You know, of course, the story of Narcissus: the vain, beautiful youth who met his end in various ways because he thought he was so darned pretty. We get two English words from this story: narcissism and Narcissus, which is the flower said to have grown in the spot where Narcissus met his end. The blooms of the flower tend to dip, and when they grow on the slope by a stream they do seem to be gazing at their own reflections.
What I find most interesting about this, though, is that the Narcissus flower has a second, more common name: Daffodil. This, too, likely comes from an entirely different part of Greek mythology. It is thought that the name is a perversion of the word "Asphodel," a very different flower. Asphodels were sometimes called Affodells in parts of Europe, and the "D" probably comes from the Dutch article "de." It's not clear how the Narcissus started being called by this very different flower's name (but then, how did people keep anything straight before the internet?).
The Asphodel itself has an interesting story in Greek mythology. It was considered the favorite food of the dead, and was often planted on or near graves. It also gave its name to the Asphodel Meadows, the middle of three sections of Tartarus, the place where judged souls spent their afterlives. The other two sections are pretty standard: the Elysian Fields, where heroes went to have a joyful afterlife, and Tartarus, where the evil went to be tormented. The Asphodel Meadows, on the other hand, was a plain of Asphodel flowers that was eternally home to those who had led boring lives, neither good nor evil. There they spent eternity, going through the same boring motions in the afterlife that they did in life. In some stories they are like automatons, with no choice but to repeat their lives over and over. In others, they are stripped of their very identities by drinking from the River Lethe. It's an interesting thought, that those who live boring lives are essentially damned to a boring afterlife (and, in the stories, it is very clearly a sort of damning). It shows that the Greeks very much valued the hero, the man who makes stories, far more than the working man. I wonder if, at the time, Tartarus was really considered a very much worse fate than was eternity among the Asphodels.
There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
Posted by: Air Jordan | February 25, 2011 at 09:23 PM
... and if you are a product of American public education, what you know as history is a sanitized version of fact with the stuff about Miles Standish and the Mayflower. That went on to the "westward expansion" and Manifest Destiny and other lies. Yes, there was Abe Lincoln and the Civil War that somehow did not have civilian deaths... and up to the civil rights movement and slavery and segregation. And now there are things like Hurricane Katrina and Global Warming and wars that never seem to end, WWI and WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Its the oil, the OIL and the Middle East and it will not stop until there is no oil. Will we break away from fossil fuels? Will we develop clean and green sources of power. This is the great question and may also be the last question.
Posted by: J. D. | July 02, 2011 at 02:55 PM