ON ORIENTAL CARPETS
ARTICLE IV.
❧ THE LOTUS AND THE TREE OF LIFE ❧
THAT the art of weaving textile fabrics was known and practised among the earliest civilized nations of the world appears to be beyond dispute. Primarily no doubt the need for some form of clothing (slight probably in a hot country) and for floor coverings which should afford a protection against scorpions and other venomous creatures and for sleeping mats called forth the production of cloths woven from reeds and grasses and from the fibres of large-leaved plants. Soon, however, the possibility of using the wool of goats and sheep and camels must have impressed itself on the minds of primitive weavers, and from this to the production of textiles proper was but a short and easy step in natural development. It is probable that a considerable time may have elapsed between the first production of woven fabrics and the time when the artistic need became felt for enhancing their appearance by the employment of colouring matters. The mind of the primitive manufacturer became no doubt gradually attuned to this necessity by the slow development of a natural desire to brighten the gloomy aspect of his darkened homes. (In this regard it will be borne in mind that an essential feature of all oriental interiors has ever been the exclusion, so far as may be, of the scorching glare of the sun’s rays.) The primitive houses of the earliest settled peoples were doubtless built of mud, as are those of their descendants to-day, and it would be difficult to imagine anything less attractive than the interior of an Upper Egypt, or Nubian or Mesopotamian house (which is to-day the exact counterpart of those we find on the paintings and bas-reliefs which have come down to us from the oldest times), with mud walls, mud floor, mud roof, all of a uniform dingy brown, and without furniture of any kind to relieve the eye. It is probable that the early weaver was in the habit of dyeing his woven products in some uniform colour for a considerable time before it occurred to him that richer effects might be produced by colouring his yarns in different tints previous to their employment on the loom. Having got so far it did not take very long before his manual dexterity had so far attained the level of his artistic aspirations as to impel him to seek models for the complicated designs he sought to introduce into his work. For these models, as for their colouring, he naturally turned to those forms which were constantly before his eyes in everyday life.
And among these most prominent no doubt was the lotus, which in one form or the other is invariably found to hold a prominent place in the centre or border of an oriental carpet. Probably the artistic weaver copied the numerous forms of the lotus long before he attached any symbolism to the plant itself, and merely because the flowing lines and sweeping curves of the plant appealed to his eye. Other tree and plant forms there were no doubt that commended themselves to him, and these, too, he sought to introduce into his designs; but the predominance of the lotus over all other forms early asserted itself and has maintained its position ever since. At what period the profound and mystic symbolism of the lotus became generally recognized among the peoples to whom it was a familiar object must ever remain a matter of controversy and of speculation. Professor Goodyear, who has written an elaborate treatise on ‘The Grammar of the Lotus,’ regards this form of classic and ancient ornamentation as a development of sun worship. His theory briefly deals with the development of the sun symbols from the lotus by a series of complicated and ingenious evolutions. The lotus, according to him, was a fetish of immemorial antiquity, which has been worshipped in many countries from Japan to Gibraltar. He claims that it is the symbol of life, immortality, renaissance, resurrection and fecundity. He describes the three forms of lotus: the blue and the white, which differ but little save in colour, and the rose lotus, which is really not a lotus at all botanically speaking, and is not a native of Egypt but of India.
This lotus (the rose) is still cultivated in China as a food plant, and it is believed that it was brought to Egypt from India by Alexander the Great for that purpose; but that it was regarded by the Egyptians as a national symbol there is, in the opinion of Professor Goodyear, no sufficient evidence to show. ¶That the lotus was early regarded as a religious symbol in India and China is generally held. It is, of course, the sacred flower of the Buddhists. ‘When Buddha was born,’ says Moor in his ‘Hindu Pantheon,’ ‘a lotus bloomed where he first touched the ground; he stepped seven steps northward, and a lotus marked each foot-fall.’ The Buddhist prayer often quoted begins: ‘O God, the jewel of the lotus,’ or ‘O holy jewel in the lotus, be it so.’ In the Hindu theogony the lotus floating on the water is an emblem of the world, and the whole plant of the earth and its two principles of fecundation. Edwin Arnold, in ‘The Light of Asia,’ says: ‘Aum Mani pâdme hûm,’ of which the literal translation is, ‘All hail to the jewel in the flower of the lotus.’ He continues: ‘The sunrise comes,’ ‘The dew-drop slips,’ ‘Into the shining sea.’ ¶ Brahmans consider the sun to be the emblem or image of their great deities, jointly or individually, i.e. Brahma the supreme one, who alone exists really and absolutely. The legend goes that Brahma, according to a generally received system founded on a doctrine of the Vaishnavas, sprang on a lotus from the navel of Vishnu, who is the personification of the sun, to bid all worlds exist. ¶ Professor Goodyear maintains that the symbolism of the lotus, which is referred most frequently by modern writers to its phallic and generative or to its funereal and mortuary bearings, is based upon well-proved but not generally recognized solar significance. The easiest way to demonstrate this is by an appeal to the acknowledged fact that the Egyptian idea of the resurrection and of a future life was connected with the worship of the creative and reproductive forces of nature, which were conceived and worshipped as solar in character and origin. It is the supposed passage of the sun at night through a lower world during its return to the dawn of a following day which makes Osiris (the sun at night) the god of the lower world and of the dead, for which reason he is represented as a mummy. As the god of resurrection, the special and emphatic character of Osiris, he represents the creative power of the sun god; and thus the lotus, as the attribute of Osiris, is at once a symbol of the sun of resurrection, and of creative force and power.
