The solar globe of the sacred bird inherited from the Egyptian religion knows many metamorphoses from Greece to Rome and from Antiquity to today. The star of the day carried by the benu (ancestor of the phoenix), either on the head or in the legs, as seen in temples and tombs or on the magic gems of Egypt, is interpreted by the historian Herodotus as the paternal mummy wrapped in an "egg" of myrrh, then by the Latin authors as a nest of herbs. This sun then paradoxically becomes the terrestrial globe, when the creature is adopted as the official symbol of power by the Roman Empire, henceforth master of the orbis terrarum: on coins, the phoenix surmounts the orb of the earth held by the emperor (in one text, the misreading of the Greek sphaira, "globe", makes it an anatomical particularity: a "malleoli", Greek sphura). By doubling and doubling the figure of the circle, it is then a radiated nimbus that expresses the solar meaning of the bird; this nimbus is also the aureole of the Christian phoenix symbol of the resurrection of the body. Another attribute of the benu-phoenix, the original mound where it arises in the Egyptian cosmogony, is reinterpreted in texts and images as a pyre of aromatics, in conformity with the funerary customs of Rome, then as the mountain of Paradise in the belief of Christians. It is modern literature that will make the globe of the phoenix a real egg, laid to give birth to its young (another itself), as in the children's novel The Phoenix and the Carpet by Edith Nesbit (1904), adapted for the screen and the inspiration for many later writers. - [Abstract]

Language: French