By FMT’s Lifestyle Desk
Many birds are cloaked in lore, but the owl is a raptor with no shortage of age-old superstitions (that ruffle humans’ feathers).
Owls are famous for their exceptional eyesight, and it was thought that people could gain sharper vision by consuming a part of the fowl. In England, the method was to cook owl eggs until they were ash, then incorporate them into a potion. Folklore from India had a more direct and gruesome method: just eat owl eyes.
Owls are a sign of death in many cultures, including some Native American tribes. For instance, dreaming of an owl signified approaching death for the Apache people. Boreal owl calls were a cry from spirits to the Cree people, and if you answered the owl with a whistle and didn’t get a response, it was a sign that your death was imminent. But for the Dakota Hidatsa people, burrowing owls acted as protective spirits for warriors, so not all owls were considered bad.
In fact, for some cultures, the owl is sacred. Among Australian Aborigines, owls are the spirits of women, and so are sacrosanct. The Kwakiutl people also thought owls were the souls of people and shouldn’t be harmed, because if an owl was killed, the person whose soul the owl carried would also die. Many different cultures even believed that a person became an owl after death.
With their air of mystery and mystical appearance, owls have inevitably become associated with witchcraft. Greeks and Romans believed witches could turn themselves into owls, and in this form, would suck the blood of babies. In other cultures, meanwhile, owls were simply the messengers of witches, or hooted to warn of the approach of a witch.
Though the owl’s nocturnal nature was at the root of many superstitions, the amazing ability of an owl to rotate its neck to extraordinary degrees was seen as most uncanny – and eventually gave birth to various myths. Most notable was a superstition in England, where it was believed that if you walked around a tree on which an owl was perched, it would follow you with its eyes, around and around until it wrung its own neck and died. Ow(l)!!
Based on an article published in the world’s premier meat-free lifestyle platform, www.KindMeal.my