The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863

THE IVY

 
'Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.
Fairies, begone, and be all ways away.
So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist,—the female Ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
Oh, how I love thee; how I dote on thee!'
 

Midsummer Night's Dream, act iv., scene 1.

'The bearers of the thyrsus (bound with Ivy) are many, but the Bacchantæ are few.'—Orphic saying.

If, among plants, the Rose is unmistakably feminine, from the delicate complexion of its flower, the Ivy is not less so from the tender sentiment of attachment expressed by its whole form and life. In her infinite array of poetic symbols, Nature has given us nothing so exquisitely typical of all that is best in woman, as that which may be found in the graceful curves and in the firm strength of this vine. In youth and beauty, she clings to the husband tree or parental wall for support, and, like a wife or daughter, conceals defects, and imparts a softer shadowing and contour to the support, without which she herself had never risen to light and life. Time passes on. The oak grows old, the wall is shattered by lightning; but the Ivy, now strong and firm, shelters the limbs or binds together the tottering walls with greater care than before, and covers decay and rifts with fresh care—aided by the younger daughter-vines.

This simile has occurred to poets in all lands, in all ages. In an old Chinese poem (Jolowicz, der Poetische Orient, s. 7) we are told that 'in the south there lives a tree, the Ivy Ko clings and winds around it, bringing the most excellent of joys and happiness in excess.' Owing to this natural and most palpable resemblance, the ancient Greeks caused the officiating priest in the temple to present to a bridal pair, on entering, a twig of Ivy, 'as a symbolical wish that their love, like it, might ever continue fresh.' It was a beautiful thought, and one which was not lost sight of in the ecclesiastical and architectural symbolism of the middle ages. 'It is,' says Friedreich (Symbolik und Mythologie der Natur, § 103), 'as an ever-greening plant, a type of life, of love, and of marriage.' It is, therefore, with both truth and propriety that the modern floral lexicons give the vitis hedera, or Ivy, as expressing 'Female affection—I have found one true heart.'

As with all plants, or, indeed, with all natural objects known to the ancients, the Ivy was the subject of a myth or religious allegory, and in investigating this myth, we find ourselves in a labyrinth of strange mystery. The ordinary works on mythology, indeed, inform the reader that it was the plant sacred to Bacchus, the god of wine, because, as Loudon states, 'this wine is found at Nyssa, the reputed birthplace of Bacchus, and in no other part of India.' 'It is related,' he continues, 'that when Alexander's army, after their conquest of Babylon, arrived at this mountain, and found it covered with laurel and Ivy, they were so transported with joy (especially when they recognized the latter plant, which is a native of Thebes), that they tore up the Ivy by the roots, and, twining it around their heads, burst forth into hymns to Bacchus, and prayers for their native country.'

But there is a deeper significance to the Ivy, even as there is a deeper and more solemn mystery and might around the primeval Bacchus. To us he is merely the wine-god, but to the ancient Initiated in the orgies and mysteries he was—as were each of the gods in their turn—the central divinity, the lord of light, and the giver of life. For, as it was concisely said in the spirit of pantheistic abstraction: 'Nothing can be imagined which is not an image of God;' so it was not possible to conceive a divinity who was not in himself all the other divinities. Thus we find that Bacchus was male, female, and at the same time an absolute ONE without regard to sex; or, in other words, he was the ancient trinity.

 
'Tibi enim inconsumpta juventus.
Tu puer æternus, tu formosissimus alto
Conspiceris cœlo, tibi, cum sine cornibus adstas
Virgineum caput est.'
 

Ovid, Met. l. 4.

For, as the great mystery of all religion, or of all being, is life, and as life, like blood, is most aptly typified by reviving and inspiring wine, it was not wonderful that renewed strength, generation, and birth should gather around the incarnation of the vine, and that the cup should become the holiest of symbols. Like the ark, the chest or coffer, the egg, and a thousand other receptive or containing objects, the cup appeared to the ancient Initiated as a womb, or as the earth, taking in and giving forth life. It was in this spirit that Nonnus, in the fifth century, wrote The Dyonisiacs, a vast poem on Bacchus, in forty-eight books; 'a magnificent assemblage of the emblematical legends of Egypt,' and in which modern criticism has discovered a creative grandeur, a beautiful wildness of fancy, and a romantic spirit, such as were combined in no other one poem of antiquity.

