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Mythical Falcons
Detective Tom Polhaus (picks up falcon statue): Heavy. What is it?
Sam Spade: The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.
Polhaus: Huh?
(closing lines of The Maltese Falcon, 1941)
ON A FOGGY NOVEMBER dawn in 1941, the American bird-preservationist Rosalie Edge was woken by the frantic alarm-calls of city birds. She peered from her Manhattan window into Central Park. What had caused this commotion? Blinking back sleep, she realized that the stone falcon she could see carved from a rocky outcrop was no statue. It was alive. Suddenly, time stood still. She was transfixed. My soul, she wrote, ‘drank in the sight’ of this impossibly exotic visitor to the modern world. Was it, she breathed, the ghost of Hathor, wandered from the Metropolitan Museum and overtaken by sunrise? But no: ‘time resumed as the swift-winged falcon swept into the air . . . the enchantment was broken’.1
Another ancient falcon worked its enchantments on Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and audiences across America that year. The small black statuette of The Maltese Falcon casts its dark shadow across the screen at the very beginning of John Huston’s film noir, and the audience reads the barest bones of its history in scrolling text:
In 1539, the Knights Templar of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels . . . but pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day.
While driving the plot, the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery. Although it reveals the characters of the people in the film – all of whom desire or fear it – and the worlds in which they live, it is a mute object that reveals nothing more about itself. Likewise, that Central Park encounter at dawn tells us almost nothing about peregrines. But it tells us much about the writer herself and about the era she lived in, revealing some intriguing contemporary attitudes towards nature and history. In wartime America, it seems, falcons could be viewed as mystical manifestations of an age of theriomorphic gods and ancient ritual. But falcons carried many other meanings, too. Falcon-enthusiasts such as Edge saw them as living fragments of primeval wilderness imperilled by the relentless encroachment of modernity. Writing about falcons in this period is commonly shot through with a gloomy romanticism akin to that displayed in the works of many contemporary anthropologists who saw the cultures they studied as exotic, primitive, vital and ultimately doomed by historical progress.
Bogey and the black bird: Humphrey Bogart, the Maltese Falcon and their conjoined shadow in a publicity shot for John Huston’s 1941 film.
The falcon as a token of a medieval Golden Age: a detail from a 14th-century fresco by Simone Martini at the church of San Francesco, Assisi. |
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And falcons could be icons of history, as well as wild nature. Way back in 1893 a popular magazine described the ancient sport of falconry as having an ‘astonishing hold on the popular imagination of Americans’ with the image of a hooded falcon ‘as firmly impressed on the popular mind as that of St George and the Dragon’.2 And the Second World War heightened this ability of falcons to conjure a lost golden age of medieval splendour. As America increasingly saw itself as the guardian of a European high-cultural heritage threatened by the dark forces of fascism, trained falcons made frequent appearances in Hollywood epics about the Second World War set in the Technicolor Middle Ages. And wartime falcons could also be seen as the biological counterparts of warplanes: heavily armed natural exemplars of aerodynamic perfection. This notion of falcons fascinated the military. It even led to real falcons being incorporated in defence systems – with varying success, as Chapter Four shows. And, making all too apparent the fact that falcon myths can carry real-world consequences, many Americans, viewing nature with crystalline conviction through their cultural lenses, inserted falcons into their own systems of morality: they viewed them as rapacious murderers of songbirds, enemies to be shot on sight.
All these stories are the falcon-myths of 1940s east coast America. Calling them myths only seems odd because most are still being told. Today, falcons remain precious icons of wild nature; they remain elegant icons of medievalism; some still damn them for their ‘cruelty’ to other birds, and American F-16 Fighting Falcon jets are familiar silhouettes in many skies. As the saying goes, myths are never recognized for what they are except when they belong to others.
