The owl seems to have been in many places considered a bird of ill omen. Among all the tribes visited by Mr Lord, from the Fraser River to the Saint Lawrence, this bird was portentously sacred, and was a favorite decoration of the medicine-men. To come on an owl at an unusual time, in daylight for example, and to hear its mystic cry, were things not desirable of any that loved fulness of pleasure and length of days.[IV-2] In California, by the tribes on the Russian River, owls were held to be devils or evil spirits incarnate.[IV-3]
We often find an animal adopted in much the same way as a patron saint was selected by the mediæval knight. The Hyperborean lad, for example, when he reaches manhood, takes some beast or fish or bird to be his patron, and the spirit connected with that animal is supposed to guard him. Unlike most Indians, the Eskimo will have no hesitation in killing an animal of his tutelary species: he is only careful to wear a piece of its skin or bone, which he regards as an amulet, which it were to him a serious misfortune to lose. Prolonged ill luck sometimes leads a man to change his patron beast for another. The spirits connected with the deer, the seal, the salmon, and the beluga are regarded by all with special veneration.[IV-4]
The Mexicans used to allot certain animals to certain parts of the body; perhaps in much the same way as astrologers and alchemists used to connect the stars of heaven with different substances and persons. The following twenty Mexican symbols were supposed to rule over the various members of the human body: The sign of the deer, over the right foot; of the tiger, over the left foot; of the eagle, over the right hand; of the monkey, over the left hand; of death--represented by a skull--over the skull; of water, over the hair; of the house, over the brow; of rain, over the eyes; of the dog, over the nose; of the vulture, over the right ear; of the rabbit, over the left ear; of the earthquake, over the tongue; of flint, over the teeth; of air, over the breath; of the rose, over the breast; of the cane, over the heart; of wind, over the lungs--as appears from the plate in the Codex Vaticanus, the Italian interpreter giving, however, "over the liver;" of the grass, over the intestines; of the lizard, over the loins; and of the serpent, over the genitals.[IV-5]