The following notes are edited down from a long letter concerning the symbolism of the owl of Athene sent to a friend...
Further
to the owl of Athene. I had originally thought of symmetries with Zeus,
inasmuch as Athene is like a female counterpart to Zeus. So I had Athene’s owl
as the counterpart to the Zeusean eagle. Thus: The owl is to Athene as the eagle is to Zeus, one nocturnal and one
diurnal. Thus the owl here is eagle of the night – the big, sharp eyed, swooping
bird of prey. And indeed many owls are formidible, but they are not the owl of
Athene. Rather, her owl is very specifically the so-called ‘little owl’, called
glaux in Greek. This is the owl in
question, so the inquiry becomes an investigation into the owl symbolism of
Athene relevant to this owl. The ‘Little Owl’ is not a counterpart to Zeus’
eagle. That symmetry doesn’t supply the relevant symbolism.
Glaux is perhaps a pre-Greek word, very old, and its basic meaning is ‘bright’. Assuredly, the name refers to the Little Owl’s bright eyes. At some point, though, the word takes the meaning of the colour ‘blue-grey’ and this continues from the Greek, so in English there is the adjective glaucous meaning ‘blue-grey’. I find this a very interesting shift in meaning. For a start, the ‘Little Owl’ has bright eyes but they are not blue-grey. More likely, the shift came from Homer where ‘glauk’ = bright is used to describe the shimmering of light on the sea (with no colour implied) and later elaboration perhaps surmised the colour of the sea to expand upon Homer’s text. But that is odd because, in any event, blue-grey is not ‘bright’. What shade of grey is ever bright? The term becomes tangled because Athene comes to be called ‘owl-eyed’ or ‘bright-eyed’ or ‘blue-grey eyed’, all translations of the same epithet, Glaukopis (Glauk-eyed).
I personally suspect that the application of the colour ‘blue-grey’ to Athene’s symbolism is meaningful and integral, not accidental or mistaken. In fact I suspect it is an important anomoly, but as yet I am not sure what it signifies or where it fits in. My suggestion, though, is that it has to do with Athene as a goddess of Air and that the ‘blue-grey’ is a sky colour, and this explains the shift from ‘bright’. Ruskin probably deals with it best. I haven’t pursued it. It remains a loose thread…
I am certain of the most central symbolism, however. It is, of course, the owl’s gaze. With any owl, or nocturnal bird, you would have the symbolism of seeing in the dark – and this is what wisdom does, therefore. In this sense the owl is wise. Sure. But this particular owl – Athene’s owl - has a conspicuously wondrous gaze, large glowing eyes all the more conspicuous on a smaller bird. Why the ‘Little Owl’? Why not a big owl to match the owl of Zeus? It is the Little Owl because in the smaller bird the important feature is accentuated, namely the large glowing eyes. The big eyes are bigger on the small bird. It is therefore the eyes that hold the key here.
I had also considered the owl as hunter with an implicit contrast between Athene and Artemis. In that case, the owl is distinguished as a bird of prey that both hunts and thinks. How did Athene move from a war goddess to an intellectual goddess? I thought her emblem, the owl, might provide a link if taken as a model of the thinking hunter. Perhaps, but the eyes of the bird are the central symbolism, and that is why it must be the ‘Little Owl’. Little Owls have big eyes.
Certainly, those big eyes see in the dark. Which is to say they see what is hidden. The owl tells us that about Athene. Her power is to see what is hidden, and wisdom (sophia) is seeing what is hidden. There are many extensions of this. But yes, the owl sees what is hidden – a fact underlined by the big eyes of the Little Owl – and for this reason alone is a fitting emblem for this intellectual goddess. The idea is that nous penetrates the darkness of existence, sees beyond appearances. Mind looking into the darkness of ignorance, and so on. That is of course the immediate symbolism.
More than that, though, the eyes of the Little Owl seem to glow. This is very important. The eagle is sharp-eyed and has long range, and flies high and is solar, but it does not carry its own inner light. The most conspicuous thing about the owl is that its eyes glow in the dark, and it is as though they have their own inner light that they cast onto the objects under their gaze. It is quite a different seeing to that of the eagle. I think this is the peculiar and unusual feature about owls, owls in general, or many of them, but again underlined in the bright glowing eyes of Athene’s Little Owl. So it is not just that the owl – this owl – sees in the dark. So do all nocturnal birds. More impressively, this particular nocturnal bird carries its own light into the depths of night. We can say: owls in general signify inner light.
This fact opens up a web of interconnected symbolisms. For a start, the symbolism is surely lunar in the sense that the moon too brings light into the night, and Athene is certainly a lunar deity who requires a lunar bird. And yet the eyes of the Little Owl are conspicuously yellow-gold – not at all blue-grey – and one would have to describe them as distinctly solar. Golden eyes. The moon, of course, might be called the sun of the night, so lunar significations are not unimportant, yet the signature of the bird is somewhat solar all the same. The moon reflects. The sun radiates. The eyes of Athene’s owl radiate. The inner light that does the radiating then becomes of prime interest. What light does the owl carry within it by which it illuminates the darkness? Or should we ask what inner fire? In any case, the owl keeps it within itself and has it under command.
Is the owl a lunar or solar bird? I think there’s an interesting ambivalence. It is most obviously lunar, just by being a bird of the night, and yet it is very solar, especially in regards the feature being underlined, the eyes. The owl of Athene has solar eyes. So the inner light, the inner fire, is the fire/light of the sun. So, more fully, the owl signifies something like the sun in the realm of the moon. That is the relation between its lunar and solar natures. The owl is externally lunar but internally solar.
