resurrected rose – from the dead looking stalk

This rose bush appeared to be dead, only a dark stem left, and I was about to throw her out some months ago: and there didn’t seem to be a place in the garden for her either. However since I don’t like throwing anything out, I decided that she might as well have a chance at life wherever: so I planted her in a spot that nothing else seemed to grow in, and that I did not really care about – under the tamarillo tree near our MoonCourt. For a while I occasionally looked, but then forgot all about her.

This morning as I was preparing pots for the Autumn Equinox ceremonial planting of daffodil seeds, she caught my eye with this astonishing new growth: I was so joyfully surprised, and it struck me as such a resurrection – “a condition of having been restored to life” as it says in the dictionary.

I was so happy and shared the news with my partner and later with friend priestess Zoe who was in my study doing some research on Cybele – Great Goddess of Anatolia and Rome, who has recently called her attention. Zoe smiled and mentioned that she had just been reading that the Romans adorned statues of Cybele “with roses, as they did those of Venus, and it may have been at the time when her Mysteries were celebrated in Rome that the symbolism of the rose began to evolve as an image of resurrection, and the rose garden as the sacred world or hidden dimension of the goddess”[i]

Cybele, Primordial Mother, has come to our MoonCourt garden near the Season of Equinox – Autumn/Spring, representing both dimensions of emergence and the hidden.

Cybele – Roman image 2 C.E. Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES:

Baring, Ann and Cashford, Jules. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. Penguin Group,1993.

NOTES:

[i] Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess, p.403.