About the Phoenix Myth

 

The Phoenix rises from the ashes,
a firebird that inspires the soul
with hope and beauty.
The violin, pan flute, harmonica,
cello, double bass and piano,
the servants of music,
put the artist
through the purifying flame of truth
to become an oracle of a world beyond words
where fantasy transcends reality.

The Phoenix Bird

by Hans Christian Andersen
(1850)

In the Garden of Paradise, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, bloomed a rose bush. Here, in the first rose, a Bird was born. His flight was like the flashing of light, his plumage was beauteous, and his song ravishing. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, when she and Adam were driven from Paradise, there fell from the flaming sword of the cherub a spark into the nest of the Bird, which blazed up forthwith. The Bird perished in the flames; but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new one the one solitary Phoenix Bird. The fable tells that he dwells in Arabia, and that every hundred years, he burns himself to death in his nest; but each time a new Phoenix, the only one in the world, rises up from the red egg.

The Bird flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in color, charming in song. When a mother sits by her infant's cradle, he stands on the pillow, and, with his wings, forms a glory around the infant's head. He flies through the chamber of content, and brings sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table smell doubly sweet.

But the Phoenix is not the Bird of Arabia alone. He wings his way in the glimmer of the Northern Lights over the plains of Lapland, and hops among the yellow flowers in the short Greenland summer. Beneath the copper mountains of Fablun, and England's coal mines, he flies, in the shape of a dusty moth, over the hymnbook that rests on the knees of the pious miner. On a lotus leaf he floats down the sacred waters of the Ganges, and the eye of the Hindoo maid gleams bright when she beholds him.

The Phoenix Bird, dost thou not know him? The Bird of Paradise, the holy swan of song! On the car of Thespis he sat in the guise of a chattering raven, and flapped his black wings, smeared with the lees of wine; over the sounding harp of Iceland swept the swan's red beak; on Shakspeare's shoulder he sat in the guise of Odin's raven, and whispered in the poet's ear "Immortality!" and at the minstrels' feast he fluttered through the halls of the Wartburg.

The Phoenix Bird, dost thou not know him? He sang to thee the Marseillaise, and thou kissedst the pen that fell from his wing; he came in the radiance of Paradise, and perchance thou didst turn away from him towards the sparrow who sat with tinsel on his wings.

The Bird of Paradise renewed each century born in flame, ending in flame! Thy picture, in a golden frame, hangs in the halls of the rich, but thou thyself often fliest around, lonely and disregarded, a myth "The Phoenix of Arabia."

In Paradise, when thou wert born in the first rose, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, thou receivedst a kiss, and thy right name was given thee thy name, Poetry.

The origin of the Phoenix Myth

"There was perhaps no astronomical phenomenon more startling to primitive and early civilized man than the total solar eclipse. Without any warning by way of sound or sight he noticed an eerie and untimely darkness settling over the land, and when he looked at the sun, he saw a menacingly dark circle covered the bright central area of light; from the edge of the darkness a desperate flare of shooting light heightened the dramatic effect of the experience, a flare which tended to take on a feathery texture, so much more spectacular in contrast to the dark centre; in an annular eclipse the light takes on the form of a bright ring. Since the flare of the total eclipse frequently reaches out farther on two opposite sides, the Assyrians and Egyptians pictured this effect as the wings of a mighty bird. The Chinese also developed the bird with outstretched wings in their image of the sun. Then followed the creation of the phoenix, the garuda of India and fanciful birds to represent the sun itself."

From The Mask, the Unicorn and the Messiah by Elmer G. Suhr

The Eye of God

"In his chapter devoted to the winged globe, Compte d'Alviella writes, 'In Egypt itself the sun appeared from remote ages as the essential manifestation, the visible face, the "Eye" of the One and only God.' While one does not have to be overly imaginative to perceive the resemblance of the sun's corona to a gigantic cosmic bird it is equally true that the overall appearance of the totally eclipsed sun usually bears a distinct resemblance to a 'radiant divine eye.' The priests and rulers of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were perfectly cognizant of this profound symbolism in the total eclipse and both of these ancient cultures had a variant of the winged sun-disk symbol, which incorporated this 'eye' symbolism."

A winged sun symbol graces
an Egyptian pyramid's capstone.

From Treasures of Darkness by Robin Edgar

The picture of the 1991 total solar eclipse is used with permission from and is copyrighted by Steve Albers. The other picture in this animation is one of the iris of the human eye.