In mythology, feathers generally represent something very similar to the bearer of the feathers—the bird. According to the principle of pars pro toto (the part stands for the whole), a magical form of thinking, the feather signifies the bird, and birds in general represent psychic entities of an intuitive and thinking character. For instance, the soul of the dead leaves the dying body in the form of a bird. There are medieval representations of this. In certain villages of Upper Wallis even today, in every house, in the parents’ bedroom, there is a little window called the soul window, which is opened only when someone is dying, so that the soul can leave through it. The idea is that the soul, a fluttering being, goes out like a bird escaping from its cage. In The Odyssey Hermes gathers the souls of Ulysses’ enemies, and they chatter like birds (the Greek word is thrizein) and follow him with wings like bats’. Also, in the underworld where Enkidu, the friend of Gilgamesh, goes, the dead sit around in the feather garments of birds. So birds, you could say, stand for a nearly bodiless entity, an inhabitant of the air, of the wind sphere, which has always been associated with breath and therefore with the human psyche.
Therefore, especially in the stories of North and South American Indians, where it is used very often, one meets the idea that gluing feathers to an object means that it is psychically real. There is even a South American tribe which uses the word for feather as a suffix to describe something which only exists psychologically and not in outer reality. You can speak of a fox-feather, an arrow-feather, or a tree-feather, the word feather indicating that the fox or the arrow or the tree is not contained in physical reality but has to do with psychic reality. When North American Indians and certain Eskimo tribes send messengers inviting others to a religious festival, the messengers carry sticks with feathers on them, the feathers making the bearer sacrosanct. Because they carry a spiritual message, such messengers may not be killed. By attaching feathers to himself, the primitive marks himself as a psychic and spiritual being.
Since the feather is very light, every breath of wind carries it. It is that which is very sensitive to what one could call invisible and imperceptible psychological spiritual currents. Wind, in most religious and mythological connections, represents spiritual power, which is why we use the word inspiration. In the Whitsun miracle the Holy Ghost filled the house like a wind; spirits make a kind of cold wind when they come, and the appearance of ghosts is generally accompanied by breathings or currents of wind. The word spiritus is connected with spirare (to breathe). In Genesis the Ruach Elohim (the Spirit of God) broods over the waters. Therefore you can say that an imperceptible wind whose direction you can only discover by blowing a feather would be a slight, barely noticeable, almost inconceivable psychic tendency—a final tendency in the current psychological flow of life. That is what happens when someone comes into analysis and tells you all his troubles and you say, “Well, I am not more intelligent than you. I do not see through this, but let us look at what the dreams say.” And then we look at them from a final angle; we look to see where the current in the dreams seems to point. According to the Jungian point of view, they are not only causal but also have a final aspect and we therefore look to see where the libido tends to go. We “throw a feather in the air” and look to see the direction it takes, and then say, “Let’s go that way because there is a slight tendency in that direction.” In the Christian world, the raven was thought to be a representation of the sinner and also of the devil. In antiquity, on the other hand, the raven belonged to the sun god Apollo, and in alchemy it symbolizes the nigredo and melancholy thoughts. The old man in the mountain who is accompanied by a raven is a frequent character in fairy tales.
Marie LouiseVon Franz. Interpretation of Fairy Tales. 1970, 1996. P. 42-42