Halcyon (a.) referring to an idyllic and peaceful age in times past.
Once upon a time, the son of the Morning Star fell in love with a woman.
His name was Ceyx, king of Trachis in Greece. Her name was Alcyone, and she was the daughter of the Wind God.
Their marriage was joyful, and they were admired and envied by the whole of Greece for the happiness and love they had for one another.
But mortal men weren’t the only ones who envied them.
The god Zeus looked down from the thundering heights of the mountains, his face veiled by shadow and cloud. He saw their laughter in the radiance of the Aegean sun. He saw that their beauty and the light in their eyes surpassed the glory of the gods. Within his dark and mist-veiled halls in the crags of Mt. Olympus, he vowed to put an end to their joy.
And in patience for that time to come, he waited. Dark and troubling times had fallen upon the Kingdom of Trachis. The goddess Artemis the Huntress had slaughtered Ceyx’s niece Chione the Beautiful, and his brother, stricken with grief, had attempted to take his own life. Shame and miasma—spiritual impurity—had fallen upon his house.
Divine anger had stricken the House of Ceyx, the Son of the Morning Star, and a foreboding loomed over the Kingdom like a gathering tempest about to strike.
Ceyx manned a ship. He stocked it with provisions. He looked upon the thrashing winter waves of the Aegean, and prayed to the gods for a safe journey. He was going on a voyage to save those he loved.
To seek the Oracle of Apollo.
Alcyone clung to her husband on the day of his departure, breathing in the comforting scent of his familiar embrace. She whispered tear-stained pleas in his ears, her cold fingers clasping his. The icy winter wind clawed at their cloaks as they stood by the docks in each other’s arms.
For a moment he was there. The next, he was gone.
The year was old and gray, and its end was drawing near. The dark of cold and frosty nights stretched long as the shadow of death, and the ashen, cloudy days grew short, like a dying candle flickering low at twilight.
The gales of the Aegean were like hounds on a leash at the edge of a hunt. As Ceyx’s caravel knifed through the swelling billows, Aeolus, the Wind God and father of Alcyone, tried in vain to hold back the tempest gathering in the northern skies. Thunder echoed through the vaulted heavens and the towering clouds amassed in fury.
Lightning burned through the sheets of rain, igniting the icy ether in the boundless wrath of a daemon. The high god Zeus had found his chance, and he was not going to waste it.
A bolt of lightning cleaved the mast of the caravel in two as monstrous waves collapsed over the deck, battering the ship into the heart of the sea. For a day and a night, the ship battled wind and sea until finally it sank below the swelling surf into the chilly embrace of Hades.
The sunrise dawned red on the Aegean sea, and the Morning Star faded behind a veil of cloud.
At the break of morning, Alcyone felt the mournful whisper of the Wind God’s voice draw her to the heights of the sea-cliffs in the light of the early dawn. The shrieks of the seagulls drifted on the cold breath of the sea and gently brushed against her nightgown as her eyes took in the morning light and the blood-red sun rising above the desolate expanse of the rippling Aegean.
For a moment, all was peace, there at the edge of land, sky, and sea.
And then her blue-green eyes flitted downward to see a lifeless form in the undulating billows far below. Recognition dawned on her face as she beheld the face of the one she’d loved. Hope left her heart, and the light in her eyes died like stars snuffed out by a veil of cloud.
She cast herself from the crags of the rock, sorrow surging into her soul, and her eyelids fluttered shut in hope of life’s end.
But her father, Aeolus the Wind God, saw her. Touched by pity for his daughter, he gave her wings, and she flew. She glided above the waves to the body of Ceyx, falling from the sky to embrace his pallid form, caressed by the gentle, icy froth of the sea. The moment her lips touched his, they were transformed by the power of the Wind God and the grace of the Morning Star into birds of the air and sea.
They became the halcyon birds, the kingfishers, reunited in death and resurrected to life. And by the will of Aeolus, the wind and waves would every year be calm seven days before the winter solstice and seven days after, for the sake of his daughter, who made her nest in the waves in which the one she loved was restored to her.
These were the halcyon days, and some who live in the land of Thessaly to this day will say that the voice of the halcyon birds can still be heard on the winter wind when one sits at the beach to listen.
Due to the story of Alcyone, the word halcyon has come to refer to both (1) the kingfisher bird, and (2) an idyllic, peaceful period of time. The word has been used in every phase of the Western literary tradition, by the Greeks, the Early Christians, the Medieval and Renaissance writers, the Romantics, and the Victorians.
The most famous version of the story of Alcyone is from the Roman poet Ovid who wrote it into Metamorphoses in 8 A.D. While his version of the story is the most influential, he did not invent it. Alcyone’s story and halcyon birds are mentioned in the poetry and writings of the Greeks—and by Aristotle—as early as 700 years before Christ.
The halcyon was also featured in early Christian bestiaries, which were books that used various animals to convey a symbolic or theological message. (Like an encyclopedia dedicated to animals, except written by bishops and not by atheist scientists.)
For example, The Physiologus (“The Naturalist) was written in Alexandria, Egypt in either the 2nd or 3rd century after Christ’s birth. It interprets the peaceful days the halcyon brings to the winter sea as representing the peace and tranquility Christ’s coming brought to a dying world. The halcyon continued to make appearances throughout the Medieval period in bestiaries written in the tradition of The Physiologus.
In the 16th century, Shakespeare references a superstition about the halcyon in King Lear:
Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters[.]
These lines refer to the belief that if you hung up a dead and dried kingfisher by a string in the open air, its beak would point in the direction the wind was blowing.
People actually killed and dried kingfishers to do this very thing, and it actually might work—I’ve never tried, so I don’t know. Aeolus would be proud, I’m sure.
The concept represented by halcyon and halcyon days was obsessed over by 18th and 19th century Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Keats, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, finally incarnating itself in the Victorian fetish of putting kingfisher feathers in high-class hairpins and brooches.
The word halcyon has endured almost 3,000 years of literary history because it compresses an immense amount of meaning into three syllables: it references an enduring, mythic love story, a natural phenomenon (calm winter seas), a beautiful bird (the kingfisher), and a time of peace and prosperity. It has a weight to it that’s difficult to put into words.
I love the word halcyon for this reason, but also because the story in which it finds its origin is a timeless one. Alcyone’s is a story that will always resonate with the human heart because it is a version of the Story at the very heart of human history—the story of the Resurrection.
It’s a story of peace and life being born out of death and despair, and that will always mean something to humans, regardless of how many centuries pass into oblivion.