Myrrha (; Ancient Greek: Μύρρα, romanized: Mýrrha), also known as Smyrna (Ancient Greek: Σμύρνα, romanized: Smýrna), is the mother of Adonis in Greek mythology. She was transformed into a myrrh tree after having coitus with her father, and gave birth — in tree form — to Adonis. Although the tale of Adonis has Semitic roots, it is uncertain where the myth of Myrrha originated, though it probably came from Cyprus.
The myth details the incestuous relationship between Myrrha and her father, Cinyras. Myrrha falls in love with her father and tricks him into sexual intercourse. After discovering her identity, Cinyras draws his sword and pursues Myrrha. She flees across Arabia and, after nine months, turns to the gods for help. They take pity on her and transform her into a myrrh tree. While in plant form, Myrrha gives birth to Adonis. According to legend, the aromatic exudate of the myrrh tree are Myrrha's tears.
The most familiar form of the myth occurs in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and the story was the subject of the most famous work (now lost) of the poet Helvius Cinna (d. 44 BCE). Several alternate versions appeared in the Bibliotheca, the Fabulae of Hyginus, and the Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis, with major variations depicting Myrrha's father as the Lebanese king Theias or depicting Aphrodite as having engineered the tragic liaison. Critical interpretation of the myth has considered Myrrha's refusal of conventional sexual relations to have provoked her incest, with the ensuing transformation to tree as a silencing punishment. It has been suggested that the taboo of incest marks the difference between culture and nature and that Ovid's version of Myrrha showed this. One interpretation of the 1700 translation of Ovid's Myrrha-account by English poet John Dryden sees it as a metaphor for Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688, linking Myrrha to Queen Mary II and Cinyras to King James II.
In post-classical times, Myrrha has had widespread influence in Western culture. She was mentioned in the Divine Comedy by Dante, was an inspiration for Mirra by Vittorio Alfieri, and was alluded to in Mathilda by Mary Shelley. The play Sardanapalus by Byron included a character named Myrrha whom critics interpreted as a symbol of Byron's dream of romantic love. The myth of Myrrha was one of 24 tales retold in Tales from Ovid (1997) by English poet Ted Hughes. Her story was the focal point of Frank Bidart's long poem The Second Hour of the Night. In art, Myrrha's seduction of her father has been illustrated by German engraver Virgil Solis, her tree-metamorphosis by French engraver Bernard Picart and by Italian painter Marcantonio Franceschini, while French engraver Gustave Doré chose to depict Myrrha in Hell as a part of his series of engravings for Dante's Divine Comedy. In music, she has appeared in pieces by Sousa and Ravel. Her name lives on in the nomenclature of several biological species and of an asteroid.
Contents
Origin and etymology
The myth of Myrrha is closely linked to that of her son, Adonis, which has been easier to trace. Adonis is the Hellenized form of the Phoenician word "adoni", meaning "my lord". It is believed that the cult of Adonis was known to the Greeks from around the sixth century B.C., but it is unquestionable that they became aware of it through contact with Cyprus. Around this time, the cult of Adonis is noted in the Book of Ezekiel in Jerusalem, though under the Babylonian name Tammuz.
Adonis originally was a Phoenician god of fertility representing the spirit of vegetation. It is further speculated that he was an avatar of the version of Ba'al, worshipped in Ugarit. It is likely that lack of clarity concerning whether Myrrha was called Smyrna, and who her father was, originated in Cyprus before the Greeks first encountered the myth. However, it is clear that the Greeks added much to the Adonis-Myrrha story, before it was first recorded by classical scholars.
Over the centuries Myrrha, the girl, and myrrh, the fragrance, have been linked etymologically. Myrrh was precious in the ancient world, and was used for embalming, medicine, perfume, and incense. The Modern English word myrrh (Old English: myrra) derives from the Latin Myrrha (or murrha or murra, all are synonymous Latin words for the tree substance). The Latin Myrrha originated from the Ancient Greek múrrā, but, ultimately, the word is of Semitic origin, with roots in the Arabic murr, the Hebrew mōr, and the Aramaic mūrā, all meaning "bitter" as well as referring to the plant. Regarding smyrna, the word is a Greek dialectic form of myrrha.
