Mainly nocturnal and solitary birds, of which there are numerous species. The best known is probably the barn owl, which is white and brown and has a shrieking call. The tawny owl is more common and makes the more familiar ‘too witt too whoo’ calls.
Nocturnal birds tend, not surprisingly, to be the subject of deep fear and suspicion, and owls, with their silent flight and eerie calls, are no exception. Chaucer, for example, refers in his Parlement of Fowles to ‘The owl eke [also], that of death the bode [omen] bringeth.’ And Shakespeare similarly regarded it as the harbinger of misfortune and death. Its appearance in Julius Caesar is all the more sinister because it is not seen at its appointed time but during the day. As Casca says (in Act I, Scene 3):
And yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noonday, upon the market place,
Hooting and shrieking.
In Shakespeare’s time, people also believed that if an owl appeared at the birth of a child, this boded ill; hence, for example, the accusation King Henry VI levels at the wicked Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in one of the final scenes of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III, ‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign.’
Nearly two thousand years earlier, owls had been greatly feared by the Romans, who, like so many other peoples over the centuries, believed the birds were the messengers of death. The poet Ovid wrote, ‘Cowardly owl, an omen dreadful to mortals’, and Pliny described it as: ‘Bird of death and utterly abominable’. Three emperors, Augustus, Valentinian and Commodus Antonius, were thought to have died after an owl had alighted on the roof of their villas, and it is no doubt for this reason that any owl seen on the Capitol was treated extremely severely: it would be caught, then burnt, and its ashes would be thrown into the Tiber.
The Pima Indians of Arizona went even further in the link they made between owls and death, for they believed that owls actually contained the souls of the departed and that if an owl was heard hooting at the actual moment someone died it was a sign that it was waiting for that person’s soul. Owl feathers were given to a dying person and were kept in a special long box ready for this purpose. If it so happened that a family did not already possess such feathers, then the medicine man, who always kept a stock of such things, would be fetched.
This link between owls and death also existed in ancient Egypt. When pharaohs decided they wished to be rid of a particular courtier or official, they would send him a picture of an owl. The message was unambiguous: the recipient was expected to take his own life. On a less sinister note, in hieroglyphics the sound ‘m’ was denoted by an owl, which, unusually for hieroglyphics, was drawn face out rather than in profile.
From the south of India comes a belief which is similar in some ways to rhymes in British folklore about MAGPIES, though here it is not a case of divining the future by counting how many birds could be seen, but by counting the number of cries that could be heard. If an owl screeched once it foretold death; twice, the success of some project; three times, a marriage; four, trouble; five, a journey; six, the arrival of visitors; seven, anxiety; eight, sudden death; and nine, a favourable event.
Many traditions record links between owls and children. In some cases, the link is part and parcel of the belief that owls portended the future; so, for example, in the South of France, it was thought that if an owl called from the chimney of a pregnant woman’s house, then the baby would be a girl; in Jewish folklore, there was a fear that the calls of an owl could cause the death of infants, and a conviction that the way to prevent this happening was to pour water out into the courtyard so as to distract the bird. But in some traditions, there was an even more direct, physical link between the birds and the humans who feared them. The Berbers of North Africa, for instance, believed that owls, known as sheerrees from the sound they make, had two nipples on their breasts, like a woman, and that if they discovered a newborn child in an encampment, they would fly in silently at night and suckle the baby. One teat produced a special milk which would make the infant grow big and strong, but the other produced infected blood which would kill the child by morning. If a baby was found with oozing nostrils it was a sign that the sheerree was the culprit. Even today, in an effort to thwart the bird, some mothers of newborn babies cover their child’s head when it’s asleep. It’s possible that the superstition arose from an attempt to account for what is known in western countries as cot death.
A parallel to this belief can be found in European folklore. The writer Titinius, who lived in the second century BC, advised that garlic should be placed on a baby to protect it from ‘strix’ (the Latin name for the screech owl), in case it ‘should instil milk between their lips’. Centuries later, the medieval German philosopher Albertus Magnus referred to a very similar belief in his discussion of the ‘bubo’, or horned owl. He also called it an ‘amma’ – a name the owl had acquired, or so the Dominican friar Vincent de Beauvais claimed in his very popular encyclopaedia, because of its love for children (amma, he said, derived from the Latin verb amare, to love).
From these beliefs to a conviction that owls could play a significant role in witchcraft was a very small step indeed. The Romans held that Hecate, the goddess of the underworld and magic, had the owl as her ally, and since then many have come to believe that owls were actually the familiars of witches, carrying them on their evil expeditions on silent wings. Country people in Sweden argued that one should exercise a great deal of caution when talking about owls, for fear of angering them. Equally, should an owl be killed, there was a strong belief that its companions might come back to avenge its death. Not surprisingly, owls were thought to be a necessary ingredient in many witches’ brews, too. The three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth add an ‘owlet’s wing’ to their magic potion, while Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queenes makes reference to ‘the screech owls’ eggs and the feathers black’.
