Saffron (Mercury and Minoans)

“ Your lips drop sweetness like honeycomb, my bride, syrup and milk are under your tongue, and your dress had the scent of Lebanon.
Your cheeks are an orchard of pomegranates,
an orchard full of rare fruits, spikenard and saffron, sweet cane and cinnamon.”

—Song of Solomon

I've been on another chase tonight- watching a show about Crete, Knossos, Thira, and what happened to the Minoans- how and why did they disappear? I've discussed this on the blog previously. I've also posted about sacred bees and their role at Knossos.

While watching this documentary, they showed frescoes from Knossos which depict women harvesting saffron. It's something I remember seeing and later reading about, but I never really thought about it. Saffron is harvested from the stamen of the crocus. It's also sacred to Mercury.

According to Ovid, Krokos was a boy loved by the god Hermes. After his accidental death the god transformed him into the saffron flower. Its red stems were described as his spilt blood.

In the book Plant lore, legends, and lyrics: Embracing the myths, traditions, superstitions and folklore of the plant kingdom  By Richard Folkard, there are many references to saffron and its uses in Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Jewish and Indian cultures. This link takes you to to the precise page with the entry for crocus. It's well worth the brief read, especially since I can't cut and paste the highlights here!

It takes 75,000 blossoms or 225,000 hand-picked stigmas to make a single pound of saffron. No wonder it's the world's most expensive spice! During the Renaissance, Venice stood out as the most important commercial center for saffron. In that period saffron was worth its weight in gold. Saffron was used to scent the baths and public halls of Imperial Rome. It is an important component of many an ayurvedic recipes. From an ayurvedic text:

Saffron is bitter, greasy and it cures head ailments and heals wounds. It is pungent, stops vomiting and gives brightness to the body as well as cures the three ailments. Saffron is bitter, pungent and heaty. It stops phlegm and cures gastric problems. It heals wounds, eye and head ailments. It serves as an anti-venom. It also gives brightness to the body.

This matches up with how Pliny describes the herb. There are still recipes describing the use of saffron, especially for wounds, eye cures, and gastric issues. It's fatal in high doses, so I'd recommend sticking with your favorite Indian restaurant as your primary intake source ;) However, some saffron rice would make a nice offering to Mercury!

From Alchemical Properties of Foods:

Saffron is considered the most perfect of all spices. It comes from the stigma of the stunningly beautiful violet crocus flower. During a two-week period in autumn, three stigmas from each flower are handpicked and dried. It takes 225,000 stigmas from 75,000 flowers to produce just a pound of the herb. Eating saffron dispels depression and eliminates psychological inertia, and it was once thought that you could die of "excessive joy" by eating too much of it. Drinking the tea is said to bestow the gift of clairvoyance and greatly enhance the body’s healing powers. Yellow safflower is often used as a cheaper substitute for saffron, but true saffron has a deep red color and imparts a golden yellow hue to the food to which it is added. The alchemists considered saffron the gold of the plant kingdom and believed it carried the "signature" of the great transmuting agent for which the alchemists spent their lives searching. According to legend, Hermes created saffron when he accidentally wounded his friend Crocus, whose blood dripped to earth and sprouted as the flower that bears his name. Saffron was sacred to the Egyptian supreme god, Amen, and the Egyptians grew it in their sacred gardens at Luxor. Persian priests were said to have controlled the winds with saffron, and Persian women attached balls of saffron to their bellies to facilitate safe pregnancies. Saffron was also sacred to Eos, the Greek god of the morning light, and the spice has been described as the dawn’s light solidified. In the Middle Ages, it was sprinkled over the beds of newlywed nobility to ensure a fruitful marriage. Alchemist Roger Bacon believed that saffron delayed the aging process, and some modern psychics believe its odor and taste release the transcendent essences of childhood.

Saffron-as-medicine is also mentioned in an Assyrian text from around 700 BCE. It was part of the collection of Ashurbanipal's Library (which was long before the one at Alexandria). This is the same collection we have to thank for the Epic of Gilgamesh. Here is a recipe for a salve allegedly made by the royal perfumer for Gilgamesh himself (ancient massage oil?):

"At first light, I gather balsam from the forest, saffron hidden in the dusty grass, flowers from the river's left bank, essential oils of the fir cone, oil from the calamus root, and a young turtle's shell ground up fine. Blessed with balsam's heat, on the altar do the flowers burn, until the heavens hear our plea, then they are crushed and stirred: For seven sunrises and seven sunsets does the mixture purify, and then it is rubbed upon the limbs and while singing praise, as this is proper toward the God."

