We are pretty sure to hear of the phenix every time a tailor or soap-maker announces that he will rebuild his shop after it has been burned; and its picture is a favorite with the advertising department of fire-insurance companies. The world first learned of this remarkable fowl when Herodotus brought back to Greece his wonder-tales from Egypt, some 400 years before Cleopatra made so much trouble by mixing love and politics. It will be well to quote in full the account by the great Greek traveller as it is found in the translation by Laurent:

There is another sacred bird, called the “phenix;” which I myself never saw except in a picture, for it seldom makes its appearance among the Egyptians—only every five-hundred years, according to the people of Heliopolis. They state that he comes on the death of his sire. If at all like his picture, this bird may be thus described in size and shape. Some of his feathers are of the color of gold; others are red. In outline he is exceedingly similar to the eagle, and in size also. This bird is said to display an ingenuity which to me does not appear credible: he is represented as coming out of Arabia, and bringing with him his father to the temple of the Sun, embalmed in myrrh, and there burying him. The manner in which this is done is as follows: In the first place he sticks together an egg of myrrh, as much as he can carry, and then tries if he can bear the burden. This experiment achieved, he accordingly scoops out the egg sufficiently to deposit his sire within. He next fills with fresh myrrh the opening in the egg by which the body was inclosed; thus the whole mass containing the carcase is still of the same weight. Having thus completed the embalming, he transports him into Egypt and to the temple of the Sun. (Euterpe, Book II.)

Herodotus seems to have been most interested in the odorous embalming, quaintly referred to in a 17th-century song—

And it will be noticed that this observant reporter says nothing of the quality that has given the bird its present popularity as a type of recovery from disaster—its ability to “rise from its ashes,” which, indeed, appears to have been a later conception.

Greeks of that day probably accepted this story from Herodotus without much demur or criticism, for they had their own traditions of wonderful birds—the Stymphalids, for example. These were gigantic and terrible fowls that lived along the river Stymphalus, in northern Arcadia—a region of savage mountains that the Athenians knew little about. They were believed to be man-eating monsters with claws, wings, and beaks of brass, and feathers which they shot out like arrows. “Heracles scared them with a brazen rattle, and succeeded in killing part and in driving away the rest, which settled on the island of Artias in the Black Sea, to be frightened away after a hard fight by the Argonauts.” So Seyfert summarizes their history; and an illustration on an antique vase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows a flock of them looking much like pelicans.

Pausanias visited the curious River Stymphalus and found it rising in a spring, flowing into a marsh, and then disappearing underground—a good setting for strange happenings, and he refers to the legend in his usual bantering way, thus:

“There is a tradition that some man-eating birds lived on its banks, whom Hercules is said to have killed with his arrows.... The desert of Arabia has among other monsters some birds called Stymphalides, who are as savage to men as lions or leopards. They attack those who come to capture them, and wound them with their beaks and kill them. They pierce through coats of mail that men wear, and if they put on thick robes of mat the beaks of these birds penetrate them too.... Their size is about that of cranes and they are like storks, but their beaks are stronger and not crooked like those of storks. If there have been in all time these stymphalides like hawks and eagles, then they are probably of Arabian origin.”

The Greeks knew also of half-human Harpies, of web-footed Sirens, of the Birds of Seleucia, and of various other ornithological monstrosities, so that the tale of an Egyptian one was easily acceptable to their minds. The ugliest of the ugly flock were the Harpies, bird-women, on whom the ancients expended the direst pigments of their imagination, and whom Dante makes inhabitants of the gnarled and gloomy groves wherein suicides are condemned to suffer in the nether world—

The Romans liked Herodotus and his story as well as they pleased the Greeks, and Pliny heard or invented additional particulars. He insists that only one phenix exists at a time, clothed in gorgeous feathers and carrying a plumed head; and at the close of its long life it builds a nest of frankincense and cassia, on which it dies. From the corpse, as Pliny asserts, is generated a worm that develops into another phenix. This young phenix, when it has grown large enough, makes it its first duty to lay its father’s body on the altar in Heliopolis; and Tacitus adds that its body is burned there. The implication in most accounts is that the bird is male (the Egyptians are said to have believed all vultures female), and doubtless the whole conception is a primitive phase of the nature-worship out of which developed the more formal Osiris-legend.

