The meaning of birds

Augury -- interpreting the behavior of birds -- is one of the oldest and most widespread forms of divination. It still survives in 21st-century Taiwan; I have seen a night-market fortune-teller interpret the hops and pecks of a tame sparrow.

Is it just an old superstition, or is there something in it? Are birds, those enigmatic little creatures with the blood of ancient dragons in their veins, perhaps a little magical?

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We once experienced a very clear bird-omen. My wife was at the home of a family whose daughters she tutored, and after one of these classes she was standing in the courtyard chatting with their mother. While teaching, she had felt that there was a "weird vibe" in the house, though everything seemed outwardly normal.

While they were talking, a large night heron suddenly appeared out of nowhere, flew full-speed into the concrete wall of the house, and fell down at their feet dead, its neck broken. There was no apparent explanation for this behavior. Birds flying into windows is normal, but concrete walls?

Days later, that family just imploded. I won't give any details here, but it was very, very bad.

Was the suicidal heron just an example of the broader phenomenon of omen or synchronicity, or is there something about birds as such? When my wife reported a "weird vibe," had she just subconsciously picked up on subtle changes in the behavior of the family members, or was it really something more like a literal vibration -- some ambient energy-like field that had become (to borrow a delightful word from those zany Scientologists) "enturbulated" -- something that birds, a sensitive lot, would react to?

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And what of the Spirit that descended "like a dove" on Jesus? I was taught in (Mormon) Sunday school that there was no actual dove involved, that the Spirit had merely descended "as gently as a dove" or something like that -- but I no longer believe that. Do doves have some specially distinctive way of descending? Spirits as such are not visible, but John the Baptist must have seen something, and the plain meaning of his words is that what he saw was a dove. Was the dove a hallucination induced by the Spirit as a means of communication? More likely, I think, an actual flesh-and-blood dove descended on Jesus, and John -- a prophet living in a culture that accepted ornithomancy as a matter of course -- interpreted the auspices correctly.

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Just after writing an earlier version of the above paragraph, I went out to get my motorcycle. As I approached the machine, a red turtle dove suddenly fluttered up from it, circled me once, and flew away. I'm going to play auspex here and call that a confirmation of my thoughts.

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A further synchronicity: While I was in the process of writing this post, I checked Bruce Charlton's blog and found this comment from one Tom Hart (see this post):

You cannot underestimate how far people are trapped in modernity. I once watched a nationalist pagan Youtuber who, while talking about population genetics on his computer, noted that an owl had landed on a branch outside his window the night before. For an ancient pagan this would have been an event of enormous import, the only thing worth talking about; the birds were messengers from the gods and augury was central to paganism. But the Youtuber, despite identifying as anti-modern and totally primal, rejecting even Christianity as too modern, mentioned the owl in passing--as if it were a curious and mildly interesting fact. The population genetics on his screen were much more important and real to him, and so he spurned a divine messenger.

Even people who have taken a conscious step out of modernity are still consumed by its frame of reference; when they see a bird, they don't see a sign--just a wildlife fact.