Homer’s Moly
Moly and the Lost Plant : The Sacred Herb from Gilgamesh to Bacon
The plant appears at the boundary of an ordinary life. A traveller has reached a place from which he may never return. A grieving king searches for a remedy against age. A fisherman discovers that the grass beneath his catch possesses an unsuspected power. A poet looks upon his guide and finds that the language of ordinary humanity no longer describes his condition. In each case, an herb or a flower enters the story where the limits of the human person become uncertain.
The Chinese materials have already shown how readily the search for prolonged life could pass between mineral medicines, herbs, sacred islands, and the transformation of the body. The Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions possess a comparably rich botanical imagination. Moly, nepenthe, the lost plant of Gilgamesh, the grass of Glaucus, and the golden bough give that imagination several distinct forms. Their powers include protection, consolation, rejuvenation, divinization, and passage through the world of the dead. The distinctions matter because they reveal how much the sacred herb could be asked to accomplish.
This chapter follows those forms into the literature that helped furnish the imaginative world of European alchemy. Some relationships are explicit: Ovid retells the Homeric Moly episode; Dante names Glaucus; an alchemical poem identifies its matter with Moly and the Red and Green Lion; Milton measures his own protective herb against the gift of Hermes. Other relationships remain comparative. Gilgamesh supplies an ancient parallel, not a text we can place in Bacon's hands. The possibility that visionary plants contributed to these traditions will remain open, with particular identifications distinguished from the literary evidence itself.
Our immediate purpose is preservation. A plant briefly mentioned in a footnote becomes more intelligible when the stories and interpretations surrounding it are restored. The herb has a narrative life as well as a botanical one. That life is part of the history of knowledge.
Gilgamesh: the remedy recovered and lost
The quest of Gilgamesh begins in grief. After the death of Enkidu, his own mortality becomes unbearable. He travels to Utnapishtim, the survivor of the Flood, seeking an escape from death. The episode of the plant comes near the end of Tablet XI, after the failure of the trial of wakefulness. Utnapishtim discloses a hidden remedy: a prickly plant obtainable from the deep. Weighted with stones, Gilgamesh descends, secures it, and returns to the surface. [1]
He intends to take the plant to Uruk and try it on an old man before eating it himself. Its promised effect is captured in its name, “The Old Man Becomes a Young Man.” During the return journey, Gilgamesh stops to bathe. A serpent detects the plant's fragrance, carries it away, and sheds its skin as it departs. The king is left to lament the loss of the object for which he has laboured. [1]
The often-used description “plant of immortality” compresses the story. The immediate promise is restored youth. That distinction brings the episode especially close to the later literature of rejuvenation, in which the aged body regains its earlier powers. The problem is the recovery of a condition once possessed. The plant would make time, at least in its bodily effects, partially reversible.
There is a curious relation here between extraordinary revelation and proposed experiment. Gilgamesh has received knowledge from someone who stands outside ordinary human life. Yet he plans to establish the remedy's effect through an old man in the city. The narrative allows divine disclosure and a test of efficacy to occupy the same sequence. For a book concerned with Bacon, that conjunction is more suggestive than a claim that the two authors possessed a single secret. It shows how an ancient story could imagine the movement from promised power to an observable result.
The serpent makes the deprivation visible. Its renewal takes place at the moment when the human beneficiary loses his remedy. Nature displays a power that the king cannot retain. The scene can therefore be read as an image of the uneven distribution of life's gifts: what is sought through an immense human effort appears elsewhere as an ordinary property of another creature. Loss does not make the object unreal within the story. It makes access to it precarious.
Thomas McEvilley proposed a further interpretation:
Gilgamesh's quest for the plant of immortality may hide an idealized memory of, and nostalgia for, abandoned shamanic drug plants... Is the plant they seek, in reality, the drug plant with which their shamanic predecessors had 'attained immortality', that is, seen the things of heaven? Such myths seem to signal the end of the free performance of the shamanic rite, and the inculcation of a new ethic of subservience to the state... There are a number of Mesopotamian myths that show a concern about the inability of human beings to fly, alongside those that show anxiety about the inaccessibility of a plant with special powers. It might be anxiety over the loss of the shamanic performance, and the drug plant used in it, that these myths record.
Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought. [2]
McEvilley's questions move the discussion from the length of life to the experience of transcendence. In that reading, a story of immortality may preserve the memory of an encounter with a realm experienced as divine. The loss of the plant would then be the loss of a means of access as well as the loss of a medicine. This is a hypothesis about the cultural memory carried by myth. The epic does not name a psychoactive species or describe a recoverable preparation. Its value here is to formulate a question that the later sources will make increasingly concrete: how closely were the ideas of healing, divine encounter, and transformation once associated? [2]
Hermes and the preservation of the human
Moly answers a different danger. In the tenth book of the Odyssey, Circe gives Odysseus's companions a drugged mixture and transforms them into swine. Their minds remain human, making their condition a conscious captivity. On his way to rescue them, Odysseus encounters Hermes, who gives him a protective drug and explains how to confront the enchantress. The god draws the plant from the ground and shows him its nature. Its root is black and its flower milk-white; Moly is its name among the gods. It is difficult for mortals to dig up, though the gods have the power to do so. [3]
The scene joins several kinds of assistance. Odysseus receives the material object, knowledge of its character, and instruction in the conduct necessary to survive the encounter. The gift is therefore also an act of teaching. Possession by itself does not exhaust the meaning of the remedy. The hero must understand the danger into which he is going and act upon what he has learned.
