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The legend of the phoenix got its start in ancient Egypt, where the bird was known as the bennu. As with many Egyptian ideas, the tale of the bennu passed into Greece and was restyled. As the Greeks tell it, the phoenix is a striking, eagle-like bird with brilliant purple feathers, and plumes of alternating red and blue in its tail. It is extremely long-lived and essentially immortal because it can resurrect itself at its time of death. Some say that the bird's former body opens up to reveal its new form, whereas others say that the bird consumes itself with fire before its new body can rise from the ashes. After recreating itself, the phoenix takes its nest, still filled with its own remains, and transports it to the city of Heliopolis to be burnt on an altar to the sun god, Helios/Ra.

The fact that the phoenix makes an offering to Helios suggests an occult origin to this legend, because occultists are sun worshipers—more accurately, they worship the spirit of illumination. The priests of Egypt were master occultists, and famous for their veneration of the sun. They associated the bennu bird with the daily death and resurrection of the sun.

Let's see what modern occultist Allan J. Stover said about this bird in the January 1948 edition of The Theosophical Forum:
The legend of the Phoenix Bird, periodically reborn from the ashes of its consumed body, is a myth from the mystery language of the Ancient Wisdom, so old that no man knows the time or place of its origin.... [It is] not an image of fancy and superstition, but a symbol of eternal truth.

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