Glendower: The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble.
Hotspur: O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,
And not in fear of your nativity.
Diseased nature often times breaks forth
In strange eruptions: oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of cholic pinched and vexed,
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth, and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers.
In the Greek mythology the owl was the symbol of Athenê. Hence, as before observed, she was styled "Glaucopis," or owl-eyed. According to Payne Knight, this symbol was adopted for the wise goddess because the owl was "a bird which seems to surpass all other creatures in acuteness of organic perception, its eye being calculated to observe objects which to all others are enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear sounds distinctly, and its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with such nicety that it has been deemed prophetic, from discovering the putridity of death even in the first stages of disease." As in the case of the dog, referred to in Chapter IX., it is by no means improbable that the extremely delicate sense of smell possessed by the owl, lies at the root of this superstition. Its after development into a prophetic power respecting approaching death, even without previous disease, can easily be understood, after the original physical conditions had entered into the mythical realm of legend and superstition.
The cuckoo is generally regarded, like the owl and the raven, as a bird of ill omen. According to Mannhardt, on first hearing its note, the German peasant rolls himself on the grass, as he does when he hears thunder. The observance of this ceremony is supposed to insure to the individual freedom from aches and pains during the year. It is considered to be unlucky to hear the cuckoo for the first time without coin in the pocket. The more fortunate peasants yet instinctively turn over their money to insure "luck" on first hearing this bird's cry.
The old English rhyme is well known in Lancashire:—
Cuckoo, cherry tree,
Good bird tell me,
How many years have I to live.
In some places there is a triple rhyme, the last line reading thus:
How many years before I dee? (die).
I remember well indulging in my youth, with other boys, in the divination described by Sir Henry Ellis, as follows:—"Easy to foretel what sort of summer it would be by the position in which the larva of Cicàda (Aphrophora) spumaria was found to lie in the froth (cuckoo-spit) in which it is enveloped. If the insect lay with its head upwards, it infallibly denoted a dry summer; if downwards, a wet one." The said spume was fully believed to have been deposited upon the vegetation by the expectoration of the cuckoo.
Cuckoos are believed to become sparrowhawks in winter. The Rev. H. B. Fristram, at a recent meeting of the British Association, held at Newcastle-on-Tyne, stated when he once remonstrated with a man for shooting a cuckoo, "the defence was that it was well known that sparrowhawkes turned into cuckoos in the summer." Grimm states that in Germany, after St. John's day, about the time when it becomes mute, the cuckoo is believed to change into a hawk. Referring to these facts, Kelly pertinently asks, as "the form of the cuckoo remotely resembles that of the falcon tribe, may we hazard a conjecture that hence, in German tradition, that bird in some degree represents the fire-bringing falcon of the Aryans?" Mannhardt says, "The cuckoo is the messenger of Thor, the god in whose gift were health and strength, length of days, and marriage blessings, and therefore it is that people call upon the bird to tell how long they have to live, how soon they will be married, and how many children they shall have; and that in Schaumberg the person who acts at a wedding as master of the ceremonies carries a cuckoo on his staff."