PELICAN

In the Christian tradition, the pelican is identified as a symbol of Christ the Redeemer. The long beak of the white pelican is furnished with a sack which serves as a container for the small fish that it feeds its young. In the process of feeding them, the bird presses the sack against its neck in such a way that it seems to open its breast with its bill. The reddish tinge of its breast plumage and the redness of the tip of its beak fostered the folkloristic notion that it actually drew blood from its own breast. The Physiologus found the action of the pelican, so interpreted, as a particularly apt symbol of Christ the Redeemer:

The little pelicans strike their parents, and the parents, striking back, kill them. But on the third day the mother pelican strikes and opens her side and pours blood over her dead young. In this way they are revivified and made well. So our Lord Jesus Christ says also through the prophet Isaiah: "I have brought up children and exalted them, but they have despised me" (Is 1:2). We struck God by serving the creature rather than the Creator. Therefore he deigned to ascend the cross, and, when his side was pierced, blood and water gushed forth unto our salvation and eternal life.

Under the influence primarily of the Physiologus, the pelican as a symbol of Christ the Redeemer, a symbol already

familiar to St. Augustine (Enarr. In Psalm. 101:7), has a wide usage in Christian literature. As important and typical examples of medieval use, it will suffice to mention the allusion in the hymn Adoro te devote and that in Dante's Paradiso (25:113). In Christian art it is employed from the late Middle Ages, but especially in the Renaissance and in the baroque period. From the late Middle Ages the pelican is employed also as a symbol of the Eucharist. In art, particularly in baroque art, the pelican is found frequently as an ornament on altars, pyxes, chalices, and tabernacle doors.

[m. r. p. mcguire/eds.]