Zempaz úchitl

[Corrinne Burns]

I don't know anything about Haiti, but I may be able
to answer another of your questions. There were no
Tagetes species in Europe before the Conquest; the
genus is native to Mexico. The flowers of the European
Calendula genus were thought to be flowers of the
Virgin Mary (the name marigold derives from "Mary's
Gold"), and it is assumed that Tagetes came to be
called marigolds because Europeans mistook Tagetes
growing in Mexico for Calendula, at least on first
sight.

I think the use of Tagetes on the Day of the Dead
comes from Xochiquetzal; she was the guardian of
graves and she was honoured with cempoalxochitl. But
there are many more instances of Tagetes uses
pre-Spanish festivals, which Joe has covered with his
email of references to Tagetes in the Florentine
Codex. 

Going back to Maria's email: the reference to "flowers
of gold" reminds me of a bit of Aztec folklore. The
flowers of Tagetes patula are typically orangy-yellow
with red splashed in the edges. After the conquest,
these flowers were considered to represent the looted
gold of Mexico, covered with the blood of the injured
Mexica people.

Finally there are references to Tagetes in the
manuscript of Hernandez, the Rerum Medicarum Novae
Hispaniae Thesaurus. The scanned pages are on the
attachment to this email.

Corrinne


--- "Frye, David" <dfrye at UMICH.EDU> wrote:

> Hope this doesn't take the discussion to far from
> Nahuatl, but I have long wondered how it is that the
> marigold (genus Tagetes, zempualxochitl,
> cempasuchil, simpasuche, etc.--there are many
> pronunciations even in the same town) came to be the
> "flower of death" in All Saint's (Todos Santos)
> celebrations in Haiti as well as in Mexico. Did
> Haiti get the flower and this use of it from Mexico,
> or was there a prior European (or at least
> Franco-Spanish) use of marigolds for the Days of the
> Dead? Many people, including me, assume that the
> cempasuchil has been the "flower of the dead" in
> Mexico since pre-Spanish times, but it wouldn't hurt
> to test these assumptions. Anybody know about a)
> pre-Spanish evidence for use of marigolds to
> commemorate the dead, and/or b) pre-1492 use of
> marigolds in the European All Saint's celebrations?
> (For that matter, were there pre-1492 species of
> Tagetes in Europe? I note that pre-1492 English uses
> of the word "marigold" refer to Calendula, a
> separate genus of flower, according to the Oxford
> English Dictionary. Not being a botanist or
> gardener, I probably couldn't tell one from the
> other.) 
>  
> David Frye
> University of Michigan
>  
>  
>  
> 




	
	
		
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