Falcon

by Helen Macdonald

  The falcon as a token of a medieval Golden Age: a detail from a 14th-century fresco by Simone Martini at the church of San Francesco, Assisi.

  And falcons could be icons of history, as well as wild nature. Way back in 1893 a popular magazine described the ancient sport of falconry as having an ‘astonishing hold on the popular imagination of Americans’ with the image of a hooded falcon ‘as firmly impressed on the popular mind as that of St George and the Dragon’.2 And the Second World War heightened this ability of falcons to conjure a lost golden age of medieval splendour. As America increasingly saw itself as the guardian of a European high-cultural heritage threatened by the dark forces of fascism, trained falcons made frequent appearances in Hollywood epics about the Second World War set in the Technicolor Middle Ages. And wartime falcons could also be seen as the biological counterparts of warplanes: heavily armed natural exemplars of aerodynamic perfection. This notion of falcons fascinated the military. It even led to real falcons being incorporated in defence systems – with varying success, as Chapter Four shows. And, making all too apparent the fact that falcon myths can carry real-world consequences, many Americans, viewing nature with crystalline conviction through their cultural lenses, inserted falcons into their own systems of morality: they viewed them as rapacious murderers of songbirds, enemies to be shot on sight.

  All these stories are the falcon-myths of 1940s east coast America. Calling them myths only seems odd because most are still being told. Today, falcons remain precious icons of wild nature; they remain elegant icons of medievalism; some still damn them for their ‘cruelty’ to other birds, and American F-16 Fighting Falcon jets are familiar silhouettes in many skies. As the saying goes, myths are never recognized for what they are except when they belong to others.

  THE FALCON AND THE COCK

  Myths, then, are stories promoting the interests and values of the storytellers, making natural, true and self-evident things that are merely accidents of history and culture. They anchor human concepts in the bedrock of nature, assuring their audiences that their own concepts are as natural as rocks and stones. The process is termed naturalization, nature being taken as the ultimate proof of how things are. Or how things should be: myths have a normative element, too. Sometimes this is obvious: the Kyrgyz proverb ‘feed a crow whatever you like, it will never become a falcon’, for example, makes inequalities between people natural facts, not merely accidents of society. Fables work similarly to naturalize the storyteller’s social mores. But the normative strength of fables is sneakily increased by the way readers are complicit in the myth-making, taking pleasure in working out the moral before reading it themselves. Thomas Blage’s 1519 animal fable Of the Falcon and the Cock begins with a knight’s falcon refusing to return to his fist.

  A Cock seeing this, exalted him selfe, sayeing: What doe I poore wretch alwayes living in durte and myre, am I not as fayre and as great as the Falcon? Sure I will light on hys glove and be fedde with my Lords meate. When he had lighted on hys fiste, the knight (though he were sory) yet somwhat rejoyced & tooke the Cock, whom he killed, but hys fleshe he shewed to the Falcon, to bring him againe to his hand, which the Falcon seeing, came hastily too it.3

  Blage’s moral hammers home the message: ‘Let every man walke in his vocation, and let no man exalte him selfe above his degree.’ His fable rests on a robust and ancient perception of falcons as noble animals. Refinement, strength, independence, superiority, the power of life and death over others – for millennia these have been assumed features of falcon and nobleman alike. Consequently, falcon myths often reinforce human social hierarchies through appealing to the straightforward ‘fact’ that falcons are nobler than other birds.

  In early modern Europe the worlds of humans and birds were thought to be organized in the same way, shaped according to the same clear social hierarchy. Royalty sat at the top of one, raptors at the top of the other, and the class distinctions between various grades of nobility were paralleled by species distinctions between various types of hawks. Often misread by modern falconers as a prescriptive list of who-could-fly-which-hawk, the fifteenth-century The Boke of St Albans illustrates this correspondence with sly facility; a kind of Burke’s Peerage meets British Birds:

  Ther is a Gerfawken. A Tercell of gerfauken. And theys belong to a Kyng.

  Ther is a Fawken gentill, and a Tercell gentill, and theys be for a prynce.

  There is a Fawken of the rock. And that is for a duke.