But the picture has many variants. One is that the phenix subsists on air for 500 years, at the end of which, lading its wings with perfumed gums gathered on Mt. Lebanon (!) it flies to Heliopolis and is burned—itself now, not its parent—into fragrant ashes on the altar of the Sun temple. On the next morning appears a young phenix already feathered, and on the third day, its pinions fully grown, it salutes the priest and flies away. Here we come to the best remembered feature of the mystery, caught and kept alive for us by the poets, such as John Lyly,^[49] who in 1591 reminded the world that—

De Kay^[18] discourses on these notions in his Bird Gods:

“In the oldest tombs, discovered lately on the upper Nile by Jacques de Morgan and others, the phenix is seen rising from a bed of flames, which may well mean the funeral pyre of the defunct. The inscriptions in question are so early that they belong to a period when the ceremonial of the mummy had not become universal in Egypt, and the conquerors of Egypt, probably a swarm of metal-using foreigners from the valley of the Euphrates, who crossed from Arabia and the Red Sea, were still burning the bodies of their chiefs and kings. The phenix of these inscriptions may indicate the soul of the departed rising from its earthly dross as the soul of Herakles, according to the much later legend in its Greek form, rose from his funeral pyre to join the gods of Olympus.”

Now, whether or not the priests of Heliopolis encouraged their worshippers to believe that such a creature really existed, they themselves knew well that it was a mere symbol of the sun; and it is easy to identify it with the bird “bennu” spoken of in the Book of the Dead and other Egyptian sacred texts, which unquestionably was a picturesque representative of the sun, rising, pursuing its course, and at regular intervals expiring in the fires of sunset, then renewing itself on the morrow in the flames of sunrise over Arabia. Plentiful evidence that this was perfectly understood in Greece and Italy of the classic age may be read in the works of their essayists and poets. Claudian (365–408), wrote, and Tickell, a British poet, translated into verse, a long poem on the phenix. Petrarch carried their wisdom onward when he declared there could be only one phenix at a time because there was only one sun.

When the Arabs succeeded the Romans in the Nile Provinces they picked up from the people remnants of the legend, and confused it with their own ancient belief in a creature that resisted burning, by whose existence they accounted for the incombustible property of asbestos, a mineral known to them, but the origin of which was a mystery. It came from the Orient, and some said it was a vegetable product, others the hair of a rat-like animal: the western Arabs, however, mostly believed it to be the plumage of a bird, so that naturally they identified it with the fire-loving phenix. Arabian authors of the 10th century and onward describe this bird, under the Greek name “salamandra,” as dwelling in India, where it lays its eggs and produces young in fire. Sashes, they say, are made of its feathers, and when one of them becomes soiled it is thrown on a fire, and comes out whole, but clean.

This is an excellent example of the mingling of fact and fancy by which a student of these old matters is constantly perplexed. It is probable that small woven articles had long been known to the Arabs and Moors as Eastern curiosities, for the people of southern China since very ancient times had been collecting and preparing fibrous asbestos, and weaving it into fire-proof cloth. Such fabrics had, no doubt, a rough, fuzzy surface, not unlike fur or the down of birds, and might easily be supposed to be the latter. Hence the assertion that asbestos was the skin of a bird indestructible by fire, the identification of the phenix with the salamandra (as a bird—it had other legendary forms), and the trade-name “samand” given to asbestos cloth when the Arabs themselves began to manufacture and sell it. So our proverbial idea of the salamander goes back to a remote antiquity; but how it came to be represented among us as a newt instead of a bird belongs to another book.

Meanwhile on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, where the legend of the phenix was popular, it had been introduced into Christianity as a symbol, as we know from memorial sculpture, and from the writings of St. Clement, who was the second pope after Peter. Its special meaning was immortality, which in that period meant the physical resurrection of the dead; and the peacock came to be used in the same sense, as representing, if not virtually merged with, the phenix. The image in men’s minds at that time appears to have been that of an eagle, a bird closely identified with the sun, clothed in the plumage of the peacock, another sun-bird (as representative of the gorgeous clouds at sunset); and the very name confirms these solar associations, for our “phenix” is the Greek word phoinix, crimson red. How large a place the peacock in this aspect fills in the art and mythology of China and Japan appears in Chapter VII.

