Free Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? by Andrew Lawler Page B

rooster appeared, quite literally saving the day. The small bird coaxed the sun to shine, simply by crowing. A team of Japanese researchers recently determined that this crowing originates from a sensitive circadian clock in the rooster that registers light before humans do.
    From Germanic graves to Japanese shrines, the chicken emerged at the start of our common era as a symbol of light, truth, and resurrection across dozens of religious traditions spanning Asia and Europe. Tibetan Buddhists shunned the bird as a symbol of greed and lust, perhaps because the animal until recently was impractical to rear on the cold Tibetan plateau. Across most of the Old World, however, the chicken’s growing spiritual role demonstrated not just the fowl’s remarkable utility on the farm but its capacity to reflect our changing beliefs. Like the Yezidi, the bird adapted as empires and religions rose and fell. Gods, creeds, and dogmas appeared, vanished, and transformed, but the chicken became a constant and essential part of our worship.

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    The Healing Clutch
    You see this egg? That’s what enables us to overturn all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth!
    â€”Denis Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream
    A s the poison numbed Socrates’s feet, legs, and then groin, the Western world’s most famous philosopher turned to his friend Crito and said, “We owe a cock to Asclepius,” referring to the Greek god of healing and medicine. “Pay the debt. Don’t forget.” His weeping friend agreed, and, moments later, when the potion reached his heart, Socrates expired. The last words of a condemned revolutionary thinker, who was praised by his famous student Plato as “the best and wisest and most righteous man,” were about a chicken.
    In ancient Greece, sacrificing a cock to Asclepius was a common practice of a sick person who wanted to recover his health or celebrate its return. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was sure that Socrates was making an ironic comment on life as a terminal disease. Others say he was expressing his pious belief that the sacrifice would ensure his immortality, since Asclepius was capable of raising the dead. The classicist Eva Keuls argues that the optimistic and irreverent philosopher was telling a dirty joke to cheer up hisgrieving companions. Before he died, she contends, Socrates lifted his cloak and exposed his erection, which resulted either from the poison or the touch of the attendant who felt his body to check the drugs’ progress—or both. He was making a pun on the Greek word for becoming cold, which can also mean rigid or enlivened, while referring to a bird associated with an insatiable sexual appetite as well as healing.
    In Socrates’s day in the late fifth century BC, the chicken was called the Persian bird. “Persian cock! Good Herakles! How on earth did he manage to get here without a camel?” says a character in The Birds by Aristophanes. Three centuries earlier, when Homer likely composed his famous sagas, the canny hero Odysseus didn’t encounter chickens on his long and treacherous voyage, which took him from Turkey to Egypt, to various Mediterranean islands, and finally to his island home off the Greek mainland. By 620 BC, the first images of the bird appear on Greek vases. A detailed and lifelike terra-cotta rooster from that era was found in Delphi, near the famous oracle and sanctuary dedicated to Apollo, god of the sun, light, and truth.
    The chicken in Greece was a powerful symbol of healing and resurrection. Aesop’s goose laid a golden egg, but a lesser-known tale attributed to him, “The Cock and the Jewel,” may be the oldest surviving story starring a chicken. In it, a rooster comes across a precious gem and recognizes its worth but realizes it is of little use to him. “Give me a single grain of corn before all the jewels in the world,” the wise creature concludes.