk, on the other hand, I repeat, usually appears as divine, in opposition to all that is diabolical. In the twenty-second story of the fifth and the forty-sixth of the sixth book of _Afanassieff_, the hero transforms himself into a hawk, in order to strangle the cock into which the devil has metamorphosed himself (a Russian proverb, however, says of the devil that he is more pleasing than the luminous hawk).[319] When they wished, in popular Russian phraseology, to express something that it is impossible to overtake, it was said, "Like the hurricane in the field, and the luminous hawk in the sky." We know that the Latin _accipiter_ and the Greek _ôküpteros_ mean the swift-winged. In the seventh story of the first book of _Afanassieff_, the hawk appears in opposition to the black crow. When the young girl, disguised as a man, succeeds in deceiving the Tzar three times, she says to him, "Ah! thou crow, crow; thou hast not known, O crow, how to catch the hawk in a cage."

The hawk was one of the distinctive badges of the mediæval cavalier; even ladies kept them. Krimhilt brings up a wild hawk; Brunhilt, when she throws herself upon the funeral pyre, that she may not survive Sigurd, has two dogs and two hawks immolated along with her. On the sepulchres of mediæval cavaliers and ladies, a hawk was not unfrequently found, as an emblem of their nobility. According to a law of the year 818, the sword and hawk belonging to the losing cavalier were to be respected by his conqueror, and left unappropriated; the hawk to hunt, and the sword to fight with. In _Du Cange_, we read that in 1642 Monsieur De Sassay claimed as his feudal right, "ut nimirum accipitrem suum ponere possit super altare majus ecclesiæ Ebraicensis (of Evreux), dum sacra in eo peragit ocreatus, calcaribusque instructus presbyter parochus d'Ezy, pulsantibus tympanis, organorum loco." According to the law of the Burgundians, he who attempted to steal another man's hawk was, before all, obliged to conciliate the hawk itself by giving it to eat (sex uncias carnis acceptor ipse super testones comedat); or if the hawk refused to eat, the robber had to pay an indemnity to the proprietor, besides a fine (sex solidos illi cujus acceptor est, cogatur exsolvere; mulctæ autem nomine solidos duos). According to information supplied me by my learned friend Count Geza Kuun, the hawk (turul) was the military ensign of Attila. According to a tradition preserved in the chronicle of Keza and of Buda, Emesu, mother of Attila, saw in a dream a hawk which predicted a happy future to her, after which dream she became pregnant.

Nor was the hawk less honoured in Hellenic antiquity; according to Homer, it was the rapid messenger of Apollo; the spy of Apollo, sacred to Zeus, according to Ælianos; having after death the faculty of vaticination, according to Porphyrios (who even recommends the heart of a hawk, a stag, or a mole to any one about to practise divination). In the _Iliad_, Apollo coming down from Mount Ida, is compared to the swift hawk, the killer of doves, the swiftest of all birds. Many are the superstitious beliefs concerning the hawk collected by Ælianos; such as, for instance, that it does not eat the hearts of animals; that it weeps over a dead man; that it buries unburied bodies, or at least puts earth upon their eyes, in which it thinks it sees the sun again, upon which, as its most beloved star, it always fixes its gaze; that it loves gold; that it lives for seven hundred years; not to mention the extraordinary medical virtues which are always attributed to every sacred animal, and which are particularly considered as essential to the sacred hawk. Several of the qualities of the sacred hawk passed also into other falcons of inferior quality, the kite (milvius),[320] for instance, of which it is said that it was placed among the stars for having carried to Zeus the entrails of the monster bull-serpent, and, according to the third book of Ovid's _Fasti_, for having brought back to Zeus the lost ring (an ancient form of the mediæval ring of Solomon, _i.e._, the solar disc):--

"Jupiter alitibus rapere imperat, attulit illi, Milvius, et meritis venit in astra suis."

With regard to the kite, we find an apologue,[321] according to which the kite, at the point of death, asks its mother to beg grace from the neighbouring statue of the god, and especially forgiveness, for the sacrilege which it had frequently committed, discharging its body upon the image of the god (the sun upon the sky).

