Cover of The Phoenix
The Phoenix An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast
by Joseph Nigg
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Cloth: 978-0-226-19549-0 | Electronic: 978-0-226-19552-0
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Arising triumphantly from the ashes of its predecessor, the phoenix has been an enduring symbol of resilience and renewal for thousands of years. But how did this mythical bird become so famous that it has played a part in cultures around the world and throughout human history? How much of its story do we actually know? Here to offer a comprehensive biography and engaging (un)natural history of the phoenix is Joseph Nigg, esteemed expert on mythical creatures—from griffins and dragons to sea monsters.

Beginning in ancient Egypt and traveling around the globe and through the centuries, Nigg’s vast and sweeping narrative takes readers on a brilliant tour of the cross-cultural lore of this famous, yet little-known, immortal bird. Seeking both the similarities and the differences in the phoenix’s many myths and representations, Nigg describes its countless permutations over millennia, including legends of the Chinese “phoenix,” which was considered one of the sacred creatures that presided over China’s destiny; classical Greece and Rome, where it can be found in the writings of Herodotus and Ovid; nascent and medieval Christianity, in which it came to embody the resurrection; and in Europe during the Renaissance, when it was a popular emblem of royals. Nigg examines the various phoenix traditions, the beliefs and tales associated with them, their symbolic and metaphoric use, the skepticism and speculation they’ve raised, and their appearance in religion, bestiaries, and even contemporary popular culture, in which the ageless bird of renewal is employed as a mascot and logo, including for our own University of Chicago.

Never bested by hardship or defeated by death, the phoenix is the ultimate icon of hope and rebirth. And in The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast, it finally has its due—a complete chronicle worthy of such a fantastic and phantasmal creature. This entertaining and informative look at the
life and transformation of the phoenix will be the authoritative source for anyone fascinated by folklore and mythology, re-igniting our curiosity about one of myth’s greatest beasts.
 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Since publication of The Book of Gryphons in 1982, Joseph Nigg has explored the rich cultural lives of mythical creatures in a variety of styles and formats for readers of all ages. His books have garnered multiple awards and have been translated into more than twenty languages. His most recent book, Sea Monsters: A Voyage around the World’s Most Beguiling Map, was also published by the University of Chicago Press. He lives in Denver.
 

REVIEWS

"Nigg’s The Phoenix is as singular as its subject. With intelligence, grace, and sound scholarship, he has restored this extraordinary beast to its rightful place in the universal library.”
 
 
— Alberto Manguel, author of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

“Nigg tells the intricate story of the phoenix in human culture with the most meticulous thoroughness, from its origins in ancient Egypt, Greece, and China to its use as a symbol of resurrection of New York City after the bombing of the World Trade Center. The tale of this mythic bird is so ubiquitous, multifaceted, and evocative that it seems to merge with the story of humankind.”
— Boria Sax, author of Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human

“This exhaustively researched and meticulously organized study of the mythical phoenix is an exceptional work of scholarship. . . . Even readers familiar with just the bare bones of the phoenix myth will find this book an engrossing history of an idea.”
 
— Publishers Weekly

“In this insightful cultural history of the mythical, self-immolating bird, Nigg traces the evolution of the phoenix from its origin as a sacred Egyptian symbol of the sun to its modern appearances in popular literature and as a motif in civic and corporate logos. Using excerpts from the writings of scholars, ecclesiastics, and poets—as well as a selection of pictorial representations from ancient eras to the present day—Nigg illustrates how the creature’s association with rebirth and longevity has resonated throughout history, serving variously as a symbol of resurrection to Christians, an alchemical allegory for the process of chemical and spiritual transformation, and a poetic convention for an idealized lover or the hopeless passion of the lovelorn. The enduring power of the phoenix as an emblem of triumph over adversity even led to its adoption as a symbol for rebuilding efforts following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Highly recommended.”
— Library Journal

“Nigg ransacks obscure texts—ancient, medieval, and modern—to discover the phoenix’s strange, exotic, compelling identity.”
 
