Isaac Asimov's Worlds of Fantasy. Book 6: Mythical Beasties

Phoenix

To early agricultural peoples, whose lives depended on the regular and reliable succession of seasons, it became clear thai these in turn depended on the motion of the sun in the heavens. In the regions of the Middle East where agriculture and civilization first developed, the midday sun was always in the southern half of the sky. From noon to noon it rose higher and higher in the sky, but never reached the zenith. By the date we know as June 21, it got as high as it could and began to sink again.

For half a year if sank, until it reached its low point on December 21. and then began to rise again. As it sank the summer passed and ended and it grew colder and colder.

It was clear that if the sun continued to sink indefinitely, all would freeze and life would come to an end. The time of the low point and the turnabout was therefore a time of rejoicing, so many cultures had a period of unrestrained celebration of the winter "solstice" ("sun standstill"). The modern version of this celebration is Christmas.

Naturally, this annual resurrection of the sun, with the promise of a coming spring and a new period of growth, gave rise to all sorts of death-and-resurrection cults. The Egyptians pictured a bird that died annually and was reborn out of its funeral pyre-an obvious sun-figure. The Greeks picked up the legend and visualized the bird as the size of an eagle, and as being gold, red. and purple in color. (These are the colors of the noonday sun, of the setting sun, and of the sky at twilight.) They called it the "phoenix" from a Greek word for "red-purple" and had it die and be resurrected every five hundred years, rather than every year. Since the phoenix was its own parent, it needed no mate, and was pictured as one of a kind.

The following story gives us a very modern version of the myth.