Bacchus was thus the lord of life, and that in a vividly real sense—the sense of intoxication, of keenly thrilling pleasure, of wild delight, and headlong rushing joy. He was fabled to have given men the grape and wine—but to the Initiated of the mystery and orgie there was higher and more intoxicating wine than that of the grape—the wine of wild inspiration, drawn from the keenest relish of beauty, of nature, of knowledge, and of love. Drunk with this wine of the soul, the Mœnad and Bacchante rushed forth into lonely forests, amid rocks, by silent lake, and streamlet lone, and cried in frantic joy, bewildered with passion, to the Great Parent, or shouted in praise: 'Bacche, Evoe, Bacche!'

 
'Then chaunted rose
The song of Bacchic women: all the band
Of shaggy Satyrs howled with mystic voice,
Preluding to the Phrygian minstrelsy
Of nightly orgies. Earth around them laughed;
The rocks reëchoed; shouts of revelling joy
Shrilled from the Naiads, and the river nymphs
Sent echoes from their whirlpool-circled tides,
Flowing in silence; and beneath the rocks
Chanted Sicilian songs, like preludes sweet,
That through the warbling throats of Syren nymphs,
Most musical drop of honey from their tongues.'
 

Nonnus.

For all this wild joy, all this exquisite union of all the pleasures known to man, whether in the mad embraces of passionate nymphs, in draining wine, in tasting the fresh honeycomb, in wild dances under green leaves, in feasting, or in song, Bacchus was the centre, and the Cup the symbol. And this cup—the absolutely feminine type—the Iona which forms the nucleus of so great and so curious a family of words in the Indo-Germanic and Shemitic languages—was fabled to have been formed from the wood of Ivy. Let the reader hear this double sex of Bacchus in mind; he will find it recurring again in the myth of Ivy. 'We must,' says Creuzer (Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Völker), 'think of ALL things, if we would not see the Bacchic genii in their mysterious rites, from a one-sided point of view. Not only Bacchus himself, but his male and female companions must each, like their lord on earth, appear in different forms. For the mysteries loved the antique, the pregnant-with-meaning, i. e. that which has a really symbolical fulness, and supplies full food for thought.' And again: 'It would have been very strange if the Man-Woman had not also appeared in this mysterious array of forms. In his origin, Bacchus is an Indian god, and to the Hindus the world was bi-sexed.' Thus we find in the Ivy, as his sacred plant, a curious and beautiful symbol, in whose trailing embraces the ancient East and West are bound together.

If the Ivy cup was held to typify female nature, so too were the leaves of that plant emblematical of the receptive sex. The thyrsus, the distinctive object borne by the worshippers of Bacchus, was a phallic or male symbol, the characteristic portion of which was wreathed and buried in Ivy leaves; signifying the union of the sexes. It is curious to observe that this regarding the Ivy as characteristic of the feminine principle, found its way among the Druids, and was transmitted from them to the Christian and Christmas ceremonies of the middle ages. In these we always find that the thorned holly is spoken of as male, and the Ivy as female. In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1779, a correspondent relates a ceremony, which is still preserved in some parts of England. 'The girls, from five or six to eighteen years old, were assembled in a crowd, burning an uncouth effigy, which they called a holly-boy, and which they had stolen from the boys; while in another part of the village, the boys were burning what they called an Ivy-girl, which they had stolen from the girls. The ceremony of each burning was attended with huzzas and other acclamations, according to the receipt of custom in all such cases.'¹

There is but one legend in all the legends of the gods; but one solution, though the enigmas be thousandfold; and the myth of the Ivy is only a repetition of that of Bacchus and of all the immortals—the endless allegory of birth and death, male and female, winter and spring. Kissos—the Greek word for Ivy—was a young faun beloved by Bacchus, who accompanied the god of the Cup and of life, in all his strange adventures. Mad with wine, Kissos once at an orgie danced until he fell dead. Then his lord, grieving bitterly, raised the beloved form in his arms, and, changing it to Ivy, wreathed it around his brow. It is the old story of death and revival.