THE FALCON AND THE COCK
Myths, then, are stories promoting the interests and values of the storytellers, making natural, true and self-evident things that are merely accidents of history and culture. They anchor human concepts in the bedrock of nature, assuring their audiences that their own concepts are as natural as rocks and stones. The process is termed naturalization, nature being taken as the ultimate proof of how things are. Or how things should be: myths have a normative element, too. Sometimes this is obvious: the Kyrgyz proverb ‘feed a crow whatever you like, it will never become a falcon’, for example, makes inequalities between people natural facts, not merely accidents of society. Fables work similarly to naturalize the storyteller’s social mores. But the normative strength of fables is sneakily increased by the way readers are complicit in the myth-making, taking pleasure in working out the moral before reading it themselves. Thomas Blage’s 1519 animal fable Of the Falcon and the Cock begins with a knight’s falcon refusing to return to his fist.
A Cock seeing this, exalted him selfe, sayeing: What doe I poore wretch alwayes living in durte and myre, am I not as fayre and as great as the Falcon? Sure I will light on hys glove and be fedde with my Lords meate. When he had lighted on hys fiste, the knight (though he were sory) yet somwhat rejoyced & tooke the Cock, whom he killed, but hys fleshe he shewed to the Falcon, to bring him againe to his hand, which the Falcon seeing, came hastily too it.3
Blage’s moral hammers home the message: ‘Let every man walke in his vocation, and let no man exalte him selfe above his degree.’ His fable rests on a robust and ancient perception of falcons as noble animals. Refinement, strength, independence, superiority, the power of life and death over others – for millennia these have been assumed features of falcon and nobleman alike. Consequently, falcon myths often reinforce human social hierarchies through appealing to the straightforward ‘fact’ that falcons are nobler than other birds.
In early modern Europe the worlds of humans and birds were thought to be organized in the same way, shaped according to the same clear social hierarchy. Royalty sat at the top of one, raptors at the top of the other, and the class distinctions between various grades of nobility were paralleled by species distinctions between various types of hawks. Often misread by modern falconers as a prescriptive list of who-could-fly-which-hawk, the fifteenth-century The Boke of St Albans illustrates this correspondence with sly facility; a kind of Burke’s Peerage meets British Birds:
Ther is a Gerfawken. A Tercell of gerfauken. And theys belong to a Kyng.
Ther is a Fawken gentill, and a Tercell gentill, and theys be for a prynce.
There is a Fawken of the rock. And that is for a duke.
Ther is a Fawken peregrine. And that is for an Erle.
Also ther is a Bastarde and that hawk is for a Baron.
Ther is a Sacre and a Sacret. And Theis be for a Knyght.
Ther is a Lanare and a Lanrett. And theys belong to a Squyer.
Ther is a Merlyon. And that hawke is for a lady.4
While the existence of this natural hierarchy was unquestionable, those who had sufficient social authority were able to be iconoclastic within its bounds. Thus the Chancellor of Castile, Pero López de Ayala, could declare his preference for the nobly conformed peregrine over the gyrfalcon, for the latter was ‘a villein in having coarse hands [wings] and short fingers [primaries]’.5
‘Ther is a Gerfawken . . . and theys belong to a Kyng’. On his throne, King Stephen feeds a white gyrfalcon. From the Chronicle of England by Peter de Langtoft, c. 1307–27.