Ovid preserves the plant's distinctive appearance in his retelling:
The peace god of Cyllene had given him a white flower,
Moly the gods name it, and black is the root that holds it.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 14.291–292. [3]
The black root and white flower would be exceptionally hospitable to later interpretation. They offer a contrast between what is hidden beneath the earth and what appears above it, between a dark beginning and a luminous result. Those possibilities belong to the image's subsequent career. Homer gives us the contrast without supplying an alchemical explanation of it. The important historical fact is that later interpreters found the image sufficiently definite to recognize and sufficiently open to develop.
Moly also introduces a moral dimension into the literature of extraordinary drugs. Its immediate service is the preservation of the human person against a degrading transformation. The hero approaches an enchantment with an aid that enables him to resist it. In the terms of this book, the sacred substance need not be a means of abandoning reason. It can stand for the protection of reason and of the person whose conduct reason should govern.
An equally important detail follows the confrontation. Circe restores the companions with another drug, and they return younger, more beautiful, and taller than before. Thus the episode contains both the prevention of a transformation and an enhanced restoration. The harmful and restorative powers belong to the same narrative world. Moly protects Odysseus; the companions' recovery is a separate act performed by Circe. [3]
That separation prevents the herb from becoming a vague name for every good effect in the story. It also sharpens the ethical question. Knowledge capable of changing the body can serve captivity or release. The character and purpose of its possessor become inseparable from its use. Bacon's concern with the governance of knowledge will later give this ancient problem a new intellectual form.
Nepenthe and the government of memory
The Odyssey contains another famous drug, introduced at a gathering shadowed by memories of the Trojan War. Helen adds to the wine a substance that quiets grief and anger. The poem attributes her knowledge of such remedies to Polydamna in Egypt, a country whose soil produces both beneficial and harmful drugs. The substance conventionally called nepenthe can suspend the tears that even the most terrible personal losses would ordinarily produce. [4]
The difference from Moly is revealing. Moly protects the traveller against an external enchantment. Nepenthe changes the sufferer's relation to remembered pain. Both operate upon the conditions under which a person can continue to act, speak, and endure. The ancient narrative makes the mind accessible to material intervention without having to separate medicine from story.
Consolation, however, is not identical with wisdom. A temporary freedom from grief may permit conversation and restore companionship. It does not by itself resolve the causes of grief or establish the truth of what the speakers remember. This distinction will matter wherever a substance is credited with spiritual benefit. The relief of suffering, the alteration of perception, and the acquisition of knowledge are different accomplishments, even when they occur together.
The Lotus-eaters provide an illuminating contrast. Their food dissolves the desire to return home. Odysseus must compel the affected men to leave. What appears delightful within the experience threatens the larger purpose of their journey. The danger is a contentment that consumes the obligation to return. In this context, Moly may be read as a protection of the journey's continuity: the traveller remains capable of fulfilling his responsibility to others. [5]
These episodes give the sacred-herb tradition a range of values. There are desirable changes and disastrous ones; there is relief that sustains human life and pleasure that can dissolve its commitments. A serious account of visionary plants should preserve that range. The literature is concerned with the quality and consequences of an altered condition, not simply with the fact that alteration occurs.
Glaucus: the herb and the new body
Ovid's Glaucus supplies one of the most explicit ancient accounts of transformation through eating an herb. Once a mortal fisherman, he lays his catch upon an untouched grassy shore. The fish revive their movements and escape into the water. Wondering whether the place or the vegetation caused the marvel, he tastes the grass. An unfamiliar agitation follows; he abandons the land and enters the sea. The sea gods receive him, and further rites remove his remaining mortality. When consciousness returns after these operations, he discovers a transformed body and mind. [6]
The sequence begins with an observation. Something has happened to the fish, and Glaucus tries to discover its cause by tasting what touched them. The experiment changes the experimenter. Knowledge of the plant's power is acquired through participation, and the result abolishes his former manner of life. This is an especially clear literary instance of the idea that an extraordinary substance can disclose a reality by altering the person who encounters it.
Ovid also preserves an interval that cannot be reported. Glaucus can describe what he remembers before the loss of consciousness and what he finds afterward. Between them lies a break in his account. The story accommodates an experience whose effects are visible but whose passage cannot be fully narrated. This feature gives the episode particular force when Dante later uses it to describe the inadequacy of language before transformation.