In the Bible, myrrh is referenced as one of the most desirable fragrances, and though mentioned alongside frankincense, it is usually more expensive. Several Old Testament passages refer to myrrh. In the Song of Solomon, which according to scholars dates to either the tenth century B.C. as a Hebrew oral tradition or to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century B.C., myrrh is referenced seven times, making the Song of Solomon the passage in the Old Testament referring to myrrh the most, often with erotic overtones. In the New Testament the substance is famously associated with the birth of Christ when the magi presented their gifts of "gold, frankincense, and myrrh".
Myth
Ovid's version
Published in 8 A.D. the Metamorphoses of Ovid has become one of the most influential poems by writers in Latin. The Metamorphoses show that Ovid was more interested in questioning how laws interfered with people's lives than writing epic tales like Virgil's Aeneid or Homer's Odyssey. The Metamorphoses is not narrated by Ovid, but rather by the characters in the stories. The myth of Myrrha and Cinyras is sung by Orpheus in the tenth book of Metamorphoses after he has told the myth of Pygmalion and before he turns to the tale of Venus and Adonis. As the myth of Myrrha is also the longest tale sung by Orpheus (205 lines) and the only story that corresponds to his announced theme of girls punished for forbidden desire, it is considered the centerpiece of the song. Ovid opens the myth with a warning to the audience that this is a myth of great horror, especially to fathers and daughters:
The story I am going to tell is a horrible one: I beg that daughters and fathers should hold themselves aloof, while I sing, or if they find my songs enchanting, let them refuse to believe this part of my tale, and suppose that it never happened: or else, if they believe that it did happen, they must believe also in the punishment that followed.
According to Ovid, Myrrha was the daughter of King Cinyras and Queen Cenchreis of Cyprus. Ovid says that Cupid was not to blame for Myrrha's incestuous love for her father, Cinyras; he comments that hating one's father is a crime, but that Myrrha's love was a greater crime, and blames it instead on the Furies.
Over several verses, Ovid depicts the psychic struggle Myrrha faces between her sexual desire for her father and the social shame she would face for acting on it. Sleepless, and losing all hope, she attempts suicide; however, she is discovered by her nurse, in whom she confides. The nurse tries to make Myrrha suppress the infatuation, but later agrees to help Myrrha into her father's bed if she promises that she will not try to kill herself again.
During Cerealia the worshipping women, including Queen Cenchreis, Myrrha's mother, were not to be touched by men for nine nights. Myrrha's nurse told King Cinyras of a girl deeply in love with him, giving a false name. The affair lasted several nights in complete darkness to conceal Myrrha's identity, until Cinyras wanted to know the identity of his paramour. Upon bringing in a lamp, and seeing his daughter, the king attempted to kill her on the spot, but Myrrha escaped.
Other versions
The myth of Myrrha has been chronicled in several other works than Ovid's Metamorphoses. Among the scholars who recounted it are Apollodorus, Hyginus, and Antoninus Liberalis. All three versions differ.
In his Bibliotheca, written around the 1st century B.C., Apollodorus tells of three possible parentages for Adonis. In the first he states that Cinyras arrived in Cyprus with a few followers and founded Paphos, and that he married Metharme, eventually becoming king of Cyprus through her family. Cinyras had five children by Metharme: the two boys, Oxyporos and Adonis, and three daughters, Orsedice, Laogore, and Braisia. The daughters at some point became victims of Aphrodite's wrath and had intercourse with foreigners, ultimately dying in Egypt.
For the second possible parentage of Adonis, Apollodorus quotes Hesiod, who postulates that Adonis could be the child of Phoenix and Alphesiboea. He elaborates no further on this statement.
For the third option, he quotes Panyasis, who states that King Theias of Assyria had a daughter called Smyrna. Smyrna failed to honor Aphrodite, incurring the wrath of the goddess, by whom was made to fall in love with her father; and with the aid of her nurse she deceived him for twelve nights until her identity was discovered. Smyrna fled, but her father later caught up with her. Smyrna then prayed that the gods would make her invisible, prompting them to turn her into a tree, which was named the Smyrna. Ten months later the tree cracked and Adonis was born from it.
In his Fabulae, written around 1 A.D., Hyginus states that King Cinyras of Assyria had a daughter by his wife, Cenchreis. The daughter was named Smyrna and the mother boasted that her child excelled even Venus in beauty. Angered, Venus punished the mother by cursing Smyrna to fall in love with her father. After the nurse had prevented Smyrna from committing suicide, she helped her engage her father in sexual intercourse. When Smyrna became pregnant, she hid in the woods from shame. Venus pitied the girl's fate, changing her into a myrrh tree, from which was born Adonis.
