Woodpecker

Zeus stole the sceptre from the woodpecker in Greece but too effectively. The tradition of Keleos the old king of Eleusis lived on; but who remembers that he was the rain-bird, the green wood-pecker living at Woodpecker-town

Harrison argues that the woodpecker was originally a sovereign rain-making king whose sacred authority was usurped by Zeus, preserving in Greek myth only a suppressed memory of the bird's archaic magician-king status.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis

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Picus and Faunus are magicians, medicine-men, and medicine-men of a class with which we are already familiar... in their skill in spells and their magical potency in matters divine they are said to have gone about Italy practising the same arts as those who in Greece bore the name of Idaean Daktyls.

Harrison establishes Picus the woodpecker-king as a sorcerer-initiate equivalent to the Idaean Daktyls, linking him to the thunder-rites of Cretan Zeus and to a specialized society of ritual magicians.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis

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The remarkable importance of the woodpecker (picus) in Italy: Picus, Piceni, etc. It was believed to have prophetic power and to have quiddam divinum so that no nail would remain in a tree in which it nested. With it, more particularly with one species, the picus Martius, the great god Mars was identified.

Onians locates the woodpecker's Italian importance in its prophetic divinity and its identification with Mars, arguing that the scarlet-crowned head connects the bird to archaic beliefs about fire, generative power, and the sacred head.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

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Trickster imitates woodpecker's way of getting bear.

In the Winnebago cycle's structural outline, the woodpecker appears as one of several animals whose specialized techniques Trickster serially and unsuccessfully attempts to copy, positioning the bird as a marker of competence the ego-less trickster cannot attain.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting

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He stuck it into his nose and climbed to the top of the lodge centrepole and said, 'Kowank, kowank, kowank!' Then he pecked at the upper part of the pole and made a loud sound.

Trickster's clumsy imitation of the woodpecker's percussive behavior results in self-injury and unconsciousness, dramatizing the gap between the bird's natural aptitude and the trickster's compulsive, boundary-less mimicry.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting

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One of the reasons for this failure, at least from a literary-psychological point of view, lay probably in the fact that one basic exploit or rather, series of exploits, connected with Wakdjunkaga... had still to be included, namely his visits to various animals, the manner in which he was entertained by them and the manner in which he attempts, quite unsuccessfully, to reciprocate their hospitality.

Radin contextualizes the woodpecker imitation episode within the broader psychological pattern of Trickster's failed animal-hospitality reciprocations, which resist integration into a narrative of moral or psychic development.

Radin, Paul, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956supporting

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the magical birds make the weather before they portend it. Take heed what time thou hearest the voice of the crane Who, year by year

Harrison's broader argument that sacred birds are weather-makers rather than weather-signs provides the theoretical framework within which the woodpecker's rain-making sovereignty becomes intelligible.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912supporting

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Fat or marrow was identified with seed. Pliny tells us that there was believed to be in the wolf amatorium virus, in the tail.

The chapter heading 'Mars, Woodpecker, Wolf' signals the conceptual cluster within which Onians situates the woodpecker — alongside Mars and the wolf as totemic embodiments of generative and martial potency — though this passage focuses on the wolf.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside

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