A second Glaucus must be distinguished from this fisherman. In the Library attributed to Apollodorus, the child Glaucus, son of Minos, drowns in a vessel of honey. The seer Polyidus is confined with his body and ordered to restore him. He observes one serpent revive another with an herb and uses the same plant to bring the child back to life. The story subsequently turns to divination, its compulsory transmission, and the withdrawal of the knowledge that has been taught. [7]
This second account belongs beside Gilgamesh because it combines the serpent, a plant, and the restoration of life. The relation is reversed: the serpent here discloses to a human observer the remedy that the serpent of the Babylonian story removes. The comparison is structural. It does not establish that the two stories arose from a single ceremony. It does show that the animal could appear as the possessor of a botanical knowledge unavailable to human beings until an exceptional encounter.
The two Glaucus stories also distinguish resurrection from divinization. The child is brought back to human life; the fisherman passes into another order of being. Both are useful to the history of alchemical imagery, whose language of death and rebirth can describe the restoration of a substance, the making of a new body, or the transformation of the operator. Their usefulness depends upon keeping their individual stories intact.
Dante: the herb at the threshold of Paradise
At the opening of Paradiso, Dante looks upon Beatrice and invokes the fisherman Glaucus to express what happens within him:
Beatrice stood, her eyes still rivetted on the eternal wheels,
and constantly, turning mine thence, I gazed on her instead.
‘Twas even thus a change came over me, as Glaucus, eating
of the weed, changed race
and grew a god among the gods of the sea.
Transhumanised...
Dante Alighieri, Paradiso 1.64–70. Quotation supplied by Francis Thackeray. [8]
The passage was supplied to me by Francis Thackeray, to whom I am grateful for drawing my attention to it. The quoted movement culminates in Dante's trasumanar: passing beyond the human condition. [8]
The importance of the comparison lies in its position. Dante brings an ancient story of a transforming herb into the first canto of the poem's ascent through heaven. A bodily metamorphosis from pagan narrative becomes a means of expressing a Christian experience that exceeds ordinary description. The comparison carries the plant into an account of the soul's relation to divine reality. It is therefore a particularly strong witness to the continuing spiritual possibilities of botanical imagery.
Thackeray asks whether the Glaucus myth may preserve an experience associated with a psychoactive herb, proposing cannabis as one possibility. His argument gives the passage a place in the present inquiry. We can credit the proposal without treating the myth's unnamed grass as an identified specimen. Nor does Dante's use of the comparison establish that he himself consumed a drug. The firm point is that he considered transformation by an herb an intelligible analogy for the passage he was trying to describe. [9]
That point is substantial. It permits the visionary reading to begin with an actual literary choice. The language of the plant is doing work inside the poem, carrying the reader toward an experience for which the ordinary vocabulary of human change is insufficient. We need not erase the Christian ascent in order to notice the botanical vehicle through which it is expressed.
The passage also extends the chapter's governing distinction between the recovery of life and its transformation. Gilgamesh seeks the vigour of youth; Odysseus preserves his human identity; Glaucus exchanges the mortal condition for divine companionship. Dante appropriates the last of these as an image of ascent. The family resemblance becomes more interesting when its members are allowed different destinations.
The soul-healing flower
Hugo Rahner makes the question of meaning explicit:
We can conclude from this that from the very beginning Homer’s moly was a thing surrounded by mystery and that it is not the botanists but the mythologists who are really in a position to tell us the truth about it. Unfortunately, it is precisely what the mythologists have to tell us that has tended to be neglected, and even the most recent and learned discussions of the matter are content to relegate the question of this mythical symbolism to a couple of lines. In particular the story of the Christian symbolism connected with the “soul-healing flower” has received deplorably little attention and it is this that I shall make the starting-point of my enquiry.
Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery. [10]
Rahner's paragraph directs attention to a further history of the herb. A plant can remain important even when its botanical identity becomes uncertain, because generations of readers continue to assign it a recognizable spiritual office. Moly protects the faculty by which a person resists degradation. Its later interpretation as a remedy for the soul develops a possibility already present in the rescue of Odysseus.
The anthology's Christian poem can now be identified more precisely as Greek Anthology 15.12, attributed to Leo the Philosopher:
Depart from me, thou murky cave of Circe, for I am ashamed,
Belonging as I do to heaven, to eat acorns like a beast.
Rather do I pray to receive from God the soul-healing flower Moly,
The good physic against evil thoughts.
Leo the Philosopher, Greek Anthology 15.12. [10]
The surrounding poem rejects distracting ambition, the forgetfulness of the Lotus-eaters, and the seduction of the Sirens. The Moly prayer participates in a larger discipline of attention. The poet asks for protection from destructive beliefs and impulses, using the voyages of Odysseus to describe the dangers of inward life. The material antidote has become a figure of intellectual and spiritual preservation. [10]
This is not an arbitrary replacement of the plant with an unrelated abstraction. The interpretation retains the herb's function. In the Homeric story, the remedy prevents a degrading change imposed by another power. In the later poem, the danger is an inward captivity, and the desired medicine protects the soul from it. A continuity of action supports the change of meaning. The plant remains recognizable because it still performs a rescue.
