The sacred dove: from Aphrodite to Noah's ark and the Holy Spirit

Gentle, faithful to its mate and always able to return to its nest, the dove was for many Mediterranean cultures an animal dear to the gods. Before becoming the symbol of peace we know, it was the bird of the great goddesses of love, the messenger of Noah's ark and the image of the Holy Spirit at the baptism of Jesus. Each stage has left precise traces in texts and in art.

The bird of the goddesses of love

In the ancient Near East the dove was associated with Ishtar and then with Astarte, and from the Phoenician and Cypriot world the association passed to Aphrodite. In the goddess's sanctuary at Paphos, on Cyprus, doves were considered sacred, and votive figurines of women holding a dove have been found in many places on the island. Lucian, in his treatise On the Syrian Goddess, reports that at Hierapolis the dove was held so holy that it could not be touched.

Herodotus too, in the second book of his Histories, links the dove to a Greek oracle. The priestesses of Dodona told him that two black doves had flown from Thebes in Egypt: one alighted on an oak at Dodona and ordered in a human voice that an oracle of Zeus be founded there, while the other went to Libya, to the oracle of Ammon. Herodotus then offers a rational explanation of the story.

The olive branch

The book of Genesis relates that, when the waters of the flood began to recede, Noah released first a raven and then a dove. The first time she returned without finding anywhere to rest; the second time she brought back a fresh olive leaf in her beak, a sign that the land was re-emerging; the third time she did not return. A similar story, with a dove, a swallow and a raven, can already be read in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.

From this episode arose the image of the dove with the olive branch, which on early Christian sarcophagi and in the catacombs often accompanies the figure of the praying soul or the name of the deceased, as a sign of peace regained. In 1949 Pablo Picasso drew the dove chosen as the poster for the World Congress of Partisans of Peace in Paris, helping to fix the modern meaning of the symbol.

The Holy Spirit

The Gospels relate that, when Jesus was baptised in the Jordan, the Spirit descended upon him «like a dove». From then on the dove became the most common form for representing the Holy Spirit in Christian art: it can be seen in baptism scenes, in Renaissance Annunciations, where it descends towards Mary on a ray of light, and in images of the Trinity and of Pentecost.

In the Middle Ages there were also Eucharistic doves, metal containers in the shape of a bird, often made of enamelled copper in Limoges, suspended above the altar to hold the consecrated hosts. The symbol even entered names: Columbanus and Columba, Irish monks of the sixth century, bore the Latin name of the dove, which monastic tradition read as a sign of gentleness.

From the sanctuary of Paphos to the dome of a Baroque church, the dove has kept a remarkable coherence of meaning: a link between heaven and earth, a gentle presence that announces something new. This very continuity explains why a symbol born in the temples of ancient goddesses could become, in the twentieth century, a universal and secular emblem of peace.