Legend of the Phoenix
Phoenix Images
Phoenix
Rise of the Phoenix
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 phoenix bird symbolizes immortality, resurrection and life after death.
In ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology, it is associated with the sun god.
According to the Greeks, the bird lives in Arabia, near a cool well.
Every morning at dawn, the sun god would stop his chariot
to listen to the bird sing a beautiful song while it bathed in the well.
Only one phoenix exists at a time.
When the bird felt its death was near, every 500 to 1,461 years,
it would build a nest
of aromatic wood and set it on fire. The bird then was consumed by the flames.
A new phoenix sprang forth from the pyre.
It embalmed the ashes of its predecessor in an egg of myrrh
and flew with it to Heliopolis, "city of the sun,"
where the egg was deposited on the altar of the sun god.
In Egypt, it was usually depicted as a heron,
but in the classic literature as a peacock or an eagle.
