Throughout the world, the Ancient crow has been both revered and feared across many different cultures, often carrying the overlapping associations with Death and Magic on its iridescent black wings. Its eerie caws haunted the trees in front of my childhood home, making it one of the first birds I felt an attachment to as a child. Watching a staggeringly large murder of them pass overhead in Minneapolis one winter made me feel connected to ancestral time. A feeling akin to looking at the Moon~ knowing my ancestors ( & yours ) gazed up in wonder to see the same thing, years and years and years ago, a map of time like the inner rings of a tree. In this way Crow, a liminal creature of this world and the next, connects us to our ancestors through time and beyond death. 

Known to be a psychopomp that guides souls to the Underworld, it also behaved as a messenger, ferrying omens and portents between realms. These responsibilities linked Crow to Odin as well as Apollo, also marking Crow as a creature of divination, prophecy and the powers of the second sight. This magic also tethered Crow to the Witch, where they were also considered the Witches familiars, shape-shifters and intelligent beings capable of sharing their hidden knowledge. 

Highly adaptable, Crows are opportunistic in their eating habits, like Vultures, they'll even eat from the dead. Partly because of this, they have been linked to the Underworld as liminal, supernatural creatures, co-existing between the realm of the natural, living world, and the realm of the unseen, of the dead, ferrying messages to and from these earthly and spiritual planes. 

Considered tricksters in some cultures, they have also been proven to have a strong sense of memory, their remembrances extending as far as individual human faces that have wronged them, or likewise, those who have fed them, as they are known to leave gifts for their caretakers. This exchange is a beautiful example of the relationship building humans are capable of with the ‘wild’; a nourishing one rather than a destructive or possessive one.

Associated with prophecy and known to have the ability to foresee the future, their caws were known to be used in divination rituals and via ornithomancy. Lastly, within Alchemy, the image of the Crow is symbolized as the first stage of the transformative process or 'Nigredo'. This stage involved the blackening or cooking of the alchemical ingredients to begin the pathway to the final stage, or the Philosopher's Stone. Within Carl Jung's interpretation of Alchemy as an "Inner Alchemy", this first stage causes the individual to confront their Shadow Self, the start of a deep descent into a union of the conscious with the unconscious.

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