But we may expect to find of course a feminine goddess, or demi-goddess, whose name includes the same root as Kissos—and she appears in Kiseis, one of the nymphs to whom Bacchus gave the infant Bacchus to be brought up. For her reward, she was placed by Bacchus among the stars—in the constellation of the weeping Hyades—that she might have a place in heaven. Apropos of which we may quote the words of the quaint old Jesuit Galtruchius, saying that 'Bacchus was brought up with the Nymphs, which teacheth us that we must mix Water with our Wine.'²

We also find that Kisæa, was, at Epidaurus, one of the names of Minerva. Notwithstanding the apparent dissimilarity between the wild god of wine and the goddess of calm wisdom, it was still taught in the mysteries that they had an affinity in more than one lower form, and, of course, an identity in their highest. 'The temple of Bacchus,' says Galtruchius, 'was next to Minerva's, to express how useful Wine is to revive the Spirits, and enable our Fancy to Invent.'³ In the older worship, Minerva was one with Venus, Diana, Proserpine—the generating female principle of love and of beauty being of course predominant. 'In this unity or identity of barbarian divinities,' says Creuzer (Symbolik, IV. Theil), ('to speak like the Greeks') 'we must, however, seek for the source of that variety which made the Greeks so rich in gods; and what had in Hellas been separated into so many, remained by the 'barbarians' single and undivided. Therefore the older a Greek local worship might be, so much the more did it in this resemble the barbarian. * * So we have truly learned in Argos, Laconia, Dodona, and Sicily, * * that Proserpine was one and the same with Venus and Diana, and the identity with Minerva may also be proved.' For the proof I refer the reader to his work. With Venus, however, Bacchus had amours, begetting Priapus. Certain it is that the Ivy Kissos appears in both male and female names.

But as the Ivy formed the cup—kissubion—into which life entered, and from which it was drained as wine; so, too, from its wood was made the sacred chest (kisté) in which, in the Dyonisiac mysteries, the same secret was preserved under the form of a serpent, while in the Eleusinian it hid the dread pomegranate which Persephone had tasted. For they were all one and the same, this wine and serpent and pomegranate—the type of life and of knowledge—of human birth, and human intellect—of the world's generation and of eternal wisdom. The fruit of which Adam ate, the bread and wine of the holy supper of the mysteries of all lands in all ages, the pomegranate, whose seeds, once eaten, kept the soul in another life beyond death, all have one meaning—and this meaning was that of infinite revival, endless begetting, the renewal of nature—and with this the knowledge of the great mystery which sets the soul free. 'Eritis sicut Deus.'

It was no small honor for a single plant to have furnished the wreath of Bacchus, the wood of his cup, emblematic of the human body containing his life-blood, and the material for the chest of the great mysteries—meaning also the body and the world. I think, however, that its philological root may also be possibly found in the Greek noun kissa, and the verb kissáo, implying strange and excessive passionate longing. Such yearning would well become the Bacchantæ, the wild children of desire and of Nature. It is longing or desire which leads to renewing life, which constitutes love, which flashes like fire and light through the beautiful, and pours forth the wine, and breaks the bread, and causes the rose-blush to bloom, and the nymphs to cry amid the mountains, Evoé Bacche!

Coming down from the pagan mysteries into lower and more literal forms, the Ivy preserved two meanings. It was already the vine of life, and the early Christians laid it in the coffins of their departed, as the emblem of a new life in Christ.⁴ It had hung upon the limbs of naked nymphs, convulsed in passionate orgies, as a type of vitality renewed by pleasure—it was now wreathed at Christmas-tide over quaint columns and tracery-laden Gothic windows and arches, as a sign—they knew not exactly of what—but guessed, naturally enough, and rightly, that it typified as an undying winter-plant the resurrection. And they sang its praises in many a brave carol:

 
Ivy, chief of trees it is,
Veni coronaberis.
 
