Now, whether or not the priests of Heliopolis encouraged their worshippers to believe that such a creature really existed, they themselves knew well that it was a mere symbol of the sun; and it is easy to identify it with the bird “bennu” spoken of in the Book of the Dead and other Egyptian sacred texts, which unquestionably was a picturesque representative of the sun, rising, pursuing its course, and at regular intervals expiring in the fires of sunset, then renewing itself on the morrow in the flames of sunrise over Arabia. Plentiful evidence that this was perfectly understood in Greece and Italy of the classic age may be read in the works of their essayists and poets. Claudian (365–408), wrote, and Tickell, a British poet, translated into verse, a long poem on the phenix. Petrarch carried their wisdom onward when he declared there could be only one phenix at a time because there was only one sun.
When the Arabs succeeded the Romans in the Nile Provinces they picked up from the people remnants of the legend, and confused it with their own ancient belief in a creature that resisted burning, by whose existence they accounted for the incombustible property of asbestos, a mineral known to them, but the origin of which was a mystery. It came from the Orient, and some said it was a vegetable product, others the hair of a rat-like animal: the western Arabs, however, mostly believed it to be the plumage of a bird, so that naturally they identified it with the fire-loving phenix. Arabian authors of the 10th century and onward describe this bird, under the Greek name “salamandra,” as dwelling in India, where it lays its eggs and produces young in fire. Sashes, they say, are made of its feathers, and when one of them becomes soiled it is thrown on a fire, and comes out whole, but clean.
This is an excellent example of the mingling of fact and fancy by which a student of these old matters is constantly perplexed. It is probable that small woven articles had long been known to the Arabs and Moors as Eastern curiosities, for the people of southern China since very ancient times had been collecting and preparing fibrous asbestos, and weaving it into fire-proof cloth. Such fabrics had, no doubt, a rough, fuzzy surface, not unlike fur or the down of birds, and might easily be supposed to be the latter. Hence the assertion that asbestos was the skin of a bird indestructible by fire, the identification of the phenix with the salamandra (as a bird—it had other legendary forms), and the trade-name “samand” given to asbestos cloth when the Arabs themselves began to manufacture and sell it. So our proverbial idea of the salamander goes back to a remote antiquity; but how it came to be represented among us as a newt instead of a bird belongs to another book.
Meanwhile on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, where the legend of the phenix was popular, it had been introduced into Christianity as a symbol, as we know from memorial sculpture, and from the writings of St. Clement, who was the second pope after Peter. Its special meaning was immortality, which in that period meant the physical resurrection of the dead; and the peacock came to be used in the same sense, as representing, if not virtually merged with, the phenix. The image in men’s minds at that time appears to have been that of an eagle, a bird closely identified with the sun, clothed in the plumage of the peacock, another sun-bird (as representative of the gorgeous clouds at sunset); and the very name confirms these solar associations, for our “phenix” is the Greek word phoinix, crimson red. How large a place the peacock in this aspect fills in the art and mythology of China and Japan appears in Chapter VII.
Hulme informs us that Philippe de Thaum writes in his Bestiary of the mystic bird: “Know this is its lot; it comes to death of its own will, and from death it comes to life: hear what it signifies. Phoenix signifies Jesus, Son of Mary, that he had power to die of his own will, and from death come to life. Phoenix signifies that to save his people he chose to suffer upon the cross.” “God knew men’s unbelief,” St. Cyril laments, “and therefore provided this bird as evidence of the Resurrection.” St. Ambrose also declares that “the bird of Arabia teaches us, by its example, to believe in the Resurrection.” Passages of like tenor might be quoted from Tertullian and other expositors of the early Christian church, all showing the most unsuspicious faith in the real existence of such a bird.
The symbolic connection of this fabulous creature with the idea of immortality may have been an inheritance from Jewish traditions. According to the Talmud Eve, after eating the terrible fruit in the Garden of Eden, tried to force it, and its consequences, on all the animals, but the bird “chol” (the phenix) would not eat, but flew away from temptation, and thus preserved its original gift of perpetual life. “And now the phenix ... lives a thousand years, then shrivels up till it is the size of an egg, and then from himself emerges beautiful again.” In the Middle Ages this deathless bird was supposed to inhabit the sacred garden of the Earthly Paradise.
Peacocks carved on early Christian sarcophagi are perched on a palm tree (the conventional sign of martyrdom in primitive Christian iconography), and hence eloquent of that rapturous belief in immortality characteristic of the catacombs, as Mrs. Jenner expresses it. Representations of the bird rising from a flaming nest and ascending toward the sun are less common, but do occur in medieval heraldry, by which pictorial path, it is probable, the notion has come down to our own day and become the cognizance of one of the oldest American insurance companies.
The association with the palm mentioned above recalls another line of legendary, for some etymologists say that the name “phenix” should be so written (not phoenix), and that it is the older name of the date-palm. This tree was regarded in ancient Egypt as the emblem of triumph, whence, perhaps, our modern symbolic use of its fronds; and Pliny was informed that “in Arabia the phenix nested only on a palm,” and that “the said bird died with the tree and revived of itself as the tree sprang again.”
Now, Arabic authors of the Middle Ages had much to say of a mythical bird, “anka,” that lived 1700 years; and they explained that when a young anka grows up if it be a female the old female burns herself, and if it be a male the old male does so. This is very phenix-like, but the anka is distinguished by huge size, the Arabic writer Kazweenee, as quoted by Payne,[[87]] describing the anka as the greatest of birds. “It carries off the elephant,” he says, “as the cat carries off the mouse”; and he relates that in consequence of its kidnapping a bride God, at the prayer of the prophet Handhallah, “banished it to an island in the circumambient ocean unvisited by men under the equinoctial line.”
I find in Miss Costello’s Rose Garden of Persia[[88]] some interesting notes quoted from M. Garcin de Tassy, relative to the anka, which, De Tassy says, has become a proverbial symbol in Persia for something spoken of but not seen—and not likely to be! Here he seems to be using the Arabic name for the bird the Persians call “simurgh,” the signification of which, as Professor A. V. W. Jackson tells me, is “the mythical,” and which is derived from the avestan word for “eagle”—another link in our chain. De Tassy explains: