CHAPTER X

A FLOCK OF FABULOUS FOWLS

We are pretty sure to hear of the phenix every time a tailor or soap-maker announces that he will rebuild his shop after it has been burned; and its picture is a favorite with the advertising department of fire-insurance companies. The world first learned of this remarkable fowl when Herodotus brought back to Greece his wonder-tales from Egypt, some 400 years before Cleopatra made so much trouble by mixing love and politics. It will be well to quote in full the account by the great Greek traveller as it is found in the translation by Laurent:

There is another sacred bird, called the “phenix;” which I myself never saw except in a picture, for it seldom makes its appearance among the Egyptians—only every five-hundred years, according to the people of Heliopolis. They state that he comes on the death of his sire. If at all like his picture, this bird may be thus described in size and shape. Some of his feathers are of the color of gold; others are red. In outline he is exceedingly similar to the eagle, and in size also. This bird is said to display an ingenuity which to me does not appear credible: he is represented as coming out of Arabia, and bringing with him his father to the temple of the Sun, embalmed in myrrh, and there burying him. The manner in which this is done is as follows: In the first place he sticks together an egg of myrrh, as much as he can carry, and then tries if he can bear the burden. This experiment achieved, he accordingly scoops out the egg sufficiently to deposit his sire within. He next fills with fresh myrrh the opening in the egg by which the body was inclosed; thus the whole mass containing the carcase is still of the same weight. Having thus completed the embalming, he transports him into Egypt and to the temple of the Sun. (_Euterpe_, Book II.)

Herodotus seems to have been most interested in the odorous embalming, quaintly referred to in a 17th-century song—

Have you e’r smelt what Chymick Skill From Rose or Amber doth distill? Have you been near that Sacrifice The Phoenix makes before she dies?

And it will be noticed that this observant reporter says nothing of the quality that has given the bird its present popularity as a type of recovery from disaster—its ability to “rise from its ashes,” which, indeed, appears to have been a later conception.

Greeks of that day probably accepted this story from Herodotus without much demur or criticism, for they had their own traditions of wonderful birds—the Stymphalids, for example. These were gigantic and terrible fowls that lived along the river Stymphalus, in northern Arcadia—a region of savage mountains that the Athenians knew little about. They were believed to be man-eating monsters with claws, wings, and beaks of brass, and feathers which they shot out like arrows. “Heracles scared them with a brazen rattle, and succeeded in killing part and in driving away the rest, which settled on the island of Artias in the Black Sea, to be frightened away after a hard fight by the Argonauts.” So Seyfert summarizes their history; and an illustration on an antique vase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a flock of them looking much like pelicans.

Pausanias visited the curious River Stymphalus and found it rising in a spring, flowing into a marsh, and then disappearing underground—a good setting for strange happenings, and he refers to the legend in his usual bantering way, thus:

“There is a tradition that some man-eating birds lived on its banks, whom Hercules is said to have killed with his arrows.... The desert of Arabia has among other monsters some birds called Stymphalides, who are as savage to men as lions or leopards. They attack those who come to capture them, and wound them with their beaks and kill them. They pierce through coats of mail that men wear, and if they put on thick robes of mat the beaks of these birds penetrate them too.... Their size is about that of cranes and they are like storks, but their beaks are stronger and not crooked like those of storks. If there have been in all time these stymphalides like hawks and eagles, then they are probably of Arabian origin.”

The Greeks knew also of half-human Harpies, of web-footed Sirens, of the Birds of Seleucia, and of various other ornithological monstrosities, so that the tale of an Egyptian one was easily acceptable to their minds. The ugliest of the ugly flock were the Harpies, bird-women, on whom the ancients expended the direst pigments of their imagination, and whom Dante makes inhabitants of the gnarled and gloomy groves wherein suicides are condemned to suffer in the nether world—

There do the hideous Harpies make their nests Who chased the Trojans from the Strophades With sad announcement of impending doom; Broad wings have they, and necks and faces human, And feet with claws, and their great bellies fledged They make lament upon the wondrous trees.

The Romans liked Herodotus and his story as well as they pleased the Greeks, and Pliny heard or invented additional particulars. He insists that only one phenix exists at a time, clothed in gorgeous feathers and carrying a plumed head; and at the close of its long life it builds a nest of frankincense and cassia, on which it dies. From the corpse, as Pliny asserts, is generated a worm that develops into another phenix. This young phenix, when it has grown large enough, makes it its first duty to lay its father’s body on the altar in Heliopolis; and Tacitus adds that its body is burned there. The implication in most accounts is that the bird is male (the Egyptians are said to have believed all vultures female), and doubtless the whole conception is a primitive phase of the nature-worship out of which developed the more formal Osiris-legend.

But the picture has many variants. One is that the phenix subsists on air for 500 years, at the end of which, lading its wings with perfumed gums gathered on Mt. Lebanon (!) it flies to Heliopolis and is burned—_itself_ now, not its parent—into fragrant ashes on the altar of the Sun temple. On the next morning appears a young phenix already feathered, and on the third day, its pinions fully grown, it salutes the priest and flies away. Here we come to the best remembered feature of the mystery, caught and kept alive for us by the poets, such as John Lyly,[49] who in 1591 reminded the world that—

There is a bird that builds its neast with spice, And built, the Sun to ashes doth her burne, Out of whose sinders doth another rise, And she by scorching beames to dust doth turne.

De Kay[18] discourses on these notions in his _Bird Gods_:

“In the oldest tombs, discovered lately on the upper Nile by Jacques de Morgan and others, the phenix is seen rising from a bed of flames, which may well mean the funeral pyre of the defunct. The inscriptions in question are so early that they belong to a period when the ceremonial of the mummy had not become universal in Egypt, and the conquerors of Egypt, probably a swarm of metal-using foreigners from the valley of the Euphrates, who crossed from Arabia and the Red Sea, were still burning the bodies of their chiefs and kings. The phenix of these inscriptions may indicate the soul of the departed rising from its earthly dross as the soul of Herakles, according to the much later legend in its Greek form, rose from his funeral pyre to join the gods of Olympus.”

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