Whether it is the Thai Kinnaree half-bird, half-woman, or Central European Goddess Holda who wore a cloak made of goose-down which she shakes as snow falls, or Athena with her wise little owl, or the Egyptian celestial goose and Mother of all Creation Gengen-Wer, we find an enduring and persistent relationship between birds and our sense of womanhood and femininity across cultures and geographies as well as over time.
Perhaps this is understandable because birds are associated with nesting and sheltering, nurturing and mothering, and these are responsibilities that traditionally entrusted to women. Though it may at first seem that these domestic and nurturing themes are the more predominating ones that connect women with birds, looking more deeply we can see that the association between women and birds in many ancient folktales casts a much more radical representation of women, and offers a much more diverse range of ways femininity and womanhood can be defined and embodied.
Work in progress carving of a linocut inspired by the Vietnamese myth of origin which includes a shapeshifting female crane fairy who mates with a dragon and births one hundred eggs that hatch into the Vietnamese people.
Details of a carved and inked block of artist’s linoleum right before printing featuring the Slavic folk-heroine Baba Yaga and a white falcon, both of whom are integral to the main character, Katrina’s, success in the heartwarming folktale “Katrina and the Bright Falcon” .
In her book Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females, Serenity Young offers a cross-cultural, multi-period, feminist study of flying women in myth, literature, ritual, and history. Young shares with us a diversity of female aerial goddesses throughout her book including: supernatural women like the Norse Valkyries, who transport men to immortality; winged deities like the Greek goddesses Iris and Nike; Hindu apsaras; figures of terror like the Furies, witches, and succubi; airborne Christian mystics; Islamic Sufis; the Middle Eastern Goddess Isis; and wayward, dangerous women like Lilith and Morgan le Fay. She even includes a female figure from Predynastic Egypt dating to ca. 3500–3400 BCE (the Naqada IIa period) with a birdlike face and upraised curved arms, as well as flying women who are associated with sexuality and bestow supernatural powers to their male counterparts in an ancient Chinese legend about the emperor Shun (ca. 2258–2208 BCE).
These bird-like heroines have been worshipped as bird goddesses, winged goddesses, and witches. Some are carried by their own wings, others by clouds, rainbows, floating scarves, broomsticks and flying horses. They are often free and sexually autonomous, they represent power and freedom, and can be life-giving and generous or unpredictable and destructive. Young asserts that flying women are resistant to and often indifferent to patriarchal values and they are reflective of an earlier, pre-patriarchal era. Women in many of these myths fly to escape the various social and religious strictures placed on them. A great example is the witch who “turns her broom into a source of power rather than domestic drudgery”, craftfully inverting the patriarchal order. Flight, whether by broom, wing, shape-shifting or mental transcendence, is liberating.
What bird-like qualities can we, as women living in the modern capitalist Industrial Age, reclaim that we have forgotten that these ancient folktales can offer us? How might we bring some of these myths and folktales that represent women as more empowered beings back into our imagination so that we might embody some of these bird-heroine-like qualities and live our lives more fully?
The Germanic folk-heroine Mother Goose, also known as Frau Holle, may have also been a goose herself, or may have shapeshifted between an elderly woman and a white swan or goose, because in some versions of the story she has a one large foot, like that of a goose, perhaps a splayed foot from pressing the treadle of her spinning wheel.
Perhaps we can find inspiration in real-life non-gender-conforming women like Harriet Tubman, a wild woman of her time, who mimicked the sound of barred owls to guide those whom she helped escape from slavery, and succeeded in navigating unfavorable terrains because of her deep knowledge of wild plants, a strong inner compass and outstanding outdoor survival skills. Virginia Hamilton, in her book The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, talks about how African American enslaved people used folktales about flying to imagine freedom as a possibility, using the phrase, ‘Come fly away!’ as code language when sharing escape plans. The bird metaphor was a way to express a collective desire for freedom without actually opening speaking about it, and Tubman used the bird-archetype as a way to harness her own power and free herself and others.
No cultural symbol of the Roaring Twenties is more recognizable than the flapper, which originally referred to female dancers who flapped their arms while doing the popular Charleston move to jazz music. “Flapper”, was also a word used to describe a new generation of young women who outrageously cut their hair short, dangled cigarettes from their painted lips, wore more comfortable clothing than their mothers and grandmothers, and explored new-found freedoms ushered in during World War I when women successfully took over many jobs traditionally held by men who were away at war. Flappers were unfazed by previous social conventions and were strong proponents for women’s social, political, economic, and sexual freedom which lead to the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. In light of so many bird-like rebellious and counter-cultural heroines in myths and folktales, it is not surprising these women were called “flappers”. The bird-metaphor, along with the newly free-flowing movement of the Charleston dance, carried with it a kind of liberating energy that awakened women to the oppressive constraints of society, and gave these women motivation and drive to advocate for their own liberation.
Interestingly, the Charleston dance has its roots in the Juba/Djuba dance, which was brought by enslaved Africans to Charleston, South Carolina, which then evolved into the African-American vernacular and syncopated dance moves done to jazz music now called The Charleston. The Charleston was based on a step called “Jay - Bird”, a simple twisting of the feet, to rhythm in a lazy sort of way, and gained popularity during the Harlem Renaissance, when great numbers of African Americans journeyed northwards during the “Great Migration” to escape the Jim Crow South. Once again, the bird-archetype comes into play during this transformative time for both African Americans and for women of various races, though much more was and still is needed to achieve freedom and equality in practice for all.
