The Bird Whose Flesh Would Not Decay

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.