Wise - Owl
PEEPING through the door, on hearing a rough kind of scale played upon his piano, a resident of Peterborough, some few years since, discovered that the player was his pet owl. Did he, I wonder, associate his discovery at all with the forgotten Wisdom of the East ? Did he know he was in process of repeating the very ancient experience of some sage—some Phoenician Of almost prehistoric days, whose name has long perished but the fruit of whose observation lies for ever patent to the world, in the device on some of his country's oldest coins ? On them you see the owl, engraved as the symbol of Divine Wisdom, with the hook of Attraction and the winnow of Separation under its wing, to represent her exclusive dominion over both.
Mr. Lemmy's* owl would step on to a key and then listen attentively to the sound, would try one note after another, looking extremely pleased ; then, when it arrived at the upper end of the piano and found no more music, it started back again and sounded all the notes until it reached the last in the bass. Wise owl ! And surely wise those men of old who could recognize wisdom where they saw it, be it in man or beast.
I do not know if Mr. Lemmy before his discovery was inclined to be of that mental complexion sometimes called Radical, or if he really knew anything of the ancient lore ; but in any case, I should like to think that after it he took an increased interest in the wisdom of his fathers and was never known to scoff at tradition.
The owl was known to the earliest peoples to surpass all creatures in acuteness and in refinement of organic sense : its eye can detect objects which to others are enveloped in darkness, its ear can distinguish sounds where no other creature can so much as perceive -them, its nose can discriminate scents so nicely that, perhaps, on this account it has been regarded as prophetic, for its being able to discover the putridity of death even in the first stages. So in the medals of ancient Athens almost every symbol, whether of creation, preservation, or destruction, is seen accompanying the owl.
Is this the reason why the night-owl, for longer than any other bird, has been associated with the darker side of the Unknown ? Virgil, Pliny, Chaucer, Marlowe, Gray, Chatterton, beside many another, introduce it as proverbially connected- with death, the entrance to the Great Unknown. Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hogarth's murder scene in Four Stages of Cruelty would be incomplete without it. Red Indians, niggers of West Africa, yellow men of Siam, aborigines of Australia, alike revere the sinister properties of the owl. In our own land, in the great family of Arundel, a white owl is said to be the sure precursor of death. Is this unique concern of the owl with Supernatural Wisdom, so well known to the ancients, the reason too why alone among creatures specially sensitive to supra-physical influences (the bat excepted) it is not at all scared by them, but chooses rather to live in haunted places ; whilst rooks and other psychic birds by violent flappings and cries show terror in the presence of the Unknown ?
Between Wisdom and Light there is an obvious con- nexion. And it may be that some one reading this page will tell us if any specimens have lately been noticed of those strange luminous owls, whose appearance in Norfolk in the first decade of this century caused so great a discussion. When one of the birds, in appearance like an ordinary barn owl, died, its luminosity vanished : as its captor remarked, " Its light had gone out."
NOEL CORNISH.
*Litirtg in St. Paul's Road, Peterborough, in 1913.
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