The deaths of several Roman emperors, among them Valentinian and Commodus Antoninus, were presaged by owls alighting on their residences, and it is recorded that before the death of the great Augustus an owl sang on the Curia.
In central India the owl is now generally regarded as a bird of ill omen. “If one happens to perch on the house of a native, it is a sign that one of his household will die, or some other misfortune befall him within a year. This can only be averted by giving the house or its value in money to the Brahmins, or making extraordinary peace-offering to the gods.” It is easy to calculate the origin of that particular form of superstition. In southern India, according to Thurston (quoted by Lauffer), the same dread prevails; and there the natives interpret the bird’s cries by their number, much as they did those of crows. “One such screech forebodes death; two screeches, success in any approaching undertaking; three, the addition by marriage of a girl to the family; four, a disturbance; five, that the hearer will travel. Six screeches foretell the coming of guests; seven, mental distress; eight, sudden death; and nine signify favorable results. The number nine plays a great rôle in systems of divination.”
In view of this Oriental and Greco-Latin history, which spread with the imperial civilization into all western Europe, and in view of the bad associations of these birds in the Old Testament, where they are pronounced “unclean,” and relegated to the desert as companions of a dreadful company (Isaiah, xxxiv, II), it was natural that owls should be regarded with almost insane fear and aversion in the Middle Ages, as the record shows they were. In Sweden even yet, the owl is considered a bird of sorcery, and great caution is necessary in speaking of any of them to avoid being ensnared; moreover it is dangerous to kill one, as its associates might avenge its death. Nuttall,[[79]] the English-American ornithologist, notes that he often heard the following couplet when he was a child in the old country:
Oh!—o-o-o—o-o!
I was once a king’s daughter, and sat on my father’s knee,
But now I’m a poor hoolet, and hide in a hollow tree.
This is explained in the northern counties of England by a legend that Pharaoh’s daughter was transformed into an owl, and when children hear at night the screams of one of these nocturnal hunters they are told the story of its strange origin—but why Pharaoh’s daughter? Then there is that cryptic “little ode” quoted from the memory of his childhood by Charles Waterton[[73]] in reference to the barn-owl, and explained elsewhere in this book, which runs thus:
Once I was a monarch’s daughter, and sat on a lady’s knee,
But now I’m a nightly rover, banished to the ivy-tree,
Crying hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, for my feet are cold