The peacock is a symbol of immortality, because people once believed that the flesh of a peacock didn't decay after death. Saint Augustine supposedly tested that theory and wrote in City of God, "A year later, it was still the same, except that it was a little more shriveled, and drier." In addition to being a symbol of eternal life, in Christianity the peacock also represents resurrection since they molt their beautiful feathers and grow new ones.
According to some myths, in history, lore, and legend, the peacock symbol carries omens of nobility, guidance, holiness, watchfulness, and protection. Native American Chiefs used to wear Peacock feathers to show their communication with spirit and to express self-wisdom.
The Greco-Roman world associated the peacock with the queen goddess, Juno, attributing the opulence of the males’ tail feathers to her favor. The first-century Roman poet Ovid wrote that Juno filled the peacock with her own vanity, coloring each feather “with jewels as bright as stars.”
The peacock became a symbol of rebirth. Aristotle described the regeneration cycle of the birds’ feathers as concurrent with the change in seasons. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder noted that they make for a good meal. These observations coincided with a widely held belief that peacocks cycled through each season into immortality.
Early Christians saw the peacock as a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. Although mentioned only once in the Bible—when King Solomon acquires the wealth of Tarshish: “gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks”—the Christian tradition picked up the bird through St. Augustine of Hippo. In “City of God,” Augustine lauds the striking beauty of a peacock in full fan and notes that peacock flesh doesn’t spoil as quickly as meat from other birds. He compares this to Christ’s resurrection through his sacrifice on Calvary. The peacock flaunts a fleeting beauty, Augustine says, but its undying flesh reminds Christians of the immortality that comes from God’s eternal love: “For who but God the Creator of all things has given to the flesh of the peacock its antiseptic property?”
St. Anthony of Padua—the 13th-century Franciscan who, pious tradition holds, could preach to the animals—wrapped the peacock even more intimately in the Christian custom. By referencing the passage in which the peacocks of Tarshish are brought to Solomon, he drew a comparison to the way Christ brings sinful man to salvation.
“Peacocks, whose flesh, if dried, becomes incorruptible—at least so they say—and which are covered with wonderful feathers, depict the perfect, purified by the fire of tribulations and then adorned with great variety of virtues,” St. Anthony once preached. “All this is brought, by means of the preaching of the church, by Tarshish, that is, by the insidious waves of the world, to our Solomon, that is, to Jesus Christ. ”
Depictions of the bird also appear throughout Byzantine and medieval Christian art, most often in funerary scenes—catacombs, sarcophagi and commemorative mosaics. Monasteries and churches often let peacocks wander the grounds.
In the 20th century, the Roman Catholic American author Flannery O’Connor kept more than 40 peacocks at her Georgia farm. O’Connor was a bird enthusiast, but loved peacocks most of all. She called them the “king of the birds”—perhaps a reference to their Christological significance.
Why does a modern Protestant church in Manhattan bother keeping them? “You really have an appreciation for the mystery of life here,” says Ms. Schubert. “The grandeur of the peacocks adds up to exactly that—their beauty through the transformation that comes with them losing their feathers and then the feathers growing right back in.”
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