 
The most worthy she is in town,—
He who says other says amiss;
Worthy is she to bear the crown;
Veni coronaberis.
 
 
Ivy is soft and meek of speech,
Against all woe she bringeth bliss;
Happy is he that may her reach:
Veni coronaberis.
 
 
Ivy is green, of color bright,
Of all trees the chief she is;
And that I prove will now be right:
Veni coronaberis.
 
 
Ivy, she beareth berries black;
God grant to all of us his bliss,
For then we shall nothing lack:
Veni coronaberis.
 
 
Very quaint is the following fragment:
Holly and Ivy made a great party,
Who should have the mastery
In lands where they go.
 
 
Then spake Holly, 'I am fierce and jolly,
I will have the mastery
In lands where we go.'
 
 
Then spake Ivy, 'I am loud and proud,
And I will have the mastery
In lands where we go.'
 
 
Then spake Holly, and bent him down on his knee,
'I pray thee, gentle Ivy,
Essay me no villany
In lands where we go.'
Old Christmas Carol.
 

'Good wine needs no bush,' says an old proverb; but is it generally known that the 'bush' in question, used as a sign for wine, was a bunch of Ivy? The custom went from Greece to Italy, from Italy to Germany, and so on westward. Very different is this use of the evergreen vine in taverns, from that of adorning churches—the one meaning a mere invitation to drink, while the other reminds the believer that, as the Ivy lives through the bitter winter, so shall our souls endure through cold death and live again in Christ, even as He passed through the grave to live in 'eternal bloom.' Yet to those who have mastered the legend of Bacchus, there is no absolute difference between the two, when studied with regard to their origin. It is worth remarking that among the ancients the impression prevailed that the Ivy was the plant of joyousness, of triumphant strength, and of life, even as Bacchus was the lord of joy. And at a later day, long after the association with genial Bacchus was forgotten, the Ivy in popular lay and legend, and quaint custom and holiday rite, still by some inexplicable association always seemed to the multitude to be sweet and gentle, noble and dear. It is such a feeling of love, derived from old traditions and old worships, long forgotten, which makes the stork and the house-cricket and the robin and dragon-fly and swallow so dear to children and grown people in many parts of Europe. The rose is gone, but the perfume still lingers in the old leaves of the manuscript. And the reader who comprehends this may also comprehend the tender affection for the Ivy expressed in the old Christmas carols which I have quoted, and which, without such comprehension, seem absurd enough; while with it, they appear truly beautiful and touching.

As the symbol of a joyous faith, the Ivy seems to have been especially repugnant to the Hebrews, whose stern monotheism admitted few attributes to the Deity save those of tremendous power, vengeance, and gloom. So we find (Maccabees, book ii., c. 6., v. 7) that it was regarded by them as most horrible that, 'in the day of the king's birth, every month, they were brought, by bitter constraint, to eat of the sacrifices; and, when the feast of Bacchus was kept, the Jews were compelled to go in procession to Bacchus, carrying Ivy.' A dislike to this emblem of heathen joy seems, however, to have clung to them through all changes of faith—a fact apparently well known to Ptolemy Philopater, king of Egypt, who ordered that all the Jewish renegades who had abjured their religion should be branded with an Ivy-leaf.

