A great scavenging bird of carrion and long patience, which in dreams brings together death, cleansing, waiting, and a maternal figure far older than its modern reputation.
Vultures in dreams are usually seen circling high overhead or gathered on a branch, a fence, or a carcass. Less commonly they perch near the dreamer, follow at a distance, or appear indoors. Their behaviour in dreams, as in life, is mostly watching and waiting; direct attacks are rare in the reports, and the unease in such dreams tends to come from being watched, and from the sense of being expected to fail or to die.
The bird's reputation divides sharply by region. In modern Western usage a vulture is a figure of contempt, the scavenger who profits from another's misfortune. In ancient Egypt, by contrast, the vulture was a goddess: Nekhbet, protector of the king, and Mut, "the mother", whose name was written with the vulture sign; the Egyptians held that all vultures were female and conceived by the wind. Across the Iranian and Tibetan worlds the exposure of the dead to vultures, in the Zoroastrian dakhma and the Tibetan sky burial, is a rite of purity and generosity rather than of horror: the bird returns the body to the sky.
Vultures do not kill; they clean. Their presence in a dream tends to mark that something has ended or is ending, that a period of waiting is under way, or that an appetite, the dreamer's own or another's, is circling. Dreams of vultures during bereavement or illness are widely reported and carry no predictive weight.
Jungian
Erich Neumann, developing Jung's work, placed the Egyptian vulture goddesses among the images of the Great Mother in her double aspect: the mother who gives life and the mother who takes the dead back into herself. The vulture's association with both motherhood and carrion is not a contradiction in this reading but the point; the same figure that nourishes also devours, so that what is finished can be reabsorbed and what is new can come. A vulture in a dream may thus stand for the part of the psyche that dismantles what is dead, a process that is unpleasant to witness and necessary to renewal.
- Neumann, E. (1955). The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype.
Freudian
Freud's most famous treatment of a bird is his study of Leonardo da Vinci, built around Leonardo's note that as an infant in the cradle a bird came down, opened his mouth with its tail, and struck his lips with it. Freud read the bird as a vulture, connected it to the Egyptian mother-goddess Mut and to the belief that vultures were all female, and interpreted the memory as a disguised fantasy of nursing at the mother's breast. It was later shown that Leonardo's word, nibbio, means kite, not vulture, and the Egyptian material does not fit; but the essay remains the classical psychoanalytic reading of a bird of prey as a screen for the earliest relation to the mother.
- Freud, S. (1910). Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.
Cultural
The vulture's meanings track the rites around it. Where the dead are exposed rather than buried, the bird is a purifier: the Parsi towers of silence in India and the Tibetan practice of jhator both depend on it, and in Tibet the vultures are sometimes called dakinis, sky-goers. In the Greek story of Prometheus the bird that eats his liver each day is sometimes pictured as a vulture. The English idiom "culture vulture" and the financial term "vulture fund" show how completely the bird has become, in the West, an image of appetite without labour. The Egyptian material, in which the vulture is the protective mother of the king, is the oldest layer and the one dreams most often seem to recover.
Religious
The Hebrew Bible lists the vulture among the birds not to be eaten (Leviticus 11:13), and many of the passages translated as "eagle" (nesher) probably refer to the griffon vulture, including Micah's image of mourning baldness. In the Gospels, "wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather" (Matthew 24:28) is a saying about the unmistakable signs of an ending. In Zoroastrianism the dakhma and the vulture keep the sacred elements of earth and fire from the pollution of a corpse, so that the bird is an instrument of ritual purity. Tibetan Buddhism treats sky burial as a final act of generosity, the body given as food, and the vulture as the one who receives the gift.
- Leviticus 11:13; Matthew 24:28.
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