Hulme informs us that Philippe de Thaum writes in his Bestiary of the mystic bird: “Know this is its lot; it comes to death of its own will, and from death it comes to life: hear what it signifies. Phoenix signifies Jesus, Son of Mary, that he had power to die of his own will, and from death come to life. Phoenix signifies that to save his people he chose to suffer upon the cross.” “God knew men’s unbelief,” St. Cyril laments, “and therefore provided this bird as evidence of the Resurrection.” St. Ambrose also declares that “the bird of Arabia teaches us, by its example, to believe in the Resurrection.” Passages of like tenor might be quoted from Tertullian and other expositors of the early Christian church, all showing the most unsuspicious faith in the real existence of such a bird.

The symbolic connection of this fabulous creature with the idea of immortality may have been an inheritance from Jewish traditions. According to the Talmud Eve, after eating the terrible fruit in the Garden of Eden, tried to force it, and its consequences, on all the animals, but the bird “chol” (the phenix) would not eat, but flew away from temptation, and thus preserved its original gift of perpetual life. “And now the phenix ... lives a thousand years, then shrivels up till it is the size of an egg, and then from himself emerges beautiful again.” In the Middle Ages this deathless bird was supposed to inhabit the sacred garden of the Earthly Paradise.

Peacocks carved on early Christian sarcophagi are perched on a palm tree (the conventional sign of martyrdom in primitive Christian iconography), and hence eloquent of that rapturous belief in immortality characteristic of the catacombs, as Mrs. Jenner expresses it. Representations of the bird rising from a flaming nest and ascending toward the sun are less common, but do occur in medieval heraldry, by which pictorial path, it is probable, the notion has come down to our own day and become the cognizance of one of the oldest American insurance companies.

The association with the palm mentioned above recalls another line of legendary, for some etymologists say that the name “phenix” should be so written (not phoenix), and that it is the older name of the date-palm. This tree was regarded in ancient Egypt as the emblem of triumph, whence, perhaps, our modern symbolic use of its fronds; and Pliny was informed that “in Arabia the phenix nested only on a palm,” and that “the said bird died with the tree and revived of itself as the tree sprang again.”

Now, Arabic authors of the Middle Ages had much to say of a mythical bird, “anka,” that lived 1700 years; and they explained that when a young anka grows up if it be a female the old female burns herself, and if it be a male the old male does so. This is very phenix-like, but the anka is distinguished by huge size, the Arabic writer Kazweenee, as quoted by Payne,^[87] describing the anka as the greatest of birds. “It carries off the elephant,” he says, “as the cat carries off the mouse”; and he relates that in consequence of its kidnapping a bride God, at the prayer of the prophet Handhallah, “banished it to an island in the circumambient ocean unvisited by men under the equinoctial line.”

I find in Miss Costello’s Rose Garden of Persia^[88] some interesting notes quoted from M. Garcin de Tassy, relative to the anka, which, De Tassy says, has become a proverbial symbol in Persia for something spoken of but not seen—and not likely to be! Here he seems to be using the Arabic name for the bird the Persians call “simurgh,” the signification of which, as Professor A. V. W. Jackson tells me, is “the mythical,” and which is derived from the avestan word for “eagle”—another link in our chain. De Tassy explains:

It [the anka] is known only by name, and is so called from having a white line round the neck like a collar; some say because of the length of the neck.... It is said that the inhabitants of the city of Res ... had in their country a mountain called Demaj, a mile high. There came a very large bird with a very long neck, of beautiful and divers colors. This bird was accustomed to pounce on all the birds of that mountain, and eat them up. One day he was hungry and birds were scarce, so he pounced on a child and carried it off. He is called ankamogreb because he carries off the prey he seizes.... Soon after this he was struck by a thunderbolt.

Mohammed is reported to have said that at the time of Moses God created a female bird called anka; it had eight wings like the seraphs, and bore the figure of a man. God gave it a portion of every thing, and afterwards created it a male. Then God made a revelation to Moses that he had created two extraordinary birds, and had assigned for their nourishment the wild beasts around Jerusalem. But the species multiplied, and when Moses was dead they went to the land of Nejd and Hijaz, and never ceased to devour the wild beasts and to carry off children till the time when Khaled, son of Senan Abasi, was Prophet, between the time of Christ and Mohammed. It was then that these birds were complained of. Khaled invoked God, and God did not permit them to multiply, and their race became extinct.

