BENNU BIRD

The Bennu bird, albeit little known nowadays, is an extremely important figure in the solar myths. The first mentions of Bennu date from the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom: the bird was associated with (or was one of the forms of) the creator god Atum, which in turn was an aspect of the sun god Re (Atum was the evening sun, Khepri the morning sun and the nominal Re the midday sun). Later, during the Middle Kingdom, Bennu was considered the ba of the sun god Re, which originated Atum. The ba is one of the souls that make up things in Egyptian beliefs; it is roughly equivalent to our notion of personality. Bennu is said to have flown over Nun, the primordial ocean, right before creation. He finally perched on a rock and let out a loud cry (in the sense of the usual animal call), which broke the primeval silence. This first cry was said to have determined what was and what was not to be in the soon-to-be-unfolded creation by the hands of Atum. 

Very little is known of Bennu’s cult, but his role in the solar mythology of Heliopolis probably made him very important in the region’s cults. Bennu’s titles were “He who Came into Being by Himself” and “Lord of Jubilees”, reflecting, respectively, his selfgenerative birth and its long life. Bennu is usually depicted as a heron (Fig. 5A), sometimes atop of the benben stone (the rock or mound where it first perched, which represents Atum/Re) or on a willow tree (which represents the god Osiris). But where did Osiris come from in this story? Bennu became linked with Osiris as a symbol of anticipated rebirth in the Underworld; as such, the bird is sometimes depicted wearing Osiris’s atef crown (a feathered white crown; Fig. 5A). Rarely, Bennu is depicted as a heron-headed man. Bennu appears as a persona only in the very first game in the series (P1). 

Its depiction in the game is completely stylized and rather bizarre (Fig. 5C), not being very reminiscent of a heron at all. However, the official artwork of the Bennu in the Shin Megami Tensei series is more similar to the Egyptian drawings (compare Figs. 5A and 5B). Nevertheless, it has a short neck and a long and curved beak, looking more like a hybrid of a vulture and an ibis than a proper heron. In addition, it wears not the atef crown of Osiris, but the headdress of the goddess Hathor (the sun disk amid cow horns), which has nothing to do with the Bennu. Archaeological remains found in the United Arab Emirates, dating from the Umm an-Nar period (2600–2000 BCE), contained bird bones, some of which belonged to a large heron. 

These bones were deemed to belong to a new species, which was named Ardea bennuides Hoch, 1979 (its common name is “Bennu heron”). This now extinct species is considered to have been the inspiration for the Bennu – for an idea of what the animal might have looked like, take a look at the grey heron (Fig. 5D), which belongs to the same genus. The date of the remains of the Bennu heron coincides with Egypt’s Old Kingdom and First Intermediate Period (Table 2). However, the Bennu only started to be depicted as a heron later in Egyptian history, during the New Kingdom. Back in the Old Kingdom days, we find another bird that might have been the first inspiration for the Bennu – and it has absolutely nothing to do with a heron. 

This bird is the yellow wagtail, Motacilla flava Linnaeus, 1758 (Fig. 5E), which in the Pyramid Texts is considered a representation of Atum himself. A Finally, I should say something about another famous mythological bird, the phoenix. The Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt during the 5th century BCE. There, he learned about the Bennu bird from the priests and called very modest bird for such an important role, perhaps? it Phoenix in his native language (the name was likely derived directly from “Bennu”). In later Greek tradition, the phoenix was often likened to an eagle, but kept the characteristics of its origin: its role as a sun-bird and a symbol of resurrection, its self-generative birth and its long life. These characteristics might have given rise to the legend that the phoenix is reborn anew in a fiery conflagration, like the sun rising at dawn. As such, we may consider that Bennu is also present in the games P2-IS and P2-EP, under the guise of “Phoenix”. In this depiction, the persona is clearly following the Greek eagle tradition.