LET ME EXPLAIN this mysterious title without further ado. The Language of Birds is a phrase which refers to a number of stones, scattered throughout folklore and literature, which describe how a man acquired the gift of understanding the language of birds. And by listening to what the eagles and sparrows were saying in the trees overhead, he became possessed of a priceless wisdom. He found a great treasure, or he mamed a princess.

Such stones appear as folk tales in many countnes of Europe and Asia, including﹜apan. They appear also in the epic literature of the Celts and Norsemen. We find them, too, in the spiritual literature of Islam, in Persian poetry and even in the Koran itself. Always the same theme is reiterated: a man acquires great and precious wisdom by knowing the Language of Birds.

What I hope to suggest in this lecture is that all these stones share a common underlying meaning. The wisdom the man learns cannot be expressed directly in words, but the stones are all symbolic or coded statements of the ‘natural’ state of wisdom we all enjoyed in the paradise which existed at the beginning of the world. This Golden Age was later lost, owing to a pnmal catastrophe, and we have been searching for this lost treasure ever since. Mercia Eliade, whose work in the history of religions I have always found mspinng repeats again and again that ‘nostalgia’ for this lost paradise has haunted human endeavour over the centunes, and that the Quest for the Great Treasure, or the Holy Grail or the Pearl of Great Pnce which figures so prominently in poetry and legend, refers to this nostalgia.

How, then, does the Language of Birds come in? What has this to do with the great natural wisdom possessed by our ancestors in Paradise? Because it has always been believed that these paradisal conditions could be restored if only we could recover the language which people spoke at that time. This Perfect Language has been lost, with the loss of Paradise. But the search to recover it, the Search for the Perfect Language, is a quest which has occupied scholars and saints over the centuries.