## Things to Keep in Mind - There is an enormous gape in worldview between us and the (Proto)-Indo-Europeans. See [[us-vs-pies]] - This wiki is always changing. Currently I am trying to tie the topical pages closer to the [[Buck]]. ## Other #cleanup In "IE" thought Gods, Birds, and Humans each have their own languages. Certain humans (wise men, priests) know the language of birds (and how to interpret the movements of birds) and can therefore predicte ("pre-dictate"?) the future. This is the skill know as [[bird-omens]]. But there is another way priests and birds are connected, another fascet to the speech of birds: poetry. (At the root of the connection is the follow correlation: "birdsong:poetry".) *This* is what we will be exploring in this paper. A topic like birds in IE culture would require a series of book, a topic like [[bird-omens]] its own book, but this last topic can fit into an article. In this paper we will look at how birds and priests were connected through song in IE culture. We'll focus particularly on the Indo-Iranian and Vedic branches, and we'll look at both motifs and rituals. We'll bring together the work of the Vedicist Fritz Staal and the Germanicist Jan de Vries to try and reconsruct older Proto-forms. The vedic sections of this work will be very much like the VEDIC FROG ARTICLE. DONT GET LOST IN THE MOTIFS/POETICS It is easy to get lost in Compaartive IE Studies. The rituals, narratives, motifs, and poetics are difficult to make out. They flow into one another. For example liquids are often equated, milk in one IE branch is semen in another {[[dodge2020-thesis]]}. One can slide from talking about "poets singing the praises of warriors before battles like birds" to "warrriors crying like birds at the beginning of battles" {[[iliad]]3.2-7}. Beyond this, many social functions that we moderns see a distinct roles (poets, priests, warriors) were originally not mutually exclusive {[[heesterman1993]]:2,13} &THAT BOOK ABOUT ODIN SACRIFICE. Cases from IE texts regarding speech as a revealer of secret knowledge, are irrelevant. Cases regarding non-priests (warriors, etc) sounding like birds, are irrelevant. Cases regarding groups of women sounding like birds, are irrelevant. Sacrifice is not always associated with gifts {[[heesterman1993]]:13} A comparative scholar can easily, intentionally or not, compress all the variety into a simplified proto-form that may or may not have been real. The scholar's desire for order can end up creating order where there is none. We'll try to trend carefully with this trechourous landscape before us. we will keep a tight focus on our two foci: priests and birds. Priests in IE cultures were not just ritual functionaries, but often more like court bards. Albeit there were separate categories (poets, priests) which had different functions (praise of men, placation of gods) but the priests expressed their prayers through poetry, instead of praising men they praied the gods. The connection thus makes birdsong not just a pleasant sound, but a *praise*. Indo-European connections between birdsong and hymns (the sacred songs of mortal priests). It's not the swiftness, feathers, wings, or flight of birds that primarily concerns us here. It's not even all kinds of birds, only song birds. Different birds have different associations in IE myth, the most common is ravens/crows and death. - Poetic formulas and patterns do not necessarily express belief or theology. They often do in IE texts simply because there was little to no distinction between poetry and sacred song early on. One person complained that myths are just the cleaver words of poets. Whatever the case we will not be looking at belief in this article, but rather practice. <br> - IE poetry is ocmposed of inumerable poetic formulas and clever turns of phrases. The more complicated the kenning, the more obscure the reference, the higher the form. What this means for us is that we have to wade through a great deal of irrelavant, or peripherally relavant, material to find the strand we're looking for. We are looking at "connections (i.e. similes, metaphors, and narrative identifications) between birdsong and hymns" not any peripherally related motifs that deserve their own article. (ex. the language of birds, the connections between birds and other beings like men and gods, etc) ex. 1.124.12