The Wind One Brilliant Day …
The wind one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an aroma of jasmine.
‘In return for this jasmine odor,
I’d like all the odor of your roses.’
‘I have no roses; I have no flowers left now
in my garden … All are dead.’
‘Then I’ll take the waters of the fountains,
and the yellow leaves and dried up petals.’
The wind left … I wept. I said to my soul,
‘What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?’
Antonio Machado, trans. Robert Bly, 1983.1
Why have we let the flowers die in the garden of our soul? Even the dried up petals have been blown away! Our present culture pays little attention to the needs of the heart – our emotional feeling nature has been subjugated to the constraints of reason for so long, that we now find ourselves in a spiritual wasteland. Compared to the great civilizations of the past, we do not honour enough the inner or unseen realm of the mind, the subtle expressions of the psyche. At one time, incense was burned upon temple altars and at household shrines on a daily basis, fragrant flowers were strewn on the floors of churches and dwelling-places, and the evocative power of perfume was understood as the silent language of divinity and human emotion. Now, having banished the ancient gods and goddesses, how are we to show our respect?
THE SYMBOLIC IMAGINATION
I do not feel like writing verses;
but as I light my perfume-burner
with myrrh, jasmine and incense,
they suddenly burgeon from my heart,
like flowers in a garden.2
Scent inspires the imagination and frees the spirit. In poetry, flowers are often used directly as a symbol of the soul, for their fragrance has an intangible quality which reaches out to our most intimate depths. To the primitive mind, the child’s eye or the poet’s pen, everything in the physical world can be seen as an expression of the more subtle, immaterial realm. To the ancients, there was far more to a plant than simply its tangible form, for each herb carried a whole series of associations with mythology, astrology and folklore. To the mind’s eye, the scent, shape and colour of a plant, its habitat and manner of growth all helped to convey its innate quality. This essential, underlying property was known as the ‘virtue’.
The bay tree, for example, with its radiant shining leaves, evergreen growth and narcotic, heady scent was associated with the sun, the sign of Leo, the god Apollo and the ‘virtues’ of strength, protection, courage, inspiration, prophecy and insight. The leaves were made into wreaths to crown victors and great artists or poets; it was planted by the door of houses to keep evil ‘at bay’; and was used as incense by the pythia, the high priestess at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. When burned, herbs were seen to release their inner virtues. The scent of bay thus evoked the presence of Apollo, as well as the qualities of prophecy and clairvoyance needed by the pythia to transmit the message of the oracle.
John Gerard, in his popular herbal of 1597, esteemed scent before taste and before ‘any confection of the apothecaries’ for comforting the heart. In Britain, even up the Victorian age, the scent of a flower was believed to be its soul, and a fragrant bouquet was considered a time-honoured symbol of love and human passion. As romantic tokens, specific flowers were often used as metaphors for the range of the human emotions. A complex vocabulary was gradually developed, in which each flower was understood to represent a different mood or stage in the courtship procedure. In the language of flowers, the white lily stood for purity, innocence and virginity; the bluebell for loyalty, assurance and truth; and the mimosa for sensitivity and delicacy. A single red rose said ‘I love you’, but a bunch of mint meant ‘Find a spouse of your own age and background’! The names of some flowers spoke for themselves, such as forget-me-not, heartsease or love-lies-bleeding.
Many flowers and plants have retained a ritual significance, though the original meaning has been lost. Kissing beneath a sprig of mistletoe at Christmas harks back to an old pagan custom when it was hung in the house throughout the year as a symbol of peace, friendship and goodwill.
The Chinese especially have always endowed certain plants and flowers with symbolic attributes, for example, the aged and crooked pine tree stands for virtue triumphant in adversity. The much loved and fragrant cassia was admired by poets chiefly for its perfume and, according to myth, grew on the moon – possibly because its scent was strongest at night! In the Chinese tale Dream of the Red Chamber, the noble family’s impending collapse is presaged in the garden by a begonia which suddenly bursts into flower in mid-November. Reversals of nature cannot but bode ill, for they reflect an inner lack of harmony which sooner or later leads to disaster. On the other hand, the vigorous but unexceptional blossoming of common plants such as the orchid or chrysanthemum signify that all is well within the household.
In Western fairy tales, trees and plants are often involved as life tokens, the life force of a person being involved with a tree planted at birth. In the Grimms’ story The Juniper Tree, a murdered boy is buried beneath a juniper tree with his mother, only to be reborn like a phoenix from its depths:
Then the juniper tree began to stir itself, and the branches parted asunder, and moved together again, just as if someone were rejoicing and clapping his hands. At the same time a mist seemed to arise from the tree, and in the centre of this mist it burned like a fire, and a beautiful bird flew out of the fire, singing magnificently, and he flew high up in the air, and when he was gone, the juniper tree was just as it had been before.3
In this story, the juniper tree is the source of new life and hope from which the released soul arises. In the original myth of the phoenix, the fire-bird dies and is reborn from the aromatic ashes of fragrant wood. The ‘spiritual bird’ arises from the depths of the pyre like incense from a fragrant fire. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians believed that the phoenix first brought incense to the Land of Punt in his claws and that the scent of incense was his own scent. The Hebrews thought the phoenix was a god reincarnated and the Egyptians saw him as the soul of Osiris, the god whose breath smelt of myrrh and incense. According to the Egyptian legend, at the end of his long life, the phoenix builds himself a nest of frankincense and cassia on which he dies, and from his corpse arises the new phoenix. Thus the phoenix, like scent, depicts the vital essence or spark of life, the immortal soul; in this sense it can be equated with the ‘fire-water’ of the shamans and with the ‘quintessence’ of the alchemists. As Gaston Bachelard says in Fragments d’une poetique du feu, ‘Odours in and of themselves make myths possible …’
Slowly, however, with the growth of rationalism in the West, the symbolic imagination was repressed – only poets and children were allowed to speak in the language of the heart:
Rational thought, in its pursuit of objective knowledge, denies the validity of subjective visualisation. Its diabolic methodology has supplanted the symbolic perspective, and the material world is perceived as existing in its own right quite dissociated from the person observing it.4