A richer variety of this story is found in another apologue, which illustrates a Greek proverb ("æton kantaros maieusomai"); but instead of the hawk, we have the beetle, and instead of the statue, the god himself, Zeus, with eagle's eggs in his lap. The beetle (the hostess-moon), wishing to punish the eagle, which had violated the laws of hospitality with regard to the hare (also the moon), attempts to destroy its eggs; the eagle goes and places them in the lap of Zeus; the beetle, who knows that Zeus hates everything that is unclean, lets some dung fall upon him; Zeus forgets the eggs, shakes himself, and breaks them. Here the eagle is identified with Zeus, as in the Vedic hymns the hawk with Indras. In the first of Pindar's Pythic odes, the poet speaks of the eagle as sleeping on the sceptre of Zeus (as a thunderbolt, which is the real sceptre of Zeus). The eagle of Zeus is also represented as holding the thunderbolt in its claws, which is in accordance with the sentence, "Fulmina sub Jove sunt." When Zeus is equipping himself to fight against the Titans, the eagle brings his dart to him, for which reason Zeus adopted the eagle as his ensign of war. In _Dion Cassius_, the eagles let the golden thunderbolts drop out of their talons into the camp of the Pompeians, and fly towards the camp of Cæsar to announce his victory. We find very numerous examples in the ancient classics of eagles that presage now victory, now supreme power to the heroes, that now nourish, now save them, and now sacrifice themselves for them.[322] The eagle of Zeus, the royal eagle, does not feed upon flesh, but upon herbs, properly upon the moisture of these herbs, by means of which we can comprehend the rape of Ganymede, the cup-bearer of Zeus, carried off by the eagle in the same way as the hawk of Indras carries off the somas in the _Rigvedas_. The Hellenic eagle is generally, like Zeus, a bringer of light, fertility, and happiness. Pliny narrates of an eagle, that immediately after the wedding of Augustus it let fall, as an omen of fecundity in the family of Augustus, into the lap of Livia Drusilla a white hen, having a branch of laurel in its beak; this branch was planted, and grew into a dense laurel-grove; the hen had so many descendants, that afterwards the villa where this happened was called the Villa of the Hens. Suetonius adds that in the last year of the life of Nero all the hens died, and all the laurel plants were dried up. We also find the eagle in connection with the laurel in the myth of Amphiaraos, whose spear, carried off by the eagle and plunged into the ground, grew into a laurel plant.

In the first chapter of the first book, when speaking of the myth of the aurora, we mentioned the young hero who disrobes the beautiful princess on the bank of the river and carries her apparel away. In the Hellenic myth we find a zoological variety of this myth. Aphroditê (here the evening aurora) bathes in the Acheloos (the river of night); Hermês (the extreme western light, and perhaps even the moon) becomes enamoured of her, and makes the eagle (the bird of night) carry off her garments, to obtain which, Aphroditê satisfies the desire of Hermês. In _Strabo_ we find a variation of the same story which reminds us of the fairy-tale of Cinderella. Whilst Rhodopê is bathing, the eagle snatches one of her slippers out of her maid's hands and carries it off to the king of Memphis, who, seeing the slipper, falls in love with the foot that wore it, gives orders to search everywhere for the girl to whom the slipper belongs, and, when Rhodopê is found, marries her. Ælianos says that this king was Psammetichos. But the Hellenic eagle is divine as long as the god Zeus, whom it represents, is propitious; when Zeus becomes the tyrant of heaven, and condemns Prometheus to be bound upon a rock, the eagle goes to gnaw at his heart. And because the poet Æschilos glorified Prometheus, making him curse the tyranny of Zeus, hence, doubtless, arose the legend that Æschilos was, when old and bald, killed by a tortoise, which the eagle, mistaking the head of Æschilos for a white rock, had let fall from the sky in order to break it and feed upon it. The eagle which, according to Theophrastos, announced death to the cutters of black hellebore, was also a funereal and demoniacal bird. In the eighth book of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, King Nisos, the golden-haired (the sun of evening), is transformed into a marine eagle (the night or winter), when his daughter Scylla (the night, or winter), in order to give him up to his enemies, destroys his strength by cutting his hair (an evident variation of the solar legend of Delilah and Samson).

