Facts about Phoenix

Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1940 short story "The Phoenix" satirized the exploitation of nature using a phoenix maltreated in a carnival sideshow, revealing the modern preference for violence and sensationalism over beauty and dignity.

Edith Nesbit's famous children's novel, The Phoenix and the Carpet is based on this legendary creature and its quirky friendship with a family of children.

In China, the phoenix is called Feng-huang and symbolizes completeness, incorporating the basic elements of music, colors, nature, as well as the joining of yin and yang.

Some cities in Europe use the phoenix in their municipal emblem to denote the one-time destruction and consequent rebuilding of the city, connecting to the image of resurrection inherent in the phoenix.

The Fenians/IRA, the Hunchaks and Dashnaks, and the IMRO may be considered typical of nationalist terrorism, and equally illustrate the (itself controversial) expression that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

The phoenix (known as Garuda in Sanskrit) is the mystical fire bird which is considered as the chariot of the Hindu god Vishnu.

Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, better known as Rashi, commented that death has no power over the phoenix, "because it did not taste the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

The new phoenix embalmed the ashes of the old phoenix in an egg made of myrrh and deposited it in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis ("the city of the sun" in Greek).

The phoenix is referenced by the early Christian Apostolic Father Clement in The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians.

Phoenix, Arizona was named such because it was a frontier station settled upon the ruins of a Native American site.

Most of the Christian-based phoenix symbolism appears within works of literature, especially in Medieval and Renaissance Christian literature that combined classical and regional myth and folklore with more mainstream doctrine.

The phoenix is always a bird, usually having plumage of colors corresponding to fire: yellow, orange, red, and gold.

The phoenix also appears in the Book of Job: "I shall multiply my days as the Chol, the phoenix" (Job 29:18), again indicating long life if not immortality.

The pattern of an over complacent and abusive society's destruction yielding a fresh new start was compared to the phoenix's mythological pattern of consumption by flame, then resurrection out of ashes.

The phoenix no longer appears significantly in any religious or cultural truths.

In any case, the ideology of the phoenix fit perfectly with the story of Christ.

The Huma, also known as the "bird of paradise," is a Persian mythological bird, similar to the Egyptian phoenix.

The phoenix's resurrection from death as new and pure can be viewed as a metaphor for Christ's resurrection, central to Christian belief.

More recently, Harry Potter series author J.K. Rowlings has used a phoenix as a central symbol in her stories.

The phoenix was also famed for being a symbol of the rise and fall of society in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

According to Greek mythology, the phoenix lived in Arabia next to a well.

The phoenix became a symbol of Christianity in early literature, either from the ancient Hebrew legend or from the incorporation of Greek and Roman culture, or from a combination of both.

The phoenix, or phњnix as it is sometimes spelled, has been an enduring mythological symbol for millennia and across vastly different cultures.

Jane Seymour's heraldic badge includes a phoenix rising from a castle, between two red and white Tudor roses.

At the end of Ivan IV's reign the Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish armies carried out the powerful intervention into Russia, devastating its northern and northwest regions.

The Greeks adapted the word bennu and identified it with their own word phoenix '??????', meaning the color purple-red or crimson.

The speaker of this poem describes her unsuccessful attempts at committing suicide not as failures, but as successful resurrections, like those described in the tales of the biblical character Lazarus and the phoenix.

Sylvia Plath also alludes to the phoenix in the end of her famous poem Lady Lazarus.

The phoenix does not appear as a heraldic figure as often as other mythical creatures.