rosa mystica

Aphrodite, Mary Magdalene, the Virgin & St Valentine

Last year’s guide to St. Valentine’s Day (lunulae, 2024), including folk love-rites and Chaucer. ♡

She was the joke of the angels—a girl
crazy enough for God

that she despised her own beauty; who grew bitter herbs
to mix with her food,

who pinned a garland of roses to her forehead;
…
she begged for death to join her with her Master

whom she called Divine Bridegroom, Thorn
in My Heart, Eternal Spouse.

— from ‘Saint Rose of Lima’, Judith Ortiz Cofer

I am loyal to the rose. They recur in my life. My christening gift was a rosebush, sweet and frail, producing maybe one bloom a year; I wore only rose fragrance for years and years; my bedroom is littered with rosewater, rose sweets, dead rose heads at the altar of Aphrodite.

No other flower is so perfumed with symbolism than the rose. Its aura hangs heavy, pink and velveteen; you are unable to look straight at it. Umberto Eco titled The Name of the Rose thus because ‘the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left’.

Many of these meanings are taken up by imagining the rose as female — the freshly bloomed (fertile) girl who wilts and decays into the woman, spoiled by sex, the folds of petals as vulva. So the disease that infects William Blake’s rose is that of the prostitute, of desire perverted, but also, perhaps, a semiotic deadening of the woman-rose as object and category.

The ultimate articulation of love, they say, comes in the form of a hundred identical hothouse roses the colour of blood. Poor, sick rose, perfected into the banality of commodified heterosexuality, dual emblem of desire and disgust.

♱

This rose is a capitalist elaboration on the early rose as holy iconography — the sacred flower of Saint Valentine, of Aphrodite,¹ of the Virgin Mary (Rosa Mystica), of Mary Magdalene.

The erotic and the divine is met thus in the rose, its scriptural significance a rare gesture towards sanctifying feminine sexuality. The Song of Songs is dense with rose-scent, the beloved as the ‘rose of Sharon’, ‘truly his rose’ (2:1). In Kabbalistic literature, the ‘thirteen-petalled rose’ represents the thirteen attributes of Divine Mercy.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti garlands both Aphrodite (Venus Verticordia) and Mary Magdalene (Mary Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee) with roses. The latter seeks Christ, her ‘Bridegroom’, to kiss him, ‘clasp these blood-stained feet’. I think of Margary Kempe.

The rose is sex and the rose is sexless; the Church cannot decide. St. Bernard of Clairvaux claimed the Virgin Mary as rosa pudoris, the rose of modesty, with Eve the ‘thorn in her wounding’. As Beatrice counsels Dante in the Paradiso: ‘There is the rose in which the Divine Word became flesh’ (23:74). See Stephan Lochner’s Madonna in a Rose Arbor, Pseudo-Pier Francesco Fiorentino’s Madonna and Child before a Rose Hedge, Sandro Botticelli’s The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child…

And of course, you may buy a rose petal rosary from the Vatican website shop.

By the turn of the fifteenth century, [a category of sequential prayers in devotion of Mary] became known as a rosary, from the German Rosenkrantz (“rose garland”), rendered in Latin as rosarium. Alternatively called chaplets or crowns, rosaries were pictured as circlets of roses.

— ‘Weaving Rose Garlands for Mary: The mystery and history of the Rosary’, Sandra Miesel

♱

In November, my elder cousin Hannah gave me a vial of rose elixir she had distilled with ‘fresh rose petals, vodka, royal gelée honey, lemurian quartz’. When I want to invoke Venus I drop a little under my tongue. She gave it to me in an Amsterdam tea house; we talked about the priestesses of Mary Magdalene and the circle of the tomb/womb.

For Grace’s birthday I made a rosewater cake. My mother had picked the huge damp petals of the Rosa x odorata, 'Mutabilis’, and Rosa x odorata, ‘Bengal Crimson’, from the gardens, deepest and palest pinks. I covered the cake, using buttercream as adhesive, and carried it across London like it was a newlyborn.

This is the redeemed rose, the rose of the soil, the rose of medicine.

St. Valentine’s day is a coupling of the erotic and the divine, birthing the rose. But this devotion does not demand the place of romance, rather the purities and impurities of all love and sensuality — of plaiting ribbons into hair, of deep sleep, of oysters, of silver charm, of ballet, of lamb’s wool, of blushing, of blackberries, of blood in a vial for your friend’s throat.

I have only spent Valentine’s day with a lover twice. My first valentine bought me red roses, which wilted before she could give them to me (she smoked the petals instead). My second valentine told me the night before he was not sure if he still loved me. I spent the day in tears. No roses.

This year I will ask a friend, dear to me and my heart, to be my valentine. I have dried rosebuds in my bedroom to bake with — I still would like to recreate the white-fondant heart cake of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Anya Taylor Joy had anatomically correct heart cakes at her wedding, which I dream of. I might make a Victorian puzzle purse.

The other Alexandra is hosting a gathering on the 15th — the theme is eroticism, and we are instructed to come in furs. I bought more vintage fur creatures in Paris and we will all match. There will be a paddling pool filled with cake. George Bataille will make an appearance. This is, from her, entirely expected.

All to say — the day of Saint Valentine is the day of the rose is the day of the girl.

with my love and affection,

Anna ♱

instagram: @anna.c.dewaal & @lunulaezine

Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,

— from ‘Sea Rose’, H.D.

from Picnic at Hanging Rock

inspiration for Grace’s birthday cake

1. Relics of St Valentine happen to lie on Lesbos, the isle of Sappho — cult devotee of Aphrodite and the finest early love poet… the red thread…