The Phoenix
The fabled phoenix is a crimson, gold, and purple bird with sweeping tail and jeweled eyes. It lives in a distant garden of flowers and crystal springs. When its wings become heavy with age, the bird builds a nest of spices, herbs, and resin in the top of a date palm.
The heat of the sun ignites the twigs, and the phoenix stands in the flames with outspread wings. The bird burns to ashes. In cool starlight a young phoenix forms in the remains of its parent.
The reborn bird rises with the rising sun and spreads its bright new wings to greet the day. It flies high with youthful strength, followed by all the birds of the air. Its own parent and its own child, the only one of its kind in the world, the aged phoenix dies and is reborn over and over again through all eternity.
This version of the story is the most common in our time.
The Western phoenix lives and dies in many ways in different versions, and its life cycle varies from story to story, from 100 years to thousands. The bird's legendary counterparts in China and Tapan never die at all, but live in the Land of the Immortals.
From its ancient beginnings, though, the phoenix has always been likened to the sun. The shining bird of fable forever renews itself like the sun, dying fiery red at the end of the day and rising golden the next morning.
Greatest of mythical birds, the phoenix is the triumphant symbol of rebirth and renewal of the human spirit.
The Phoenix from the Past
The mysterious beginnings of the phoenix (also fenix or phenix) can be seen in its very name, a Greek word that also means "purple-red," "crimson," "date," "date palm," and "Phoenicia."
The date palm continually renews itself, and Phoenicia is "the red land." Together, the several words suggest that the bird is associated with red and purple and comes from the East, land of the sunrise. Traditionally, the phoenix has been sacred to the sun.
Phoenix was the name Greek writers gave the Egyptian bennu, a symbol of the gods Ra and Osiris and a hieroglyph representing the sun.
The bennu introduces itself in the Egyptian Book of the Dead: "I am bennu, that which is in Heliopolis. I am the keeper of the book of that which is, and of that which shall be."
This stork or heron figure would not seem to be the eagle-like bird the Greek historian Herodotus saw in Egyptian paintings, but he did report that it was worshipped in Heliopolis, "the City of the Sun."
The Phoenix Appears in Egypt
Tacitus
In his Annals, a history of Rome, Tacitus [TA-cih-tus] circa A.D. 55-120, tells of another report of the phoenix being seen in Egypt. That recorded appearance of the sacred bird was in the period A.D. 32-37, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius. Tacitus was the first writer to mention the birds that accompany the phoenix in its flight.
During the consulship of Paulus Fabius and Lucius Vitellius, the bird called the phoenix, after a long succession of ages, appeared in Egypt and furnished the most learned men of that country and of Greece with abundant matter for the discussion of the marvelous phenomenon. It is my wish to make known all on which they agree with several things, questionable enough indeed, but not too absurd to be noticed.
That it is a creature sacred to the sun, differing from all other birds in its beak and in the tints of its plumage, is held unanimously by those who have described its nature. As to the number of years it lives, there are various accounts.
The general tradition says five hundred years. Some maintain that it is seen at intervals of fourteen hundred and sixty-one years, and that the former birds flew into the city called Heliopolis successively in the reigns of Sesostris, Amasis, and Ptolemy, the third king of the Macedonian dynasty, with a multitude of companion birds marveling at the novelty of the appearance.
But all antiquity is of course obscure. From Ptolemy to Tiberius was a period of less than five hundred years. Consequently some have supposed that this was a spurious phoenix, not from the regions of Arabia, and with none of the instincts which ancient tradition has attributed to the bird.
For when the number of years is completed and death is near, the phoenix, it is said, builds a nest in the land of its birth and infuses into it a germ of life from which an offspring arises, whose first care, when fledged, is to bury its father.
This is not rashly done, but taking up a load of myrrh and having tried its strength by a long flight, as soon as it is equal to the burden and to the journey, it carries its father’s body, bears it to the Altar of the Sun, and leaves it to the flames. All this is full of doubt and legendary exaggeration. Still, there is no question that the bird is occasionally seen in Egypt.
From The Annals of Tacitus, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. London: Macmillan, 1877.
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