Phoenix

The phoenix is a bird about which the earliest sources are far more cautious than the later ones.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, gives the first extended account. He reports what the Heliopolitans say: a bird resembling an eagle, red and gold, which comes once in five hundred years bearing the body of its parent embalmed in myrrh, to bury it in the temple of the sun. Herodotus adds that he has not seen it himself except in a painting, and that he does not find the story credible. That scepticism is worth noting, because everything afterwards drops it.

The Egyptian source is almost certainly the bennu, a heron associated with Ra, with Atum and with Osiris, connected in the Heliopolitan theology with the primeval mound that first rose from the waters and with the daily rebirth of the sun. The bennu is a real element of Egyptian religion and its associations are with cycle and origin. The Greek elaboration, the five-hundred-year interval, the funerary flight from Arabia, goes well beyond it.

Fire is a later addition. Herodotus has no fire. The self-immolation on a nest of spices, and the young phoenix rising from the ashes of the old, develops in Roman-period writing; Tacitus discusses conflicting accounts of the interval, Pliny reports the bird's appearance in Rome under Claudius, and Ovid and Lactantius give the burning version. By the time the image is stable it has travelled a long way from anything Egyptian.

The number of years is unstable throughout: five hundred in Herodotus, 540, 1,000, 1,461 in others, the last matching the Egyptian Sothic cycle, which is why some accounts tie the bird to the calendar.

The phoenix entered Christian use very early and very explicitly. Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians around 96 CE, cites the bird by name as a natural sign that God provides of the resurrection to come, describing the death, the worm born from the decaying flesh, and the flight to Heliopolis. He offers it as evidence. Later writers, Tertullian, Origen, Ambrose, take it up, and the phoenix becomes a standard motif in catacomb painting, mosaic and funerary sculpture, usually shown with a rayed nimbus.

It is worth being clear that these writers believed the bird existed. The phoenix was not for them a metaphor but a fact of natural history that happened to be theologically convenient, in the same way that the peacock's supposedly incorruptible flesh was for Augustine. The shift from creature to symbol happens later, and it happens because the natural history collapsed.

Two other birds are routinely called phoenixes in English and are unrelated creatures.

The Chinese fenghuang is an auspicious composite bird, paired with the dragon, associated with the empress as the dragon is with the emperor, and with the arrival of peace and virtuous rule. It does not burn, does not die, and is not reborn. The translation as phoenix is a European convenience of the early modern period and it has misled generations of readers.

The Persian simurgh is a vast benevolent bird of the Shahnameh who raises the abandoned Zal, and in Attar's Conference of the Birds is the goal of a pilgrimage whose resolution turns on a pun. The Slavic firebird is another creature again. None of these is the Mediterranean phoenix, and the resemblances that exist are resemblances of function rather than of descent.