Demeter and Persephone

                                       
Whilst looking into the symbolism of the poppy (having decided to concentrate on a particular flower each month for my blog) I came across the beautiful, yet heartbreaking, story of Demeter and Persephone.  In Greek mythology, Demeter was worshipped as a vegetation/earth goddess and her symbols were, amongst others, the corn and the poppy. As the corn comes from the earth and flourishes, it is touched by the Sun where it manifests as the rich Solar gold of matter.  But it is also symbolic of death and resurrection: as the corn is cut down by the scythe of death, it always returns and grows again the following year. The symbolism of  Demeter's poppy, however, is a lot more ambiguous and decidedly more human... but also more mysterious.

Demeter, being the goddess of grain, harvest and the seasons, was responsible for the earth's bounty.  She gave birth to a sweet and lovely daughter, Persephone, the Maiden of Spring.  Demeter delighted in her beautiful daughter and her love and happiness kept the earth in bloom all through the year.  Mother and daughter were rarely apart, but one day Persephone wandered into a field full of red flowers (some writers describe the flowers as being poppies).  Unfortunately, Hades, Lord of the Underworld, saw her there and fell in love with her.  As she was busy admiring the flowers, Hades rode up from the bowels of the Earth on a chariot drawn by 7 black horses. He pulled the young maiden on board before descending back to the Underworld.  Persephone cried out in anguish for her mother but it was too late, Hades had captured her and was determined to make her his bride.

When Demeter realized that her beloved daughter had gone, she was inconsolable. Eventually, after much searching, Demeter went to Apollo and asked him if he knew where Persephone had been taken.  Apollo informed her that she now resided in the kingdom of the dead where Hades had made her his wife. This news broke Demeter's heart, the thought of her beautiful daughter residing in that dark, shadowy wasteland was more than she could bear.  She wandered the Earth in the hope that she would find some way of getting her back. Because of her anguish and despair, according to some writers, Demeter used the opium from the poppy to ease her grief. In so doing, Demeter no longer had the will to bless the crops or look with  favour at the harvest.  The Earth, which was once lush and green, became cold and barren and all the inhabitants suffered. 

This state of affairs alarmed and worried the other gods.  They realized that unless Demeter was consoled in some way, the human inhabitants would eventually die off, leaving no one to worship them.  They pleaded with Zeus to do something about it.  Zeus decided to send Hermes, the messenger god, to the Underworld in an effort to retrieve Persephone.  When Hermes demanded the return of the maiden, Hades gave her up quite willingly.  However, unknown to Hermes, Hades had managed to persuade Persephone to eat a seed from the pomegranate - the fruit of the dead.  This meant that she was doomed to spend part of the year with him in the Underworld.

When Persephone and Demeter were reunited, they wept tears of joy. Persephone told her mother how Hades had abducted her from the sunny meadow and carried her down into the dark Underworld to make her his queen. She described how she pined for the sight of the sun and the beauty of the earth and the sky. She had been so unhappy, that she ate nothing the entire year, despite Hades constant attempts to get her to eat, until finally, so that he would leave her alone, she had eaten a pomegranate seed.

Demeter was horrified to hear this for she knew that her daughter would be condemned to spend part of the year in the dreaded Underworld.  Consequently, when Persephone has to return to the Underworld, Demeter goes into mourning and, in her grief and loneliness, she makes the earth turn barren and cold.  This is what we now experience as the autumn/winter months.  The world then waits with Demeter for Persephone's return each spring, when the earth will turn green and warm again, leading us into summer.

And that concludes the story of Demeter, Persephone and the poppy... but does it?

It would appear on the surface, at least, that this is a simple, though inspiring, description that the Greeks gave to explain the four seasons.  However, on closer inspection, there is a whole lot more to be revealed...
which I hope to do in my next blog entitled Too Much Yang, Not Enough Yin :-)

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

The Flower Duet (Lakmé)

Under a dome of white jasmine
With the roses entwined together
On a river bank covered with flowers laughing in the morning

Gently floating on it's charming risings
On the river's current
On the shining waves
One hand reaches
Reaches for the bank
Where the spring sleeps and
The birds, the birds sing.

Under a dome of white jasmine
Ah! calling us
Together!

Under a dome of white jasmine
With the roses entwined together
On a river bank covered with flowers laughing in the morning
Let us descend together
Gently floating on it's charming risings,
On the river's current
On the shining waves,
One hand reaches,
Reaches for the bank,
Where the spring sleeps,
And the birds, the birds sing.

Under a dome of white jasmine
Ah! calling us
Together!

