Record #117
Phoenix
A radiant bird eternally reborn through cycles of death and fire.
Original Text
In monumental effigies, in pyramids of stone, and in treasured mummies, the Egyptians sought eternity. It is therefore appropriate that their country should have given rise to the myth of a cyclical and deathless bird, though its subsequent elaboration is the work of Greece and of Rome. Adolf Erman writes that in the mythology of Heliopolis, the Phoenix (benu) is the lord of jubilees or of long cycles of time. Herodotus, in a famous passage (II, 73), tells withinsistent scepticism an early form of the legend:
Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix. I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness. The Egyptianstell a tale of this bird’s devices which I do not believe. He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun’s temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him. His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such is the tale of what is done by this bird.
Some five hundred years later, Tacitus and Pliny took up the wondrous tale; the former justly observed that all antiquity is obscure, but that a tradition has fixed the intervals of the Phoenix’s visits at I,46I years (Annals, VI, 28). The latter also looked into the Phoenix’s chronology; Pliny records (X, 2) that, according to Manilius, the bird’slife coincides with the period of the Platonic year, or Great Year. A Platonic year is the time required by the sun, the moon, and the five planets to return to their initial position; Tacitus in his Dialogus de Oratoribus gives this as I2,994 common years. The ancients believed that, upon fulfilment of this vast astronomical cycle, the history of the world would repeat itself in all its details under the repeated influence of the planets; the Phoenix would be a mirror or an image of this process. For a closer analogy between the cosmos and the Phoenix, it should be recalled that, according to the Stoics, the universe dies in fire and is reborn in fire and that the cycle had no beginning and will have no end.
Time simplified the method of the Phoenix’s generation. Herodotus speaks of an egg and Pliny of a maggot, but the poet Claudian at the end of the fourth century already celebrates an immortal bird that rises out of its own ashes, an heir to itself and a witness of the ages.
Few myths have been as widespread as that of the Phoenix. In addition to the authors already cited, we may add: Ovid (Metamorphoses, XV), Dante (Inferno, XXIV), Pellicer (The Phoenix and its Natural History), Quevedo (Spanish Parnassus, VI), and Milton (Samson Agonistes, in fine). Shakespeare at the close of Henry VIII (V, iv) wrote these fine verses:
But as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir, As great in admiration as herself . . .
We may also mention the Latin poem ‘De Arte Phoenice’, which has been attributed to Lactantius, and an AngloSaxon imitation of it dating from the eighth century. Ter- tulius, St Ambrose, and Cyrillus of Jerusalem have used the Phoenix as a proof of the resurrection of the flesh. Pliny pokes fun at the physicians who prescribe pills compounded of the nest and ashes of the Phoenix.
Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix. I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness. The Egyptianstell a tale of this bird’s devices which I do not believe. He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun’s temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him. His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such is the tale of what is done by this bird.
Some five hundred years later, Tacitus and Pliny took up the wondrous tale; the former justly observed that all antiquity is obscure, but that a tradition has fixed the intervals of the Phoenix’s visits at I,46I years (Annals, VI, 28). The latter also looked into the Phoenix’s chronology; Pliny records (X, 2) that, according to Manilius, the bird’slife coincides with the period of the Platonic year, or Great Year. A Platonic year is the time required by the sun, the moon, and the five planets to return to their initial position; Tacitus in his Dialogus de Oratoribus gives this as I2,994 common years. The ancients believed that, upon fulfilment of this vast astronomical cycle, the history of the world would repeat itself in all its details under the repeated influence of the planets; the Phoenix would be a mirror or an image of this process. For a closer analogy between the cosmos and the Phoenix, it should be recalled that, according to the Stoics, the universe dies in fire and is reborn in fire and that the cycle had no beginning and will have no end.
Time simplified the method of the Phoenix’s generation. Herodotus speaks of an egg and Pliny of a maggot, but the poet Claudian at the end of the fourth century already celebrates an immortal bird that rises out of its own ashes, an heir to itself and a witness of the ages.
Few myths have been as widespread as that of the Phoenix. In addition to the authors already cited, we may add: Ovid (Metamorphoses, XV), Dante (Inferno, XXIV), Pellicer (The Phoenix and its Natural History), Quevedo (Spanish Parnassus, VI), and Milton (Samson Agonistes, in fine). Shakespeare at the close of Henry VIII (V, iv) wrote these fine verses:
But as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir, As great in admiration as herself . . .
We may also mention the Latin poem ‘De Arte Phoenice’, which has been attributed to Lactantius, and an AngloSaxon imitation of it dating from the eighth century. Ter- tulius, St Ambrose, and Cyrillus of Jerusalem have used the Phoenix as a proof of the resurrection of the flesh. Pliny pokes fun at the physicians who prescribe pills compounded of the nest and ashes of the Phoenix.