And why do storks look for babies in wells? For that, we will have to go back a long time. At the time of the Celtic civilizations, and we are going to have to talk about rocks with cupules. You know, these round or oval shapes carved into the stone, we find a lot of them in Alsace. Like a puddle in a rock when it rains.
No one can say exactly what these cupules were used for, but some ethnographers think, among other things, of funerary functions. Some legends see the cupules, the water in the rock, as a passage between the world of the living and the dead. Many ancient beliefs, including Celtic Druidism and Greek Orphism, believe that the soul is immortal, and that newborns collect the souls of the dead, brought back among the living.
Moreover, this soul ferryman theory also applies to animals and plants. In Caesar’s Gallic Wars, he writes of the Druids: “The essential point of their teaching is that souls do not perish, but that after death they pass from one body to another; they believe that this belief is the best stimulant of courage, because one is no longer afraid of death.” And precisely, let us return to the storks, which bring back life.
Worldwide, for that matter. In the great family of waders, I ask you for the ibis, symbol of the Egyptian god Thoth, secretary and archivist of Osiris in the Hall of Judgment of the Dead, he was a psychopomp deity, a ferryman of souls. In ancient Egypt, the white stork was well known, it was associated with the ba, the “soul”, of which it was the hieroglyph. Bam, here we go again. The stork can therefore have this same power of passers-by, since it is moreover sculpted in the four corners of the cathedral of Strasbourg. More generally, in the Germanic world, the stork has always had the role of messenger. She was charged, for example, by the Germanic goddess Holda with reincarnating dead souls in newborn babies. And now, is it clearer? The stork-ibis comes to seek in the Kindelsbrunne, in the cupules, in the water surrounded by stone, therefore the well, the soul of the dead to give them to newborns and transmit the soul into a new body.
To end on a lighter note, here is the nursery rhyme engraved by Jean Frédéric Wentzel, printer from Wissembourg in 1840:
Storick, Storick, stipper di Bein,
Bring de Mamme to Bubbela heim,
Eins wo hielt, eins wo lacht
Eins, wo ins Hafela macht.
Storick, Storick, stipper di Bein,
Bring m’r e Korb voll Wegga heim,
Bring fer mich eu einer mit.
Awer iron of beesi Büewa nit.
And the translation:
Stork, stork rear up
Bring mom a pretty brat,
One who cries, one who laughs,
One that does well in the pot.
Stork, Stork rear up,
Bring me some buns,
One for me, one for you,
But for the bad boys none.