Russian anthropologists have traced the existence of these shared falcon myths to a near-universal cult of birds of prey that once existed across ancient Central Asia. They maintain that trade, invasion, migration and settlement carried elements of this cult eastward and westward over millennia. In addition to seeing falcons as creator gods associated with sun and fire, these ancient myths associate falcons with the human soul; they see falcons as messengers between heaven and earth and between humans and gods. They also associate falcons with marriage and fertility. Falcons populate many legends of the foundation of dynasties and empires. Genghis Khan’s future mother-in-law dreamt that a white falcon holding the sun and moon in its talons flew down from the sky to her hand. She took the vision as a sign that her daughter would marry the future conqueror. Falcons’ association with fertility has its practical uses, too. In parts of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, trained falcons are traditionally brought inside the yurt during childbirth, for their sharp eyes scare away the demon known as al-basty or ‘the Red Mother’ who attacks women in labour and gives them puerperal fever.
Emeshe, the mythological ancestress of the Magyars, is visited by the falcon Turul in a dream.
The legends of the giant Turul falcon of Hungarian mythology evince many elements common to this cult of raptors. The Turul was often depicted as the sun. It was the symbol of the house of Attila, and the ancestor of the Hungarian Árpád dynasty. In 819 King Béla III’s royal scribe recorded that the Scythian leader Ügyek married a woman called Emeshe, who bore Álmos, the first of this dynasty of kings:
The boy obtained his name because of the unusual circumstances of his birth, when his mother in a vision saw the great Turul descend from heaven on her and made her fertile. A great spring welled forth from her womb and began flowing westward. It grew and grew until it became a torrent, which swept over the snow-covered mountains into the beautiful lowlands on the other side. There the waters stopped and from the water grew a wondrous tree with golden branches. She imagined famed kings were to be born from her descendants, who shall rule not here in their present lands but over that distant land in her dreams, surrounded with tall mountains.12
A 7th-century AD Persian silver dish showing a falcon (or perhaps an eagle) carrying a deceased person’s soul to the sky. Shown as a naked female figure, the soul feeds the bird with the fruits of her good deeds.
After this visitation, Emeshe and her son became the first people able to read the will of god from the stars. Like many other elements of this ancient cult, the notion that the first priests were born from the union of a falcon and a woman is firmly located in a shamanic religio-mythical universe. A term borrowed from the Tungus of Siberia, a shaman is a person who can travel between different worlds during ecstatic trances; in these trances, the shaman’s soul leaves his or her body. It can ascend to the upper realms of heaven or down to the underworld; it guides the souls of the dead to heaven, or petitions or negotiates with gods and spirits for knowledge, cures for sickness, predictions of the future and so on.
Falcons often feature as an assisting spirit in shamanic traditions. Haoma, ‘the drink of immortality’, was used in ancient Zoroastrian sacrificial rituals; there’s a long tradition of using hallucinogens to achieve these ecstatic trances. Reputedly a preparation of the fly agaric mushroom, haoma was stolen from the gods by the falcon and brought to man: falcon images are frequent on ancient Iranian and Persian artefacts and on Achaemenid and Sassanid vessels and weapons. In what is now California, the Chumash people used the Datura plant to allow them to contact their personal ‘dream helper’ spirits. In the early twentieth century, Fernando Librado related how the crew of a Chumash sea canoe were all saved through the intercession of the captain’s dream helper, the peregrine, during a storm. Falcons appear as assisting spirits in literature, too: falcons in Serbo-Croatian epic poetry protect their owners by bringing them water in their beaks and shading them from the sun when they are sick.
The world tree is a central element in many shamanic cosmogonies. It bridges heaven, earth and the underworld and often on its topmost branch sits a falcon. The Hungarian Turul, for example, perched at the top of the Tree of Life. In Norse legend the falcon was called Vedfolnir, ‘blown down’. Vedfolnir perched on the beak of the eagle that itself sat on the topmost branch of the world tree Yggdrasil. This falcon’s task was to report to Odin everything he saw in the heavens, on earth and below. Related to the falcon atop the world tree is another frequently encountered shamanic symbol: a bird or falcon perched on a stick. The creation myth of Horus of Edfu describes how the world was formed from chaos when two amorphous beings appeared above a tiny island in the primeval sea. One picked up a stick from the shore, snapped it in two and stuck one half into the ground near the water’s edge. A falcon flew out of the darkness and alighted on the stick. Immediately, light broke over chaos, the waters began to recede, and the island grew and grew until it became the earth.
