The Phoenix in Rabbinic Literature

1996 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. R. Niehoff
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Rabbinic Literature ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Intercultural Encounters ◽  
Symbolic Approach ◽  
Foreign Ideas ◽  
The Phoenix

Contact between cultures is a complex phenomenon that often involves accepting foreign ideas until these become new ways of self-expression. The case of the phoenix is of special interest, in this respect, because in antiquity it was associated with the sun temple at Heliopolis and miraculous forms of rebirth. The phoenix motif also appears in a variety of early Jewish and Christian writings, thus allowing for a comparative appreciation of its rabbinic reception. In light of these other intercultural encounters, it becomes clear that the rabbis were familiar with the details of the Hellenistic phoenix myths, and not only adapted the story to their own values but even enhanced its mythological dimension. In this way, the rabbis continued the Hellenistic practice of reactivating an ancient Egyptian myth. In contrast to the symbolic approach of early Christianity, the rabbis characteristically chose to accommodate the phoenix on a literal level, interpreting it mythopoeically, that is, by creating myth. Their interpretation of the phoenix moreover illuminates important, yet hitherto unnoticed aspects of rabbinic mythology.

Suicide

1988 ◽  
Vol 152 (5) ◽  
pp. 725-726
Author(s):  
H. G. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Clinical Problem ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
Patient At Risk

As it is a special interest of mine, I read about suicide regularly. Most often this is because of the need to prepare a talk of some kind. I also read frequently in search of help in dealing with a clinical problem concerning a patient at risk. Less commonly, when I am not pressed for time, I am able to indulge in the luxury of reading for its own sake, out of sheer interest and curiosity, following up themes wherever they take me. Each of these approaches complements the others in an attempt to understand the complex phenomenon of suicide.

Word and Sign in Elizabethan Conflicts with the Devil

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-256
Author(s):  
Kathleen R. Sands
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Psychological Impact ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
Landed Gentry ◽  
The Devil ◽  
The Phoenix

Gloriana, Britomart, Astraea, Belphoebe, the Sun in Splendor, England’s Moses, the new Deborah, the Phoenix—Elizabeth I possessed a generous wardrobe of public personas. Monarchy, chastity, divinity, and other intangibles played in the early modern mind as images, personifications, embodiments—the invisible rendered visible. As Clifford Geertz has observed, the Elizabethan imagination was “allegorical, Protestant, didactic, and pictorial; it lived on moral abstractions cast into emblems.” These emblems were culturally ubiquitous, appearing in books and broadsides, painted and carved portraits, architecture, tapestry, jewelry and clothing, armor and weapons, monumental funerary sculpture, wall and ceiling decoration. University students neglected Aristotle in favor of fashionable continental emblem books, and the taste for embellishing houses with emblems extended from the monarchy and aristocracy to the landed gentry and the rising middle class. Peter Daly stresses the psychological impact of emblems on the early modern mind when he observes that emblems were “as immediately and graphically present in this period as illustrated advertising is today.”

Flights of Imagination: Avicenna’s Phoenix (ʿAnqā) and Bedil’s Figuration for the Lyric Self

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-72
Author(s):  
Jane Mikkelson
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Philosophical System ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
The Phoenix

Abstract The phoenix (ʿanqā) appears in the philosophy of Avicenna (d.1037) as his example of a “vain intelligible,” a fictional being that exists in the soul, but not in the world. This remarkable bird is notable (along with the Earth, the moon, the sun, and God) for being a species of one. In this essay, I read the poetry Bedil of Delhi (d.1720) in conversation with the philosophical system of Avicenna, arguing that the phoenix in Bedil’s own philosophical system functions as a key figuration that allows him simultaneously to articulate rigorous impersonal systematic ideas and to document his individual first-personal experiences of those ideas. The phoenix also plays a metaliterary role, allowing Bedil to reflect on this way of doing philosophy in the first person—a method founded on the lyric enrichment of Avicennan rationalism. Paying attention to the adjacencies between poetry and philosophy in Bedil, this essay traces the phoenix’s transformations from a famous philosophical example into one of Bedil’s most striking figurations in his arguments about imagination, mind, and self.

Astrology for Maecenas

Antichthon ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 88-96
Author(s):  
D.A. Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Julian Calendar ◽  
Time Of Year ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Limited Scope

Astronomical themes, with a rather limited scope, were a minor but recurrent element in ancient poetry, and Horace makes considerable use of them in the Odes. Most of the examples involve risings and settings as guides to the time of year, and most are within the range of the phenomena mentioned in Hesiod’s Works and Days. But in Odes 3.29.17-20, for the special interest of Maecenas, Horace breaks new ground by drawing more topical material from the Julian calendar, to remind his friend that it is now July and too hot for working in Rome: the (evening) rising of Cepheus on the 9th, the (morning) risings of Procyon on the 15th and Regulus on the 29th, and the entry of the sun into Leo on the 17th. Such an array of calendaric lore is clearly designed to appeal to Maecenas, who must have had a particular interest in astronomical phenomena.

scholarly journals Sadness, Gender and Empathy

Eikon / Imago ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 271-281
Author(s):  
Inmaculada Vivas Sainz
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Complex Process

