The Meaning of Birds by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

Eagles operate as a fierce aspect of spirituality. For some spiritual purposes, all eagles are snake eagles: emblems of nobility and aspiration that regularly cleanse the world of the evil and poisonous things that creep across its surface. The eagle is the symbol for St John the Evangelist, which is one of the reasons for the eagle lecterns. There is a painting in the National Gallery in London by Domenico Zampieri that shows St John receiving the divine inspiration to write his gospel. His eyes are turned heavenwards while his feet rest on an eagle. It seems that the evangelist’s aspirations have already risen higher than eagles can carry him.

Spirituality, then, is not a fuzzy New Age sort of thing. It is not entirely lovey-dovey, for all that we will be coming to doves very shortly. The eagle symbolism demonstrates something hard-edged and direct—imposing, and not a little frightening. There is an eagle flying around the throne of God in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible and the most alarming.

Eagles represent religion at its least compromising. They carry a sense of magnificence and aspiration, but also an aura of hardness, of the cruel-but-necessary kind. Like all symbols they are packed with ambiguities of every kind.

The Bible has its jaunty, even its saucy, moments. Eagles aren’t always connected with high and lonely duties of the spiritual quest. Sometimes they can be persuaded to play a more earthy role. There is a chunk in Proverbs, one of those bits of the Bible half-known to us all, though few of us can remember where it actually came from without looking it up. I did so myself, of course, and was delighted to be reunited with this verse. Savour the rhythm of it:

There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.

The white dove is a symbol of peace, love and fertility, the three things being naturally connected. It also stands for the Holy Spirit among its many other religious duties. So what is the difference between a dove and a pigeon? None whatsoever. We use the term in an apparently random way, but ultimately, the species we like we call dove and those we like less we call pigeon. Thus the bird of our cities is variously known as the feral pigeon and the common pigeon; both come from the same wild species, which we call rock dove.

The domesticated pigeon is, as said before, bred from the same species. The homing pigeons, fantails, pouters and tumblers that pigeon-fanciers love are blood brothers and sisters to the birds we curse in city streets. And so the white dove that we love is the same bird that scavenges for chips outside McDonald’s at Liverpool Street Station in London.

In James

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