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.