Joni Mitchell, celebrated folk singer of the 60’s, often would use bird symbols in her songs, with melodies that were also meandering, loose and free from conventional structures, personifying a wandering soul, an archetype Mitchell embodies completely not only with her music, but her life. Her album Hejira, for example, includes the song “Crow” and “Amelia”, which is about Amelia Earhart, the renowned female aviator. The song Heijira, is about a pilgrimage or migration towards finding her true self. And certainly there is something about a bird-like migration that fits so well with the idea of a pilgrimage or spiritual journey.
This is a hand carved linocut print inspired by an African American folktale featured in Virginia Hamilton’s book Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairytales and True Tales about three women who live in the woods who transform into owls.
Perhaps the bird-archetype is interwoven into our ideas of rebellious, non-gender-conforming mythical and real-life heroines because birds fly indiscriminately across landscapes without conforming to any humanly-constructed borderlines. They also fly seasonally, indifferent to the artificially constructed time frames that characterize capitalist industrial work schedules that define most of our lives. Birds are fiercely loyal to earthly cycles and borderless landscapes and in so doing, they remind us of wild-time. “There is human time and there is wild time,” says Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who writes about women and how the deepest feminine characteristics mimic that of the wild: “The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place” (276).
Like the concept of Yin and Yang, the folkloric motif consisting of two opposing forces is timeless and enduring and is hidden in plain sight in this White Mountain Apache folktale about an Old Woman who Weaves the World while Trickster Crow unravels it again. I find it telling that these two powerful cosmic forces that work in tandem are a woman and a crow.
Vanessa Chakour says in her book Awakening Artemis: Deepening our Intimacy with the Living Earth and Reclaiming our Wild Nature, “Revisiting traditional tales across cultures reflects the fact that there are places - inside and outside of us - that are worthy of protecting, sanctifying, and remembering”. What parts of ourselves have we forgotten that these bird-heroines remind us of that we can rightfully reclaim? Perhaps through orienting ourselves more towards wild-time, and finding ways to embody the bird metaphor in our everyday lives, we may pay more attention to our internal cues, our natural inclinations, our intuitions. We may come to honor our bodies’ wisdom, and value what deeply desire over the pressure to conform to the expectations, benchmarks and measures of success that do not necessarily correspond with our own internal clocks and rhythms, or who we naturally are. Do we really need to follow a map and compass when, like migrating birds, we already have our own internal compass to guide us? We have our own internal sense of when we need to winter, to retreat and rest, and this may or may not conform to the calendar, clock or best business practices, or prescribed career paths dictated by the industrial capitalist complex. In the midst the machine-like-pressure to always be busy and producing, in what small ways can we reclaim our power, rebel like these bird heroines, and embody the energy and spirit of wild birds? The bird-like heroines in Young’s book show us we have permission to show up as whole people, with strengths as well as shadows, with the power to give life and also to destroy it. They ask us to ponder the deep dark question: in what ways does always being “good” get in the way of transformation and empowerment?
Tokopa, author of the book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, writes about the sense of separation and lack of belonging to each other and to the landscape that many people feel today. She talks about the need for restorying our past, which is a way of unhindering ourselves from the spells and stories others have cast on us in order to voice our own truths and our own versions of ourselves. She says we can change the way we perceive the past by reframing and changing the language we use to describe events, circumstances, choices and decisions we faced, in such a way that empowers us and/or gives us more voice today. In light of this, how have we parceled off our wholeness in exchange for acceptance, and how can the language of birds be used to revive those parts so that we can bring our whole self into being?
The myth of Athena is a story about how Princess Nyctimene is lifted from the shame of her rape, through Athena’s transforming her into an owl who sits on Athena’s blind side. It is through her companionship with an owl that Athena is able to see the whole truth, and gain wisdom.
Folktales are symbolic, and like spells, can reinforce energy we may carry towards a subject or theme in our lives. Toko-pa says, “Restorying takes place along the living edge, where we are at once a disciple of the great story being born of our lives, but also the speller of the way.” She encourages to watch for new images that can appear in our dreams, and to follow them until a way out is found. Dreaming is a reflection of the earth speaking through us, dreaming is nature naturing through us. Dreams are like fruits, they ripen with an expression of our collective consciousness and collective culture.
These folktales about women as birds speak of a latent avian power that exists within us that we have the choice to manifest. We belong to the earth, like the birds, which means we are part of the ecosystem. The landscape is not just the backdrop on which the human drama takes place, we are an integral part of it. The choice is in our hands whether to bring the energy of these bird-heroines back to life, to open ourselves up to let them live through us so we can fly.
References:
Chakour, Vanessa., (2021) Awakening Artemis: Deepening Intimacy with the Living Earth and Reclaiming our Wild Nature. Penguin Random House.
Pinkola-Estes, Clarissa. (1992). Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. Ballentine Books.
Young, Serenity., (2018). Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females. Oxford University Press.
Turner, Toko-pa., (2017) Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home. Her Own Room Press.
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Singebis is an ancient Ojibwe winter folktale about a beloved folk hero and wild grebe whose perseverance, courage, resilience, and loyalty in the face of Kabibona'kan, Winter Maker, shows us we can do the same in the face of adversity. This story asks us to reflect on what kinds of Kabibona'kans do we face in our lives today that threaten to divide us from others who might be our friends? This folktale reminds us we all have the capacity to tap into our inner Singebis, find our inner trickster, and remind ourselves that even a little wild bird can outsmart the Winter Maker!