— Literary Review

"Ambitious and painstakingly researched. . . . Enlightening."
— Fortean Times

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0001
[Phoenix;mythical;death;rebirth;unique;transformations;cycle;history]
This book sets out to follow the cultural transformations of the mythical Phoenix from ancient Egypt to the present day. The millennia-long history of the bird that dies in its nest and rises, reborn, from its own ashes attests to its timeless importance. The classical Phoenix fable of death and rebirth embodies such elemental human longing for renewal that people of each historical epoch adapted the bird’s story and image to their own worldview. Each literary account of the bird, and each depiction of it in art, is a cultural “sighting.” The transformations of the fable and meaning of the Phoenix through individual writings and related works of art reveal how the bird both mirrors and transcends historical periods, flourishing and declining in one age only to emerge in another in a different form. The bird’s recurring appearances from one age to another replicate the unique figure’s own fable of life, death, and rebirth. Throughout the book, the capitalized “Phoenix” becomes the major character of its own story.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0002
[benu;Heliopolis;Creation;sun;Atum;Ra;Nile;Egyptologists;Phoenix]
This is the first of two prologue chapters that introduce the Western Phoenix’s Egyptian benu precursor and Chinese fenghuang counterpart. Due to nineteenth-century Egyptologists and a Sinologist, each of the birds has become widely known as a “phoenix.” The history of the Western Phoenix begins in Heliopolis, home of the sacred benu heron and the site of Herodotus’s seminal fifth-century BCE account of the mythical Greek bird. The benu was worshipped in the Temple of the Sun, believed to be the exact spot of Creation. In variant myths, the benu is the manifestation (ba) of the creator god that rises on a mound out of the primordial sea. The bird is associated with Atum, the sun, daily rebirth, the seasonal inundation of the Nile, Ra, immortality, Osiris, resurrection, and is a guide to the deceased through the underworld. This chapter presents the benu in third-to-first millennia BCE religious texts: Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, The Book of the Dead, and Ptolemaic writings––before and after Herodotus arrived in Egypt. Vignettes of the benu from Chapters 17 and 83 of the Book of the Dead illustrate the chapter.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0003
[fenghuang;empress;Chinese Classics;James Legge;Chinese art;phoenix;ho-oo]
Concurrent with the Egyptian benu (Ch. 1) from the early second millennium BCE onward, a pair of immortal Chinese birds (feng, male; huang, female) heralds the reign of benevolent emperors in times of peace and prosperity. This second prologue chapter follows the fenghuang through Chinese Classics: the Shu Ching, Shih Ching, Li Chi, Lun Yü––and the Bamboo Annals. The long-legged fenghuang with the beautiful plumes lives in the Land of the Immortals and does not die in its nest nor is reborn like the traditional Western Phoenix. Nonetheless, renowned nineteenth-century Chinese Classics translator James Legge rendered fenghuang as “phoenix.” The usage has persisted to our own day, as is seen in names of Chinese restaurants. Chapter text also traces the evolution of the fenghuang in Chinese art from ancient bronzes to robes and crowns of the empress and to influence on the Japanese ho-oo. An engraving of a pair of fenghuang and the “Phoenix robe” of the Empress Dowager Cixi illustrate the chapter.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0004
[Herodotus;Heliopolis;phoenix;Arabia;five hundred years;eagle;Hesiod;Ovid]
