Ruby's Greek Thread

[cvetkakocj@rogers.com]

Cvetka, why do you think this is the first word for the plant?

I checked the first words at the time when Dr. Bax presented his theory that the first words are the names of the plants. I believe that the text in the plant section are poems which may or may not contain the name of the plant, and plain description and usefulness of the plant, but this might be implied. As Koen proposed, the plants have hidden religious meaning, but they have some association with real flowers. Like the flower-shaped menorah is an allusion to light and enlightenment. I myself used a lot of flower imagery in my poems. Flower imagery was very popular in Slovenian literature, as well as in the medieval Europe. Dante called his poems 'flowers'.
Flowers are a gift of nature (God), so they reveal the harmony, but also the struggle for survival. There is some magic in comparison of humans to flowers (there is a lot of floral imagery in the Bible). It is about the cycle of life - that is how artists compared themselves to plants: their work is compared to flowers and seeds (life-giving words), just like plants contain magical substance that heals. According to holistic approach to medicine, both psychological and herbal medicine was used in the Middle Ages, so much so that the Church had prescribed formulas to bless the flowers.
 Flowers have a magic symbolic language. For example, when Koen explained that a certain plant looks like the outline of Juda's kiss, the plant is an invasive plant, suggesting that a lot of betrayal was taking place in the Middle Ages (not by Jews).  The twin bell picture, which is one of the easiest to recognized, alludes to the duality, and the pain associated with in on the individual level (as mental illness) and on collective level (insanity of wars). At the same time, the plant was used for the headache. So, whether it was named or not, the association is clear.
Often, the name of the plant would be hard to recognize, because they were named by various local folk-names, like St. John's worth, or Perunika (after Slavic god Perun), or Mary's shirt, or Bloody milk etc. You need to see the words in context. Or the plants could be named by some ancient names originating from the Middle East where the first medical herbal books were written. 
For now, I don't anything for granted and I am not particularly looking for the names.