  Ther is a Fawken peregrine. And that is for an Erle.

  Also ther is a Bastarde and that hawk is for a Baron.

  Ther is a Sacre and a Sacret. And Theis be for a Knyght.

  Ther is a Lanare and a Lanrett. And theys belong to a Squyer.

  Ther is a Merlyon. And that hawke is for a lady.4

  While the existence of this natural hierarchy was unquestionable, those who had sufficient social authority were able to be iconoclastic within its bounds. Thus the Chancellor of Castile, Pero López de Ayala, could declare his preference for the nobly conformed peregrine over the gyrfalcon, for the latter was ‘a villein in having coarse hands [wings] and short fingers [primaries]’.5

  ‘Ther is a Gerfawken . . . and theys belong to a Kyng’. On his throne, King Stephen feeds a white gyrfalcon. From the Chronicle of England by Peter de Langtoft, c. 1307–27.

  Such notions of parity between hawk and human exemplify that ferociously strong aspect of Kulturbrille in which humans assume that the natural world is structured exactly like their own society. A Californian Chumash myth held that before humans, animals inhabited the world. Their society was organized in ways just like that of the Chumash themselves, with Golden Eagle chief of all the animals, and Falcon, kwich, his nephew. Such parallels seem obvious. But they may be hidden deep. Sometimes their very existence is surprising – particularly when they occur in ‘objective’ science. But they are there. Furthermore, ecologists have routinely inflected their understandings of predation ecology with concerns relating to the exercise of power in their own society. Sometimes mappings from human to natural world have assumed moral, as well as functional, equivalences between raptors and humans, particularly in the ways each are respectively supposed to maintain stability in nature and society. This kind of analogical thinking can reach alarming heights. In 1959 soldier, spy and naturalist Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen wrote that the role of birds of prey was to weed out the weak and unfit. Without birds of prey, he maintained, one finds ‘decadence reducing birds to flightless condition and often to eventual extinction’.6 Peace leads to the decline of civilization, for Meinertzhagen. Fear is necessary to maintain social order. Without predators birds ‘would become as gross, as stupid, as garrulous, as overcrowded and as unhappy as the human race is today’. ‘Where absolute security reigns, as in the pigeons of Trafalgar Square,’ he wrote, ‘then there is no apprehension. I should dearly love to unleash six female goshawk in Trafalgar Square and witness the reaction of that mob of tuberculous pigeon.’7 You don’t need to have read Nietzsche to comprehend the subtext here, or when Meinertzhagen describes the mobbing of predators by ‘hysterical, abnormal, irresponsible’ flocks of birds as ‘atrocious bad manners’.8

  TOTEMS AND TRANSFERENCES

  For millennia, people wanting to possess qualities their culture considers intrinsic to falcons – power, wildness, speed, hunting proficiency and so on – have assumed falcon identities to do so. Warriors and hunters of the American Southeast Ceremonial Complex lent themselves the falcon’s keen eyesight and hunting ability by painting a stylized red-ochre peregrine ‘forked eye’ design around their own. Falcon beaks were interred alongside arrows fletched with falcon feathers in European Bronze Age graves, perhaps to lend the arrows the speed, precision and lethality of a falcon’s flight. Today, a man wearing a falcon t-shirt, a woman wearing a silver falcon necklace, a child grasping a moulted falcon feather tightly after a zoo visit: all these partake of a similar, if less pragmatic, desire to possess falcon qualities by assoc
iation. But to become falcon-like, neither talismans nor disguises are required: such symbolic transferences can be granted by being named after a falcon or otherwise taking your personal or social identity from one.

  In the early twentieth century anthropologists used the term totemism to describe the phenomenon in which particular families, clans or groups identify strongly with something non-human, often an animal. The function of animal totems, they wrote, is to allow one group of people to maintain that they are as different from another, otherwise similar group as one species of animal is different from another. For example, in Central Asia, the nomadic Oghuz carefully differentiated between the species, ages and sexes of various birds of prey and used many as emblems, or ongon, of their 24 tribes; the Turul, or Altai falcon, was the emblem of the house of Attila and was portrayed on Attila the Hun’s shield.