Part I: Classical Marvel. The highlight of this chapter is the fifth-century BCE Phoenix passage of Herodotus (History, 2.73). The benu was still being worshiped at Heliopolis (Ch. 1), and depictions of the fenghuang graced the imperial courts of China (Ch. 2) when Herodotus wrote that he visited the Egyptian city. He said he was told that the bird carries the remains of his parent from Arabia every five hundred years and buries them in the shrine of the sun. In the pictures he was shown, the bird was about the size and shape of an eagle, with red and golden plumage. He called the sacred bird of Heliopolis a “phoinix.” Even though he did not find the tale credible, his brief story represents the beginning of the Western Phoenix tradition. It is cited as authoritative up to the seventeenth century; many of Herodotus’s details remain in traditional Phoenix lore today. This chapter’s discussion of the problematic account follows analysis of “phoenix” in Hesiod’s earlier riddle of longevity; after Herodotus, more than four centuries pass before the next major literary treatment of the bird, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ch. 4). There is no known phoenix bird in ancient Greek art.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0005
[Augustus;Phoenix;Ovid;Pliny;Great Year;Tacitus;Sothic period;Hadrian]
Four centuries after Herodotus, Rome’s occupation of Hellenistic Egypt generates Egyptian influence on Rome. Augustus transports two obelisks from the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis and re-erects them in the Circus Maximus. The emperor’s reign also ushers in the first literary flourishing of the Western Phoenix. This chapter traces the development of the Phoenix of Herodotus (Ch. 3) in writings of Ovid, Mela, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus. The Phoenix story evolves with detailed descriptions of the eagle-like bird, the nest of spices in a date-palm tree, death and rebirth of the bird, and its flight to a temple of the sun, where it consecrates the remains of its parent. Contradictory appearances of the bird in Egypt are chronicled in Roman records. Varying durations of its heralding of a new era include the 540-year Great Year and the 1,461-year Egyptian Sothic period. A spurious phoenix is displayed in the Roman Forum to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the founding of the city. A long-legged benu-like Phoenix figure begins gracing imperial coins in 118 CE, during the reign of Hadrian.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0006
[Phoenix;Achilles Tatius;Aelian;Philostratus;Solinus;Lactantius;Claudian]
After Ovid, Pliny, and Tacitus establish the Roman Phoenix literary tradition, later authors extend it in both Greek and Latin: through novels, a satirical Phoenix appearance, a biography set in India, a variation of Pliny, and poems with frameworks of classical mythology. Descriptions in some of these works are clearly influenced by the radiate nimbus of the bird on Roman coins, which continue to be minted throughout the Constantine dynasty to the reign of Valentinian II. This chapter discusses development of the classical Phoenix in the respective works of Achilles Tatius, Aelian, Philostratus, Solinus, Lactantius, and Claudian. As the empire divides, the most inventive and longest treatment of the classical Phoenix, the De Ave Phoenice, attributed to Lactantius, presages the Christian Phoenix to come. Claudian’s later verse, with Ave echoes, rounds out the Phoenix’s Roman cycle. Contrary to the tradition that there is only a single, unique Phoenix in the world at any one time, Judeo-Christian transformations of the bird had been evolving for centuries. A benu-like Phoenix in a pavement mosaic from “House of the Phoenix, a fifth-century Roman villa, illustrates the chapter.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0007
[Job;Ezekiel the Dramatist;Enoch;Baruch;Midrash Rabbah;Babylonian Talmud]
Part II: Bird of God. While the classical Phoenix evolves from Herodotus’s seminal passage (Ch. 3) to Phoenix poems by Lactantius and Claudian (Ch. 5), the Jewish Phoenix emerges controversially in different forms, under different names, at different times, from different traditions. The bird is said to appear in a speech of Job, at the Exodus, in apocalyptic visions, in the Garden of Eden, and on Noah’s ark. This chapter discusses the respective texts of Job 29:18, the Exodus of Ezekiel the Dramatist, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, and Rabbinical commentaries in the Midrash Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud. Translations and interpretations of these texts are influenced by the classical Phoenix fable, but the sources are independent of Greco-Roman lore and have only a tangential effect upon the Christian allegory of resurrection (Ch. 7).