The vulture, too, is a sacred bird in the legends of ancient classical authors; Herodotos says that it is very dear to Hêraklês (the killer of the eagle that gnaws at the heart of Prometheus, who had made for the hero the cup in which he had been enabled to cross the sea); it announces sovereign dominion to Romulus, Cæsar, and Augustus. Pliny writes that burnt vulture's feathers make serpents flee; the same feathers, according to Pliny, have the property of facilitating parturition, inasmuch as, as St Jerome writes (adversus Jovinianum ii.), "Si medicorum volumina legeris, videbis tot curationes esse in vulture, quot sunt membra."[323] Two vultures (a form of the Açvinâu) eat every day, in hell, the liver that continually grows again (the _immortale jecur_ of Virgil) of the giant Tityo, the offender of Latona (the moon), dear to Jupiter. (The monster of night is killed every day and rises again every night). The two youths Ægipios and Nephrôn are another form of the Açvinâu, who, hating each other on account of the love which each has for the other's mother, are changed by Zeus into two vultures, after that Ægipios, by a stratagem of Nephrôn, united himself with his own mother. Iphiklos consults the birds to have children, from the vulture downwards, who alone knew how to assign the reason why Iphiklos had no children and indicate the means of obtaining them. Philakos had tried to kill Iphiklos; not having succeeded, he fastened his sword on a wild pear-tree; around the sword a covering of bark grew, which hid it from the sight of men. The vulture shows the place where this tree grows, and advises Iphiklos to take the bark off, to clean the rust off the sword, and after ten days to drink the rust in a toast; Iphiklos thus obtains offspring.

The vulture, therefore, generally preserves in Græco-Latin tradition the heroic and divine character which it has in Indian tradition, although its voracity became proverbial in ancient popular phraseology. Lucian calls a great eater the greatest of all the vultures. Moreover, the special faculty of distinguishing the smell of a dead body, even before death, is attributed to him; whence Seneca, in an epistle against the man who covets the inheritance of a living person, says "Vultur es, cadaver expecta," and Plautus in the _Truculentus_ says of certain parasitical servants: "Jam quasi vulturii triduo prius prædivinabant, quo die esituri sient."

Besides these royal birds of prey that become mythical, there are several mythical birds of prey that never existed, still to be noticed, such as the phoenix, the harpy, the griffon, the strix, the Seleucide birds, the Stymphalian birds, and the sirens. Popular imagination believed in their terrestrial existence for a long time, but it can be said of them all as of the Arabian Phoenix:--

"All affirm that it exists; Where it is no one can tell."[324]

In point of fact, no man has ever seen them; a few deities or heroes alone approached them; their seat is in the sky, where, according to their several natures and the different places occupied by the sun or the moon in the sky, they attract, ravish, seduce, enchant, or destroy.

The phoenix is, beyond all doubt, the eastern and western sun; hence Petrarch was able to say with reason,

"Nè 'n ciel nè 'n terra è più d'una Fenice,"

as there is not more than one sun; and we, like the ancient Greeks, say of a rare man or object, that he or it is a phoenix. Tacitus, who narrates, in the fourteenth book, the fable of the phoenix, calls it _animal sacrum soli_; Lactantius says that it alone knows the secrets of the sun--

"Et sola arcanis conscia Phoebe tuis,"

and represents it as rendering funereal honours to its father in the temple of the sun; Claudian calls it _solis avem_ and describes its whole life in a beautiful little poem.

It is born in the East, in the wood of the sun, and until it has assumed its whole splendid shape it feeds upon dew and perfumes, whence Lactantius--

"Ambrosios libat coelesti nectare rores Stellifero teneri qui cecidere polo. Hos legit, his mediis alitur in odoribus ales, Donec maturam proferat effigiem."

It then feeds upon all that it sees. When it is about to die it thinks only of its new birth--

"Componit bustumque sibi, partumque futurum" (_Claudian_);

inasmuch as it is said to deposit a little worm, the colour of milk, in its nest, which becomes a funeral pyre,

"Fertur vermis lacteus esse color" (_Lactantius_).

Before dying, it invokes the sun:

"Hic sedet, et solem blando clangore salutat Debilior, miscetque preces, et supplice cantu Præstatura novas vires incendia poscit; Quem procul abductis vidit cum Phoebus habenis, Stat subito, dictisque pium solatur alumnum" (_Claudian_).

