Why Do We Associate Ravens With Death?

Ravens are incredibly intelligent birds able to mimic human speech, remember faces, and even hold grudges against those who've wronged them. And while they have been a symbol of wisdom and prophecy in different cultures, they're most often thought of in relation to grief and death. But why?

In several mythologies from around the world, the raven is associated with death. Does that mean these birds are actually ill omens, or that there's some truth to the folklore? How did so many different civilizations all come to believe similar things about the raven? It honestly has a lot to do with their main source of food.

Carrion Birds

Ravens, along with crows, rooks, and magpies, are carrion birds. They are scavengers, eating the decaying flesh of dead bodies. Today, they commonly find their meals in roadkill and other dead animals, but in the past, they learned that there were absolute feasts on the world's battlefields.

In war, there were many times that the number of dead was too great to bury all of them. Ancient peoples saw ravens flitting among the bodies of the slain at almost every battlefield, and the connection became ingrained in the collective conscience. Superstition then bled into the narrative, and people saw ravens as omens of death rather than the clean-up crew afterwards.

Ravens in Myth and Religion

Ravens appear in ancient myths and religious texts as symbols of fate and death. In several different cultures, ravens act as messengers between the worlds of the living and the dead. They might even work as Grim Reapers, collecting and transporting souls to the underworld. Swedish mythology claims that ravens are the souls of murder victims who didn't receive a proper burial, and Germanic lore says they are the souls of the damned.

In Norse mythology, Odin, the god of war and death, had two ravens, Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory), who acted as his eyes and ears in battle. The Norse people believed that if a raven appeared on the battlefield with them, it meant that Odin was watching. In Celtic lore, ravens were also linked to the Mórrígan, goddess of death, war, and fate.

The Bible and the Quran also feature ravens in stories that deal with death. In the biblical tale of the Flood, Noah first releases a raven to see if the waters still cover the land. The raven never returns, presumably because it has found food in the number of wicked flood victims. And in the Quran, a raven is the one to teach Cain how to bury his murdered brother's body.

Poe's "The Raven"

While ravens had been connected with death for centuries, it wasn't until Edgar Allan Poe popularized the bird in his Gothic poem that they became symbols of horror and misery as well. Poe published "The Raven" in January of 1845, telling the sad tale of a man haunted by the loss of his love and the beginnings of madness. He wants to know if he will ever see his love again, or if the pain of loss will ever subside, and the raven drowns him in despair when it cries out: "Nevermore!"

Ravens were no longer mere omens of death, but an integral part of the horror genre. Alfred Hitchcock would later capitalize on this connection in his 1963 horror film, The Birds. If you weren't scared of ravens and their association with death before, you were certainly wary of them after that film. And it's probably a good idea to remain wary of ravens, or at least remember to treat them kindly. Otherwise, they may work together to cause you misery as vengeance.

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