Faced with a world without animals, the goddess Asintma of the Athabascans of western Canada wove a blanket of fireweed and spread it on the ground, then began to sing, bringing forth all the beasts of the world1. This is one of my favorite creation stories, full of gentle beauty, flowers, music, and love. It is especially resonant in the northern hemisphere in May, a time of abundant blossoms that delight our eyes, noses, touch, and even taste, and bring joy to our souls and wonderment to our hearts. Truly, the vibrant energy between humans and flowers grows with each leaf and petal that emerges in this season.
Across the globes and millennia, goddesses associated with flowers are creatrixes. This is an apt association given that flowers and the pollination they enable are so crucial to the sexual reproduction of seed plants. Nonō’osqua, the Bella Coola “mother of flowers” creates all plants every spring2. Wohpe, of the Lakota and Ogallala people, “appears as the source of all flowers, for she blew upon dust at the dawn of time until her breath enlivened them into bloom”3. Flowers are also associated with goddesses who created all that exists. The Egyptian Mehurt, is “the sacred cow of creation” and she is sometimes shown holding a “lotus of the world”4, while the Hindu Lakshmi sat on a lotus at the time of Creation of the universe, and is known as “Lotus Goddess”5.
Further, flower goddesses also remind us that our bodies and our free sexuality are a part of cosmic creation. Xochiquetzal was the Aztec goddess of flowers whose name means “Precious Feather Flower” and who was “much loved by Aztec women6. She was also “the patron deity of healthy sexuality”7 and “the essential creative force, and all who participated in creative acts—transforming nature into arts — paid homage to her”8. Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, was celebrated during “Floralia,” a Roman festival known for its “licentiousness” which “the prostitutes of Rome…considered to be their own” and which also had many elements honoring fertility9.
The fiery passion of creation is highlighted by flower goddesses who are also associated with the sun and the ecstatic joy it can bring. The Greek nymph Clytie is the “spirit of the sunflower or the heliotrope” who “slept with the sun. Transformed into a flower, she still worshipfully follows his movement across the sky”10. Olwen is a Welsh goddess who left white trefoil flowers in her wake everywhere she walked. She “was specifically the summer sun” which “seems clear from descriptions of her: she had streaming yellow hair, anemone fingers, and rosy cheeks.” She was the flower-bringing ‘golden wheel’ of summer”11. The Iroquois Oniata, daughter of the sun, abandoned Earth because her beauty caused havoc among the men, but left “a trace of her beauty behind, the spring wildflowers”12.
Wisdom about valuing our creative powers comes from the story of Blodewedd, or “Flower Face,” from the Welsh collection of stories called the Mabinogion, Blodewedd was created by two male magicians out of nine kinds of wildflowers as a bride for a young man whose mother, Arianrhod, refused to allow him to marry a human woman. Blodewedd fell in love with another man, leaving her husband for him13. What to make of this complex story? Blodewedd is made of flowers, symbols of creation and sexuality, but by two men who bypass women’s spiritual and physical creative power by making her themselves. Further, she is made for a particular man whom she did not choose, for the primary purpose of giving him male heirs, stealing her power of choice. But, as Patricia Monaghan reminds us, Blodewedd rebels to be with the one she loves14. The flowery procreative power of women, of our bodies, minds, and spirits belong to us alone, Blodewedd declares.
Creation is not only bringing forth something new, but also nurturing and making whole what has already been created. Here, too, flowers show us the way. Humans seem to be hard-wired to love and be healed by flowers. A study done by Rutgers University in 2005 showed that simply being given flowers enhanced positive mood for days afterward, encouraged social connections, and even improved memory15. These effects were in addition to “biophilia,” or the overall health-giving aspects of being in nature, because the research was done inside buildings and so seem to reflect truly the effects of the flowers themselves. And we should be co-creators of the Earth’s wellness in response. Our relationship with flowers is deeply healing for us and so, perhaps, we can, as a species, be inspired by flowers to be motivated to take action in our current environmental catastrophe.
People have been cultivating flowers for at least 5000 years16 and the relationship between flowers and goddesses also goes back millennia. The themes of creation in the global stories of flower goddesses, show, to me, certain truths that are common to many societies and based not only on observation of the flower’s role in creation but also in the way flowers connect us to our own spiritually powerful acts of creation, whatever those might be. As those of us in the northern hemisphere once again surround ourselves with these blossoming living beings may their relationship to us express the sacredness of our own acts of passion, personal autonomy, and healing. May we enter into a mutual co-creative relationship with all beings and the Earth to rebuild a world that blooms with wellness for all beings.
Sources:
Evans, Susan Toby. “Sexual Politics in the Aztec Palace: Public, Private, and Profane.” Anthropology and Aesthetics , Spring, 1998, No. 33, Pre-Columbian States of Being (Spring, 1998), pp. 166-183
Haviland-Jones, Holly Hale Rosario, Patricia Wilson, and Terry R. McGuire. “An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers.” Evolutionary Psychology 2005 3:1; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/147470490500300109
McCafferty, Geoffrey G., and Sharisse D. McCafferty. “The Metamorphosis of Xochiquetzal: A Window on Womanhood in Pre- and Post-Conquest Mexico.” Manuscript. n.d.
Monaghan, Patricia. The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, St, Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2000.
Monaghan, Patricia. Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines, Novato, CA: New World Library, 2014.
University of Chicago. Floralia. In Essays on the History and Culture of Rome. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/calendar/floralia.html.
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 56. ↩︎
- Monaghan, Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines, 329. ↩︎
- Monaghan, Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines, 341. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 213. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 190. ↩︎
- Monaghan, Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines, 348-349. ↩︎
- Evans, Sexual Politics in the Aztec Palace, 173. ↩︎
- McCafferty, The Metamorphosis of Xochiquetzal. ↩︎
- University of Chicago. Floralia. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 90. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 238-239. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 239. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 71. ↩︎
- Monaghan, New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, 71. ↩︎
- Haviland-Jones, An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers. ↩︎
- Haviland-Jones, An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers. ↩︎