The sun extinguishes the conflagration, which consumes the phoenix, and out of which it has to arise once more. At last the phoenix is born again with the dawn--

"Atque ubi sol pepulit fulgentis lumina portæ, Et primi emicuit luminis aura levis, Incipit illa sacri modulamina fundere cantus, Et mira lucem voce ciere novam" (_Lactantius_).

In my opinion, no more proofs are required to demonstrate the identity of the phoenix with the sun of morning and of evening, and, by extension, with that of autumn and of spring. That which was fabled concerning it in antiquity, and by reflection, in the Middle Ages, agrees perfectly with the twofold luminous phenomenon of the sun that dies and is born again every day and every year out of its ashes, and of the hero or heroine who traverses the flames of the burning pyre intact.

The nature of the phoenix is the same as that of the burning bird (szar-ptitza) of Russian fairy tales, which swallows the dwarf who goes to steal its eggs (the evening aurora swallows the sun).[325]

The solar bird of evening is a bird of prey; it draws to itself with its damp claw; it draws into the darkness of night; it has night behind it; its appearance is charming and its countenance alluring, but the rest of its body is as horrid as its nature.

Virgil and Dante ascribe women's faces to the Harpies--

"Ali hanno late e colli e visi umani Piè con artigli e pennuto il gran ventre."

Rutilius[326] says that their claws are glutinous--

"Quæ pede glutineo, quod tetigere trahunt."

Others give them vultures' bodies, bears' ears, arms and feet of men, and the white breasts of women. Servius, speaking of the name they bear of _canes Jovis_, notes that this epithet was given them because they are the Furies in person, "Unde etiam epulas apud Virgilium abripiunt, quod Furiarum est." Ministers of the vengeance of Zeus, they contaminate the harvests of the king-seer Phineus, inspired by Apollo, whom some consider to be a form of Prometheus, the revealer of the secret of Zeus to mankind, and others, the blinder of his own sons.

The bird of prey, the evening solar bird, becomes a strix, or witch, during the night. We have already noticed the popular belief that the cat, at seven years of age, becomes a witch. An ancient superstition given by Aldrovandi also recognises witches in cats, and adds that, in this form, they suck the blood of children. The same is done by the witches of popular stories,[327] and by the striges. During the night they suck the blood of children; that is to say, the night takes away the colour, the red, the blood of the sun. Ovid, in the sixth book of the _Fasti_, represents the maleficent striges as follows:

"Nocte volant, puerosque petunt nutricis egentes, Et vitiant cunis corpora rapta suis. Carpere dicuntur lactentia viscera rostris, Et plenum poto sanguine guttur habent."

Festus derives the word strix _à stringendo_, from the received opinion that they strangle children. The striges, in the book of the _Fasti_, previously quoted, attack the child Proca, who is only five days old--

"Pectoraque exhorbent avidis infantia linguis."

The nurse invokes the help of Crane, the friend of Janus, who has the faculty of hunting good and evil away from the doorsteps of houses. Crane hunts the witches away with a magical rod, and cures the child thus--

"Protinus arbutea postes ter in ordine tangit Fronde ter arbutea limina fronde notat. Spargit aquis aditus, et aquæ medicamen habebant, Extaque de porca cruda bimestre tenet."

The usual conjurings are added, and the incident ends thus--

"Post illud, nec aves cunas violasse feruntur, Et rediit puero qui fuit ante color."

Quintus Serenus, when the _strix atra_ presses the child, recommends as an amulet, garlic, of which we have seen that the strong odour puts the monstrous lion to flight.

The same maleficent and demoniacal nature is shared in by the bats and the vampires, which I recognise in the "two winged ones entreated not to suck" of a Vedic hymn.[328]

Of analogous nature were the Stymphalian birds, which obscure the sun's rays with their wings, use their feathers as darts, devour men and lions, and are formidable on account of their claws--

"Unguibus Arcadiæ volucres Stymphala colentes" (_Lucretius_);

which Hêraklês, and afterwards the Argonauts, by the advice of the wise Phineos, put to flight with the noise of a musical instrument, and by striking their shields and spears against each other. The bird of Seleucia which Galenus describes as "of an insatiable appetite, malignant, astute, a devourer of locusts," also has the same diabolical nature. If our identification of the locust with the moon be accepted, to kill the locust, its shadow alone sufficed. But inasmuch as the locusts are considered destroyers of corn, the birds of Seleucia, which come to devour them, are held to be beneficent, and the ministers of Zeus.

