Flights of Imagination

John Collie - Priestess of Delphi

The peacock fragment in rhetoric is an enigma. The white peacock in Wonder Woman is an enigma. An enigma is a puzzle and a boundary figure. They appear whenever the world feels like a puzzle.

The ancient Greeks would go to Delphi to consult the oracle Pythia whose name evoked the memory of the snake killed by Apollo. Python’s dead hide made a channel for a woman to communicate with the gods. Pythia became the woman everyone wanted to consult before making a major decision (source) .

Who or what do we consult before taking a major undertaking? The ancient Greeks consulted the image of the peacock to solve a problem of human communication and political decision-making. Wonder Woman grew up in a world where the peacock roamed freely and perhaps this empowered her to consult it. The peacock contains in flash and flicker a whole world dedicated to Wonder Woman’s desire for our autonomy and freedom.

Look for the peacock. When it appeared to Charles Darwin, he wrote “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” Richard O. Prum in his The Evolution of Beauty says the peacock tail seems to challenge everything that Darwin had said in the Origin of the Species. The peacock appears whenever we need to grapple with a puzzle. The peacock is our most brilliant Self.