The Phœnix.
The Rabbins tell us "that all the birds having complied with the first woman, and, with her, having eaten of the forbidden fruit, except the phœnix, as a reward it obtained a sort of immortality. It lived five hundred years in the wilderness; then making a nest of spices, it lighted it by the wafting of its wings, and the body was consumed. From the ashes arose a worm which grew up to be a phœnix." Moore, in "Paradise and the Peri," alludes to
The enchanted pile of that lonely bird
Who sings at the last his own death-lay,
And in music and perfumes dies away.
"The myth of the phœnix," says George Stephens, in Archæologia, "is one of the most ancient in the world. Originally a temple type of the immortality of the soul, its birthplace appears to have been the sunny clime of the fanciful and gorgeous East. Even in the days of Job and David it was already a popular tradition in Palestine and Arabia."
Herodotus describes the phœnix in the following words: "The plumage is partly red, partly golden, while the general make and size are almost exactly that of the eagle. They tell a story in Egypt of what this bird does, which appears incredible,—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 exactly of the same weight as at first. So he brings it to Egypt, as I have said, and deposits it in the Temple of the Sun." Ariosto alludes to this fable in the voyage of Astolfo—
"Arabia, named the Happy, now he gains;
Incense and myrrh perfume her grateful plains;
The virgin phœnix there, in need of rest,
Selects from all the world her balmy nest."
The phœnix, as a sign over chemists' shops, was adopted from the association of this fabulous bird with alchemy.