DID YOU KNOW: PEACOCK’S LITTLE EYE

 

 Image generated by : Gencraft

 

When seeing a peacock, aren’t you always marveling at the sight of his train? Such a mesmerizing mixture of colors coroneted with very specific markings known as the “ocelli” meaning “little eyes” or “eye-like spots” in Latin. 

Curious to know more?

The story begins when Zeus becomes infatuated with a beautiful nymph called Io, while making his advances on the poor creature, Hera exposes Zeus’s infidelity, giving him no choice but to turn Io into a heifer to protect her from the jealous Hera, who demanded to be offered the heifer, as proof of Zeus’s innocence. Hera placed the transformed nymph under the watchful eye of Argus, the one-hundred-eyed giant who ended up being slain by Hermes after that Zeus sent him to save the nymph. It is told, that Io wandered the earth and even crossed the sea through today’s Bosporus (a passage named after Io, which means ‘boos-cow’ and ‘foros-gate’) and gave birth to a son who became a figure in the Egyptian mythology. 

Back to our peacock known to be Hera's sacred bird and after Argus’s death, Hera took his hundred eyes and placed them on the tail feathers of the peacock, as a sign of his good service, creating the distinctive eye-shaped markings known as “ocelli”.

And once again, with this little story, I stand amazed by the human’s ability to fashion the marvelous out of the ordinary.

 

Meryem !