By way of the ancestral traditions sketched above, arise those “sacred animals” constantly mentioned in accounts of ancient or backward peoples. Various birds were assigned to the deities and heroes of Egyptian and Pagan mythology—the eagle to Jove, goose and later the peacock to Juno, the little owl to Minerva, and so on; but to call these companions “sacred” is a bad use of the term, for there was little or nothing consecrate in these ascriptions, and if in any case worship was addressed to the deity, its animal companion was hardly included in the reverential thought of the celebrant.
It is conceivable that such ascriptions as these are the refined relics of earlier superstitions held by primitive folk everywhere in regard to such birds of their territory as appealed to their imaginations because of one or another notable trait. Ethnological and zoölogical books abound in instances, which it would be tedious to catalog, and several examples appear elsewhere in this book. A single, rather remarkable one, that of the South African ground-hornbill or bromvogel, will suffice to illustrate the point here. I choose, among several available, the account given by Layard,[[15]] one of the early naturalist-explorers in southern Africa:
The Fingoes seem to attach some superstitious veneration to the ground-hornbills and object to their being shot in the neighborhood of their dwellings, lest they should lose their cattle by disease.... The Kaffirs have a superstition that if one of these birds is killed it will rain for a long time. I am told that in time of drought it is the custom to take one alive, tie a stone to it, then throw it into a “vley”; after that a rain is supposed to follow. They avoid using the water in which this ceremony has been performed.... Only killed in time of severe drought, when one is killed by order of the rain-doctor and its body is thrown into a pool in a river. The idea is that the bird has so offensive a smell that it will make the water sick, and that the only way of getting rid of this is to wash it away to the sea, which can only be done by a heavy rain.
The ground where they feed is considered good for cattle, and in settling a new country spots frequented by these birds are chosen by the wealthy people. Should the birds, however, by some chance, fly over a cattle kraal, the kraal is moved to some other place.... It is very weak on the wing, and when required by the “doctor” the bird is caught by the men of a number of kraals turning out at the same time, and a particular bird is followed from one hill to another by those on the lookout. After three or four flights it can be run down and caught by a good runner.... The Ovampos [of Damara land] seem to have a superstition [that the eggs cannot be procured because so soft that] they would fall to pieces on the least handling.
It seems to me likely that the sense of service to men in its constant killing of dreaded snakes—birds and serpents are linked together in all barbaric religious and social myths—may be at the core of the veneration paid the hornbill, as, apparently, it was in the case of the Egyptian ibis. This wader was not only a foe to lizards and small snakes, but, as it always appeared in the Nile just as the river showed signs of beginning its periodic overflow, a matter of anxious concern to the people, it was regarded as a prescient and benevolent creature foretelling the longed-for rise of the water. At Hermopolis, situated at the upper end of the great fertile plain of the lower Nile, the ibis was incarnated as Thoth (identified by the Greeks with Hermes), one of the highest gods of the ancient Egyptians. This ibis, and other incarnated animals, originally mere symbols of lofty ideas, came to be reverenced as real divinities in the places where their cult flourished (although they might enjoy no such distinction elsewhere), were given divine honors when they died, and were, in short, real gods to their devotees; that is to say, the sophisticated Egyptians of the later dynasties had elevated into the logical semblance of divinity this and that animal-fetish of their uncultured ancestors.
Another singular case of a bird rising to the eminence of tutelary deity is that of the ruddy sheldrake (Casarca rutila) or Brahminy duck in Thibet. From it is derived the title of the established church of the lamas (practically the government of that Buddhistic country); and their abbotts wear robes of the sheldrake colors. In Burmah the Brahminy duck is sacred to Buddhists as a symbol of devotion and fidelity, and it was figured on Asoka’s pillars in this emblematic character. This sheldrake is usually found in pairs, and when one is shot the other will often hover near until it, too, falls a victim to its conjugal love.[[16]]
A stage in this process of deification is given by Tylor in describing the veneration of a certain bird in Polynesia, as a Tahitian priest explained it to Dr. Ellis, the celebrated missionary-student of the South Seas. The priest said that his god was not always in the idol representing it. “A god,” he declared, “often came to and passed from an image in the body of a bird, and spiritual influence could be transmitted from an idol by imparting it by contact to certain valued kinds of feathers.” This bit of doctrine helps us to understand what Colonel St. Johnston has to tell in his recent thoughtful book[[48]] on the ethnology of Polynesia, of the special use of the feathers (mainly red) of particular birds in the insignia of chiefs, and in religious ceremonials; and he comments as follows:
In the Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga groups the very special mats of the chiefs were edged with the much-prized red feathers usually obtained with great difficulty from Taverni Island.... In Tahiti the fan was associated with feathers in a peculiar idea of sacredness, and feathers given out by the priests at the temple at the time of the “Pa’e-atua” ceremony were taken home by the worshippers and tied on to special fans. These beautiful feathers of the Pacific were, of course, prized by an artistic people for their colors alone, but there seems to have been something more than that, something particularly connected with a divine royalty. In Hawaii the kahili, the sceptre of the king, was surmounted with special feathers. The royal cloaks (as in Peru) and the helmets had feathers thickly sewn on them; the para-kura, or sacred coronet of Tangier was made of red feathers; and the Pa’e-atua ceremony that I have just written of consisted of the unwrapping of the images of the gods, exposing them to the sun, oiling them, and then wrapping them once more in feathers—fresh feathers, brought by the worshippers, and given in exchange for the old ones, which were taken away as prized relics to be fastened to the sacred fans.
Can it be that the feathers represent divine birds, symbolic of the “Sky People”? We know that many birds were peculiarly sacred (the tropic bird of Fiji might be mentioned among others), and the messages of the gods were said to have been at first transmitted by the birds, until the priests were taught to do so in the squeaky voices—possibly imitative of bird-cries—they adopted.
Such deifications of birds took place elsewhere than in Fiji and Egypt. Charles de Kay has written a learned yet readable book[[18]] devoted to expounding the worship of birds in ancient Europe, and their gradual mergence into deities of human likeness. He calls attention to remains in early European lore indicating a very extensive connection of birds with gods, pointing to a worship of the bird itself as the living representative of a god, “or else to such a position of the bird toward a deity as to fairly permit the inference that at a period still more remote the bird itself was worshipped.” The Polynesian practices detailed above certainly are of very ancient origin, probably coming to the islands with the earliest migrants from the East Indian mainlands; and the theology involved may be a lingering relic of the times and ideas described in De Kay’s treatise.