Throughout known human history Bird Men have featured in religious and cultural beliefs. All over the world for millennia mythical Bird Men have been worshipped as Gods or deities.
Why is this?
Why would seemingly unrelated cultures from all over the globe have similar depictions of bird/human hybrids?
Could there have been one original source that inspired ancient people to worship these mythical creatures or is it all just coincidence?
This post will be the first of a number looking into the Bird Men revered on different continents by different people at different times. Today we begin in Asia.
THE BIRD MEN.
ASIA - GARUDA.
Garuda is a large mythical bird like creature appearing in both Hindu and Buddhist mythology, often depicted with the upper body and wings of an eagle with the lower body of a human. Most commonly the body is golden, the wings red and the face white however as you move around the Asian sub-continent the depictions are known to change slightly.
Regarding Garuda in Hinduism Wikipedia states.......
Images Source
In Hinduism, Garuda is a Hindu divinity, usually the mount of the Lord Vishnu. Garuda is depicted as having the golden body of a strong man with a white face, red wings, and an eagle's beak and with a crown on his head. This ancient deity was said to be massive, large enough to block out the sun.
Garuda is known as the eternal sworn enemy of the Nāga serpent race and known for feeding exclusively on snakes. Such behaviour may have referred to the actual short-toed eagle of India. The image of Garuda is often used as the charm or amulet to protect the bearer from snake attack and its poison, since the king of birds is an implacable enemy and "devourer of serpent". Garudi Vidya is the mantra against snake poison to remove all kinds of evil.
The story of Garuda's birth and deeds is told in the first book of the great epic Mahabharata. According to the epic, when Garuda first burst forth from his egg, he appeared as a raging inferno equal to the cosmic conflagration that consumes the world at the end of every age. Frightened, the gods begged him for mercy. Garuda, hearing their plea, reduced himself in size and energy.
Garuda's father was the creator-rishi Kasyapa. He had two wives, Vinata and Kadru, who were daughters of Prajapathi Daksha. Kasyapa, on the pleadings of his wives, granted them their wishes; Vinata wished for two sons and Kadru wished for a thousand snakes as her sons. Both laid eggs. While the thousand eggs of Kadru hatched early (after steaming the eggs to hatch) into snakes, the hatching of the two eggs of Vinata did not take place for a long time. Impatient, Vinata broke open one egg, which was half formed, with the upper half only as a human and was thus deformed. Her half-formed son cursed her, decreeing that she would be a slave for her sister (she was her rival) for a long time, by which time her second son would be born who would save her from his curse. Her first son flew away and came to prominence as Aruna, the red spectacle seen as the Sun rises in the morning, and also as charioteer of the Sun. The second egg hatched after a long time, during which period Vinata was the servant of her sister as she had lost a bet with her. When the second egg hatched, a fully grown, shining and of mighty size, bird form emerged as Garuda, the king of birds. Garuda was thus born.
According to the Mahabharata, Garuda had six sons (Sumukha, Suvarna, Subala, Sunaama, Sunethra and Suvarchas) from whom were descended the race of birds. The members of this race were of great might and without compassion, subsisting as they did on their relatives the snakes. Vishnu was their protector.
Throughout the Mahabharata, Garuda is invoked as a symbol of impetuous violent force, of speed, and of martial prowess. Powerful warriors advancing rapidly on doomed foes are likened to Garuda swooping down on a serpent. Defeated warriors are like snakes beaten down by Garuda. The field marshal Drona uses a military formation named after Garuda. Krishna even carries the image of Garuda on his banner.
Unsurprisingly Buddhist fokelore regarding Garuda is similar with different protagonists involved in the stories as you would expect. The most fascinating part for me is the constant reoccurance of a 'snake type enemy' of these bird men as you will see as we journey through this series of posts. But I digress, let's see what the Buddhist traditions tell us.....
