Owls
OWLS. As a creature of two realms, the owl is a multivalent symbol admitting of both benevolent and malevolent interpretations. Like most birds, owls represent higher states of being (angels, spirits, supernatural aid, and wisdom), while their nocturnal nature and ominous hoot ally them with the instinctual world of matter, darkness, death, and blind ignorance. In a series of etchings he called Los caprichos, the Spanish painter Goya depicted owls as the dark forces of the irrational.
For many early peoples, owls were associated with the baleful, devouring nature of the Great Mother, and their sinister aspect as birds of ill omen prevailed over their benign connotations. In the Egyptian system of hieroglyphs, owls signify night, death, the sun that has sunk into darkness; in the Hindu tradition, they represent the soul and Yama, god of the dead; and in China, images of owls carved on funeral urns symbolize death. The owl was an attribute of the god of darkness for the Etruscans, a chthonic sign for the Celts, who called it the "corpse bird," and the taboo animal of early metallurgists. In the pagan religion of the Abyssinian Hamites, owls were sacred and were believed to embody the souls of those who had died unavenged.
Because of the owl's association with the otherworld and its mysteries, the bird was thought to be cognizant of future events and became an emblem of wisdom. Owls were regarded as auspicious in classical Greece, where they were sacred to Pallas Athena, the goddess of divine knowledge, human wisdom, and the arts; they were depicted on vases, coins, and monuments as her emblem and companion. A trace of totemism is detected in one of her epithets, Glaucopis ("owl"), which suggests that at one time the bird had been worshiped as a god and only later became an attribute of the goddess. The Romans allied the owl to Athena's counterpart Minerva, and also believed that it augured death. The funereal screech owl was anathema to the Romans, and its appearance at public auspices was deemed unpropitious. In Vergil's Aeneid, when Dido contemplates death upon learning that Aeneas is to abandon her, she hears the "deathly lamentations" of an owl. And Shakespeare has Lady Macbeth say "I heard the owl scream" when Duncan is murdered.
In Judaism the owl symbolizes blindness, and according to the Talmud it is an ill omen in dreams. The Hebrew scriptures classify owls among the unclean birds, and when God declares his vengeance against Zion, he condemns it to be "a habitation of dragons and a court for owls" (Is. 34:14). Job, in his despair, cries that he is "a companion to owls" (Jb. 30:29).
Throughout Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, owls were a sign of the darkness that prevailed before the advent of Christ and a symbol of those Jews who elected to dwell therein instead of in the light of the gospel. As a bird that shuns the light, the owl was equated with Satan, Prince of Darkness, who lures people into sin as the owl tricks birds into snares. A symbol of solitude when depicted with hermits at prayer, the owl denotes wisdom when it is shown at the side of Saint Jerome. Scenes of the crucifixion sometimes show the owl with Christ, whose sacrifice brought light to those in darkness.
Owls are considered the agents of magic among many peoples. Siberian and Inuit (Eskimo) shamans regard them as helping spirits, a source of powerful aid and guidance, and wear their feathers on caps and collars. Tatar shamans try to assume the bird's shape, and the Buriats keep an owl or hang up its skin to ward off evil spirits. The Ainu look on the owl as a deity. In one Samoan village the people believe that the owl incarnates their god. A malevolent pre-Columbian Aztec god is represented with a screech owl on his head.
Among certain American Indian tribes, it was believed that God's power was transmitted to the shaman through owls. The Kiowa thought that the medicine man became an owl after death, and Creek priests bore a stuffed owl as their insignia. Owl dances were performed as a magical rite, and in the Medicine Pipe Dance of the Crow tribes, the pipe stem was decorated with owl and woodpecker feathers to symbolize night and day. For some tribes the owl represented a psychopomp: The Ojibwa called the bridge over which the dead passed the "owl bridge," and the Pima believed that owl feathers facilitated the soul's flight to the world beyond.
Bibliography
Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, Conn., 1955. The owl as a totemic animal. Basing his concept of totemism on the mythically experienced unity and equivalence of human and animal, the author accounts for totemism as a belief that the clan was not merely descended from the animal but united with it in a magical context of the energy flowing between them.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964). Rev. & enl. ed. Reprint, Princeton, N.J., 1970. Owls as powerful guardians and helping spirits, bearers of instructions to sorcerers and shamans, symbolic of their power of flight.
Ovid. Metamorphoses, vol. 2. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. New York, 1916. The association of owls with the dark aspects of the goddesses of the underworld and their evocation of primitive fears.
New Sources
Cenzanto, Elena, and Fabio Santopietro. Owls: Art, Legend, History. Translated by Graham Fawcett. Boston, 1991.
Holmgren, Virginia. Owls in Folklore and Natural History. Santa Barbara, Calif., 1988.
Weinstein, Krystyna. The Owl in Art, Myth, and Legend. New York, 1991.
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