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A number of peace symbols have been used many ways in various cultures and contexts. The dove and olive branch was used symbolically by early Christians and then eventually became a secular peace symbol, popularized by Pablo Picasso after World War 2. In the 1950s the "peace sign", as it is known today, was designed by Gerald Holtom as the logo for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a group at the forefront of the peace movement in the UK, and adopted by anti-war and counterculture activists in the US and elsewhere. The V hand signal and the peace flag also became international peace symbols.
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Classical antiquity
The use of the olive branch as a symbol of peace in Western civilization dates at least to 5th century BC Greece. The olive branch, which the Greeks believed represented plenty and drove away evil spirits, was one of the attributes of Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace. Eirene (whom the Romans called Pax), appeared on Roman Imperial coins with an olive branch.
The Roman poet Virgil (70–10 BC) associated "the plump olive" with Pax and he used the olive branch as a symbol of peace in his Aeneid:
The Romans believed there was an intimate relationship between war and peace. Mars, the god of war, had another aspect, Mars Pacifer, Mars the bringer of Peace, who is shown bearing an olive branch on coins of the later Roman Empire. Appian describes the use of the olive-branch as a gesture of peace by the enemies of the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus in the Numantine War and by Hasdrubal of Carthage.
Later representations
Poets of the 17th century associated the olive branch with peace. A Charles I gold coin of 1644 shows the monarch with sword and olive branch. Throughout the 18th century, English coins show Britannia with a spear and olive branch.
The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, contains an allegorical painting by James Thornhill, Peace and Liberty Triumphing Over Tyranny (1708–1716), depicting King William III and Queen Mary (who had enacted the English Bill of Rights) enthroned in heaven with the Virtues behind them. Peace, with her doves and lambs, hands an olive branch to William, who in turn hands the cap of liberty to Europe, where absolute monarchy prevails. Below William is the defeated French king, Louis XIV.
In January 1775, the frontispiece of the London Magazine published an engraving of Peace descending on a cloud from the Temple of Commerce, bringing an olive branch to America and Britannia. In July that year, the American Continental Congress adopted the "Olive Branch Petition" in the hope of avoiding a full-blown war with Great Britain.
On the Great Seal of the United States (1782), the olive branch denotes peace, as explained by Charles Thomson, Secretary to Congress: "The Olive branch and arrows denote the power of peace & war which is exclusively vested in Congress."
Christianity
The use of a dove and olive branch as a symbol of peace originated with the early Christians, who portrayed the act of baptism accompanied by a dove holding an olive branch in its beak and also used the image on their sepulchres. The first literary reference to its signifying "peace unto the nations" is in the writing of the Church father Tertullian (c.160 – c.220)
The dove appears in many funerary inscriptions in the Roman catacombs, sometimes accompanied by the words in pace (Latin for "in peace"). For example, in the Catacomb of Callixtus, a dove and branch are drawn next to a Latin inscription NICELLA VIRCO DEI OVE VI XIT ANNOS P M XXXV DE POSITA XV KAL MAIAS BENE MERENTI IN PACE, meaning "Nicella, God’s virgin, who lived for more or less 35 years. She was placed [here] 15 days before the Kalends of May [17 April]. For the well deserving one in peace." In another example, a shallow relief sculpture shows a dove with a branch flying to a figure marked in Greek as ΕΙΡΗΝΗ (Eirene, or Peace). The symbol has also been found in the Christian catacombs of Sousse, Tunisia (ancient Carthage), which date from the end of the first century AD.
Christians derived the symbol of the dove and olive branch from two sources: Greek thought, including its use of the symbol of the olive branch, and the story of Noah and the Flood. The story of Noah in the Hebrew Bible ends with a passage describing a dove bringing a freshly plucked olive leaf (Hebrew: עלה זית alay zayit),[Gen 8:11] a sign of life after the Flood and of God's bringing Noah, his family and the animals to land. Jews never used Noah's dove and olive leaf as symbols of peace, Rabbinic literature interpreting the olive leaf as "the young shoots of the Land of Israel" or the dove's preference for bitter food in God's service, rather than sweet food in the service of men. But the symbol acquired that meaning among early Christians, it was confirmed by St Augustine of Hippo in his book On Christian Doctrine and became well established.
The New Testament has a comparison between a dove and the Spirit of God that descended on Jesus during his baptism.[Mt 3:16], which is paralleled in the Talmudic sentence, "the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters like a dove." Early Christians drew parallels between baptism and Noah's flood, the First Epistle of Peter (composed around the end of the first century AD) comparing the salvation through water in baptism to Noah's salvation through water.[1Pt 3:20–21] Tertullian compared the dove, who "announced to the world the assuagement of divine wrath, when she had been sent out of the ark and returned with the olive branch", with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove that descends in baptism, "bringing us the peace of God, sent out from the heavens". In the fourth century, St. Jerome's Latin Bible, possibly reflecting this Christian comparison between the peace brought by baptism and the ending of the Flood, rendered the Hebrew Bible's "olive leaf" in Noah as "olive branch" (Latin: ramum olivae). By the fifth century, St Augustine confirmed the Christian adoption of the olive branch, writing that, "perpetual peace is indicated by the olive branch (Latin: oleae ramusculo) that the dove brought with it when it returned to the ark."
