He the seven birds hath seen that never part,
Seen the Seven Whistlers on their nightly rounds
And counted them.
The idea that the wailing of invisible birds is a warning of danger direct from Providence prevails especially in the English colliery districts, where wildfowl, migrating at night and calling to one another as they go, supply exactly the right suggestion to the timid. Sailors fear them as “storm-bringers.” Even more horrifying is the primitive Welsh conception (probably capable of a similar explanation) of the Three Birds of Rhiannon, wife of Pwyll, ruler of Hades, that could sing the dead to life and the living into the sleep of death. Luckily they were heard only at the death of great heroes in battle.
How easily such things may beguile the imagination is told in Thomas W. Higginson’s book on army life in the black regiment of which he was the colonel during the Civil War. This sane and vigorous young officer writes of an incident on the South Carolina Coast: “I remember that, as I stood on deck in the still and misty evening, listening with strained senses for some sound of approach of an expected boat, I heard a low continuous noise from the distance, more mild and desolate than anything my memory can parallel. It came from within the vast circle of mist, and seemed like the cry of a myriad of lost souls upon the horizon’s verge; it was Dante become audible: yet it was but the accumulated cries of innumerable seafowl at the entrance of the outer bay.”[[9]]
But I have rambled away along an enticing by-path, as will frequently happen in the remainder of this book—to the reader’s interest, I venture to believe.
Returning to the theme of a moment ago, I recall that the Rev. H. Friend[[11]] tells us that he has seen Buddhist priests in Canton “bless a small portion of their rice, and place it at the door of the refectory to be eaten by the birds which congregate there.” These offerings are to the “house spirits,” by which the Chinese mean the spirits of their ancestors, who are still kindly interested in the welfare of the family. This is real ancestor-worship expressed in birds; and Spence[[12]] records that “the shamans of certain tribes of Paraguay act as go-betweens between the members of their tribes and such birds as they imagine enshrine the souls of their departed relatives.” The heathen Lombards ornamented their grave-posts with the effigy of a dove. This notion of birds as reincarnated human souls is not confined to untutored minds nor to an ancient period. Evidences of its hold on the human imagination may be found in Europe down to the present day, and it animates one of the most picturesque superstitions of pious followers of Mahomet, two forms of which have come to me. The first is given by Doughty,[[13]] the second by Keane,[[14]] both excellent authorities.
Doughty says: “It was an ancient opinion of the idolatrous Arabs that the departing spirit flitted from man’s brainpan as a wandering fowl, complaining thenceforward in perpetual thirst her unavenged wrong; friends, therefore, to avenge the friend’s soul-bird, poured upon the grave their pious libations of wine. The bird is called a ‘green fowl.’”
Quoting Keane: “It is a superstition among the Mohammedans that the spirits of martyrs are lodged in the crops of green birds, and partake of the fruit and drink of the rivers of paradise; also that the souls of the good dwell in the form of white birds near the throne of God.”
But the spirits represented in birds are not always ancestral or benevolent: they may be unpleasant, foreboding, demoniac. The Indians and negroes along the Amazons will not destroy goatsuckers. Why? Because they are receptacles for departed human souls who have come back to earth unable to rest because of crimes done in their former bodies, or to haunt cruel and hard-hearted masters. In Venezuela and Trinidad the groan-like cries of the nocturnal, cave-dwelling guacharos are thought to be the wailing of ghosts compelled to stay in their caverns in order to expiate their sins. Even now, the Turks maintain that the dusky shearwaters that daily travel in mysterious flocks up and down the Bosphorus are animated by condemned human souls.