THE GRYPHON, OR GRIFFIN,
Was originally an emblem of life. It was used to adorn funeral monuments and sepulchres. The upper part of this allegorical animal resembles the eagle, the king of the birds, and the rest the lion, the king of beasts; which is said to imply that man, who lives upon the earth, cannot subsist without air. In later times it was supposed that the Gryphon was posted as a jailor at the entrance of enchanted castles and caverns where subterraneous treasures were concealed. Milton compares Satan in his flight to the Gryphon, in the following beautiful passage:
“As when a Gryphon through the wilderness,
With winged course o’er hill or moory dale,
Pursues the Arimaspian, who, by stealth,
Had from his wakeful custody purloined
The guarded gold; so eagerly the fiend,
O’er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.”
The Arimaspians were Asiatic wizards, who, by magic, used to obtain a knowledge of the places where treasures lay hidden. Their incessant wranglings with the Gryphons about gold-mines are mentioned by Herodotus and Pliny. Lucan says that they inhabited Scythia, and adorned their hair with gold; that they had but one eye in the middle of the forehead, and lived on the banks of the gold-sanded river Arimaspes.
Virgil, in his eighth Pastoral, mentions this animal as if really existing, but does not give us any description of it; and Claudian, in his Epistle to Serena, alludes to the supposed fact of their keeping watch over masses of gold in the bosom of northern mountains.
THE PHŒNIX.
Herodotus, Pliny, and nearly sixty other classical authors, have related marvellous stories of this bird, all of which are of course fabulous. The Phœnix, they say, inhabits the plains of Arabia, and is about the size of an eagle, with gorgeous plumage of purple and gold. He is the only one of his kind in the world. At the approach of death, he builds himself a nest of aromatic herbs, and on it yields up his life. From his marrow proceeds a worm, which shortly becomes a young Phœnix, whose first duty is to discharge the obsequies of his sire. For this purpose he collects a quantity of myrrh, which he moulds into the shape of an egg, as large as he can conveniently carry, and then scooping it out, he deposits the body of his sire in the inside. Having stopped it up again with myrrh, he carries it to the Temple of the Sun in Egypt, where he devoutly places it on the altar. This is the only time that he is seen during his life, which lasts five hundred years. According to others, after preparing a funeral pile of rich herbs and spices, he burns himself, but from his ashes revives in all the freshness of youth.
From late mythological researches it is conjectured that the Phœnix is a symbol of five hundred years, of which the conclusion was celebrated by a solemn sacrifice, in which the figure of a bird was burnt. His being restored to youth signifies that the new springs from the old.