Hens and Cocks in Religion, Folklore and Myth
by Aelian wrote in the second century A.D. of two Greek temples separated by a river, one consecrated to Hercules and the other to his wife, Hebe. Cocks were kept in the temple of the god, and hens in that of the goddess.
Cockfighting has been a popular sport since ancient times, and its willingness to fight another to the death has made the cock a symbol of the warrior spirit. Before such battles as Marathon and Salamis, commanders would rouse their men to battle by showing them fighting cocks.
The general Themistocles ordered an annual cockfight in Athens to commemorate the victory of the Greeks over the Persians. Fighting cocks were also used to predict the outcome of a battle. In the medieval Japanese Tale of the Heike, a local warlord used a cockfight to decide which side to take in the war between the Heike and Genji clans. He matched seven cocks that were white, the color of the Genji, against seven that were red, the color of the Heike. When all of the white cocks proved victorious, he knew that he should take the side of the Genji.
In an Irish tale that relates the call of the rooster to the resurrection, a group of unbelievers sat around a fire over which a cock is boiled. “We have buried Christ now,” said one, “and he has no more power to rise from the dead than the cock in this pot.” Immediately the cock leaped up and crowed three times, saying, “The Virgin’s son is saved”.
The cock also experiences a sort of resurrection in a famous story from the work of Alcuin, a learned monk at the court of Charlemagne. A rooster, boasting of his powers, forgot to remain watchful and suddenly found the jaws of a wolf had closed about his neck. The cock begged to hear the wolf sing just once, so he would not have to die without hearing the wonderful harmonies of a lupine voice. The wolf opened his mouth to grant the request, at which point the cock immediately flew up to a tree and admonished the wolf, saying, “Whoever is taken in by false pride will go without food”. The jaws of the wolf here represent the grave or, perhaps, the gate of Hell, and the bird is saved not only by his cleverness but also by grace. In later versions the adversary of the cock was usually the fox, and the story has been retold by Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, and countless other fabulists from the Middle Ages to the present.
Since the cock and hen are so quintessentially male and female, people have often viewed any violation of their sexual roles with horror. According to traditional belief in cultures from Germany to Persia, a hen that crows like a cock augurs terrible fortune and has to be killed immediately. Similarly, a number of cocks were judicially condemned to death in the Middle Ages for laying eggs. Writing around the end of the twelfth century, Alexander of Neckam stated that an egg laid by an old cock and incubated by a toad could produce a “cockatrice,” a serpent able to kill with a glance. Today, the proud society of the barnyard has almost disappeared, and most people rarely see fowl before it reaches the supermarket or the dinner plate, though heraldic roosters still decorate packages of cereal and many other products. Smaller farms, often run by humane activists, still raise free-range chickens. Cockfighting is now illegal in the United States and most of Europe, but people, particularly from Latin America or the Caribbean, still engage in it, believing they are preserving the values of a more heroic age.
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