Owl

by Desmond Morris

  The goddess Lakshmi with her owl, in an Indian popular print.

  Long-legged owl, a mid-20th-century brass figure made by a local artist in Mumbai, India.

  Confusingly, in the northern Indian city of Ludhiana, owls are caught and killed every year to honour the goddess Lakshmi during the festival of Divali. A local headline reads: ‘Divali spells doom for owls in Ludhiana. Hapless birds sacrificed to appease Goddess Lakshmi.’ Owl-catchers are able to sell the birds to individuals who are suffering from financial problems, and who believe that the sacrifice of the owls will please the goddess of prosperity, who will then solve their problems for them. A report claims that the owl-catchers are approached every year by ‘disillusioned industrialists’ with requests that they perform black magic involving the body parts of owls: the flesh, beak, claws, feathers and blood. Why the destruction of the very bird on which Lakshmi relies for her movements through the skies will please the goddess is not at all clear. Logically, the ritual slaughter of owls, robbing her of her sacred vehicle, should make her sad or angry, so this is yet another complication in the contradictory role of the owl in the Hindu religion.

  For many Indians owls are also symbols of laziness, because they appear to sit around doing nothing. A wife whose husband is not pulling his weight with household chores may be described by her as ‘sitting round like an owl’. Despite this the small brass images of owls that are sold in India today look remarkably sprightly and ready to spring into action.

  Taken together, these attitudes towards the owl in India add up to something closer to the ancient view of the wicked bird rather than the wise one. And yet, at the same time, Uluka is accepted as a trusty beast of burden for the beloved goddess of prosperity and even, occasionally, for her companion Shiva. Curious ambiguities of this kind are not unknown in other aspects of the Hindu religion, which may be one of the reasons why Westerners find its tenets rather hard to grasp.

  THE WISE OWL

  Today the most popular view of the owl is that he is a friendly, wise old bird. As we have seen, the owl as a sorcerer and a messenger of doom has largely been relegated to a superstitious past. Thanks to natural history books and television programmes we are all much too familiar with the wonders of bird life today to be able, even in fantasy, to see the owl as anything other than an avian marvel. In moments when we set aside our scientific objectivity and allow ourselves to indulge in a little romantic make-believe, we find ourselves compelled to see the owl in a more kindly light.

  The reason we select wisdom as the special quality of this particular bird is due simply to the human shape of its head. Its broad face with a pair of huge, solemn eyes blinking at us gives the impression that, like us, its brain is packed with higher centres that give it a level of intelligence far beyond that of other avian species. A bird it may be, but bird-brained it is not. As a result, in countless myths, legends and tall tales, the owl is featured as the epitome of clever thinking. A classic example is the story of the mice and the owl by La Fontaine.4 This tells us about an ingenious owl that lived in a hollow pine. Inside the tree

  Were found full many footless mice,

  But well provision’d, fat, and nice.

  The bird had bit off all their feet,

  And fed them there with heaps of wheat.

  That this owl reason’d, who can doubt?

  When to the chase he first went out,

  And home alive the vermin brought,

  Which in his talons he had caught,

  The nimble creatures ran away.

  Next time, resolved to make them stay,

  He cropp’d their legs, and found, with pleasure,

  That he could eat them at his leisure;

  It were impossible to eat

  Them all at once, did health permit.

  His foresight, equal to our own,

  In furnishing their food was shown.

  The mice and the owl: an engraving by J. J. Grandville for the 1841 edition of Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables Choisies (verses first published in 1678).

