The Fire Phoenix and the Stars
One of the strangest and least understood myths of Ancient Egypt concerns the bennu bird or phoenix. A description of the symbolism which it was intended to invoke was given by Rundle Clark.
Clark: “One has to imagine a roost extending out from the deep of the Abyss. On it rests a herald (a grey heron) of all things to come. It opens its beak and breaks the quiet of the dawn with the call of life and destiny, which ‘determines what is to be and what is not’…
The Phoenix embodies the original Word of God (Logos) or declaration of fate which moderates between the God-mind and created things…In a sense, when the phoenix gave out the primeval call it put into motion the cycles of the calander. So it is the father of all divisions of time, and its temple at Heliopolis became the centre of calendrical regulation.”
The fact that shafts in both the kings chamber and queens chamber point to specific stars fixing their processional cycles confirms that the phoenix is closely related to the Great Pyramid. The Great pyramid served as the epoch time keeper of pharaonic kingship both mystical and historical.
There is therefore a link between the phoenix and the pyramid as timekeepers of the stars of Orion and, by extension, the ’soul’ of the Osiris-kings. In the Book of the Dead (Chapter 17) the question is asked: ‘Who is he? . . . I am the great phoenix which is in Heliopolis . . .’
According to Rundle Clark the phoenix was a great cosmic bird which came from a distant and magical land beyond the earthly world called the Isle of Fire, the place of everlasting light beyond the limits of the world, where the gods were born or revived and whence they were sent into the world.
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