In Buddhism, the Garuda (Pāli: garuḷā) are enormous predatory birds with intelligence and social organization. Another name for the Garuda is suparṇa (Pāli: supaṇṇa), meaning "well-winged, having good wings". Like the Naga, they combine the characteristics of animals and divine beings, and may be considered to be among the lowest devas.
The exact size of the Garuda is uncertain, but its wings are said to have a span of many miles. When a Garuda's wings flap, they create hurricane-like winds that darken the sky and blow down houses. A human being is so small compared to a Garuda that a man can hide in the plumage of one without being noticed (Kākātī Jātaka, J.327). They are also capable of tearing up entire banyan trees from their roots and carrying them off.
Garudas are the great golden-winged Peng birds. They also have the ability to grow large or small, and to appear and disappear at will. Their wingspan is 330 yojanas (one yojana being 8 miles long). With one flap of its wings, a Peng bird dries up the waters of the sea so that it can gobble up all the exposed dragons. With another flap of its wings, it can level the mountains by moving them into the ocean.
So although the Buddhist traditions don't state the exact size they do indicate that Garuda is a massive creature with a wings span measured in hundreds of miles! We saw earlier the Hindu belief that Garuda was large enough to 'block out the sun' so I think it's fair to say we not talking about a creature currently inhabiting the earth!
Could this myth have been born out of ancient 'visitation' of some kind of craft mistaken for a bird? I can hear the groans, I'm just saying, I know of no known flying creature that has ever inhabited the earth that was so big it could block out the sun.
As I mentioned many times in my previous series 'When does a myth become truth' followers of Hinduism, Buddhism and all other religions believe that their holy scriptures are history written down in some cases many millennia ago by people who were chronicling events they were witnessing, with so many myths proven to be true in recent decades who is to say the Bird Men traditions aren't based on actual events that took place in antiquity?
Continuing....
Garudas have kings and cities, and at least some of them have the magical power of changing into human form when they wish to have dealings with people. On some occasions Garuda kings have had romances with human women in this form. Their dwellings are in groves of the simbalī, or silk-cotton tree.
The Garuda are enemies to the nāga, a race of intelligent serpent- or dragon-like beings, whom they hunt. The Garudas at one time caught the nāgas by seizing them by their heads; but the nāgas learned that by swallowing large stones, they could make themselves too heavy to be carried by the Garudas, wearing them out and killing them from exhaustion. This secret was divulged to one of the Garudas by the ascetic Karambiya, who taught him how to seize a nāga by the tail and force him to vomit up his stone.
In the Maha-samaya Sutta (Digha Nikaya 20), the Buddha is shown making temporary peace between the Nagas and the Garudas.
The Sanskrit word Garuda has been borrowed and modified in the languages of several countries. In Burmese, Garudas are called galone. In Burmese astrology, the vehicle of the Sunday planet is the galone. In Japanese a Garuda is called karura (however, the form Garuda ガルーダ is used in recent Japanese fiction.
In the Qing Dynasty fiction The Story of Yue Fei (1684), Garuda sits at the head of the Buddha's throne. But when a celestial bat (an embodiment of the Aquarius constellation) flatulates during the Buddha’s expounding of the Lotus Sutra, Garuda kills her and is exiled from paradise. He is later reborn as Song Dynasty General Yue Fei. The bat is reborn as Lady Wang, wife of the traitor Prime Minister Qin Hui, and is instrumental in formulating the "Eastern Window" plot that leads to Yue's eventual political execution. It is interesting to note The Story of Yue Fei plays on the legendary animosity between Garuda and the Nagas when the celestial bird-born Yue Fei defeats a magic serpent who transforms into the unearthly spear he uses throughout his military career. Literary critic C. T. Hsia explains the reason why Qian Cai, the book's author, linked Yue with Garuda is because of the homology in their Chinese names. Yue Fei's courtesy name is Pengju (鵬舉). A Peng (鵬) is a giant mythological bird likened to the Middle Eastern Roc.Garuda's Chinese name is Great Peng, the Golden-Winged Illumination King (大鵬金翅明王).
