Pity me, for here you see me, persecuted, poor and old.
If the delvers into Indo-European mythology are right, the dread of owls existed long before the Romans colonized among Gauls and Britons, and were in turn overrun by Teutonic hordes. It exists among the wildest savages in every part of the world where owls prowl with ghostly silence and stealth and hoot in the darkness, startling men’s nerves, and it survives in all peasantries. In that delightful Sicilian book by Mrs. John L. Heaton,[[80]] we have a narrative of a journey after dark with some village-women. “A screech-owl [cuca] hooted. Gra Vainia crossed herself, and Donna Ciccia muttered: ‘Beautiful Mother of the Rock, deliver us!’ Donna Catina touched something Owls have always been regarded as the familiars of witches, sometimes bearing them through the night on noiseless wings to some unholy tryst, sometimes contributing materials to their malignant, magic-brewing recipes. It was by meddling in such matters that the hero of that fine old romance, The Golden Ass of Apuleius, fell into his ridiculous and painful predicament. British poets, and especially the dramatists from Chatterton down, have taken advantage of the black repute of owls to enhance any scene of horror they want to depict, Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens furnished excellent examples; and my friend J. E. Harting,[[42]] of London, has gathered into his admirable Ornithology of Shakespeare many owl-extracts from the great master’s play. “The owlet’s wing,” Mr. Harting finds, “was an ingredient in the cauldron wherein the witches prepared their ‘charm of powerful trouble’ (Macbeth, iv, I); and with the character assigned to it by the ancients, Shakespeare, no doubt, felt that the introduction of an owl in a dreadful scene of tragedy would help to make the scene come home more forcibly to the people who had from early times associated its presence with melancholy, misfortune and death.... Its doleful cry pierces the ear of Lady Macbeth while the murder is being done: Hark! Peace! It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman Which gives stern’st good-night. “And when the murderer rushes in immediately afterwards, exclaiming ‘I have done the deed. Did thou not hear a noise?’ she replies ‘I have heard the owl scream.’ And later on: ‘The obscure bird clamored the live-long night!’... Should an owl appear at a birth, it is said to forebode ill luck to the infant. King Henry VI, addressing Gloster, says: ‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign’; while upon another occasion its presence was supposed to predict a death or at least some dire mishap.... When Richard III is irritated by the ill news showered thick upon him, he interrupts the third messenger with ‘Out on ye, Owls! Nothing but songs of death.’” It is not surprising on turning to the medieval pharmacopœia, where there was quite as much magic as medicine, that the owl was of great potency in prescriptions. “Thus the feet of the bubo, burnt with hard plumbago, was held to be a help against serpents. If the heart of the bird was placed on the left breast of a sleeping beauty, it made her tell all her secrets: but the warrior who carried it was strengthened in battle.” A modern relic of this bit of superstitious therapeutics was found by me in The Long Hidden Friend, a little book printed at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1863, which was a crude translation by George Homan of a German book published at Reading, Penn., in 1819. It consists of a long series of remedies and magic arts to be followed, and which were actually in use in that region in cases of disease. Some of them introduced birds, one of which is reminiscent of the “sleeping beauty” mentioned a moment ago, and reads thus: “If you lay the heart and right foot of a barn-owl on one who is asleep, he will answer whatever you ask him, and tell what he has done.” This should be known to our chiefs of police, whose detectives appear to be wasting much time in applying the extractive process called the Third Degree. The owl tribe, among the most innocent and serviceable, in its relation to mankind, of avian groups, has been as outrageously slandered south of the Mediterranean as north of it. “The inhabitants of Tangier,” as Colonel Irby tells us[[81]] in his book on the ornithology of Gibraltar, consider the barn-owls, numerous there, “the clairvoyant friends of the Devil.”