Eagle Tattoo Meaning
Vision, freedom, power, and a high and far-seeing perspective.
The eagle flies highest and sees farthest, and alone among creatures it was said to be able to look straight into the sun without flinching. So it became, almost everywhere there were eagles and high places, the emblem of the highest things: the king of birds, the messenger of the sky god, the carrier of prayers and souls toward heaven, the standard of empires. To take the eagle is to claim the high view — the perspective from which the whole landscape, and the truth, can be seen at once.
The eagle was the personal bird of Zeus, king of the gods — his messenger, his omen, and sometimes his disguise. In the form of an eagle he carried off the beautiful youth Ganymede to be cupbearer of the gods. An eagle seen flying on the right was among the surest signs of Zeus's favor.
But the eagle also carried out Zeus's harshest sentence. When the Titan Prometheus stole fire and gave it to humanity, Zeus chained him to a rock in the Caucasus and sent an eagle to tear out and devour his liver each day; each night it grew back, and each day the eagle returned. The eagle was the instrument of the sky god's will in both its gift and its punishment — the creature that could look into the sun, carrying out the judgments of the one who ruled it.
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