The Phoenix: A Universal Mythical Bird?

Introduction

Every 500 years, the ancient Greek historian Herodotus tells us, an eagle-like bird visited the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis. It flew from its home in the Arabian Peninsula, where it had spent its long years perched on a palm tree. The bird carried a burden: the ashes of its dead father, mummified within a ball of myrrh.

This tale is 2,500 years old. The flames from which the firebird phoenix is famously reborn are a later addition. Yet this version of the tale is far from original, but part of many overlapping traditions. At least a dozen mythical birds have been given the moniker of “phoenix.” They play various rich roles in their cultures, ranging from the familiar self-renewing bird reborn from its own ashes to unfathomable giants who allegedly sank Arab ships and magical peacocks that foretold the reigns of Chinese emperors.

The familiar form of the legend as it exists in the West today, adapted or inherited from the Greco-Roman myths, does not hint at the fascinating cultural web of phoenix representations. It thus misses a fascinating convergence: what led many cultures to envision so many similar creatures?

Ancient Egypt: Bird of the Sun

In Egyptian tomb reliefs portraying the world’s creation, a huge heron is often seen on top of a mound rising from the sea. The heron was a form of the sun god Ba, whose emergence from water represented light emerging out of infinite darkness. His first cry is said to have set time in motion. This mythical heron was called Bennu. His sacred status was noted by the priests of Heliopolis, who believed their Temple of the Sun stood on the exact spot where the world was first created.³

Egyptians thought of Bennu as a deity who guided resurrected souls in the afterlife, a scene depicted in the Book of the Dead.⁴ “I am that great Bennu which is in Heliopolis,” coffin texts read, “the supervisor of what exists.”⁵ People kept figures of this manifestation of the sun god close to them in funerals and tombs,⁶ ensuring the deceased would find a safe passage to their next life.⁷ For instance, a Bennu figure was found in the Bab el-Gasus tomb near ancient Thebes, placed under the armpit of a mummy as a guarantee of their resurrection in the afterlife.⁸

Egyptologists have long hypothesized that this heron was the ancestor of the phoenix, which it predated by two thousand years.⁹ In addition to both Bennu and the phoenix sharing Heliopolis as a home,¹⁰ and the similar sound of their names,¹¹ this link is justified by one of the first surviving literary instances of the phoenix’s story. The famous historian Herodotus, whose account above was foundational to the Western phoenix,¹² claimed that the Egyptians believed in a similar bird from which the Greek myth may have originated. However, Bennu does not have a visual or descriptive resemblance to Herodotus’s phoenix, which is an eagle-like bird with gold and red feathers.¹³ Therefore, although many scholars believe that the “classic” (Greco-Roman) phoenix was related to Bennu, some believe that one didn’t directly develop from the other.^14 15

Greece, Rome, and Europe: Self-Renewing Firebird

The Greek myth of the phoenix is the most popular today. Herodotus, Pliny, and other Greco-Roman writers consistently describe it as roughly the same size and appearance of an eagle,^16 17 and the contemporary Alexandrian Ezekiel the Dramatist describes it as unmistakably the King of all Birds.¹⁸ In spite of its many mentions in writing, no ancient Greek art featuring the phoenix survives today.¹⁹ Its few known Roman representations are puzzling, as they portray a Bennu-like heron instead.²⁰

In Greek mythology, there is only a singular, immortal phoenix that is reborn in an eternal cycle of between 500 and 1,000 years.²¹ This cycle seems to be strongly tied to the cultural purpose of this phoenix. The mythical bird was not thought of as a mere bewildering fantasy but as material evidence for the cyclicity of time, and its appearances were thought to mark great changes in the Greco-Roman world.²²

There are Roman records of several “historical” appearances of the phoenix, which were probably meant to symbolically mark new eras. For example, a phoenix allegedly appeared in Egypt²³ in 36 CE as an omen of Calilgula’s terrifying reign.²⁴ Emperor Claudius sought to replace the public’s memory of this appearance—and by association to erase the baneful past—by parading a living “phoenix” through the Roman Forum to celebrate the city’s 800th anniversary in 47 CE. However, Pliny reports that “no one” among contemporary Romans doubted that the bird was a fake.²⁵

In spite of its many variations, one version of the tale is especially unique to the Greek phoenix: at the end of its life, the bird sets itself aflame, only for a new bird to rise from its predecessor’s ashes. This evolution of the story came at a crucial time, written during the era of Constantine the Great by his Christian advisor Lactantius.²⁶ His version evokes the Christian image of Jesus’s resurrection.²⁷ To bestow authority on the newly-founded Byzantine Empire, between 346 to 350 CE, Constantine’s son minted coins of himself bearing a phoenix, symbolizing revival in the Roman Empire.²⁸ The phoenix on these coins appears like a heron, reminiscent of the Egyptian Bennu.²⁹

Christian art associated the phoenix with the resurrection of Christ,³⁰ to the extent of Coptic retellings placing the spot where the bird ignites at the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem.³¹ In Medieval Europe, the phoenix finally assumed its modern eagle-like form, usually seen on top of a burning pyre. This phoenix became popular throughout Europe in the Renaissance, often featured on heraldic crests and emblems to signify renewal.³² An example of this is a typical Italian medal, like the one made in the city of Mantua seen above, where a phoenix stands on a pyre while facing the sun.³³ The fiery pile is typically made of twigs of aromatic spice,³⁴ which seems to recall the story's origins in birds that dwell in either Arabia or India.³⁵ For instance, an etching of Raphael’s painting is accompanied by an Italian poem that describes how the phoenix builds a nest from oriental spices, in which it lives alone until its rebirth.

