The Symbolism of the Tulip
Introduction
The tulip is a member of the lily family, Liliaceae.
There are about 75 species,
and these are divided among four subgenera.
The name "tulip" is thought to be derived from a Persian word
Meaning ‘turban’.
In their natural state
they are adapted to steppes and mountainous areas with temperate climates.
Flowering in the spring,
they become dormant in the summer once the flowers and leaves die back,
emerging above ground as a shoot
from the underground bulb in early spring.
The upturned bowl shaped flower,
its appearance in Spring,
its straight stalk
and its emergence from a hidden bulb
give the tulip its symbolic meaning.
As the bowl has the same significance
as the bowl described in our video of Rivers,
streams and the Holy Grail.
Its appearance in Spring marks the end of the Spiritual path
and thus the final stages of enlightenment
And the straight stalk [the spine]
and bulb hint at the kundalini experience
where energy stored is used to provoke the experience.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khaiyyam
As then the Tulip for her morning sup
Of heavenly vintage from the soil looks up
Do you devoutly do the like, till Heav'n
To Earth invert you -
like an empty cup
Some history and the Sufi connection
Tulips were originally wild flowers from Central Asia.
Some sources say they originate from the Tien Shan Mountains,
yet others name the mountains in Kazakhstan.
But they were first cultivated by the Turks,
as early as 1055 AD.
We see tulips for the first time
in the artworks of the Seldjuks.
In the 12th century, tulips were included in motifs,
especially in the city of Konya,
which was the capital of the Anatolian Seldjuks.
Rumi, the great Anatolian Sufi,
mentioned the tulip in his poem entitled.
‘So Recklessly Exposed’;
December and January, gone.
Tulips coming up.
It’s time to watch how trees stagger
in the wind
and roses never rest
When Constantinople was redesigned as Istanbul,
following the Ottoman conquest,
Sultan Mehmet II
ordered tulips to be planted in the new parks and gardens.
By the 15th century,
he had so many flowers in his 12 gardens
that he required a staff
of 920 gardeners.
Sultan Suleiman took the love of tulips to another level.
He professionalized the planting
and use of tulips in Istanbul,
and it became more popular than the rose.
Suleiman was also a poet,
and mentioned tulips several times in his poems.
His poet name was “Muhibbi.”
Muhibbi.
Do not let the occasion pass:
leave not your hand off tulip-red wine.
Oh heart,
let intoxication flow,
a Frankish taster
has already poured the wine
At which point all should become clear
as ‘wine’
is spiritual intoxication -
ecstasy -
and blood is spirit input.
As such a tulip is symbolically identical to the Holy Grail -
symbolic cup
into which the pourings of the spirit realm can be captured.
The symbolism is greatly reinforced
by the fact the word “Allah” (God), in Arabic script, ,
resembles the shape of a tulip.
And the Arabic letters
that form the word tulip (“Lale” in Arabic) ,
are the same as those
that form the name of Allah,
making it a very special flower
with an exalted status in Islamic art and culture.
The tulip, the Dutch and ‘tulip mania’
Tulips were imported into Holland
in the 16th century
by Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq,
an ambassador
of Emperor Ferdinand I
to Suleyman the Magnificent.
De Busbecq was astonished to find highly sophisticated hybrids
growing in the royal court in Istanbul.
So,
he shipped some bulbs to Carolus Clusius in Prague,
who eventually took over the botanical gardens in Leiden,
ensuring the widespread distribution of tulips
in Europe.
The Dutch found out that tulips could be grown
either from seeds or buds
that grew on the mother bulb;
A bulb that grows from seed takes 7 to 12 years before flowering,
but a bulb is able to flower the very next year.
So the bulb was and is used
All the outlandish stories of economic ruin,
of an innocent sailor thrown in prison for eating a tulip bulb,
of chimney sweeps wading into the market in hopes of striking it rich
are actually not true.
Of particular interest to Clusius and other tulip traders were “broken bulbs”-
tulips whose petals showed a striped, multicoloured pattern
rather than a single solid colour.
As the effect was unpredictable,
but the growing demand for these rare,
“broken bulb” tulips was high, they were expensive.
Economist Peter Garber
“The high market price for tulips
to which the current version of tulipmania refers,
were prices for particularly beautiful broken bulbs,”.
The pattern was later discovered to be the result
of a mosaic virus that actually makes the bulbs sickly
and less likely to reproduce.
But this just added to their rarety value.
Peter Garber
“Since breaking was unpredictable,
some have characterized tulipmania among growers as a gamble,
with growers vying to produce better
and more bizarre variegations and feathering.”
So where did all the tulipmania stories come from?
Propaganda pamphlets
published by Dutch Calvinists.
The Calvinists worried that a tulip-propelled consumer boom would lead to societal decay.
And that the great wealth it brought some, was “ungodly”.
So they set about counteracting this sudden burst of materialism
with some counter propaganda.
Anne Goldgar, professor of early modern history at King’s College London,
discovered the historical reality
when she dug into the archives.
Anne Goldgar - Tulipmania:
Money, Honour,
and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age
“Some of the stuff hasn’t lasted,
like the idea that God punishes people
who are overreaching by causing them to have the plague.
That’s one of the things people said in the 1630s,
but the idea that you get punished if you overreach?
You still hear that.
It’s all, ‘pride goes before the fall.’”
Painting Tulips
in paintings,
poems architecture and novels
Tulips were frequently depicted in Dutch Golden Age paintings,
and the symbolism appears to have been understood by the artists.
There is still a group of specimens today known as the Rembrandts -
so named
because Rembrandt painted some of the most admired breaks of his time.
Tulips are a holy symbol in Islam
and they are used as decorative motifs on tiles,
mosques, fabrics, crockery, etc.
Few in the west seem to realise its significance in the east,
despite the western expression ‘my cup runneth over’,
which is symbolically the same.
Tulips are, in a sense,
a symbol of paradise on earth and have a divine status,
it is why they were the subject of numerous poems by Persian poets
from the thirteenth century on ward.
In the poem Gulistan
by Musharrifu'd-din Saadi,
he describes a visionary garden paradise
with "The murmur of a cool stream / bird song,
ripe fruit in plenty /
bright multicoloured tulips
and fragrant roses...".
But the artistic in the west -
artists and writers -
are not without their own understanding of its significance.
The Black Tulip (1850) -
an historical romance by Alexandre Dumas,
takes place in Haarlem,
where a reward is offered
to the first grower
who can produce a truly black tulip.
And the tulip occurs on a number of the Major Arcana cards
of occultist Oswald Wirth's deck of Tarot cards,
specifically
the Magician,
Emperor,
Temperance
and the Fool.
Iran has a red tulip on its flag,
redesigned in 1980.
The sword in the centre,
with four crescent-shaped petals around it.
Saadi - The Gulistan of Saadi -
from The Manners of Kings Solitude
“How can a man fabricate a good sword of bad iron?
O sage, who is nobody becomes not somebody by education.
The rain, in the beneficence of whose nature there is no flaw,
Will cause tulips to grow in a garden
and weeds in bad soil.
Saline earth will not produce hyacinths.
Throw not away your seeds or work thereon.
To do good to wicked persons is like
Doing evil
to good men