This characteristic Bedouin camp-fire novelette reminds us at once of the famous roc, or “rukh,” to adopt the more correct spelling, with which we are familiar from the story in the Arabian Nights of Sinbad the Sailor. Let me quote it succinctly from Payne’s edition.^[87] Sinbad had sailed on a commercial venture from his home in Basra, a port on the Persian Gulf, and the ship had stopped at a very pleasant island, situation unrecorded. Sinbad went ashore with others, wandered in the lovely woods, fell asleep, and awoke to find the ship gone and himself the only person on the island. As he was exploring the place rather timidly he came to a great shining dome, but could see no doorway. “As I stood,” he relates, “casting about how to gain an entrance, the sun was suddenly hidden from me and the air became dark....”

So I marvelled at this, and lifting my head looked steadfastly at the sun, when I saw that what I had taken for a cloud was none other than an enormous bird whose outspread wings, as it flew through the air, obscured the sun and veiled it from the island. At this sight my wonder redoubled, and I bethought me of a story I had heard aforetime of pilgrims and travellers, how in certain islands dwells a huge bird, called the roc, which feeds its young on elephants, and was assured that the dome aforesaid was none other than one of its eggs. As I looked ... the bird alighted on the egg and brooded over it, with its wings covering it and its legs spread out behind it on the ground, and in this posture it fell asleep, glory be to Him who sleepeth not!

When I saw this I arose, and unwinding the linen of my turban twisted it into a rope with which I girt my middle, and bound myself fast to his feet.

Sinbad’s purpose was to get himself carried away to some better place, but when, next morning, the roc did bear him aloft and afar, and finally alighted, the sailor found himself in a horrid desert. After many further adventures and voyages Sinbad revisits his island yet does not recognize it until the men with whom he is strolling bade him look at a great dome. Not knowing what it was they broke it open with stones, “whereupon much water ran out of it, and the young roc appeared within; so they pulled it forth of the shell and killed it, and took of it great store of meat.” Dreadful misfortune followed this inconsiderate act.

This was a well-known Arabic wonder-tale. The author of one of their popular old books of “marvels,” several of which exist, tells almost exactly Sinbad’s story as happening to himself, and at least two other Arabic works are said to contain the tale with picturesque variations. In later times the home of the monster was placed in Madagascar. Marco Polo, the adventurous Italian, who in the 13th century wandered overland to China, and whose Travels^[89] are a fine mixture of fact and fancy, had a fair idea of where Madagascar was, and recorded much that he was told about it—mostly erroneous. He relates that the people of that island report “That at a certain season of the year ... the rukh makes its appearance from the southern region.... Persons who have seen this bird assert that when the wings are spread they measure sixteen paces in extent.” Marco says that he heard that the agents of the Grand Khan took to him a feather ninety spans long. It is explained in Yule’s edition of Polo’s Travels that the supposed roc’s feather was one of the gigantic fronds of the raphia palm “very like a quill in form.”

Such wonder-tales have a truly phenix-like quality of indestructibility. As late as the time of Charles I of England there lived in Lambeth, on the Surrey side of London, John Tradescant, renowned as traveller and florist, who accumulated an extensive “physic-garden” and museum of antiquities and curiosities. He was a man of science, but to satisfy the popular taste of the time, as Pennant explains, his museum contained a feather alleged to be of the dragon, and another of the griffin. “You might have found here two feathers of the tail of the phoenix, and the claw of the rukh, a bird capable to trusse an elephant.” This collection after the death of Tradescant’s son in 1622, became the property of Elias Ashmole, and it was the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum founded at Oxford in 1682.

But phenix, rukh, anka, simurgh, garuda, feng-huang and others that have not been mentioned, such as Yel, the mythical raven of our Northwest, and those of Malaya described by Skeat,^[7] are all, apparently, members of the brood hatched ages ago in that same sunrise nest and still flying amid rosy clouds of prehistoric fable.