  This beautiful, anatomically precise copper falcon effigy of c. AD 1–350 was found as part of a deposit of Hopewell Culture objects at the Mound City Group, located near present-day Chilllcothe, Ohio.

  Identifications like these have practical and political ramifications. Kyrgyz and Kazakh falconers could give falcons to members of their own families and clans but not to those of others, for doing so would undermine the power of their own. Capturing an enemy’s falcon had immense symbolic import. And presenting your own falcon to an enemy was a clear and unambiguous sign of surrender. The legend of Khan Tokhtamysh’s famous falcons captures this perfectly. Tamerlane, his arch enemy, wanted to steal eggs from the Khan’s falcons, for if he reared chicks from them himself, he reasoned, he could possess his enemy’s power. Tamerlane obtained his eggs by bribing the falcon’s guard. And indeed, once the falcons were reared, the Khan’s powers were lessened: he lost his next battle to Tamerlane and fled. Such notions underpin the long history of falcons as gifts of diplomacy, political settlement and martial negotiation of a value far greater than their rarity or their usefulness as falconry birds would suggest.

  The concept of totems fell from favour in the late twentieth century, and for good reason: anthropologists had routinely used it in ways that reinforced their presumptions that totemic societies were ‘primitive’ compared to their own. But recently cultural historians who study how industrialized societies articulate notions of personal, national and corporate identity have resurrected the term. Falcons can be the collective representation of your family, your clan, your company, your country, your band, your brand. Some falcons are national emblems – the white gyrfalcon depicted on the nineteenth-century Icelandic flag, for example, or the saker on the flag, stamps and banknotes of the United Arab Emirates. Falcon national identities and sporting identities collided in the nineteenth century in the Austro-Hungarian physical education organization Sokol (Falcon), which became a strongly nationalist organization in the interwar period. And falcon totems are frequent in sport. In the 1960s a schoolteacher won a competition to name Atlanta’s football team: the Atlanta Falcons was her suggestion. Her rationale pushed parallels between birds and football players to ludicrous and delightful heights. ‘The Falcon is proud and dignified,’ she wrote, ‘with great courage and fight. It never drops its prey. It is deadly and has a great sporting tradition.’9

  The Falcons, the US Air Force Academy’s American Football team, display their live mascot in a 1950s photo. Real men, it seems, don’t need gauntlets to hold falcons.

  A flying peregrine on a cloth patch for the band British Sea Power.

  The notion of falcon as Ur-football player might stretch the symbolic functionality of falcons a little far. But it’s par for the course; falcons have been used to naturalize such a vast panoply of concepts that it’s almost impossible to see where the bird ends and the image begins. Thus falcon totems often carry much broader associative significances. For example, the falcon evokes a special brand of neo-romantic hard-edged pastoralism for the iconoclastic Cumbrian rock group British Sea Power: crowned with leaves, they perform on a stage bedecked with masses of green foliage, a plastic peregrine falcon looming through smoke from the top of an amp, the atmosphere redolent of Platoon meets The Animals of Farthing Wood.

  Technology meets the family in 1950s America: a Ford Falcon advertisement.

  Hopeful transferences of falcon characteristics also litter the international marketplace, for falcons seem to offer a litany of favoured qualities the world over. A baffling diversity of goods has been named after falcons. Atari’s Falcon computer, for example; Falcon bicycles. Publicity shots for the Japanese Hayabusa (peregrine) superbike show a falcon sitting on its sculpted handlebars. There are Dassault Falcon corporate jets and Falcon companies selling everything from fishing gear to accountancy skills. The simplicity of this strategy of corporate symbolic transference makes it grist for the cynic’s mill. Miami Herald humourist Dave Barry, for example, described falcons as ‘fierce birds of prey named after the Ford Falcon, which holds the proud title of the Slowest Car Ever Built’.10