A Crow painted shield cover from Montana with an image of the warrior’s protecting genius, the prairie falcon, and an attached bundle of prairie falcon feathers.
Shamans often transform themselves into birds during their ecstatic trances. In this form they can fly to the world tree to bring back souls as birds, or transport the bird-souls of the recently dead to heaven. The Hungarian Turul perched next to the souls of unborn children in the form of birds. As befits shamans with falcon ancestors, shamans can become a falcon on their journeys. Singing chants in honour of the stars, for example, Malekula shamans spread their arms to imitate a falcon. And in some traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains of North America, the falcon was the only animal that knew the location of the hole in the sky through which it could reach God. After being asked whispered questions the falcon flew through the hole in the sky and back to deliver the divine replies to the shaman.
SOULS AND UNIONS
Kushlak, the unwise knight, sold his talking falcon to a stranger in exchange for a herd of horses in the Bashkir epic Kara yurga. As the stranger took Kushlak’s falcon onto his hand, it cried: ‘if you give me up, happiness will leave you; prosperity will leave you, your life will leave you. Don’t give me away, Kushlak-batir; do not sell me, Kushlak-batir.’ Ignoring his falcon’s pleas, Kushlak received his herd of horses, and shortly afterwards died. His unlikely death is better understood if we keep in mind the fact that, as D’Arcussia wrote in 1598, ‘ancient people used the Falcon to signify the spirit of man’.13 Right across pre-Christian and pre-Islamic Eurasia, falcons were associated with the human soul. Ancient Turkic gravestones depict the souls of fallen warriors as falcons perching on their hands. The Egyptian Book of the Dead describes the deceased as a falcon flying away – and the Egyptian pharoah could adopt the form of a falcon to visit his mortal body after death.
Such associations continue: in some parts of Central Asia killing a falcon is still considered a crime morally equivalent to murder. In the early twentieth century this taboo against harming falcons was still extended to falconers; hurting or humiliating someone carrying a falcon or other bird of prey on the fist was unthinkable. In early twentieth-century California, Three-dollar Bar Billy of the Karuk people maintained that anyone who killed Aikneich, the peregrine falcon, would die before the year ended – this had happened recently, he explained, after a man had shot a peregrine, mistaking it for a chicken hawk. ‘That year, before leaving’, he continued, ‘the Aikneich flew around looking at all the towns and houses here and there, and sitting on the houses as if to inspect them.’14
A late 17th-century calligraphic prayer in the shape of a falcon by Mohamed Fathiab.
The association of falcons with souls and the notion that falcons facilitate communion with heaven or the divine is evoked in numerous mystical traditions. In Sufi mysticism the exiled soul suffers while in mortal flesh and longs to return home to the creator. To become pure enough to rejoin God, one must follow the difficult path of higher and higher levels of spiritual life. Such themes are
richly evoked in the work of the great Iranian poet Hafez; in one poem he compares man to a falcon who flies from his home to the city of miseries. Christian writers, too, have used falcons in tropes of mystical union. D’Arcussia wrote of how Holy Scripture compares the falcon to the contemplative man who does not embroil himself in worldly affairs and who, ‘if at any time there is need for him to descend among them, at once flies back to the sky’,15 and explained that a saintly person is often portrayed through the image of the falcon. In The Hound and the Hawk, historian John Cummins elegantly glosses the ways in which St John of the Cross used the theme of the falcon binding to its prey in the skies as a metaphor for his soul’s union with God. The falcon’s stoop, Cummins writes, ‘has two senses: the peregrine’s hurtling descent which gives it the momentum to soar up almost vertically, and the individual’s self abasement and relinquishing of individuality which enable the soul to rejoin the divine’.16
The nearer I came
to this lofty quarry,
the lower and more wretched
and despairing I seemed.
I said: ‘No-one can reach it’;
and I stooped so low, so low,
that I soared so high, so high,
that I grasped my prey.17
Mystical unions shade toward erotic unions in falcon tropes, as this medieval Spanish lyric shows:
To the flight of a heron,
the peregrine stooped from the sky,
and, taking her on the wing,
was caught in a bramble bush.
High in the mountains
God, the peregrine came down
to be closed in the womb
of Holy Mary.
