Provoking an immediate furore, the painted figure and its interpretation remain disputed to this day. Is it a man or a woman? A theocratic king or a female leaper? One person or two, facing left or right? And what are we to make of the lily emblems on the crown and necklace: do they really support Evans’s views about the figure’s status? As Evans himself described, the stylized lilies in fact combine two flowers in one: the fan-shaped papyrus or waz, borrowed from the snake goddess of the Egyptian delta, grafted onto a Minoan lily. Convinced that the crown represented a mystic Egyptian element, Evans proclaimed the lily as ‘pre-eminently the Minoan sacred flower’. Ritual dances before the goddess took place in a field of lilies, he claimed, relying on the evidence of signet rings from Candia and especially Mycenae, which linked the goddess to offerings of lilies.
While scholars today are far more cautious in their interpretation, Evans’s pronouncements on the ‘Priest-King’ are regaining partial favour, and expert opinion grants at least some religious significance to the Minoan lily. But without supporting texts, we cannot know exactly what the Minoans intended when they painted lilies on the walls of their houses and sacred spaces.
A similar mystery surrounds the red lilies discovered in other Bronze-Age wall paintings at Akrotiri on the island of Thera, ironically preserved by the volcano’s catastrophic eruption midway through the second millennium BCE. Painted around three walls of a ground-floor room to an Akrotiri town house, small clumps of red lily flowers protrude from a rocky Aegean landscape that looks almost Japanese in its boldly delineated blocks of red, yellow, black and shades of blue. Swallows, flying either alone or in pairs, swoop close to the blooms, but in contrast to the nearby fresco of the saffron-gatherers, people are entirely absent. Like a theatrical backdrop, the ‘Spring Fresco’ of lilies and swallows looks as if it is waiting for something to happen. Perhaps this is why virtually all scholars have accorded the room a ritual function, despite the absence of any real evidence. Whatever its original purpose, by the time of Thera’s eruption it was little more than a storeroom for domestic clutter. No text has yet elucidated the mystery, but equally no ‘restorer’ has imposed a modern view on these lilies, which some experts believe were painted before 1759 BCE. And what of the lilies themselves? Did Thera’s artists paint what they saw, adding the bright red of the endemic Scarlet turkscap lily (Lilium chalcedonicum) to their stylized lilies based more closely on the form of the white lily, L. candidum? Or did they – the more usual explanation – simply paint white lilies red to make them stand out against the white background?
7. Bronze-Age Minoan wall painting of red lilies and swallows from a townhouse at Akrotiri on the Aegean island of Thera.
The same red lilies, with blue rather than yellow stems, appear in another house at Akrotiri in elegant two-handled vases, displayed in trompe-l’oeil open windows close to a room containing friezes in miniature of exploration and perhaps conquest. While the friezes tell us nothing specific about the lily, they map a context for its gradual dispersal, as the most prized flowers spread slowly outwards from their native lands, whether seized as booty, passed from conqueror to conquered, or simply bought and sold in the marketplaces of the civilized world and handed eagerly from one delighted plant collector to another.
After the Minoan catastrophe, the lily lost for a time its religious associations but it was undoubtedly colonizing the lands of the Mediterranean. By the early seventh century BCE, graceful and clearly recognizable trumpet lilies had reached the northern palace of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (modern-day Mosul in Iraq), carved into a stone relief. Another tomb relief of Egyptians gathering cultivated white lilies for perfume shows that lilies had reached Egypt by the twenty-sixth dynasty, the last to rule Egypt before the Persian conquest of 525 BCE. The vast quantities of flowers required to make perfumes imply cultivation on a commercial scale; as the lily is not indigenous to Egypt, it may have travelled there with the Greeks, who established a trading colony around this time at Naucratis on the Nile delta. Lilies were woven into the wreaths and bouquets left by mourners in the tombs of pharaonic Egypt, along with their ‘lotuses’ and many other flowers.
