This last semester, I spent much of my time mulling over how I want to produce scholarship by exploring the stories I want to share with others. While this is something I'm still grappling with, I think I've come to the conclusion that I will always be more concerned with smaller, quieter worlds of intimacies, of closeness. I am more concerned with the magic of this world than its governments—although magic is never quite free of the burden of politics either. In any case, the big things tend to write themselves. The smaller wishes float away more subtly. I hope my favorite paper I wrote this semester illuminates this in an "academic sense," and I would love to hear your feedback on how to improve in the future.
WHEN BIRDS ARE SENT FROM GOD:
CORPOREAL MAGIC, DIVINE OMEN, AND SPATIAL TRANSGRESSION IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN
A few months after my grandfather’s passing, my mother saw a bird trapped in a tree in our yard. Its feet was somehow tangled into the tree’s branches and the bird was unable to escape the bind. My mother tried to release it from the tree—she couldn’t. The bird was far above her reach; she could not release it without hurting the bird (or the tree) in the process. Later that day, as the sun was beginning to set, a very peculiar thing occurred. My mother and I were sitting in the kitchen, discussing how we could help the bird, when another bird flew to the tree and released the trapped bird. The new bird pecked some of the branches around the trapped bird with its beak; it pulled the twigs with its feet until the trapped bird was free. Then, just as the sun set, the two birds flew away together.
My mother and I both began talking about our interpretations of this moment, and it was clear that, even though we witnessed the same course of events, we had very different emotional and intellectual experiences in relation to it. To me, this was a miraculous event; but my interpretation began and ended with my amazement at the ingenuity and companionship between two birds. My mother, on the other hand, had an entirely different, much more intimate analysis of what we had seen. To her, the bird trapped in the tree symbolized—or perhaps even physically carried—the departed soul of her father. The bird who rescued the trapped one represented the soul of her mother, who had passed away when my mother was six years old.
Because her father had to play the role of both parents after her mother’s death, my mother would always tell people that she had lost two parents at once when my grandfather passed away. So, the act of seeing the two birds fly away together told her that her parents’ souls had finally been reunited after forty-three years of separation. Watching the bird’s pain in separation, release into freedom, and reunion with another bird thus became an omen given to her by the gods. My mother told me the gods had used these birds to communicate to her that she need not grieve for the loss of her parents, but rather find solace in the reunification of their souls.
When my mother told me her interpretation of the birds as intermediaries of divine communication, I must admit I was puzzled. I remained puzzled for a long time. Although I always believed her interpretation, I could not trace how she arrived to this conclusion, nor could I understand why I fully believed her despite not being able to follow the patterns of her logic.[1] I knew it was more than just another moment when my mother, an extraordinarily pious woman, was expressing her faith—but I was unable to comprehend that moment any deeper than that. It was only when I encountered the ways in which magic and animals existed in the Ancient Mediterranean that I was able to cultivate a vocabulary regarding these phenomena. This process of learning ultimately allowed me to make a home in the world which my mother lives—a world where the gods are in communication with us via the natural world.
In comparing my mother’s interpretation of the two birds with what I have learned about magic and animals from the ancient Mediterranean, my ideas about what religion is has transformed considerably. Placing this personal moment between my mother and myself (which is also a moment between my mother and her parents) in conversation with my newfound knowledge about magic and animals in the ancient Mediterranean opened up a dialogue with myself about the intimate experiences of religion. These intimate experiences not only shape the worlds as my mother and I know and experience them, but they also bind my mother and I in a particular relationship with each other, our ancestry, and divinity—all as beings we can communicate through the mysteries of the environments we find ourselves in as part of the South Indian diaspora located in the United States. I was able to deepen my understanding in these moments because, for the first time in a classroom, I was encountering cultures and societies which practiced traditions so similar to my own inherited cosmologies that I did not feel the need to defend my own. Because the Ancient Mediterranean would not have seen my own beliefs about divinity as present and embedded in the natural world as a transgression, the conversation arguing the validity of my beliefs became redundant. I then realized I needed to nurture a language about my own traditions that moved past defense and moved towards a more creative outlook.
