For the Birds

Today, a fun spin through the history of listening to birds.

Fulcanelli concludes this opening section of Le Mystère des Cathédrales:

Finally I would add that argot is one of the forms derived from the Language of the Birds, parent and doyen of all other languages—the one spoken by philosophers and diplomats.

In Les Demeures des Philosophes, Fulcanelli elaborates:

The language of the birds is a phonetic idiom solely based on assonance. Therefore, spelling, whose very rigour serves as a check for curious minds and which renders unacceptable any speculation realized outside the rules of grammar, is not taken into account.

(The latter statement closely resembles what I described as Walter Whiter's 'ghoti' reasoning.) Now, what is this 'language of the birds' all about? There is, of course, a Wiki article on it, though the page is rather haphazard and unreliable. Similarly, the internet is full of newage mama-djambo on the subject, much of it in French. We can do better.

The trope is found throughout classical literature, associated often but not always with the great Roman institution of augury, divination by birds. Thus the hopelessly unsceptical Aelian, On Animals I.48:

The Raven, they say, is a sacred bird and attends upon Apollo: that is why men agree that it is also of use in divination, and those who understand the positions of the birds, their cries [klaggas], and their flight whether on the left or on the right hand, are able to divine by its croaking.

Herodotus on the priestesses at Dodona:

I expect that these women were called 'doves' [peleiades] by the people of Dodona because they spoke a strange language, and the people thought it like the cries of birds.

The oaks at Dodona, and Apollo's laurels at Delphi, have symbolic links to augury. Before the development of sibyls, priests interpreted oracles from the rustling of leaves—a rarefied aerial music, like birdsong. Mediaeval scholia on the twin doves at Aeneid 6.190 make reference to the Dodonean peleiades, and Fulcanelli also raises the oaks in the context of his 'diplomatic language', which has 'a double meaning corresponding to a double science'. Meanwhile, Apollonius of Rhodes, from the Argonautica:

And above the golden head of Aeson's son there hovered a halcyon prophesying with shrill voice the ceasing of the stormy winds; and Mopsus [the sage] heard and understood the cry of the bird of the shore, fraught with good omen.

The Roman poet Pacuvius (whom we last met here), quoted in Cicero's sceptical dialogue On Divination, and again by Montaigne in his essay on prognostications (Essais I.9), here Englished wittily by Charles Cotton:

Who the Birds Language understand, and who
More from Brutes Livers than their own do know,
Are rather to be heard than hearkned to.

In Plutarch's dialogue De Sollertia Animalium, Aristotemus argues:

But as for starlings, magpies, and parrots, that learn to talk, and afford their teachers such a spirit of voice, so well tempered and so adapted for imitation, they seem to me to be patrons and advocates in behalf of other creatures, by their talent of learning what they are taught; and in some measure to teach us that those creatures also, as well as we, partake of vocal expression and articulate sound.

And then there are the sages, to whom the faculty for understanding the birds (and often the beasts) is ascribed. Apollodorus, The Library, 3.6.7, on Tiresias:

And when Chariclo asked her to restore his sight, she could not do so, but by cleansing his ears she caused him to understand every note of birds.

Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 1.20:

I must perforce dwell upon. . . the cleverness with which after the manner of the Arabs he managed to understand the language of the animals. For he learnt this on his way through these Arab tribes, who best understand and practice it. For it is quite common for the Arabs to listen to the birds prophesying like any oracles, but they acquire this faculty of understanding them by feeding themselves, so they say, either on the heart or liver of serpents.

An instance of Apollonius using this power is related in Life 4.3. Meanwhile this on Melampus, from Pliny's Natural History, 10.137, and quoted again in Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 10.12:

The person, however, who may think fit to believe in these tales, may probably not refuse to believe also that dragons licked the ears of Melampus, and bestowed upon him the power of understanding the language of birds [avium sermonis]; as also what Democritus says, when he gives the names of certain birds, by the mixture of whose blood a serpent is produced, the person who eats of which will be able to understand the language of birds.

