A sure interpreter of fate.—Churchill.
The peculiar province of the auspices, or bird-inspecters, was to seek the will of the gods as to some contemplated act or policy by watching the behavior of the sacred chickens, cared for by an official called pullarius. “If the chickens came too slowly out of the cage, or would not feed, it was a bad omen; but if they fed greedily, so that some part of their food fell and struck the ground, it was deemed an excellent omen.”—and so forth and so forth.
It is rather engaging to inquire why the humble barnyard fowl was used for so momentous a function. Partly, no doubt, because it was the most convenient kind of bird to keep and propagate in captivity, and therefore would always be at hand when wanted (and in case the prophecy-demand was light an occasional pullet for the official pot would not be missed!), but also because its witlessness made it dependable. A devotee of this way of omen-catching would explain that of course the bird was unconscious of the part it played; that its mind was a mere receptacle of divine impulses to act in a certain way, the significance of which the auspex understood and reported. If that theory is true, it follows that the more empty-headed the “medium” is the better, for it would then have fewer ideas of its own to short-circuit the inspired impulses. This view has, in fact, influenced ignorant folks everywhere in their conclusion that men who were witless, or crazy, or had lost their mentality in a trance, were “possessed,” mostly by devils but sometimes by good “spirits” which had found a mind “swept and garnished,” as St. Luke said, and had become vocal tenants; whence, it was argued, no human rationality interfered with the transmission of the message, and men must accept what the tongues uttered as inspired words. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings came forth praise” that was praise indeed, because the infants knew not what they said. That was the reason Balaam listened with so much respect to the warning spoken by his ass; and many a preaching ass since has had a similar reward for articulate braying.
One more consideration suggests itself. The ominous flock kept by the pullarius contained both cocks and hens; and the cock, as a bird of the sun, has been “sacred” from prehistoric antiquity in that primitive nature-worship from which the Greco-Romans were by no means free. “It is not improbable,” we are assured by Houghton[[95]] “that the sacrificial rites and consultation by augury, in which cooks figured among the Romans, came originally from Babylonia.... I think that the figure [in a seal] of a cock perched on an altar before a priest making his offerings ... represents the bird in this capacity as a soothsayer.” In fact, a whole department of the science of augury was known as alectromancy, in which a barnyard cock was the agent or medium of inspiration.
These practices—which were entirely void of morality—are a curious index of the mental barbarism of the early Greeks and Romans, for they are quite on a level with the ideas and doings of savages now.
With the advance in knowledge and enlightenment culminating in the philosophy of Cicero and his skeptical contemporaries, both faith and practice in this childish consultation of chickens and crows disappeared, or descended to be merely a political sop for the credulous populace. Even this passed away when superstitious paganism faded out of the religion of mankind in Europe, or, more exactly, it became changed into a faith in weather prophecy by noticing the behavior of birds and other animals; but these prognostications are based not on a supposed message from the gods but on deductions from observation and experience. Let us see how far this modern method of augury is of service as a sort of homemade Weather Bureau—we will, as it were, study the genesis of the Rain-bird. It began early. Aristophanes tells us, of the Greeks:
From birds in sailing men instruction take
Now lie in port, now sail, and profit make.
The proprietor of Gardiner’s Island, at the eastern end of Long Island, New York, where fish-hawks then abounded, and always since have been under protection, told Alexander Wilson[[46]] many facts of interest respecting their habits, among others the following:
They are sometimes seen high in the air, sailing and cutting strange gambols, with loud vociferations, darting down several hundred feet perpendicularly, frequently with part of a fish in one claw, which they seem proud of, and to claim “high hook,” as the fishermen call him who takes the greatest number. On these occasions they serve as a barometer to foretell the changes of the atmosphere; for when the fish-hawks are thus sailing high in air, in circles, it is universally believed to prognosticate a change of weather, often a thunder-storm in a few hours. On the faith of the certainty of these signs the experienced coaster wisely prepares for the expected storm, and is rarely mistaken.