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Spices in Greek Mythology Marcel Detienne

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EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES General Editor: John Mepham This is a new series of translations of important and influential works of European thought in the fields of philosophy and the human sciences. Other titles in the series: Sartre and Marxism Pietro Chiodi Society Against Nature Serge Moscovici SPICES IN GREEK The Human History of Nature MYTHOLOGY Serge Moscovici Galileo Studies Alexandre Koyrt MARCEL DETIENNE Translated from the French by JANET LLOYD With an introduction by J. -P. VERNANT Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, Contents New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex Copyright O 1972 in France as Les jardins d'Adonis by Gallimard Edition; English translation by Janet Lloyd 0 1977 by the Harvester Press, Limitcd. Afterword to the 1985 printing of the French edition is copyright 0 1985 Gallirnard, and is translated into English for Princeton University Press by Froma I. Zeitlin. Afterword translation Introdu~tzonby Jean-Plerre Vernant vii Q 1994 Princeton University Press. This publication is by arrangements with Editions Gallimard and Simon & Schuster, Ltd. Translator's Note xli All Rights Reserved Foreword 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chapter 1 The Perfumes of Arabia Detienne, Marcel. [Jardins d'Adonis. English] Chapter 2 The Spice Ox The gardens of Adonis: spices in Greek mythology I Marcel Chapter 3 From Myrrh to Lettuce Detienne; translated from the French by Janet Lloyd; with an introduction by 1.-P. Vernant. Chapter 4 The Misfortunes of Mint p. cm.-(Mythos: the PrincetoniBollingen series in world mythology) Chapter 5 The Seed of Adonis Originally published: Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977. Includes bibliographical references and index. Chapter 6 The Lettuce of Pythagoras ISBN 0-691-00104-9 @bk. : alk. paper) 1. Aromatic plants-Mythology. 2. Mythology, Greek. Afterword 3. Adonis (Greek deity) I. Title. 11. Series: Mythos (Princeton, N.J.) Notes to the Text BL795.A7D4713 1993 292.1'3-dc20 '93-5590 Index First Princeton Paperback printing, for the Mythos Series, 1994 Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the Un~tedStates of Amer~ca Filnmficki fakulta by J.-P. VERNANT Marcel Detienne's quest for the gardens of Adonis leads him to take us by the long way round that Plato mentions when he advises those seeking the truth to follow patiently along every bend in its winding way. We have to leave the well-trodden paths of mythology and, as we do so, the mirage of the conventional view of the East, transplanted to Greek soil, melts away - the mirage to which we have become accustomed and which the historians of religion at the turn of the century explored exhaustively (as they believed) without ever encountering there any other forms or species than those they had already classified and listed. They found, for instance, a god who disappears in the full flower of youth, vegetation which dies and is revived each year and the spring reawakening of the forces of nature that slumber through the cold winter or are consumed under the burning summer sun. In this hook we discover new horizons, a landscape full of perfumes, extraordinary plants and marvellous beasts, an unknown land retaining all the appeal of a fairy-tale country yet'whose features are delineated with all the rigourous austerity and sober logic of a scale diagram. There are Herodotus' fabulous stories to fascinate us, telling of the harvesting of spices in the Land of the Sun. Starting with myrrh and ending with lettuce, we see displayed before us the full range of plants in whose context Adonis' story is set. The whole scale of the animal kingdom rises before us, stretching from the beasts that fly to those that grovel: at the top is perched the eagle, then come the vulture, the hat and the winged snake; at the very bottom lurk the snakes of both water and land. But with the rising of the fabled phoenix the two ends of the scale are brought together. The phoenix belongs far above the eagle, close to the sun, yet it is in the form of a larva, a worm born of corruption that it must he reborn from its own ashes and thus, all of a sudden, we behold it placed lower than the snake and even closer to the earth and waters. We see how the sad stories of Adonis .. VIII The Gardens of Adonis Introduction ix and his mother Myrrha are interwoven with those of Mintha or therefore he embodies a spirit of vegetation; he spends a third of his Mint, Phaon the ferryman, Iunx the wryneck bird and sorceress, life in the underworld and the remainder with Aphrodite in the light and Ixion the ungrateful, the father of the Centaurs. We are truly of the sun, therefore he embodies the spirit of wheat in the same once again in the land of fairy-tales but the pleasure we once felt way as Persephone does. This threefold hypothesis has already there as children is now supplemented by the scholarly