The first glimpse of them is on the seals and tablets recovered from Mesopotamian ruin-mounds. In the mystic antiquity of the Summerian kingdom of Ur and its capital-city Lagash, a gigantic eagle, “the divine bird Imgig” was the royal cognizance. In those days, as Dr. Ward^[23] discloses from his study of the oldest Babylonian cylinders, people told one another tales of monstrous and fantastic birds of prey that could fly away with an antelope in each talon, and which fought, usually victoriously, against huge winged and feathered dragons with bodies like those of crocodiles, and sometimes with human heads. Such representations of demons were the prototypes of the grotesque combinations of animal features, and of men and animals, more familiar to us in the Egyptian Sphinx, the classic centaurs, and medieval angels and devils.

When the elders in Babylon expounded the reason for faith in these antagonistic supernatural creatures, they explained that the “divine” eagle symbolized beneficence and protective power in the universe, while the feathered monsters stood for the baffling forces of malignancy and harm. In this philosophy, probably, is the underlying relationship that connects all this Oriental flock of fabulous fowls—visionary flight-beings in varying forms and phases that seek to portray the powers of the air, mysterious, uncontrollable, overwhelming, capable of all the mind of primitive man could conceive or his gods perform. All of them became endowed in time with the luxuriant colorings of Eastern poetry and fiction, and appear now heroic and picturesque, as one expects of everything in the dreamy Orient of tradition.

In the cold and stormy North, however, where the sun is a source of comfort rather than of terror, and movements of the atmosphere are more often feared than blessed, the similar conception of a gigantic sky-bird is far more definite. When the native of the Russian plains, struggling homeward against driving snow, hears the shrilling and howling of the tempest he knows Vikhar, the Wind-Demon, is abroad. Norsemen represent him as Hraesvelg, the North Wind, an eagle: he does not “ride on the wings of the wind,” he is the wind, and the blast from the arctic sea that beats upon your face is the air set in motion by the wings of this colossal, invisible bird flying southward. That it is big enough to stir the atmosphere into a veritable hurricane is plain:

And such an eagle as this one, described as a reality in the Kalevala, the legendary epic of the Finns, possessing beak and talons of copper, once seized and bore away a maiden to its eyrie, thus showing itself true to the “form” of the East whence it came.

Most of our North American Indians typified the winds, especially those from the north, as birds, and many tribes identified the storm-bringing ones with their thunder-birds, which was very natural. The Algonkins believed that certain birds produced the phenomena of wind and created waterspouts, and that the clouds were the spreading and agitation of their gigantic wings. The Navahos thought that a great white swan sat at each of the four points of the compass and conjured up the blasts that came therefrom, while the Dakotas believed that in the west is the residence of the Wakinyjan, “the Flyers,” that is, the breezes that develop into occasional storms.

It was in the Orient, however, where, by the way, both simurgh and garuda serve as storm-bringers in several myths, that the conception of gigantic bird-beings was expanded and elaborated with the picturesque details that have been suggested in an earlier paragraph.

A very old Persian tale, with many fanciful embroiderings, runs as follows: There are, or were, two trees—one the Tree of Life, and the other the Tree Opposed to All Harm, the tree that bears the seeds of all useful things; which is like the two trees in the Garden of Eden, over in Babylon. In the latter tree sits and nests the chief of all the mythic birds, the simurgh (called in the Avesta “saena-meregha”), which is said to suckle its young, and to be three natures “like a bat.” “Whenever he arises aloft a thousand twigs will shoot out from that tree, and when he alights he breaks off the thousand twigs and bites the seeds from them. And the bird cinamros [second only to the simurgh] alights likewise in that vicinity; and his work is this, that he collects those seeds that are bitten from the tree of many seeds, which is opposed to harm, and he scatters them where Tishtar [angel that provides rain] seizes the water [from the demons of drought]; so that, while Tishtar shall seize the water, together with those seeds of all kinds, he shall rain them on the world with the rain.” Such is the language of the sacred books.^[26]

The simurgh figures in Firdausi’s^[93] legendary epic as the foster-parent of Zal, father of Rustam, the national hero of Persia. When Rudabah’s flank was opened to bring forth Rustam her wound was healed by rubbing it with a simurgh’s feather. Rustam himself, once wounded unto death, was cured in the same manner, and other cases are recorded in great variety. Firdausi explains that the simurgh had its nest on Mt. Elburz, on a peak that touched the sky in a place no man had ever seen; and that it was to that eyrie that it carried the princely baby Zal, whence it was recovered by its parents. In the ancient Avestan ritual it is stated of the vulture varengana: “If a man holds a bone of that strong bird ... or a feather, no one can smite or turn to flight that fortunate man. The feather of that bird brings him help ... maintains him in his glory.” According to De Kay^[18] the simurgh was a “god-like bird that discussed predestination with Solomon, as the eagle of Givernberg held dialogues with King Arthur.... The simurgh was a prophet.”

