Record #115
Pelican
A symbolic bird whose blood resurrects its dead offspring.
Original Text
The Pelican of everyday zoology is a water bird with a wingspan of some six feet and a very long bill whose lower mandible distends to form a pouch for holding fish. The Pelican of fable is smaller and its bill is accordingly shorter and sharper. Faithful to popular etymology - pelicanus, whitehaired - the plumage of the former is white while that of the latter is yellow and sometimes green. (The real origin of pelican is from the Greek ‘I hew with an axe’, in a confusion of its large bill with that of the woodpecker’s.) But more unusual than its appearance are its habits.
With its bill and claws, the mother bird caresses her offspring with such devotion that she kills them. After three days the father arrives and, despairing over the deaths of his young, rips at his own breast with his bill. The blood that spills from his wounds revives the dead birds. This is the account given in medieval bestiaries, though St Jerome in a commentary on the IO2nd Psalm (‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert’) attributes the death of the nestlings to the serpent. That the Pelican opens its breast and feeds its young with its own blood is the common version of the fable.
Blood that gives life to the dead suggests the Eucharist and the cross, and so a famous line of the Paradiso (XXV, II3) calls Jesus Christ nostroPellicano - mankind’s Pelican. The Latin commentary by Benvenuto of Imola amplifies this point: ‘He is called pelican because he opened his side for our salvation, like the pelican that revives its dead brood with the blood of its breast. The pelican is an Egyptian Bird.’
The Pelican is common in ecclesiastical heraldry and it is still engraved on chalices. The bestiary by Leonardo da Vinci describes the Pelican in this way:
It is greatly devoted to its young and, finding them in the nest killed by snakes, tears at its breast, bathing them with its blood to bring them back to life.
With its bill and claws, the mother bird caresses her offspring with such devotion that she kills them. After three days the father arrives and, despairing over the deaths of his young, rips at his own breast with his bill. The blood that spills from his wounds revives the dead birds. This is the account given in medieval bestiaries, though St Jerome in a commentary on the IO2nd Psalm (‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert’) attributes the death of the nestlings to the serpent. That the Pelican opens its breast and feeds its young with its own blood is the common version of the fable.
Blood that gives life to the dead suggests the Eucharist and the cross, and so a famous line of the Paradiso (XXV, II3) calls Jesus Christ nostroPellicano - mankind’s Pelican. The Latin commentary by Benvenuto of Imola amplifies this point: ‘He is called pelican because he opened his side for our salvation, like the pelican that revives its dead brood with the blood of its breast. The pelican is an Egyptian Bird.’
The Pelican is common in ecclesiastical heraldry and it is still engraved on chalices. The bestiary by Leonardo da Vinci describes the Pelican in this way:
It is greatly devoted to its young and, finding them in the nest killed by snakes, tears at its breast, bathing them with its blood to bring them back to life.