History from the Goddess Garden

Judith Hawkins-Tillirson

I am honored that I have been asked to contribute a piece for The Oracle.  I would like to share some of the research I undertook for my book, The Weiser Concise Guide to Herbal Magick. Due to the format of the series, the length of the book was limited to 128pp; I am delighted that some of the most fascinating materials, left out of the published book, will at last have readers.  

You’d be appalled at what my research unearthed that simply verified, even on the level of plant iconography and like associations, the truism we all know: the gods of one era become the demons of the next. The supplanting of the Goddess-worshipping civilizations by invading Sky-god followers was so thorough that even Her sacred plants were debased, imbued with connotations despised by the invaders. The flexible wood of the Willow, for instance, comes to be seen as “weakness”—but I get ahead of myself.  

I will be referring throughout this piece to the works of Aleister Crowley as my exemplar sanspareils of patriarchial magical attitudes and spiritual phallicentrism. We’ll look at this phenomenon through a few examples: the Willow, the Hazel/Almond, and the Pomegranate and its cognate, the Poppy. Along with our stroll through the Goddess’ Garden, we’ll look at the color Red, the color of the chthonic Goddess’ Pomegranate and Corn Poppy; for even colors were not exempt from the “reframing” committed by the invaders. We will observe how Red was moved from signifying Life—the blood of childbirth—to Death—the blood spilt in battle.  

It was a tree linked with the Underworld and with Death. Ambiguity enters this realm, however, when we remember that the Willow roots easily from its smallest twig, and thereby becomes also a symbol of resurrection and rebirth. J.C. Cooper relates[iii] that to the Taoists, the Willow represented strength in weakness.  Contrasted with the pine or oak which resists the storm and is broken by it, the willow bends, gives way, springs back and survives. Willow’s wood is ill-suited for large building projects. However, writes Hageneder,[iv]

Here another aspect pointing us towards the veiled power of the Goddess: Her tree loves water, is a symbol both of death and rebirth, and its wood is used for containers. Further along these lines, Professor Cooper notes[v]that among the Ainu, the indigenous people of Japan, the Willow is especially sacred… since the spine of the first man was made of willow.

We have at once associated with the Willow the symbols of Water, always the emblem of the Divine feminine; the fact that its wood is used traditionally to make containers (cradles, coffins, daub-and-wattle walls, fences, and baskets are among the “containers” enumerated by Hageneder), its wood provided the spine of the first human. Finally, the entire tree is rich in salicins, the natural aspirin, a fact known for millennia and used as a pain reliever and febrifuge. In short, this was a tree that provided for the clan’s well-being in many important ways—from cradle to casket (or burial-basket), and as an important medicine as well.

Turning to the Hazel, we have Crowley’s pronouncement that:[vi]  

“The Hazel is suitable for the wand of the Black magician whose typical deity is the Moon just as that of the White Magician is the Sun.”

Just a couple of pages earlier, he wrote of Almond:  

   “The Almond is the proper wood for the Wand of the White magician…”[vii]

Robert Graves’ The White Goddess has rather a lot to say about Hazel (as you might imagine!). From the tale of Fionn, we find this Fionn:[viii] 

“was instructed by a Druid of the same name as himself to cook for him as salmon fished from a deep pool of the River Boyne, and forbidden to taste it; but as Fionn was turning the fish over in the pan he burned his thumb, which he put into his mouth and so received the gift of inspiration. For the salmon was a salmon of knowledge, that had fed on nuts fallen from the nine hazels of poetic art.”

“Hazel” in Gaelic is Coll and is the ninth tree in the Celtic Beth-Luis-Nion tree alphabet. Graves continues:

“The ninth tree is the hazel, in the nutting season. The nut in Celtic legend is always an emblem of concentrated wisdom: something sweet, compact and sustaining enclosed in a small hard shell.…The letter Coll was used as the Bardic numeral nine—because nine is the number sacred to the Muses and because the hazel fruits after nine years.  The hazel was the Bile Ratha, ‘the venerated tree of the rath,--the rath in which the poetic Aes Sidhe [“people of the hill”, Faerie folk] lived. It gave its name also to a god named Mac Coll or Mac Cool (‘son of the Hazel’) who …[with] his two brothers Mac Ceacht (‘son of the Plough’) and Mac Greine (‘son of the Sun’)…celebrated a triple marriage with the Triple Goddess of Ireland, Eire, Fodhla and Banbha…"[ix]  

[The reader will notice the Goddess’ numbers 9 (the ninth tree, the “perfected” three—3x3, as well as the association between the brothers Mac Coll and their marriages to the Irish Triple Goddess.] Graves goes on to describe why, in fact, it might be supposed that Hazel was the proper wand of the “Black” magician, whose allegiance was to the Moon:

“In the Fenian legend of the Ancient Dripping Hazel, the hazel appears as a tree of wisdom that can be put to destructive uses. It dripped a poisonous milk, had no leaves and was the abode of vultures and ravens, birds of divination. It split in two when the head of the God Balor was placed in its fork after his death, and when Fionn used its wood as a shield in battle its noxious vapours killed thousands of the enemy….”[x]

Another and very intriguing idea of Graves' is his reconstruction of the seven trees of the ancient Hebrew days of the week, the seven pillars of Wisdom:

“The substitute for the hazel was the almond: this was the tree from which Aaron took his magic rod…”[xi]

However, Graves’ most suggestive evidence is found in an endnote: in note 1 on page 387 of The White Goddess he reminds his readers of the tale of Attis, son of Nana,[xii] who:

“conceived him virginally as the result of swallowing either a ripe almond or else a pomegranate seed. The mythological distinction is important. The pomegranate was sacred to Attis as Adonis—Tammuz—Dionysus—Rimmon, and at Jerusalem , as has been shown, the pomegranate cult was assimilated to that of Jehovah. But the almond was also, it seems, sacred to Attis as Nabu—Mercury—Hermes—Thoth, whose cult was also assimilated to that of Jehovah; which explains the myth recorded by Euhemerus, the Sicilian sceptic, that Hermes so far from ordaining the courses of the stars was merely instructed in astronomy by Aphrodite—that is to say by his mother Nana who gave her name to the planet Venus. Thus Nana, as mother of Jehovah in two of his characters can be claimed as the paternal, as well as the maternal, grandmother of Jeohovah’s Only Begotten Son.”  

What Graves is telling us is this: there is a mythological identity between the seeds of the almond and the pomegranate. On the one hand, the pomegranate is sacred to the dying-and-reviving sons of the Mother, Attis, Adonis, etc; this pomegranate-cult had been subsumed by that of the Jehovists at Jerusalem (as we’ll see later, it was the only natural object allowed to be portrayed in the Holy of Holies). On the other hand, the almond was sacred to Attis in his form of Nabu, the local and pre-Jehovist version of Mercury/Hermes. It is in association with this form of the cult that Graves mentions that charming story of Euhemerus’, that Hermes did not set the courses of the stars but “was merely instructed in astronomy” by the Goddess.  

I apologize to the reader for having taken such a long way around to get to my point, but finally, here it is.  At the heart of this Almond-Hazel tension is the old war between the Great Mother, with her oracular tree the Hazel, and the invading Sky-god Indo-europeans who later came to comprise the Semitic tribes of the Middle East with their rival (and stolen, if the Qabala has anything real to suggest here) Tree of Power, the Almond. (Aaron’s Rod, etc.) I find it most interesting that early translators of the Bible routinely substituted “Hazel” for “Almond.”[xiii] In other words, they are symbolically identical—however, the Almond became for the Semitic invaders—who summarily cut out all its Goddess associations detailed above--the “good” tree, while the Hazel was condemned as the tree of “black magic” (which is to say, “women’s magic”).  

We now take up the Pomegranate, the Poppy, and their shared color, red. Of the Pomegranate, Crowley mentions it almost in passing: 

“The Pomegranate is sacred to Proserpine; in appearance also it is strongly suggestive of the feminine symbol;” a bit later he refers to it as “a symbol with reference to menstruation.”[xiv]

It is the darkened blood-red color, of course, of the crushed pulp that so evokes menstrual blood. To appreciate the Pomegranate and the Poppy, we need to go deeper, and so let us dive into the color Red.  Red ochre, derived from iron oxides in the earth, was an important and sacred color to the ancient peoples; as Marija Gimbutas writes:

   "The caves, crevices and caverns of the earth are natural manifestations of the primordial womb of the Mother. This idea is not Neolithic in origin; it goes back to the Paleolithic, when the narrow passages, oval-shaped areas, clefts, and small cavities of caves are marked or painted entirely in red… This red color must have symbolized the color of the Mother’s regenerative organs.”[xv]

The use of Red by our Homo erectus ancestors—dating from a million or more years ago—is the first indication of what D. Bruce Dickson calls “the emergence of modern operational modes of thought.”[xvi] Dickson goes on to identify the use of red pigment as one of the first magical acts of our species’ prototype. These two significators—the Mother Goddess and the Magical Act—come together in the use of red ocher in Neolithic burial sites: the bodies were formed to preserve a fetal shape, sprinkled with the red pigments “as a way of restoring to them the ‘warm’ color of blood and life”[xvii] and buried in, and with, womb-shaped vessels. Marija Gimbutas writes:

