the Stork

Most of us know or have a fair understanding of where babies have come from but most of us have forgotten, that as well as all that cell division and other mechanical stuff, the rest of the baby is delivered by a Stork. It sounds stupid yet everyone knows this story and I imagine that if I say to our child, when it asks as a two or three year old where it came from, “A stork put you in mama’s tummy”, I should get a response something like “what’s a stork?” and when I say a type of bird, everything will make sense.

Which is the truth in one sense. After all, something animates those dividing cells. It is, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “The fuse that through the green fuse drives the flower.” When I say the stork delivered the baby it is dealing, not with the mechanics of a baby developing, with the emerging soul of a new person. Something creates the personality and uniqueness of our developing child and, to me at least, it makes sense that the soul is brought about by the interaction of two forces, namely the material development of the child, the intermingling of mine and sicily’s X’s and Y’s, and the previous mentioned force that activates it, which we may label as Spirit, or Life Force or even the Orgones of our little monster.

Let us say that what the stork brings is the interaction between these two forces that produces the flower. In Ancient Egypt the Stork was the symbol of the BA, the two words (BA and STORK and everything they signify) are phonetically similar. The BA was (and still is) the individual unique soul of a human. Indeed the BA is represented as a human with a stork head.

Furthermore, the hebrew word for stork, Hasidah, also means ‘kind mother’. This is an idea the Greeks also talked about in their myth of Gerana. So the story goes, Gerana pissed of Hera (or vice versa)and Hera turned Gerana into a Stork. From then on Gerana, as Stork, wanted one thing, her son Mopsos, but the people didn’t want the Stork to take the child and a war erupted. Aside from all the war and stuff this is another basis for the symbolism of a stork carrying a baby. Interestingly this image transformed from the stork taking a baby to a Stork delivering a baby.