The Phoenix An unnatural biography of a mythical beast

"A bird dies in its nest and rises, reborn, from its own ashes. The standard fable of the mythical Phoenix is thus easily summarized." Nigg opens his account of the Phoenix with this brief synopsis, but what follows is anything but brief. In a meticulously researched yet eminently readable book, the author adds another massive tome on a mythological beast to his previous work, which includes The Book of Gryphons (1982), The Book of Dragons and Other Mythical Beasts (2002), and Sea Monsters: A Voyage around the World's Most Beguiling Map (2013). Nigg traces the Phoenix and its legend from Heliopolis, in ancient Egypt, to its modern-day namesake, Phoenix, Arizona. In telling the story, Nigg focuses on four individuals as major players in the development and spread of the myth: Herodotus, Saint Clement of Rome, Petrarch, and 17th-century scholar/author Thomas Browne. Nigg tracks the mythical bird across the pages of history, alchemy, and literary metaphor, and scholars of mythology and historical symbolism will appreciate the detail. But this "biography" will also intrigue nonspecialists, for example those piqued by appearances of the Phoenix in the Harry Potter books and movies. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Dann Everett Wigner, The University of the South

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. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.