  The suggestion here is that the owl was using a reasoning power similar to our own and that it was capable of developing a kind of animal husbandry in which it kept legless mice alive and fattened them up so that it could make a meal of them when its nocturnal hunting was failing to provide new kills. La Fontaine added a note to this poem insisting that it was based on observational fact. As this is clearly nonsensical it is worth asking how such a claim could have come about. In such cases there are usually separate fragments of fact that, when combined, are allowed to add up to much more than the sum of their parts. It has been claimed that some owls may store a few freshly killed surplus rodents for later consumption. It has also been noted that some mice will feign death, going limp when they are caught by the owl, only to make a dash for freedom when the bird relaxes its grip. And third, owls are said to have been observed biting through the feet of mice that have been trapped by their legs, to free them before devouring them. If these three isolated facts – storing mice in a larder, finding them sometimes alive after they have been caught, and biting through their imprisoned limbs to release them from metal traps – are combined, it is only a short step to create a scenario in which the owl has become a clever livestock farmer. As so often happens, there are grains of truth in even the most outlandish tales of animal activities and it is these grains that explain how a myth can have been born and then allowed to grow and develop a life of its own.

  This romantic vision of the owl as a bird of great sagacity is over 2,000 years old. As we have seen it began as a major force in ancient Greece, but it is not clear whether it flourished in modern times because of a respect for ancient Greece and a growing scholarly knowledge of Grecian society, or whether it developed independently out of the major shift of attitude towards animals that occurred during the Victorian period. It was then, during the nineteenth century, that animal welfare first became a major issue and special societies were set up to prevent animal abuses and to promote a more caring attitude towards other species.

  Whichever is the case, it is certainly true that the Victorians generally viewed the owl as a wise rather than an evil bird. In Punch magazine in 1875 appeared the following rhyme:

  There was an owl lived in an oak,

  The more he heard the less he spoke,

  The less he spoke the more he heard –

  O, if men were all like that wise bird.5

  A wedding owl at a ceremony at Balgonie Castle, Fife, Scotland, 8 October 2008.

  In modern times the wise, friendly owl still makes a symbolic appearance on certain special occasions. At Scottish weddings a live owl is sometimes required to be present at the ceremony. Its role is to deliver the wedding rings to the best man. At the start of the service, the owl sits on its perch at the back of the church, alongside its trainer. When the best man is asked for the rings, he turns and the owl is released and silently flies the length of the church to settle on his arm. On one of the bird’s legs there is a leather strap carrying the two rings for the bride and groom. These are untied and handed to the officiating priest. In this way, when the young couple put on the rings they feel that they are being blessed with the wisdom of the owl.

  For the record, the sad truth is that, scientifically speaking, the owl is not the most intelligent of birds. Its wisdom is simply an illusion created by its physical appearance. Intelligence in animals is related to their way of life, with opportunists always being more intelligent than specialists. The opportunists – birds like the crows – have no special survival device and must rely on their wits every day, trying out every trick in the book to survive. To give just one example, a crow learned to drop hard nuts, that it could not open with its beak, on to a main road where they were run over and broken by passing cars. It even learned to drop them on a pedestrian crossing, so that it could collect the broken nuts when the traffic stopped and it could avoid being run over itself. It is inconceivable that an owl could display this level of inte
lligence. As with all birds of prey, it has evolved the highly specialized sense organs and refined physical attributes that make it such an efficient killer that it does not face the daily survival challenges of the opportunist. Like a snake, it can strike, feed and rest.

  THE PROTECTIVE OWL

  The owl has yet another symbolic role. In this it matters little whether its personality is evil or saintly. This is because the owl is now acting as a security guard and providing this protective owl is on your side you care little whether it is a demon or a scholar, just so long as it defends you against attack.

  Several different animals have been used in the past as amulets or charms to protect their owner from ill fortune or evil spirits. Despite its association with death and disaster the owl has been employed in this way and it is easy to see why. If an owl is the herald of death, then if you wear a lucky owl you can imagine its powers being directed towards your enemy instead of towards yourself. In other words if the owl is a frightening creature you can use it to frighten your opponents.

  Some Asiatic peoples, such as the Turks and the Mongols, are known to keep an owl near the cradle of a sick child in the belief that it will frighten away the evil spirits that are causing the illness.