It is because of my own experiences that I hypothesize studying magic and animals in the Ancient Mediterranean is helpful for those who have lost vocabularies regarding these elements of divinity due to colonial and imperial violence. The politics of these two forces have forced many traditions into hiding and even extinction. Those traditions that have been protectively tucked away—particularly those that thrive within the context of the natural world—makes learning about the significances of magic and animals challenging as well. To access these traditions, even when they are your own, is an unruly process; is it often painful and disturbing to ask silenced traditions to speak again knowing that there is very little one can to do to revitalize them. This pain exists outside of explanation, and I am not sure if I can fully describe it at this time.
This being said, while the details regarding magic and interpretations of animals in the Ancient Mediterranean may differ from my own inherited traditions, the striking similarities have given me the ability to wade deeper into my own. By giving me the tools and ideas needed to be able to approach my own magical encounters, the magic of the Ancient Mediterranean has cemented in my mind that “[magic] does not historically follow after religion, neither is it earlier: religion contains magic, as one specific religious form.”[2] In other words, magic is a vast language that cannot be contained by a single tradition because of its profound ability to speak to beings and worlds near and far.
In terms of my mother’s interpretation of the two birds, I have become fascinated by the ways in which she understood how the animal’s physical body hosted communication from a divine source. It is important to note that this story bore meaning precisely because one of the bird’s location was unusual—it was trapped in a tree, a location where birds are usually seen to be comfortable enough to build their homes in. This shows us how it is possible that animals’ locations in different spaces influence how sacred messages are received and interpreted. While my mother’s interpretation of the two birds is a fascinating way to approach the ideas of magic and meaning making, these understandings of animals and space are not unique to my mother, nor the traditions we practice. These themes run through the Ancient Mediterranean as well, and we see this in how the Greeks and Romans appeared to understand many types of animals—including birds—as omens. As animals were often considered intermediaries for the gods, the omens carried by animals required specific, sometimes even systematic, types of interpretation and study in order to determine what divine message they carried.[3] It is because of these analyses that the spaces in which animals traveled also becomes of great interest to their interpreters—especially those spaces humans cannot gain access to. This is because space indicates the ambiguity of supernatural communication and the freedom of supernatural powers.[4] In other words, because the bodies of certain animals can be read as literal and/or metaphoric sites of religious practice, the ways in which these animals travel through and transgress physical spaces indicate how the gods choose to communicate with humans through hidden or secretive performances.
By tracing the logic of how the Ancient Mediterranean understood certain animals as intermediaries of divinatory messages as they transgressed spatial norms, one can gain insight to how my mother understood the two birds as an omen sent by a divine source. To demonstrate my reasoning, I will first describe what I see as the symbiotic relationship of animal bodies as representations of symbolic omens and, in turn, how symbolic omens charge the physical bodies of animals into sites of religious practice. Then, I will look at how divine communication is emphasized when animals—as both symbolic omens and as physical bodies—transgress spatial norms and/or access liminal spaces humans cannot naturally infiltrate. Finally, I will discuss how these seemingly distant, metaphysical trajectories of magic and animals in the Ancient Mediterranean have helped me analyze the logic of my mother’s interpretation of the two birds. By doing this, I hope to describe how studying magic and animals in the Ancient Mediterranean has given me a sharper image of my own inherited traditions birthed from the sacred geographies of Southern India.
Animal Bodies: Omens and Oedipus
For both the Ancient Greeks and the Romans, animal bodies served multiple purposes in religious and spiritual life by means of divination and magic. Scholars have proposed that the Ancient Mediterranean people’s awareness and curiosity of animals is related to how animals embody unpredictable, impulsive behaviors unknown and mysterious to humans.[5] Because of this, unspoken gestures exhibited by animals transformed into symbolic representations of the gods’ messages to humans in the mortal realm.[6] In other words, because these communities understood the gods’ way to communicate with humans to be ambiguous and indirect in its nature, animal bodies—in their ambiguous, unpredictable and impulsive behaviors—became functional, corporeal symbols that could be used to interpret the messages of the gods.
This is not to say everyone at this time felt obligated to regard animal omens as critical messages. However, it was known that dire consequences arose when the gods’ omens were not taken seriously. Imparting a fear of disrespecting divine communication by ignoring animal omens is reflected in Oedipus Rex, when discounting the power of bird omens is cited as one of the reasons that led to Oedipus’ tragic fate. His defiance towards bird omens heightens the importance of birds as vehicles of divine communication especially when he tries to convince himself he is battling his disastrous fate while actually succumbing to it. For example, after solving the Sphinx’s riddle, Oedipus’ pride swells as he recounts the following as self-convinced proof that his human rationale is superior to the gods’ warnings:
Say, sirrah, hast thou ever proved thyself
A prophet? When the riddling Sphinx was here
Why hadst thou no deliverance for this folk?
