May no chough’s dark shadow
Lose thee a sunbeam, nor one green woodpecker
Dare to tap leftward.
Why should “leftward” (lævus) signify ill-luck in this case, when the left was considered lucky by the Romans, although unlucky by the Greeks? “It is suggested,” is Lytton’s comment, “that the comparison may have arisen from the different practice of the Greeks and Romans in taking note of birds—the former facing north, the latter south [an attitude connected with migration?] I believe, however, it was the tap of the woodpecker, and not his flight, that was unlucky. It is so considered still in Italy, and corresponds to our superstitious fear of the beetle called the death-watch. If, therefore, heard on the left, or heart side, it directly menaced life.”
I leave the solution of the general problem of the value of direction in ancient ornithomancy to the Orientalists, advising them that a hint of subtile and half-forgotten reasons for such distinctions may be found in the ideas prevailing among the shamans, or “medicine men,” of our southwestern village-Indians; among the Hopi (miscalled Mokis), for example, North is represented in their mystical ceremonies by yellow, West by blue, South by red, and East by white.
Religious interest in black-hued birds is not confined to the Old World, as was tragically illustrated in that remarkable excitement among the Indians of the Upper Missouri region in 1890, known as the Ghost Dance, of which the crow was the honored symbol. James Mooney,[[77]] of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, investigated this outburst of sentiment very thoroughly, and explained it at length in the 14th Annual Report of that Bureau, from which I extract the information as to the crow’s part in the matter. Dr. Mooney reminds us in advance that the crow was probably held sacred by all the tribes of the Algonquian race. Roger Williams, speaking of the New England tribes, says that although the crow did damage to the corn, hardly an Indian would kill one, because it was their tradition that this bird had brought them their first grain and vegetables, “carrying a grain of corn in one ear and a bean in the other from the field of their great god Cautantouwit in Sowwaniu, the Southwest, the happy spirit-world where dwelt the gods and the souls of the great and good.”
The so-called Ghost Dance meant to the Plains Indians generally a preparation for the coming of a superhuman Messiah who would restore the old order of things when the redman was supreme in the land, and free from the restraint of an alien and encroaching civilization; and primarily it contained no special hostility toward white neighbors.
Among the western redmen the eagle for its general superiority, the magpie (particularly by the Paiutes), the sagehen because connected with the country whence the Messiah was to come, and some other birds, were revered in certain subsidiary ceremonies; but the central bird-figure in this excitement was the crow, for it was regarded as the directing messenger from the spirit-world, because its color is a reminder of death and the shadow-land. I have seen the figures of two upward flying crows and two magpies in a “medicine shirt” made to be worn in the Ghost Dance. The raven shared in this devotional respect, but is rare on the northern plains, where its humbler relative was an abundant substitute. Some understanding of this supreme position of the crow in the Ghost-dancing—the equivalent of our “revival” meetings—may be had by examining the Arapahoe version of the belief on which the anticipated advent of a red Messiah was based. Dr. Mooney expounds it[[77]] as follows:
In Arapahoe belief the spirit world is in the west, not on the same level with this earth of ours, but higher up, and separated also from it by a body of water.... The crow, as the messenger and leader of the spirits who had gone before [i.e. the dead] collected their armies on the other side and advanced at their head to the hither limit of the shadow-land. Then, looking over, they saw far below them a sea, and far out beyond it toward the east was the boundary of the earth, where lived the friends they were marching to rejoin. Taking up a pebble in his beak, the crow then dropped it into the water and it became a mountain towering up to the land of the dead. Down its rocky slope he brought his army until they halted at the edge of the water. Then taking some dust in his bill the crow flew out and dropped it into the water as he flew, and it became a solid arm of land stretching from the spirit world to the earth. He returned and flew out again, this time with some blades of grass, which he dropped upon the land thus made and at once it was covered with a green sod. Again he returned and again flew out, this time with some twigs in his bill, and dropping these also upon the new land, at once it was covered with a forest of trees. Again he flew back to the base of the mountain, and is now [that is, at the time of the Ghost dancing] coming on at the head of all the countless spirit-host.