The appeal to heavenly origin gives the rescue a further significance. To become bestial is to live beneath what the speaker understands himself to be. The cure restores a proper relation between origin, conduct, and destination. That pattern belongs naturally beside the alchemical language of purification and the recovery of a nobler condition. The comparison concerns what these images enable their writers to say about the person; it does not require a common preparation hidden beneath every use.
Biblical plant imagery enlarges the setting. Genesis distinguishes the tree of knowledge from the tree of life and makes access to the latter a decisive question after the expulsion from Eden. Revelation places the tree of life within the restored city and assigns a healing function to its leaves. In the biblical sequence, the life-giving tree marks both lost access and promised restoration. A Christian author could therefore encounter classical healing plants within a scriptural imagination already organized around vegetation, knowledge, life, and exclusion. [11]
For Bacon, such a conjunction would be especially congenial. The recovery of knowledge and the relief of the human condition belong within an account of what humanity has lost and what disciplined work might recover. The Moly tradition does not prove a hidden botanical programme behind that account. It supplies part of the inherited vocabulary in which restoration could be thought. Its spiritual interpretations belong to the history of the question, alongside the medicinal ones.
Natural historians and the elusive specimen
The symbolic career of Moly developed beside efforts to find the plant itself. Theophrastus reports a plant near Pheneus and Mount Cyllene said to resemble Homer's Moly. It has a rounded, onion-like root and a leaf compared to squill. It is employed against spells, but, unlike the Homeric plant, it is not difficult to dig up. His account registers both resemblance and discrepancy. The name has passed into an attempt at natural description. [12]
Pliny likewise begins with Homer:
The most renowned of plants is, according to Homer, the one that he thinks is called by the gods moly, assigning to Mercury its discovery and teaching of its power over the most potent sorceries.
Pliny, Natural History 25.8.26. [13]
His continuation complicates identification. He records disagreement over the flower's colour and a report of an Italian specimen with an extraordinary root. The passage shows ancient readers comparing poetic authority, reports of actual plants, and the claims of herbal expertise. Moly was already a problem of interpretation within natural history. [13]
The question is therefore older than any modern division between a symbolic and a material reading. The same name could call up a Homeric plant, a specimen offered as its equivalent, or a medicine whose powers justified the comparison. To recognize this variety is to ask a more exact question of each occurrence: is the writer identifying a species, describing an effect, repeating an inherited name, or interpreting a story?
Modern pharmacological proposals provide a useful illustration. A recent study by Rafael Molina-Venegas and Rodrigo Verano reconsiders the familiar snowdrop hypothesis and proposes that Moly might reflect a group of related Mediterranean plants rather than one species, with sea daffodils among the candidates. Its account is explicitly hypothetical. It is useful here because it allows a traditional name to preserve a practical grouping that does not correspond exactly to a modern botanical classification. [14]
None of these proposals supplies a reason to remove the material question from the chapter. Plants really do affect the body and mind, and their effects can invite extravagant explanation. Equally, the recognition of an effect does not give us a licence to assign the same drug to every story of wonder. A history of sacred plants must examine names, descriptions, uses, and contexts together. Their meanings may travel farther than the plants themselves.
This also clarifies the relationship with the Chinese chapter. The older Near Eastern and Greek stories belong to a chronology extending before the proposed late-first-millennium BCE horizon of early Chinese alchemy. A hypothesis of east-to-west transmission in the formation of alchemical language must therefore distinguish that formation from the much older existence of sacred-plant narratives. Exchange could have brought already established bodies of imagery into new combinations. The argument does not require every image to have originated at the same place or time.
Erasmus and the garden beyond suffering
Erasmus places the celebrated plants together in the birthplace imagined by Folly:
I wasn't born on wandering Delos nor out of the waves of the sea nor 'in hollow caves', but on the very Islands of the Fortunate, where everything grows 'unsown, untilled'. Toil, old age and sickness are unknown there. There's no asphodel, mallow, onions, vetch or any other such worthless stuff to be seen in the fields, but everywhere there's moly, panacea, nepenthe, marjoram, ambrosia, and lotus, roses and violets and hyacinths, and gardens of Adonis to refresh the eye and nose. Born as I was amidst these delights I didn't start life crying, but smiled sweetly at my mother straight away.
Erasmus, The Praise of Folly. [15]
The speaker and the genre matter. This is Folly's self-presentation, with its exuberant catalogue and its playful dismissal of ordinary vegetation. We should hear the humour. Yet humour requires recognition: the remarkable plants can furnish an ideal landscape because their names already suggest extraordinary powers. A reader is invited to imagine a place in which medicine, delight, fragrance, and the absence of suffering have become the natural condition of life. [15]
Moly belongs to that garden beside nepenthe and panacea. Protective, consoling, and universally healing powers appear as neighbours. The catalogue does not make them one plant. It makes them participants in one imagined abundance. The garden offers a compact literary form for what the individual myths distribute among journeys, divine gifts, and dangerous discoveries.
This is a valuable intermediate stage between the ancient stories and the alchemical texts. The sacred herb has become part of a portable learned vocabulary. A writer can invoke it without recounting the entire Homeric episode. When the alchemist subsequently names Moly, the word arrives carrying both a story and a history of interpretation. Its meaning has already been enriched by repeated use.