In the earliest Christian art, the dove represented the peace of the soul rather than civil peace, but from the third century it began to appear in depictions of conflict in the Old Testament, such as Noah and the Ark, and in the Apocrypha, such as Daniel and the lions, the three young men in the furnace, and Susannah and the Elders.
Before the Peace of Constantine (313 AD), in which Rome ceased its persecution of Christians following Constantine's conversion, Noah was normally shown in an attitude of prayer, a dove with an olive branch flying toward him or alighting on his outstretched hand. According to Graydon Snyder, "The Noah story afforded the early Christian community an opportunity to express piety and peace in a vessel that withstood the threatening environment" of Roman persecution. According to Ludwig Budde and Pierre Prigent, the dove referred to the descending of the Holy Spirit rather than the peace associated with Noah. After the Peace of Constantine, when persecution ceased, Noah appeared less frequently in Christian art.
Medieval illuminated manuscripts, such as the Holkham Bible, showed the dove returning to Noah with a branch. Wycliffe's Bible, which translated the Vulgate into English in the 14th century, uses "a braunche of olyue tre with greene leeuys" ("a branch of olive tree with green leaves") in Gen. 8:11. In the Middle Ages, some Jewish manuscripts, which were often illustrated by Christians, also showed Noah's dove with an olive branch, for example, the Golden Haggadah (about 1420).
English Bibles from the 17th-century King James Bible onwards, which translated the story of Noah direct from Hebrew, render the Hebrew 'aleh zayit as "olive leaf" rather than "olive branch", but by this time the association of the dove with an olive branch as a symbol of peace in the story of Noah was firmly established.
Secular representations
The broken rifle
The broken rifle symbol is used by War Resisters' International (WRI) and its affiliates but predates the foundation of WRI in 1921. The first known example of the symbol is in the masthead of the January 1909 issue of De Wapens Neder (Down With Weapons), the monthly paper of the International Antimilitarist Union in the Netherlands. In 1915 it appeared on the cover of a pamphlet, Under det brukne Gevær (Under the Broken Rifle), published by the Norwegian Social Democratic Youth Association. The (German) League for War Victims, founded in 1917, used the broken rifle on a 1919 banner.
In 1921, Belgian workers marching through La Louvrière on 16 October 1921, carried flags showing a soldier breaking his rifle. Ernst Friedrich, a German who had refused military service, founded the Anti-Kriegs Museum in Berlin, which featured a bas-relief broken rifle over the door. The Museum distributed broken-rifle badges, girls' and women's brooches, boys' belt buckles, and men's tie pins.
The white poppy
In 1933, during a period in which there was widespread fear of war in Europe, the Women's Co-operative Guild began the practice of distributing white poppies as an alternative to the red poppies distributed by the Royal British Legion in commemoration of servicemen who died in the First World War. In 1934 the newly formed Peace Pledge Union (PPU), which was the largest British peace organization in the inter-war years, joined in distributing white poppies and laying white poppy wreaths "as a pledge to peace that war must not happen again". In 1980, the PPU revived the symbol as a way of remembering the victims of war without glorifying militarism.
Roerich's peace banner
Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947), a Russian artist, cultural activist, and philosopher, founded a movement to protect cultural artifacts. Its symbol was a maroon-on-white emblem consisting of three solid circles in a surrounding circle. It has also been used as a peace banner. In 1935 a pact initiated by Roerich was signed by the United States and Latin American nations, agreeing that "historic monuments, museums, scientific, artistic, educational and cultural institutions" should be protected both in times of peace and war.
According to the Roerich Museum,
The Banner of Peace symbol has ancient origins. Perhaps its earliest known example appears on Stone Age amulets: three dots, without the enclosing circle. Roerich came across numerous later examples in various parts of the world, and knew that it represented a deep and sophisticated understanding of the triune nature of existence. But for the purposes of the Banner and the Pact, Roerich described the circle as representing the totality of culture, with the three dots being Art, Science, and Religion, three of the most embracing of human cultural activities. He also described the circle as representing the eternity of time, encompassing the past, present, and future. The sacred origins of the symbol, as an illustration of the trinities fundamental to all religions, remain central to the meaning of the Pact and the Banner today.
The peace symbol
The internationally recognized peace symbol – variously known as the nuclear disarmament symbol, the CND symbol and the peace sign – was designed in 1958 for the British nuclear disarmament movement by Gerald Holtom. Holtom, an artist and designer, made it for a march from Trafalgar Square, London, to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, organised by the Direct Action Committee to take place in April and supported by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Holtom's design was adapted by Eric Austen (1922–1999) to ceramic lapel badges. The original design is in the Peace Museum in Bradford, England.
The symbol is a combination of the semaphore signals for the letters "N" and "D", standing for "nuclear disarmament". In semaphore the letter "N" is formed by a person holding two flags in an inverted "V", and the letter "D" is formed by holding one flag pointed straight up and the other pointed straight down. Superimposing these two signs forms the shape of the centre of the peace symbol.