In 1646, the English physician Thomas Browne was among the first Europeans to explicitly challenge the actual existence of the phoenix, deeming it a mere fantasy. Although this quickly became a widespread scientific opinion,³⁶ depictions of the phoenix continued to gain popularity. The mythological beast makes appearances in modern works of fiction as diverse as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter.

China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam: Magical Peacocks

In 2647 BC, about the time when the Egyptian pyramids were being built, a legendary Chinese emperor had a curious incident. Huangdi, or the Yellow Emperor, was supposedly ruling one of the first states in Chinese history. He stepped into his palace’s courtyard to find a peacock-like bird, with a long neck and legs like a crane.³⁷ This was recorded as the first appearance of the Fenghuang, an immortal bird that only visits the human world during a period of peace and prosperity.³⁸ Conversely, the lack of their appearance was a terrible omen. “The [fenghuang] bird does not come,” Confucius allegedly wrote hundreds of years later during the Warring States period, “the river sends forth no map—it is over with me.”³⁹

Half a world away, this mythical bird independently assumed a parallel form and meaning to that of the phoenix. Along with its immortality and signaling of fortunes, the Fenghuang also held the “emperor of the birds” status similar to the phoenix and its other oriental relatives.⁴⁰ With time, this bird became known in Japan as the Hō-ō,⁴¹ in Korea as Bonghwang,⁴² and in Vietnam as Phượng hoàng, all traditionally dubbed phoenixes by Western translators.⁴³

Fenghuang’s imagery decorates countless paintings, garments, and ceramics, paralleled in popularity as an East Asian art motif only by the dragon.⁴⁴ Ceramics bearing its image were often traded in lands far apart, like this pitcher made in Vietnam during the 15th-16th centuries, which was sold in Indonesian markets, showing how widespread the imagery had become.

The Fenghuang symbolizes the female yin or the “empress,” which is why it is often seen with a dragon, who stands for the male yang or the “emperor."⁴⁵ The Chinese bird’s distinctive mark is often its five serrated tail feathers or, if depicted with a second bird, its head facing backward and crest overlapping.⁴⁶ Silk robes featuring the Fenghuang were worn by Chinese princesses until at least the tenth century. The motif later spread to garments used by the rest of society.⁴⁷

India, Arabia, Persia & China: Monstrous and Wise Giants

In the Mahabharata epic, nagas (a race of half-serpent deities) enslave the mother of the birds through a dishonest trick. This sparked an eternal enmity between the serpents and her son Garuda,⁴⁸ the king of the birds. Ancient tales depict Garuda as a divine bird of massive proportions feeding on giant serpents, and attacking clans of naga, as in the sculpture below, where he holds a hooded cobra head in his beak.⁴⁹ In one story, Garuda flies by an elephant and a giant tortoise mixed up in a fight, and simply picks up both in his talons for lunch.⁵⁰

These references suggest a continuity between Garuda and a series of gigantic mythical “phoenixes”: the Near Eastern Rukh, the Persian Simurgh, the Arabian Anqa,⁵¹ and the Chinese Peng.⁵² These birds all shared long age, magical properties, and the “King of the Birds” status that Ezekiel the Dramatist bestowed on the Greek phoenix,⁵³ though they all far exceed it in size.

In the One Thousand and One Nights, Sinbad the Sailor and his shipmates get stranded on a remote island where the infamous rukh lives. They find a giant egg, break the shell with their axes, and eat the large chick inside. The angry parent rukhs, however, chase the ship on its way back, pelting it with rocks “as large as mountains.” To save the ship from getting flooded, the sailors use the chick’s quills as water buckets, a description that resembles the Chinese peng, whose quills were reported to be useable as water jars and whose diet included swallowing camels, according to the traveler Chou Ch’ű-fei.⁵⁴ The rukh also bears a striking resemblance to Garuda, and is similarly reported to carry off elephants and rhinos.⁵⁵ Both Marco Polo⁵⁶ and Ibn Battuta recorded what they thought was an appearance of this bird in the seas of China.⁵⁷

In Islamic mythology, anqa and simurgh make various appearances as symbolic rulers and intelligent creatures who guide or rescue their followers, echoing not only Garuda but even the Egyptian Bennu. In the Shahnameh, an 11th-century Persian epic, Zal is abandoned as a boy at the top of a mountain. A simurgh takes him into her care, raising him and even teaching him human speech. Zal then goes on to become a great hero and kills the knight Esfandiyār with the powers of a magic simurgh feather.⁵⁸

In the 12th century Persian poem The Conference of the Birds, a group of thirty birds embark on a journey in search of their king—the simurgh. The poem is a remarkable religious allegory in which the birds represent individual souls embarking on a pilgrimage. After a long series of trials, they finally understand that “they themselves are the simurgh.” Their name combines “si-” (thirty) and “-murgh” (birds)⁵⁹ to echo the spiritual unity of sufism, and thus creating the simurgh as a religious device.⁶⁰

Finally, a 10th-century Arabic epistle, The Case of the Animals versus Man, represents these two birds as kings: anqa ruling over birds of prey and the simurgh ruling over the songbirds. This retelling gives the anqa her own voice and impressive perspective on her relationship with humans.⁶¹ She was never a monster, it turns out, but a misunderstood outcast. The anqa never sank ships, but guided the lost ones back on course. She got so fed up with the human race’s “oppression and trespasses against animals” that she fled to mountains and remote islands, merely seeking to live in peace.⁶²

Conclusion

For thousands of years, mythical birds with striking similarities have appeared in cultures all over the world. While they may have originated independently, we can be sure that these cultures intermingled and cross-pollinated. Translators often considered them all phoenixes. Today, we can try to restore the specificity of each of these versions of the mythic bird, many of which are still commonly confused with each other in art collections and archives. Although not every culture has a bird that is reborn from its own ashes, so many have their own wonderful “phoenix” story that is worth telling on its own terms.