And yet the riddle was not go be solved
By guess-work but required the prophet’s art;
Wherein thou wast found lacking; neither birds
Nor sign from heaven helped thee, but I came,
The simple Oedipus; I stopped her mouth
By mother wit, untaught of auguries.[7]
Here we see that Oedipus believes he has fooled the gods through his clever human reasoning because he was able to maneuver through a complex riddle without the wisdom of birds or the understanding of omens. Unfortunately, he does not realize that answering the riddle correctly allows for the rest of his devastating foretold fate to come true: defeating the sphinx is what leads him to his ascension to the throne and the marriage to his mother. What this shows us is that the omen of birds offered an extremely intricate, complex way of thinking about Oedipus’ actions that cannot be altered even through human wit. Oedipus is bound to his fate because the gods had decided so, and they displayed this through the omens told by the birds. This powerful communication displayed by the birds revealing Oedipus’s fate highlights the complexity of engaging with divine communication and how disastrous the consequences are if one challenges the gods’ omens.
Omens to Ritual Objects: The Paradox of Animal Bodies as Sites of Religious Practice
In understanding how animals provided the Ancient Mediterranean with divine communication, we can see how animal bodies were often read as omens determined by the gods rather than literal manifestations of forecasts predicting actions and reactions of human life. Understanding how animal bodies were read as ambiguous omens further suggests how and why certain animal bodies, or even their parts, were coded in various rituals and ritual objects to serve human desires.[8] The systematic ritualization of various animals suggest that these rituals may have been conducted to soothe the anxieties and fulfill the desires humans expressed in the many layers of life.[9] But because some animals were commonly seen in everyday settings, we must also note how omens occurred in non-ritualized settings. Peter Struck refers to this dichotomy in Roman divination as “imperative divination” and “oblative divination.”[10] While imperative divination revolved around the interpretations of animal behavior in their literal bodies and parts, oblative divination rested in the revelatory means in which animals produced themselves in humans’ cognitive behavior.[11] Helpful examples of these terms understand that while imperative divination often had to do with ceremonies regarding the entrails produced by ritualized animal sacrifices, oblative divination had more to do with one interpreting why they experienced seeing unusual behavior performed by specific animals.
Another perspective to grasp these dimensions of divination is through the ways in which the Greeks considered birds in their framing of the world. In Birds in the Ancient World, Jeremy Mynott takes readers through a range of concepts in which birds played various roles in everyday, ancient Greek life.[12] He puts forth the notion that, in this context, “birds became so important as ‘signs’ that were then projected back on to the world in the form of metaphors and symbols”[13] to illustrate how the everyday experience of birds in popular Greek culture meant birds “populated people’s minds and imaginations and then reemerged in their language, legends, and patterns of thought in some symbolic form.”[14] These interpretations of bird behaviors were even incorporated into ritual objects created by the Greeks. We can see an example of this through examining the iynx wheel, a ritual object made of terracotta and shaped like a wheel with eleven iynx birds sitting upon it. Not only does this ritual object resemble what these birds look like in real life, but when this wheel is spun around, it reanimates the “erotic dance” iynx birds perform that once fascinated the Greeks who saw them as magical.[15] [16]
What stands out here is that for both the ancient Greeks and Romans the physical body of animals symbolized messages from a divine source in one way or another. The excavation, interpretation, and/or reanimation of these bodies thus becomes types of worship in its desire to seek or understand revelatory messages from the gods. This would further imply that the physical body of the animal itself, its parts, and/or its structures become sites of religious practice. The paradox emerging here is that, while the physical body of the animal serves as the omen needing to be read in various ways, the message itself maintains an expression of something that is abstract, ambiguous, and relayed to humans by the gods—whose distance from humans may also be described as abstract and ambiguous.