This paper is focused on private tomb scenes with mourners dated to the end of the 18th Dynasty located in the Egyptian Memphite necropolis, with a special interest on the artistic resources and the clear division of groups according to the gender of mourners, as mourning men in expressive attitudes are particularly rare in ancient Egyptian scenes. The presence of men in grief, together with the traditional female mourners, within the funerary procession is striking, portraying expressive poses which provoke feeling of empathy and sorrow in the beholder. Indeed, the expressions of feelings in mourning scenes and their diverse artistic treatment in Memphite tomb decoration reveals the innovation and originality of the artists, features that could be traced back to the reign of Akhenaten. This paper explores the complex process of creation of the funerary iconography of the Post-Amarna art, a period of religious, political and social changes which were mirrored in private tomb scenes.

scholarly journals Lovely Ugly Bes! Animalistic Aspects in Ancient Egyptian Popular Religion

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter
Keyword(s):  
Pregnant Women ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
To Come ◽  
And Function ◽  
Newborn Children

The popular yet demonic guardian of ancient Egypt, Bes, combines dwarfish and leonine features, and embodies opposing traits such as a fierce and gentle demeanor, a hideous and comical appearance, serious and humorous roles, an animalistic and numinous nature. Drawing connections with similarly stunted figures, great and small cats, sacred cows, baboons, demonic monsters, universal gods and infant deities, this article will focus on the animalistic associations of the Bes figure to illustrate that this leonine dwarf encompassed a wider religious significance than apotropaic and regenerative functions alone. Bes was thought to come from afar but was always close; the leonine dwarf guarded the sun god Ra along the diurnal solar circuit; the figure protected pregnant women and newborn children; it was a dancer and musician; the figure belonged to the company of magical monsters of hybrid appearance as averter of evil and sword-wielding fighter. Exploring the human and animal, demonic and numinous aspects of this leonine dwarf will not only further our understanding of its nature and function, but also its significance and popularity.

Pharaohs and Pyramids

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Fagan
Keyword(s):  
Human Existence ◽  
Sahara Desert ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
Egyptian Mummy ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Sense Of Time ◽  
Steep Slopes

The Nile slashes through the eastern Sahara Desert like an arrow, a stalk of green amid some of the most arid landscape on earth. Each summer, floodwaters from deep in tropical Africa inundate the floodplain, depositing fertile silt and nourishing growing crops, enabling an Egyptian civilization to endure for five thousand years. Along the river’s banks, pharaohs, considered to be living gods, created a palimpsest of pyramids, rock-cut tombs, and temples that have fascinated the traveler since Herodotus’s day. Egypt was the land of Ra, the sun god, whose golden rays shone day after day in an unchanging chronicle of human existence and immortality— birth, life, and death. Ra’s rays shine between the serried pillars of Karnak’s Hypostyle Hall, darken the jagged contours of the Valley of Kings in deep shadow, project the steep slopes of the pyramids of Giza over the surrounding desert. Ancient Egyptian ruins cast a profound spell over the visitor, especially in the days before Egyptologists measured the ruins and recorded their secrets. They were desolate, unfamiliar, their gods irrevocably gone, the hieroglyphs on the walls unintelligible except to a privileged few—and that only after about 1830, when Jean François Champollion’s decipherment came into common use. But the sense of time and history these monuments conveyed was, and still is, pervasive. The figures on temple and tomb walls expose the habits, fantasies, and beliefs of thirty dynasties. Even today, there is an underlying sense of permanence along the Nile. The pharaohs have vanished, succeeded by caliphs, pashas, colonial overlords, and presidents, but life along the Nile still follows a timeless routine of planting and harvest, of life and death. The traveler has been part of this timeless landscape for more than two thousand years. We have already encountered Roman tourists at the Colossi of Memnon. Christian pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem passed through, too, although travel was difficult for the faithful in what was now Islamic territory. The founding in London of the Levant Company in 1581, originally to foster trade with Turkey—among other things, trade in coffee—brought more visitors, some of them in search of mumiya, pounded-up Egyptian mummy, considered to be a powerful aphrodisiac.

scholarly journals PARALLELS BETWEEN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN RELIGIOUS LITERATURE AND THE OLD TESTAMENT PSALMS: PSALM 103 AND "THE GREAT HYMN TO THE ATEN"

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-11
Author(s):  
Ksenia A. Shperl ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Ancient Egyptian ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Egyptian Literature ◽  
First Time

Ever since J. Breasted pointed to the similarity between Ancient Egyptian literature and the Old Testament psalms for the first time, the issue of whether the parallels seen between these texts are an evidence of plagiarism has been widely discussed, but to no avail: while most scholars argue that the evident similarity in forms actually means the psalm authors used older texts as a source for writing their own prayers, there is no reason to accuse the Hebrews of plagiarism. The author of the article makes an attempt to analyze the similarities and differences between the two texts, and pays attention to the theological gulf that separates psalm 103 and the Great Hymn to the Aten. Despite the seeming identity of images and ideas, the analysis of the verses reveals that it is doubtful that the authors of the psalms simply rewrote ancient texts to match their religion. The difference manifests itself in the way God and Ra are described, the emphasis on the crucial role of the pharaoh, which is absent in psalm 103, the implicit meaning of night (the two images of night used are contrasting, as the Egyptian text implies that night is the time when evil dominates everything, whereas psalm 103 shows that night is just another wonder of God, and the fact that the Sun is no longer seen does not mean that God loses His power), etc...

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