Falcon (6 page)

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, presumably 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 association. 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.

Identifications like these have practical and political ramifications. Kyrgyz and Kazakh falconers could give falcons to

This beautiful, anatomically pre- cise copper falcon effigy of
c
. ad 1–350 was found as part of an elab- orate deposit of Hopewell Culture objects at the Mound City Group, located near present-day Chilllicothe, Ohio.

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 pos- sess 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 useful- ness 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 articu- late notions of personal, national and corporate identity have resurrected the term. Falcons can be the collective representa- tion 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 identi- ties 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 inter war 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 dig- nified’, she wrote, ‘with great courage and fight. It never drops its prey. It is deadly and has a great sporting tradition.’
⁹

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 redol- ent of
Platoon
meets
The Animals of Farthing Wood.

Hopeful transferences of falcon characteristics also litter the international marketplace, for falcons seem to offer a litany of

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.

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

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

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 repre- sents the Egyptian funerary deity Sokar.

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.