Vulture: Symbolism, Hieroglyphs, Mythology and Long History

The vulture, long before us
From hieroglyphs to the Causses

The bird we see gliding above the Vercors Highlands has carried, for millennia, a meaning that our contemporaries have almost entirely lost. In several Mediterranean civilisations, the vulture was not the symbol of death: it was the symbol of motherhood, of divine breath, of mercy. That reversal of meaning took two thousand years, under the influence of three distinct factors. Undoing it takes time.

When today's children learn the alphabet, they recite a string of sounds whose first sign was drawn in the shape of a vulture more than four thousand five hundred years ago. From the sands of ancient Egypt to the ridges of the Vercors, the same silhouette crosses the centuries without repeating itself identically: each culture has read something different in it.

A as in... Vulture?

Pharaonic Egypt did not just observe vultures, it coded them at the very heart of its writing system, drawing in two distinct species:

The great goddess Mut, protector of Karnak, is written with this sign: the bird symbolised maternal love, fear and protection at the same time. The Egyptologist Jean Yoyotte, in his preface to Le Vautour (Lamblard, 2001), notes that this double register (gentleness and power) is specific to the vulture in all the cultures that have depicted it.

Nekhbet, protector of the pharaohs

Down the Nile to El-Kab, sanctuary of Nekhbet, vulture goddess of Upper Egypt. With her counterpart Wadjet (the cobra goddess), they formed the duo charged with protecting the pharaoh. They appear side by side on the famous funerary mask of Tutankhamun.

To grasp the importance of the bird, look at the vulture headdress worn by queens and goddesses from 2560 BCE. It is literally the skin of a vulture: the entire body sits on the head, the wings frame the face and the tail falls onto the nape. A symbol of absolute power.

The remarkable myth of the "mother without a male"

Here is the most stubborn belief of antiquity: for the Ancients, there were no male vultures. All were female, fertilised directly by the wind!

Fixed by the Greeks and Romans, this idea was to have a symbolic consequence no one expected. Between the 2nd and 4th centuries, the Church Fathers (Tertullian, Ambrose...) took it up. For them the equation was perfect: if the vulture conceives by the wind (pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin), it is natural proof that the Virgin Mary could conceive by the Holy Spirit!

The vulture became, through fourteen centuries of Christian doctrine, the natural argument for the Immaculate Conception. Tertullian, Ambrose, Basil of Caesarea, Cyril of Alexandria: all cite the bird. The strength of the argument lay in the fact that it came from the natural world, not from theology. A scavenger, instrument of grace.

The great pelican hold-up

So how did the bird of the Virgin Mary become the pariah we know? Because of an image problem.

In old texts, the vulture is said to open its own thigh to feed its young with its blood in case of famine. The image is beautiful, but the Church eventually found the vulture a little too "macabre". In the 4th century, Saint Jerome transferred that fine symbolism of eucharistic sacrifice to a bird judged more noble: the pelican.

The pelican scoops the prize. The vulture is thrown into the dustbin of Christian history, surviving only in a few old names of our Pyrenean mountains (where the Egyptian vulture is still sometimes called Marie-Blanche).

Rachamah: the bird of mercy

If the West turned its back on it, the East kept venerating it. In Arabic, the name of the Egyptian vulture is rachamah. It shares the Semitic root r-h-m (womb, entrails, maternal love) with the first two names of God in the Qur'an: Al-Rahman (the Most Merciful) and Al-Rahim (the Most Compassionate).

In 18th-century Cairo, killing an Egyptian vulture was a heavily punished crime, so respected was the bird as a natural cleaner and benefactor.

Eagle 1 - 0 Vulture: the PR battle

The Western coup de grâce came in two stages, eighteen centuries apart.

In 104 BCE, Marius reformed the Roman army and chose the eagle as the only emblem of the legions. Before him, five animals shared that honour: the wolf, the minotaur, the horse, the boar, and the vulture. Marius wiped them all out and kept only the eagle. The vulture left Roman state symbolism, and with it European state symbolism for the next two millennia. Plutarch, however, still pleaded: "the vulture is the least harmful of animals, which destroys no harvest, kills no living being, and feeds only on what is already dead."

Buffon, in the 18th century, finished the job in his Natural History. He crowned the eagle "king of birds" and called the vulture a "vile, cowardly and repugnant" animal. Michelet tried to repair the affair in the 19th: "the eagle lives only by murder, the vulture, on the contrary, is the servant of life." The public did not follow.

What is left of that drift is an image: the bird circling on a carcass in a Western film. The caricature buried two thousand years of maternal and purifying symbolism.

A triumphant return through the Causses

It took modern ecology to repair 2,000 years of injustice.

15 December 1981 marked a turning point: the LPO and the Cévennes National Park released five griffon pairs on the Causse Méjean. Jean-Marie Lamblard recounts in Le Vautour (2001) the prior negotiations with livestock farmers, who had not forgotten Buffon but eventually agreed to leave summer-pasture carcasses accessible instead of burying them. A practical agreement before a symbolic gesture. The French population now counts over 1,700 griffon pairs.

The cinereous vulture followed in 1992 on the same Causse, the bearded vulture in the Alps from 1986. Forty years later, all four species are visible in the Vercors sky. It is the return of what Michelet called "the servant of life": a bird that seeks death so that matter can keep moving.

🌍 A universal soul carrierElsewhere in the world, its role as "cleaner" has always kept a sacred dimension. Among the Bambara of Mali, it symbolises total knowledge. In Tibet and among Zoroastrians, the deceased are still entrusted to it today during sky burials, so that the soul rises to the firmament carried by its wings.

The anecdote: when Freud got his feathers tangled

Hard to speak of the vulture without bringing up the most famous mistake of psychoanalysis. In 1910, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay on Leonardo da Vinci, based on a childhood memory of the painter in which a "vulture" had brushed his lips. Freud built a whole psychoanalytic theory on the Egyptian maternal symbolism of the vulture.

The problem? In his notebooks, Leonardo had written nibbio (kite). It was Freud's German translator who had got it wrong. The episode is revealing: even by getting the wrong bird, psychoanalysis fell back on Egypt and on the symbol of the Mother. The symbolism of the vulture is powerful enough to cross translation errors and centuries of forgetting.

Going further

When we take a group up to the Vercors ridges and a giant wingspan passes overhead, this is the story we tell. Forget the gloomy scavenger: watch the original Mother of the pharaohs fly.

Come and look up at the sky with us during our naturalist outings in the Vercors, or dig deeper with Lamblard's fine book Le Vautour.

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