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0008
[resurrection;Clement I;Letter to the Corinthians;Physiologus;Ambrose;Isidore]
In a new cycle of its cultural life, the Greco-Roman Phoenix is concurrently transformed into proof of Christian resurrection. The Western Phoenix was born in the single brief account of Herodotus (Ch. 3); it is reborn in St. Clement I’s first Letter to the Corinthians (c. 95 CE, only decades after Pliny’s Natural History). This Phoenix chapter traces the Christian bird’s derivation from Greco-Roman Phoenix lore through Clement’s epistle, the Physiologus, and the writings of Church Fathers, including St. Ambrose and St. Isidore of Seville. The Physiologus, Ambrose, and Isidore become major sources of Phoenix entries in twelfth-and-thirteenth-century bestiaries (Ch. 9). Chapter illustrations of Early Christian cathedral mosaics portray a bird derived from Roman art that, in turn, evolved from figures of the Egyptian benu.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0009
[Phoenix;Christian resurrection;Exeter Book;Lactantius;Phoenix Homily;Old Norse]
Composed about eight centuries after Clement’s late-first-century CE Letter to the Corinthians, the Old English Phoenix is the longest and most elaborate Phoenix allegory of Christian resurrection. Based upon Lactantius’s third-or-fourth-century De Ave Phoenice, the Exeter Book poem is nearly four times the length of its Latin model. It generates Germanic writings that are subsidiary to the Latin mainstream of the Church’s Phoenix literature. This chapter discusses the English work and traces its influence on two Phoenix Homily manuscripts, which, in turn, are reshaped into Old Norse versions. One of the Phoenix homilies is presented in its entirety for perhaps the first time in modern English.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0010
[Phoenix;bestiaries;Isidore;Physiologus;Ambrose;Cambridge;Harley;Aberdeen]
A standard Physiologus entry, the Phoenix appears in the texts and art of nearly all medieval bestiaries. Among all the animals used to teach religious lessons, it bears the greatest burden as a representation of Christ’s Resurrection, the foundation of Christian doctrine. The importance of the Phoenix as a symbol is reflected in both the content and length of its bestiary entries. Copied or adapted from one manuscript to another, Phoenix chapters are a pastiche of authorities, usually without attribution (except for scripture) and seemingly without concern for inconsistences between sources. Portrayals of the Phoenix in bestiary art frequently accompany texts in pairs, either in separate images of it gathering spices and then immolating itself, or in a single continuous narrative. This chapter explicates standard Isidore/Physiologus/Ambrose sources as presented in the Cambridge Manuscript and others. Chapter illustrations are illuminated Phoenix pages from the British Library’s Harley bestiary, the Aberdeen Bestiary, and Oxford’s Bodley bestiary. Most of these indicate the pictorial evolution of the Western Phoenix from its Egyptian, Roman, and Early Christian heron-like form to its transformation into a bestiary eagle, influencing later representations of the bird.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0011
[Eschenbach;Dante;Alexander Romance;Prester John;Mandeville;Mappa Mundi]
During the flourishing and decline of the medieval bestiaries from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, the Phoenix appears in a variety of literary forms, from encyclopedias to romances and spurious travelers’ tales. The bird is also portrayed on the largest and best-preserved map of the age. While bestiary lore and Christian doctrine are evident in these works, the diverse genres reshape the Phoenix figure, beginning to free it from static religious allegory. This chapter explores the presence of the Phoenix in the following: works of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Alexander Neckam, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Dante; in the Romance of Alexander, The Letter of Prester John, and Mandeville’s Travels; and on the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Chapter illustrations are from the Alexander Romance, Mandeville’s Travels, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0012
[Petrarch;Laura;Ariosto;Michelangelo;Rabelais;Du Bartas;Tasso;Cervantes]
Part III: Renaissance Transformations. This is the first chapter of what constitutes the cultural zenith of the Phoenix’s long history. After being a static allegory of resurrection for more than a millennium dominated by the Church (Chs 7-10), the bird undergoes multiple transformations of role and meaning, beginning with the transitional Humanist movement generated in great part by Petrarch. He innovatively uses the Phoenix in his Laura poems as a metaphor for a unique individual. Besides its dissemination through books of classical and medieval lore, the Phoenix appears in a variety of contemporary forms, from lyric poetry and literary epics to novels. Most of the authors represented in this chapter are from the Continent, several from Italy, where the cultural sea change of the Renaissance begins: Petrarch, Ariosto, Michelangelo, Joachim du Bellay, Rabelais, Du Bartas, Tasso, and Cervantes. The chapter illustration is a Phoenix woodcut with accompanying text from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle; the text is a virtually verbatim copy of Pliny’s Phoenix passage, shortened and rearranged in the manner of bestiary scribes (Ch. 9).