Liminal Spaces, Transgressing Spaces: A Navigation of the Sacred
If studying the functionality of omens carried by animals in the ancient Greek and Roman contexts reflects how animal bodies can be seen as physical sites of religious practice, how do we understand what happens when these sites are dynamic and unpredictable? What does it mean for a house of worship to be able to travel through both sacred and profane spaces? To explore how these questions may have manifested in the Ancient Mediterranean, we should turn once more to stories of birds in the lives of the ancient Greeks and Romans—but also to mice as well, as they give dimension to the spatial analysis I am putting forth here. With the knowledge that animals function as divinatory, magical omens in a variety of ways, we can speculate what it meant when these animals could transgress human-made—or human-imagined—boundaries by transporting themselves “betwixt and between” spaces humans could not access.[17]
Consider how omens in the form of animals did not always reveal themselves in rituals or other systematic formations, but rather in moments of the everyday. Such spontaneous omens could lead to spiritual anxieties for those who caught glimpse of certain animals, so it is interesting to note how the spaces in which these animals navigated also played a role in how these anxieties were produced. This could also potentially complicate the categories “artificial divination” and “natural divination,” another categorical analysis of divination referenced to by Peter Struck.[18] Because some animals were visible in an everyday sense, and because their regularity granted them particular magical narratives, I remain curious about how these categories of divination may have overlapped if everyday sights and sounds were given prescriptive omens by their ancient interpreters.
This grey area between these two distinctions may also be explored through the Greeks’ relationship to birds as beings capable of flight in the inaccessible sky as well as the Romans’ relationship to mice as beings who could traverse the smallest, almost unseen, parts of the world. In both scenarios, birds and mice not only inhabited spaces in which humans cannot naturally exist, but these animals were also able to travel through these and into human-scale spaces.
Take the omen mice represented in the Roman context for example. While Christopher McDonough describes the ways in which scholars have had difficulty in their ability to define the importance of mice in Roman cultures, he does posit the following:
The mouse's ability to cross such boundaries was a fundamental aspect of its nature. Yet, precisely because of this capacity for
passing between the worlds, the mouse belonged simultaneously to neither realm but somehow to both. As a creature caught
"betwixt and between," in the anthropologist Victor Turner's phrase, the mouse was a liminal entity existing on the cusp
between categories. It embodied opposites, and so possessed an essential ambiguity at once powerful and upsetting.[19]
This quote exemplifies the anxieties people held towards the spaces unknown to them. In this way, McDonough is also speaking to the Foucauldian concept of Heterotopia—the idea that there are certain otherized spaces understood as an unknown dimension of reality, and it is in the processing of otherizing this space that allows for societies to reason through perceived difference and unease of the other.[20] This is pertinent to the discussion of how animals are read as omens in the Ancient Mediterranean, because it demonstrates another vocabulary that puts into perspective the Romans’ anxiety of mice—animals which could crawl through homes and temples, tombs and corpses, thus transgressing the boundaries between what is sacred and what is profane—manifested as supernatural, perhaps divine, expressions.[21]
These discussions and theories about how magic and divination not only permeated the Ancient Mediterranean but how they were also found in the bodies of animals may appear to cultivate an experience of the natural world that appears unique to us in the modern world. But I would say that these supernatural, perhaps divine, experiences—including all types of non-human beings—are not so far away from us as we might imagine. For example, my mother’s story and her analysis about the birds returns these so-called “ancient” conversations about magic, divination, and animals as omens to a contemporary focus. I remain curious to see how the conversation between the Ancient Mediterranean and present experiences of animals communicating their magical and/or divine powers to us may reveal new insights about the ever so mysterious natural world.
My Mother, Me, and the Birds Sent from God
While the story about my mother and the birds has always captivated my attention, it has taken me a long time to see it as more than just a story or brief, spiritual experience in our lives. This moment opened up an unexplored, intellectual aspect of my own inherited religious traditions that I was not previously able to understand because I did not possess the language to make sense of it. To study magic and animals in the Ancient Mediterranean ultimately exposed me to ways in which this kind of thinking is an emotional, spiritual, and intellectual endeavor of understanding divinity through developing an intimate relationship with the earth to which we belong.