The gryphes are represented as of double nature, now propitious, now malignant. Solinus calls them, "Alites ferocissimæ et ultra rabiem sævientes." Ktesias declares that India possesses gold in mountains inhabited by griffins, quadrupeds, as large as wolves, which have the legs and claws of a lion, red feathers on their breasts and in their other parts, eyes of fire and golden nests. For the sake of the gold, the Arimaspi, one-eyed men, fight with the griffins. As the latter have long ears, they easily hear the robbers of the gold; and if they capture them, they invariably kill them. In Hellenic antiquity, the griffins were sacred to Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, and were represented in sepulchres in the act of pressing down a bull's head; but they were far more celebrated as sacred to the golden sun, Apollo, whose chariot they drew (the hippogriff, which, in mediæval chevaleresque poems, carries the hero, is their exact equivalent). And as Apollo is the prophetical and divining deity, whose oracle, when consulted, delivers itself in enigmas, the word _griffin_, too, meant enigma, logogriph being an enigmatical speech, and griffonnage an entangled, confused, and embarrassing handwriting.

Finally, the siren, or mermaid, who had a woman's face, and ended now as a bird, now as a fish; and who, according to Greek grammarians, had the form of a sparrow in its upper parts and of a woman in the lower, seems to be a lunar rather than a solar animal. The sirens allure navigators in particular, and fly after the ship of the cunning Odysseus, who stuffs his ears; for which reason they throw themselves in despair into the sea. The sirens are fairies like Circe; hence Horace[329] names them together--

"Sirenum voces et Circes pocula nosti."

Pliny, who believed that they existed in India, attributed to them the faculty of lulling men to sleep by their songs, in order to tear them to pieces afterwards; they calmed the winds of the sea by their voices, they knew and could reveal every secret (like the fairy or Madonna moon). Some say that the sirens were born of the blood of Acheloos, defeated by Hêraklês; others, of Acheloos and one of the Muses; others, again, narrate that they were once girls, and that Aphroditê transformed them into sirens because they wished to remain virgins. In the sixteenth Esthonian story, the beautiful maiden of the waters, daughter of the mother of the waters, falls in love with a young hero with whom she stays six days of the week; the seventh day, Thursday, she leaves him, to go and plunge into the water, forbidding the youth to come and see her: the young man is unable to repress his curiosity, surprises the maiden when bathing, and discovers that she is a woman in her upper and a fish in her lower parts--

"Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne;"

the maiden of the waters is conscious of being looked at, and disappears sorrowfully from the young man's sight.[330]

FOOTNOTES:

[289] Pra çyenah çyenebhya âçupâtvâ--Acakrayâ yat svadhayâ suparno havyam bharan manave devagushtam; _Rigv._ iv. 26, 4.--The somah çyenâbhritah is also mentioned in the _Rigv._ i. 80, 2, iv. 27, ix. 77, and other passages.

[290] Çatam mâ pura âyasîr arakshann adha çyeno gavasâ nir adîyam; _Rigv._ iv. 27, 1.

[291] Yam te çyenaç cârum avrikam padâbharad arunam mânam andhasah--enâ vayo vi târy âyur givasa enâ gagâra bandhutâ; _Rigv._ x. 144, 5.

[292] In the _Mahâbhâratam_ (i. 2383), the ambrosia takes the shape of sperm. A king, far from his wife Girikâ, thinks of her; the sperm comes from him and falls upon a leaf. A hawk carries the leaf away; another hawk sees it and disputes with it for the possession of the leaf; they fight with one another and the leaf falls into the waters of the Yamunâ, where the nymph Adrikâ (equivalent to Girikâ), changed by a curse into a fish, sees the leaf, feeds upon the sperm, becomes fruitful, and is delivered; cfr. the chapter on the Fishes.

