MODULE: WORLD LITERATURE

At the end of this module, learners will be able to:

1. Know the story of Narcissus, Hyacinth, and Adonis,

What can you say about this saying, “He who loves not others
love himself.”?
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FLOWER MYTHS: NARCISSUS, HYACINTH, and ADONIS

The first story about the creation of the narcissus is told only in an early
Homeric Hymn of the seventh or eighth century, the second I have taken from
Ovid. There is an immense difference between the two poets, who are separated
from each other not only by six or seven hundred years. But also by the
fundamental difference between the Greek, and the Roman. The Hymn is written
objectively, simply, without a touch of affectation. The poet is thinking of his
subject. Ovid is as always thinking of his audience. But he tells this story well.
The bit about the ghost trying to look at itself in the river of death is a subtle
touch which is quite characteristic of him and quite unlike any Greek writer.
Euripides gives the best account of the festival of Hyacinthus; Apollodorus and
Ovid both tell his story. Whenever there is any vividness in my narrative it may
be ascribed securely to Ovid. Apollodorus never deviates into anything like that.
Adonis I have taken from two third-century poets, Theocritus and Bion. The tale
is typical of the Alexandrian poets, tender, a little soft, but always in exquisite
taste. In Greece there are most lovely wild flowers. They would be beautiful
anywhere, but Greece is not a rich and fertile country of wide meadows and
fruitful fields where flowers seem at home. It is a land of rocky ways and stony
hills and rugged mountains, and in such places the exquisite vivid bloom of the
wild flowers, A profusion of delight, Gay, bewilderingly bright, comes as a
startling surprise. Bleak heights are carpeted in radiant colors; every crack and
crevice of a frowning crag blossoms. The contrast of this laughing, luxuriant
beauty with the clear-cut, austere grandeur all around arrests the attention
sharply. Elsewhere wild flowers may be little noticed—but never in Greece. That
was as true in the days of old as it is now. In the faraway ages when the tales of
Greek mythology were taking shape men found the brilliant blossoms of the
Greek spring a wonder and a delight. Those people separated from us by
thousands of years, and almost completely unknown to us, felt as we do before
that miracle of loveliness, each flower so delicate, yet altogether covering the land
like a rainbow mantle flung over the hills. The first storytellers in Greece told
story after story about them, how they had been created and why they were so
beautiful.

