Everyone knows Macbeth’s witch’s ingredient list:
Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, / Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing, […]
While real medieval recipes were hardly averse to a bit of mystification, I think it’s fair to say that – by and large – most seem to have been intended to be achievable. But… why do so many of them include a hoopoe’s heart?
It’s a vague question that I’ve had lurking at the back of my mind for ages, that lurched abruptly forward yesterday when I saw a news story about how a hoopoe had been sighted in York for the first time in forty years. Here’s Jon Noble’s nice photograph of the York hoopoe:
So I went on a short journey into the archives to try to answer the historical question: why a hoopoe’s heart?
Hoopoe History
Perhaps the best source on everything to do with the hoopoe is John Gotthold Kunstmann’s (1938) University of Chicago dissertation “The Hoopoe : A Study in European Folklore“. Kunstmann traces the pictorial history of the hoopoe all the way back to Ancient Egypt and Crete; notes references to it in Ovid, Pliny, Pausanias, Isidore (via Hrabanus Maurus), and even Rabelais; and discusses folk tales about ‘how the hoopoe got its crest‘ (though e.g. it seems a tad unlikely that Solomon gave the hoopoe its crest because of its hatred of women, etc).
Kunstmann’s chapter II is where things start to get more meaty. The (originally African) hoopoe appears in “Egyptian (Demotic), Coptic, Graeco-Egyptian medical prescriptions, in Pliny […]” etc, all the way up to R. James’ (1752) Pharmacopeia Universalis (2nd edition).
Pretty much every part of the hoopoe was considered to have magical properties, along with its eggs, its ashes, and even a magical stone called “lapis quirinis” (or quiritia, cinreis, withopfenstain) fabled to be found in its nest.
Hoopoe Hearts
The heart of the hoopoe is said (in Konrad von Megenburg’s Buch der Natur, which we’ve seen here a number of times of late) to be used “by magicians and by people who perform evil deeds secretly”. Kunstmann goes on:
Hans Vintler in Pluemen der tugent informs us that the hoopoe’s heart, placed upon a sleeper at night, will cause him to reveal hidden things. According to a MS from Stendal, the hoopoe’s or the treefrog’s heart, if carried on one’s person, will cause everybody to love one. The same MS advises drying and pulverizing the heart of the hoopoe and placing it under one’s head at night, in order to dream about the location of hidden treasure. Johannes Ravisius Textor mentions the heart of the hoopoe as good for stitches in the side.
(Note that Textor was just reprising Pliny)
Voynich Manuscript researcher Marco Ponzi also recently mentioned a hoopoe heart in a post on magic rings:
Laura Mitchell (Cultural Uses of Magic in Fifteenth-Century England) quotes a spell in MS Ashmole 1435 in which the heart of a hoopoe grants prophetic dreams (Cor ypapa supponatur sub capite dormientis et sompniabit futuram).
Eating a Hoopoe Heart
The Papyri Graecae Magicae talks about eating the honeyed heart of a hoopoe at full moon. So the idea of eating a hoopoe heart has a very long pedigree indeed.
Václav Havel’s (1984) “Thriller” begins (and, if you read it all, ends) with:
BEFORE ME LIES the famous Occult Philosophy of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, where I read that the ingestion of the living (and if possible still beating) heart of a hoopoe, a swallow, a weasel, or a mole will bestow upon one the gift of prophecy.
Agrippa’s ultimate source might be the one mentioned by Richard Kieckhefer in his “Magic in the Middle Ages” (p.142):
[…] to learn all that happens on earth, the secrets of everyone’s mind, and even heavenly things, one manuscript [British Library Ms Sloane 3132 fol. 56v] recommends beheading a hoopoe at sunrise, under a new moon, and swallowing its heart while it is still palpitating.
(Though it might be less fuss to just get a Twitter account.)
In the same footnote, Kieckhefer mentions Bodleian MS e Mus. 210 fol. 186v: “to learn the language of the birds, take the heart of a hoopoe or the tongue of a kite and put it in honey for three days and nights, then place it under your tongue“.
Dirty Hoopoes
Yet the hoopoe was also considered a filthy bird, and was included in the list of “birds of abomination” in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 (Kunstmann p.44) “whose flesh must not be eaten”. Even Aristotle passed forward various explanations for the hoopoe’s bad smell (which is genuinely the case, it’s sadly not a very hygienic bird).
Even though Kunstmann doesn’t say so, I suspect this makes the idea of consuming a (dirty) hoopoe’s heart as part of a magical recipe also (because it was a a “bird of abomination”) transgressive.
And yet because of the hoopoe’s magical associations and powers, people were clearly happy to do that. Even if they didn’t first store it (as per Havel’s “Thriller”) in a Thermos flask. 🙂
Nick: There’s your answer in an egg shell. Mr. Hoopoe bird hadn’t been seen in the County for forty years then, ‘upupaepops’ from out of nowhere with his smelly missus and fledglings, no doubt as if he were the grand old Duke of flaming York. Gotta have a big heart to pull a stunt like that!
It’s a beautiful and much beleaguered bird.
The smell is a wonderful adaptation—part waterproofing, part bactericide, and possibly also a deterrent to predators. Starlings also have an oily smell but not as distinctive and pungent as the Hoopoe.
Unfortunately, what nature bequeathed the Hoopoe as protection also gave it a terrible reputation among humans and numerous books on magic and spells include the foul-smelling bird in their rituals. I’m surprised they weren’t extinct by the 17th century.
It’s good news that there is hope for them.
It’s interesting that the Hoopoe has been documented all the way back to ancient Egypt. I didn’t know that. I know it mostly from nature videos and medieval books of magic.
As the Duchfat, Hoopoe or Upupaepops (Lat/Greek) is also the national bird of Israel according to my informative Wiki facts.