But of all the fabulous birds that infest ancient Persian mythology none is held so important as the falcon-like “karshipta,” which brought the sacred law into the Paradise of Jamshid. “Regarding the karshipta they say that it knew how to speak words, and brought the religion to the enclosure which Yim made, and circulated it: there they utter the Avesta in the language of birds.”

We read also of a gigantic bird in Iran, the “kamar,” “which overshadowed the earth and kept off the rain till the rivers dried up.”

In the Hindu mythology Vishnu is the sun-god, while Indra represents the lightning and storm, and the two are in general opposites, rivals, enemies. Vishnu rides on an eagle of supernatural size and power called garuda. In the Pahlavi translation of the stories the simurgh takes the place of the eagle, for their characters as well as their names are interchangeable. Garuda was born from an egg laid by Vinata, herself the daughter of a hawk and the mother of the two immense vultures that in Persian myths guard the gates of hell, and elsewhere figure boldly in Oriental fables; it is a mortal enemy, now of the serpent and now of the elephant, and now of the tortoise—all three connected with Indra. This bird carries into the air an elephant and a tortoise in order to devour them, and in one of the various accounts leaves them on a mountain-top as did the simurgh and the rukh their iniquitous “liftings.”

Garuda also appears in Japanese legendary art as gario, or binga, or bingacho, or karobinga, half woman, half bird, a sort of winged and feathered angel with a tail like a phenix and legs like a crane. This reminds us of the harpies of Greece. The Malays recognize the image, and when a cloud obscures the sun Perak men will say: “Gerda is spreading his wings to dry.”

The Chinese, and after them the Japanese, had a phenix-like bird in their mythical aviary, which persists in the faith of the more simple-minded of their peoples, and as a fruitful motive in the decorative art of each. It was one of the four supernatural creatures that in ancient Chinese philosophy symbolized the four quarters of the heavens. The Taoists, whose religious ideas are older than Confucianism and prevailed especially among the humble and unlearned, called it the Scarlet Bird, and associated it with the element Fire, and with their mystic number 7. Archaic pictures show a crested bird with long tail-feathers—a figure that might well be meant for a peacock. The creature itself is said not to have been seen by mortal eyes since the time of Confucius, but it has by no means been forgotten, for it is the fung-whang, or feng-huang (which is the names of the male and the female of the species conjoined); and it lives even now on embroidered screens and painted vases, or proudly distinguishes royal robes, from the Thibetan mountains to the Yellow Sea.

A recent writer on Eastern art^[68] describes the proper fung as a gorgeously colored bird with a long tail. Its feathers are red, azure, yellow, white, and black, the five colors belonging to the five principal virtues; and the Chinese ideograms for uprightness, humanity, virtue, honesty, and sincerity, are impressed on various parts of its body. Its cries are symbolic, its appearance precedes the advent of virtuous rulers. As in the other cases this bird carries something away—this time an eminent philosopher, Baik-fu, was translated. In Japan the peasantry, at least, still hold to the reality of the same bird under the name ho-ho, and artists and symbolists have beautifully utilized the conception.^[90] The belief is that the sun descends to earth from time to time in the form of the ho-ho, as a messenger of love, peace, and goodwill, and rests on one or another of the torii. It appears to have become a badge of imperial rank in China before the time of the Ming dynasty, and, in Japan it became the symbol of the empress, and in old times, as we are told, only empresses and royal princesses could have its likeness woven into their dress-goods.

It will be noticed that this last-considered member of our fabulous flock, the fung-whang or ho-ho, is the only one not of gigantic size or distorted or terrifying aspect. This indicates to me its comparatively recent origin, and its beneficent disposition shows that it is the creation of men accustomed to peace under kindly skies. It is an interesting fact that when the Mongolian felt called upon to portray demoniac beings he exaggerated to the extent of his ability human expressions of rage, villainy and ferocity, instead of using for his purpose animals of Titanic size, or in horrifying combinations, as did magicians south of the great mountains.

