Alexander the Great was also reputed to have ascended on the back of an eagle.  Among the myths attached to his memory in the Ethiopic “history” is one which explains how “he knew and comprehended the length and breadth of the earth”, and how he obtained knowledge regarding the seas and mountains he would have to cross.  “He made himself small and flew through the air on an eagle, and he arrived in the heights of the heavens and he explored them.”  Another Alexandrian version of the Etana myth resembles the Arabic legend of Nimrod.  “In the Country of Darkness” Alexander fed and tamed great birds which were larger than eagles.  Then he ordered four of his soldiers to mount them.  The men were carried to the “Country of the Living”, and when they returned they told Alexander “all that had happened and all that they had seen".[195]

In a Gaelic story a hero is carried off by a Cromhineach, “a vast bird like an eagle”.  He tells that it “sprang to the clouds with me, and I was a while that I did not know which was heaven or earth for me”.  The hero died, but, curiously enough, remained conscious of what was happening.  Apparently exhausted, the eagle flew to an island in the midst of the ocean.  It laid the hero on the sunny side.  The hero proceeds:  “Sleep came upon herself (the eagle) and she slept.  The sun was enlivening me pretty well though I was dead.”  Afterwards the eagle bathed in a healing well, and as it splashed in the water, drops fell on the hero and he came to life.  “I grew stronger and more active”, he adds, “than I had ever been before."[196]

The eagle figures in various mythologies, and appears to have been at one time worshipped as the god or goddess of fertility, and storm and lightning, as the bringer of children, and the deity who carried souls to Hades.  It was also the symbol of royalty, because the earthly ruler represented the controlling deity.  Nin-Girsu, the god of Lagash, who was identified with Tammuz, was depicted as a lion-headed eagle.  Zeus, the Greek sky and air god, was attended by an eagle, and may, at one time, have been simply an eagle.  In Egypt the place of the eagle is taken by Nekhebit, the vulture goddess whom the Greeks identified with “Eileithyia, the goddess of birth; she was usually represented as a vulture hovering over the king".[197]

The double-headed eagle of the Hittites, which figures in the royal arms of Germany and Russia, appears to have symbolized the deity of whom the king was an incarnation or son.  In Indian mythology Garuda, the eagle giant, which destroyed serpents like the Babylonian Etana eagle, issued from its egg like a flame of fire; its eyes flashed the lightning and its voice was the thunder.  This bird is identified in a hymn with Agni, god of fire, who has the attributes of Tammuz and Mithra, with Brahma, the creator, with Indra, god of thunder and fertility, and with Yama, god of the dead, who carries off souls to Hades.  It is also called “the steed-necked incarnation of Vishnu”, the “Preserver” of the Hindu trinity who rode on its back.  The hymn referred to lauds Garuda as “the bird of life, the presiding spirit of the animate and inanimate universe ... destroyer of all, creator of all”.  It burns all “as the sun in his anger burneth all creatures".[198]