The fabled phoenix, in most legends, is a gold and purple bird with sweeping tail and jeweled eyes. When it grows old, the bird builds a nest of spices, herbs, and resin in 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, and a young phoenix develops from the remains. Reborn, the bird rises with the sun and spreads its bright new wings to greet the day. Thus its life continues, dying and being reborn over and over again for all eternity.

The Western phoenix lives and dies in many ways in the different versions of this story, and its life cycle varies from a hundred years to thousands. The rebirth process takes place through fire only in later versions of the legend. The bird's counterparts in Chinese legends never die at all.

The Greek traveler and historian Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century BCE, heard the phoenix story in Egypt, and wrote the first major account of this bird:

"They have also another sacred bird called the phoenix, which I myself have never seen, except in pictures. Indeed it is a great rarity, even in Egypt, only coming there [~] according to the accounts of the people of Heliopolis [~] once in five hundred years, when the old phoenix dies. Its size and appearance, if it is like the pictures, are as follows: The plumage is partly red, partly golden, while the general make and size are almost exactly that of the eagle. They tell a story of what this bird does, which does not seem to me to be credible; that he comes all the way from Arabia, and brings the parent bird, all plastered over with myrrh, to the temple of the Sun, and there buries the body. In order to bring him, they say, he first forms a ball of myrrh as big as he finds that he can carry; then he hollows out the ball, and puts his parent inside, after which he covers over the opening with fresh myrrh, and the ball is then of exactly the same weight as at first; so he brings it to Egypt, plastered over as I have said, and deposits it in the temple of the Sun. Such is the story they tell of the doings of this bird." (From The History of Herodotus, translated by George Rawlinson [New York: D. Appleton, 1859])

As the phoenix fable changed over time, fire eventually became part of the tale. In a fourth-century Latin poem by Lactantius, the older phoenix bursts into flame from the heat of the sun and burns to ashes in its nest of spices. Several centuries later, legends stated that the phoenix catches fire because it flies too close to the sun. In other versions, the nest of aromatic spices bursts into flame from the sun's heat or from the fanning of the bird's wings.

...There is no smoke without fire [~] what is the fire from which the legend of the phoenix was born? The nineteenth century anatomist Georges Cuvier suggested that on remote occasions a golden pheasant from China may have strayed across Asia into Arabia or Egypt; Peter Costello, in The Magic Zoo, points out that it is more likely that golden pheasants were brought there by traders or travelers.

,,,A suggested root for this aspect of the legend comes from a real aspect of bird behavior that is only slightly less remarkable.

Several types of birds engage in behavior known as "anting." They pick up ants in their beaks and rub them over their feathers. It seems that the birds derive some sort of pleasure from the formic acid (contained in ants) on their bodies. It was then discovered that it is not only ants that birds use for pleasure:

"In May, 1957, a tame rook named Niger, living in an aviary in my garden at East Horsley, in Surrey, disported himself on a heap of burning straw. With flames enveloping the lower part of his body and smoke drifting all around him, he flapped his wings, snatched at burning embers with his beak and appeared to be trying to put them under his wings. The sight of this was breathtaking, but there was still more to come. Every now and then he would pose amid the flames with his wings outstretched and his head turned to one side, looking exactly like the traditional picture of the phoenix." (Maurice Burton, Phoenix Reborn [London: Hutchinson 1959])

Perhaps this behavior, even if not solely responsible for the phoenix legend, was contributory towards it.
1:05:38 PM    comment []  

I dreamed, finally. Ordinary, mundane stuff with paved surfaces--freeways and parking lots, plaster and brick--except a Santa sleigh kept going past in the sky--amazing to me, but an advertisement, I learned, and not so magical. And so beautiful a pair of golden pheasants pursued one another in a weedy lot alongside the asphalt. A man in a suit was trying to capture them. And Dr. O was a late-night disc jockey behind a glass wall in a white cubicle making announcements and reading poems and taking umbrage.

I'm listening to my Snow Files CD this morning, Mark Snow's X-files music; very Tubular Bells-ish, but appropriate for some reason, especially inasmuch as I awoke with no poetry in my head.
11:12:33 AM    comment []