Such notions of parity between hawk and human exemplify that ferociously strong aspect of Kulturbrille in which humans assume that the natural world is structured exactly like their own society. A Californian Chumash myth held that before humans, animals inhabited the world. Their society was organized in ways just like that of the Chumash themselves, with Golden Eagle chief of all the animals, and Falcon, kwich, his nephew. Such parallels seem obvious. But they may be hidden deep. Sometimes their very existence is surprising – particularly when they occur in ‘objective’ science. But they are there. Furthermore, ecologists have routinely inflected their understandings of predation ecology with concerns relating to the exercise of power in their own society. Sometimes mappings from human to natural world have assumed moral, as well as functional, equivalences between raptors and humans, particularly in the ways each are respectively supposed to maintain stability in nature and society. This kind of analogical thinking can reach alarming heights. In 1959 soldier, spy and naturalist Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen wrote that the role of birds of prey was to weed out the weak and unfit. Without birds of prey, he maintained, one finds ‘decadence reducing birds to flightless condition and often to eventual extinction’.6 Peace leads to the decline of civilization, for Meinertzhagen. Fear is necessary to maintain social order. Without predators birds ‘would become as gross, as stupid, as garrulous, as overcrowded and as unhappy as the human race is today’. ‘Where absolute security reigns, as in the pigeons of Trafalgar Square,’ he wrote, ‘then there is no apprehension. I should dearly love to unleash six female goshawk in Trafalgar Square and witness the reaction of that mob of tuberculous pigeon.’7 You don’t need to have read Nietzsche to comprehend the subtext here, or when Meinertzhagen describes the mobbing of predators by ‘hysterical, abnormal, irresponsible’ flocks of birds as ‘atrocious bad manners’.8
TOTEMS AND TRANSFERENCES
For millennia, people wanting to possess qualities their culture considers intrinsic to falcons – power, wildness, speed, hunting proficiency and so on – have assumed falcon identities to do so. Warriors and hunters of the American Southeast Ceremonial Complex lent themselves the falcon’s keen eyesight and hunting ability by painting a stylized red-ochre peregrine ‘forked eye’ design around their own. Falcon beaks were interred alongside arrows fletched with falcon feathers in European Bronze Age graves, perhaps to lend the arrows the speed, precision and lethality of a falcon’s flight. Today, a man wearing a falcon t-shirt, a woman wearing a silver falcon necklace, a child grasping a moulted falcon feather tightly after a zoo visit: all these partake of a similar, if less pragmatic, desire to possess falcon qualities by association. But to become falcon-like, neither talismans nor disguises are required: such symbolic transferences can be granted by being named after a falcon or otherwise taking your personal or social identity from one.
In the early twentieth century anthropologists used the term totemism to describe the phenomenon in which particular families, clans or groups identify strongly with something non-human, often an animal. The function of animal totems, they wrote, is to allow one group of people to maintain that they are as different from another, otherwise similar group as one species of animal is different from another. For example, in Central Asia, the nomadic Oghuz carefully differentiated between the species, ages and sexes of various birds of prey and used many as emblems, or ongon, of their 24 tribes; the Turul, or Altai falcon, was the emblem of the house of Attila and was portrayed on Attila the Hun’s shield.
Identifications like these have practical and political ramifications. Kyrgyz and Kazakh falconers could give falcons to members of their own families and clans but not to those of others, for doing so would undermine the power of their own. Capturing an enemy’s falcon had immense symbolic import. And presenting your own falcon to an enemy was a clear and unambiguous sign of surrender. The legend of Khan Tokhtamysh’s famous falcons captures this perfectly. Tamerlane, his arch enemy, wanted to steal eggs from the Khan’s falcons, for if he reared chicks from them himself, he reasoned, he could possess his enemy’s power. Tamerlane obtained his eggs by bribing the falcon’s guard. And indeed, once the falcons were reared, the Khan’s powers were lessened: he lost his next battle to Tamerlane and fled. Such notions underpin the long history of falcons as gifts of diplomacy, political settlement and martial negotiation of a value far greater than their rarity or their usefulness as falconry birds would suggest.
