Sacred Plants and Flowers Across Faiths and Cultures

The Nile water lily is the most frequently depicted plant in Egyptian art, held to the nose at banquets, offered to the dead and used as an emblem of the sun rising from the water and so of rebirth. Despite its name it is not a true lotus, and whether it was psychoactive remains an open question.

The sacred lotus rises unstained from black mud. In Egypt the sun-god was born from the primal lotus; in India and the Buddhist world it is the throne of the gods, the opening of the chakras and the awakened mind.

In Hindu tambulam offerings, betel leaf and nut are presented to a deity as a complete offering, and betel trays are carried in processions such as Sri Lanka's Esala Perahera, so a leaf becomes a standing item of devotion.

In China the peach is the great emblem of immortality, its fruit the food of the immortals in the garden of the Queen Mother of the West, while the blossom signifies spring, renewal and the luck that opens the way to marriage.

In China the peony is the king of flowers, an emblem of prosperity, honour and noble rank prized since the Tang dynasty. Culpeper made it an herb of the Sun, and its root was hung about the neck as a guard against evil spirits.

One of the Four Gentlemen in China, flower of autumn and long life, and in Japan the sixteen-petalled imperial seal. Across southern Europe it is laid on graves at All Saints, so one bloom stands for both longevity and remembrance.

Since antiquity the white lily has been the flower of purity and virtue, sacred in Christian art to the Virgin Mary and carried by the angel of the Annunciation.

Spanish friars saw in this American bloom the whole Passion of Christ: the corona as the crown of thorns, the three stigmas as the nails, the five anthers as the wounds and the ten petals as the faithful apostles.

The red rose is the flower of Venus and of love, sacred to Aphrodite and said by the poets to have sprung from the blood of her wounded Adonis. Culpeper called it the crowning herb of Venus.

The costly threads are the dried stigmas of the autumn crocus, three to a flower, long used as a golden dye for the robes of kings and priests and counted in Culpeper as an herb of the Sun.

Culpeper ruled the marigold by the Sun. It opens with the dawn and closes at dusk, and folklore holds that it protects and brings prophetic dreams when placed beneath the pillow.

The name descends from the Persian yasmin. In the older correspondences jasmine is a lunar and watery flower, its blossoms laid beneath the pillow for prophetic dreams, woven into garlands and steeped as attar across the East.