Moly in the alchemical books
The anonymous poem preserved in Benedictus Figulus's collection makes the transition explicit:
I call it the Flower of Honey,
The Flower known to the Wise...
Homer knew it well, and called it Moly...
The gods also have bestowed it upon man
As a singularly great gift,
Designed to assuage and comfort him.
[...]
It is called the Red and Green Lion…
“Certain Verses of an Unknown Writer, Concerning the Great Work of the Tincture,” in Benedictus Figulus’s collection. [16]
The reference to Homer is overt. So is the movement from Moly to the Red and Green Lion. We are not supplying an alchemical connection from outside the document; the poem makes it for us. Its language places the herb among the names used for the matter of the work. The anthology's excerpt draws together passages separated in the fuller poem, which also invokes philosophical mercury, primordial matter, and the creation of Adam. [16]
The fuller context adds an important complication. The opening directs the seeker away from ordinary vegetable, animal, and mineral candidates before developing its profusion of botanical and metallic names. Its subject is then described through pairs and operations: water and earth, volatility and fixation, dissolution and coagulation. The medicine's language ranges across kingdoms because its author presents it as a principle or prepared matter whose powers ordinary classification fails to exhaust. [16]
This way of writing allows several levels of reference to coexist. A flower can signify the perfection of a process; a root, its source; a seed, its capacity to generate; a lion, its strength or destructive power. Such readings need not exclude a material basis. They show why that basis cannot be recovered simply by replacing every emblem with the name of a familiar plant. The poem asks the reader to follow relations and operations as well as nouns.
Moly is particularly effective within this language because its ancient story already joins matter and instruction. Hermes gives a drug and reveals how it is to be used. An alchemical writer can therefore make the herb an image of a communicated secret without inventing its entire significance anew. The gift protects the seeker, and the knowledge associated with it governs his conduct.
Michael Maier supplies a second explicit witness in Septimana philosophica:
Long have I had in my nostrils the scent of the herb moly which became so celebrated thanks to the poets of old... this herb is entirely chemical. It is said that Odysseus used it to protect himself against the poisons of Circe and the perilous singing of the Sirens. It is also related that Mercury himself found it and that it is an effective antidote to all poisons. It grows plentifully on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia...
Michael Maier, Septimana philosophica. [17]
The words “entirely chemical” give the passage its force. Maier treats the poetic plant as a subject for alchemical interpretation. Its discovery by Mercury and its protection against poison become intelligible within the search for an extraordinary medicine. His formulation also shows how reception can combine episodes: the Sirens enter his account even though Homer's protections against them are wax and binding, not Moly. That enlargement belongs to Maier's use of the tradition. [17]
The two witnesses have different voices but a shared conviction. The anonymous poet gives Moly a place within a sequence of names for the work; Maier turns a famous mythic herb into an object of philosophical discussion. Together they establish the point on which this chapter depends: early modern alchemical authors deliberately appropriated ancient botanical myths as vehicles of knowledge.
We can now approach an alchemical plant name expecting a history behind it. A passage may refer simultaneously to a material operation, an inherited myth, and a transformation of the person. Its possible experiential dimension belongs within that field of meanings.
Milton's despised root
Milton's Comus gives the tradition another English life. The protective herb in the masque is Haemony, and it is explicitly compared with the Moly that Hermes gave to Odysseus. A shepherd versed in plants has shown it to the attendant spirit. Its ordinary appearance conceals an exceptional virtue:
Amongst the rest a small unsightly root,
But of divine effect, he cull'd me out;
John Milton, Comus, lines 629–630. [18]
The surrounding description adds a dark, prickly leaf and a golden flower borne in another country. At home the plant is trampled by people who do not recognize it. The spirit discovers the truth of its reputed protection when he encounters the disguised enchanter. The herb makes possible a recognition that appearances alone would not have supplied. [18]
The chapter has arrived at a familiar alchemical paradox: an object may be common in appearance and extraordinary in value. The failure lies in recognition. This is close to the Chinese passages in which the medicine is near at hand or present in every household while remaining unknown to the ignorant. The comparison is especially useful because Milton identifies the classical background himself. We do not have to infer Moly from the root's colour or its supposed effects.
The plant nevertheless belongs within a drama whose moral and spiritual resources exceed it. Haemony is part of the rescue, while the Lady's steadfastness and the eventual assistance of Sabrina have their own indispensable roles. The masque distributes deliverance among inward resistance, knowledge, action, and supernatural aid. The herb has a real office within that design without becoming a sufficient explanation of the whole. [18]
Milton also helps articulate a distinction essential to the preservation of esoteric literature. A thing may be hidden because it is physically remote. It may also be hidden because it is overlooked, misnamed, or encountered without the knowledge required to understand it. The second form of concealment does not require an inaccessible object. It requires a difference between seeing and recognizing.
That difference gives force to the persistent language of the lowly or despised substance. Its significance cannot be decided from the adjective alone. It becomes meaningful when a text joins obscurity to a particular act of discovery, preparation, or proof. In Comus, the occasion of danger reveals what the unpromising root can do.
