Around 9500 BCE, in Southeastern Turkey, the world’s first temple was being carved, surrounded by a savanna of flowering plants. It’s a time before time, before religion, before tools or even pottery. Yet humans have sensed the presence of otherworldly creatures, half human and half animal; they are engraving these figures in stone in Göbekli Tepe.
This enigmatic sacred site had no apparent pragmatic purpose. And yet a communal tie was formed between different foraging bands; thousands gathered in this artistic and ritualistic undertaking, deciphering animistic spirits. Here at Göbekli Tepe, over 7,000 grinding tools have been found, bearing traces of grain. To carve this temple, humans might have domesticated the most widely consumed flowering plant in the world for the first time: wheat. “It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase their normal food supply but rather to support the building and running of a temple,” writes Historian Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens. Somewhere between carving the temple and cultivating the earth, perhaps the veil dropped, a sight of the invisible, ochre on skulls, human-animal figures and the world turned as the flower grew into grain.
After 6000 years, in England, under some mysterious celestial influence, another sacred site was being erected by humans who might have crossed the seas with these massive stones. Rituals, burials, spirit homes and celestial movements, once again, unite different communities across the landscape. More than 4200 years after, In 1842, 10,000 pilgrims gather on this site, a public re-imagining of Stonehenge, orchestrated by a flower: Dahlia. Between 1842 and 1845, the Stonehenge Dahlia Show featured an exuberant display; gardeners and sculptors cultivating dahlias were rewarded with prizes. “It’s how people experienced the stones at one point in the 19th century,” mentions Louise Crawley, the English Heritage landscape historian.
The Dahlia became a symbol of reimagining the English sacred site, yet its origins hold another story of spirit and symbolism. Dahlia comes from Central America; it was widely cultivated by the Aztecs as a food and medicinal plant, named “cocoxochitl”, meaning “water pipe”. The etymological origin of ‘cocoxochitl’ is related to ‘Xochitl’, meaning ‘Flower’ from Nahuatl Aztec, which shares its root with the word ‘Xōchipilli’, an Aztec god of flowers. Xōchipilli in english translate to ‘flower prince’, and he governs the spiritual essence of flowers, representing the human souls that turn into birds and butterflies upon death, mirroring a cyclical divine realm. In the rituals, Dahlia is one of the flowers offered to Xōchipilli.
In 1992, American anthropologist Jane Hill coined the term “Flower World” in her essay “The Flower World of Old Uto-Aztecan”. Flowers’ symbolism and metaphors evoked spirits through songs, speech and communing with the land of the dead. According to her, the flower world is a bridge, transcending flowers and entering the cosmological and cultural realms of songs, the human spirit and the life force (blood, heart and fire) that moves through the sacred landscape from north to south with Uto-Aztecan linguistic expansion. The first people of this land emerged from flower mountain, which is a prevalent theme in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest origin stories.
Elsewhere, in Asia, another origin story blooms in the cosmic lotus that sustains the world above the chaotic waters, giving birth to Brahma, the god of creation in Hindu mythology. In Buddhist mythology, where Buddha first touched the earth after being born, a lotus blooms. In both spiritual traditions, the lotus is revered as a symbol of enlightenment, rising above the muddy waters of worldly attachment.
Beyond these symbols of divine cosmological stories, flowers carry other worlds. In the poetry written between 100 and 300 CE, in South India, each landscape denotes a phase of love, and flowers within those landscapes symbolise the interior world of lovers.
Bigger than earth, certainly.
higher than the sky,
more unfathomable than the waters
is this love for this man
of the mountain slopes
where bees make rich honey
from the flowers of the Kurinci
that has such black stalks.
Kuruntokai 3,
Tamil Sangam poem
A.K. Ramanujan, Indian poet and folklorist questions “why did the Tamil poets pick on the kurinci as the one flower that will name the mountain landscape and the mood of first love?” and he explains that the kurinci plant is a mountain flower that grows 6,000 feet above sea level, and it flowers from nine to twelve years after being planted, which symbolises the same period when the female protagonist reaches her puberty from birth. These flowers bloom on the mountain slope, covering the entire landscape, another metaphor of the overwhelming nature of first love.
Where and when did flowers penetrate the human psyche? How did spirit get entwined with the world of flowers that awakened origin stories, spirituality and even love? It is unknown and the beauty of it lies in this unknown. Flowers will speak when words lose their meaning. Each petal will unfurl from the centre, and from this centre, the world will be created, a cosmic explosion bursting in flowers, between mystery, myth and memory.
Words by Priyanka Singh Parihar