It was the most natural thing possible to connect them with the gods. All
things in heaven and earth were mysteriously linked with the divine powers, but
beautiful things most of all. Often an especially exquisite flower was held to be
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the direct creation of a god for his own purpose. That was true of the narcissus,
which was not like ours of that name, but a lovely bloom of glowing purple and
silver. Zeus called it into being to help his brother, the lord of the dark
underworld, when he wanted to carry away the maiden he had fallen in love with,
Demeter's daughter, Persephone. She was gathering flowers with her
companions in the vale of Enna, in a meadow of soft grass and roses and crocus
and lovely violets and iris and hyacinths. Suddenly she caught sight of
something quite new to her, a bloom more beautiful by far than any she had ever
seen, a strange glory of a flower, a marvel to all, immortal gods and mortal men.
A hundred blossoms grew up from the roots, and the fragrance was very sweet.
The broad sky above and the whole earth laughed to see it and the salt wave of
the sea. Only Persephone among the maidens had spied it. The rest were at the
other end of the meadow. She stole toward it, half fearful at being alone, but
unable to resist the desire to fill her basket with it, exactly as Zeus had supposed
she would feel. Wondering she stretched out her hands to take the lovely
plaything, but before she touched it a chasm opened in the earth and out of it
coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look
of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible. He caught her to him and
held her close. The next moment she was being borne away from the radiance of
earth in springtime to the world of the dead by the king who rules it. This was
not the only story about the narcissus. There was another as magical, but quite
different. The hero of it was a beautiful lad, whose name was Narcissus. His
beauty was so great, all the girls who saw him longed to be his, but he would
have none of them. He would pass the loveliest carelessly by, no matter how
much she tried to make him look at her. Heartbroken maidens were nothing to
him. Even the sad case of the fairest of the nymphs, Echo, did not move him.
She was a favorite of Artemis, the goddess of woods and wild creatures, but she
came under the displeasure of a still mightier goddess, Hera herself, who was at
her usual occupation of trying to discover what Zeus was about. She suspected
that he was in love with one of the nymphs and she went to look them over to
try to discover which. However, she was immediately diverted from her
investigation by Echo's gay chatter. As she listened amused, the others silently
stole away and Hera could come to no conclusion as to where Zeus's wandering
fancy had alighted. With her usual injustice she turned against Echo. That
nymph became another unhappy girl whom Hera punished. The goddess
condemned her never to use her tongue again except to repeat what was said to
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her. "You will always have the last word," Hera said, "but no power to speak first."
This was very hard, but hardest of all when Echo, too, with all the other lovelorn
maidens, loved Narcissus. She could follow him but she could follow him, but
she could not speak to him. How then could she make a youth who never looked
at a girl pay attention to her? One day, however, it seemed her chance had come.
He was calling to his companions. "Is anyone here?' and she called back in
rapture, "Here—Here." She was still hidden by the trees so that he did not see
her, and he shouted, "Come!"' —just what she longed to say to him. She
answered joyfully, "Come!" and stepped forth from the woods with her arms
outstretched. But he turned away in angry disgust. "Not so," he said; "I will die
before I give you power over me." All she could say was, humbly, entreatingly, "I
give you power over me,” but he was gone. She hid her blushes and her shame
in a lonely cave, and never could be comforted. Still she lives in places like that,
and they say she has so wasted away with longing that only her voice now is left
of her. So Narcissus went on his cruel way, a scorner of love. But at last one of
those he wounded prayed a prayer and it was answered by the gods: "May he
who loves not others love himself.” The great goddess Nemesis, which means
righteous anger, undertook to bring this about. As Narcissus bent over a clear
pool for a drink and saw there his own reflection, on the moment he fell in love
with it. "Now I know," he cried, "what others have suffered from me, for I burn
with love of my own self—and yet how can I reach that loveliness I see mirrored
in the water? But I cannot leave it. Only death can set me free.” And so it
happened. He pined away, leaning perpetually over the pool, fixed in one long
gaze. Echo was near him, but she could do nothing; only when, dying, he called
to his image, "Farewell —farewell,” she could repeat the words as a last good-by
to him. They say that when his spirit crossed the river that encircles the world
of the dead, it leaned over the boat to catch a final glimpse of itself in the water

The nymphs he had scorned were kind to him in death and sought his
body to give it burial, but they could not find it. Where it had lain there was
blooming a new and lovely flower, and they called it by his name. Narcissus.
Another flower that came into being through the death of a beautiful youth was
the hyacinth, again not like the flower we call by that name, but lily-shaped and
of a deep purple, or, some say, a splendid crimson. That was a tragic death, and
each year it was commemorated by the festival of Hyacinthus that lasts
throughout the tranquil night. In a contest with Apollo He was slain. Discus
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throwing they competed, and the god's swift cast Sped beyond the goal he aimed
at and struck Hyacinthus full in the forehead a terrible wound. Lie had been
Apollo's dearest companion. There was no rivalry between them when they tried
which could throw the discus farthest; they were only playing a game. The god
was horrorstruck to see the blood gush forth and the lad, deathly pale, fall to the
ground. He turned as pale himself as he caught him up in his arms and tried to
staunch the wound. But it was too late. While he held him the boy's head fell
back as a flower does when its stem is broken. He was dead and Apollo kneeling
beside him wept for him, dying so young, so beautiful. He had killed him,
although through no fault of his, and he cried, "Oh, if I could give my life for
yours, or die with you." Even as he spoke, the bloodstained grass turned green
again and there bloomed forth the wondrous flower that was to make the lad's
name known forever. Apollo himself inscribed the petals—some say with
Hyacinth's initial, and others with the two letters of the Greek word that means
"Alas"; either way, a memorial of the god's great sorrow. There is a story, too,
that Zephyr, the West Wind, not Apollo, was the direct cause of the death that
he also loved this fairest of youths and in his jealous anger at seeing the god
preferred to him he blew upon the discus and made it strike Hyacinth.