  DIVINE FALCONS

  Some mythical falcons exist in a world far from bicycles, aircraft and corporate brand hunger. On a pedestal in the Louvre stands a bronze human figure with a falcon’s head. His stance – hollow eyes and ruff of feathers above outstretched arms – has been held in bronze for 3,000 years. This is one manifestation of the ancient Egyptian god Horus. Since the popular craze for ancient Egyptian iconography that swept the West after Howard Carter opened the tomb of Tutankhamen, he has become the most familiar mythical falcon of all. Horus means ‘the distant one’ or ‘the one on high’. In pre-Dynastic Egypt his earliest form was worshipped at cities such as Nekhen, known to the Greeks as Hierakonpolis, or Falcon City. This early Horus was a creator god, the celestial falcon who flew up at the beginning of time. His wings were the sky; his left eye was the sun, his right the moon; and the spots on his breast were the stars. When he beat his wings, winds blew.

  Ancient Egypt had many falcon gods – war-god Montu, for example, Sokar, Sopdu, Nemty, Dunanwi. As alliances were forged between different regions and cults, many local falcon gods became assimilated to Horus, and Horus to many others. In Heliopolis, the centre of the sun cult, the sky-god Horus merged with the sun-god Re to become the god Re-Hor-Akhty, depicted as a falcon or a falcon-headed man with the sun disk on his head. Horus was also incorporated into Heliopolian cosmogony as the son of the gods Osiris and Isis. In this form he was crowned as the first king of Upper and Lower Egypt. All his human royal successors were known as ‘The Horus’ during their reign. Real falcons were considered living manifestations of the powers represented by falcon gods, and were deeply involved in Egyptian religious practice. Every autumn a live falcon was ceremonially crowned as the new king at the temple of Edfu, the centre of the Horus cult in Upper Egypt. The statue of Horus presented his new, living heir to the people, and then the falcon was crowned and invested with royal regalia in the temple. This now-sacred falcon was then kept in the nearby grove of the sacred falcons. On its natural death it was mummified and buried with great ceremony.

  Horus, the most famous falcon god of all. This bronze, dating from 800–700 BC, was originally part of a scene in which the two Egyptian gods of royalty, Horus and Thoth, faced each other and purified the king with water during ceremonies.

  The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, owned this painted figure of a mummified falcon. It represents the Egyptian funerary deity Sokar.

  Hundreds of thousands of falcons in ancient Egypt were mummified and given as votive offerings to the gods. Dipped into tar, or preserved with natron, their bodies were placed in a suitable receptacle or coffin before being passed to the shrine priest to be entombed on the devotee’s behalf in mass interment ceremonies. The temple of Nectanebo II at Saqqara, dedicated to Isis, the mother of Horus, contained 100,000 mummified votive falcons stored in galleries, stacked in rows of jars separated by layers of sand. Temple priests bred some sacred animals such as cats and ibises specifically for the purpose of interment, but falcons are difficult to breed in captivity;
the Horus cult must have had significant impact on wild falcon populations in the region. The trade in falcons was extensive, and while most of these offerings were indeed local falcon species such as kestrels and lanners, many weren’t: kites, vultures and even small songbirds were also interred. Perhaps these were fakes, fraudulently sold to devotees in an ancient deception revealed – along with the birds’ frail bones – centuries later by x-ray and magnetic resonance imaging.

  FALCON CULTS

  Striking parallels exist between the mythico-religious roles of falcons across diverse cultures and over many millennia. As the cult of Horus suggests, falcon-gods are commonly creator-gods and associated with sun or fire. Like Horus, the ancient Iranian fire- and water-god Avestan Xvaranah was depicted as a falcon. Like Horus he was synonymous with the celestial fortune of kings and their divine right to wield authority. God, according to the prophet Zoroaster, had the head of a falcon. The sixteenth-century French falconer Charles D’Arcussia reminded his readers that the ancients thought that the thighbones of peregrines or sakers attracted gold just as a magnet attracts iron. An apt correspondence, D’Arcussia thought, because ‘the Alchemists . . . attribute golden metal to the sun’. But as a falconer D’Arcussia had a more prosaic explanation. ‘The Ancients did not mean anything more than that flying hawks is a great expense,’ he wrote, ‘attracting and consuming much gold from those whose passion for it goes beyond reason.’11