The Pelican in Her Piety: Where the Blood Legend Comes From

The short answer

The "pelican in her piety" comes from the Physiologus, an early Christian book of nature lore written in Greek sometime between the second and fourth centuries. In it the pelican first kills her own young; on the third day the mother opens her side and brings them back to life with her blood. The church read that as a picture of Christ.

Three things drop out of most retellings. Augustine and Isidore of Seville passed the story on only with a caveat. The bird in the psalm that everything hangs on was probably not a pelican at all. And real pelicans do nothing of the kind — which an English physician wrote down, point by point, in 1646.

Louisiana, 2006: an eighth-grader and three drops of blood

Start with the version most Americans have actually seen. A pelican feeding her young has been on Louisiana's state seal since the nineteenth century, and the blue flag with the white pelican was adopted on July 1, 1912. What the 1912 law never pinned down was the blood. For nearly a century, flag makers showed anything from zero to four drops on the bird's breast.

In 2006 a 14-year-old eighth-grader at a Catholic school in Houma noticed the inconsistency while working on a social studies project. His family contacted their state representative, Damon Baldone, who drafted a bill and let the student present his findings to the House Judiciary Committee. House Bill 833 passed both chambers unanimously. Governor Kathleen Blanco signed it on May 25, 2006, and the statute now requires "an appropriate display of three drops of blood." The same law covers the state seal.

"I think it's a great example of how an eighth-grader can change state law," Baldone told LSU's Daily Reveille. So a story that Augustine would only repeat with a shrug is now written into Louisiana law — as an emblem, not as ornithology. That is also the sensible way to read it.

What the Physiologus actually says

The Physiologus pins every animal story to a Bible verse. For the pelican it is Psalm 102:6 — in the King James Version, "I am like a pelican of the wilderness." The Latin Bible, which numbers the psalm 101, has "Similis factus sum pellicano solitudinis."

The story that follows is not the gentle one on the flag. In the standard telling, as the young pelicans grow they begin to strike their parents in the face. The parents strike back and kill them. For three days they mourn. Then the mother pierces her side and lets her blood run over the dead chicks, and they revive.

A twelfth-century German prose version makes the logic plain. It still calls the bird by an old German name, Sisegoum, and tells how the young "bite the old pelican and their mother," how the parents bite back until the young are dead, and how on the third day the mother "breaks her side" and lets the blood run. Then comes the moral: humankind struck its maker in the face, and by the blood from Christ's side "we were made alive and healed." What later heraldry leaves out is the beginning. In the source, the pelican is not a tender parent. She kills her young first. Another version, in a letter once attributed to Jerome, has a serpent do the killing.

The church fathers hedged

Augustine, who died in 430, preached on exactly this verse. He begins by admitting that nobody in his congregation knows the bird: it "is born in a region which makes it unknown to us," in lonely places along the Nile. Then he repeats what "is said, or even read" about it — and stops to add: "This may be true, it may be false: yet if it be true, see how it agrees with Him, who gave us life by His blood."

Isidore of Seville, who died in 636 and whose encyclopedia was copied all through the Middle Ages, gets the story into one sentence and puts four words in front of it: "Fertur, si verum sit" — it is said, if it be true.

So the two authorities most often cited for the legend are also its first recorded doubters. The caveat fell away in the retelling. The picture stayed.

The bird in the psalm was probably not a pelican

The Hebrew psalm has qa'at, a bird name whose meaning is uncertain. The ancient Greek translation chose "pelican," the Latin followed, and the Physiologus hung its story on that word. How open the question is shows in the Bibles themselves:

Translation	Psalm 102:6
Latin Vulgate	"pellicano solitudinis" — pelican
Luther Bible, 1545	"Rhordomel" — a bittern
King James Version, 1611	"a pelican of the wilderness"
New American Standard Bible	"a pelican of the wilderness"
New International Version	"a desert owl"
English Standard Version	"a desert owl of the wilderness"

A fish-eating water bird is an odd emblem for a desert, and several modern translations have moved to an owl. Which species the psalmist meant is not known. For the legend, that means its biblical anchor is a translator's choice.

From hymn to Hamlet

In the thirteenth century the pelican turns up in the hymn Adoro te devote, traditionally attributed to Thomas Aquinas: "Pie pellicane, Iesu Domine, me immundum munda tuo sanguine" — loving pelican, Lord Jesus, cleanse me, unclean, in your blood. Dante, in Paradiso XXV, calls Christ simply "nostro pellicano," our pelican.

Shakespeare knows both halves of the story. In Hamlet, Laertes offers to feed his father's friends "like the kind life-rendering pelican" and "repast them with my blood." King Lear, cursing Goneril and Regan, turns the image around: "'twas this flesh begot those pelican daughters" — the young who devour the parent.

Elizabeth I sat for her portrait around 1575 with a pelican jewel on her breast. The "Pelican Portrait," attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, hangs in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, and the pendant is usually read as an allusion to the queen as the self-sacrificing mother of her people. Heralds still call the figure a pelican "in her piety," or "vulning" — wounding — herself.

