Lotus Eater

Lotus Eater
May 2, 2006
The 52 Figments questtion seemed odd: "Imagine your meals consisted only of flowers. What would be for dinner?" At first, I wasn't much inspired by this topic. All I could think is I want something a little more hunger satisfying than flower petals. I remember reading of some dude living in the 'Art Nouveau' period who existed solely on champagne and rose petals. The chap didn't live very long. However, other excesses may have contributed to this.

Meanwhile, one morning, Julia made a funny that made me think of it:

"This 'Wild Irish Rose' sure doesn't taste very much like roses!"

After thinking about it, lotus petals sounded interesting. There's all sorts of symbolic significance given to lotuses relating "to creation, regeneration, and the state of the initiate and higher beings...". Plus, they don't have nasty thorns to contend with. That's always a plus.

And I had in mind a picture to inspire my own efforts:

On the large, vertical block of relief, Niankhwadjet inhales the scent of a lotus.
Elements from the False Door in the Chapel of Mery's Mastaba
First half of Dynasty 4 (2575-2520 B.C.)
From Saqqara, Limestone, now at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The information accompanying the relief says the scent of a lotus is associated with rebirth because the flower opens each morning for the sun. Bridget McDermott in Decoding Egyptian Hieroglyphs informs us further:

"The lotus had an important symbolic role in religious life. The blue lotus, which opens with the first rays of the sun, and the white lotus, which opens only at night, were associated with the sun and moon, and the opposing forces of light and dark...The lotus became a symbol of rebirth after death" and is "also linked to fertility and was a sexual symbol."

I especially like this picture as being a metaphor for inhaling deeply of life. To expand this into the realm of eating the lotus would be to symbolically (I'm not REALLY going to eat the lotus!) enhance this that much further. However, this isn't an exaggeration of Egyptian thought, for 'swallowing' did figure in Egyptian magical practice. In the chapter titled "Spitting, Licking and Swallowing," Robert K. Ritner tells of this. It may be to "ingest divine force" and there was also "an increasingly common idiom expressly linking consumption with acquired familiarity, in which the terms "to taste/taste" (dp/dp.t) assume the nuance "to experience/experience": "It goes well with every god of whom I have experience (literally "whom I have tasted")". "The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice", pages 102-104)

Thus, a very idealized me is dining on lotus petals: