According to the symbolist school of thought, anything with wings typically represents an aspect of the spiritual realm. The primary symbolic function of birds is as messengers from the other world, from the gods or Neters. It should come as no surprise that Hermes, a conduit between worlds and messenger of the Gods, “invented” the alphabet by observing the flight patterns of birds, cranes in particular. And of course, in Egypt, Thoth who was depicted as a man with the head of an ibis was the inventor of the sacred medu-neter or hieroglyphic language gifted to man.