Once upon a time, the mulberry was an important plant in both eastern and western culture; the nursery rhyne “Here we go round the mulberry bush”


so similar to the may pole dance, is what remains of an old pagan fertility ritual; mulberry was once the plant associated with Minerva/Athena, the Roman/Greek goddess of wisdom, before being supplanted by the olive, and the white/red/black colours taken on by the mulberry fruit in its life cycle, were taken to represent the triple goddess – her three phases of child, maiden and hag; mulberry also makes an appearance in a Cretan story involving King Minos, with some sort of life reviving capability.

While mulberries do not grow abundantly in Europe, West Asia probably had more of them since ancient times: during the Tang Dynasty, merchants from the region smuggled silk worm eggs (supposedly inside the hollows of bamboo poles used to carry goods on their shoulders – export of silk worms, cocoons and eggs were forbidden at the time) to Persia, and a silk industry developed there.

Antique silk rugs

The merchants must have been confident that they would be able to find mulberry leaves to feed silk worms after the eggs hatched, because they have seen these trees growing in their region. We can only speculate that once some people in Central Asia considered the mulberry sacred, and they brought the idea into Europe, before losing interest in it.

In Chinese mythology, the mulberry was the tree of life, long before the mulberry moth catepillar was domesticated into the high yield silk producer. Its importance was probably due to the fruit’s nutritional value – not only was it directly eaten, but like the grape after fully ripening, it naturally ferments into wine, whose intoxicating effect was used in shaman rituals to achieve a mass ecstacy and probably also as an aphrodisiac as part of fertility worship. When King Shou of Shang was overthrown by the Zhous, one of his crimes was “building pools of wine and forests of meat to encourage naked frolicking”, and this was not a trumped up charge, but a description of the fertility ritual that tribes living in China had engaged in long before the Shangs became their rulers, and continued, though in a more lowkeyed fashion, even under the Zhous.

The Shangs were originally a cattle raising tribe from up north, and their experience allowed them to learn to breed horses and fight with chariots. After conquering the older agricultural tribes down south, they seemed to have fully assimilated to the life style of their subjects, and even took their tribe name: Shang was probably derived on sang 桑 mulberry, and Shangqiu 商丘, the name of one of their main capitals, was probably originally sangqiu 桑丘 mulberry hill.They certainly adopted the mulberry based worship practices: the founding king of Shang was supposed to have gone to the altar in the mulberry forest to pray for rain during a 7 year drought, offering to have himself sacrificed in order to appease heaven; a sudden downpour not only saved his life, but also gave him a reputation of divine favour which undoubtedly helped him to conquer the previous ruling Xias.

Silk weaving existed in China at least 2000 years before the Shangs: jade silk worms

were excavated from 5000 year old tombs in various locations, and in a 7000BC excavation near Hangzhou a sliced open silk worm pupa was found, though it could have been for the purpose of food. The legendary Dark Maiden tribe 玄女族 surely knew about silk, since the tribe name contained half of the word for silk 丝. After Yellow Emperor defeated his enemies and made himself supreme, the silkworm goddess was supposed to have presented him with a gift of fabric, a symbolic gesture of submission from the silk weaving tribe. The practice of submitting jade and silk to once’s overlord, and presenting wine, jade and silk as part of the ceremony of honouring heaven, or just some famours person, continue long afterwards.

But well before there was a silk industry, legends already attached high divine importance to the mulberry; the daughter of Emperor Yan the fire god, who preceded Yellow Emperor, was supposed to have returned to life on the mulberry tree after suffering an unfortunate early death. The tree was also called fumu 扶木 the grip wood, because one could climb up to heaven gripping it, and a giant fusang 扶桑 was supposed to grow on the eastern coast of China, on which perched 10 golden birds that took turns to fly east to west, sunrise to sunset, and 12 moons bathed in the pond under the tree. The numbers 10 and 12 clearly related to the 10-day chinese “week” and 12-month year, and the names of the Queens who gave birth to these 10/12 children happen to coicide with the name of the person/family responsible for calendars and astronomic observations.

Why was the mulberry so important to the Chinese even then? Probably because they were the only trees that grew in eastern China at the time: the legendary bird woman Magu麻姑 was supposed to have three times witnessed the “east sea” turning into “mulberry fieds”: the large amount of silt carried by the Yellow River into the sea caused the shoreline to steadily push outwards, and it appears the new sandy soil can wuickly support the growth of the mulberry tree. The premitive tribes arriving by boat immediately found a reliable food source, and like the pilgrims finding turkey, had a feeling of thanks giving. Their brother tribes in other parts of the world did not have the same access; in west asia, the date palm, a better food source, became the local tribes’ tree of life, and the Greeks later turned to the olive.

But the Celts and Druids found their down sacred plant, the mistletoe, which grows on the oak; the mulberry has its own mistletoe, known in China as 桑寄生, mulberry parasitic,


 

which like to oak mistletoe, is supposed to have various curing capabilities. Maybe this was the original mistletoe familiar to the ancesters of the celts and druids, before it got supplanted by another that grows more abundantly in Europe? I guess we shall never know.