Song of the Wood Thrush

Abstract

Chapter 1 begins with the song of the wood thrush and then focuses on divine animals in the Bible. It examines the Gospels’ “pigeon God” in which the Spirit-bird alights on Jesus at the time of his baptism, signaling the unity of all things: divine life and birdlife, divinity and animality, spirit and flesh. And it argues that the Bible’s seeming prohibitions against animal deities is vitiated by Moses’ and Jesus’ ophidian shamanism that privileges snake-totemism as a source of salvation in Numbers and John, respectively. It examines intimations of “Christian animism”—the belief that all things, including so-called inanimate objects, are alive with sacred presence—in George E. “Tink” Taylor, Lynn White Jr., and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a second-century CE avian spirit possession narrative. It concludes that insofar as the Spirit is ornithomorphic, it behooves us to care for the natural world as the site of God’s daily presence.