Speaking of Alexandria, this ties in nicely with last night's post which included Alexander the Great. From the holy wiki:

Persian saffron was heavily used by Alexander the Great and his forces during their Asian campaigns. They mixed saffron into teas and dined on saffron rice. Alexander personally used saffron sprinkled in warm bath water. He believed it would heal his many wounds, and his faith in saffron grew with each treatment. He even recommended saffron baths for the ordinary men under him. The Greek soldiers, taken with saffron's perceived curative properties, continued the practice after they returned to Macedonia

Let's bring it back around tonight with an article from a 2004 published in the New York Times:

Until now, the earliest known use was around 1000 B.C., with visual and written evidence for the myrtle, the lily, the poppy and others. Now, scholars say, the dating of a volcanic eruption and botanically accurate wall paintings indicate that saffron has been a versatile medicine since 3,500 years ago.They base their case on frescoes at Thera, a Greek island in the Aegean, that have been thought to depict a goddess overseeing the production of perfume or spice. Instead, the scholars say, the frescos, from 1500 or 1600 B.C. -- the exact date is a topic of debate -- show the goddess presiding over the manufacture and use of a drug from the saffron flower.

It's believed this flower originated in Crete. I've posted before about Knossos being a city of the dead, where mummification took place and where sacred rites were held. It just occured to me that Hermes is associated with the bee nymphs which are associated with Crete, and with the crocus/saffron, and is a guide of souls. The information tonight might not be new, but my perspective is. I'm off to dream about this!

Ancient Ghost Town

One of the reasons behind my daily blogging is to set aside time to investigate and research and to contemplate what I know and what I only think I know. There is so very much on this topic- it's a huge body of water with a great number of tributaries. There's no way I'm going to parse all of this tonight, so come take a trip on my train of thought...

When I made my offerings eariler, I found myself in a prayer pose which I recall my Aunts using, even the ones who went to Church (tho not as exaggerated). Almost no one else in the church did this, certainly not anyone who wasn't Italian (It was a mostly Italian parish anyway!). From there, it was a quick leap to the Minoan figures of worshipers. I remember how striking they were when I saw them in person:

I took this picture in the Heraklion museum.

I meditated tonight before blogging and was reminded of my dance with Ereshkigal. I didn't really understand why until, when searching for pictures of the figures of worshipers, I came across pictures of the Minoan Snake Goddess.

I wound up looking at these pictures side by side for the first time. I've known about Ninhursag, but somehow I've never connected these two pictures before.



Ninhursag, meaning "Lady of the Mountain," is the Sumerian Earth Goddess/Mother Goddess. Her attributes were later subsumed into Inanna/Ishtar. If you are unfamiliar with this Goddess I highly suggest this article. "In art, Ninhursag is often depicted with a tiered skirt, often with a horned head-dress. She sometimes carries bow cases at her shoulders, and/or a mace or staff with an omega motif at its top."

What really has me in a tizzy tonight is this article I've found on the links between Egypt and Crete. I would love to just post the entire article here on the blog. Instead I'll summarize it and add a few excerpts of interest, tho I have to say the entirely article is fascinating and makes a lot of sense. I would love to hear from those who work with the Egyptian pantheons weight in on this. Happily, I know a few and will ask them to comment.

Points to ponder from the article:
Was Crete an Egyptian colony, with care for the dead their primary occupation?
Were the "palaces" of Crete actually temples?
These were made of gypsum, when limestone was available.
No artifacts of daily living or waste have been found in the complexes
The stairs showed little sign of travel
There are identical processional paintings, of the same age, found in both Crete and Egypt; They speak of an island, identified in Egyptian sources as “Keftiu” – Crete.
The Phaistos Disc, found in Crete, might be a version of the Egyptian the snake game, Senet, which became an important funerary object and a metaphor for ascending to Heaven.

An excerpt:

The bull was important both in Crete and Egypt. In Egypt, the animal is linked with the deceased king, whereas the bull is depicted on all Minoan monuments, though its specification function is unclear, because of the absence of any knowledge on the Minoan religion. The palaces depict lilies and lotus flowers, plants that had an important, religious function in Egypt.

The Minoan palaces have a depiction of what is known as “bull leaping”: people performing acrobatics on a leaping bull. Experts have identified that this form of acrobatics is physically impossible – humans and bulls cannot interact in such a manner. The question is therefore whether these scenes depict “imaginary” scenes, i.e. scenes that might occur in the Afterlife?

The name of king Minos is identical to the first king of the Egyptian First Dynasty, Menes. But in the Homeric legends, Minos is not so much king, as a judge, “wielding a golden sceptre while dispensing laws among the dead.” If Minos ruled Crete, Crete was therefore an island of the dead.                  

YES! It makes such perfect sense to me.

Talking to hubby about our time in Knossos and about the rest of our experience in Greece in general, we both agreed that the "palace" felt very different than the other sites we visited. It was quieter in a way. I don't mean lack of tourist quieter, I mean energy of life quieter. We explored out of the way places like Eleusis and popular places like the Parthenon and Delphi- It wasn't a matter of how many tourists were around, it was the quality of the energy. There was a palpable difference. Despite the presence of people and a booming tourism industry, Knossos felt like a ghost town. According to this article? Literally.

And this isn't even getting into the Labyrinth, or Ariadne, or the Goddess cult on the island before it was colonized by Egypt or claimed by Greece! Another time!

Thanks for following my train tonight. Here are a few more pictures from that trip:

"Horns of Consecration"

The Prince of Lilies doesn't look Egyptian at all...

I thought this was just darn cool.