Peacock’s tail

The diffraction of light that occurs in natural phenomena such as rainbows, peacock feathers, certain insects, and the colors that appear on the surfaces of some metals during heating are persistent motifs within a particular stage of the alchemical opus. The cauda pavonis (the peacock s tail) is the brief stage that heralds the final... 

Rapid cycling through iridescent colours - Peacock s Tail. 

With the Peacock stage, the alchemist has entered into the inner experience of the astral world, which initially appears as ever shifting patterns of colour. This experience is often symbolised in alchemy by the appropriate image of the peacock s tail with its splendid iridescence of colour. In terms of this series of five stages, the turning point is reached with the Peacock. Up until this point the alchemist has experienced aspects of his being which he was... 

The Peacock s Tail is the central experience to this process, the point of inner transformation, which arises from a true consciousness of the astral body. We note also that the other stages mirror each other. Thus the Black Crow and the Phoenix are related as beginning and end of the process, but in a deeper sense they are both connected with death-processes. The dying to the senses of the Black Crow stage is ultimately transformed into the triumph over the death process of the physical, that is pictured by the Phoenix. There is a further mirroring of the White Swan and Pelican stages. The White Swan is an experience of the etheric forces in one s being, and this is later transformed into a conscious mastery and outward expression of these life forces. 

Sometimes the voyager feels he should report back his vision. He converts the life flow into a cosmic ink-blot test - attempts to label each form. "Now I see a peacock s tail. Now Muslim knights in colored armor. Oh, now a waterfall of jewels. Now, Chinese music. Now, gem-like serpents, etc." Verbalizations of this sort dull the light, stop the flow and should not be encouraged. 

Maynard Smith In relation to music, yes. Music has to be a peacock s tail. 

Humphrey I would suggest that John Maynard Smith s distinction isn t anything like so clear-cut as he is making out. Even a peacock s tail has direct markers of fitness, such as the symmetry of the eyes on the tail and its glossiness. It is no more costly to produce a tail which has beautifully symmetrical eyes than one which is not so symmetrical it is just that only the more fit males are able to accomplish this. 

This is followed by 7 washes, rinses or steepings, to which the Spiritus volatilis is added 7 times to the materia. When this occurs, all the colours of the rainbow appear, the so-called Peacock s tail, as a sign that Venus has begun its rule. 

The colourspiel of the Peacock s tail is as follows firstly, many colours appear, all in disarray. For example, white, red, black, green, yellow, grey, blue, everything is mixed. Then, all these colours disappear again, and one main colour after the other appears in the following sequence black, black-blue, dark red, highly red (this colour... 

This Peacock s tail should only appear during the transition from black to white colour. Should the Peacock s tail appear later, or should the black colour show up again, this is then a certain sign that something was incorrectly done insofar as the work was concerned and therefore, it was a failure. The same is true when a colour (such as the redness) appears before its time. The blackness should not show itself again at a later date, because once the raven is drowned, he should never return yet the Dove should return often. That is what the Philosophers say. 

Nobody can get from the black to the white colour, other than through the Peacock s tail, and nobody can get from the white to the red colour, other than through the yellow colour. The black stone represents the Winter of the philosophical work. The multi-coloured and the white Stone represents Spring, the yellow stone represents Summer, and the red stone represents Autumn, meaning the ripe fruit. 

It was often recorded that as the colors of the peacock s tail appeared in the Philosopher s Egg, a wonderful scent also came forth. 

Where complex properties occur in living systems, as for example in chaotic cardiac arrhythmias, they are characteristic of pathological failure of the normal controls— in this case in some kinds of heart disease—not of health. Even at the level of an individual enzyme, the enzyme peroxidase from horseradishes, an example of chaotic behavior has been known for many years, but we have no idea how its properties benefit the horseradish, and they contribute nothing to our present understanding of how metabolic systems are controlled in general. The sort of positive feedback loops that account for the complex behavior of economic systems, political relations, and indeed some aspects of biology such as the extravagant overdevelopment of the peacock s tail, are conspicuously absent from the major pathways in the metabolic economy. There is no reason, therefore, to see any contradiction in the claim that classical economic theory works much better in metabolism than it does in the domain in which it was developed. 

When any one in the dark preffes either corner of his eye with his finger, and turns his eye aw ay from his finger, he will fee a circle of colours like thofc in a peacock s tail and a... 

The Rule of Jupiter begins. It takes about 56 to 60 days more to achieve the Peacock s Colors. The alchemist slowly increases the temperature to fever heat to 41 C. A water washes the Nigredo. It is called Diana naked . Beautiful colors appear, very like the refraction of light on spilt oil. Alchemists know this as the Peacock s Tail. It signals the end of Jupiter s Rule. 

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