▪ In Egyptian mythology, the stork was associated with Ba or personality, the unique individual character of each human being. The Ba or soul was represented by a bird, usually a stork, with a human head.
▪ The Egyptians believed that the soul left the body during sleep but unerringly migrated home each night.
▪ Egyptians thought that the Ba could return to the body of a deceased person because that was its rightful home.
▪ In German, the name for stork is literally soul bringer.
▪ In Norse mythology, Hoeir, a Stork King figure popular in northern European myths and fables, gives to mankind the spirit gift, the óor, that includes will and memory, those things which make us human.
▪ Each winter, the stork visits the watery swamps of Egypt, where the souls of unborn children live.
▪ In related Greek mythology, the stork was believed to steal the baby and carry it away.
▪ When the stork appears, a birth or rebirth will soon happen.
▪ The presence of a stork was seen to bring fruitfulness and prosperity. Its common Dutch name, ooievaar, comes from the word for the bringer of good.
▪ The Hebrew word for stork was equivalent to “kind mother” and the care of storks for their young made the stork a symbol of protection of children. They were thought to be very gentle with their young and to return in pairs to the same nest year after year.
▪ In Norse mythology, the stork was considered monogamous and a symbol of family protection.
▪ It was widely noted that a stork pair would be consumed with the nest in a fire rather than abandon it.
▪ If a stork deserted its nest, death would soon follow to someone close by.
▪ Aristotle, Pliny, Aelian, and others praised the stork’s devotion to its parents. According to the Physiologue, the bird nourished its parents with great affection in their old age.
▪ The stork was depicted in tapestries as battling a serpent, the symbol of evil, as on the capital in the interior courtyard of the Palace of the Doge in Venice.
▪ Renaissance writers declared the stork to be avis piissima, a bird most pious, a bird of God.
▪ A Polish folktale relates that the Stork was once a man, a very pious pilgrim, who went to the Holy Sepulcher regularly. God trusted the man with a sack containing evil in the form of snakes and toads. The man was to take the sack and throw it into the sea. But under no conditions was he to open it. The journey was hard, and the man had to cross a high mountain. Exhausted, he sat down to rest, where his curiosity proved stronger than his will. When he opened the sack, strife and misery covered the world. God changed the man into a stork until he should recapture all the suffering that he had released.
▪ The migratory stork has two homes, but in each, she is filled with longing for the other. So she wanders eternally back & forth.
▪ In Estonian, stork is toonekurg, which is derived from toonela (underworld in Estonian folklore).
▪ For the Chinese, the stork was able to snatch up a worthy man, like the flute-player Lan Ts’ai Ho, and carry him to a blissful life.
▪ The stork was the emblem of a grateful man.
