Legend of the Phoenix

According to tradition . . . only one Phoenix at a time could live in our world. Its true home was Paradise, a land of unimaginable beauty lying beyond the distant horizon towards the rising sun. Nothing dies in Paradise, and here was the crux of the bird's dilemma. After a thousand years had passed, the Phoenix had become oppressed by the burden of its age; the time had come for it to die. To do so, the Phoenix had to wing its way into the mortal world, flying westwards across the jungles of Burma, and the torrid plains of India until it reached the scented spice groves of Arabia. Here it collected a bunch of aromatic herbs before setting course for the coast of Phoenicia in Syria. In the topmost branches of a palm tree, the Phoenix constructed a nest out of the herbs and awaited the coming of the new dawn which would herald its death.

As the sun soared above the horizon the Phoenix faced east, opened its bill and sang such a bewitching song that even the sun god himself paused for a moment in his chariot. After listening to the sweet tones, he whipped his horses into motion and a spark from their hooves descended onto the Phoenix's nest and caused it to blaze. Thus the Phoenix's thousand-year life ended in conflagration. But in the ashes of the funeral pyre a tiny worm stirred. Within three days the creature grew into a brand-new Phoenix, which then spread its wings and flew east to the gates of Paradise in the company of a retinue of birds. The Phoenix represents the sun itself which dies at the end of each day, but is reborn the following dawn. Christianity took the bird and the authors of bestiaries equated it with Christ, who was put to death but rose again. ~ J. Sparks

In ancient Egyptian mythology and in myths derived from it, the Phoenix is a female mythical sacred firebird with beautiful gold and red plumage. Said to live for 500 or 1461 years (depending on the source), at the end of its life-cycle the phoenix builds itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arises. The new phoenix embalms the ashes of the old phoenix in an egg made of myrrh and deposits it in Heliopolis ("the city of the sun" in Greek), located in Egypt. The bird was also said to regenerate when hurt or wounded by a foe, thus being almost immortal and invincible - a symbol of fire and divinity. Originally, the phoenix was identified by the Egyptians as a stork or heron-like bird called a bennu, known from the Book of the Dead and other Egyptian texts as one of the sacred symbols of worship at Heliopolis, closely associated with the rising sun and the Egyptian sun-god Ra.

The Greeks adapted the word bennu (and also took over its further Egyptian meaning of date palm tree), and identified it with their own word phoenix meaning the color purple-red or crimson (cf. Phoenicia). They and the Romans subsequently pictured the bird more like a peacock or an eagle. According to the Greeks the phoenix lived in Arabia next to a well. At dawn, it bathed in the water of the well, and the Greek sun-god Apollo stopped his chariot (the sun) in order to listen to its song. One inspiration that has been suggested for the Egyptian phoenix is flamingo of East Africa. This bird nests on salt flats that are too hot for its eggs or chicks to survive; it builds a mound several inches tall and large enough to support its egg, which it lays in that marginally cooler location. The convection currents around these mounds resembles the turbulence of a flame

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