The Book of Symbols 6...

Flower

The ancient Greek counterpart to Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, was named Chloris, meaning "green." Zephyr, the gentle west wind, enamored of Chloris, pursued her, and as he overtook the maiden, flowers spilled from the lips, and they were subsequently married.

Mayan whistle depicting most probably Xochiquetzal

or "Flower Feather," goddess of love, erotic pleasure

and spiritual transformation. Ceramic, ca. 550-850,

Jaina Island, Campeche, Mexico.

Flowers are the hallmark of springs. There is no surer sign of renewal in the world, of awakening and rebirth. The young, budding shoots of violets, snowdrops and crocuses push up even through the impacted earth and late snows of winter's end. Delicate, fragrant cherry and apple blossoms signal anticipated fruits; other flowers are themselves vegetation's radiant, culminating bloom. Their ephemeral blossoms have associated flowers with all the brilliant forms that quickly fade. The transitory soul, for example. Or Kore, the divine maiden who, picking flowers, was herself plucked by Hades and carried to the underworld to become its queen. Or the lovely, short-lived mythic youths of antiquity: Narcissus, who wasted away, spellbound by his own reflection; Hyacinthus, felled by Apollo's misguided arrow; Adonis, for whom the briefly petalled anemone memorializes the blood of his mortal wound from a boar. Yet flowers are, in truth, remarkably resilient. Their aggressive roots invade rough, inauspicious soil. They assert their bright growth on the rocky banks of highways and out of asphalt cracks. Wildflowers gloriously latch onto walls and railings and fill jungles, deserts, and woods. Rare species of orchid thrive in swamps.

Possibly a figure of one of the Graces, Thalia (bloom)

evokes springs; virginal, feminine beauty and all that is

 lovely and fleeting. Primavera, painting from a 

bedroom of Villa Arianna, 89 B.C.E.-79 C.E., Stabiae (near

Pompeii),Italy.

All of nature is enticed into the flower's proliferation. The stamen forms golden pollen grains that produce male gametes. These sperms are transferred to the stigma or tip of the pistil and burrow down through the pistil to ovules at its swollen base. In the fusion of sperm cell and ovule a seed is formed. Most flowering plants are hermaphroditic, but some have either a stamen or a pistil. Cross-pollination of flowers is provided by bees, wasps, butterflies and moths, birds, bats and other mammals, water, and the fructifying wind: "There's April in the west wind and daffodils," said the poet John Masefield. Color, fragrance and sweet, golden nectar in the cup of the flower invite and guide the many pollen carriers.

Is anything more sensual than the flowers? Its green sepals forming the calyx, its shy buds unfurling to reveal a corolla of velvety petals, its heady perfumes, the edible and cosmetic essences of rose, jasmine, lily, freesia? In Pampore, India, the lavender-blue crocus sativus that flowers for just two weeks in October is plucked at dawn and the stigmas carefully removed to make saffron, that costliest spice with which the Hindu deities Krishna and Radha were traditionally anointed (Bharadwaj, 36-7). Flowers are incorporated into ritual and sacrament the world over, as emblems of eros, beauty, perfection, purity, fertility, joy, and resurrection. The simplest form of the flower with a radial shape is a natural mandala linking the flower symbolically with the wheel and eternal, cosmic movement around a mystic and orienting center. The flower's hermaphroditic qualities suggest the joining of opposites in self-becoming. Visible above yet rooted in the invisible below, the flower symbolically bridges the manifest and unseen worlds, realms of latency and potentiality and those of active generation. The poppy, for example, associated with the grain goddess Demeter, combines bright, many-hued blooms with narcotic properties inducing painlessness, slumber or death. The four-petalled "blue flower" of alchemy signifies both the darkness of the prima materia, as the shadowy, unknown self and the quadratic, unifying totality of the lapis.

Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers. Primavera,

detail, by Sandro Botticelli, tempera on panel, ca. 1482,

Italy.

We flourish in concert with the flower. It is an emblem of the hidden "seeding-place" within ourselves, supported by multiple, participating energies. The Holy Spirit makes itself known in the secret redolence of flowers. The lush rose intimates the presence of Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary. In Buddhism, the lotus signifies enlightenment and the "golden flower" of Chinese alchemy the achievement of the "diamond body" through the interior circulation of light. A European alchemical text describes the synthesis of the four elements, the hoped for unity in multiplicity of nature and psyche as the goal of the opus: It is " as if it were a meadow decked with colours and sweet- smelling flowers of divers kinds, which were conceived in the earth by the dew of heaven" (CW 14:389).  

~Bella