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0013
[Petrarch;Elizabeth I;Tottel's Miscellany;Phoenix Nest;Loves Martyr;Shakespeare]
Chaucer’s fourteenth-century “solyn fenix of Arabye,” referring to a woman (Ch. 11), was an early English harbinger of the Renaissance Phoenix, but it takes two more centuries before Petrarch’s paragon metaphor (Ch. 11) permeates English culture. Queen Elizabeth I is the supreme English “Phoenix” of the age. Elizabeth not only transforms a politically and religiously divided England into a world power but also presides over the country’s eminent literary period of lyric poetry and drama. She adopts the Phoenix as one of her personal emblems. This chapter follows poetic uses of the Phoenix beginning in the reign of Henry VIII with Sir Thomas Wyatt’s imitation of one of Petrarch’s Laura verses. Elizabethan Phoenix tropes multiply in Tottel’s Miscellany, The Phoenix Nest, Robert Chester’s Loves Martyr, and in the works of Shakespeare and others. After Elizabeth’s death, the first theatre in London’s Drury Lane is named “The Phoenix” following restoration of “The Cockpit.” Illustrations of the obverse and reverse of Elizabeth’s “Phoenix Medal” open the chapter.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0014
[heraldic Phoenix;badges;mottoes;emblem books;printer's devices;celestial charts]
After being depicted as a long-legged benu-like bird in Roman and Early Christian art (Chs. 3 and 6), the medieval bestiary Phoenix (Ch. 9) is often portrayed as an eagle in a flaming nest. Variations of that iconic image spread throughout Renaissance Europe and Britain. The standard heraldic Phoenix is a demi-eagle, wings displayed, issuant from flames. Derivations of such a crest on heraldic badges of notable figures are accompanied by mottoes in Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian. International emblem books honor distinctive individuals and present ideas with symbolic Phoenix figures, mottoes, and texts that explain the pictures. Phoenix printer’s devices of Venice’s House of Giolito are imitated across the Continent and in England. Celestial charts represent the newly discovered Phoenix constellation with the heraldic figure of the bird. The Phoenix crest of London’s Company of Painter-Stainers, the badge of Jane Seymour, the “Marian Hanging” of Mary Stuart, a Claude Paradin emblem, a Giovanni Battista Pittoni emblem, and new southern constellations in Johann Bayer’s Uranometria illustrate the chapter.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0015
[Phoenix;opus magnum;transmutation;prima materia;Philosopher’s Stone]
Concurrent with its many other emblematic uses in the Renaissance, the Phoenix is one of the most venerated symbols in esoteric alchemy. The bird’s fabled rebirth from the ashes of its dead parent becomes an integral part of a discipline based on transmutation of both metals and the spiritual life of the alchemist. The hermetic figure of the bird, present in medieval manuscripts, multiplies in both texts and plates of printed books, especially in the early seventeenth century, and remains a major hermetic symbol up to our own day. This chapter explicates the alchemical process and the Phoenix’s role in it. Associated with sulphur and the color red, the Phoenix represents the final agent of the opus magnum, the ultimate conversion of prima materia into the incorruptible Philosopher’s Stone. Engravings from Libavius’s Alchymia and Alexandre Toussaint de Limojon de Saint-Didier’s Le Triomphe Hermétique illustrate the Great Work.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0016
[Phoenix;metaphysical;Donne;Crashaw;Vaughan;neoclassical;Herrick;Dryden;Milton]
While the Phoenix thrives in various pictorial forms, the figure of the bird spreads throughout the poetry of the time. Uses of the Phoenix range from secular to religious, attesting to the elemental symbolic power of the bird. Two major developments of English verse, by Metaphysical and neoclassical poets, develop in their own directions. The Phoenix continues to denote perfection, uniqueness, renewal, and royalty, while at times becoming even more symbolically erotic than it had been in Elizabethan poetry. Meanwhile, devotional poets transform medieval associations of the Phoenix with Christ and resurrection through often jarring syntax and metaphors. This chapter examines seventeenth-century Phoenix imagery in works of Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herrick, Dryden, and Milton. The many poetic shapes of the Phoenix presage dissipation of the figure while they parallel a quiet but rising rationalistic skepticism of the bird’s existence.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0017
