Firebird and hope

Did God have a hand in the rescue of 33 miners in Chile’s Atacama Desert ? Mario Sepulveda, the second miner to be brought up, has spoken about how the experience tested his faith and belligerence . “I was with God and I was with the devil, they fought me, but God won,” he said. “He took me by my best hand, the hand of God.” It was actually a capsule built by Chilean Navy under guidance from mining engineers and NASA experts that finally did the trick.

The more prosaic explanation was that it wasn’t the hand of God, but the capsule working like an elevator running down on a cable through a shaft drilled 622 metres into solid rock. But the operation that drew global headlines did not entirely preclude poetic fancy: the rescuers named the capsule Phoenix, after the mythical firebird that resurrects itself after being completely burnt down to ashes.

According to Roman poet Ovid, the phoenix could therefore be considered the classical equivalent of a modern clone: “Most beings spring from other individuals ; but there is a certain kind which reproduces itself,” he wrote . The phoenix supposedly did not live on fruit or flowers, but on inflammable stuff like frankincense and odoriferous gums.
After it had lived five hundred years, the firebird built itself a nest in a palm or an oak where it collected other pyromaniac things like cinnamon, spikenard, and myrrh, from which it fashioned a pyre lit by its dying breath! Then from the ashes of the parent bird arose the young phoenix, supposedly destined to live as long a life as its predecessor.

It’s this fabled ability to rise out of its own ashes which makes the phoenix ‘first cousin to Man’ , says noted sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury. For as a warmongering society , humans are continually burning down things and getting born all over again, he says in Fahrenheit 451.

Ill-starred poet Sylvia Plath also evokes the phoenix at the end of her famous poem Lady Lazarus , where the protagonist describes her unsuccessful attempts at suicide not as failures, but as successful resurrections , like those of the Biblical characters Lazarus and Phoenix. Then she rises “out of the ash/ with my red hair/ And I eat men like air” .

As for the riddle which came first, the phoenix or the flame, the only answer is ‘The circle has no beginning’ , according to Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The rescue highlights that.