[293] Çyeno 'yopâshtir hanti dasyûn; _Rigv._ x. 99, 8.--In the Russian stories the hawk and the dog are sometimes the most powerful helpers of the hero.

[294] Ghrishuh çyenâya kritvana âsuh; _Rigv._ x. 144, 3.--Yam suparnah parâvatah çyenasya putra âbharat çatacakram; _Rigv._ x. 144, 1.

[295] Sa pûrvyah pavate yam divas pari çyeno mathâyad ishitas tiro ragah sa madhva â yuvate yevigâna it kriçânor astur manasâha bibhyushâ; _Rigv._ ix. 77, 2.

[296] iii. 3, 26.

[297] Antah patat patatry asya parnam; _Rigv._ iv. 27, 4.--Cfr. for this mythical episode the texts given by Prof. Kuhn and the relative discussions, _Die Herabkunft d. F. u. d. S._, pp. 138 _seq._ and 180 _seq._

[298] Çyeno na bhîtah; _Rigv._ i. 32, 14.

[299] Anyam divo mâtariçvâ gabhârâmathnâd anyam pari çyeno adreh; _Rigv._ i. 93, 6.

[300] Â vâm çyenâso açvinâ vahantu--ye apturo divyâso na gridhrâh; _Rigv._ i. 118, 4.

[301] Gridhreva vriksham nidhimantam acha; _Rigv._ ii. 39, 1.

[302] _Rigv._ i. 88, 4.--In fact, in the hymn i. 165, 2, the Marutas are explicitly compared to hawks that fly through the air (çyenân iva dhragato antarikshe).

[303] Drapsah samudram abhi yag gigâti paçyan gridhrasya cakshasâ; _Rigv._ x. 123, 8.

[304] i. 1078, _seq._

[305] _Mbh._ i. 1495.

[306] _Ib._ i. 1496, _seq._

[307] _Râmây._ vii. 6.

[308] _Ib._ vii. 7.

[309] _Ib._ vi. 26.

[310] _Mbh._ i. 1337, _seq._

[311] iii. 20.

[312] iii. 29.

[313] _Râmây._ iv. 58, 59.

[314] For the numerous Eastern varieties of this legend, cfr. the Einleitung to the _Pancatantram_, of Prof. Benfey, p. 388, _seq._--In the fifth story of the first book of _Afanassieff_ (cfr. the sixth of the same book), Little John is carried back from the bottom of the earth into Russia upon the wings of an eagle. When the eagle is hungry it turns its head, and Johnny gives it food; when the provisions come to an end, Johnny feeds it with his own flesh.--In the twenty-seventh story of the second book, the two young people are carried from the world of darkness into that of light on the wings of the bird Kolpalitza; when the provisions come to an end, it is the girl that gives flesh, cut off her thigh, to the bird. But the youth, who has with him the water of life, heals the amorous maiden; cfr. also _Afanassieff_, v. 23, and v. 28, where, instead of the eagle, we find the hawk.--The same sacrifice of himself is made in a Piedmontese story, recorded by me in first number of the _Rivista Orientale_, by a young prince, who wishes to cross the sea in order to see the princess that he loves; the same is done by the young hero of the following unpublished Tuscan story, which I heard from a certain Martino Nardini of Prato:--"A three-headed dragon steals during the night the golden apples in the garden of the king of Portugal; the three sons of the king watch during the night: the first two fall asleep, but the third discovers the thief and wounds him. The day after, the three brothers follow the track caused by the robber's blood: they come to a beautiful palace, in which there is a cistern, into which the third brother is lowered down, taking a trumpet with him to sound when he wishes to be taken up. Following a dark path he comes to a fine meadow, where there are three splendid palaces, one of bronze, one of silver, and one of gold; following the trace of blood, he goes to the palace of bronze; a beautiful maiden opens the gate to him, and wonders why he has come down to the world underground; the young couple are pleased with each other, and promise to marry one another; the maiden has a crown of brilliants, of which she gives him half as a pledge. The dragon comes back home, and says:--

"Ucci, ucci O che puzzo di Cristianucci, O ce n' è, o ce n' è stati, O ce n' è di rimpiattati."

