A Tale of Two Goddesses and Saffron

Rolled up between the thighs of a mummy from dynastic Egypt, the Ebers Papyrus was found intact. A medical treatise written in 1500 BCE, it was bought by Georg Ebers in Luxor in 1873, and is kept at the University of Leipzig. It details several uses for saffron in the treatment of women. In the Late Bronze Age, saffron was a ritual and a medicinal substance, and a dye for the garments of highly placed women. In fact, it has a barely secret 4000-year history binding it to the sexuality of women.

“To possess wings,” writes the classics professor Deborah Tarn Steiner, “is to be deeply implicated in the workings of desire.” Prof. Steiner is not making specific reference to Eos, the saffron-winged goddess of the dawn in ancient Greece, but among female pre-Olympians driven too far by desire, Eos is peerless.

A typical representation of Eos appears on Attic Red Figure-style kraters, her arms raised for snatching. She chases down Cephalus, a youth with whom she’s besotted. Eos will nab the wingless, dewy boy, and get from him a son. Greek goddesses saved seduction for other Olympians; when they desired mortal boys, they simply took them, albeit sometimes rather sweetly. Eos is as big a kidnapper as Zeus, the pottery shards tell us, and it wasn’t altogether voluntary. She labored under a curse from Aphrodite — payback for a bit of amatory poaching –- and her adventures brought her only intense sadness. Though not remorse.

Nicolas Poussin, above, in a subtler reading from 2000 years later, Aurora and Cephalus, in The National Gallery,London, shows the pathos of her situation. Eos could take a boy, but she couldn’t keep him. The goddess, needy and greedy, her gold and red saffron-dyed garments falling away from her, her raptor wings transposed onto her dawn-facing horse, grasps her young lover around the hips. But he’s clearly had enough of her, twisting away and shielding from his sight her seeking and — Hesiod tells us – all-seeing gaze. She’ll get back at him another day by causing the death of his young wife, but here is an iconic image of the fear-tinged sexual distaste that it was the sad portion of Eos to inspire in a boy by the end of every affair.

At the time of Homer, Hesiod and Sappho, to make a figure of speech involving saffron was to evoke the most precious substance after gold, one that created extravagant color — a red as sudden and shocking as the dawn, for instance, or as bright and slippery as blood. The variously translated references to crimson, rose-red, saffron, gold and yellow associated by poets from Homer to the Byzantine era — over 1000 years — with dawn and Eos tend to lead back to just a few Greek and Greek/Latin words, epithets for Eos all. She is called golden-armed (khrysopakhos), golden-throned (khrysothronon) and golden-sandaled (khrysopedillos), elsewhere rosy-armed (krokopakhos) and saffron-robed (krokopeplos.) To write, as Ovid did, of the saffron wheels of her chariot and of her saffron cheeks, he used adjectives derived from the Greek-based Latin word, crocus. It is Ovid who calls her a “saffron mother [who] arrives to view the widening earth on rosy horses.” The ruddy color of her arms and fingertips is the red of the first light of dawn.

In Eos’s day – coming 800 years after the Ebers Papyrus was authored — saffron was well understood to be an aphrodisiac, to treat female complaints, and to treat what are now called mood disorders. Ingesting too much saffron was known to bring on mania, so then as now, one must be careful of it. And careful Eos was not. The relentless, onrushing goddess who knew only how to increase and engulf and not how to back away is an icon of immoderation. For being unrestrained and frightening, she is punished more severely than other transgressive Olympian female deities, and is allied with the much earlier and scarier man-hungry goddesses of Minoan times. The tears springing from her numerous sorrows — the withering of her truest love, the death of her son — are found every morning on the grass and on tender plants. They are the dew.

The saffron crocus figures superbly in Book 14 of the Iliad, when Hera beguiles and beds Zeus. Despite the fierce disappointments of their millennium-long union, the sky god having pursued with perfect impunity his many dalliances — here a nymph, there a boy, again and again and again – despite Hera’s turning occasionally into a scold, the two gods at the summit of Olympus, brother and sister as well as husband and wife, were capable of convincing and even comic reconciliations. One day on Trojan War-related business, the story goes, Hera made for Mt. Ida, where she knew Zeus to be hiding out, en route tricking Aphrodite out of a golden sash filled with charms. (“It has sex in it,” Aphrodite tells her.) Ensorcelled, Zeus finds his wife lovelier than all the competition, and insists that she lie with him in the open air – just like that. She preferred to be indoors, but as James Barry’s painting of the late 18th century, Zeus and Hera on Mt. Ida, suggests, she summoned the mood. And in a rite going back almost a thousand years before Homer to Hera’s beginnings in Mycenae, the sky father and the nature mother lay down by a river, so furious their coupling that a bed of saffron crocuses sprang from the earth beneath them, the violet petals opening to release a spicy golden dew. Hera needn’t have worried, for of all this, passers by saw nothing but a shimmering red-gold cloud.