   “The folded and pressed arm position (the attitude of the embryo in the matrix?) is typical of the dead buried in the cemeteries of Old Europe. Babies and children squeezed into egg-shaped pithoi for burial had arms tightly pressed to the body, a natural foetal position. A pithos was a womb as was the grave pit from which the child or adult could be born again. For this purpose miniature vessels filled with red colour were laid in graves… The color of blood was as effective as the real blood necessary for restoration of life.”[xviii]

The many sanctuaries of the Goddess at Çatal Hüyül are either completely painted red, as is the Birth Shrine, or have red as a predominate color theme.[xix] In later epochs, other layers of meaning came to accrete around the color red, and the birthing-bed lost to the killing-field; it was associated with fire and the masculine, with gods associated with war, and with war in general. To stay within our Western Ritual Magical example, in the Qabala, it is significant to note that the plant associated with Fire is the Red Poppy, Papaver rhoeas is of course a member of the Poppy family but it does not have the narcotic alkaloids of the Opium Poppy, Papaver somniferum. Crowley writes:

    “The Red Poppy is given in this place only on account of its colour… All scarlet flowers might be equally well placed here. But the attribution is not very satisfactory, as the nature of flowers in themselves is not usually fiery except as their perfume is a stimulant."[xx]

“that known to the Greeks by the name of "rhœas;"…. This last grows spontaneously, but in fields, more particularly, which have been sown with barley: it….bears a red flower, which quickly fades; it is to this flower that it is indebted for its Greek name."[xxi]

The “rhoeas” Pliny refers to is the Pomegranate—in Greek, “rhoa” (΄ροά or ΄ροιά)—to signify, reports Pliny’s modern editors, its crimson color.[xxii] In fact, an iconographic identity exists between the Poppy and the Pomegranate;[xxiii] the shape of the seedhead of any Poppy is a fairly exact replica, in small, of the fruit of the Pomegranate, and the import of the symbolism is fecundity contained: the seeds in the womb. These two plants, along with corn (that is, of course, wheat), were emblematic of Demeter and of Her Eleusinian Mysteries:

   “The Eleusinian symbolism of corn, pomegranates and poppies…refers to the unseen forces which affect mankind via the vegetable kingdom, building the body and informing the mind.”[xxiv]

The Red Poppy is sacred to Demeter, growing everywhere wild among her grain-fields, and was worn by Her Priestesses; and while this is the Corn Poppy, the Opium Poppy has also been associated with Demeter—it is said that She used it to relieve Her grief at the loss of Persephone. Still another account has Demeter loving a mortal man, Mekon, whom She translated into the Red Poppy flower; “mekon” is indeed the ancient Greek word for “poppy,” with “papaver” not found in earlier Greek writers; the word “mekon” does not exist in modern Greek.  

It is tragic that the Red of the corn poppy, which originally signified the first birth and the rebirth implicit in the womb-shaped, red-ochre-stained burial vessels, becomes by the end of World War I emblematic of the horrors of death in battle. The poem “In Flanders Field” by John McCrae is arguably the most famous poem of that War. It commemorates the terrible Third Battle of Ypres, that resulted in over half a million casualties on both sides. The poem begins:

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow

         Between the crosses, row on row…”  

Some VFW units still sell Red Poppy pins on Armistice Day to commemorate the end of that War, and now what the Red Poppy brings immediately to mind is the agonizing, pointless deaths of battle. Any species of Poppy’s symbolism always involves the concept of fertility, because of the hundreds of tiny seeds each flower produces. The Opium Poppy adds another emblematic layer, one signifying forgetfulness, sleep and death. J.C. Cooper finds that the Poppy is symbolic of:

   “the Great Mother as the One and the Many, the Mother and the Maid; Night; sacred to all lunar and nocturnal  deities; represents fertility; fecundity; oblivion idleness.. The blood-red poppy depicts the passion of Christ and the sleep of death. Graeco-Roman The period of the sleep and death of vegetation; emblem of Demeter/Ceres, Persephone, Venus, Hypnos and Morpheus."[xxv]

The Great Mother is the Primordial Mother, the source of all; as we read in Neumann:

   “She is the vulture Mother goddess…who is worshipped as a ‘form of the primeval abyss which brought forth the light,’ and whose name means ‘the father of fathers, the mother of mothers, who hath existed from the beginning and is the creatrix of the world."[xxvi]  

 