A TABRIZ CARPET, WITH A DEEP RED FIELD AND BLUE BORDER, THE MEDALLION ILLUSTRATING THE TREE OF LIFE AND LOTUS FLOWER
FROM THE COLLECTION OF MESSRS. GILLOW
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Professor Goodyear further contends that the lotus, which he holds, as has been said, to be the keynote of decoration, is identical with the tree of life, or rather that the accepted tree of life is really a variant of the lotus in one form or the other of its many aspects. He objects to the theory that the date palm, the palmetta, or the papyrus is invariably the tree of life, as is held by several writers.¶ The weakness of the theory regarding the soma tree or hom (date-palm) as the tree of life is not only the weakness of the palm theory, which is that no transitional forms between the palmetta and palm can be shown in Assyrian art and that they are not known to have grown there, because it is not to be denied that the sacred tree of Assyria[113] was the palm, but it is a pure hypothesis to suppose that all were soma trees.
The Assyrian tree of life, he holds, was really an artificial form of the lotus, which plant was as well known in Assyria as in India. Sir George Birdwood, who gives a lengthy list of trees held sacred in one part or another of the east, is more or less emphatic as to the hom or soma, which he says is the date-palm, being the tree of life. He allows, however, that on Yarkand rugs the tree of life is represented by a pomegranate tree. As against this, Sayce, in one of the Hibbert lectures, as quoted by Goodyear, says that, ‘the cedar tree is identified with the tree of life,’ and ‘the palm is possibly later.’ The palm, he adds, is undoubtedly a symbol on Assyrian and Chaldean cylinders, as illustrated in Layard’s ‘Culte du Methra,’ but Goodyear does not think that Layard’s text would give much support to the theory of ornamental palm symbolism in Assyria. Count Goblet d’Alviella, in his work on ‘La Migration des Symboles,’ bears out Goodyear and Sayce, and, to some extent, even Birdwood, as to the locality where the tree of life had its origin; but albeit he describes what he holds to be its early representation, he does not attempt to establish a theory as to what was the tree originally typified. The sacred tree, he says, is one of the earliest historic symbols (note he does not call it the tree of life) and had its origin in Mesopotamia; it passed thence to India, where it was used by Buddhists and Brahmans, and thence again to the Phoenicians, and from Asia Minor to Greece. From Persia it was introduced to the Byzantines, and found its way in early Christian times into Christian symbolism in Sicily, Italy, and even in the west of France. ¶ The earliest type, he claims, was a tree of complex and ornate pattern, having on either side of it a monster who faced each the other. These had the forms of winged bulls or of griffins.
Another type, which was that of the semi-human or human priests and kings, followed the same route into China and India and eastern Asia, and being found in the ancient Mexican and Maga codices, is held by Goblet d’Alviella as a part of the evidence which he cites in support of his theory of a pre-Columbian communication between the old world and the new. ¶ As opposed to Sir George Birdwood’s theory that the soma or hom is a date-palm, it may be pointed out that other authorities who are not less entitled to speak on the subject declare the soma of the Vedas[114] and the hom of the Zendavesta[115] to be the Sarcostemma viminale, a leafless asclepiad with white flowers in terminal umbels which appear during the rains in the Dekhan. The flower obtains its name apparently from the fact that it is gathered by moonlight (presumably the full moon), the sanskrit word for the moon being soma. Its conveyance home in carts drawn by rams is accompanied by ceremonials. A fermented liquor is obtained from the flower by mixing its juice, which has been strained through a sieve of goats’ hair, with a preparation of barley and clarified butter or ghee. This beer or wine is used at religious festivals; it may be said that according to Hindu superstition the gods of their system can do nothing without having been previously stimulated with soma. In the second hymn of the Rigveda occurs this passage: ‘Approach, O Wayu; be visible; this Soma juice has been prepared for thee; approach, drink, hear our invocation.’ Many indeed are the allusions made in religious ceremonials to the invigorating power and even intoxicating qualities of the soma, as to which Windischmann suggests that the plant was identical with the gogard tree, which has the quality of ‘enlightening the eyes’ and which he compares with Ampelus, the vine of Bacchus. This same beverage is used at their meals by the Muhammedan Rishis in Kashmir, who abstain from animal food and from marriage. It may be said that Soma, as well as being the name of a tree, to which it may afterwards well have been given, is in the Hindo mythology the name of the son of Rishi Atri by his wife Anasuga (he is also said to be the son of Dharma and Prabhakara). He married the twenty-seven daughters of Daksha (which are the twenty-seven lunar asterisms). He also carried off Tara the wife of Brihaspati, who bore him a son and named him Buddha. This Buddha is regarded as being the parent of the lunar race. Thus are we inevitably brought back to Buddha and Buddhistic emblems and to the long-vanished origins from which those emblems were derived. The lotus, none have disputed, is the oldest known attribute of Buddhist symbolism, but is it not equally certain that the lotus existed in remote ages long antecedent to the dawn of Buddhism? Here then is matter which makes for the support of Professor Goodyear’s ingenious theory. He takes the sepals of the lotus in their natural form, he shows how they have been twisted and exaggerated into spirals and volutes, which, being squared on their passage through the Ionic style of architecture, formed at length what is known as the meander, Greek fret or key pattern, which being doubled produces the svastika. The svastika therefore, which every authority has acknowledged to be the most ancient expression of symbolism, as it is also the earliest form of ornamentation known to the world, should in accordance with this be regarded as identical with the lotus symbol in one of its many phases.
[The previous articles of this series appeared in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE for March, May, and June.]
THE SORÖ CHALICE
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LARGER IMAGE