The Bird That Wakes the World

Nearly all the rooster's symbolism grows from its crowing at dawn. Zoroastrian tradition treats the cock as the bird that wakes humanity and drives off the demons of darkness, and it is praised in that role in the Avesta, an ally of the forces of light in the daily struggle. In Christian tradition the cock is fixed to Peter's denial, which all four gospels place before the cock crows, and that association is why weathercocks stand on churches, a practice general in Europe by the ninth century. Greek practice offered a cock to Asclepius on recovery from illness, which is the meaning of Socrates' famous last words. In West African and Afro-diasporic religions the cock is a common sacrificial animal.

France's use of the rooster as a national emblem grows from a Latin pun rather than from any religious source: gallus meant both a rooster and an inhabitant of Gaul, and medieval and later writers played on the coincidence until the coq gaulois became an accepted symbol of the French nation, adopted especially during the Revolution and still appearing today on French sporting jerseys and coinage, a case of the bird's meaning generated entirely by wordplay rather than by myth or scripture.