The lotus was a form of the ancient love-goddess, as was also the cowry. In Egypt the solar-god Horus emerges at birth from the lotus-form of Hathor as it floats on the breast of the Nile. Ho Sien Ku’s basket of fruit is also symbolic. “A basket of sycamore figs” was in Ancient Egypt “originally the hieroglyphic sign for a woman, a goddess, or a mother”. It had thus the same significance as the Pot, the lotus, the mandrake-apple, and the pomegranate. The latter symbol supplanted the Egyptian lotus in the Ægean area.[16]
GOATS CROPPING PLANT OF LIFE
From the jade sculpture in the Scottish National Museum, Edinburgh
Mugwort, as already stated, was a medicine, and chiefly a woman’s medicine. “The plant (mugwort)”, says Dr. Rendel Harris, “is Artemis, and Artemis is the plant. Artemis is a woman’s goddess and a maid’s goddess, because she was a woman’s medicine and a maid’s medicine.”[17] The mugwort promoted child-birth, and controlled [[173]]women like the moon, and was used for women’s ailments in general. It was a healing plant, and was “good for gout” among other troubles.
The women’s herb in China is called the “san tsi”. An eighteenth-century writer[18] says it is “efficacious in women’s disorders and hæmorrhages of all sorts”. It is found “only on the tops of high, steep mountains”, as is the scented Edelraut (Artemisia mutellina) an alpine plant like the famous and beautiful Edelweiss.
Continuing his account of the “san tsi” herb, the eighteenth-century writer and compiler says: “A kind of goat of a greyish colour is very fond of feeding upon this plant, insomuch that they (the Chinese) imagine the blood of this animal is endowed with the same medicinal properties. It is certain that the blood of these goats has surprising success against the injuries received by falls from horses, and other accidents of the same kind. This the missionaries have had experience of several times. One of their servants that was thrown by a vicious horse, and who lay some time without speech or motion, was so soon recovered by this remedy that the next day he was able to pursue his journey.” It is also “a specific against the smallpox”. The author of The Chinese Traveller, touching again on the blood substitute for this plant, which is “not easy to be had”, says: “In the experiments above mentioned, the blood of a goat was made use of that had been taken by hunters”.
The goat appears to be the link between Artemis “the curer” and Artemis as “Diana the huntress”. As the virtues of rare curative herbs passed into the blood of animals who ate them, the goddess, like her worshippers, hunted the animals in question, or became their protector. [[174]]Pliny, in his twenty-eighth book, having, as Dr. Rendel Harris notes, “exhausted the herbals”, shows that “a larger medicine is to be found in animals and in man”.[19]
In China the stag or deer, the stork, and the tortoise are associated with the Tree of Life as “emblems of longevity”. One is reminded in this connection of the Western, Eastern, and Far Eastern legends about birds that pluck and carry to human beings leaves of “the plant of life” or “fungus of immortality”, and of Mykenæan and Ancient Egyptian representations of bulls, goats, deer, &c., browsing on vines and other trees or bushes that were supposed to contain the elixir of life, being sacred to the goddess and shown as symbols of her or of the god with whom she was associated as mother or spouse.
Another famous Far Eastern curative “wort” is the ginseng. Like the fungus of immortality, it grew on one of the Islands of the Blest. Taken with mermaid’s flesh, it was supposed to lengthen the life of man for several centuries.