173 



BIRDS IN LEGEND 



and folklore has many quaint ways of dissipating the 

 evil effects feared from their presence. 



Now all this is but the ragtag and bobtail, as it were, 

 of the science of the ancient Oriental world that has come 

 down to us in frayed and disconnected fragments, to be 

 now a matter more of amusing research than of belief or 

 practice among most of us. It was old even at the be- 

 ginning of the Christian era, but all the ornithomancy of 

 the Greek and Roman soothsayers was inherited in its 

 principle, if not always in its forms, from the remotely 

 antique "wisdom" of the East, in which the consultation 

 of birds appears to be the basis of divination. 



In the Far East the raven has been regarded from 

 time immemorial with dread interest, and where that 

 species was rare the crow — equally black, destructive, 

 and cunning — took its place. To the primitive phi- 

 losophers of Persia and India the raven was a divine bird, 

 of celestial origin and supernatural abilities, and was the 

 messenger who announced the will of the Deity. A 

 German commentator on the Vcdas, H. Oldenberg, con- 

 cludes that the animals sent by the gods, as pictured in the 

 myths, were those of a weird, demoniacal nature, and 

 were for this reason themselves deified, but subsequently 

 became mere stewards to divine mandators. "In the 

 belief of the Persians/' says Lauffer, "the raven was 

 sacred to the god of light and the sun." Moncure D. Con- 

 way, 66 when discussing the Biblical legend of the Deluge, 

 suggests that the raven sent out of the Ark may typify 

 the "darkness of the face of the deep," and the dove the 

 "spirit of God" that "moved upon the face of the waters." 

 In China, Dr. Williams 76 tells us, "the sun is signalized 

 by the figure of a raven in a circle." I have seen Chinese 

 drawings of it in which the raven (or a crow) stood on 