This importance of language, perception, and meaning making is articulated in Edward Said’s article, “Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” where Said traces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies regarding language and perception, and how the experiences of these create meaning out of the world. Said quotes Merleau-Ponty in the following, which articulates the importance of language:
[Language] must surround each subject, like an instrument with its own inertia its own demands, constraints, and
internal logic, and must nevertheless remain open to the initiatives of the subject (as well as to the brute contributions of
invasions, fashions and historical events), always capable of the displacement of meanings, the ambiguities, and the
functional substitutions which give this logic its lurching gait.[22]
In my case, my inability to understand or speak the language of divine magic meant I was unable to understand the deeper implications of my mother’s interpretation of the two birds. This explains why I could only read the two birds’ relationship as the cleverness of two animals, while my mother was able to read them as a comforting message from the gods. While both are ways to make sense of the shared experience, my mother’s interpretation captured far more information than my own. Thus, to understand the language of magic as it exists in the bodies of animals—even when I began learning it in a perspective foreign to my own traditions—still `gave me the tools needed to develop a vocabulary that allowed me into my mother’s world, a world I did not quite understand even though she has shared so much of it with me.
This leads us to how perception, the other key aspect of Said’s commentary on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies, shapes how we create meaning out of a world that already exists. Said states that “perception is an activity that clarifies a primordial way of being, a being that lies beneath the level of intelligible discourse. Perception, quite literally, is the way human existence comes into being.”[23] What is striking about Merleau-Ponty’s work philosophies is his argument that human nature makes meaning out of a meaningless world that already exists. This implies an opposition to the idea that humans exist in a world that is already embedded and encoded with meaning. In other words, as Said elegantly puts it, “we are in and of the world before we can think about it.”[24] Said further articulates this while exploring a phrase he repeats through the article, that we are “condemned to meaning,” to describe how humans are doomed to make meaning out of existence, but the world itself may not be previously coded with meaning.
This is not to say that meaning is wholly absent in the world, rather, it is the individual’s perceptions of the world that charges it with meaning. In short, the world is made up of an infinite number of significances, not because they are already loaded with meaning, but because we allow them to become valuable and special in their own right. Furthermore, it is the languages in tandem with the perceptions that the individual understands the world which initiates the meanings people have assigned to their worlds. In the case of my mother, the world is built out of languages of sacred geographies and magical animals. She perceives the messages of the gods through unusual actions displayed by the natural world that reveals parts of itself to her at specific points in her life.
Much like those of the Ancient Mediterranean, my mother deeply trusts the unspoken gestures of animals because her perception of them represents divine communication. In conversation with this is Merleau-Ponty’s philosophies of how languages and perceptions are the ways in which my mother codes the world. It also allows us to understand how and why divine messages and divinity can also be animals. With this in mind, we can also understand why a bird, a potential manifestation of divine message and the divine, being trapped in a tree symbolized something more to my mother than just an absurd occurrence. Not only was the bird located in an unreachable part of the tree, but it was also trapped in the tree, a place that is universally known to be a home for birds. In this way, the entrapment of the bird in this tree made heterotopias out of the location and the event. In other words, a divine being was trapped in its home; a place where it was once safe had now become perilous. Because of this, my mother understood that entrapped bird as an omen.
At this point, the sacred animal trapped in a tree was already interpreted a message sent by the gods to my mother. I remember watching her nervously watching the bird as she thought about who she could call to help set the bird free. She was explicit in stating a sense of urgency to release the bird back into freedom, but there was no way my mother to help the animal. Fortunately, we know that the story of the birds did not end there. It ended when another bird rescued the trapped bird, and they flew from one heterotopia to another—the natural heterotopia of their flight through the skies which has lured human interest in birds for centuries.
The story in its entirety illustrates how my mother’s perception of the birds revealed how the gods wanted her to process the recent death of her father in relationship to the early death of her mother. Because my mother has an exceptional sense of the natural world, she understands birds as beings who can travel between and betwixt these fluid, powerful, heterotopic realms of the living and the dead. This has helped her determine why birds are appropriate bodies to carry those souls most important to us. For her to immediately recognize that birds command the worlds they traverse in particular ways is the genius of how the emotional, the spiritual, and the intellectual come together to make sense of the everchanging world. To understand her perception of the world then, as Claude Lévi-Strauss puts it, “we must see magical behavior as the response to a situation which is revealed to the mind through emotional manifestations, but whose essence is intellectual.”[25]
While these stories of the gods and magical animals do not live in books, my mother embodies them through the stories, languages, and perceptions we inherit from the natural world. This inheritance is as ambiguous, unpredictable, experiential, and as ultimately sacred as the gods themselves. In addition to this, we also must consider how she sees these relationships between memories, bodies, gods, and nature as part of a religious mindset that takes on magic as a facet of both life experiences as well as religious landscapes.