The concept of totems fell from favour in the late twentieth century, and for good reason: anthropologists had routinely used it in ways that reinforced their presumptions that totemic societies were ‘primitive’ compared to their own. But recently cultural historians who study how industrialized societies articulate notions of personal, national and corporate identity have resurrected the term. Falcons can be the collective representation of your family, your clan, your company, your country, your band, your brand. Some falcons are national emblems – the white gyrfalcon depicted on the nineteenth-century Icelandic flag, for example, or the saker on the flag, stamps and banknotes of the United Arab Emirates. Falcon national identities and sporting identities collided in the nineteenth century in the Austro-Hungarian physical education organization Sokol (Falcon), which became a strongly nationalist organization in the interwar period. And falcon totems are frequent in sport. In the 1960s a schoolteacher won a competition to name Atlanta’s football team: the Atlanta Falcons was her suggestion. Her rationale pushed parallels between birds and football players to ludicrous and delightful heights. ‘The Falcon is proud and dignified,’ she wrote, ‘with great courage and fight. It never drops its prey. It is deadly and has a great sporting tradition.’9
The Falcons, the US Air Force Academy’s American Football team, display their live mascot in a 1950s photo. Real men, it seems, don’t need gauntlets to hold falcons. |
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A flying peregrine on a cloth patch for the band British Sea Power. |
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The notion of falcon as Ur-football player might stretch the symbolic functionality of falcons a little far. But it’s par for the course; falcons have been used to naturalize such a vast panoply of concepts that it’s almost impossible to see where the bird ends and the image begins. Thus falcon totems often carry much broader associative significances. For example, the falcon evokes a special brand of neo-romantic hard-edged pastoralism for the iconoclastic Cumbrian rock group British Sea Power: crowned with leaves, they perform on a stage bedecked with masses of green foliage, a plastic peregrine falcon looming through smoke from the top of an amp, the atmosphere redolent of Platoon meets The Animals of Farthing Wood.
Technology meets the family in 1950s America: a Ford Falcon advertisement.
Hopeful transferences of falcon characteristics also litter the international marketplace, for falcons seem to offer a litany of favoured qualities the world over. A baffling diversity of goods has been named after falcons. Atari’s Falcon computer, for example; Falcon bicycles. Publicity shots for the Japanese Hayabusa (peregrine) superbike show a falcon sitting on its sculpted handlebars. There are Dassault Falcon corporate jets and Falcon companies selling everything from fishing gear to accountancy skills. The simplicity of this strategy of corporate symbolic transference makes it grist for the cynic’s mill. Miami Herald humourist Dave Barry, for example, described falcons as ‘fierce birds of prey named after the Ford Falcon, which holds the proud title of the Slowest Car Ever Built’.10
DIVINE FALCONS
Some mythical falcons exist in a world far from bicycles, aircraft and corporate brand hunger. On a pedestal in the Louvre stands a bronze human figure with a falcon’s head. His stance – hollow eyes and ruff of feathers above outstretched arms – has been held in bronze for 3,000 years. This is one manifestation of the ancient Egyptian god Horus. Since the popular craze for ancient Egyptian iconography that swept the West after Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamen, he has become the most familiar mythical falcon of all. Horus means ‘the distant one’ or ‘the one on high’. In pre-Dynastic Egypt his earliest form was worshipped at cities such as Nekhen, known to the Greeks as Hierakonpolis, or Falcon City. This early Horus was a creator god, the celestial falcon who flew up at the beginning of time. His wings were the sky; his left eye was the sun, his right the moon; and the spots on his breast were the stars. When he beat his wings, winds blew.
Ancient Egypt had many falcon gods – war-god Montu, for example, Sokar, Sopdu, Nemty, Dunanwi. As alliances were forged between different regions and cults, many local falcon gods became assimilated to Horus, and Horus to many others. In Heliopolis, the centre of the sun cult, the sky-god Horus merged with the sun-god Re to become the god Re-Hor-Akhty, depicted as a falcon or a falcon-headed man with the sun disk on his head. Horus was also incorporated into Heliopolian cosmogony as the son of the gods Osiris and Isis. In this form he was crowned as the first king of Upper and Lower Egypt. All his human royal successors were known as ‘The Horus’ during their reign. Real falcons were considered living manifestations of the powers represented by falcon gods, and were deeply involved in Egyptian religious practice. Every autumn a live falcon was ceremonially crowned as the new king at the temple of Edfu, the centre of the Horus cult in Upper Egypt. The statue of Horus presented his new, living heir to the people, and then the falcon was crowned and invested with royal regalia in the temple. This now-sacred falcon was then kept in the nearby grove of the sacred falcons. On its natural death it was mummified and buried with great ceremony.
