While working on a new project on symbols for the excellent indie publishing house Saraband, I’ve often returned to the peacock, a bird with more symbolic associations than it has ‘eyes’ in its tail. According to ancient Greek mythology, those ‘eyes’ (a hundred of them, it is said) once belonged to the giant Argus Panoptes, the ‘All-seeing’. After Argus the All-seeing was killed by Hermes, the sky goddess Hera (whose Roman equivalent was Juno) plucked out his eyes and set them in the tail of the peacock, the bird sacred to her and the creature that, in Western art, is often shown pulling her chariot across the heavens. Indeed, the peacock’s fanned-out tail has itself been compared to the vault of the sky, with the ‘eyes’ representing the stars.
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| The Peacock Complaining to Juno (1881), Gustave Moreau, Musée Gustave-Moreau, Paris. |
When displayed, the male peacock’s tail is a glorious sight, and its habit of slowly and deliberately stalking around shows it off to its full advantage. It’s no wonder that the bird came to be linked with the Graeco–Roman queen of the sky, as well as with other deities the world over. Its dignified magnificence, and the crown-like crest of feathers on its head, caused it to become an emblem of royalty, too. Less positively, but also understandably, the peacock later became a symbol of Pride (Superbia in Latin), one of the seven deadly sins of Christian tradition.
All of this aside, my own experience of peacocks hasn’t filled me with unmitigated admiration for Pavo cristatus. As unlikely as it may seem, a peacock regularly disturbed my sleep with its astonishingly harsh and loud, dawn-greeting cries when I was living in the Dutch countryside (the noisy bird belonged to a local farmer). And whenever I do come face to face with a peacock, as I did most recently in West London, in Holland Park, its tail feathers have usually been firmly folded away. This does, however, give you a good view of its feet, which, like its voice, are less than lovely, and that makes me smile.
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| One of Holland Park's peacocks. |
For catching sight of a peacock’s feet reminds me of the Hindu sayings: ‘the peacock is delighted with its body, but ashamed of its feet’, and ‘the peacock has the feathers of an angel, the voice of the devil and the walk of a thief, and screams upon glimpsing its ugly feet’. This balanced viewpoint is echoed within Sancti Ephiphanii ad Physiologum [Saint Ephiphanius on the Physiologus], a book published in 1588, but based on Physiologus, a second century text:
The Epiphanius Physiologus says that the peacock is of all birds the most proud, and indeed his body and wings are beautiful. When he walks about he admires himself greatly, but when he looks down and sees his feet he gives a loud cry, for they are very ugly.
The medieval bestiaries,* which were based on Physiologus and other Classical texts, had much of interest to tell their readers about the peacock. They include De Proprietatibus Rerum [On the Properties of Things], which was written by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, or Bartholomew of England, in around 1240:
The peacock hath an unsteadfast and evil shapen head, as it were the head of a serpent, and with a crest. And he hath a simple pace, and small neck and areared, and a blue breast, and a tail full of eyes distinguished and high with wonder fairness, and he hath foulest feet and rivelled. And he wondereth of the fairness of his feathers, and areareth them up as it were a circle about his head, and then he looketh to his feet, and seeth the foulness of his feet, and like as he were ashamed he letteth his feathers fall suddenly, and all the tail downward, as though he took no heed of the fairness of his feathers. And as one saith, he hath the voice of a fiend, head of a serpent, pace of a thief. For he hath an horrible voice.
[This translation from the Latin is taken from Robert Steele’s Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus (1905), which you can read online, thanks to Project Gutenberg.]
‘An horrible voice’ and ‘foulest feet’ – I wouldn't go that far, but in giving the peacock a few imperfections, they somehow make this symbolic bird more endearing.
*For more on the peacock from the bestiaries, visit the Medieval Bestiary website.
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