Holtom later wrote to Hugh Brock, editor of Peace News, explaining the genesis of his idea:
I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.
Ken Kolsbun, a correspondent of Holtom's, says that the designer came to regret the symbolism of despair, as he felt that peace was something to be celebrated and wanted the symbol to be inverted. Eric Austen is said to have "discovered that the 'gesture of despair' motif had long been associated with 'the death of man', and the circle with 'the unborn child'".
The symbol became the badge of CND, and wearing it became a sign of support for the campaign urging British unilateral nuclear disarmament. An account of CND's early history described the image as "a visual adhesive to bind the [Aldermaston] March and later the whole Campaign together ... probably the most powerful, memorable and adaptable image ever designed for a secular cause".
Not copyrighted, trademarked or restricted, the symbol spread beyond CND and was adopted by the wider disarmament and anti-war movements. It became widely known in the United States in 1958 when Albert Bigelow, a pacifist protester, sailed a small boat fitted with the CND banner into the vicinity of a nuclear test. Buttons with the symbol were imported into the United States in 1960 by Philip Altbach, a freshman at the University of Chicago. Altbach had traveled to England to meet with British peace groups as a delegate from the Student Peace Union (SPU) and, on his return, he persuaded the SPU to adopt the symbol. Between 1960 and 1964, they sold thousands of the buttons on college campuses. By the end of the decade, the symbol had been adopted as a generic peace sign, crossing national and cultural boundaries in Europe and other regions.
In 1970, two US private companies tried to register the peace symbol as a trade mark: the Intercontinental Shoe Corporation of New York and Luv, Inc. of Miami. Commissioner of Patents William E. Schuyler Jr, said that the symbol "could not properly function as a trade mark subject to registration by the Patent Office".
Between 1968 and 1971, the John Birch Society circulated rumours about the origin and meaning of the symbol, claiming it was a sign of the devil and a Nazi "rune". In 1971, Peggy Duff, who had been the general secretary of CND, re-affirmed Eric Austen's explanation of the symbol, saying that the inside was a "runic symbol for death of man" and the circle the "symbol for the unborn child".
In 1973, the South African government tried to ban its use by opponents of apartheid.
It can be formed as U+262E ☮ Peace symbol in Unicode.
Rainbow flag
The international peace flag in the colours of the rainbow was first used in Italy on a 1961 peace march from Perugia to Assisi organised by the pacifist and social philosopher Aldo Capitini (1899–1968). Inspired by the peace flags used on British peace marches, Capitini got some women of Perugia hurriedly to sew together coloured strips of material. The march has been repeated many times since 1961, the most recent in 2010. The original flag was kept by Capitini's collaborator, Lanfranco Mencaroni, at Collevalenza, near Todi. In 2011, plans were announced to transfer it to the Palazzo dei Priori in Perugia.
The flag commonly has seven rainbow-colored stripes with the word "Peace" in the center. It has been explained as follows:
In the account of the Great Flood, God set the rainbow to a seal the alliance with man and nature, promising that there will never be another Flood. The rainbow thus became a symbol of Peace across the earth and the sky, and, by extension, among all men.
The flag usually has the colours violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red from top to bottom, but some have the violet stripe below the blue one (as in the picture at the right) or a white one at the top. A picture of Capitini's first peace flag, carried by Anna Capitini and Silvana Mencaroni, shows the colours red, orange, white, green, violet, indigo, and lavender.
In 2002, renewed display of the flag was widespread with the Pace da tutti i balconi ("Peace from every balcony") campaign, a protest against the impending war in Iraq planned by the United States and its allies. In 2003, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported leading advertising executives saying that the peace flag had become more popular than the Italian national flag. In November 2009, a huge peace flag, 21m wide by 40m long, was made in Lecce, Salento, by young members of "GPACE – Youth for Peace – Give Peace a Chance Everywhere".
The V sign
The V sign (U+270C ✌ Victory hand in Unicode) is a hand gesture, palm outwards, with the index and middle fingers open and all others closed. It had been used to represent victory during the Second World War. During the 1960s in the USA, activists against the Vietnam War and in subsequent anti-war protests adopted the gesture as a sign of peace.
Paper cranes
The crane, a traditional symbol of luck in Japan, was popularized as a peace symbol by the story of Sadako Sasaki (1943–1955), a girl who died as a result of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. According to the story, popularized through the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, in her last illness she started folding paper cranes, inspired by the Japanese saying that one who folded a thousand origami cranes was granted a wish.
Shalom/Salaam
A wordmark of the three words, Hebrew word "Shalom" (Hebrew: שָׁלוֹם), together with the Arabic "Salaam" (Arabic: سلام) and the English word "peace" has been used as a peace symbol in the Middle East. Shalom and Salaam mean "peace" and are cognates of each other, derived from the Semitic triconsonantal of S-L-M (realized in Hebrew as Š-L-M and in Arabic as S-L-M). The symbol has come to represent peace in the Middle East and an end to the Arab–Israeli conflict. Wall plaques, signs, T-shirts, and buttons are sold with only those words. (See Gallery, and see also Vulcan salute.)