94. The Double-headed Eagle
An unexpected story of wandering attaches to the figure or symbol of the double-headed eagle. Like many other elements of civilization, this goes back to an Egyptian beginning. One of the great gods of Egypt was the sun. The hawk and vulture were also divine animals. A combination was made showing the disk of the sun with a long narrow wing on each side. Or the bird itself was depicted with outstretched wings but its body consisting of the sun disk. These were striking figures of considerable æsthetic and imaginative appeal. From Egypt the design was carried in the second millenium B.C. to the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and to the Hittites of Asia Minor. A second head was added, perhaps to complete the symmetry of the figure. Just as a wing and a foot went out from each side of the body or disk, so now there was a head facing each way. This double-headed bird symbol was carved on cliffs in Asia Minor. Here the pictures remained, no doubt wondered at but uncopied, for two thousand years. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries after Christ, the Turkish princes, feeling the symbol to be a fit emblem of sovereignty, began stamping it on their coins. The later Crusaders brought these coins, or the idea of the pattern, back with them to Europe, where the mediæval art of heraldry was flourishing. The double-headed eagle was a welcome addition to the lions and griffins with which artists were emblazoning the coats of arms of the feudal nobility. The meaning of sovereignty remaining attached to the figure, the device before long became indicative of the imperial idea. This is the origin of its use as a symbol in the late empires of Austro-Hungary and Russia.
Four hundred years ago Charles V was king of Spain and Austria and Holy Roman emperor of Germany. It was in his reign that Cortez and Pizarro conquered Mexico and Peru. Thus the symbol of the double-headed eagle was carried into the New World and the Indians became conversant with it. Even some of the wilder tribes learned the figure, although they were perhaps more impressed with it as a decorative motive than as an emblem. At any rate, they introduced it into their textiles and embroideries. The Huichol in the remote mountains of Mexico, who use the design thus, seem to believe that their ancestors had always been conversant with the figure. But such a belief of course proves no more than did the ignorance of European heraldists of the fact that their double-headed eagle came to them from Asia Minor and ultimately from Egypt. No pre-Columbian representation of the two-headed eagle is known from Mexico. The conclusion can therefore hardly be escaped that this apparently indigenous textile pattern of the modern Huichol is also to be derived from its far source in ancient Egypt of whose existence they have never heard.