Red crows of the Sun

Ask anyone who knew me when I was about nine years old, and they'll tell you that one of the things I was into was taking photos of black birds -- crows, starlings, grackles, anything black -- and maintaining that they were in fact red birds from outer space, cleverly disguised as black ones from Earth.

Not my photo, but typical of dozens that I took

I  know where the idea of red birds from outer space came from: the 1986 Atari ST video game Starglider -- featuring, among other enemy craft, two kinds of spaceship (the more formidable of which was red) that had been disguised as intergalactic migratory birds (!) in order to evade the security system of the world they were invading. However, the idea that black birds were red birds (just "red birds," not "Stargliders") in disguise was my own, and I have no real explanation for it. A nine-year-old's mind moves in mysterious ways.

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In a recent post on the Sun card and the birdemic, I noted that the child in the Rider-Waite card has a large feather in his hair, reflecting the term birdemic itself.

I thought it a pity, though, that the feather was red. After all, the term birdemic comes from the similarity of the scientific names corvid ("member of the crow family") and Corvus corone (the carrion crow; "Carrion, my wayward Sun!") to the birdemic's official name -- and all crows are, as we are reminded every time we see a purple cow, black. Anyway, it's a feather, and that's close enough. Pity about the color.

Wait, close enough? That's not really the Tarot's style, is it?

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Another recent post of mine discussed how the Sun card alludes to three different flags of China. I wrote,

And before [the Wuhan Battle Flag] there was the Qing Dynasty, whose flag actually looks Chinese and has nothing to do with the Tarot. It is only the revolutionary flags of China that are prefigured by the Sun card.

A curious oversight, that! How, in a post called "The reddest red Sun in our hearts," could I mention and dismiss the flag of the Qing dynasty without noticing that it, too, features a red sun?

Infogalactic describes it as a flag "featuring the Azure Dragon on a plain yellow field with the red sun of the three-legged crow in the upper left corner."

Following that link, I read this about the three-legged crow:

The three-legged (or tripedal) crow is a creature found in various mythologies and arts of East Asia. It is believed by East Asian cultures to inhabit and represent the sun. . . .

The most popular depiction and myth . . . is that of a sun crow called the Yangwu (Chinese: 陽烏; pinyin: yángwū) or more commonly referred to as the Jīnwū (Chinese: 金烏; pinyin: jīnwū) or "golden crow". Even though it is described as a crow or raven, it is usually colored red instead of black.

According to folklore, there were originally ten sun crows which settled in 10 separate suns. . . . Folklore also held that, at around 2170 BC, all ten sun crows came out on the same day, causing the world to burn; Houyi the celestial archer saved the day by shooting down all but one of the sun crows.

So there we have it. Chinese myth associates the Sun with a red corvid -- "a crow or raven . . . colored red instead of black."

Note also the legend that there were originally 10 red sun-crows but that nine of them were shot down. The Sun's number is 19, and I have already noted that this can be seen as a combination of 1 and 9; for example, the Sun is the card of revolution (in both the political and the astronomical sense), and the Beatles wrote two songs called "Revolution 1" and "Revolution 9." In much the same way, the Chinese myth features 1 + 9 suns and crows -- the one that we know today, plus the nine that were shot down.

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I have mentioned several times the Sun card's connection to Samson -- the long-haired biblical figure whose name literally means "sun" -- so it is interesting to note that there was a Crow Indian chief known for his extraordinarily long hair, reportedly some 25 feet long. The whites called him, for obvious reasons, Chief Long Hair, but his real Crow name can be literally translated as Red Plume at the Forehead.