When the reader who may be interested in the architecture of the middle ages meets in its tracery, as he often must, the Ivy-leaf, let him recall that here is a symbol which was not used unthinkingly by the Free Masons, who seldom lost an opportunity to bring forward their orientally derived Nature-lore. In fact, the whole mass and body of mediæval architectural emblems presents nothing less than a protest of Nature and life, independence and intelligence, knowledge and joyousness, against the gloomy prison of form and tyranny which held Truth in chains. The stone Ivy-leaf carved on the capitals of old cathedrals was as reviving a symbol to the heart of the Initiated as was the living Ivy on the walls without, green and beautiful among mid-winter's snow. It has been well conjectured by a German writer (Stieglitz, Archæologie der Baukunst der Griechen und Römer, Weimar, 1801, I Theil, § 268), that the relation of the Ivy to Bacchus was probably the cause why it was so frequently introduced by the Greeks among the architectural ornaments of their temples; a very natural conjecture, when we remember that it was a firm conviction in the early faith, even of India, that where the Ivy was found, the god had literally been. The same bold spirit of tradition which brought into the very bosom of the church so much genial, latent heresy and heathen daring, kept the Ivy alive—for Nature and Truth will live, and man will have his guardian angels, who will hope for him and for the dawn, though buried in the deepest night and lost among horrible dreams and ghastly incubi. A French writer on mediæval art⁵ has declared that an excellent work might be written on the foliage of Christian architecture, but regrets that the relations of the leaves as employed—or, in fact, the law guiding their employment—should be unintelligible. Let them be studied according to their symbolical and antique meaning, and they will seem clear as legible letters; and to those who can read them, the gloomy Gothic piles will ray forth a strange and beautiful light—the sympathetic light of congenial minds long passed away, yet who did not vanish ere they had breathed out to those who were to come after them, in leaf or other character, their hatred of the tyrant, and their unfailing conviction of the Great Truth. God bless them all! I have studied for hours their solemn symbols—each a cry for freedom and a prayer for light; and when I thought of the gloom and cruelty and devilishness of the foul age which pressed around them, I wondered that they, knowing what they did, could have lived—ay, lived and sung and given a soul to art. And, understanding them in spirit and in truth, every Ivy-leaf carved by them seemed the whole Prometheus bound and unbound—yes, all poems of truth, all myths, all religion.

And as it is the leaf of life, so is it by that very fact the leaf of death; for death is only the water of life. And in this sense we find a rare beauty in the poem by Mrs. Hemans, though she saw its truth, not through the dim glass of tradition, but by direct communion with Nature.

O THE IVY

OCCASIONED BY RECEIVING A LEAF GATHERED IN THE CASTLE OF RHEINFELS

 
Oh! how could fancy crown with thee,
In ancient days, the god of wine,
And bid thee at the banquet be,
Companion of the vine?
Thy home, wild plant, is where each sound
Of revelry hath long been o'er;
Where song's full notes once peal'd around,
But now are heard no more.
 
 
The Roman, on his battle plains,
Where kings before his eagles bent,
Entwined thee, with exulting strains,
Around the victor's tent;
Yet there, though fresh in glossy green,
Triumphantly thy boughs might wave—
Better thou lov'st the silent scene
Around the victor's grave.
 
 
Where sleep the sons of ages flown,
The bards and heroes of the past,
Where through the halls of glory gone,
Murmurs the wintry blast;
Where years are hastening to efface
Each record of the grand and fair—
Thou, in thy solitary grace,
Wreath of the tomb! art there.
 
 
Oh! many a temple, once sublime
Beneath a blue Italian sky,
Hath nought of beauty left by time,
Save thy wild tapestry.
And, reared 'midst crags and clouds, 'tis thine
To wave where banners waved of yore,
O'er towers that crest the noble Rhine,
Along his rocky shore.
 
 
High from the fields of air look down
Those eyries of a vanished race,
Homes of the mighty, whose renown
Hath passed and left no trace.
But thou art there—thy foliage bright,
Unchanged, the mountain storm can brave—
Thou that wilt climb the loftiest height,
And deck the humblest grave.
 
 
The breathing forms of Parian stone,
That rise round grandeur's marble halls;
The vivid hues by painting thrown
Rich o'er the glowing walls;
Th' acanthus on Corinthian fanes,
In sculptured beauty waving fair—
These perished all—and what remains?
—Thou, thou alone art there.
 
