"For happy hours the Rose will idly blow-- The Poppy hath a charm for pain and woe.”

-Mary A. Barr

“The poppy opens her scarlet purse of dreams.”

-Scharmel Iris

"Nox (Night) [Nyx] approaches: a garland of poppies binds her peaceful brow, black Somnia (Dreams) trail her."

-Ovid

The Papaver spp. has been cultivated for at least 5,000 years, and there are about 250 species grown all over the world. First cultivated in the Mediterranean Basin and Southwest Asia, these species have had a host of medicinal and recreational uses, and have been celebrated for their sedative and pain-relieving actions, and have been used in care for the dead, dying, and the bereaved.

An overview of Poppy’s uses

Poppies have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and have been used ceremonially across many cultures. Poppies been "respected for their seeming power to annihilate as well as restore" (Connolly).

The Romans believed poppies would heal a broken heart, and made offerings of Poppies to the dead. Throughout Europe, seeds would be placed in coffins to keep the dead asleep, and sometimes scattered from graves on pathways back to homes of the bereaved, because of spirit's compulsion to count seeds (Boyer). Seeds would also sometimes be scattered on oneself or ones bed before sleep to encourage divinatory dreams (Boyer).

The California Poppy, Eschscholzia californica, is an incredible sleep ally for those in grief, and as a tea or tincture, is a relaxing nervine, gentle sedative, muscle relaxant, pain reliever, and calming ally for ungroundedness, anxiety, and tension. When worked with as a flower essence, "California poppy is said to help find one’s own sense of spirituality, and develop an inner center of knowing (Kaminski & Katz, 1994)." (Merrick)

The Opium Poppy, Papaver somniferum, has been used both medicinally and recreationally for thousands of years. "It has its origins in the start of human history and its use almost certainly pre-dates civilization. In fact, there seems little doubt that opium was one of the first medicinal substances known to mankind." (Booth, p. xii). The Opium Poppy has also led to many deaths, both intentional and unintentional, and was a choice poison for the Romans. The physician, philosopher, and polymath Avicenna, or Abdallah ibn Sina, who wrote the Canon of Medicine, and whose work served as a foundation for western medicine and herbalism, was one of many to die of an overdose of opium mixed with wine (Booth).

“The earliest reference to opium growth and use is in 3,400 B.C. when the opium poppy was cultivated in lower Mesopotamia (Southwest Asia). The Sumerians referred to it as Hul Gil, the "joy plant." The Sumerians soon passed it on to the Assyrians, who in turn passed it on to the Egyptians. As people learned of the power of opium, demand for it increased. Many countries began to grow and process opium to expand its availability and to decrease its cost. Its cultivation spread along the Silk Road, from the Mediterranean through Asia and finally to China where it was the catalyst for the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s.” (DEA Museum)

The Opium Poppy has been used to create other opioids such as heroin, laudanum, codeine, oxycodone, and morphine.

Today, derivatives of the Poppy are still used in death care. While these derivatives have proven to be addictive and deadly, they have also played an important part in pain relief, such as the role that morphine continues to play in alleviating suffering of the terminally ill and dying. "For the terminal cancer patient, opium and its derivatives can afford a blessed relief from the tortures and indignities of pain... In other words, Opium and its derivatives are all things to all men and have been so for centuries." (Booth, p. xii)

Poppy Symbolism, Mythology, and Folklore

An ancient symbol of death, fertility, spilled blood, and ephemerality, the seeds of this Corn Poppy (Papaver Rhoeas) can lay dormant for up to 100 years, their seeds only germinating in disturbed soils - finding ways toward the sunlight through pockets of air created by tilled fields, but also wastelands, war zones. This capacity to bring beauty amidst these conditions has made the Poppy also a symbol of beauty amidst destruction, and life in the midst of death.

In WWI, the decimation of Europe’s landscapes by bombs, trenches, and mass burials caused a blanket of millions of corn poppies to bloom across the countryside, a startling contrast with the horrors of war. Soldiers wrote poems about it:

“In Flanders field the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place, and in the sky,

The larks, still bravely singing, fly,

Scarce heard amid the guns below” (McCrae, 1915)

The Poppy shows up again in Medieval epic poems about battles, and there’s speculation that the biblical “flower of the fields” is also referring to the Poppy.

Because of the Poppies propensity to blanket battle fields and mass graves, the Poppy has been used as an adornment to memorialize fallen soldiers.

In Greek Mythology, the Poppy was associated with Demeter, the great mother Goddess of agriculture, wheat, grain, the harvest, and threshing. She was believed to have taught humans how to grow grain and corn, and the grain fields and threshing-floor were under her protection. Demeter is frequently depicted with wheat, corn, and poppies.

When Demeter's daughter Persephone was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the underworld, Demeter entered a period of wild grief. The fields and crops died, people starved, and the other gods pleaded for her bring plant life back. In on version of the story, the gods offer Demeter Poppies to help her sleep, and the oblivion of sleep becomes her only refuge from grief. In another telling of the story, Demeter finds Sicyon, the city of poppies, in her search for Persephone: "she picked the flowers and cut open their unripe pods. Tasting the gum which exuded from them Demeter forgot her sorrows" (Booth). In all of these stories, Poppy provided Demeter some relief from her grief:

"Sleep bringing Poppy, by the plowman late,

Not without cause to Ceres consecrate...

Fairest Proserpine was rapt away,

and in plaints the night, in tears, the day

Had long time spent: when no high power could give her

Any redresse, the Poppy did relieve her:

For eating of the seeds, they sleep procured,

and so beguiled those griefs she long endured."

