Many flowers from around the world appear in mythology. The anemone, carnation, hyacinth, lily, lotus, narcissus, poppy, rose, sunflower, and violet are among those that are associated with stories or customs from various cultures.
Anemone Greek mythology linked the red anemone, sometimes called the windflower, to the death of Adonis (pronounced uh-DON-is). This handsome young man was loved by both Persephone (pronounced per-SEF-uh-nee), queen of the underworld (land of the dead), and Aphrodite (pronounced af-ro-DYE-tee), goddess of love. Adonis enjoyed hunting, and one day when he was out hunting alone, he wounded a fierce boar, which stabbed him with its tusks. Aphrodite heard the cries of her lover and arrived to see Adonis bleeding to death. Red anemones sprang from the earth where the drops of Adonis’s blood fell. In another version of the story, the anemones were white before the death of Adonis, whose blood turned them red.
Christians later adopted the symbolism of the anemone. For them its red represented the blood shed by Jesus Christ on the cross. Anemones sometimes appear in paintings of the crucifixion.
Carnation Composed of tightly packed, fringed petals of white, yellow, pink, or red, carnations have many different meanings. To the Indians of Mexico, they are the “flowers of the dead,” and their fragrant blooms are piled around corpses being prepared for burial. For the Koreans, three carnations placed on top of the head are a form of divination, or predicting the future. The flower that withers first indicates which phase of the person’s life will contain suffering and hardship. To the Flemish people of Europe, red carnations symbolize love, and a kind of carnation called a pink was traditionally associated with weddings.
Hyacinth The Greek myth of Hyacinthus (pronounced high-uh-SIN-thuhs) and Apollo (pronounced uh-POL-oh) tells of the origin of the hyacinth, a member of the lily family. Hyacinthus, a beautiful young man of Sparta, was loved by the sun god Apollo. One day the two were amusing themselves throwing a discus, a heavy disc used in Greek athletic games, when the discus struck Hyacinthus and killed him. Some accounts say that Zephyrus, the god of the west wind, directed the discus out of jealousy because he also loved Hyacinthus.
While Apollo was deep in grief, mourning the loss of his companion, a splendid new flower rose out of the bloodstained earth where the young man had died. Apollo named it the hyacinth and ordered that a three-day festival, the Hyacinthia, be held in Sparta every year to honor his friend.
Lily To the ancient Egyptians, the trumpet-shaped lily was a symbol of Upper Egypt, the southern part of the country. In the ancient Near East, the lily was associated with Ishtar (pronounced ISH-tahr), also known as Astarte (pronounced a-STAR-tee), who was a goddess of creation and fertility. The Greeks and Romans linked the lily with the queen of the gods, called Hera (pronounced HAIR-uh) by the Greeks and Juno (pronounced JOO-noh) by the Romans. The lily was also one of the symbols of the Roman goddess Venus.
In later times, Christians adopted the lily as the symbol of Mary, who became the mother of Jesus while still a virgin. Painters often portrayed the angel Gabriel handing Mary a lily, which became a Christian symbol of purity. Besides being linked to Mary, the lily was also associated with virgin saints and other figures of exceptional purity of body.
Lotus The lotus shares some associations with the lily. Lotus flowers, which bloom in water, can represent female sexual power and fertility as well as birth or rebirth. The ancient Egyptians portrayed the goddess Isis (pronounced EYE-sis) being born from a lotus flower, and they placed lotuses in the hands of their mummified dead—dried and preserved before burial—to represent the new life into which the dead souls had entered.
World History