The golden bough and Bacon's hope of restoration
Virgil's golden bough belongs beside these herbs as a plant that enables a passage. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, the Sibyl tells Aeneas that entry into the underworld requires a branch sacred to Proserpina. The bough is concealed in the grove; once plucked, another grows in its place. Its discovery and removal mark the traveller's fitness for the descent. The object combines concealment, permission, and renewed growth. [19]
Bacon interprets this part of the story in “Proserpina, or Spirit,” in The Wisdom of the Ancients. His discussion deserves to stand at length:
All that we can say concerning that sprig of gold is hardly able to defend us from the violence of the Chymists, if in this regard they set upon us, seeing they promise by that their elixir to effect golden mountains and the restoring of natural bodies, as it were, from the portal of hell. But concerning chemistry, and those perpetual suitors for that philosophical elixir, we know, certainly, that their theory is without grounds, and we suspect that their practice also is without certain reward. And therefore, omitting these, of this last part of the parable this is my opinion. I am induced to believe by many figures of the ancients that the conservation and restoration of natural bodies in some sort was not esteemed by them as a thing impossible to be attained, but as a thing abstruse and full of difficulties; and so they seem to intimate in this place, when they report that this one only sprig was found among infinite other trees in a huge and thick wood, which they feigned to be of gold, because gold is the badge of perpetuity, and to be artificially, as it were, inserted, because this effect is to be rather hoped for from art than from any medicine, or simple or natural means.
Francis Bacon, “Proserpina, or Spirit,” The Wisdom of the Ancients, chapter 29. [20]
The paragraph contains both a criticism and a retained possibility. Bacon finds the alchemists' theory groundless and doubts the reward of their practice. He nevertheless refuses to dismiss the conservation and restoration of natural bodies as impossible. The promise survives as a difficult object of inquiry. That position is characteristic of the Bacon who belongs in this book: suspicious of extravagant claims, yet unwilling to let their extravagance decide in advance what nature can permit.
The sprig amid the vast wood makes the difficulty concrete. A rare possibility lies within an abundance that can conceal it. Gold signifies durability, and the image of an inserted or grafted growth directs attention toward art. Bacon's final emphasis is therefore consequential. He places his hope in an achieved operation rather than in the effortless possession of a wonderful simple. The passage does not identify a secret herb. It interprets a botanical image as a sign of what a developed art might accomplish. [20]
This need not diminish the importance of plants in the history we have traced. It changes the question asked of them. The ancient gift could place a remedy directly into the hero's hand. Bacon asks how human work might discover and produce effects that have hitherto appeared exceptional or inaccessible. Restoration becomes a task whose obstacles must be understood.
His handling of the myth also gives the exoteric and esoteric levels a more precise relation. The public text contains its own invitation to interpret. It neither abandons the old fable nor merely repeats it. The mythical form becomes a means of proposing a natural-philosophical question while testing the claims that have gathered around it. We do not need a disputed attribution to establish that Bacon could write in this manner.
The comparison with Maier is correspondingly exact. Both encounter an ancient botanical image and consider its relation to an extraordinary medicine. Their conclusions and explanatory habits need not be identical for the encounter to matter. They inhabit a world in which inherited stories can still be interrogated for knowledge of nature. Bacon's caution is part of that world, not a reason to remove him from it.
What the herb preserves
The tradition assembled here has several centres. Moly protects the human form; nepenthe relieves remembered grief; the plant of Gilgamesh promises renewed youth; the grass of Glaucus begins a passage into divine life. The Christian flower guards the soul, the alchemical Moly names a transformative matter, and Milton's neglected root discloses its power in an hour of danger. Bacon's golden sprig finally carries the question into the deliberate restoration of natural bodies.
These differences give the evidence its substance. The recurring plant is a means of thinking about the limits of the person and the possibility of changing them. Its smallness can stand against an immense danger. Its concealed virtue can exceed the knowledge of those who tread upon it. Its discovery may depend upon a god, a teacher, an animal, an experiment, or the interpretation of an inherited text. The history of the herb is consequently also a history of how extraordinary knowledge is acquired and transmitted.
The possibility of psychoactive experience remains one strand of that history. McEvilley's reading of the lost plant and Thackeray's reading of Glaucus give it articulate modern forms. Explicit records of plant use, preparation, and experience must carry the more specific historical argument. Myth supplies questions and preserves patterns of meaning; named substances and situated practices allow those questions to be tested more closely.
The next chapter will turn toward the Indian and Arabic materials, where accounts of herbs and altered experience can be considered beside alchemical medicine, translation, and eastern initiation. That movement will also prepare a fuller reading of Eugenius Philalethes and the Indian sages. Moly has supplied a necessary foundation: the recognition that material remedies and spiritual transformation could share a language long before the early modern alchemist put them together in a book.
