"The Symbolic Rose" of High Romance

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“As the anagrammatical connection between the ‘queen of flowers,’ the rose, and the ancient ‘god of love,’ Eros, indicates, there is a rose in eros, and an eros in the rose. This connection is more than that of words; it is one that goes back—way, way back—to the origins of Western history. But the rose-flower's commonality today—used as an expression of sentimental love on greeting cards—hides a long, ancient history as a profound esoteric symbol of the highest aspirations of the human quest. Among literary flowers (like the narcissus, hyacinth, and fleur-de-lis), it reigns supreme. In fact, the poet Dante, in his masterwork, the Divine Comedy, made the white rose the very mandala of the Christian heaven. Most literary people today are aware of this celestial rose. Yet, unfortunately, few seem to know that this transcendent element that attached to the rose was actually a further elaboration of a preoccupation for symbolic flowers that long pre-dated Christian iconography.

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It is, in fact, almost impossible to imagine an entity more evocative than the rose. Not only do its roots extend at least to the beginnings of recorded time, but its petals embrace the deepest positive values ever held by man. For example, the rose that culminates Dante’s Divine Comedy embraces Mary, Paradise, grace, and Divine Love, and at the same time reconciles the spiritual concepts with the hitherto opposing concept of terrestrial courtly love.

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Romantic writers, pursuing a more personal but equally in tangible vision, have employed the rose as the only possible means of suggesting their transcended ecstasy and longing…. Accordingly, the eras most favorable to symbolism have been the Catholic Middle Ages and the Romantic nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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The quest for a rose that could, like Isaiah's, redeem a wasteland has led some contemporaries back to the literature to the Middle Ages and even beyond them to pre-Christian times.

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…. many writers have discovered in the fertile rose the wellsprings of the life instinct itself.

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Capable of bearing a vast range of meanings, the flower has symbolized man's happiest dreams for countless centuries. As a creation of beauty appearing in spring, it has been associated with love and woman, concepts which have in turn been transposed to their religious equivalents, divine love and female fertility deities or Christ and the Virgin. The associations with woman and female deities, reinforced by the flowers annual appearance after the barren in winter season, have led to further associations of the rose with the ideas of motherhood and mother nature…. But even more closely allied to mother are the ideas of birth and rebirth, both of which have been symbolized by the rose, together with the joys of time or eternity to which the awakening soul has been born. Considered together, these associations with love, beauty, life, joy, creation, and eternity have made the rose relevant to all human ideals, whether the ideals be worldly or religious, personal or universal.

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For the roses a part of what Jung calls the mandala, a symbolic design recurrent in myths and dreams, which has among its basic constituents a circle and a center.

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The symbol of a rose or rose-shaped flower vitalized by and omnipotent sun, which was later to culminate in Dante’s Comedy, was central among the earliest organized attempts of man to comprehend the universe around him. This ancient integration of sun and flower was intended to symbolize simultaneously the sexual union of male and female creative forces, the physical fertility of all natural things, and the spiritual attainment of ultimate harmony.

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As such, Isis was the personification of universal nature mother of all living things, so that her flower represented the female generative principle in the world at large. Beyond this, the goddess and her symbol developed certain moral connotations in keeping with her generative role. The rose came to symbolize the power of love as it operated in the human heart…. But Isis was not the only deity flourishing in the early years of Christianity who had a rose for her particular flower. Aphrodite or Venus, also to be reckoned with, is also associated with the rose…. Aphrodite, of all pagan goddesses, bore the rose which has most directly affected the history of Western literary blossoms….Her rose pervaded the life of the people in customs celebrating love. A Latin poet equates her with the fertility of the earth and uses the unfolding rose to symbolize her generative powers. ‘A glossy freshness hence the rose receives, / And blushes sweet through all her silken leaves’…. More important, it is as a simple token of human love that Aphrodite’s rose as most deeply impressed literature. For although the limited goddess held a limited flower, it was one so extravagantly popular with poets that few later roses have been unaffected by it…. 

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Aphrodite's son Eros adopted her roses, as did her companions, the three lovely Graces. As early as the sixth century B.C., Anacreon had written of an Eros crowned with roses and sleeping in rose beds …. Associations with the Muses, also to be found in Anacreon and Sappho, may again have been the indirect result of the roses’s relation to Aphrodite …. 

Persephone, the harbinger of spring, had gathered roses among other early flowers in the ancient Homeric Hymn to Demeter. And Dionysus, god of wine—and therefore, like love, an inspiration to song—had come close to rivaling Aphrodite as possessor of a widely popular rose.

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It blossoms in classical lyrics from the time of Anacreon, whose flower exhales ‘Sweet incense to mortals  from Bacchanal wreaths,’ through and beyond exhortations like Martial’s: ‘In thy dark wine-cup mingle summer snows, / And wreathe thy temples with the blushing rose.’ Most important of all, because wine betokened ecstasy, Dionysus' rose was linked with Aphrodite's as the flower of compound joy that encompassed wine, love, beauty, song, spring, and youth….

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Moreover, the decorative flowers Elysium where to reappear in early Christian writings as ornaments of Eden and of the heavenly Paradise, concepts that in turn would gain symbolic qualities in the religious writings of succeeding centuries. For however far the symbolic roses of the Christian era might travel from the metaphors of classical times, they would never quite escape their distant pagan roots in beauty, love, spring, joy, festivity, and the afterlife.

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Roses were the ‘queen of the flowers’ that made up the original heaven—the pagan Elysium—and were later transplanted into the Christian Garden of Eden and Paradise of the Blessed. With the coming of Christianity and its condemnation of pagan delight in earthly beauties for their own sake, seeing in this a perversion of the power of Christian love, the pagan ‘queen of flowers,’ longtime symbol of love (eros) in a natural, ensouled cosmos, was sublimated to the exclusive, anti-erotic, spiritual love (agape). Thus the rose, along with its goddess, experienced a complete reversal of pagan values and was sublimated to a de-sexualized heaven.

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All of which is not to say that the classical poets originated anything new to the rose. It is clear that their flower itself was derived from a plant rooted deep in the primitive mind, and that in fact in their lyrical art it had lost a great part of its original meaning. For the roses cosmic origins in fundamental, primitive explanations of the universe had been greatly diminished in the customs and lyrics an entirely civilized people. For modern writers who wish to discover primitive, unconscious, or historical origins must inevitably return to those origins from the perspective of a Christian era.... But both primitive roots and classical blossoms have come down to us filtered through the Christian centuries.... For the pagan rose had achieved such popularity that it had to be taken account of and adapted to Christian purposes by the early Church. Certainly most of its meanings on the planes of earth and heaven had already existed long before the Christian era." 

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                                          ~"The Troubadours & The Beloved" (Essay-with-Soundtrack, 4/8/19)