1646: a doctor lists what is wrong with the picture

Sir Thomas Browne, a physician in Norwich, gave the image its own chapter in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, his 1646 catalog of common errors. His first observation is about silence. "Upon enquiry we find no mention hereof in Ancient Zodiographers" — he names Aristotle, Aelian, Pliny and Solinus — "who seldom forget proprieties of such a nature."

Then he holds the painted bird up against the real one. The picture, he writes, "containeth many improprieties, disagreeing almost in all things from the true and proper description":

• It is painted green or yellow; the real bird is "inclining to white."
• It is drawn the size of a hen; the real one "approacheth and sometimes exceedeth the magnitude of a Swan."
• It gets a short, pointed bill; the real bill reaches "the length of two spans" and is "flat and broad."
• It has divided claws; the pelican is "fin-footed like Swans and Geese."
• And the artists leave out the part "more remarkable then any other": the pouch.

Browne also offers a pedigree. The Egyptians, he says, never told the blood story about the pelican; it "seems translated unto the Pelecan from the Vulture." The late antique Hieroglyphica of Horapollo (I.11) does say that a vulture short of food opens its own thigh and lets its young drink the blood. Whether the pelican legend really descends from that is a scholar's guess of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not a demonstrated fact.

The image was hard to kill. In 1555 Conrad Gessner of Zurich, in the bird volume of his Historia animalium, still printed a pelican pecking her breast and bleeding onto the nest.

What real pelicans do

Pelicans feed their young on regurgitated fish. The parent lowers its bill against its chest to pass the food along, and older chicks reach right into the bill and pouch. From a distance that can look as if the bird were digging into its own breast — the explanation offered, for instance, by the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas in its note on Gessner's woodcut.

A second common suggestion involves the Dalmatian pelican of southeastern Europe and Asia, whose pouch turns a vivid orange-red in the breeding season. A resting bird with a red pouch against its chest may have helped the picture along. Browne, for his part, thought the birds might nibble and bite at their own breasts, "though not for their young ones."

None of these explanations is proven; they are reasonable inferences. Only the negative is certain. No pelican feeds its young on blood, and none revives dead chicks. Louisiana's state bird, the brown pelican, is no exception.

The pelican in the glass: alchemy and ink

Alchemists gave the name to a piece of glassware: a flask whose arms lead rising vapor back into the body, so that a liquid can circulate on itself for days or weeks. Princeton University Library, in its exhibition on the Ripley Scroll, traces the name to the bird "thought to nurture its young on its own blood, by piercing its breast with its long beak"; on the scroll, the prime matter in the pelican dissolves into "blood-like droplets."

In practice it was a circulation vessel, part of the working kit we describe in our piece on what the alchemist Edward Kelley really did. For the border between natural magic and early science, see Giambattista della Porta. The Physiologus's other great resurrection bird is the phoenix.

And the fountain pen? Günther Wagner, a chemist who took over a paint and ink works in Hanover, Germany, in 1871, turned the pelican from his family crest into a trademark. By the company's own account he first drew it with three chicks and added a fourth after his fourth child was born; the mark was filed on November 27, 1878. Today's Pelikan logo has one chick left in the nest.

Frequently asked questions

What does the pelican symbolize?

In Christian tradition the pelican stands for sacrifice and self-giving. She was said to feed or revive her young with her own blood and so became an image of Christ, which is why she appears on altars, in coats of arms and in hymns.

What does "pelican in her piety" mean?

It is the heraldic name for a pelican standing over her nest and wounding her breast to feed her chicks with blood. "Piety" here keeps the older sense of the Latin pietas: dutiful devotion to one's own.

Where does the pelican blood legend come from?

From the Physiologus, an early Christian book of nature lore from the second to fourth century. In it the parents first kill their young; on the third day the mother revives them with blood from her side.

Do pelicans really feed their young with blood?

No. Pelicans feed their chicks regurgitated fish. The way a parent presses its bill against its chest while feeding is a possible source of the image, but that has not been proven.

Why does the Louisiana flag show a pelican with drops of blood?

The pelican feeding her young has been on Louisiana's seal since the nineteenth century. A law signed on May 25, 2006, requires three drops of blood on the pelican's breast on both the flag and the seal.

What is a pelican in alchemy?

A glass circulation vessel in which vapor condenses and runs back into the flask. The name alludes to the bird that pierces her breast with her beak.

Sources: Physiologus, Vienna prose version, ch. 20 (text after F. Maurer 1967, digitized by the TITUS project, University of Frankfurt) · Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, Psalm 101 (102), sections 7–8 (trans. J. E. Tweed, New Advent) · Isidore of Seville, Etymologies XII.7.26 · Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica V.1 (1646; 6th ed. 1672, University of Chicago online edition) · Horapollo, Hieroglyphica I.11 · Bible translations compared at biblehub.com and bibel-online.net (Luther 1545) · Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5 and King Lear 3.4 · Dante, Paradiso XXV · Kenneth Spencer Research Library, "The Pelican in Her Piety" (2017) · Princeton University Library, "The Philosophers' Glass" · The Daily Reveille, June 15, 2006; Louisiana Act 92 of 2006 · pelikan.com, company history · bestiary.ca, "Pelican." Title image: our own illustration, not a historical artwork.

Keep reading: The phoenix in its ancient sources · Edward Kelley, alchemist · Swan symbolism: the myth and the bird · Stork symbolism and the baby myth