The object of preservation is therefore larger than the name of a plant. It is the record of what successive writers believed a remedy might restore: the body, memory, judgment, youth, the soul's proper condition, or a lost relation to the divine. To read the sacred herb in its full range is to recover part of the ambition that made the alchemical promise compelling—and part of the background against which Bacon's own hope of restoration becomes intelligible.
Working source notes
These notes distinguish checked textual locations from inherited translations still requiring edition-level collation. Long excerpts supplied in The Green Lion and in the author's working materials are preserved at their supplied extent. Existing ellipses remain visible. The chapter is an editable working draft; the anthology's two unresolved attributions are retained separately below rather than silently corrected or used as established evidence.
[1] Epic of Gilgamesh, Standard Babylonian Tablet XI, concluding plant episode. Narrative checked against Maureen Gallery Kovacs, trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh (Stanford University Press, 1989), online transcription at Project Rastko. The transcription contains typographical and OCR errors elsewhere; the short quoted plant name follows its text. Andrew R. George's electronic Babylonian Library edition of Tablet XI is the recommended critical control for the final edition; its text was not fully accessible in this research pass. The chapter does not claim that Bacon knew the Akkadian epic.
[2] Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (Allworth Press, 2002). Excerpt preserved from The Green Lion, p. 5, and the author's supplied quotation. Original page numbers and the extent of the two existing omissions remain to be collated. The interpretation is identified as McEvilley's hypothesis, not as an assertion made by the epic.
[3] Homer, Odyssey 10.210–243, 275–347, and 388–399. A. T. Murray's translation, Book 10. The defining botanical description is 10.302–306. The narrative distinguishes Moly's protection of Odysseus from Circe's separate restorative treatment of his companions. The contrast with the Sirens refers to Odyssey 12.39–54 and 165–200. Ovid's Moly description is Metamorphoses 14.291–292; compare Brookes More's translation of Book 14. The two-line English quotation follows the supplied anthology, p. 18; its translator remains to be identified.
[4] Homer, Odyssey 4.219–232. Murray's translation, Book 4. Nepenthe is the conventional name for Helen's grief-dispelling drug; the poem supplies no secure modern botanical identification. Polydamna is the Egyptian woman who supplied the drugs. No identification with cannabis, opium, or another species is assumed here.
[5] Homer, Odyssey 9.82–104, the Lotus-eaters. Murray's translation, Book 9. The comparison is ethical and narrative; the chapter does not identify their food with the plant called lotus in any modern flora.
[6] Ovid, Metamorphoses 13.898–968, especially Glaucus's account of his former life and transformation. Brookes More's translation, Book 13. The herb initiates the change; the sea gods' rites continue it. The story does not name the plant or identify it as Moly.
[7] Apollodorus, Library 3.3.1–2. J. G. Frazer's translation, Book 3. Glaucus son of Minos is distinct from the fisherman who becomes a sea god. Polyidus's observation of the serpents and his use of the herb are explicit; a historical connection to the Gilgamesh plant episode is not established.
[8] Dante, Paradiso 1.64–70; the Glaucus comparison occupies 67–69 and trasumanar begins 70. The English passage is preserved as supplied by the author through Francis Thackeray. Thackeray's “Dante, Glaucus and a ‘Weed’”, dated 2001 on the page, cites Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, The Divine Comedy (Penguin, 1962); Paradiso was completed by Reynolds. The precise wording, punctuation, lineation, and page should be checked against that edition before publication. Thackeray's web version includes the explanatory insertion “[taxon]” after “race”; the author-supplied excerpt omits it, and it is not introduced here. Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Francis Thackeray for bringing this passage to my attention and supplying the quotation (personal communication; date not recorded).
[9] Francis Thackeray, “Dante, Glaucus and a ‘Weed’” (2001), cited in note 8. The chapter credits his hypothesis while separating Glaucus's mythical transformation, Dante's use of it, and any claim about Dante's own drug use. Thackeray's involvement in the Stratford pipe-residue investigation is background to the acknowledgment, not evidence for identifying the plant in Dante. His “Shakespeare's Sonnets and Sources of Inspiration” discusses that research programme.
[10] Leo the Philosopher, Greek Anthology 15.12. The supplied four-line excerpt is preserved from The Green Lion, p. 18. Its wording is not identical to W. R. Paton's translation, but the passage is identifiable in the Greek poem. Greek text and Paton's English are reproduced in “A Poem by Leo the Philosopher”. That source identifies The Greek Anthology, vol. V (1918), pp. 118–119, and L. G. Westerink, “Leo the Philosopher: ‘Job’ and Other Poems,” Illinois Classical Studies 11 (1986): 193–222, poem IX, pp. 199–200. Rahner's full supplied paragraph is preserved from Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, trans. Brian Battershaw (1963; later reprints); original page locator remains to be confirmed. The excerpt's complaint about neglect is Rahner's own and is not expanded into an institutional argument in this chapter.
[11] Genesis 2.9 and 3.22–24; Revelation 22.1–2 and 14. These are distinct scriptural images, not botanical identifications. Their use here concerns the Christian reception of plant imagery and the relation between lost access and restoration.