  The Ainu people in Japan make wooden images of eagle owls and nail them to their houses to protect the occupants in times of famine or epidemic. Even today the owl is employed as a lucky charm by the Ainu and it is possible to buy a hand-carved wooden owl figure to carry on a talismanic key-ring and chain. Made from the red wood of the Japanese spindle tree and decorated with gold and green colouring, this highly stylized owl image is believed to keep watch not just over the owner but also his entire village. A larger model, created by the whole community, is sometimes erected as ‘the defender of the village’.

  A protective owl key-ring, made from the carved and painted wood of the Spindle Tree. Ainu culture, Japan, 20th century.

  Strangely the Ainu do not view all kinds of owls as protective. Some are seen as downright evil. These are believed to be harmful to man and able to tell a good man from a bad one. If one is caught it will look at a good man with open eyes, but will only peer at a bad one through nearly closed eyes. Staring with open eyes is called ‘searching out the man’ (ainu oro wande); peering through slit eyes is called ‘man-ignoring’ (ainu eshpa). And heaven help the man who sees the shape of a flying owl crossing the face of the moon, for this means that the impending evil is going to be serious, so much so that the man concerned may have to change his name to hide from the approaching demon.

  Lucky owl with hearts and flowers, a painted ceramic figure made by a local artist in Minorca, late 20th century.

  On the other side of the world, on the Balearic island of Minorca in the Mediterranean, the owl is also used as a protective device. Even today it is the most popular amulet or lucky charm among the Minorcans, who may wear it around the neck in the form of a pendant or place it as a ceramic figure in their houses to ward off demonic spirits or to outstare the malevolent Evil Eye. It is sometimes reduced to little more than a pair of bulging, round eyes and a small beak, with the body largely omitted. This simplification emphasizes that it is the large eyes that are thought to be the important element in the task of out-staring the Evil Eye. The larger Minorcan protective owls, placed in the houses to protect the occupants from misfortune, are usually made from white ceramic covered in brightly coloured detail in red, orange, purple, green and blue.

  There is no denying that symbolically the owl is truly versatile. As a nocturnal predator it is evil; with its (supposedly) poor daylight vision it is blindly obstinate; with its swift, elegant flight it is a vehicle for the gods; with its solemn expression it is wise, and with its powerful weapons it is an efficient protector. Few other animals can boast so many contrasting symbolic roles. No wonder the owl has had such a long and complex involvement in human mythology.

  5 Emblematic Owls

  Today many organizations employ the owl as an emblem, placing its image on a badge, a flag, a sign or a crest to provide themselves with an attractive visual logo that identifies them and sets them apart from their rivals. A sports club may display it as a predatory bird, emphasizing the sharp talons as it swoops down for the kill. A learned society may depict it in its guise as the wise old owl, employing it as a symbol of knowledge. This modern use of the owl as an emblematic figure has a long history, stretching back to the sixteenth century and beyond.

  The cult of illustrated emblem books began in 1531 with the publication of the Emblematum Liber of Andrea Alciati.1 His idea was to make moral points in the form of illustrated poems, borrowing heavily on ancient fables and moral tales but his special contribution was to condense these tales into epigrams and pictures. He felt that if he could express the moral concept briefly and elegantly it would be possible for artists to ‘fashion the kind of thing we call badges and which we fasten on hats, or use as trademarks’. In a revised edition of his book that appeared in 1534 the pictures were reorganized so that emblems were presented one per page. This idea became so popular that many more books of emblems appeared in the centuries that followed and a whole genre of pictorial moralizing was developed.

  The owl and corpse, the young girl and old man, in a woodcut illustration from Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata (1584): ‘Like the horned owl standing upon cadavers, so sits our girl next to Sophocles.’

