A bird that lives 500 years before it dies—sometimes by fire, sometimes not—only to be reborn from its ashes and live another 500 years is, today, one of the most widely known mythical creatures. Towns are named after it; its figure adorns coins and publishing logos; and it haunts plays, poems, and novels—from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (1613) and Yeats’s “His Phoenix” (1919) to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939).
It is, of course, the phoenix, and while there is said to be only one in existence at any time, its significance to people and cultures, as Joseph Nigg shows in his survey of the bird, has multiplied over time.
The Western myth was slow to catch on, and originated in Egypt. The Egyptian benu was a heron-like bird that was understood to be the physical manifestation of the sun god, Ra. In the Pyramid Texts, for example, it is depicted as standing on the “Primordial Mound” of creation. In the Book of the Dead, the benu is a divine guide that helped souls in their spiritual journey through the underworld. Thus, it was associated with both transformation and the sun.
It is the benu, it seems, that Herodotus refers to in his Histories (ca. 450-425 b.c.) as an Egyptian “sacred bird called the phoenix,” though many of the details vary. The phoenix, Herodotus tells us, is a bird of “great rarity . . . partly red, partly golden” with the “general make and size . . . of the eagle” that lives for 500 years before it dies in Arabia. The bird’s child then carries the parent bird’s carcass, wrapped in myrrh, to the Temple of the Sun in Egypt, where it is buried.
Nigg writes that there’s no mention of the bird’s 500-year lifespan in existent Egyptian sources, nor is there any mention of the carcass of its parent wrapped in myrrh. In Herodotus, furthermore, the phoenix is like an eagle, whereas the Egyptian benu is always portrayed as a heron.
While Herodotus seems to have been cribbing from another source, it is his account of the phoenix that begins the long history of the mythical bird in the West. In both the Iliad and Odyssey, the word “phoinix” and its cognates always refers to people and things that originated from the ancient island of Phoenicia, not a bird of paradise. And while there is a brief mention of the phoenix in Hesiod’s Precepts of Chiron (ca. 700 b.c.), which is quoted in Plutarch’s Obsolescence of Oracles (ca. 100 a.d.), no details of the bird are given, other than its unnaturally long life.
The other ancient propagator of the myth was Ovid. It is in his account of the bird in Amores that it is stated that there is only one phoenix in existence at any time, and it is in Metamorphoses that we have the first mention of the most striking detail of the phoenix myth: the bird’s rebirth from its parent. Ovid writes:
Drawing from the lost account of the phoenix in the work of the poet and astrologer Marcus Manilius, as well as older accounts, Pliny the Elder also writes that the young phoenix is reborn; but in his account, it is not from the parent’s breast but from “a kind of maggot” in its parent’s bones that the young bird emerges. Unlike Herodotus, Pliny describes the phoenix as resembling the Asian golden pheasant, which was the model, Nigg points out, of another ancient mythical bird: the Chinese fenghuang.
Nigg traces the changing significance of the bird, and its sudden rise in popularity during the Christian Middle Ages. While the bird was seen by secular Romans as little more than a curious myth, Nigg argues that from Lactantius’ De Ave Phoenice (which helped establish the tradition further of the bird dying by fire) to late medieval accounts, the phoenix became a symbol and proof of the resurrection and an allegory for virtuous living. According to Nigg, whereas ancient writers generally treated the phoenix’s existence with skepticism, Christians in the Middle Ages took it to be real. The bird’s existence, however, was again called into question in the early Renaissance.
While this may be generally true, the timeline is a little too neat. First, both Christian and pagan writers before the Middle Ages occasionally treat the bird as real. The 1st-century Saint Clement I of Rome certainly understood the bird to actually exist when he wrote in a letter to the Corinthians: “Do we then think it to be a great and marvelous thing, if the Creator of the universe shall bring about the resurrection of them that have served Him with holiness in the assurance of a good faith, seeing that He showeth to us even by a bird the magnificence of His promise?” But so did Pomponius Mela, who describes the phoenix in his De Chorographia (ca. 44 a.d.) as “the most remarkable bird,” of which there is only “one of a kind” in existence at any time. The 2nd-century rhetorician Aelian wrote in his De Natura Animalium that the “Phoenix knows how to reckon 500 years without the aid of arithmetic, for it is a pupil of all-wise Nature.”
Second, while Christian writers in the Middle Ages seem to treat the bird as real in etymologies and bestiaries, this is complicated by the fact that most of them are less interested in animals as animals and more interested in their symbolic significance. While the phoenix may have been more widely treated as a myth after Sir Thomas Browne’s debunking of the bird in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), a number of earlier Christian accounts call the phoenix’s existence into question. Albertus Magnus (1200-1280), for example, writes in his account of the phoenix in De Animalibus that ancient writers are “guilty of many untruths” and goes on to relay the bird’s “supposed” characteristics.
What did change radically in the Renaissance was the bird’s meaning. Treated for centuries as a symbol of piety—”It brings forth a fire with its wings,” Hugh of Fouilloy writes in his Aviarium (ca. 1132-52), “because by the heat of the Holy Spirit, the righteous man kindles the mind aroused by the wings of contemplation”—the bird becomes in Petrarch’s hands a metaphor for the exemplary and beautiful Laura: The phoenix forges with her golden plumes, Petrarch writes, Without the help of art, a jewel bright / For her beautiful neck so smooth and white / That it soothes every heart and mine consumes.
Chaucer uses the myth in much the same way in his Book of the Duchess (1369), where he describes the late wife of John of Gaunt as “the solyn fenix of Arabye.” Queen Elizabeth adopted the phoenix as one of her “personal emblems,” Nigg writes, using it on a silver medal and in portraits. In The Light of Britayne (1588), published the year England defeated the Spanish Armada, Henry Lyte honored Elizabeth as “the Phoenix of the worlde” and “the Angell of Englande.”
From Elizabeth on, the phoenix is associated with individuality, creativity, and passion. Shakespeare uses the bird as a metaphor for originality and fame. In Herrick’s “A Nuptiall Song,” the phoenix is a bird of passion. Byron associates the bird with fame, and Keats with inspiration. For D. H. Lawrence, Nigg writes, the bird embodies “his vision of the self’s realization through primal forces.” For James Joyce, the phoenix is a metaphor for the circularity of human history.
The shift in significance shows a change in how we think about ourselves. Once preoccupied, at least publicly, with purity and sacrifice, we now live for the moment and burn with desire, not piety. But as Nigg shows, the idea of rebirth has remained.
Micah Mattix is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and associate professor of English at Regent University.