interpreta- been completely demolished by the work of Georges Dumtzil and tion of a code or rather of many interlocking codes which offer us Claude Levi-Strauss. A god has no more one particular essence the keys to a whole mental universe different from ours, not easy to than a single detail of a myth is significant on its own. Every god is penetrate, even disconcerting, yet in some ways familiar. It is as if defined by the network of relations which links him with and the Greeks had used these fantastic and marvellous tales to transmit --opposes him to the other deities included within a particular as clearly as possible the code to the statements in which they pantheon; and similarly, a single detail in a myth is only significant express their own distinctive view of the world. It is this code that by virtue of its place within the ordered system to which the myth Detienne helps us to decipher. itself belongs. So the Greek scholar must start again from scratch. Such is this book which simultaneously affords us both delight It is not that he totally rejects the comparative method; on the and instruction. As for the former, we can do no more than express contrary, he has constant recourse to it, but he applies it from a the pleasure we have experienced in reading - and above all different standpoint, giving it a different meaning. Now the rereading - it. As for the latter, no book can have less need of an comparisons are made within the context of the particular introduction. It is self-sufficient and speaks for itself. So rather civilisation to be studied, by making systematic cross-references than write a preface to it, I should prefer to accompany the author between cycles of legends which seem, at first sight, to revolve on his way to raise and discuss certain questions about some of the around figures having nothing to do with each other. The partitions guiding themes in his enquiry. separating the purely mythological tradition from evidence from other areas of the material, social, and spiritual life of the Greeks My first question is this: how should we interpret a myth such as are done away with. The aim is to define, as one proceeds, as that of Adonis? The Frazerian type of classical interpretation saw exhaustively as possible, the framework within which the myth Adonis as an example of the 'spirit of vegetation'. Detienne rejects must be set so that every detail in its structure and episodes may this from the outset but he also challenges the over-facile global take on a precise meaning which can, in every case, be confirmed or comparisons which attempt to assimilate one myth to another refuted by reference to other parts of the body of data as a whole. without taking any account of the particularities of different The comparison is only valid in so far as it is carried out within a cultural systems. The attempt to decipher the story of Adonis by definite field of enquiry that can adequately ensure on the one hand tracking down, here and there, gods and heroes that appear comprehensiveness and, on the other, internal coherence. With an analogous to him implies three interdependent assumptions which aim such as this the nature of the work of comparison becomes are bound to affect the entire view of the myth. In the first place it infinitely more demanding. The study takes just as much account is assumed that every mythical figure can be defined as a separate of differences as of similarities or - to more precise - it does not entity in and by himself and that he possesses some sort of essence; attempt to establish analogies between figures or legends of secondly, that this essence corresponds to some reality which, in the different types but rather to establish the relative positions of last analysis, must be considered to be a part of the natural world various elements within a single complex. Thus it distinguishes since it is found to be represented by one god or another in the most separations, distances, intervals and inversions as well as points of widely differing civilisations. The third assumption is that the symmetry, with the final aim of establishing an ordered system. relationship between the mythical figure and the reality it Instead of postulating as if it were self-evident that Adonis is represents is a 'symbolical' one, in other words that it rests upon equivalent to vegetation and so connecting this Greek god at times metaphor or analogy: thus, Adonis is born of the myrrh tree, with deities of the dema (tubercules) type and at others with the x The Gardens of Adonis Introduction xi oriental gods who die and are reborn in accordance with the cycle code for which the evidence is, first, the stories in Herodotus, of plant life, the study tries to identify accurately the position which introduce certain categories of animals to act as the occupied by myrrh, considerd as a species of spice, within the necessary mediators between man and the spices and, secondly, the hierarchical classification of plants which the Greeks elaborated.
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