Many birds feature in proverbial sayings throughout the world. For example, in Holland people sometimes say, ‘Wat baten kaars en bril, als den uil niet zienen wil?’, which literally means ‘What use are candle and glasses if the owl does not want to see?’ and is roughly equivalent to ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’ If you want to tell a Hungarian that money doesn’t grow on trees, you might well say, ‘Nem repül a sült galamb a szádba’, meaning ‘Fried chicken doesn’t fly into your mouth’; but if you’re not great with money yourself you may well get the response ‘Bagoly mondja a verébnek, hogy nagyfeju’, which means ‘The owl calling the sparrow big-headed’, in other words ‘The pot calling the kettle black.’ In Turkey, the problems with debating an issue for too long are summed up in the phrase ‘Horozu çok olan köyün sabahi geç olur’, which means ‘In a village with too many cockerels, morning will come late.’ And in the Philippines, there is a proverb that warns against riches if all they bring is solitude: ‘Aanhin mo ang palasyo, kung ang nakatira ay kuwago? Mabuti pa ang bahay kubo, ang nakatira ay tao’ or ‘What good is a palace if it’s inhabited by owls? Better a straw hut inhabited by people.’
That said, there is a counter-tradition to these negative and fearful beliefs. For many, the owl may have been a creature of the night, to be avoided and shunned. It may even have been regarded as a rather stupid bird (perhaps because it is confused and dazzled by daylight). However, to the ancient Greeks the owl was a symbol of sagacity, a bird sacred to Athene, the goddess of wisdom and victory, and frequently depicted on Greek coins. To catch sight of an owl was a good omen, as Aristophanes makes clear in his play The Wasps:
Yet we drove their ranks before us, ere the fall of eventide, As we closed in, an owl flew o’er us and the gods were on our side.
The general Agathokles released a number of owls before the Greeks’ victory over the Carthaginians in 310 BC, and when the birds flew among the troops and settled on their shields they served to boost morale considerably. In fact, ‘There goes an owl’ was a Greek saying that meant a victory was in prospect.
This rather more positive view of owls can be found in many aspects of folk medicine as well. Although they may have been used by witches for evil purposes, owls could be used by ordinary people to effect cures. In India, for example, it was thought that eating owls’ eggs improved night vision. Local people would also place a few owls’ feathers under the pillows of fractious babies to calm them. Conversely, the Cherokees of North America bathed their children’s eyes with a liquid containing owls’ feathers to help them stay awake at night. And people in Yorkshire believed that because owls can hoot without coming to any harm, a broth made from an owl would cure whooping cough. Meanwhile in Germany it was believed that placing the heart and right foot of an owl under the left armpit would ensure you’d never be bitten by a mad dog, while the Romans believed the ashes of an owl’s feet to be a certain remedy against snake venom. Pliny also wrote that ‘owlet’ was a remedy for leech bites and insect stings.
Evidence of belief in the magic properties of the owl can be found all over the world. In Pennsylvania, an Amish belief was recorded in 1863 that claimed that placing the heart and right foot of a barn owl on a sleeping person would compel the sleeper to answer any question truthfully – this belief resembles one held by Albertus Magnus, probably quoting from Pliny, who observed that an owl’s heart placed on the left breast of a sleeping woman would cause her to reveal her secrets. In Britain and Europe in the not-too-distant past, dead owls were nailed to barns as a protection against hail and lightning. Again, this is a belief with a long pedigree, being referred to by the Roman author Columella, who wrote a long tract on agriculture in the first century AD called De Re Rustica. It seems to be quite a widely held belief, too: in China, owls were known as ‘thunder-averters’, and special owl-like ornaments were fixed to the corners of roofs to protect houses against fire.
Among all these various folk remedies and charms, one of the longest standing – and certainly most bizarre – is that owls can prevent drunkenness. The ancient Greeks believed that any child who ate an owl’s egg would never become an alcoholic, while in his 1643 work Speculum mundi (The Mirror of the World), John Swan wrote that owls’ eggs broken in a cup would serve to cure a drunkard of his drunkenness. A more tangential link between owls and alcohol comes in the first-century AD medical treatise called Cyranides, which, in addition to prescribing a soup made from an owl’s egg and eaten at the time of the waning moon as a cure for epilepsy, also recommended salted owl as good for gout. Since excessive consumption of alcohol was thought to cause gout, this proposed cure seems to form part of a wider pattern of beliefs.
No description of owls in folklore would be complete without an account of the legend that lies behind the remark ‘They say the owl was a baker’s daughter’ that Ophelia makes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet shortly before her suicide. The legend tells how Jesus went into a baker’s shop for something to eat. The baker put some dough into the oven to make a cake, but his daughter thought he was being too generous, so she took the dough out of the oven and halved it. When the cake was done it turned out to be enormous and the daughter cried, ‘Hoo! hoo! hoo!’ in surprise. She was immediately turned into an owl by Jesus as a punishment for her miserliness. Similar stories are told about LAPWINGS and WOODPECKERS.