The explanation seems not far away. The territory that apparently always has been the home of the homogeneous “yellow” race is essentially a vast plain extending from the mountains of central Asia westward to the Pacific and meridianally from southern China to the border of Kamptchatka. It includes the spacious valleys of China, proper, the plains and deserts of Mongolia, and the broad prairies that stretch across Manchuria, making together the widest area of fairly level and tillable land on the globe. Much of it was never forested, and from a large part of the remainder the scanty growth of woods had been cleared before written history began. The climate as a whole is temperate and equable, and rarely disturbed by startling and destructive meteorological phenomena. Furthermore, except the tigers of the jungly southeastern border, no dangerous animals are to be feared or to be idealized into mythical things of terror. Two evils of nature remain to disturb the inhabitants of this favored region—annual spring-floods, often fatally widespread; and, second, frequent earthquakes. The floods are perfectly understood in their cause as well as in their effects, and afford little material for superstition. As for the earthquakes, the people long ago found a sufficient explanation in the invention of a burrowing beast of prodigious size and strength, which they called an “earth-dragon,” and whose movements as it stirs about heaves the ground beneath our feet. The wave-like character of the earth-shocks showed that the dragon must be elongated and reptile-like; and now and then a landslide or diggings disclosed long and massive bones that evidently were those of these subterranean monsters, although foreigners said they were fossil remains of Mesozoic reptiles or something else. The whole idea, in fact, is so plausible and logical, that it really belongs to scientific hypothesis rather than to mythology.

The reaction of this tranquil geographical situation and history has been to produce, or mould, a people gentle, self-contained and averse to strife. This is not particularly to their credit or their discredit. It is as natural for a race developed in the valley of the Hoang Ho to be peaceable as for one bred along the Danube or the St. Lawrence to be belligerent.

In such an unterrifying situation as his the Mongolian felt no impulse to coin the manifestations of nature, elemental or animated, into malignant demons, but rather impersonated them, if at all, as beings with kindly intentions and of beautiful form. That such impersonations are few, and that Chinese mythology furnishes a comparatively small contribution to the world’s store of specimens of that primitive stage in human mentality, is, I think, another evidence of the equable physical environment in which the people of the Flowery Kingdom have been nurtured, which, while it contributed to their sanity, did little to stimulate their imaginations.

On the other hand, men and women who endured, day by day, the blistering heat and drouth of the desert; or who knew the awe-inspiring mountains, where gloomy glens alternate with cloud-veiled heights, the thunders of unseen avalanches shock the ear, and appalling fires that no man kindles rage against the snows; or who night and day must guard his or her life in the jungle against lurking perils from tooth and claw and poison-fang—such persons were aroused to mental as well as physical alertness for safety’s sake, and saw in almost every circumstance of their lives visions of unearthly power. Unable in their narrow, slowly developing knowledge and meagre intellection, to comprehend much of what confronted them, yet understanding some small sources and agencies of power, what more natural than that they should picture the often tremendous exhibitions of nature’s force as the product of enormously greater powers. Hence not only the bigness attributed to the mythical birds we have sketched but their supernatural abilities, and also—in accordance with constant experience of the general antagonism between nature and human purposes—the malignancy characterizing most of them.

For, as has been said, Garuda, Simurgh, Phenix, Fung-Whang and all the others are only visions woven out of the sunshine, the clouds and the winds, in the loom of primitive imagination. It is quite a waste of time, therefore, to try as some have done (notably Professor Newton^[55]) to connect any one of them with some living or extinct reality, as, for example, the Rukh with the epiornis or any other of the big extinct ratite birds of Madagascar. Eagles and vultures and peacocks have served as suggestions for fantastic creations of a vagrant fancy, and that is all the reality they ever had. We do not know, probably never can know, the ultimate source of these stories and images, so varied yet so alike; nor whether all have spread from one source, or have in some instances arisen independently, as would seem probable in the case of those told about American aboriginal campfires; but we may be sure that their conception was in the morning of civilization (more likely far back of that) as products of the uncultured, nature-fearing, marvel-loving fancy of prehistoric mankind.