There are many stories about birds in the mythologies of peoples around the world – they are guides to the spirit realms, they are the bringers of language, they taught humanity to plant seeds, they bring fertility and food in general. Many of these stories, and the ecological lessons and connections that are encoded in them, point us to powerfully important relationships between our remote ancestors who migrated around the world following the paths of migrating birds and the landscape.
Ben Gagnon has written an engaging and provocative wide-ranging eco-history-centred in both archaeology and anthropology of early and pre-literate humanity from many parts of the world and the ecology and mythology of those areas and peoples. Although many of his sources are a hundred years old, I will excuse him as this is a poetic and eclectic speculative meditation on the possibilities of ecological spiritual connections.
There are a number of evocative correlations and connections here – humanity’s migration routes and settlement fitting in with the migration of the birds (an important food source for hunter-gatherers), the similarities in both sounds and in the pathways in the brain between birdsong and human speech, ancient evidence of the use of feathers in religious ritual, the correlation of early farming with bird migration pathways, the symbolism of the cosmic egg and eggs in general as fertility and rebirth, spring sexual rituals at the time of the arrival of migrating bird flocks (leading to a spate of births around the sacred season of winter solstice). He includes numerous photographs and drawings and briefly discusses archaeological finds from around the world which support his case, from Europe, the Americas, Australasia, Asia.
His final chapters deal with the ecological crisis currently underway and point back to the value of traditional spiritual practices like the sacred groves at the edges of villages, conservation measures that were destroyed with the enclosures of the consolidation of capitalism and private ownership of land. The crisis of habitat loss through treating forests as commodities is clearly reflected in the decline of populations of birds and insects.
Yes, it’s wide-ranging speculation tied together with ‘what-ifs’, not purely scholarship, poetic with selective use of evidence. But it inspires me, it is an opening to a theology that incorporates human culture into natural cycles, I’m pleased to have read it.
~review by Samuel Wagar
Author: Ben H. Gagnon
Moon Books, 2023
231 pg. Paperback £19 / $27 Can / $20 US
