Cock

It is no coincidence that "cock" is slang for "penis." The cock was a phallic totem in Roman and medieval sculptures showing cocks somehow transformed into, or supporting, human penises. Roman carvings of disembodied phalli often gave them the legs or wings of cocks. Hidden in the treasury of the Vatican is a bronze image of a cock with the head of a penis on the torso of a man, the pedestal inscribed "The Savior of the World."1 The cock was also a symbol of Saint Peter, whose name also meant a phallus or male principle (pater) and a phallic pillar (petra). Therefore the cock's image was often placed atop church towers.2

     In Jewish  tradition the cock was almost universally accepted as a substitute for a man. The Hebrew word for a cock, gever, also means "man." The Kapparah atonement offering involves killing a cock and passing its body around the head of the offender, with the words, "This fowl is my substitute, this is my surrogate, this is my atonement." Among Russian Jews it was considered bad luck to dig a grave and leave it empty overnight; so if burial could not take place until the next day, a cock was buried in the partly filled gave as a substitute for the human corpse.₃

     It is said in the Zohar that a cock crowing three times is an omen of death. Medieval superstition generally claimed that the crowing of the white cock, red cock, and black cock in turn signaled the departure of the dead from the earth.4 (These were, of course, the colors of the Triple Goddess of Fat in former times.) The Gospel story of Peter's denial of Christ, three times before cockcrow, was related to older legends associating the crowing of the cock with the death and resurrection of the solar Savior. In Greek paganism the bird was sacred to Asclepius, the god who was able to resurrect the dead, and was always vaguely connected with phallic spirit in the process of dying and standing up again. As a bird supposedly in communication with the other world, the cock became the preferred medium of Roman alectromancers, who drew omens from the way the bird pecked scattered grains of corn.

1.  Knight, pl. 2                         2.  Whittick, 220.

3.  Trachtemberg, 164, 176.      4.  Wimberly, 104.

Barbara G. Walker.  The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects,  1988 pg. 397