The dove was regarded as the symbol of the holy spirit which came in the eventide of days, bringing safety and peace to the ark of Christ and a world rescued from wreck, and to whom Christians should be conformed in innocency. A dove was suspended over the altar, as Amphilochius says of S. Basil that he broke the Holy Bread and placed one third part in the pendant golden dove over the altar. The Council of Constantinople charged a heretic with robbing the gold and silver doves that hung above the fonts and altars. The dove was also the symbol of our Blessed Lord, as we learn from Prudentius and an expression of Tertullian, “the Dove’s house,” applied to a church, probably in allusion to Coloss. i, 20.
The dove for reservation [that is, withholding a part of the eucharist] whether for communion of infants in the baptistery, or of sick under a ciborium, was suspended by a chain. One is preserved in the church of S. Nazarius at Milan, and a solitary mention of another is contained in an inventory of Salisbury. In Italy at an early date, the dove was set upon a tower for reservation.... We also find in early works of devotional art the dove represented as flooding a cross with streams of living water. There is a famous example in the Lateran, symbolical of Holy Baptism. A holy lamb and dove are placed on the canopy of the baptistery at Saragossa.
It seems unlikely that Mohammed could have heard of these pontifical sources or methods of divine inspiration, yet, according to Brewer,[[34]] Prideaux, in his Life of Mahamet, relates that he taught a dove to pick seed placed in his ear as it perched on his shoulder; but the wily prophet “gave it out it was the Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, come to impart to him the counsels of God.” This accounts probably (for Shakespeare may well have heard the tradition) for the doubting query in Henry V: “Was Mohammed inspired with a dove?”
Whether this legend is credible or not, it is certain that Islam has preserved the ancient Oriental reverence for this bird, which now flocks in great numbers around all the mosques; and the Moslems have a half-superstitious feeling that any bird that seeks its rest and makes its nest about temples and holy buildings must not be disturbed—a kindly regard in which swallows share, at least in the Near East, where the Mohammedans say that the swallow must be a very holy bird, because it makes an annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
John Keane,[[14]] an Englishman who spent a long time in Arabia about forty years ago, records that at Mecca vast flocks of pigeons were to be seen in the public space surrounding the kaaba. By repeated observations he estimated that between 5000 and 6000 pigeons assembled there daily, all so tame that they would alight on men’s heads and shoulders. They are still held as almost sacred, are never killed, and nest in nearly every building in niches left for that purpose in the walls of the rooms. Pilgrims purchase baskets of grain to give to the pigeons as a pious act, and each benefactor “becomes the vortex of a revolving storm of pigeons.” In some remote places, indeed, these temple-pets become themselves almost objects of worship. For example, on the direct road between Yarkand and Khotan, Chinese Turkestan, stands the locally celebrated pigeon-shrine (Kaptar Mazzar), where all good Moslems must dismount and reverently approach the sacred spot. “Legend has it that Imam Shakir Padshah, trying to convert the Buddhist inhabitants of the country to Islam by the drastic agency of the sword, fell here in battle against the army of Khotan, and was buried in the little cemetery. It is affirmed that two doves flew forth from the heart of the dead saint, and became the ancestors of the swarms of pigeons we saw ... sated with the offerings of the Faithful, and extremely fat.... We were told that if a hawk were to venture to attack them it would fall down dead.”
A pretty story is related by E. Dinet, a French artist, in his book of sketches in Algeria. “Doves, which the Arabs name imams, because,” he was told, “like the imam in the mosques, they call the faithful to prayer, and because, like him, they do not cease to prostrate themselves by inclining their necks in devotions to the Creator.” Newspapers of the year 1921 contained an account of how two European boys ignorantly provoked a riot in Bombay by killing a couple of pigeons in the street. The Mohammedans were horrified and the police had difficulty in suppressing an extensive disturbance; the stock exchange and other general markets were closed, and a wide-spread strike of workmen in India was threatened, as an evidence of the deep feeling aroused by the boys’ sacrilegious act. It was evidence also of the panic-force of superstition under an appropriate stimulus, and a good illustration of Professor George Santayana’s definition of superstition as “reverence for what hurts.” In the same year it was reported by telegraph from Brownsville, Texas, that a snow-white pigeon flew into Sacred Heart Church there on the morning of November 11, during a service celebrating Armistice Day, and perched over a memorial window, where it remained throughout the service. Had it been a sparrow or woodpecker no one would have thought of recording the incident.
Men in the Middle Ages had perfect faith in prodigies such as those connected with the holy ampoule of St. Remi and the subsequent miracles in which it was so efficacious; and everyone understood their meaning. This continued as long as the Church held sway over hearts and minds of the populace. Nobody, probably, had the disposition, not to say the hardihood, to deny the story—you may read it in Froissart—that at the battle of Roosebeek (or Rosebeque), which put an end to the power of Philip van Artevelde in 1382, a white dove was seen to circle about and alight on the French oriflame, which then swept on to victory.
Readers of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur will recall that as on its appearance the Holy Grail passes before Lancelot’s eyes in the castle of Pelleas, a dove, entering at the window and carrying a small golden censer in its beak, impressed the awe-struck knights of the Table Round as a lovely token of the purity and worship to which the castle was devoted. Nothing could be more natural in medieval romance than this incident—a miracle commemorated in the opera Parsifal. The Venetians still assert that the pigeons so familiar and petted in the piazza of St. Mark fly three times daily around the city in honor of the Trinity.
A later example: in the first voyage of Hernando Cortez to America water and food were almost exhausted, and everybody in the vessel was discouraged and mutinous, when “came a Dove flying to the Shippe, being Good Friday at Sunsett; and sat him on the Shippe-top; whereat they were all comforted, and tooke it for a miracle and good token ... and all gave heartie thanks to God, directing their course the way the Dove flew.” Any sort of bird would have been welcome as an indication of nearness of land, but a dove meant to them a heavenly pilot. No wonder that they were comforted! And when they had landed they found in abundance a flower (the orchid Peristeria elata) which they at once named La Flor del Espiritu Santu—Flower of the Holy Ghost. Why? Because in its center the consolidated pistil and stamens form an unmistakable image of a dove.
The immediate source of this symbolism is evidently the account in the gospels of the divine sanction witnessed at the baptism of Jesus. Matthew (iii, 16) records: “Lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him”; and St. Luke strengthens the realism by writing that “the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove.” Hence this bird is constantly associated with Christ and with the Cross by artists and decorative designers; and it is no wonder that in so strictly Catholic countries as Italy it is considered sacrilegious by many of the people to eat the flesh of pigeons.