We have had occasion to speak of the eagle in many different aspects, as the elected king of the birds, as an emblem of empire, and so on, but there remain for use in this chapter some very curious attributes assigned to the great bird by ancient wonder-mongers that long ago would have been lost in the discarded rubbish of primitive ideas—mental toys of the childhood of the world—had they not been preserved for us in the undying pages of literature. Poetry, especially, is a sort of museum of antique inventions, preserving for us specimens—often without labels—of speculative stages in the early development of man’s comprehension of nature.
In the case of the eagle (as a genus, in the Old World not always clearly distinguished from vultures and the larger hawks) it is sometimes difficult to say whether some of its legendary aspects are causes or effects of others. Was its solar quality, for example, a cause or a consequence of its supposed royalty in the bird tribe? The predatory power, lofty flight, and haughty yet noble mien of the true eagle, may account for both facts, together or separately. It would be diving too deeply into the murky depths of mythology to show full proof, but it may be accepted that everywhere, at least in the East, the fountain of superstitions, the eagle typified the sun in its divine aspect. This appears as a long-accepted conception at the very dawn of history among the sun-worshippers of the Euphrates Valley, and it persisted in art and theology until Christianity remodelled such “heathen” notions to suit the new trend of religious thought, and transformed the “bird of fire” into a symbol of the Omnipotent Spirit—an ascription which artists interpreted very liberally.
In Egypt a falcon replaced it in its religious significance, true eagles being rare along the Nile, and “eagle-hawks” were kept in the sun-gods’ temples, sacred to Horus (represented with a hawk-head surmounted by a sun-disk), Ra, Osiris, Seku, and other solar divinities. “It was regarded,” as Mr. Cook explains in Zeus,[[37]] “as the only bird that could look with unflinching gaze at the sun, being itself filled with sunlight, and eventually akin to fire.” Later, people made it the sacred bird of Apollo, and Mithraic worshippers spoke of Helios as a hawk, but crude superstitions among the populace were mixed with this priestly reverence.
It was universally believed of the eagle, that, as an old writer said, “she can see into the great glowing sun”; few if any were aware that she could veil her eyes by drawing across the orbs that third eyelid which naturalists term the nictitating membrane. Hence arose that further belief, lasting well into the Middle Ages, that the mother-bird proved her young by forcing them to gaze upon the sun, and discarding those who shrank from the fiery test—“Like Eaglets bred to Soar, Gazing on Starrs at heaven’s mysterious Pow’r,” wrote an anonymous poet in 1652. “Before that her little ones be feathered,” in the words of an old compiler of marvels quoted by Hulme,[[38]] “she will beat and strike them with her wings, and thereby force them to looke full against the sunbeams. Now if she sees any one of them to winke, or their eies to water at the raies of the sunne, she turns it with the head foremost out of the nest as a bastard.”
How many who now read the 103d Psalm, or that fine figure of rhetoric in Milton’s Areopagitica, could explain the full meaning of the comparison used? The passage referred to is that in which Milton exclaims: “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep.... Methinks I see her renewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the sun.” Milton evidently expected all his readers to appreciate the value of his simile—to know that eagles were credited with just this power of juvenescence. “When,” in the words of an even older chronicler, “an eagle hathe darkness and dimness in een, and heavinesse in wings, against this disadvantage she is taught by kinde to seek a well of springing water, and then she flieth up into the aire as far as she may, till she be full hot by heat of the air and by travaille of flight, and so then by heat the pores being opened, and the feathers chafed, and she falleth sideingly into the well, and there the feathers be chaunged and the dimness of her een is wiped away and purged, and she taketh again her might and strength.” Isn’t that a finely constructed tale? Spencer thought so when he wrote:
As eagle fresh out of the ocean wave,
Where he hath left his plumes, all hoary gray,
And decks himself with feathers, youthful, gay.
Margaret C. Walker[[39]] elaborates the legend in her excellent book, suggesting that it may have originated in contemplation of the great age to which eagles are supposed to live; but to my mind it grew out of the ancient symbolism that made the eagle represent the sun, which plunges into the western ocean every night, and rises, its youth renewed every morning.
“It is related,” says Miss Walker, “that when this bird feels the season of youth is passing by, and when his young are still in the nest, he leaves the aging earth and soars toward the sun, the consumer of all that is harmful. Mounting upward to the third region of the air—the region of meteors—he circles and swings about under the great fiery ball in their midst, turning every feather to its scorching rays, then, with wings drawn back, like a meteor himself, he drops into some cold spring or into the ocean wave there to have the heat driven inward by the soul-searching chill of its waters. Then flying to his eyrie he nestles among his warm fledglings, till, starting into perspiration, he throws off his age with his feathers. That his rejuvenescence may be complete, as his sustenance must be of youth, he makes prey of his young, feeding on the nestlings that have warmed him. He is clothed anew and youth is again his.”