The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, owned this painted figure of a mummified falcon. It represents the Egyptian funerary deity Sokar. |
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Hundreds of thousands of falcons in ancient Egypt were mummified and given as votive offerings to the gods. Dipped into tar, or preserved with natron, their bodies were placed in a suitable receptacle or coffin before being passed to the shrine priest to be entombed on the devotee’s behalf in mass interment ceremonies. The temple of Nectanebo II at Saqqara, dedicated to Isis, the mother of Horus, contained 100,000 mummified votive falcons stored in galleries, stacked in rows of jars separated by layers of sand. Temple priests bred some sacred animals such as cats and ibises specifically for the purpose of interment, but falcons are difficult to breed in captivity; the Horus cult must have had significant impact on wild falcon populations in the region. The trade in falcons was extensive, and while most of these offerings were indeed local falcon species such as kestrels and lanners, many weren’t: kites, vultures and even small songbirds were also interred. Perhaps these were fakes, fraudulently sold to devotees in an ancient deception revealed – along with the birds’ frail bones – centuries later by x-ray and magnetic resonance imaging.
FALCON CULTS
Striking parallels exist between the mythico-religious roles of falcons across diverse cultures and over many millennia. As the cult of Horus suggests, falcon-gods are commonly creator-gods and associated with sun or fire. Like Horus, the ancient Iranian fire- and water-god Avestan Xvaranah was depicted as a falcon. Like Horus he was synonymous with the celestial fortune of kings and their divine right to wield authority. God, according to the prophet Zoroaster, had the head of a falcon. The sixteenth-century French falconer Charles D’Arcussia reminded his readers that the ancients thought that the thighbones of peregrines or sakers attracted gold just as a magnet attracts iron. An apt correspondence, D’Arcussia thought, because ‘the Alchemists . . . attribute golden metal to the sun’. But as a falconer D’Arcussia had a more prosaic explanation. ‘The Ancients did not mean anything more than that flying hawks is a great expense,’ he wrote, ‘attracting and consuming much gold from those whose passion for it goes beyond reason.’11
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
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. |
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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
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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,
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.
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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. |
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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.
Another fatherless child unaware of his true identity, the young King Arthur, is transformed into a merlin by his teacher Merlin in T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone as part of his ‘eddication’. White’s portrayal playfully digs at familiar tropes of medievalism; his talking hawks and his Arthurian armoured knights share a social hierarchy, etiquette and iconography. In the mews of the Castle Sauvage, each hawk or falcon is ‘a motionless statue of a knight in armour’, the birds standing ‘gravely in their plumed helmets, spurred and armed’. The parallels are winningly unsubtle and beautifully couched: ‘The canvas or sacking screens of their perches moved heavily in a breath of wind, like banners in a chapel, and the rapt nobility of the air kept their knight’s vigil in knightly patience.’25 White gently satirizes the mores of military and sporting elites; before turning the Wart into a merlin and setting him loose into the mews, Merlin suggests that he ‘learn by listening to the experts’ in the martial culture Arthur will have to live and breathe as king. Merlin points out that these falconry birds:
don’t really understand that they are prisoners, any more than cavalry officers do. They look on themselves as being dedicated to their profession, like an order of knighthood or something like that. You see, the membership of the mews is after all restricted to the raptors, and that does help a lot. They know that none of the lower classes can get in. Their screen perches don’t carry blackbirds or such trash as that.26
In the 1930s White himself, an unhappy schoolteacher rent by anxieties over his status, his sexuality and his career, quit his job, took a gamekeeper’s cottage deep in a wood and set about the task of training a hawk. He saw hawk-training as a form of psychoanalysis, treasuring the notion that he might become a feral creature, like the bird he trained. Indeed, falcons’ long, familiar partnership with mankind as falconry birds – often living right inside the most domestic of spheres, the household – coupled with their resistance to domestication, has allowed falcons and other birds of prey to become powerfully charged symbols of wildness in many cultures. Falconry has marked mankind’s relation with falcons in myriad robust and decisive ways, and the next chapter explores the phenomenon of what T. H. White called a ‘rage that you sleep and drink and tremble to think of . . . even in recollection’,27 and what King James I described as an ‘extreme stirrer up of passions’.28
An iconic falconry image: an immature peregrine, wearing jesses, Lahore bells and a feather-plumed Dutch hood.