Recently my nephew Kameron
went on a tour to visit The Painted Churches. “The "Painted Churches"
of Texas are a unique collection of churches, primarily built by Czech and
German immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that feature
stunning, hand-painted interiors. These churches, often appearing unassuming
from the outside, were built by immigrants seeking to recreate the look and
feel of their homelands, particularly the Gothic structures they were familiar
with.” He took many pictures which I was later able to explicate for him, from
the Stations of the Cross to a peculiar bit of stained glass with a rather odd
but once popular bit of religious imagery.
This was a representation of
“a Pelican in her Piety”, a formerly widespread religious symbol, popularized and
disseminated through a Second Century bestiary, the Physiplogus and its
successors.
“The Physiologus is a
strange hybrid of genres, … [it] is neither quite natural history nor entirely
a collection of just-so-stories. … the Physiologus is the earliest known bestiary—compendium
of beasts—that staple of medieval literature. Like many of its inheritors, the
Physiologus contains information about a variety of animals, and in each case,
a theological interpretation of it. It is difficult to appreciate how, for
early Christians, the Bible and the natural world really did make up “two
books” to be read and interpreted and mined for meaning. Concerning the
pelican, the Physiologus says that
it is an exceeding lover of
its young. If the pelican brings forth young and the little ones grow, they
take to striking their parents in the face. The parents, however, hitting back
kill their young ones and then, moved by compassion, they weep over them for
three days, lamenting over those whom they killed. On the third day, their
mother strikes her side and spills her own blood over their dead bodies (that
is, of the chicks) and the blood itself awakens them from death.
It does not take a subtle
mind to see how one might theologise this ornithological observation.” - https://www.theschooloftheology.org/posts/essay/symbols-the-pelican-in-her-piety
Shakespeare refers to this legend in King Lear. In Act 3, Scene 4, Lear refers to his two daughters, Goneril and Regan, as "pelican daughters," implying that they are feeding off his lifeblood with their greed and cruelty. Shakespeare also uses the imagery in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Henry VIII.
