Book Review: Church of Birds

A marvelous, unusual book

I’ve just finished reading an unusual book, and I wanted to share a little about it by way of recommendation and review. I honestly wasn’t sure what to make of it going in, given the title and subtitle. What I found was a deeply textured exploration of the sacred relationship between birds and humanity.

I love to connect figurative threads, finding larger patterns in the Great Web of Being. Church of Birds: An Eco-History of Myth and Religion by Ben H. Gagnon connects all kinds of threads in fascinating ways. At the risk of flogging the metaphor, I’d say it depicts a vast tapestry of being, with humans and birds connected around the world and across time, from the very moment we first became human, if not earlier.

Instead of science refuting spirituality, as the argument is often made these days, in this book science supports spirituality. Gagnon’s research uncovers the many ways human culture, belief, and practice have evolved alongside a vast array of birds, their migration flyways, and their nesting grounds.

The Old European Bird Mother, whose worship continued into the Bronze Age among the Minoans, makes her presence felt in these pages. But there are so many other bird deities alongside her, many whose names are lost to time, all of them precious and vital to the humans who worshiped them.

Gagnon explores the worldwide human tendency to choose places to live where bird flyways intersect. At first it’s interesting, then it begins to feel uncanny, this repeated, undeniable pattern that can’t be ignored. And it’s not just the flyways and the bird deities, but also egg-shaped homes, community buildings, temples, stone circles and tombs. There’s a tantalizing connection between birds and rivers, sacred groves, and stone circles.

It’s a longish book (the paperback is 248 pages), and it’s just crammed full of information, layer upon layer that had me flipping pages back and forth to connect even more dots. But it’s not rote or dull or dry. Every tidbit is fascinating.

Did you know that humans and birds share a set of identical genes? In birds, they’re activated when they learn to sing; in humans, when we learn to talk. The language of the birds indeed.

There is what feels like an obligatory chapter about bird connections in the Abrahamic religions. That’s not my path, but the information was definitely interesting from a cultural anthropology perspective, and it showed how firmly the bird-human connection has continued to maintain through the centuries, undaunted even by monotheism.

After all that information, which I’m still crunching in my brain as even more patterns continue to emerge, the author offers an Afterword describing his inspiration and process for writing the book. That was also quite interesting and enlightening. Sometimes, a detail you run across leaps out at you, and you simply can’t ignore it. Someone, or perhaps many someones, want their story told. All you can do is tell it, which he did, remarkably well.

Now all you have to do is read it.

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About Laura Perry

I'm an author, artist, and creator who works magic with words, paint, ink, music, textiles, and herbs. I'm the founder and Temple Mom of Ariadne's Tribe, an inclusive Minoan spiritual tradition. My spiritual practice also includes spirit work and herbalism through the lens of lifelong animism. I write Pagan / polytheist non-fiction and fiction across several different subjects and genres. I'm currently working on an illustrated book of modern Minoan myths and a Minoan entry in the Moon Books Pantheons series. I’m also an avid gardener and living history demonstrator.

You can find my books and Tarot deck on my website, where you can also find my social media links.