 
'Tis still the same—where'er we tread,
The wrecks of human power we see,
The marvel of all ages fled,
Left to decay and thee.
And still let man his fabrics rear,
August in beauty, grace, and strength,—
Days pass, thou 'Ivy never sere,'⁶
And all is thine at length.
 

There was a strange old belief that Ivy leaves worn as a garland prevented intoxication, that wine was less exciting when drunk from a cup of its wood, and that these cups had finally the singular property of separating water from wine by filtration, when the two were mingled—or, as it is expressed by Mizaldus Monlucianus in his delightfully absurd 'Centuries,'⁷ 'a cup of Ivy, called cissybius, is especially fitted for two reasons, for feasts: firstly, because Ivy is said to banish drunkenness; and secondly, because by it the frauds of tavern keepers, who mix wine with water, are detected.' It is worth remarking, in connection with this, that, according to Loudon(Arboretum et Fruticetum Brittanicum, c. 59), the wood of the Ivy is, when newly cut, really useful as a filter, though it is highly improbable that anything like a complete analysis of mingled water and wine can be effected by it.

It may interest the literary critic, should he be ignorant of the fact, to know that the golden-berried Ivy—worn by Apollo ere he adopted the Daphnean laurel—is the plant consecrated to his calling. Witness Pope:

 
'Immortal Vida, on whose honored brow
The poet's bays and critic's Ivy grow.'
 

Perhaps it is given to the critics to remind them that they should be kindly sheltering and warmly protecting to poor poets and others, who may be greatly cheered by a little kindness. For there is an old legend that the Druids decorated dwelling places with Ivy and holly during the winter, 'that the sylvan spirits might repair to them, and remain unnipped with frost and cold winds, until a milder season had renewed the foliage of their darling abodes. (Dr. Chandler, Travels in Greece.) Think of this when ye ink your pens for the onslaught!

It is worth noting that in two or three 'Dream Books' the Ivy is set down as indicating 'long-continued health, and new friendships'—an explanation quite in keeping with its ancient symbolism, and still more with its most literal and apparent meaning of attachment. This latter sense has given poet and artist many a fine figure and image. 'Nothing,' says St. Pierre in his Studies of Nature, 'can separate the Ivy from the tree which it has once embraced: it clothes it with its own leaves in that inclement season when its dark boughs are covered with hoar frost. The faithful companion of its destiny, it falls when the tree is cut down: death itself does not relax its grasp; and it continues to adorn with its verdure the dry trunk that once supported it.'

And of the golden-berried Ivy, Spenser sings:

 
'Emongst the rest, the clamb'ring Ivy grew,
Knitting his wanton arms with grasping hold,
Lest that the poplar happely should rew
Her brother's strokes, whose boughs she doth enfold
With her lythe twigs, till they the top survew
And paint with pallid green her buds of gold.'
 

Madame De Genlis tells us of a true-hearted friend, who clung to a fallen minister of state, through good and ill fortune, and followed him into exile, that he adopted for a 'device' a fallen oak tree thickly wound with Ivy, and with the motto: 'His fall cannot free me from him.' An 'emblem' of the later middle age expresses undying conjugal love in a like manner, by a fallen tree wound around with Ivy, beneath which, is the inscription in Spanish: 'Se no la vida porque la muerte.' (Radowitz, Gesammelte Schriften.) A not uncommon seal gives us the Ivy with the motto; 'I die where I attach myself;' while yet another of the ivied fallen trees declares that 'Even ruin cannot separate us.'

Ivy is the badge of the clan Gordon, and of all who bear that name. In conclusion, lest my readers should object that the subject, though eminently suggestive, has been treated entirely without a jest, I will cite a quaint repartee, shockingly destructive of the sentiment just cited:

'Woman,' said a lovelorn youth, 'is like Ivy—the more you are ruined, the closer she clings to you.'

'And the closer she clings to you, the sooner you are ruined,' replied an old cynic of a bachelor.

Poor man! He had never realized the truth of the French saying, that to enjoy life, there is nothing like being ruined a little.