THE MYTH OF THE RISEN PHOENIX
One of the most prominent of the ancient immortality myths, a story that can be found throughout the old world, from India to Egypt, is the myth of the risen phoenix. According to this myth, the phoenix is a divine bird, which has initially a mortal body.
In order to attain immortality, it must offer its body to the sacred fire so that it is reduced to ashes. Yet from those ashes a new immortal body is resurrected. Once the phoenix attains this new body, it then stretches its wings and flies above into the immortal realms.In effect, the phoenix represents the ascending soul whose mortal body corresponds to the created body of the universe. In the process of ascending through the seven shells, the mortal vestige of the soul is offered to the fire of universal destruction and is reduced to ashes. When the soul finally hatches from the cosmic egg by breaking through the egg’s outermost shell, the ashes of the dissolved universe are infused with imperishability and a new immortal body—an imperishable body of Logos—is obtained.
The archetypal form of the immortal body is none other than the divine lotus cube, which is fashioned from twenty-seven cosmic eggs linked together by imperishable whirlwinds of cosmic fire. These may be compared to the outstretched feathers (parnas) of the risen phoenix, which ascends on wings of fire. In the Vedic tradition, the phoenix was thus called suparna, the bird with “beautiful feathers.”
The feathers of the risen phoenix correspond to the feathers of the Egyptian goddess Maat, the personification of truth, justice, and harmony. In this comparison, we can understand as a measurement ceremony the final judgment scene, which takes place in the Hall of Two Truths. In this interpretation, the heart of the aspirant represents a measure of the cosmic egg itself, while the feather of Maat represents a measure of the relation among cosmic eggs, which is upheld by an immortal feather (parna).
If the awareness of the soul can span only the outermost dimensions of the cosmic egg so that its mortal heart outweighs the immortal feather, then the soul is rejected. Yet if it can span both the cosmic egg and the relation among cosmic eggs, then it is accepted—because it has developed the ability to conceive the relations on the basis of which the immortal body is conceived. Those relations were represented symbolically by the immortal feathers (parnas) of Maat.Metaphorically, the risen phoenix ascends into the immortal realms by stretching its feathers to embrace ever-larger forms of the divine lotus cube, which are stacked one inside the other like an infinite series of concentric Chinese boxes. As the phoenix ascends, the cosmic eggs from which the cubes are composed appear to become smaller and smaller, until they eventually resemble infinitesimal points. Just as an ordinary crystal composed of discrete atoms appears continuous when viewed from a macroscopic perspective, so the crystalline body of God composed of cosmic eggs (or cosmic atoms) appears to assume an increasingly continuous character when viewed from increasingly large, transfinite scales of consciousness. Eventually, the discrete crystalline structure of consciousness, which represents the imperishable body of God, assumes the appearance of the infinite continuum of consciousness, which represents the immortal self of God.