This article found at earthbeforeflood.com tells another interesting story regarding Garuda....
Many Indian legends contain stories about a huge mythical bird of Garuda which was capable to carry people. One of them tells about the theft of soma-amrita by this bird - a beverage of immortality from Indra garden on a top of the Meru mount. In the colourful ancient description Garuda appears before readers in the appearance of "a tsar of feathery, a bird-man or a bird-human", who can speak on-human. According to one myth Garuda had been created the first among the birds and then became the rideable (flyable) bird of Vishnu.
According to the "Vishna-purana", Garuda had received authority all over the birds. It (or he) had been endowed with great power and immeasurable force, on his back the bird could deliver several sacred wise men simultaneously to the distant northern mount Meru. The colourful appearance of Garuda in the description is amplifyed by the next fantastic details:
The body from gold, the wings is of dazzling red colour, a human head with a beak, when Garuda had a seat on trees, under his heaviness branches and trunks were broken".
The appearance of the ancient Aryan igneous bird - the source of the dazzling red light (at Garuda birth, gods dazzled by his glowing have accepted this bird-man for an embodiment of the sun) - bears a strong resemblance to the appearence of the Firebird from Russian legends and the tsar of the birds - Simurg from Persian legends.
Garuda - the peculiar magic bird, exceeding by his size the sizes of eagles, with horns on a head, which symbolized in ancient times the energy of light considering in the Bon religion as the most active element among the five elements. Garuda - one of the main deities of the Bon.
The image of Garuda was saved in myths of many northern people and people of Central Eurasia. Buryats know him under the name (of) Herdig, Kalmyks - Herd, Mongols - Hangaruda. In the North Ural Mountains a great number of bird-men's bronzed figures is discovered. Some of the discovered bronzed figures show beings with three heads. Metallic amulets of Garuda occur very often in the Western and Northern Tibet.
On many statuettes and pictures Garuda is imaged with horns and a little resembles the "old people" from the "Popol-Vuh" and from the other works of Maya, Naua and Aztecs, and a mythical basilisk (cockatrice) . All of them had imposing sizes, large wings, as a rule, had a bird's beak and membranous paws, "wore" horns. However, if the first two types of mythical beings with high probability was dragons-people or demons-snakes (reptiles), Garuda had no any ratio to them. To the contrary, according to the "Vishnu Purana" and the "Mahabharata", it (or he) was an ardent opponent and a fighter of snakes.
Fascinating! So here not only do we have more countries Russia and Persia (modern day Iran) brought into the legend of Garuda, we also have a link to another continent....
South America!
We'll explore this link further in an upcoming post.
It is evident that the 'myth' of Garuda has had a huge influence throughout written history all across Asia, featuring in many stories, poems and epic's. To this day Garuda's image is used as a symbol to adorn government buildings, is the national symbol of both Thailand and Indonesia and sits proudly on the front of Thailand's Royal Barges.
There are many more countries in this region have been influenced by the myth of Garuda and as a result depictions can be found such as Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mongolia, Laos, Vietnam, Suriname and Bhutan. This is to be expected considering the widespread influence of both Hinduism and Buddhism. The stories are slightly different in each country which considering the passages of time since the original scriptures were written is no surprise. Even so the story of Garuda has stood the test of time.
In my opinion Garuda is much more than the religious icon depicted as a half bird - half man deity in the scriptures of these two great philosophies, it is a possible depiction of history. History in its purest sense as in 'His Story'. As we will see in the next and further posts Garuda is just one depiction of a half bird - half man creature said to have existed in antiquity and as I stated at the beginning of this post, I find it hard to believe that unconnected people's from different continents and epochs would have similar beliefs unless there was a shared worldwide experience.
As I often state in these posts, I invite you to do your own reading into the subject as the stories read better than so much modern fiction, not to say these stories are fiction, to millions of people they are recorded history, their truth with many being gripping tales of epic battles and heroism from deep antiquity.
