medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
>
> This is interesting, regarding the slightly unpleasant smell of May
blossom:
>
> "Botanists later discovered that the chemical trimethylamine present in
> hawthorn blossom is also one of the first chemicals formed in decaying
> animal tissue."
I can provide a rather unpleasant but perhaps significant gloss on this.
As a child I was forbidden to bring may (hawthorn) blossoms into the house:
my mother declared it was unlucky. My husband had an even more interesting
experience. He once took some may blossom home as a gift for his mother and
the other children in his group (who clearly came from more superstitious
families) were horrified. They told him the plant was known as "Mother Die"
and if you took may blossom into your home it would kill your mother or at
least it was a sign that you wanted her to die. (This was in Sheffield in
the 1920s.)
A few years ago, I attended a lecture where the speaker was talking about
plants and their attributes and referring to the hawthorn and the
superstitions relating to it. He said that a friend of his who had been
working as a medic in a third world country said that the smell of some
types of hawthorn were almost indistinguishable from the smell of gangrene.
Putting these two bits of information together, I would suspect that if a
pregnant woman became aware of this odour emanating from her body she would
know that her unborn child had died within her and was already decomposing.
This in most cases (unless a midwife could effect an abortion) would
foretell her own immanent death from blood poisoning / puerperal fever. Thus
to bring this hawthorn into the house where there was a pregnant woman - a
mother - would be to terrify her with the prospect of a hideous death.
I would guess that to make this plant sacred to any divine mother -
including the BVM - would be an attempt to neutralise the danger that the
smell of the plant suggested.
Brenda M. C.
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