The Japanese are fond of the peacock as a motive in their exquisite art, and frequently combine it with the peony, as do the Chinese, who consider that the only flower worthy of such association. Another subject frequently seen illustrated is a representation of the Buddhist healing deity Kujako Myowo, the Japanese analogue of the Hindoo deification of this fowl.
Whether the peacock was brought to the Mediterranean region from India or Persia or from Phoenicia is unknown. It is commonly said that Alexander the Great was its introducer; but wherever it went its symbolic significance accompanied it, otherwise the peoples of Greece and Italy would hardly have given it the name of their own goddess of light and day, or have held it to be a visible sign of the rainbow itself. In combination with the eagle it was originally an attribute of Pan, who later was obliged to yield it to Juno, the goddess of Heaven, thus making it the star-bird, the symbol of the starry firmament, on account of the “eyes” in its tail-feathers, which were regarded as the very stars themselves. Out of this arose many myths, chief among which is that of the hundred-eyed Argus—how Argus was set by Juno to watch Io, of whom she had been jealous, but was killed by Mercury in the interest of the queen’s unrepentant husband; and how Juno makes the best of a bad situation:
Thus Argus lies in pieces cold and pale; And all his hundred eyes with all their light Are closed at once in one perpetual night. These Juno takes, that they no more shall fail, And spreads them on her peacock’s gaudy tail.[69]
But the Christians, in their revolt against everything Pagan, regarded this bird, which like so many other facts and fancies of the ancient régime they could not destroy, from a new and different angle. They observed that although it lost (by molting) its splendid raiment yet as often it was re-acquired—manifestly a similitude of the resurrection of the devoted soul into renewed glories after death. The fact was true, of course of all birds, but it was most noticeable in this gaudy stranger from the land of sunrise; and, in addition, a belief was borrowed from the phenix that its flesh was incorruptible. Thus the peacock became in early Christian art a symbol of immortality.