[Phoenix;bird of paradise;zoology;New Philosophy;Genesis;ark]
Part IV: Challenged and Discredited. Doubts about the Phoenix fable began with Herodotus (Ch. 3) when he introduced the bird to the West; they were compounded by Pliny (Ch. 4) and the disclaimers of Tacitus (Ch. 4), and Albertus Magnus (Ch. 10). Those reservations remained isolated until zoology and the rationalistic New Philosophy began to develop in the sixteenth century. While popularity of the protean Phoenix spread in Renaissance literature and art, naturalists identified the Phoenix with the legendary but actual bird of paradise and other birds. The New Philosophy questioned the works of medieval and classical authorities and even the Bible. Clergymen re-examining Genesis charged that the Phoenix, the only one of its kind, was not part of God’s animal kingdom because it could not go forth and multiply; nor could the single bird have boarded the Ark along with male and female pairs of other creatures. Conrad Gesner’s woodcut of a bird of paradise illustrates the chapter.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0018
[Phoenix;Thomas Browne;Pseudodoxia Epidemica;Alexander Ross;Arcana Microcosmi]
The major way the Phoenix could be discredited was by discrediting the authors who gave the bird cultural life and spread belief in its fable. Sir Thomas Browne does that in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (commonly known as “Vulgar Errors,” 1646). In a battle of the books between the Ancients and the Moderns, Alexander Ross refutes him virtually point for point in Arcana Microcosmi (1651). Browne’s attempts to expose the fallacies of classical and medieval authorities and Ross’s defense of tradition represent the defining moment of the bird’s millennia-long cultural history. The authors’ quoted Phoenix writings are presented as alternate arguments and responses; these constitute a debate that’s both a scholastic survey of most of the authorities that appear in the classical and medieval sections of this book and a summation of standard Renaissance arguments for and against the existence of the bird.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0019
[seventeenth-century doubts;vulgar error;Enlightenment;satirical fantasies;American colonies]
Sir Thomas Browne (Ch. 17) accurately defined the nature of the Phoenix as a body of conflicting traditional accounts, not as an actual bird in nature. His Pseudodoxia Epidemica chapter expresses growing seventeenth-century doubts about the bird that become certainty in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. While ejection of the Phoenix from the animal kingdom spreads across Europe, the metaphorical figure remains ubiquitous in seventeenth-century poetry, emblem books, alchemical treatises, and celestial atlases. But its literal existence denounced by naturalists and its symbolic powers all but spent, the figure is, more and more, regarded as a “vulgar error,” an embarrassing reminder of fallacious thinking. Nonetheless, it makes rare appearances as an innovative speaking character in satirical fantasies and is joined in Enlightenment decorative arts by its counterparts from China. It also becomes a corporate symbol for a London fire insurance company and even migrates across the Atlantic to the new American colonies. A fledgling Phoenix on an April 1, 1778, South Carolina five-shilling note illustrates the chapter.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0020
[Phoenix;myth;Romantic;cultural rebirth;Wundervogel;Edith Nesbit;Harry Potter]