Lilies were in any case gaining a foothold in the ordinary garden plots of the early Greeks, who loved the lily for its sweetness even if they gave it no central role in the complicated genealogies of their gods. In Hesiod’s Theogony, for instance, lilies appear only fleetingly in the ‘lily-like’ voices of the Muses that sweeten the ears of their father, Zeus. And in the epic pre-Iliad cycle of poems known as the Cypria, perfumed garlands to adorn the goddess Aphrodite contained seasonal flowers such as ‘crocus and hyacinth and flourishing violet and the rose’s lovely bloom, so sweet and delicious, and heavenly buds, the flowers of the narcissus and lily’.
The lily comes into clearer focus in the works of the Greek botanist Theophrastus. While the detail in Theophrastus’ Enquiry into Plants does not permit a reliable taxonomy of Greek lilies, he knew of at least two different types that accord with two of Europe’s native species. These were the white Madonna lily, Lilium candidum, believed to have originated in the Balkans before it was taken into cultivation by the Cretans and carried into western Mediterranean countries by the Phoenicians and others; and the Scarlet turkscap lily, L. chalcedonicum from the mountains of Thessaly, the Ionic isles and much of Greece, which Theophrastus seems to have known only through hearsay. He refers also to planting the seeds of Martagon lilies, possibly a form of L. martagon, which is native to much of Europe.
Theophrastus classed his lilies with other coronary plants grown principally for garlands. He described them – as he described all his plants – dryly and methodically, noting the lily’s colour variation and its manner of flowering, generally on a single stem that divided occasionally into two, perhaps due to differences in position and climate. There was ample root, he said, fleshy and round, and although the fruits were able to germinate, they produced smaller plants. The plant – presumably he meant the bulb and underground stems – also produced ‘a sort of tear-like exudation, which men also plant’.
Like the Egyptians before them, the Greeks used lily flowers in their perfumes. Because of its lightness, lily was recommended for men along with other light perfumes such as rose and kypros, a compound perfume steeped in sweet wine, while women were thought to require a perfume that would linger, such as myrrh oil, sweet marjoram and spikenard. The clearest guidance on how to make lily ointment comes from the Greek-born herbalist, Pedanius Dioscorides, writing in the first century CE, who reveals just how messy the ancient business of perfumery could be. First you had to thicken the oil by boiling it in fragrant wine, with aromatics such as sweet flag or myrtle sedge and myrrh, adding bruised cardamom steeped in rainwater to the strained oil. After more straining came lily flowers in vast quantities:
Take three and a half pounds of this thickened oil and a thousand (counted) lilies, and having stripped off their leaves, put them in a broad but not deep jar. Pour in the oil, stir it around with your hands (that have been previously rubbed with honey) and let it stand for a day and a night. The next morning pour it into a cupped strainer and presently (when it is strained) separate the oil on top from the water that is strained out with it . . . Pour it out again into other jars smeared with honey, first sprinkling a little salt in there and taking away the filth carefully as it gathers together.
And so the process continued with ever more steepings, strainings and pressings, adding more cardamom and more fresh lily flowers, a thousand at a time.
Finally when it seems to you that you have enough, mix with every preparation seventy-two teaspoons of the best myrrh, ten teaspoons of crocus and seventy-five teaspoons of cinnamon. Some take the same amount of crocus and cinnamon (having pounded and sifted it), put it into a jar with water, and pour on it the ointment from the first pressing: afterwards (leaving it alone a little while) they put it into little dry jars (first smeared around with gum or myrrh and saffron and honey diluted with wa
ter). Do the very same things to the second and third pressings.
As for the lily’s healing virtues, Dioscorides judged it warming and softening, an effective cure for all female ailments and especially for reducing inflammation around the vulva. It was also good, he said, in cases of scaly scalp, varicose veins, dandruff and fever marks on the skin, while the leaves were used for snakebites, burns, ulcers and soothing old wounds. Although generally very purifying, expelling bile through the bowels and inducing the flow of urine, he warned that it could also damage the stomach and cause nausea.
Writing about the same time as Dioscorides was Rome’s Pliny the Elder, who completed his vast compendium of Natural History just before scientific curiosity lured him to his death in the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which destroyed the nearby towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pliny and Dioscorides almost certainly never met, or Pliny would have cannibalized the other’s work for his own writings. Yet however widely he borrowed, or stole, from other authors, Pliny lets us see the lily through Roman eyes.