  To give one example of Alciati’s original emblems, no. 116 shows an elderly man fondling the naked left breast of a young girl. They are seated beneath a tree and on the ground next to them is an owl standing on the chest of a corpse. This strange scene symbolizes the idea that it is wrong for a young girl to give herself to a man who is so old that he is almost a corpse. The Latin poem accompanying the illustration reveals that the author is making the point that an elderly man (in this case the aged Sophocles) should not use his power and his riches to seduce a young woman: ‘Like the night-owl perched on the tombs, and like the horned-owl standing upon the cadaver, so sits our girl next to Sophocles.’ Here the owl is being used symbolically in a rather unusual way. Because it is a living thing that is associated with graveyards (where it may be observed flitting about at night) it is thought of as being somehow related to the dead. So, emblem-atically, with a leap of the imagination, it becomes the full-of-life young girl who is associating with the one-foot-in-the-grave old man. This symbolism of the owl as a young girl did not catch on, however, and does not appear anywhere else in myth or folklore as far as I can ascertain.

  The owl breaks the silence of the night with its cries, a woodcut illustration for Guillaume de La Perrière’s Morosophie (1553).

  ‘SIC VIVO’ – Thus I live: one of Pierre Woeiriot’s engraved illustrations for Georgette de Montenay’s Emblematum Christianorum centuria (1584).

  A slightly later version of this literary genre was Guillaume de La Perrière’s Morosophie (1553).2 It was the first bilingual book of emblems, having the text in both Latin and French. In one of the illustrations a couple are shown in a state of shock, having been awoken by the weird hooting of an owl that perches in a tree right outside their open door. In translation, the text reads: ‘As the bird that babbles under the deep night desires to disturb those whom sleep refreshes, so the evil tongue desiring to pour out evil poison does so, so that sound minds should moan having lost their calm.’ Clearly, here the owl is being depicted as a sinister creature of the night, disturbing the slumber of honest folk with its eerie, haunting cries.

  One of the followers of this publishing phenomenon was Georgette de Montenay, described by some as a proto-feminist, who in 1584 produced a volume of 100 Christian emblems.3 It was the first book of emblems to employ incised engravings instead of the more usual woodcuts for the illustrations. These engravings, by Pierre Woeiriot, made it possible to create more precise and detailed images. Among them is a curious example of owl symbolism, in which the bird is depicted holding a severed hand on the end of a long stick. With this hand it reache
s out towards a burning lamp, trying to touch the hot oil in the lamp with the dead fingers. The title of the picture is sic vivo – Thus I live. The explanation offered for this odd scene is that ‘Longing for some of the oil in the burning lamp, the owl does not risk using its own claws’. This is meant to symbolize the way in which Satan, unable to face a difficult problem directly, instead moves the brutal arms of evil leaders against the innocent. Since the owl in this scenario must stand for the Devil, this example of the emblematic owl must be harking back to the evil owl of folklore.

  In 1635 an Oxford scholar called George Wither produced A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne, with the texts in English. Wither had gone up to Magdalen College, Oxford, at the age of sixteen and would go on to become a prolific and outspoken author who was imprisoned more than once for the way he expressed his views. His book of emblems is full of sound advice in the form of what were called ‘silent parables’, the allegorical pictures to which he attached his epigrams and poems. Several of these depicted owls and each one showed the bird in a different emblematic role. One example shows an owl with outspread wings standing on top of a caduceus, a snake-entwined staff that later became the symbol of medicine.4 Mercury and Pallas stand on either side, each holding a cornucopia. In this context the owl symbolizes the night and the epigram that accompanies the picture is: ‘Before thou bring thy Works to Light, Consider on them, in the Night.’ In other words think hard about what you are saying before you rush into print. In the poem beneath the picture, the author points out that the cornucopia signify a wealth created by ‘studious watchfulness which, here, the Bird of Athens signifies’. And he concludes with the words ‘By Night, we best may ruminate upon Our Purposes . . . For, of the World-without, when most we see, Then, blindest to the World-within, are we.’