The Phoenix: An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast

This exhaustively researched and meticulously organized study of the mythical phoenix is an exceptional work of scholarship. It traces the phoenix’s emergence from uncertain origins in antiquity and development into an icon of resurrection and regeneration throughout Eastern and Western civilization. After linking the phoenix to the benu-bird depicted in Egyptian funerary texts, Nigg (Sea Monsters) shows the bird’s gradual evolution through its accretion of attributes described in historical texts. Hesiod mentions the phoenix’s unusually long life in the Precepts of Chiron (700 BCE); Herodotus, in his History (450-425 BCE), describes the bird’s migration to the Egyptian Temple of the Sun bearing the remains of its parent; Ovid, in his first-century BCE Metamorphoses, recounts the phoenix’s death and regeneration after 500 years; and the second-century CE Physiologus finally references the bird’s death and rebirth in fire. By the early Christian era, the phoenix was firmly established as a symbol for death and resurrection. Nigg draws his insights from a wealth of classical texts and bestiaries, and he amply demonstrates the persistence of the phoenix as a popular emblem of renewal and immortality. Even readers familiar with just the bare bones of the phoenix myth will find this book an engrossing history of an idea. [em](Nov.) [/em]