Like Theophrastus before him, Pliny writes of the lily as a garland or chaplet flower, ranking it second after the rose. ‘No flower grows taller,’ he declared, entranced; ‘sometimes it reaches three cubits, its neck always drooping under the weight of a head too heavy for it. The flower is of an exceeding whiteness, fluted on the outside, narrow at the bottom and gradually expanding in width after the fashion of a basket. The lips curve outwards and upwards all around’; standing upright at its heart were saffron-coloured stamens and a slender pistil. The lily’s perfume was twofold, he said, exuded by petals and stamens alike; both were used in making lily oils and unguents.
Such pure white lily trumpets add their sweetness to the garden frescoes of Pompeii, preserved for centuries like Thera’s wall paintings under a coating of volcanic debris. Pompeiian lilies include a stylized flower in the House of Cornelius; a lily bearing five or more blossoms in the House of Adonis; four lily blooms in different stages of opening at the House of the Fruit Orchard; a couple of Madonna lilies in a badly preserved tomb painting of a young man’s funeral banquet by the Vesuvius Gate; and, most resplendent of all, the white lilies in Pompeii’s House of the Gold Bracelet, thrown together with wild morning glories, a young date palm, camomile and opium poppies in an orgy of early summer.
The frescoes catch echoes of the lilies in Virgil, who placed them in the garden of an old Cilician smallholder from southern Anatolia, always the first to welcome the bees to his plot of cabbages, brambles, roses, apples and ‘white lilies in a ring, with vervain, and with frail poppy’. The Spanish-born Columella, another Roman writer on agriculture, also urged the spring planting of lilies and other flowers:
Now. In all hues, paint the flowers – they are earth’s own stars:
Snowdrops in shimmering white. Burnished marigold-en eyes.
Sprays of narcissus. Wild lion’s raging mouth gaping wide miming snap dragon. Lilies putting their strength in white cups.
Throughout this time, the number of lily varieties in cultivation was slowly increasing. Pliny counted four but his text is confused, proposing a red lily known as ‘crinon’ (the usual Greek name for a white lily) and called by some ‘cynorrodon’ (the usual Greek name for a Dog rose). He also included a new medical use for lily bulbs, suggesting that they could be boiled in wine and applied to corns on the feet, ‘not being taken off before the end of three days’. As the Latin word for lily spread into the languages of northern Europe many centuries before Linnaeus codified its use in plant names, is it too far-fetched to suppose that Rome’s conquering armies took lily bulbs with them to cure the corns and aching feet of their foot soldiers?
LIKE THE ANCIENT Greeks before them, the Romans gave the lily only an incidental role in their mythology. It was said to be the flower of Jupiter’s wife Juno, queen of the Roman pantheon, who was celebrated as the goddess of women, of childbirth and as the patron goddess of Rome. But Juno’s principal feast day, the Matronalia, was celebrated in March, long before the lily comes into flower; and although the goddess was believed to delight in flowers, it is hard to find contemporary evidence of the lily’s role in her cult. One suspects that the lily came later, added as an origin myth like those created by the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. The Elizabethan herbalist John Gerard recounts his version of the lily’s birth from milk spilled from Juno’s breast, saying that the lily was sometimes called ‘Rosa Junonis, or Junos rose, bicause as it is reported, it came up of hir milke that fell upon the ground’. According to Gerard, the child Hercules, born of Jupiter and Alcmene, was put to Juno’s breast while she was sleeping, and after he had suckled, a quantity of milk fell away – one part to earth, and ‘of this sprang the Lillie’, and the other to the heavens, where it formed the Milky Way.
The story does not feature among the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose one possible lily appears in his retelling of the death of Hyacinth, inadvertently slain by a discus thrown by Apollo and commemorated with a new flower that bore the signs of Apollo’s lament: ‘Gorgeous as Tyrian dye, in form a lily’. But in Ovid, the lily’s silvery petals had turned into the ‘richest purple’, marked with the letters ‘AI AI’; if the poet really did have a lily in mind, he may have intended the red-flowered L. chalcedonicum.
