The Vulture as Mother Symbol: A Note on Freud's Leonardo

Strachey pointed out in his editorial preface to Leonardo that Freud's remarks on the vulture as a mother symbol are irrelevant to Leonardo's “vulture”-phantasy, since the bird of that phantasy was a kite. Neverthless, he continued, “How was it that the ancient Egyptians came to link the ideas of ‘vulture’ and ‘mother’?”, in that the hieroglyph for “mother” (“mut”) quite certainly represents a vulture, Gyps fulvus. “Does the Egyptologists' explanation that it is merely a matter of a chance phonetic coincidence meet the question? If not, Freud's discussion of androgynous mother-goddesses must have a value of its own, irrespective of its connection with the case of Leonardo.”12

In that discussion Freud referred to late classical sources, from which “We learn … that the vulture was regarded as a symbol of motherhood because only female vultures were believed to exist; there were, it was thought, no males of this species. A counterpart to this restriction to one sex was also known to the natural history of antiquity: in the case of the scarabaeus beetle, which the Egyptians worshipped as divine, it was thought that only males existed. How then were vultures supposed to be impregnated if all of them were female? This is a point fully explained in a passage in Horapollo. At a certain time these birds pause in mid-flight, open their vagina and are impregnated by the wind.”2 (88-89, italics added.)

Recent archaeological discoveries provide even more striking evidence of the ancient connection between mother and vulture than was available to Freud, and they emphasize above all the oral-sadistic basis for the association, in contrast to what Eissler has concluded was Freud's view of the vulture “as a symbolic representative of the nourishing, love- and pleasure-giving mother.”1 Freud's concern with the vulture symbol as such was, however, merely incidental to his study of Leonardo's “vulture”-phantasy, and he by no means overlooked the sadistic elements in that phantasy. After