Plants of Life, Plants of Death - Softcover

Simoons, Frederick J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299159043 ISBN 13: 9780299159047

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998

Synopsis

"A most exciting, erudite, and stylish work. I can think of no one other than Simoons who could have written it."-Robin Donkin, Cambridge University

"It dazzles as a piece of scholarship."-Daniel W. Gade, University of Vermont

Pythagoras, the ancient Greek mathematician, did not himself eat fava beans in any form; in fact, he banned his followers from eating them. Cultural geographer Frederick Simoons disputes the contention that Pythagoras established that ban because he recognized the danger of favism, a disease that afflicts genetically-predisposed individuals who consume fava beans. Contradicting more deterministic explanations of history, Simoons argues that ritual considerations led to the Pythagorean ban.

In his fascinating and thorough new study, Simoons examines plants associated with ritual purity, fertility, prosperity, and life, on the one hand, or with ritual impurity, sickness, ill fate, and death, on the other. Plants of Life, Plants of Death offers a wealth of detail from not only history, ethnography, religious studies, classics, and folklore, but also from ethnobotany and medicine. Simoons surveys a vast geographical region extending from Europe through the Near East to India and China. He tells the story of India's giant sacred fig trees, the pipal and the banyan, and their changing role in ritual, religion, and as objects of pilgrimage from antiquity to the present day; the history of mandrake and ginseng, "man roots" whose uses from Europe to China have been shaped by the perception that they are human in form; and the story of garlic and onions as impure foods of bad odor in that same broad region.

Simoons also identifies and discusses physical characteristics of plants that have contributed to their contrasting ritual roles, and he emphasizes the point that the ritual roles of plants are also shaped by basic human concerns-desire for good health and prosperity, hopes for fertility and offspring, fear of violence, evil and death-that were as important in antiquity as they are today.

About this title

About the Author:

Frederick J. Simoons is professor emeritus at the University of California-Davis, adjunct professor of geography at Eastern Washington University, and adjunct research associate in anthropology at Washington State University. His other books include Eat Not This Flesh:; A Ceremonial Ox of India (with the assistance of Elizabeth S. Simoons), both published by the University of Wisconsin Press; and Food in China.

Review:

"A most exciting, erudite, and stylish work. I can think of no one other than Simoons who could have written it."—Robin Donkin, Cambridge University

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0299159043
• ISBN 13: 9780299159047
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592