[12] Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants 9.15.7. Arthur Hort's translation at ToposText. The passage reports both the resemblance to Homer and the discrepancy in uprooting. The chapter does not treat the reported Arcadian plant as a securely identified Homeric specimen.
[13] Pliny, Natural History 25.8.26–27. The opening quotation follows the supplied anthology, p. 19; its English translator is not identified there. The continuation was checked against the Latin text of Book 25. Pliny also returns to Homeric Moly as a defence against poisons and magic at 25.79.127. His accounts are historical testimony to belief and identification, not modern treatment guidance.
[14] Rafael Molina-Venegas and Rodrigo Verano, “The quest for Homer's moly: exploring the potential of an early ethnobotanical complex”, Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 20, article 11 (2024). Consult the corrected online version. The ethnobotanical-complex proposal and the role suggested for Pancratium are the authors' hypotheses. No preparation or use of any proposed plant is recommended.
[15] Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, early account of Folly's birth in the Fortunate Islands. Supplied excerpt: The Green Lion, p. 19. Compare the online text of “My Birth and Education”, which includes “and beans” after “vetch”; the supplied anthology omits those words. The quotation is retained as received for editorial preservation, but the translator, edition, and this variant require final collation. Folly is the speaker; the passage is not presented as Erasmus's literal account of a medicinal garden.
[16] “Certain Verses of an Unknown Writer, Concerning the Great Work of the Tincture,” in Benedictus Figulus's Pandora magnalium naturalium aurea et benedicta (Strasbourg, 1608), English version in A Golden and Blessed Casket of Nature's Marvels (London, 1893). Supplied excerpt: The Green Lion, p. 18. The full English transcription confirms the Moly and Red and Green Lion references. They are separated by intervening verses; an omission marker is inserted before the Lion line in this chapter to make the excerpt's composite extent clear. The nineteenth-century English title page and translator/editor credits should be collated before final bibliographical styling. No attribution of these anonymous verses to Bacon is made.
[17] Michael Maier, Septimana philosophica (Frankfurt, 1620). Quotation preserved from The Green Lion, p. 18. The English translator and exact original-page locus remain to be collated. Peter J. Forshaw's “Michael Maier and Mythoalchemy” independently identifies Moly as a subject in Septimana philosophica and situates it within Maier's alchemical readings of myth. This secondary confirmation establishes the topic, not every word of the inherited English quotation. The passage's reference to the Sirens is retained rather than silently made to agree with Homer.
[18] John Milton, A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634), usually called Comus, especially 619–658 and the subsequent invocation and intervention of Sabrina. Milton Reading Room text. The brief quotation is 629–630. The root's description, naming, and comparison with Moly occur in 629–641. Its function is discussed as part of the masque's rescue, not as an independently sufficient cure.
[19] Virgil, Aeneid 6.136–148, 187–211, and 405–416. H. R. Fairclough's translation, Book 6. The golden bough is an admission token and offering in the underworld episode; Virgil does not call it Moly.
[20] Francis Bacon, “Proserpina, or Spirit,” The Wisdom of the Ancients, chapter 29. The long paragraph follows the author's supplied quotation, with “spring of gold” corrected to “sprig of gold,” the reading confirmed in the collected text. Compare Works, vol. I (1884), printed pp. 311–312 (scan images 439–440). Edition-specific spelling and punctuation should be normalized consistently with the rest of the book in the final pass. The emphasis on the single sprig and on art is developed from Bacon's own explicit interpretation.
Preserved references awaiting identification
The following two anthology excerpts are retained for the author's source file. Their original locations and translations were not established in this pass. Neither has been used to increase the count of confirmed witnesses in the chapter's argument.
The most renowned of herbs, on Homer’s testimony, discovered by Mercury as a remedy against all kinds of poisons….
Pseudo-Apuleius [anthology attribution; unresolved].
Editorial status: preserved from The Green Lion, p. 18, under “Pseudo-Apuleius.” The exact work and location remain unresolved. The wording is close to the Plinian testimony, so independence from that source should not be assumed.
And Hermes gave Odysseus moly - the most effective of magic drugs - but his companions, in their stupidity, were transformed by Circe from men into irrational animals.
Theocritus [anthology attribution; unresolved].
Editorial status: preserved from The Green Lion, p. 19, under “Theocritus.” No matching passage in an identified work of Theocritus was established. Retain for investigation; do not treat the attribution as verified. The unlocated English text should not be silently assigned to another ancient author.
Editorial transition: the Indian and Arabic chapter
The next chapter should bring the Indian and Arabic references into one sustained inquiry while preserving their distinct languages, dates, and genres. Its first movement can gather the explicit Indian herb and bhang testimonies; its second can examine the Arabic materials on medicine, altered experience, and alchemical knowledge; its third can follow translation and initiation into the Rosicrucian and Philalethes texts. The Indian sages in the Life of Apollonius and their treatment by Eugenius Philalethes belong here, with the proposed four-ways comparison reserved for a clearly identified interpretive section. Khidr, Morienus, and Book M can provide a transition to the book's existing eastern-initiation material without duplicating that discussion wholesale.