Georgia On My Mind

                                           
I absolutely adore Georgia O'Keefe's art!  This is one of her most famous paintings called 'Oriental Poppies.'  The poppies cover the whole canvas, which is 30 inches tall and over 40 inches wide. She painted it in 1928 and the painting is part of a collection at the University of Minnesota. Throughout her life she painted hundreds of flower images of many different colours, shapes, and sizes.

Many of these paintings evoke a veiled representation of female genitalia, although she consistently denied painting vaginal imagery.  However, many prominent art historians have linked her work to feminist artists of the 1970s.  Georgia herself said that her flower paintings expressed what she saw in her mind and felt in her heart.

Beautiful...

Wake Up!!! Be Here Now...

Truth

Truth, like the juice of the poppy, in small quantities, calms men; in larger, heats and irritates them, and is attended by fatal consequences in excess.
Walter Savage Landor

A Tale of Two Poppies

Yesterday, David Cameron and his delegation were asked by their Chinese hosts to remove the remembrance poppies from their lapels.  It was explained to the Prime Minister that allowing his team to sport the symbol would cause offence by reminding the Chinese people of the tragic Opium Wars.  Characteristically, the Old Etonian's aide said, 'We tried to explain the importance of the poppy in Britain and informed them we would be wearing them all the same.'  The arrogance and lack of empathy of this remark dismayed and saddened me.

The Opium Wars, between China and the then British Empire, were the climax of trade disputes over Chinese attempts to stop British opium trafficking.  The chaos and devastation of opium to Chinese society prompted the Manchu Emperor to ban any opium from entering their ports.  He named the commissioner of Canton, Lin Tse-Hsu, to lead the campaign and he duly seized massive amounts of opium and threw them in the river.  This outraged the opium traders and they demanded that the British Government retaliate.  Sadly, the British agreed and in 1839 the first of the Opium Wars began.  The Chinese army, weakened by ten years of opium addiction, were no match for the British who attacked and decimated cities and blockaded ports.

The war ended in 1842 with a British victory.  A treaty was drawn up which guaranteed the opium traders the right to enslave an entire population with opium.  This treaty included: the full legalization of the opium trade in China, compensation for the stock-piles confiscated by Tse-Hsu, territorial sovereignty for the British Crown over off-shore islands and a demand that Traders, Britain and France be reimbursed for the cost of the war - a tidy sum of 20 million taels of silver each.  However, they made one demand too many; that all of interior China be open for uninterrupted opium traffic.  The Manchus resisted this and the second of the two wars, which began in 1856, escalated.  The Prime Minister of the time, Lord Palmerston, declared, ' We shall teach such a lesson to the perfidious hordes that the name of Europe will hereafter be a passport of fear.'  The British besieged Peking (now known as Beijing, where, ironically, David Cameron is now visiting) and sacked and burned temples and sacred shrines in an effort to show Britain's total contempt for China and her people.  Again Britain was victorious and in 1860 gave the traders the right to expand their opium trade all over China.  However, they were quick to point out that there would be no opium imported into Britain or, indeed, anywhere in Europe.

The story behind the Remembrance Poppy is decidedly more poignant.  Thanks to an American lady named Moina Belle Michael, this vivid red flower has become synonymous with great loss of life in war.  On the 9th of November 1918, Moina came across a poem in a magazine entitled, 'We Shall Not Sleep'.  It was written by Canadian, John McCrae, who had written it for a fellow soldier who had recently been killed in action.  Lieutenant-Colonel McCrae was inspired by the vibrant red poppies growing defiantly in the shattered, war-torn land of Flanders.  The first lines of the poem have become some of the most famous lines ever written in relation to the first World War.  More commonly known as, 'In Flanders Fields', it captures natures unyielding beauty amid the chaos of war:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.


However, it was the last verse of the poem that deeply moved Moina:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.


In her autobiography, entitled 'The Miracle Flower', Moina describes this experience as being deeply spiritual.  It inspired her to buy and sell some artificial poppies to be worn in remembrance of the soldiers who died.  Her work and experience with ex-servicemen after the war, led her to widen the scope of the remembrance idea. She thought it could be developed so that it could be used to help all servicemen who needed help for themselves and their dependants.  The rest, as they say, is history. 

Many historians believe that the mistrust the Chinese feel towards foreigners today is the direct result of the rampant greed and the worse of imperialism before, during and after the Opium Wars.  If only Mr Cameron and his aides had remembered this and, while still proudly wearing their poppies, apologised for any offence this may have caused.