Such charming tales of lovely young people who, dying in the springtime
of life, were fittingly changed into spring flowers, have probably a dark
background. They give a hint of black deeds that were done in the far-distant
past. Long before there were any stories told in Greece or any poems sung which
have come down to us, perhaps even before there were storytellers and poets, it
might happen, if the fields around a village were not fruitful, if the com did not
spring up as it should, that one of the villagers would be killed and his—or her—
blood sprinkled over the barren land. There was no idea as yet of the radiant
gods of Olympus who would have loathed the hateful sacrifice. Mankind had only
a dim feeling that as their own life depended utterly on seedtime and harvest,
there must be a deep connection between themselves and the earth and that
their blood, which was nourished by the corn, could in turn nourish it at need.
What more natural then, if a beautiful boy had thus been killed, than to think
when later the ground bloomed with narcissus or hyacinths that the flowers were
his very self, changed and yet living again? So they would tell each other it had
happened, a lovely miracle which made the cruel death seem less cruel. Then as
the ages passed and people no longer believed that the earth needed blood to be
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fruitful, all that was cruel in the story would be dropped and in the end forgotten.
No one would remember that terrible things had once been done. Hyacinthus,
they would say, died not slaughtered by his kinsfolk to get food for them, but
only because of a sorrowful mistake. Of these deaths and flowery resurrections
the most famous was that of Adonis. Every year the Greek girls mourned for him
and every year they rejoiced when his flower, the blood-red anemone, the
windflower, was seen blooming again. Aphrodite loved him; the Goddess of Love,
who pierces with her shafts the hearts of gods and men alike, was fated herself
to suffer that same piercing pain. She saw him when he was born and even then
loved him and decided he should be hers. She carried him to Persephone to take
charge of him for her but Persephone loved him too and would not give him back
to Aphrodite, not even when the goddess went down to the underworld to get
him. Both goddess would yield, and finally Zeus himself had to judge between
them. He decided that Adonis should spend half the year with each, the autumn
and winter with the Queen of the Dead; the spring and summer with the Goddess
of Love and Beauty.

All the time he was with Aphrodite she sought only to please him. He was
keen for the chase, and often she would leave her swan-drawn car, in which she
was used to glide at her ease through the air, and follow him along rough
woodland ways dressed like a huntress. But one sad day she happened not to
be with him and he tracked down a mighty boar. With his hunting dogs he
brought the beast to bay. He hurled his spear at it, but he only wounded it, and
before he could spring away, the boar mad with pain rushed at him and gored
him with its great tusks. Aphrodite in her winged car high over the earth heard
her lover's groan and flew to him. He was softly breathing his life away, the dark
blood flowing down his skin of snow and his eyes growing heavy and dim. She
kissed him, but Adonis knew not that she kissed him as he died. Cruel as his
wound was, the wound in her heart was deeper. She spoke to him, although she
knew he could not hear her:—"You die. O thrice desired, and my desire has flown
like a dream. Gone with you is the girdle of my beauty. But I myself must live
who am a goddess and may not: follow you. Kiss me yet once again, the last, long
kiss, Until I draw your soul within my lips and drink down all your love." The
mountains all were calling and the oak trees answering, oh, woe, woe for Adonis.
He is dead. And Echo cried in answer, Oh, woe, woe for Adonis. And all the Loves
wept for him and all the Muses too. But down in the black underworld Adonis
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could not hear them, nor see the crimson flower that sprang up where each drop
of his blood had stained the earth.

Please click the link below for the Course Overview:

 https://prezi.com/vhkp2zllyoox/flower-myths-
narcissus-hyacinth-and-adonis/
 http://docplayer.net/51891917-Flower-myths-
narcissus-hyacinth-adonis.html