Porphyry, in his pro-vegetarian treatise De Abstinentia 3.3, also mentions both Apollonius and Melampus in the course of his assertion that animals have reason and speech:

If, however, it is requisite to believe in the ancients, and also in those who have lived in our times, and the times of our fathers, there are some among these who are said to have heard and to have understood the speech of animals. Thus, for instance, this is narrated of Melampus and Tiresias, and others of the like kind; and the same thing, not much prior to our time, is related of Apollonius Tyanaeus.

Porphyry claims further that: 'an associate of mine informed me that he once had a boy for a servant, who understood the meaning of all the sounds of birds, and who said that all of them were prophetic, and declarative of what would shortly happen', and adds that 'perhaps, all men would understand the language of all animals, if a dragon were to lick their ears'.

In the utopian past or afterlife, the language of the birds need not be decoded by sage or augur, but can be understood by all. Thus this tale, related by a woman returning from the underworld, in Pherecrates, The Miners, quoted by Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae, 6.269) in the context of cockaignish paradises—

Roast thrushes, dressed for a rechauffé, flew round our mouths entreating us to swallow them as we lay stretched among the myrtles and anemones.

To comprehend the language of birds is to transcend the realm of culture for that of nature. The language of culture uses clumsy, confusible words; the language of nature moves with the rhythms of the world—it is beyond words, and more like music—birdsong. It is also, like everything natural, an expression of divine will; thus augury and prophecy. This yearning for the pre-cultural and the pre-verbal represents a sort of Rousseauvian streak in the classical world. It is related, I think, to this passage in Plutarch's De Signo Socratis:

Our recognition of one another's thoughts through the medium of the spoken word is like groping in the dark; whereas the thoughts of daemons are luminous and shed their light on the daemonic man. Their thoughts have no need of verbs or nouns, which men use as symbols in their intercourse, and thereby behold mere counterfeits and likenesses of what is present in thought, but are unaware of the originals except for those persons who are illuminated by some special and daemonic radiance.

In the Middle Ages came the 'parliament of fowls' genre, owing everything to Platonic mysticism and nothing to Aristophanes, and surfacing simultaneously in the Persian Mantiq at-Tayr (1177) and the Latin Speculum Stultorum of Nigellus Wireker (c. 1180). Biblical manuscripts, meanwhile, commonly portrayed doves twittering the Word of God into the ears of the evangelists. The loci classici on the sages quoted above were collected by the great arcanist Agrippa of Nettesheim in his 1531 De Occulta Philosophia, I.55—I quote from the 1651 translation, by one 'J. F.':

Most wonderful is that kind of Auguring of theirs, who hear, & understand the speeches of Animals, in which as amongst the Ancients, Melampus, and Tiresias, and Thales, and Apollonius the Tyanean, who as we read, excelled, and whom they report had excellent skill in the language of birds.

But Democritus himself declared this art, as saith Pliny, by naming the birds, of whose blood mixed together was produced a Serpent, of which whosoever did eat, should understand the voices of birds.

I do not know where 'Thales' comes from—not Diogenes Laertius, at any rate. Agrippa and his sources were well-known among European intellectuals of the later Renaissance, and Samuel Butler could count on his literate readers getting the joke when in Hudibras (1663) he describes the hero's squire Ralpho as:

A deep OCCULT PHILOSOPHER,
As learn’d as the wild Irish are,
Or Sir AGRIPPA; for profound
And solid lying much renown’d. . .

He understood the speech of birds
As well as they themselves do words;
Cou’d tell what subtlest parrots mean,
That speak, and think contrary clean.

Fulcanelli evidently knew Agrippa, or at least one of his French plagiarists, for the list of sages in Mystère precisely parallels that found in the Occult Philosophy:

Mythology would have it that the famous soothsayer Tiresias had perfect knowledge of the Language of the Birds, which Minerva, goddess of Wisdom, revealed to him. He shared it, they say, with Thales of Miletus, Melampus and Appolonius [sic] of Tyana. . .

Grasset d'Orcet, according to Raminagrobis, had already used the expression in his esoteric analysis of Rabelais; I don't know if he was the first to talk in these terms. But his conceit, followed by Fulcanelli, is clear: by unlocking the mystical potential of the words with which they play, they are tapping into a deeper current than that of human language and grammar—they are, in other words, listening to the music of the birds, of the gods—listening to nature.