Part V. Modern Rebirth. Following the seventeenth-century discrediting of the Phoenix as a myth, the bird’s cultural rebirth on the other side of belief is the supreme test of the figure’s archetypal powers. After rare Enlightenment evocations of the bird, Romantic interest in the imagination generates a return to Phoenix traditions. This chapter considers a variety of prose treatments of the mythical bird. Among those in the nineteenth century are: a poetic panegyric; an extensive scholarly history of the Phoenix myth; and the bird’s placement among “Modern Monsters,” solar animals, and Wundervogel counterparts of different cultures. Notable works of children’s literature in which the Phoenix appears frame the twentieth century: Edith Nesbit’s 1904 The Phoenix and the Carpet and J. K. Rowling’s renowned Harry Potter series, beginning in 1997. The chapter illustration from the Nesbit novel depicts the Phoenix being reborn in the fireplace of a London flat.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0021
[Phoenix;Romantic;Victorian;modern poetry;Gaston Bachelard;Adonis;Robert Pinsky]
After the Phoenix was virtually ignored by Enlightenment poets, scattered uses of the bird surface in Romantic and Victorian verse and increase in frequency and psychological innovation in twentieth-century poetry. Samples of poetry in this chapter indicate that nineteenth-century poets cited the Phoenix primarily as a subject, either as brief allusions by the major poets or in extended treatment by others. Philosophical literary critic Gaston Bachelard provides a continuum for usage of Phoenix imagery in twentieth-century poetry. In no earlier age do the titles of so many poems contain the “Phoenix” name; in modern poems of that or other titles, the Phoenix might be used metaphorically, might have only an allusive presence without a name, or may be just an amorphous analogue. Among the international poets represented in this portion of the chapter are Howard Nemerov, Gyula Illyés, Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said Esbar), Paul Éluard, Patrick Kavanagh, Denise Levertov, Ivan V. Lalic, and Robert Pinsky.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0022
[Phoenix;D. H. Lawrence;Ashmole Bestiary;Finnegans Wake]
The Phoenix figure was the personal emblem of one eminent twentieth-century writer and a metaphor for all human history in the work of another. D.H. Lawrence derived his picture of a rising Phoenix from an illumination in the twelfth-century Ashmole Bestiary (Ch. 9). First sketched in one of his letters along with the motto “Fier,” he chose it as the device to be printed on his later books. He wrote about the figure of psychological renewal in novels, essays, and poetry, notably in his late poem, “Phoenix.”James Joyce’s notoriously difficult novel, Finnegans Wake (1939), embodies the falls and renewals of mankind. The traditional death and rebirth cycles of the Phoenix comprise one of a cluster of subtexts that structure the book. Verbal shapes of the mythical figure surface throughout the novel’s dream-language. Joyce’s evocations of the Phoenix represent the ultimate linguistic transformations of the bird. D. H. Lawrence’s Phoenix emblem and photographs of the exterior and interior of the D. H. Lawrence Memorial outside Taos, New Mexico, illustrate the chapter.


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226195520.003.0023
[Phoenix;rising from the ashes;restorations;September 11;Heliopolis]
The proverbial phrase, “Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes,” retains the residual power of the ancient Phoenix fable of renewal and rebirth. Paradoxically, modern coins, logos, seals, and flags depict the bird as rising triumphantly from flames, not from the traditional ashes. The Phoenix has nonetheless been adopted in name or image for buildings, institutions, cities, and even countries rebuilt following their destruction, primarily by fire. A post-World War II essay expressing the need for the mythical Phoenix in the modern world opens this Phoenix chapter; it is coincidentally echoed in a description of New York’s Village Halloween Parade of Phoenixes following the September 11, 2001, terrorist bombings of New York City and Washington, D. C. Between the two are examples of global Phoenix restorations from Greece’s War of Independence to the Kobe, Japan, earthquake. The book ends in the United States with verbal and pictorial Phoenix presence in Phoenix, Arizona, the current commercial counterpart of Heliopolis (Ch. 1), source of the Western Phoenix.

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2016. Page maintained by BiblioVault.