It used to be thought that magic was the precursor to religion, but nowadays our understanding of ‘religion’ has developed rather more, and magic is often defined today as the maintenance of practical or of religious routines after knowledge of the informing matter has been lost.
The fact – pointed out by you, Nick, and by others here – that the hoopoe’s heart remained an element in western magic suggests in itself a long history for that bird, and one originally rooted in some practical (‘scientific’) or religious usage.
One common thread in the ancient and medieval eastern Mediterranean traditions is that the hoope pierces the ‘shell’ of the earth, imagined much thinner in ancient times than in today. From the underworld arises water, but also demons, and by such associations and the appearance of script on its chest and/or wings, as well as its evident capacity for devotion, the bird became the quintessential servant and messenger. That these ideas survived into the medieval era is evident from its being mentioned by the Prophet of Islam, and featured in the well-known philosophical-poetic ‘Conference of the Birds’. I won’t quote from the latter text, but here’s an end-note from the translation made into English (from the French translation of the Persian text) by C.S. Nott, which is the copy I have.
In the notes, Nott writes,
Hoopoe: Hudhud (both u’s long) from its call. When Solomon had finished his temple he went on pilgrimage to Mecca and from there to Arabia felix. Needing water, he called on the hoopoe, for she was able to discover water underground, and when she marked the place with her beak, the demons drew the water. The hoopoe carried the letter from Solomon to Balkis, the Queen of Sheba’Reviewing the birds, Solomon said, ‘I do not see the Hudhud. Is it that she is among the absent?’. A mark on her beak resembles the Persian character ‘Bismillah’. Her “crown of glory” (alluded to in Attar’s poem) is her crest. When its mate dies it does not take a new one; also it cares for its parents. Mohammad forbade his people to kill it.
That the injunction was made indicates an older and widely known tradition among the people, one which the Prophet did not wish his followers to attack.
Indeed, respect for the bird is demonstrably ancient in the regions where it is seen – including Egypt today.
Dorothea Arnold, who composed a short illustrated ‘Egyptian bestiary’ for the Met. exhibition, describes a papyrus from the late 13thC.BC and says,
“In the Old Kingdom hoopoes were caught as pets for children. In the papyrus drawing it sits atop a stylized papyrus(?) plant and is identified in the accompanying inscription as ‘he whose magic is hidden’. This (Arnold continues) is an apt description if nineteenth dynasty Egypt followed the practice reported from much later times, when parts of the bird’s body – the heart, head and blood – played a role in magical practice (third to eighth century AD).
p.46
As we’d expect the ‘magical’ associations are late, this emerging as ‘magical’ only after the destruction of classical religions and temples from the 3rdC AD. Context thus lost, popular tradition retained the traditional reverence for the bird, but soon lost knowledge of its original context. That loss of conceptual context also explains persistence of the bird’s character in general until the 7thC and so what we have in the Muslim tradition is a re-contextualisation in religion, without so much superstition as we find in the west, which was so far removed from the eastern cultural traditions.
If someone were interested to know more, I suspect we’d find something of interest in the footnotes made by Robert Burton to his full translation of the ‘Alf Layla wa Layla’, but forgive me if I don’t put myself to the labour of that search unless it’s wanted.
There could also be something in ‘Animals of the Bible’ but again, I leave that aside unless someone wants to know.
Cheers.
Online, Project Gutenburg has a copy of
Whymper’s Egyptian Birds
but it was published in 1909, during the short revival of Egyptomania, and has the quaint-verging-on-twee character of popular works of such a type at that time.
However –
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46825/46825-h/46825-h.htm#THE_HOOPOE
Now that the Hoopoe thread is at last up and gaining interest, mainly from the easily led Voynich crowd, I have access to an important detail that Nick seems not to be fully aware of, or else has left it to us. In a nut shell it is a well known fact that contrary to popular belief, it’s only the hen bird and her shitty chicks that stink to high heaven, her partner being pleasing to the nose, and with a regal pose comes up smelling like a rose. I’d implore others intent on putting their own big beaks in, either as a fan from afar, or one who already has a nose for old Upupa Epops, to be considerate of all our feathered friends no matter their habits..
Nick – and others who mightn’t have happened on this – the word translated by the English ‘abomination’ does not carry quite the same sense in the original Hebrew, for the sacred texts contain instances where it describes things which English would call ‘holy’. The underlying sense might be explained by saying that even to imagine touching or using a thing ought rightly inspire the horror of sacrilege.
When eastern ideas and customs were carried from the eastern to the western Mediterranean, and the latter was already Christendom, so something untouchable in one sense easily became ‘untouchable’ in the other.
John et.al.,
It is interesting, I think, that a perceived relationship between Ibis and Hoopoe – as was implied by the Egyptian depictions – was also seen by Linnaeus, who placed both in his genus Upupa. I’d also say that I was led to comment less because of the topic, or even mutual interest in Beinecke MS 408, but because I have benefited, over the years, from Nick’s generosity in sharing his own research. To add a little that he might find of interest, as one can, seems only fair.
Nick,
Was Marco Ponzi (and you)making a connection to the Voynich with the Hoopoe or just magic discussion in general? I can see from D.’s comment a similarity with the idea of the “seagull” potentially being a Hoopoe, though I don’t think of piercing when I look at it.
On a related topic, can we expect a Catoblepas followup anytime soon? That was very helpful if you as I did not even see it until you pointed it out.
Pomo
p.s. I think D. you means Richard rather than Robert Burton, yes?
Then again, perhaps.
P.
Thanks for the info. I ran across “hoopoe’s heart” in Arabian Nights, used in the sense of placing on a sleepers heart to get them to speak truth.