Bat: A Powerful Pagan Symbol
Greatly Maligned Mammal Represents Different Things to Many Cultures
Bats: symbolic of rebirth to Native Americans, anathemas to others and subjects of superstitions. Feared by some, bats are beneficial to the environment and humans.
Bats are among the most misunderstood animals. Among the myths that gave them a bad rep is that they fly into people’s hair and they are bloodsuckers. The latter is most likely perpetuated by fiction about Count Dracula and other vampires turning into bats.
The Animal
Bats are divided into two major groups: Megachiroptera and Microchiroptera. Many eat fruit, nectar or pollen. Some eat small animals, and fish. The former have big eyes and keen eyesight. The others usually eat insects and use sound waves to navigate. They make high-pitched sounds that bounce off objects returning to the bat as echoes, like submarines use sonar. Bats are not blind, but most have better nocturnal vision than diurnal. They are one of the most numerous, if not, the most plentiful mammal found on earth. Like other mammalians, they can be carriers of rabies.
Females usually have only one baby, a pup, per year. The pups drink milk from birth to six months of age. These mammals live in flocks numbering in the millions and each one can eat half its weight in insects a night.
There are three species of “vampyre” bats, living from Mexico to South America, that eat the blood of mammals, birds and domestic animals. They bite a small, V-shaped cuts in the animal’s skin, then lick, not suck, the blood.
Bats pollinate flowers, trees and cacti and spread seeds. Some microorganisms found in bat droppings, guano, and might have important medical uses for humans. Guano is a valued fertilizer.
Bat represents rebirth, transition and initiation. Nighttime is her cycle of power. She is symbolic of the Shaman’s death in which the personal identity and the old ways of life give way to the new.
Native American Symbolism
She is the Guardian of the Night and represents longevity, double nature, peace and wisdom. Bat is the totem of the shaman, teaching people to go into the night of inner darkness and emerge reborn while reminding them that eyes are only one way of seeing clearly.
Other Cultures’ Symbolism
- To most Orientals, bats are good luck and bring happiness and peace.
- The Japanese believe bat symbolizes chaos, unrest and unhappiness.
- Finnish people believed that the soul took the shape of a bat when one is asleep.
- Medieval alchemists believed bat was similar to the dragon.
- Scottish people believed that when a flying bat rises and descends, it does so by a witch’s house.
- Ancient South Native American tribes believed that bat’s power was strong medicine.
- To other cultures, bat was symbolic of desolation, the Underworld, hypocrisy, melancholy, revenge and wisdom and was unlucky and unclean.
Superstitions
- Early Christians believed that the devil turned into a bat to harass people and that witches shape-shifted into bats.
- Bats flying near people mean someone is trying to bewitch them.
- Carrying a bat or its bone brings good luck.
- Carrying the right eye of a bat makes one invisible.
- A dried heart of a bat carried in a pocket will make a bullet turn or stop one from bleeding to death.
- Ghosts can turn into a bat.
- Bats hitting buildings are an omen of rain.
- An Australian tribe believes that killing bats shortens life.
- Bats deliberately get tangles in people’s hair and don’t let go until they hear thunder.
Related Articles:
Vampyres: Legend, Cases and Theories
Sources:
Animal Magick, D. J. Conway, (Llewellyn Publications, 1996)
Animal Messages, Susie Green, (Cico Books, 2007)
Animal-Speak, Ted Andrews, (Llewellyn Publications, 2002)
The Medicine Cards, Jamie Sams & David Carson, (Bear & Company, 1988)
