Does their sight betoken us evil?”
“To see one raven is luck, ’tis true,
But it’s certain misfortune to light upon two,
And meeting with three is the devil.”
Quoting Margaret Walker:[[39]]
The belief in his power of divination was so general that knowledge of the whereabouts of the lost has come to be known as “raven’s knowledge.” To the Romans he was able to reveal the means of restoring lost eyesight even. In Germany he was able to tell not only where lost articles were, but could also make known to survivors where the souls of their lost friends were to be found. In Bohemia he was assigned the task usually performed by the stork in other lands, while in some parts of Germany witches were credited with riding upon his back instead of on the conventional broomstick.
Regular formulas regarding magpies are repeated in rural Britain, where magpies are numerous—they are common in our American West, also, but nobody is superstitious about them there—of which a common example runs:
One for sorrow, two for mirth,
Three for a wedding, four for a birth.
Many variations of these formulas are on record, some carrying the rimes up to eight or nine pies seen at once; and folklore has many quaint ways of dissipating the evil effects feared from their presence.