y
refrained religiously from doing it harm;[102-2] while the Aztecs and
various other nations thought that all good people, as a reward of
merit, were metamorphosed at the close of life into feathered songsters
of the grove, and in this form passed a certain term in the umbrageous
bowers of Paradise.

But the usual meaning of the bird as a symbol looks to a different
analogy--to that which appears in such familiar expressions as "the
wings of the wind," "the flying clouds." Like the wind, the bird sweeps
through the aerial spaces, sings in the forests, and rustles on its
course; like the cloud, it floats in mid-air and casts its shadow on the
earth; like the lightning, it darts from heaven to earth to strike its
unsuspecting prey. These tropes were truths to savage nations, and led
on by that law of language which forced them to conceive everything as
animate or inanimate, itself the product of a deeper law of thought
which urges us to ascribe life to whatever has motion, they found no
animal so appropriate for their purpose here as the bird. Therefore the
Algonkins say that birds always make the winds, that they create the
water spouts, and that the clouds are the spreading and agitation of
their wings;[103-1] the Navajos, that at each cardinal point stands a
white swan, who is the spirit of the blasts which blow from its
dwelling; and the Dakotas, that in the west is the house of the
Wakinyan, the Flyers, the breezes that send the storms. So, also, they
frequently explain the thunder as the sound of the cloud-bird flapping
his wings, and the lightning as the fire that flashes from his tracks,
like the sparks which the buffalo scatters when he scours over a stony
plain.[103-2] The thunder cloud was also a bird to the Caribs, and they
imagined it produced the lightning in true Carib fashion by blowing it
through a hollow reed, just as they to this day hurl their poisoned
darts.[104-1] Tupis, Iroquois, Athapascas, for certain, perhaps all the
families of the red race, were the subject pursued, partook of this
persuasion; among them all it would probably be found that the same
figures of speech were used in comparing clouds and winds with the
feathered species as among us, with however this most significant
difference, that whereas among us they are figures and nothing more, to
them they expressed literal facts.

How important a symbol did they thus become! For the winds, the clouds,
producing the thunder and the change