(William Browne in Folkard)

Eventually Persephone was allowed by Zeus to reunite with her mother, but was tricked by Hades into eating the seeds of a pomegranate, which would require her to return to the underworld. So, for half the year, Demeter's grief brings the winter, and her joy from her reunion with her daughter brings the spring and summer months. It was also believed that the Poppy sprung up in the Demeter's footsteps. Offerings were made to Demeter of seeds of the corn Poppy, and garlands made from wheat and Poppies.

Persephone was often called the "dread(ed) Persephone", Kore "the maiden", the queen of the underworld, and it was also said that her true name couldn't be spoken. Persephone is a chthonic Goddess able to move between our realm and the underworld. Like a long lineage of vegetal gods being composted back into the earth, Persephone is a vegetal goddess, who's story differs from those lover-centric stories like Adonis and Aphrodite-- hers is of the love between mother and daughter. Daughter of the Goddess of the fields, Persephone is also thought to have been the personification of the seeds and the grain. Stored underground in ceramic Pithoi in the fall and winter months, and exhumed and spread in the Spring, these seeds and grain may have understood as the goddess Persephone herself, returning to and from the underworld each year. In earlier Assyrian myth, Poppies were known as the daughter of the field.

The Poppy is also associated with another Greek goddess and her children. The primordial goddess of night, Nyx, was born of chaos and understood to be one of the first elements. With Erebus (darkness), she becomes pregnant with and births Brightness (Aether) & Day (Hemera). Without the help of a male god or any other God, Nyx then births Sleep, Death, Dreams, Destruction, Doom, Blame, Death, Deceit, Strife, friendship, old age. From Nyx, it is understood that all life and death springs. Nyx chooses to reside in the underworld, in Tartarus, and asks for no ones permission. She is not understood as evil. She represents the formless, and is a shapeshifter who can change form at will. Nyx and her son Hypnos (sleep), the twin brother of Thanatos (death), uses the Poppy to help the earth sleep. Nyx's son Morpheus sleeps in a cave full of Poppy seeds, and uses the Poppy to bring and shape the dreams of mortals, on whose heads he drops wreaths of the flower. The river Lethe in the underworld is infused with Poppies, helping the dead who drink from it's waters to forget their lives and thus ease their passing:

"Near the Cimmerii (Cimerians) a cavern lies deep in the hollow of a mountainside, the home and sanctuary of lazy Somnus (Sleep) [Hypnos] . . . there silence dwells: only the lazy stream of Lethe 'neath the rock with whisper low o'er pebbly shallows trickling lulls to sleep. Before the cavern's mouth lush poppies grow and countless

herbs, from whose bland essences a drowsy infusion dewy Nox (Night) [Nyx] distils and sprinkles sleep across the darkening world..." (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Melville)

These were associations taken up by the Romans as well.

"For the Romans, the poppy was a powerful symbol of sleep and death. Somnus, the god of sleep, is frequently portrayed as a small by or sprite carrying a bunch of poppies and an opium horn, the vessel in which the juice was collected by farmers, whilst another popular image is that of a figure bending over a woman and pouring poppy juice on to her closed eyes." (Booth, p. 20)

The Poppy, whose lore spans and disrupts binary thinking, being both medicine and poison, used for support in life and in death, being both beautiful and terrifying, erupting in fields disturbed by war, agriculture, and death, invites us to consider Bayo Akomolafe’s suggestion that we might really call birth, life, or death, the inseparable “life-death”. Poppy invites us to think of life and death less linearly, as well as less separately. Life-death is here the whole time. What other categories and binaries might we trouble together?

Of trouble, Donna Haraway shares:

"Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response...The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places."

The Poppy invites us to wonder at a seed that can lay dormant for a century, but in the face of devastating violence to the land and one another, responds and awakens with vigor, returning from the underworld bringing the medicines of beauty and awe. The Poppy makes invites us to consider what other small beauty has laid dormant, waiting for these particular times and conditions to erupt and blanket the wastelands.

Sources

Akomolafe, B. (2022, February 4). Death is Always Unprecedented – Humanism, Self, and Impermenance. Science and Nonduality. Retrieved June 11, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1Z3xnqC08Y

Atsma, A. J. (n.d.-a). LETHE - Greek River-Goddess & Underworld River of Oblivion. Retrieved June 7, 2023, from https://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/PotamosLethe.html

Atsma, A. J. (n.d.-b). NYX - Greek Primordial Goddess of the Night (Roman Nox). Retrieved June 7, 2023, from https://www.theoi.com/Protogenos/Nyx.html

Booth, M. (1999). Opium: A History (First Edition). St. Martin’s Griffin.

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Chatfield, S. (n.d.). Poppies: Sleep, Death, Rembrance. Retrieved June 6, 2023, from http://preraphaelitesisterhood.com/poppies-sleep-death-remembrance/

DEA Museum. Opium Poppy. Retrieved June 12, 2023, from https://museum.dea.gov/exhibits/online-exhibits/cannabis-coca-and-poppy-natures-addictive-plants/opium-poppy

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Frazer, J. (1890.). Chapter 44: Demeter and Persephone. In The Golden Bough.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Illustrated edition). Duke University Press Books.

LaVolpe, N. (2022, May 24). Poppy Flower—Facts, Symbolism, And Gardening Tips. Farmers’ Almanac - Plan Your Day. Grow Your Life. https://www.farmersalmanac.com/poppy-flower-facts-symbolism-and-gardening-tips

McIntyre, A. (1996). Flower Power: Flower Remedies for Healing Body and Soul Through Herbalism, Homeopathy, Aromatherapy, and Flower Essences (1st edition). Henry Holt and Company.

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