The heron screamed so loudly
that Ecce ancilla rose to the sky,
and peregrine stooped to the lure
and was caught in a bramble-bush.
The jesses were long
by which he was caught:
cut from those wobs
which Adam and Eve wove.
But the wild heron
took so slowly a flight
that when God stooped from the sky
He was caught in a bramble-bush.18
Lovemaking has frequently been metaphorized as the struggles of falcon and prey. In Turkish songs the love between a virgin bride and her fiancé is couched in terms of the helpless attempts of a female partridge to escape from a falcon. And falconry has irresistibly contributed to erotic falcon myths. Taming falcons and seducing women have long been understood as analogous arts. Many high-school students learn their first falconry from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, where the gentle art of falconry is a trope embedded in the male arts of seduction. As John Cummins delicately phrases it, both activities involve a man’s obsessive wish to bend a free-ranging spirit to his own desires, and he quotes a medieval German maxim that ‘women and falcons are easily tamed: if you lure them the right way, they come to meet their man.’19 The metaphor runs both ways: falconry has frequently been couched in erotic terms: novelist David Garnett, for example, described T. H. White’s attempts to train a goshawk as reading strangely like an eighteenth-century tale of seduction.
A wry take on gender relations in 1950s America.
Furthermore, the trappings of falconry – its technologies of control such as hoods, jesses and leashes – working in conjunction with a discourse that often portrays the falcon as mistress and falconer as slave, have allowed it to become figured in explicitly fetishistic and masochistic terms. ‘Falconers do it with leather,’ proclaimed a 1980s car-sticker. The fabulously baroque and disturbing psychosexual thriller of the same decade, The Peregrine by William Bayer, is the ne plus ultra of such imaginings. A crazed falconer trains a giant peregrine to kill women; kidnaps a journalist, calls her ‘Pambird’, decks her in modified falconry equipment crafted by a city sex shop and trains her. ‘He took her thus through all the stages of a falcon’s training,’ says Bayer, ‘telling her always that when she was sufficiently trained he would let her fly free and make her kill.’20 Its final tableau is of a jessed, belled, near-mute and brainwashed woman who has just committed the ritual murder of her captor, standing ‘still like a statue, a monolith, an enormous bird, her arms outstretched, her posture hieratic, a cape sewn with a design of feathers falling from her arms like giant wings’.21
A happily less explicit story of transformation and desire is found in the Russian folk-tale Finist the Falcon. Marya works as housekeeper for her widowed father and two evil older sisters. They ask her father for fineries and silks; she asks for nothing but a feather from Finist the Falcon. Her father finally finds her one; delighted, she locks herself into her room, waves the feather – and a bright falcon hovers in the air before transforming itself into a handsome young man. Her jealous sisters hear his voice and break into her room, but Finist escapes as a falcon through the window. He returns to Marya the next two nights, but alas, on the third night Marya’s malicious sisters see him leave, and they fasten sharp knives and needles to the outside of her window frame. The next night the unsuspecting Marya sleeps while Finist gravely injures himself trying to fly into her room. Finally he cries farewell to her with the words ‘if you love me, you will find me’ and flies away. In the way of such tales, Marya is finally reunited with Finist after a long quest – and of course they live happily ever after.
FALCON TRANSFORMATIONS
A familiar tale of falcon transformation in Indian mythology is the Sibi-Jâtaka, in which the gods Indra and Agni test the charity and compassion of the king of the Sibis by changing themselves into a falcon chasing a dove. The terrified, exhausted dove flies into the king’s lap and the king offers it protection. But the falcon is outraged. ‘I have conquered the dove by my own exertions and I am devoured by hunger!’ it exclaims. ‘You have no right to intervene in the differences of the birds. If you protect the dove, I shall die of hunger. If you must protect it, then give me an equal weight of your own flesh in return.’ The king of the Sibis agrees, commands that scales be brought and places the dove upon them. He cuts some flesh from his thigh with a knife. It is not enough to balance the dove, so he cuts more. Still not enough. The dove grows heavier and heavier as the king cuts flesh from his arms, legs and breast. Finally the king realizes that he must give all of himself, and sits upon the scale. With this, music is heard and a sweet shower of ambrosia falls from the skies to drench and heal the king. Indra and Agni reassume their divine forms, well pleased at his compassion, and announce that the king shall be reincarnated in the body of the next Buddha.
Another divine falcon transformation occurs in Germano-Norse mythology: Freja, goddess of fertility, possessed a falcon-cloak that transformed its wearer into a falcon. But humans, as well as gods, can shape-shift and become falcons. The hero of East Slavic bylini, epic warrior-class poems, is a bogatyr, a term related to the Turkic and Mongol term bagadur, or ‘hero’. The bogatyr Volkh Vseslavich could change into a bright falcon, a grey wolf, a white bull with golden horns and a tiny ant. Shamanic mythic sources lie deep; the bogatyr’s name is related to the Slav term Volkhv, signifying ‘priest’ or ‘sorcerer’. In the 1970s Marvel Comics’ first black superhero, The Falcon, teamed up with Captain America to fight evil, aided by The Falcon’s trained falcon ‘Redwing’. Such stories of human–animal transformations have fascinated critics for years: what do they mean? Do they subvert hegemonic versions of social identity? Question what it means to be human? Articulate religious or gender anxieties? Or are such transformations creating monsters in order to destroy them in fables wrought to reinforce the status quo?
The bogatyr Volkh Vseslavich assumes the shape of a falcon in a 1927 watercolour by the Russian artist Ivan Bilibin.
When mere humans assume falcon form, lessons are generally to be learned. The young mage Ged, hero of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, transforms himself into a peregrine, a ‘pilgrim falcon’ with ‘barred, sharp, strong wings’, to attack the winged, malevolent demons who have just
torn apart his female companion. He flees across the sea, ‘falcon-winged, falcon-mad, like an unfailing arrow, like an unforgotten thought’. Ultimately Le Guin’s novel is a meditation on the importance of recognizing and accepting one’s true self. By manifesting his over whelming emotions in falcon form Ged puts himself in jeopardy; for the price of shape-shifting is ‘the peril of losing one’s self, playing away the truth. The longer a man stays in a form not his own,’ the text explains, ‘the greater the peril.’ Pilgrim-falcon Ged seeks out the mage Ogion, his old teacher, and alights on his hand. Ogion recognizes him, weaves a careful spell and transforms the falcon back into human form – a silent, gaunt figure, clothes crusted with sea-salt, with ‘no human speech in him now’.
The wizard Ged flies in the form of a falcon: a vignette by Ruth Robbins for Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1968 fantasy classic A Wizard of Earthsea.
A poster for Wes Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums. During filming, the falcon, held here by Luke Wilson, chased a pigeon across New York and was lost for several days.
Ged had taken hawk-shape in fierce distress and rage . . . the falcon’s anger and wildness were his own, and had become his own, and his will to fly had become the falcon’s will . . . In all the sunlight and the dark of that great flight he had worn the falcon’s wings, and looked through the falcon’s eyes, and forgetting his own thoughts he had known at last only what the falcon knows; hunger, the wind, the way he flies.22
Those familiar notions of falcons as living concretizations of power, wildness, independence and freedom have afforded them a special role in many fables of self-fulfilment. They operate as figures helping to negotiate the correct balance between civilized human and wild nature. The assistance or aid of a falcon in self-development is elucidated in many modern literary and film representations; here the falcon acts as a balancing alter ego or tutelary animal of a powerless person – often a child stymied by social circumstance or by the emotional absence of a parent. The kestrel in Barry Hines’s Kes, for example, or the peregrine falcon Frightful in Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, the companion of an urban child who runs away to the Catskill mountains to live wild and recapitulate American history as a modern-day Daniel Boone. Another neglected child, tennis prodigy Richie Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, keeps a saker falcon called Mordecai in a mews on the roof of his family home. Set free, Mordecai returns from the New York skies to his fist once an accord is made between father and son. In Victor Canning’s novel The Painted Tent, sixteen-year-old orphan Smiley, on the run from the police, hides out with a west-country circus family and develops a special bond with a caged peregrine in their menagerie. Fria was a falcon who ‘had never known the pure wonder of a peregrine’s real flight . . . the mastery of the air which is the supreme gift of the falcons’.23 Of all creatures, Smiley ‘loved birds because they seemed to carry the real meaning of freedom in their lives’ and the peregrine’s captivity oppresses him.24 Fria escapes, and as the book progresses young Smiley’s gradual personal empowerment is mirrored by Fria’s; she learns hunting skills, revels in the capacity of her freedom; like Smiley she eventually finds a mate.
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