by Norman A. Rubin

Created on: April 01, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

The Dove

("Oh my Dove - Let me hear your voice...")
(The dove was, by far, one of the most important bird in the Bible
for it was the poor man's sacrifice and widely kept as a domestic bird.)

Various cultures and religions conceive of birds, the denizens of
heavens, as divine revelations, and the bearers of heavenly message of
guidance. Birds symbolize man's soul or spirit as it is released from

the body in ecstasy or in death. The bird is seen as the embodiment
of liberty and the transcendence of the soul, the victory spirit over
matter. Hence, birds are often associated with godliness, immortality,
power and victory and kingship. (The affinity between birds and sacred
places is evidence to this day, as in the large numbers of cooing
pigeons at mosques throughout the Levant and North Africa.)

In the Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman world, birds, mainly
doves (1), were charged with the complex symbolic significance as
manifestations of the Godhead. In the Ancient Near East the dove was a
symbol of a female deity of love and fecundity - Ishtar, Astarte, Tanit,
Anat, 'Ata, and Atargis. To the Ancient Greeks, the dove was perceived
as Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and thus also invested
with erotic connotations; As an attribute of the fertility goddess the
dove became a symbol of love between human beings, and between the
deity and the worshippers. The Cyprians believed that Aphrodite
(Anadomyne) rose from the sea as she was born from an egg brooded by a
dove and pushed ashore by a fish.

The white doves were well regarded during the Roman period, and are
depicted in various forms on mosaics of that period. The Romans
sacrificed doves to Venus, the goddess of love and fertility, whom
Ovid and other writers wrote as riding in a dove-drawn chariot. The
Roman worship of Venus was to a large extent derived from the
Phoenecian sanctuary (Eryx) where the dove was revered by the goddess
Astarte. (The dove is also sacred to Adonis and Bacchus as the "First
Begotten of Love".)and in latter years Giovana de Medici adopted two caged turtle-
doves as her device to represent conjugal fidelity.

In the ancient Levant doves are sacred to all Great Mothers and
Queens of Heaven, the mother of all, the nourisher of the earth. "In
the heavens I take my place and send rain, in the earth I take my
place and cause the green to spring forth." From Mesopotamia to the
the Greco-Roman world the Great Mother was seen as the symbol of
fertility, the renewal of life both to man and the fruits of the
earth. Babylon

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