The Persians teach that great blessings come to that person on whom the Huma's shadow falls. It avoids killing for food, rather preferring to feed on carrion. The Huma bird joins both the male and female natures together in one body, each sharing a wing and a leg. The Huma is considered to be a compassionate bird and its touch is said to bring great fortune. It consumes itself in fire every few hundred years, only to rise anew from the ashes. The Huma, also known as the "bird of paradise," is a Persian mythological bird, similar to the Egyptian phoenix. The Bennu also became closely connected to the Egyptian calendar, and the Egyptians kept intricate time measuring devices in the Bennu Temple. Because of its connection to Egyptian religion, the Bennu was considered the “soul” of the god Atum, Ra, or Osiris, and was sometimes called “He Who Came Into Being by Himself,” “Ascending One,” and “Lord of Jubilees.” These names and the connection with Ra, the sun god, reflected not just the ancient Egyptian belief in a spiritual continuation of life after physical death, but also reflected the natural process of the Nile River's rising and falling, which the Egyptians depended upon for survival. In rare instances the Bennu was pictured as a man with the head of a heron, wearing a white or blue mummy dress under a transparent long coat. Occasionally it was depicted as a yellow wagtail, or as an eagle with feathers of red and gold. The Bennu was pictured as a grey, purple, blue, or white heron with a long beak and a two-feathered crest. The new phoenix embalmed the ashes of the old phoenix in an egg made of myrrh and deposited it in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis ("the city of the sun" in Greek). At the end of its life-cycle, the phoenix would build itself a nest of cinnamon twigs that it then ignited both nest and bird burned fiercely and would be reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix arose. The Bennu was supposed to have rested on a sacred pillar that was known as the benben-stone. In the more prevalent myths, the Bennu created itself from a fire that was burned on a holy tree in one of the sacred precincts of the temple of Ra. One version of the myth says that the Bennu bird burst forth from the heart of Osiris. However, since the Bennu, like all the other versions of the phoenix, is primarily a symbolic icon, the many mythical sources of the Bennu in ancient Egyptian culture reveal more about the civilization than the existence of a real bird. The earliest representation of the phoenix is found in the ancient Egyptian Bennu bird, the name relating to the verb “weben,” meaning “to rise brilliantly,” or “to shine.” Some researchers believe that a now extinct large heron was a possible real life inspiration for the Bennu. Mythical Origins Egyptian Bennu –or Heron
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