Regarding this inner light, I am reminded at this point of the account of eyesight in Plato, in the Timaeus. It involves both a light coming into the eye and an inner light radiating out, and the actions of seeing are explained in this simultaneous mechanism. Long modern commentaries explain how Plato’s knowledge of eyesight was hopelessly faulty. But the projection of an inner light – a light of consciousness – is highly suggestive given the mythological background of the Timaeus cosmology.
I want to say that what is being described there are the eyes of the autochthon and that the autochthons are glaukopis. That is, the account of sight in the Timaeus is an account of owl eyes. The model for the Timaeus account is the (apparently) radiating eyesight of the owl. And in the context of the Timaeus, Athene’s owl. This is how to understand Plato’s account of eyesight and seeing. The idea of the inner light projected outwards and meeting the in-coming light has its model in the owl.
The Timaeus gives an account of the creation of the primal man by the Demiurge. Primal man is autochthonous. This is the mythology of the Athene cultus where the Athenians are descended from the primal autochthon. Plato gives us an account of the eyes, anatomy and physiology, based on the model of Athene’s owl – glaukopis. The text draws attention to this account. The section on eyesight in the Timaeus is out of sequence. More generally, I want to say that the Timaeus is a remarkably visual cosmology. Radiance and solidity produce a visual universe. Seeing is the most important of the senses in the Timaeus.
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The Egyptian hieroglyph depicting the owl is interesting. Once again, it is the Little Owl. Among hieroglyphs it represents the letter and sound M. The Roman representation of the letter M (m) that we use is very old and is a pictogram of water and waves. That association – the sound mmm – with water, sea, waves seems to be very ancient. But in Egyptian hieroglyphs the letter is shown by a stylization of the Little Owl. This stylization draws attention to another aspect of the bird that I think is important – another important symbolism – namely that the owl turns. In the hieroglyph we see the bird’s body in profile, but the face is turned full-frontal. Frontality, of course, is a common device within Egyptian art, but here I think it is worth noting. The hieroglyph wants to show the way in which this bird turns its face to the object of its gaze. It turns its face to look.
It might be objected that sundry birds do this, yet I think it is conspicuous in the owl. It is the gesture that accompanies the bird’s radiant gaze. The idea is a turning of attention. When we turn our attention to something in our mind it is the disembodied correlate of turning our face and gaze to it. The owl represents this. It represents this mental act: the act of turning. So not only is the bird known for its radiant gaze of an inner light, it turns this gaze onto things. This is very particularly the intellectual act that the owl symbolizes. This act of turning the mind is philosophically very interesting, and we could explore it, but for now I just want to note that the owl – Athene’s owl – is emblematic of it, and it is very clear in the Egyptian heiroglyph. Note the motif of turning.
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An owl is a creature of the turning in another sense. It is associated with the middle of the night, the darkest hour of the night. But the darkest hour is the turning point. It is also where the light begins. That is the owl’s symbolic habitat – the turning point of night. Let us always place the owl in that natural context, the turning point of night. In all associations, across all traditions, the owl is a creature of the depths of night, and is therefore subject to negative symbolic readings as an ill-omen. Actually, that is the norm. It is notably not the case in Athens. The owl of Athene is not an ill-omen. Instead, we have a positive reading of the symbolism in Athene’s mythology. Seen positively, the depths of night are the beginning of the dawn and the owl – carrying an inner light – is a creature of that turning point. And also, therefore, a creature of all the symbolism that follows, because that turning point (from dark to light) is symbolically fecund.
We find this symbolism rendered by Coleridge. In fact, Coleridge supplies the key to the essential symbolism of the owl in the first few lines of his poem Christabel:
'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock;
Tu—whit! Tu—whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.
To summarize it: In the very middle of the night the owls awaken the cockerel, bird of the rising sun.
The poem is a spell, and its purpose is to lull us into a certain in-between world, which is a realm Coleridge knew well, not least through the agency of opiates. (Kubla Khan is about this realm as well.) Mr Coleridge is concerned with that in-between world of half-sleep. The crowing cock, how drowsily it crew. This is another way to think of the world of the owl. If the dead of night, the turning point, is also the birth of the light, then it is an in-between realm. The turning point is neither one side or the other. The turning point is the pivot of the duality but outside the duality itself, the point where night and day meet and overlap. The owl then is a creature of that middle world. This is the realm of the dream.
The owl is emblematic of dreams since our dreams seem lit by an inner light. Dreaming is a seeing in the dark. More particularly, though, the owl must represent the lucid dream, since the owl not only illuminates, it is aware. In fact, above all it is aware. Above all, sophia is an awareness. Conceived as a turning it is a coming to attention. The owl of Athene symbolizes this.
The deeper symbolism, though, must concern the idea of the sun in the night, which is also to say consciousness in sleep. The wide eyed owl with its inner light represents the Sun at Midnight and all the subsequent symbolism that that entails. The owl is a creature of the midnight sun. By analogy, its attentiveness, its gaze, is like consciousness in the darkness of sleep. I think this takes us very near to the heart of what the symbolism of the owl of Athene is ultimately about. We could explore it through a host of parallelisms from that point. That is to say, it’s the key that unlocks all the important doors.
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Finally, philosophy begins in wonder. I think that wonder goes with turning. That philosophical act of turning (like the owl) is an act of wonder. Wondering and turning go together. Surely there is wonder in the big eyes of the Little Owl?