A grove near the city of Dodona contained one of the most ancient and venerable oracles in Greece. According to legend, a black dove from Egypt alighted there. As it moved among the oak trees, the branches would rustle and speak to the priests in the voice of a woman. In the time of Homer, the shrine at Dodona was the most revered in all the land.

In the ancient world, doves were often associated with prophecy. In The Voyages of the Argo, Apollonius of Rhodes told how the Greek heroes in search of the Golden Fleece found their way through a sea barred by the Clashing Rocks, which would continually open and close. They released a dove. It passed between the rocks, so the heroes knew they could navigate unscathed. In Virgil’s Aeneid, doves guided Aeneas through a forest to a golden bough, which he needed to enter the world of the dead. Even Christianity, which often took a dim view of pagan oracles, was full of stories in which doves assist in divination, perhaps because doves seemed above every suspicion of evil. One apocryphal gospel had a dove from heaven alighting on the staff of Joseph and anointing him as the husband of Mary. Of course, whatever pleased the gods would be offered up to them in the ancient world. For the Hebrews, doves and pigeons were the only birds that might be offered for sacrifice (Lev. 1:14), and they were the favorite sacrifice of people who could not afford sheep or oxen.

The biblical book of Genesis states that “God’s spirit hovered over the water” (1:2). This image certainly suggests a bird, and it has usually been depicted as a dove. During the Flood, Noah sent out a dove. When it returned with an olive branch, he knew that the waters had begun to subside. In Christianity, the dove represents the Holy Spirit. A dove descended on Jesus at his baptism. In pictures of the Annunciation, the dove has traditionally been portrayed descending to Mary from God the Father as she becomes pregnant with the infant Jesus. The scene recalls the amorous adventures of Zeus, for example, when the god assumed the form of a swan to impregnate the maiden Leda. The dove, usually painted directly between Mary and God the Father, seemed to shield Mary with its purity. The dove was sacred to many goddesses of the ancient world.

Doves drew the chariot of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Though sometimes thought promiscuous, Aphrodite became a guardian of chastity when the hunter Orion attempted to break into the home of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. She changed the girls into doves so they might escape by flight, and Zeus later transformed them into stars.

Doves fed the legendary Assyrian queen Semiramis, daughter of the goddess Derceto, when she was abandoned as an infant in the desert. They were also closely associated with the Roman Venus, the Babylonian Ishtar, and the Semitic Astarte. The following amorous symbolism enters the Judeo-Christian tradition through the biblical “Song of Songs,” which probably referred to turtledoves Jews and Christians have interpreted this song of love as an allegory of the longing of the soul for God. The image of the dove has always served to spiritualize erotic desire. It is also a symbol of conjugal fidelity. According to the medieval German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach in his epic Parzifal, a dove that has lost its mate would always perch on a withered branch.

The Holy Spirit is traditionally spoken of with a masculine pronoun. Nevertheless, it is hard to think of it in that way. The Trinity and the very concept of God seem unbalanced without some feminine element. Several heretical groups have identified the dove with the feminine concept of “Sophia,” or divine wisdom, as well as with Mary herself. The wings of a dove, spread out and pointing downward, are sometimes stylized in Christian art to form an M for Mary.

When Christianity was introduced into Russia, people were forbidden to eat the flesh of doves. The dove is also important in the Grail romances. In Eschenbach’s Parzifal, written in Germany around 1200, a dove visited the Castle of the Grail every year on Good Friday to bring the Host from Heaven. The dove was also the badge of the Knights of the Grail. European folklore made the dove the one shape that the Devil could not assume. The dove was also one of the very few common animals that were never mentioned as familiars of witches.

In the ancient world, several cultures sometimes portrayed the soul as a dove. There is an enormously moving sculpture in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from the grave of a Greek child who died in the mid-seventh century B.C. The young girl holds a pair of doves or pigeons in her hands, and her lips touch the beak of one. The doves are to go on and have the marriage and family that were denied the maiden. The dove was the symbol of Saint Scholastica, founder of a convent and the patroness of rain. Her twin brother, Saint Benedict, visited her on her deathbed. When she died, Saint Benedict saw her soul ascend to Heaven in the form of a white dove.

The dove is also holy in Islam. Christian polemicists sometimes tried to discredit Islam by claiming that Mohammed had a dove feed from his ear. This was allegedly a trick to make his followers believe that the Holy Spirit was giving him advice.

In their collection of German legends, the Grimm brothers tell how a dove saved the town of Höxter. This community had held out valiantly against the mighty army of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War. At last, when other attempts had failed, the imperial generals ordered their troops to bring in the heavy artillery and bombard the town into submission. In the evening, a soldier was about to light the fuse of the first cannon when a dove flew down and pecked his hand, forcing him to drop the kindling. The soldier took this as a sign from God, and he refused to fire. This delayed the bom-bardment long enough for Swedish troops to arrive and lift the siege. The dove, particularly in a drawing by Pablo Picasso, was a symbol of the peace movement during the Cold War. Is the dove a little too perfect? It suggests eroticism without lewdness and virtue without self-righteousness. It is rare, indeed, for any symbol to be accepted with so little ambivalence. Perhaps it is possible in this case because the pigeon functions as a sort of double to the dove, deflecting any resentment.

When people do distinguish between doves and pigeons, the rock doves become the black sheep of the family. The urban pigeons descended from the rock doves, which originally came from the northern coasts of the British Isles. People have not always distinguished very sharply between pigeons and doves. Pigeons were often trained to carry messages in the Roman Empire. This probably contributed to the role of a dove in Christianity as a sort of messenger from God. In Christian paintings the dove of the Annunciation was often portrayed as a white rock dove, with a very broad fanlike tail rather than the narrower tail of the turtledove and related varieties. The passenger pigeons of North America, once so numerous that they darkened the skies, were driven to extinction in the early twentieth century. Now they are remembered as a symbol of human rapacity and the lost bounty of the New World. Poet Wallace Stevens probably had the passenger pigeon at least partially in mind when he wrote “Sunday Morning” in 1915.

But pigeons generally blend in so well with our urban environments that most people hardly even notice them. The few who do pay attention find much beauty in their enormous variety of patterns and tones, caused largely by the mixing of urban and feral birds. Pigeons thrive in cities because the facades of buildings resemble the stony landscapes of their original homes. People sometimes call pigeons “rats with wings.” It is now illegal to feed them in New York City, though many people, especially immigrants from the Mediterranean, do anyway.

There are small but devoted circles of pigeon fanciers who race the birds and display them at pigeon shows. While lovers of many animals, such as horses and cats, tend to be female and aristocratic, pi-geon enthusiasts are generally male and blue-collar. They identify with the toughness of these birds, which can survive easily in the roughest of neighborhoods.

Mourning doves are also found in New York and other cities, although they are not as common. They are a bit smaller, have a delicate call, and often seem like feminine counterparts to the more masculine pigeons. Most of the time, mourning doves are even more unobtrusive. Few people ever even think, at least consciously, of a connection between the dove on the street and the one in church. But isn’t it like that with many religious symbols?