CHAPTER VI BIRDS IN CHRISTIAN TRADITION AND FESTIVAL
The crowing of a cock ushered in the momentous tragedy that closed the earthly career of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus had told one of his disciples in the evening of the Passover, that “the cock shall not crow this day before that thou shalt twice deny that thou knowest me” (_Luke_, xxii, 34). Later that same night Jesus was arrested and taken into the house of the Jewish high priest, and when, one after another, three persons had identified Peter as one of the Disciples Peter each time denied it, “and immediately, while he yet spake, the cock crew.”
Although the cock and his brood have had a part in Oriental and classical superstitions, ceremonies, and myths since these things began, it is probable that Jesus had in mind nothing more than the time of “cock-crowing,” which among the Jews was a recognized name of the third watch of the night, beginning at three o’clock in the morning. Mark enumerates the four watch-divisions when he says: “Ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning.”
Out of this simple matter, a natural habit of the bird, the early Christians, with the avidity of zealots for inspired pegs on which to hang new devotions, set up many theories and customs. For instance, I find in the English periodical _Nature Notes_ (VI, 189) the following, translated from the _Treasury of Brunetti Latini_, a teacher of Dante in the poet’s youth: “By the song of the cock we may know the hour of the night, and even as the cock before it singeth beateth its body with its wings, so should a man before he prays flagellate himself.” To this added a fourteenth-century chant, as follows:
Cock at midnight croweth loud, And in this delighteth: But before he crows, his sides With his wings he smiteth: So the priest at midnight, when Him from rest he raiseth, Firstly doeth penitence, After that he praiseth.
Ratzel mentions that in Abyssinia cocks were often placed in churches as living alarm-clocks. It is a tradition that at the moment of the great Birth the cock crowed: _Christus natus est!_ Hence as early as the 4th century arose the belief in its crowing always on Christmas eve—a legend alluded to by Shakespeare: