Peacock

The peacock's resurrection symbolism has two roots, one observed and one mistaken. The observed one is the annual renewal of its spectacular train, shed and regrown each year. The mistaken one is the ancient belief that peacock flesh does not decay, Augustine reports having tested it himself at Carthage and offers it in the City of God as a natural analogue for the incorruptible resurrected body, and on that basis peacocks appear in the Roman catacombs and on early Christian sarcophagi from the third and fourth centuries. The bird thus entered Christian art as a promise of eternal life, its hundred eyes reread as the all-seeing Church.

The peacock's colour is itself a scientific curiosity worth stating: the iridescent blues and greens of the train are not produced by pigment at all but by the microscopic structure of the feather's barbules, which are built as a photonic crystal that reflects only certain wavelengths of light, the same physical principle, structural colour, seen in butterfly wings and opals; the feathers that classical and Christian writers took as proof against decay are, in that sense, made from geometry rather than dye, a display that would look identical to a peacock without a single molecule of blue or green pigment in it.

The many eyes of the peacock's train have their own Greek story: they are the hundred eyes of the giant Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing watchman, which Hera transferred to the bird's tail after Argus was slain, as Ovid tells it. In India the peacock is the vahana of Kartikeya, the war-god, and a peacock feather adorns the crown of Krishna, so that the bird carries both martial and tender associations; it is also linked with Saraswati and, as a killer of snakes, with the destruction of poison and evil. The peacock's sheer visual extravagance made it, almost everywhere it occurs, a sign of royalty, pride and the sun, the fanned train read as a radiant disc.

India formally recognised the bird's ancient prestige in 1963 by naming the Indian peafowl the national bird, and it has been a protected species under India's Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 ever since, making it illegal to hunt, capture or trade the birds; the legal protection sits on top of millennia of religious and royal reverence for a species that, unusually among the world's iconic birds, has never been especially rare or endangered in its native range. A point of species accuracy: peacock properly names only the male bird, the female is a peahen and the species peafowl, and the vivid train belongs to the Indian peafowl described above; two further, distinct peafowl species exist, the green peafowl of Southeast Asia and the Congo peafowl of central Africa, both far less familiar in the Greek and Indian traditions recorded here.