When the elders in Babylon expounded the reason for faith in these antagonistic supernatural creatures, they explained that the “divine” eagle symbolized beneficence and protective power in the universe, while the feathered monsters stood for the baffling forces of malignancy and harm. In this philosophy, probably, is the underlying relationship that connects all this Oriental flock of fabulous fowls—visionary flight-beings in varying forms and phases that seek to portray the powers of the air, mysterious, uncontrollable, overwhelming, capable of all the mind of primitive man could conceive or his gods perform. All of them became endowed in time with the luxuriant colorings of Eastern poetry and fiction, and appear now heroic and picturesque, as one expects of everything in the dreamy Orient of tradition.
In the cold and stormy North, however, where the sun is a source of comfort rather than of terror, and movements of the atmosphere are more often feared than blessed, the similar conception of a gigantic sky-bird is far more definite. When the native of the Russian plains, struggling homeward against driving snow, hears the shrilling and howling of the tempest he knows Vikhar, the Wind-Demon, is abroad. Norsemen represent him as Hraesvelg, the North Wind, an eagle: he does not “ride on the wings of the wind,” he is the wind, and the blast from the arctic sea that beats upon your face is the air set in motion by the wings of this colossal, invisible bird flying southward. That it is big enough to stir the atmosphere into a veritable hurricane is plain:
From the East came flying hither,
From the East a monstrous eagle,
One wing touched the vault of heaven,
While the other swept the ocean;
With his tail upon the waters,
Reached his beak beyond the cloudlets.
And such an eagle as this one, described as a reality in the Kalevala, the legendary epic of the Finns, possessing beak and talons of copper, once seized and bore away a maiden to its eyrie, thus showing itself true to the “form” of the East whence it came.
Most of our North American Indians typified the winds, especially those from the north, as birds, and many tribes identified the storm-bringing ones with their thunder-birds, which was very natural. The Algonkins believed that certain birds produced the phenomena of wind and created waterspouts, and that the clouds were the spreading and agitation of their gigantic wings. The Navahos thought that a great white swan sat at each of the four points of the compass and conjured up the blasts that came therefrom, while the Dakotas believed that in the west is the residence of the Wakinyjan, “the Flyers,” that is, the breezes that develop into occasional storms.