The maiden, who has concealed the young hero, caresses the dragon and makes him fall asleep. When he is asleep, she brings the young man out of his concealment, gives him a sword and tells him to cut the three heads off at one blow. Helped by a second maiden, the young hero prepares to accomplish a second undertaking in the silver palace of the five-headed dragon. He must cut the five heads off at a blow, for if one remains, it is as if he had cut none off. After having killed the dragon, he promises to marry the second maiden too. Finally, he knocks at the gate of the golden palace, which is opened by a third maiden; she too asks, "What ever induced you to come to lose your life in the lower world? The seven-headed dragon lives here." He promises to marry her; the dragon does not wish to go to rest this night; but the maiden persuades him to do so, upon which the youth cuts off the seven heads in two strokes. The three girls, who were three princesses carried off by the dragons, are released, and take all the riches that they can find in order to carry them into the upper world. They come to the cistern, the hero sounds the trumpet, and the two brothers draw up all the riches, the three maidens, shutting up the entrance with a stone, and leaving their young brother alone in the subterranean world. The two elder brothers force the three princesses to declare that they had delivered them; they then go to the King of Portugal and boast of this feat, saying, that the third brother is lost. The three princesses are sad, at which the King of Portugal wonders. The elder brothers wish to marry the maiden who was in the bronze palace; but she declares that she will only marry him who brings to her the other half of the crown of brilliants. They send to all the goldsmiths and jewellers to find one who can make it. Meanwhile, the third brother, abandoned underground, cries out for aid; an eagle approaches the tomb, and promises to carry him into the world above, if he will allay its hunger. The young hero, by the eagle's advice, puts lizards and serpents into a sack, and calls the eagle after having made a plentiful provision of food. He fastens the sack round his neck in order to give an animal to the eagle each time that it asks for food. When they are a few arms' length distant from the upper world, the sack is empty; the youth cuts his flesh off with a knife and gives it to the eagle, which carries him into the world, when the young man asks him how he can return home. The bird directs him to follow the high road. A charcoal-seller passes by; the young man proposes himself as his assistant, on condition that he give him some food. The charcoal-seller takes him with himself for some time, and then recommends him to an old man, his friend, who is a silversmith. Meanwhile, the king's servants have been six months wandering towards the sunset, searching for a silversmith capable of making the other half of the crown, but in vain; they then wander for six months towards the sunrise till they come to the dwelling of the poor silversmith where the third brother serves as an assistant. The old man says he is not able to make the half crown; but the young man asks to see the other half, recognises it, and promises to give it back entire in eight days. At the expiration of this time, the king sends for the crown and the manufacturer, but the youth sends his master instead of himself. The princess, however, insists upon seeing the young assistant too; he is sent for and brought to the palace; the king does not recognise him, and asks what reward he wants; he answers that he wishes for what the crown cost to the princess. The latter recognises him, after which his father does so too. The young hero weds the princess to whom he had promised himself; and the two brothers are covered with inflammable gums, and used as lamps to light up the wedding.

[315] In a hitherto unpublished story of the Monferrato, communicated to me by Signor Ferraro, a king with three sons is blind; he would be cured if he could bathe his eyes in oil with a feather of the griffon-bird, which lives upon a high mountain. The third brother succeeds in catching one, having been kind to an old woman; he brings the griffon-bird to his father, who recovers his sight and his youth.--Cfr. the third story of the fourth book of the _Pentamerone_, in which a hawk that is a princess transformed, also gives to the brother of his wife one of his feathers, which he is to throw to the ground in case of necessity; indeed, when young Tittone requires it, a battalion of hawks appear in order to free the imprisoned maiden loved by Tittone.--In the fifth story of the fifth book of the _Pentamerone_, the hawk serves as a guide to a young king to find a beautiful princess whom a witch has put to sleep, and who is believed to be dead. This princess becomes the mother of two sons, who are called Sun and Moon.--In the sixth Sicilian story of Signora Gonzenbach, a young man releases an eagle that was entangled in the branches of a tree; the grateful eagle gives him one of its feathers; letting it fall to the ground, the youth can become an eagle at pleasure.

[316] In the ninth Esthonian story it is the eagle that takes the message to the thunder-god to enable him to recover his weapon, which the devil had carried off.--In the first Esthonian story, the eagle also appears as the propitious messenger of the young prince.