Because magic has the ability to guide a being from one realm to the next, for my mother and those of the Ancient Mediterranean, magic bears the ability for worlds far apart to continue speaking to one another regardless of spatial boundaries. Magic thus makes distances across the world and throughout centuries appear insignificant, as it gives us a vocabulary to connect with the gods and the past. Because of how time and space are warped by these logical intricacies of divine communication via animals, the logic of magic itself becomes as vast, ambiguous, and expansive as the divine ultimate. While my mother often tells me about the formidable enormity of the gods, she also reminds me that the divine eventually rests in “chinna chinna asai”—the small, magical moments we wish for in this world.[26]
Works Cited
Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité. Trans. Jay Miskowiec. 1967. 1-9.
Graf, Fritz. Magic in the Ancient World. Trans. Franklin Philip. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, 1963.
McDonough, Christopher. “Ridiculus Mus: Of Mice and Men in Roman Thought.” A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. 413-422.
Mynott, Jeremy. Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Ogden, Daniel. “Animal Magic.” The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life. Ed. Gordon Lindsay Campbell.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Rahman, A.R. “Chinna Chinna Aasai.” Roja. Vairamuthu. Perf. Minmini. Lahari Music, 1992.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls1irCsEPaU.
Said, Edward W. “Labyrinth of Incarnations: The Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.” The Kenyon Review. Vol. 29: No. 1. Gambier: Kenyon College, 1967. 54-68.
Sophocles. Oedipus the King. Trans. F. Storr. http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/oedipus.html.
Struck, Peter. “Animals and Divination.” The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life. Ed. Gordon Lindsay Campbell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Endnotes
[1] See Bell, 15-17 for a nuanced discussion of the historical studies of ritual; I have considered many of these methods as platforms to understand this particular event with my mother and the two birds.
[2] Graf, 211.
[3] Mynott, 325-334.
[4] Ogden, 6.
[5] Struck, 2.
[6] Ibid., 1-2.
[7] Sophocles.
[8] Four themes that reflect how divination was further carried out is displayed in Peter Struck’s articulation that the transformation of humans into animals, exploitation of animals and animal parts, deployment of magic against animals, and deployment of magic by animals against man were central in understanding the Ancient Mediterranean’s use of magic in relation to animals.
[9] See Ogden’s discussion of the multiple uses of hyena parts for concrete analysis of how this was practiced (4-5).
[10] Struck, 5. Struck also notes that the “oblative” category was more familiar to the Greeks’ practice of divination.
[11] Ibid., 2-3.
[12] Mynott, 3-6; 67-69; 129-130; 189-190; 245-247; 305-306.
[13] Ibid., 246-247.
[14] Ibid., 245
[15] Ogden, 2-3. One can see the “erotic dance” of iynx birds on many online video platforms, such as YouTube.
[16] An example of the iynx wheel can be seen on the Boston's Museum of Fine Arts' website under the page “Ritual object with eleven birds on a wheel.” Unfortunately, due to the Museum's copyright and redistribution terms, I am unable to include a photograph of the iynx wheel here.
[17] The reference of “betwixt and between” is a framing of space coined by Victor Turner and is referred to by Christopher McDonough in “Ridiculus Mus: Of Mice and Men in Roman Thought.”
[18] Struck defines artificial messages as “…observed in significant phenomena in the world outside the observer, the meaning of which is determined using empirical methods” and natural divination as “…direct inspiration through dreams, visions, or inspired oracular pronouncements” (2-3).
[19] McDonough, 415.
[20] Foucault, 4.
[21] McDonough, 416-417.
[22] Said, 65.
[23] Ibid., 62.
[24] Ibid., 57.
[25] Lévi-Strauss, 184.
[26] This phrase is derived from “Chinna Chinna Aasai,” an extremely popular Tamil song among the South Indian diaspora. It features the voice of a young girl describing the minute details of her home in Tamil Nadu; she focuses particularly on the most intricate moments she loves about the natural world. Figure 2 features a photograph of my mother, some birds, and myself from the time in my life my mother most frequently sang this song to me.