"….But the goddess is not merely the vessel of the Great Round; She is also the dynamic of the life contained in it. In Egypt as in India and in alchemy this dynamic is manifested as fire and heat. This fire can be consuming and destructive, but it can also be the positive fire of transformation.”[xxvii]

Later in The Great Mother, Neumann discusses what he names the center of the primordial mysteries of the Feminine: namely, “the guarding and tending of fire:

   “As in the house round about, female domination is symbolized in its center, the fireplace, the seat of warmth and food preparation, the ‘hearth,’ which is also the original altar.”[xxviii]

Fire resides in the Feminine, and is only “called forth” by the masculine, whether it be by the friction of the sexual act or the action of the fireboard. Agni, the Indian Fire God, is called “he who swells in the mother (the fire board).”[xxix] This ancient deity, Agni, is defined by his relationship to Her. The Fire is Hers; he only calls Her forth. We will recall that the Goddess Demeter, as well as Hekate, are shown with Torches to signify that they own and wield the fire.  

Finally, and too briefly, we return to the Pomegranate, a fruit of so many layered meanings to be far beyond the scope of a brief article such as this. We’ve already noted how deep is the strata of the human psyche that belongs to this fruit, the Punica granatum.

In the story of the Abduction of Persephone, we have a Mother’s loss and grief, male duplicity and deceit, the clear vision of the Crone, and the Mother’s courage in Her search: these themes are absolutely visceral to our human experience—far more “real” than anything seen on news programs. It is interesting to note that the Pomegranate was not solely or even originally the sacred plant of Proserpine (Persephone); it first belonged to Hera, Queen of the Gods, marginalized by later myth-tellers to be but a jealous harridan of a housewife. Pausanias writes[xxx] of the Pomegranate, the only fruit grown in Hera’s honor, that he “must say nothing, for its story is somewhat of a holy mystery.” Holy mystery or not, we can make a couple of surmises: one, that the great multiplicity of seeds, each contained in its own little container of sweet-tart juicy pulp,[xxxi] came to stand for fertility, like the fig, and like the fig came to imply the female pudenda. The other guess has to do with the death of Zagreus, one incarnation of Dionysus, born as a horned serpent. (Note again the conflation of Goddess symbols: Her Lunar Horns, and Her totemic, resurrecting animal.) The Titans tore young Zagreus/Dionysus apart and ate him, either raw or cooked in a cauldron;[xxxii] where the Titans spilled his blood, the Pomegranate arose, lending it a second Death association.[xxxiii] Giving us even further Pomegranate associations, Graves notes:[xxxiv]      

   "The pomegranate was… sacred to Rimmon, a name for Adonis and from whose blood it is said to have sprung. Also, the Paschal victim was traditionally spitted on pomegranate wood. The pomegranate was the only fruit allowed to be brought inside the Holy of Holies—miniature pomegranates were sewn on the High Priest’s robes when he made his yearly entry."

With this we return again to the story of Attis/Adonis, born of the seed swallowed by Nana, Grandmother, and reminding us what we all know to be true: She brought us into the World, and She will take us out.  

Thank you for allowing me to share some of my research with the readers of The Oracle!

Bibliography

Baring, Anne and Cashford, Jules. The Myth of the Goddess: The Evolution of an Image. New York . Viking Penguin. 1991.

Biederman, Hans. Dictionary of Symbols, tr. By Hames Hulbert. New York . Penguin. 1994.

Cooper, J.C. An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols. New York . Thames & Hudson. 1987.

Dickson, D. Bruce. The Dawn of Belief: Religion in the Upper Paleolithic of Southwestern Europe . Tucson . University of Arizona Press. 1990.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco . Harper & Row. 1989.

Godwin, Joscelyn. Mystery Religions in the Ancient World. San Francisco . Harper & row. 1981.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historic Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York . Farrar Straus and Giroux. 1981.

Hageneder, Fred. The Spirit of Trees: Science, Symbiosis, and Inspiration. London . Continuum International Publishing Group. 2005.

Moldenke, Harold N., and Moldenke, Alma. Plants of the Bible. New York . Dover Publications. 1986.

Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, tr. by Ralph Manheim. Princeton , NJ . Princeton University Press. 1974.

Pausanias. Descriptions of Greece , tr. W.H.S. Jones. Harvard , MA . Harvard University Press. 1919. Found online at: the Perseus-Tufts Classics Collection: http://www.peresus.tufts.edu

Pliny the Elder. The Natural History. tr. y John Bostock and H.T. Riley. London . Taylor & Francis. 1855. Found online at: the Perseus-Tufts Classics Collection: http://www.peresus.tufts.edu