*

But wait—there's more! What about those who really did take bird-language seriously, not just as a myth or metaphor, but as something susceptible to rational analysis? Athanasius Kircher discusses birdsong in Book I of his 1650 Musurgia Universalis (some pictures here), transcribing a few melodies with notes and staves. He recounts various anecdotes, for instance about

Damian of Fonseca, Portugal, a man of great learning and authority, who has in his Museum a little caged bird, of the species Alauda, which they call 'Gallandra', trained by the said friar on his right hand, not only to pronounce the Holy Liturgy as if in a human voice, but also to chatter many other things, which can hardly be witnessed without admiration.

In his 'Appendix de Phonognomia', Canon 3, Kircher goes on to discuss the causes of animal language, concluding that 'from this a refined knowledge can be formed, by which we can understand the voice and language of the animals, as is written of Apollonius Thyaneus', before referring the reader to his own forthcoming Turris Babel (1679), in which 'we explain at greater length the language of these animals'. That work is online here, but sadly I cannot find the relevant passage, if indeed it exists.

Following on from the arguments of Plutarch and Porphyry about animal reason, the French Jesuit Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant claimed (contra Descartes) that animals had a (limited) rationality; this is the subtext of his delightful book, A Philosophical Amusement upon the Language of Beasts and Birds (1739), which was translated anonymously the following year. The text is online (of course), thanks to Animal Rights History—hurrah for political correctness!

Birds do not Sing but speak. What we take for Singing is no more than their natural Language. Do the Magpy, the Jay, the Raven, the Owl, and the Duck Sing? What makes us believe that they Sing is their tuneful Voice. Thus the Hottentots in Africa seem to cluck like Turkey-cocks tho’ it be the natural Accent of their Language, and thus several Nations seem to us to sing, when they indeed speak. . .But in short, what do these Birds say? The Question should be proposed to Apollonius Tyanaeus, who boasted of understanding their Language. As for me, who am no Diviner, I can give you no more than probable Conjectures.

Bougeant makes an interesting admission at the end of his treatise:

I shall here make you a Confession, that will reduce the whole Language to almost nothing. I mean that you must absolutely retrench from it whatever is called Phrase or grammatical Construction, not excepting the most Contracted.

Although Bougeant wants us to appreciate the linguistic abilities of the birds and other beasts, he denies that animals are as intelligent as humans: they can only utter 'sentences' corresponding to very basic immediate sensations and needs. But compare this to Fulcanelli's stipulation that esoteric analysis of the 'language of the birds' should disregard human grammar and spelling.

We come to Michel Bréal, the founder of semantics, whose little essay 'On Bird Language' is included in George Wolf's collection of Bréal's shorter works. Bréal quotes a transcription of crow-calls made in an 1806 paper by Dupont de Nemours (a friend of Turgot and progenitor of the Duponts):

cra, cré, cro, crou, crouou.
grass, gress, gross, grouss, grououss.
craé, créé, croa, croua, grouass.
crao, créé, croé, croue, grouess.
craou, créo, croo, crouo, grouoss.

Bréal makes the point previously made by both Bougeant and Porphyry that 'the difference between animal and human organs makes hearing the details of animal language even more difficult'. He then goes on to discuss repetitions in bird-sounds (the nightingale: 'zquo, zquo'; the sparrow: 'tell, tell', etc.), insisting that they come about because 'the speech organ once in movement, less effort is required to let them continue than to bring them to rest'. Bréal compares bird-repetition to primitive human reduplication, including Kaffir njo njo, 'to break', as well as Latin me-min-i, 'I remember'. Bréal agrees with Dupont that there are dialects in bird-languages, although he concludes that 'Tiresias, who understood the language of all birds, knew more about it'.

This was in 1900; since then there has been plenty of scientific interest in bird communication. According to Jean Aitchison, birdsong is the closest thing to human speech, containing both innate cries and learnt patterns—a combination of meaningless notes carrying a given message. She also discusses dialects of birdsong. Last year an article on recursive 'grammar' in starlingsong caused a splash in certain sectors of the blogging community. I learnt of it mainly via Languagehat, who claims to have 'an admitted prejudice against the whole talking-animal thing'. I guess Steve won't have much interest in this post, then.

Update: material on Kircher's Musurgia has been added. Thanks to Michael for the pointer (see comments).