A ruder story explains how the lily gained its prominent sexual organs, when the goddess Venus – the Greek Aphrodite – experienced a wave of jealousy at the sight of the flower’s ethereal whiteness. Like the wicked fairy in Sleeping Beauty, she turned her spite into a malevolent gift, making a giant pistil emerge like a donkey’s penis from its heart. These are just the kind of lilies to appeal to Des Esseintes, the decadent anti-hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s late nineteenth-century novel, Against Nature (À Rebours). Venturing into his garden, Des Esseintes spied a row of white lilies, immobile in the heavy air, and his lips ‘curled up in a smile’ as he remembered the ancient writings on toxicology of Nicander of Colophon, who ‘likened the pistil of a lily to the testicles of an ass’.
GIVEN THAT THE lily had such a scurrilous heritage, it is hardly surprising that the early Christian Church tried to ban the flower, like the rose, from its rituals. The wearing of floral crowns or chaplets was particularly condemned as a lingering pagan practice that smacked of idolatry. Christians, wrote the early Church father Minucius Felix, ‘do not crown our heads; we are accustomed to receive the scent of a sweet flower in our nostrils, not to inhale it with the back of our head or with our hair’. Garlands wither, too, in contrast to the everlasting flowers of heaven.
Yet despite the Church’s disapproval, lilies (and roses – see Chapter 5) regained their place in Christian hearts, just as they became an essential feature of Church gardens. The sixth-century historian and bishop Gregory of Tours speaks of the priest, Severus, who gathered lily flowers (flores liliorum) to decorate the walls of his church – but were they yellow flag iris from boggy fields, or white Madonna lilies from a garden? White lilies and little red roses adorned the monk’s cell at Tours of the scholarly Alcuin of York, adviser to Emperor Charlemagne. The lily also led the list of herbs, fruits and nuts that an imperial decree of the time ordered to be planted in all royal estates. A bed was naturally kept for lilies in the herbularius or infirmary garden in the roughly contemporary plan of an idealized monastery preserved at the great abbey of St Gall in Switzerland. (The other beds contained kidney bean, savory, rose, horse mint, cumin, lovage, fennel, tansy or costmary, sage, rue, flag iris, pennyroyal, fenugreek, mint and rosemary.) The lily’s ‘white of glistening snow’ and ‘scent of sweetest frankincense’ gladdened the heart of Germany’s great gardening monk, Walahfrid Strabo, abbot of Reichenau, who ended his gardening poem musing on the respective virtues of the lily and the rose, both intimately linked with Christ’s fate:
By His holy word and life He sanctified
The pleasant lily; dying,
He gave its colour to the rose.
WHILE THE LILY was undoubtedly useful in early mon
astic life – Walahfrid recommended crushed lilies boiled in wine as an antidote to snakebites – even more critical to its pre-eminence in medieval times was its growing power in Christian iconography as it underwent a subtle transformation from simple flower of Paradise, to an emblem of the Virgin Mary, to the crucified Christ – sometimes combining all three associations (and more) at the same time.
First came the lilies of Paradise, which appear at their loveliest in the apse mosaic of the Transfiguration in the Church of St Apollinaris at Classe, Ravenna. A gem of Byzantine art created in the mid-sixth century, the mosaic concentrates on the moment when Christ revealed his divinity to the apostles Peter, James and John. In the lower part, St Apollinaris, whose relics originally lay under the altar, intercedes for his flock, portrayed as twelve white lambs, separated by clumps of white lilies, completing the paradisiacal landscape of a green meadow filled with pine trees, rocks, bushes and flowers – a landscape bathed in the light of Christ’s glory.
In the Christian hierarchy of flowers, Lilium candidum derived its most enduring power from its affinity with the Virgin Mary. The bloom’s astonishing whiteness and all-pervading sweetness make this lily the perfect emblem of spiritual and physical purity; and so – despite the asceticism of the early Christian fathers – the white lily of the ancients became the ‘Madonna lily’ of Christianity.
By the eighth century, the Benedictine Paul the Deacon was painting the lily in words that better describe the lotus, suggesting that just as virginity yearns for a higher realm, so the lily raises herself up from the earth and looks towards the sky – the fact that the lily often hangs her head is not allowed to spoil his argument. And just as the flower is white on the outside and flame-coloured on the inside, ‘so the purity of virginal flesh shows white on the outside while burning inwardly with the burning heat of clarity’.
Seven Flowers Page 5
