Why do wings grow when we fall in love?

BarcelonaCupid has gone down in history as a winged child-god: seductive, deceitful, and malevolent, he shoots poisoned arrows that have the power to awaken desire and love in the recipient, until he himself is wounded by his own weapon and goes mad for the young Psyche. "Cupid is also known by the name of Eros, and the love he represents has a double connotation, that of sweetness and that of bitterness: we desire what we cannot catch, what appears and disappears, like a bird that flies across the sky." explains writer and editor Elisabet Riera (Barcelona, ​​​​1973), who has just published one of the most unique books of this fall, The winged ones (Malas Hierbas / Siruela, 2025), where birds, angels, gods, monsters, and other flying creatures continue to be represented as they have been for centuries of cultural history.

One way to make it evident that someone has fallen in love is the ascension they undertake thanks to a pair of newborn wings. "Cupid or Eros has wings to mark this possible route to heaven for the lover, but also because thanks to the wings he can stealthily descend on the unsuspecting lover to take control of him through the arrow he shoots," continues Riera, before making one of the many revelations she gleans throughout the book: "not a woman, but from an egg, just like birds." The winged ones combines erudition and lyricism to tell stories like that of the origin of Eros. "Human beings were originally spherical," we read, "a happy and perfect union of two sexes and two souls in a single form, a round and complete creature, self-sufficient. The spherical beings rolled everywhere with extreme joy, until one day, their joy rolled them back to what was Olympus. Zeus, as punishment, split them in two, and since then humans are incomplete and eagerly seek their other half." The human desire to become a sphere again justifies Eros, which the poet Anne Carson considered "postponement, challenge, obstacle, hunger, elevation around a radiant absence."

The art of divination and birds

"The symbol of wings is always present in everything that constitutes us as humans: in love, the yearning for freedom, death and rebirth," says Riera, who in parallel with the very interesting editorial project of Wunderkammer - where he has vindicated authors such as Unica Zürn, Valentine Penrose and Germaine Dulac– has created a remarkable narrative work, with novels such as Light (The Other, 2017) and Once upon a time it was summer all night long (Weeds, 2023). The winged ones It begins with the personal anecdote that, over the years, became the seed of Riera's search, for which she obtained a Ventanas essay grant. "When I was little, I used to go out for walks a lot with my father, especially on Saturday mornings, because of my mother's work," the author recalls. "My father liked to walk down the Rambla, at a time when it was still full of animal and flower stalls. When we got to the bottom of the story, one with a long one from the collection: there was a can of Columbus. There was still a can of Columbus. The man had them in a cage and, if you gave him a coin, the bird would pick up one of the many colored pieces of paper there and give it to you.

The birds that Riera watched in admiration on the Rambla were the last reminiscence of the long history that this class of vertebrates has in relation to divination. "Ornithomancy dates back to ancient Greece. "Old Tiresias is credited with originating the auspices, through which one can look, consult and predict thanks to the flight of birds," he explains. One of the Latin evolutions of the auspices was the augural science, which allowed "predictions to be made according to the song of the birds, the branches of the trees where they perched, their way of eating and drinking, their flight and even the way they left the cage." The future could also be found in the entrails of oxen, lambs and white doves: this was the work of the haruspices, who studied "the victims before disemboweling them, the entrails once extracted from the animal and the flame that formed from the burnt flesh."

Symbols of an inner journey

One of the virtues ofThe winged ones is that it does not focus solely on examining the presence of flying creatures in Greco-Roman tradition. Among the numerous oriental references, it stands out The conversation of the birds, by Farid ud-Din Attar, a 12th-century Persian text that the poet Carlos Duarte has translated into Catalan for the first time this year for the publishing house Tres Portals and which narrates the physical and spiritual journey of birds in search of the meaning of existence. "As in many other traditions, the bird is a symbol of an inner journey," says Riera, who in the book recalls that the tempting sirens, in addition to being represented as fish, have also been flying beings, that saints like Francis of Assisi had a special connection with birds and that if angels are an asset, gods like Hermes descend to Hades to guide the dead and bring them back to earth to introduce them to a new body. "This ambassador and messenger of the depths also has wings," he comments.

Erratic and unpredictable like the flight of birds, The winged ones It is full of sparks of revealing information: "In the Neolithic period, more than 10,000 years ago, and surely as the continuation of an even more primitive cult, the Bird Goddess, who was a sacred goose, was worshipped," summarizes Isabel Riera. "This old matriarchal Europe was replaced by the Indoeur civilization. If the masculine fighting drive had not prevailed over feminine harmony, the world would be a very different place from the one we have inherited.