Magpie Lore
So common are magpies (Pica pica), it seems, that it is not so much a case of “one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told” as enough for the first team squad of Newcastle United or Notts County. Little wonder that gazza is the Italian word for a magpie.
The magpie is one of our most distinctive wild birds with its black plumage, interspersed with white flanks, belly, and wing patches, and a long, stiff tail, which accounts for over a third of its forty-five-centimetre length. On closer inspection its ostensibly black feathers take on a purplish-blue hue and the tail has a green gloss to it. Even if it cannot be seen, its loud chattering and repetitive call of “chac-chac-chac-chac” makes it hard to ignore.
In folklore the magpie’s reputation was positively Manichaean. Admired by the Romans for its intelligence and reasoning abilities, for the ancient Greeks it was sacred to Bacchus, god of wine, and associated with intoxication. In China, a singing magpie was thought to bring good fortune and was adopted as a symbol of happiness and luck, for the Koreans it delivered good news, and for the Mongolians it was smart enough to control the weather. A magpie feather was worn as a sign of fearlessness by some native Americans, others believing it to be a messenger of the spirits or imbued with shamanic powers.
The Christian church saw the magpie differently, though, the only bird, they claimed, not to have wept for or comforted Christ during his crucifixion and, because of its pied plumage, not to have observed a proper period of mourning. As a hybrid of the raven and the dove it was the only bird not to be baptised and to eschew the comforts of Noah’s ark, preferring to sit in the pouring rain chattering and swearing. It carried a drop of the Devil’s blood in its tongue which, if released, would render the bird capable of human speech. In captivity, magpies have proven to be excellent mimics.
Often seen scavenging for carrion near battlefields, field hospitals, and gallows, magpies were associated with death, a reputation enhanced by their habit, during the breeding season, of raiding nests. Their inquisitive and mischievous nature led to them, somewhat unfairly, being seen as thieves with a penchant for shiny objects and jewellery, a reputation Puccini exploited to good effect in La Gazza Ladra (1817) with Ninette tried, convicted, and executed for theft, only for the true culprit, the thieving magpie, to be revealed too late.
Tarred with the reputation of being evil, it was but a small step to view a solitary magpie as a harbinger of bad luck. Over the ages several strategies were devised to ward off misfortune including saluting the bird, doffing one’s hat to it, saying “Good morning, General” or “Good morning, Captain”, spitting three times over your shoulder, blinking rapidly to fool yourself into thinking that you have seen two magpies, or flapping your arms about and cawing to mimic the bird’s missing mate. In Somerset, carrying an onion at all times warded off any evil that a magpie might bring but in Yorkshire it was sufficient to make the sign of the cross and shout “Devil, devil, I defy thee” when coming across one.
The sight of a magpie in specific circumstances had particular significance. For the Scots one seen near the window of a house was a sign of an impending death while in Wales the sight of a magpie moving from right to left at the start of a journey meant it was going to be hazardous. In Northamptonshire a group of three together was a sign that a fire would break out and for a fisherman in Devon the sight of the bird early in the morning meant that he would not catch anything that day. In Sussex, though, a magpie perched on the roof of a house indicated that it was solidly built and unlikely to collapse.