[317] In the story of Santo Stefano, _La Principessa che non ride_, the eaglets have the same faculty of drawing after themselves everything that they touch; and, as forms of the winds (or the clouds), in which character they sometimes appear, we can understand this property of theirs; the wind, too, draws after itself everything that comes in its way, and especially the violent north wind (aquilo).--In Russian stories we have, instead, now the funereal storks, now the marvellous goose taking the place of the eagle that drags things behind it.

[318] In the tenth Sicilian story of Signora Gonzenbach, it is in the shape of a silver eagle that the king of the assassins penetrates into the room where the young wife of the king sleeps, upon whom he wishes to avenge himself.--Stephanus Stephanius, the interpreter of _Saxo Grammaticus_, writes, that among the English, the Danes, and other Northern nations, it was the custom when an enemy was defeated, to thrust a sword, as a greater mark of ignominy, into his back, in such a manner as to separate the backbone on both sides by a longitudinal wound; thence stripes of flesh having been cut off, they were fastened to the sides, so as to represent eagle's wings. (In Russian popular stories, when heroes and monsters fight, we find frequent reference to a similar custom.)

[319] Panravílas sataná lucshe yasnavo sakalá, _Afanassieff_, vi. 16.--The proverb, however, may have another sense, viz., better the devil in person than a beautiful but diabolical shape. The devil sometimes assumed the form of a hawk, as we learn from the legend of Endo, an English man-at-arms, who became enamoured of one into which the devil had transformed himself, in Guillelmus Neubrigensis, _Hist. Angl._ i. 19.

[320] In Plato's _Phædon_, rapacious men are transformed into wolves and kites.

[321] Cfr. Aldrovandi, _Ornith._ v.--And, moreover, in the same Aldrovandi:--"Narrant qui res Africanas literis mandarunt Aquilam marem aliquando cum Lupa coire ... producique ac edi Draconem, qui rostro et alis avis speciem referat, cauda serpentem, pede Lupum, cute esse versicolorem, nec supercilia posse attollere."

[322] I recommend, to whoever wishes to find all these circumstances united, the perusal of the first volume of the _Ornithologia_ of Aldrovandi, who dedicated in it to birds of prey a long and detailed study.--Cfr. also Bachofen. _Die Sage von Tanaquil_, Heidelberg, 1870.

[323] Comparative popular medicine might be the subject of a special work which could not fail to be instructive and interesting.

[324]

"Come l'Araba Fenice; Che ci sia, ciascun lo dice; Dove sia, nessun lo sa."

[325] Cfr. _Afanassieff_, v. 27.

[326] _Itin._ i.

[327] In the first chapter of the first book we saw how the witch sucked the breasts of the beautiful maiden.--In _Du Cange_, s. v. _Amma_, we read as follows: "Isidorus, lib. xii. cap. vii. bubo strix nocturna: 'Hæc avis, inquit ille, vulgo Amma dicitur ab amando parvulos, unde et lac præbere dicitur nascentibus.' Anilem hanc fabulam non habet Papias MS. Ecclesiæ Bituricensis. Sic enim ille: Amma avis nocturna ab amando dicta, hæc et strix dicitur a stridore."

[328] Mâ mâm ime patatrinî vi dugdhâm; _Rigv._ i. 158, 4.--In Sicily, the bat called _taddarita_ is considered as a form of the demon; to take and kill it, one sings to it--

"Taddarita, 'ncanna, 'ncanna, Lu dimonio ti 'ncanna E ti 'ncanna pri li peni Taddarita, veni, veni."

When it is caught, it is conjured, because, when it shrieks, it blasphemes. Hence it is killed at the flame of a candle or at the fire, or else is crucified.

[329] According to a Sicilian story, as yet unpublished, communicated to me by Dr Ferraro, a siren once carried off a girl, and bore her out to sea with her; and, though she occasionally allowed her to come to the shore, she secured her against running away by means of a chain which was fastened to her own tail. The brother released his sister by throwing bread and meat to the siren to satiate her hunger, employing seven blacksmiths the while to cut the chain.

[330] Cfr. the _Pentamerone_, iv. 7; and the legend of Lohengrin, in the chapter on the Swan.