Now all this is but the ragtag and bobtail, as it were, of the science of the ancient Oriental world that has come down to us in frayed and disconnected fragments, to be now a matter more of amusing research than of belief or practice among most of us. It was old even at the beginning of the Christian era, but all the ornithomancy of the Greek and Roman soothsayers was inherited in its principle, if not always in its forms, from the remotely antique “wisdom” of the East, in which the consultation of birds appears to be the basis of divination.
In the Far East the raven has been regarded from time immemorial with dread interest, and where that species was rare the crow—equally black, destructive, and cunning—took its place. To the primitive philosophers of Persia and India the raven was a divine bird, of celestial origin and supernatural abilities, and was the messenger who announced the will of the Deity. A German commentator on the Vedas, H. Oldenberg, concludes that the animals sent by the gods, as pictured in the myths, were those of a weird, demoniacal nature, and were for this reason themselves deified, but subsequently became mere stewards to divine mandators. “In the belief of the Persians,” says Lauffer, “the raven was sacred to the god of light and the sun.” Moncure D. Conway,[[56]] when discussing the Biblical legend of the Deluge, suggests that the raven sent out of the Ark may typify the “darkness of the face of the deep,” and the dove the “spirit of God” that “moved upon the face of the waters.”
In China, Dr. Williams[[76]] tells us, “the sun is signalized by the figure of a raven in a circle.” I have seen Chinese drawings of it in which the raven (or a crow) stood on three legs, as does the toad that the Taoists see in the moon—but why three legs? Mrs. Ball answers this question thus:
The crow—known in China as wuya, and in Japan as karasu—is most intimately related to the sun. Ch’un Ch’iu in an ancient poem says: “The spirit of the sun is a crow with three legs”; while again Hwai Nan Tse, an ancient philosopher, explains that this crow has three legs because the number three is the emblem of yang [light, good] of which the sun is the supreme essence.... The Chinese, it would appear, actually believed in the existence of a three-legged crow, for in the official history of the Wei dynasty—3d century A. D.—it is related that “more than thirty times, tributes consisting of three-legged crows were brought from the neighboring countries.... The principal of sun-worship [in Japan] was Amateresu no Ohokami, from whom the imperial family traces its descent. This divinity ... had as her messenger and attendant ... a red bird having three legs.”
Based on the fears and philosophy indicated above, the soothsayers of India contrived a most elaborate scheme of judging meanings from the actions of ravens and crows, for little attention seems to have been paid to ornithological distinctions; and this spread in very early times to China and Thibet. It is a wonderful monument of priestcraft, which has been elucidated by several students of early Oriental manuscripts; and I am indebted to a profoundly learned discourse on the subject by Dr. Berthold Lauffer.[[52]] Briefly the scheme was as follows:
A table or chart was constructed containing ninety squares, each square holding an interpretation of one or another sound of a raven’s or crow’s voice; but his utterances were separated into five characters of sound, and the day divided into five “watches,” while the direction from which the bird’s voice came may be from any one of eight points of the compass, or from the zenith, making nine points in all. Multiplying these together gives the ninety squares of the mystic table, and the intersection of two conditions gives you the square where the appropriate interpretation or prophecy is written.
Thus if in the first watch (i.e., early in the morning) you hear a raven in the east say ka-ka, your wish to obtain more property will be fulfilled; but if in the fourth watch you hear a bird off in the southeast say da-da you may be sure that a storm will arise in seven days. Five different tones of the cawing were recognized as significant. Just where and what you see a raven do when you are travelling foretells some sort of a fortunate or unfortunate incident of the progress or outcome of your journey; yet these omens differ according to whether you are moving and the bird is stationary, or you are standing still and the bird is flying, or both or neither are motionless!
There was also a settled rule for taking prognostications from the nests of these birds. “When a crow has built its nest on a branch on the east side of a tree,” according to Donacila’s translation of a Thibetan manuscript, “a good year and rain will be the result of it. When it has built its nest on a southern branch the crops will then be bad. When it has built its nest on a branch in the middle of a tree, a great fright will then be the result of it. When it makes its nest below, fear of the army of one’s adversary will be the result of it. When it makes its nest on a wall, on the ground, or on a river, the [sick] king will be healed.”
Whenever it appears that the omen observed portends harm, offerings of food and so forth must be made to the bird in order to avert the evil, and these offerings vary according to prescribed rules. It is no wonder that an extensive priesthood was needed to aid in this intricate guarding against danger or the foretelling of benefits to come; and one suspects that the whole thing was a clever invention by the sacerdotal class to provide priests with a good living. Nor have the practices, and much less the superstitious notions behind them, become wholly obsolete, for not only in India and China are the movements of birds now watched with anxiety, and offerings made to them in the temples and individually by the peasantry, but similar ideas and practices prevail in all Malayan lands, as readers of such books as Skeat’s Malay Magic[[7]] may learn.
Perhaps learned students of ancient ways of thinking may be able to explain why the direction of a prophetic bird from the listener was an essential element in its message: for example, why is the cawing of a crow east of you a more favorable portent than cawing from the west? Lord Lytton studies this question briefly in the Notes to his translation of the Odes of Horace, who, in his Ode to Galatea, exclaims: