How fascinating that the imagery of “Woman as Goddess” right around the world involves connection to birds and death. For years I have been interested in Athene, who is often represented by her birds of morning, the cockerel, and of night, the more familiar owl. As patron deity of ancient Athens She had a role in supervising and explaining to ordinary mortals the ‘why’ of things happening.

I’ve just been listening to “The Makers”, a program on ABC Radio National this Sunday morning, talking to John Bosco Tipiloura from Melville Island who has developed an art form that demonstrates the traditional stories of the Tiwi people. What has intrigued me is the story of Beema and how mortality was brought to the Tiwi and the images that are associated with her. Owls and other birds are associated with Beema, much in the same way as they are associated with Athene. In fact the further I explore the myths of my heritage, of Greece and Rome and Britain, the more it strikes me that when ever there is an attempt to explain the why of mortality, there is nearly always a female deity involved as psychopomp, and in some way there is also a connect with birds, particularly owls.

What is it about birds particularly night birds like owls that associates them with death and in particular a female deity of death? There is some evidence that owls in particular were the totemic emblems of those deities that the medieval Christian church was particularly opposed to and those deities associated with owls were also associated with death too. Lillith was associated with the death of children. Blodeuwedd was associated with the death of a warrior (which would surely have been threatening to the royal courts of medieval Europe which were full of warrior types), and Anat or Anath was associated with the death of prophets and sages (as those ancient churchmen seemed to have seen themselves). So having covered all stages of a man’s life, obviously any deity that could be represented by an owl must surely be evil in the cutting of that life short?

Yet owls seem to also represent the ability to see in the dark, or to find out things that were supposed to be kept in the dark. They also represent the ability to be comfortable with those aspects of ones-self that Jung called the Shadow Self, which I understand as being those bits of my soul that I don’t like and project onto others so that I can dislike them more effectively. Perhaps that is a reason why those female deities were considered to be evil? Their totem would look into the heart and tell all those dark secrets that had been safely hidden, even from the one whose secrets they were/are?

That is a scary thought. It would certainly explain why any deity with the ability to see into the dark places of a heart and see all the secrets buried there even from one’s self, would be a frightening concept. Perhaps the ancient Greeks were right in their dictum of “Know Thyself” because to them the Gods, particularly the Goddesses, did have the ability to look inside and know even what we hide from ourselves. And being known to one's self like that would be a death of a sort.