In the Metamorphoses by Antoninus Liberalis, written somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd century A.D., the myth is set in Phoenicia, near Mount Lebanon. Here King Thias, son of Belus and Orithyia, had a daughter named Smyrna. Being of great beauty, she was sought by men from far and wide. She had devised many tricks in order to delay her parents and defer the day they would choose a husband for her. Smyrna had been driven mad by desire for her father and did not want anybody else. At first she hid her desires, eventually telling her nurse, Hippolyte, the secret of her true feelings. Hippolyte told the king that a girl of exalted parentage wanted to lie with him, but in secret. The affair lasted for an extended period of time, and Smyrna became pregnant. At this point, Thias desired to know who she was so he hid a light, illuminating the room and discovering Smyrna's identity when she entered. In shock, Smyrna gave birth prematurely to her child. She then raised her hands and said a prayer, which was heard by Zeus who took pity on her and turned her into a tree. Thias killed himself, and it was on the wish of Zeus that the child was brought up and named Adonis.
Interpretation
The myth of Myrrha has been interpreted in various ways. The transformation of Myrrha in Ovid's version has been interpreted as a punishment for her breaking the social rules through her incestuous relationship with her father. Like Byblis who fell in love with her brother, Myrrha is transformed and rendered voiceless making her unable to break the taboo of incest.
Myrrha has also been thematically linked to the story of Lot's daughters. They live with their father in an isolated cave and because their mother is dead they decide to befuddle Lot's mind with wine and seduce him in order to keep the family alive through him. Nancy Miller comments on the two myths:
[Lot's daughters'] incest is sanctioned by reproductive necessity; because it lacks consequences, this story is not a socially recognized narrative paradigm for incest. [...] In the cases of both Lot's daughters and Myrrha, the daughter's seduction of the father has to be covert. While other incest configurations - mother-son, sibling - permit consensual agency, father-daughter incest does not; when the daughter displays transgressive sexual desire, the prohibitive father appears.
Myrrha has been interpreted as developing from a girl into a woman in the course of the story: in the beginning she is a virgin refusing her suitors, in that way denying the part of herself that is normally dedicated to Aphrodite. The goddess then strikes her with desire to make love with her father and Myrrha is then made into a woman in the grip of an uncontrollable lust. The marriage between her father and mother is then set as an obstacle for her love along with incest being forbidden by the laws, profane as well as divine. The way the daughter seduces her father illustrates the most extreme version a seduction can take: the union between two persons who by social norms and laws are strictly held apart.
James Richard Ellis has argued that the incest taboo is fundamental to a civilized society. Building on Sigmund Freud's theories and psychoanalysis this is shown in Ovid's version of the myth of Myrrha. When the girl has been gripped by desire, she laments her humanity, for if she and her father were animals, there would be no bar to their union.
That Myrrha is transformed into a myrrh tree has also been interpreted to have influenced the character of Adonis. Being the child of both a woman and a tree he is a split person. In Ancient Greece the word Adonis could mean both "perfume" and "lover" and likewise Adonis is both the perfume made from the aromatic drops of myrrh as well as the human lover who seduces two goddesses.
Cultural impact
Literature
One of the earliest recordings of a play inspired by the myth of Myrrha is in the Antiquities of the Jews, written in 93 A.D. by the Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. A tragedy entitled Cinyras is mentioned, wherein the main character, Cinyras, is to be slain along with his daughter Myrrha, and "a great deal of fictitious blood was shed". No further details are given about the plot of this play.
Myrrha appears in the Divine Comedy poem Inferno by Dante Alighieri, where Dante sees her soul being punished in the eighth circle of Hell, in the tenth bolgia (ditch). Here she and other falsifiers such as the alchemists and the counterfeiters suffer dreadful diseases, Myrrha's being madness. Myrrha's suffering in the tenth bolgia indicates her most serious sin was not incest but deceit. Diana Glenn interprets the symbolism in Myrrha's contrapasso as being that her sin is so unnatural and unlawful that she is forced to abandon human society and simultaneously she loses her identity. Her madness in Hell prevents even basic communication which attests to her being contemptuous of the social order in life.
Dante had already shown his familiarity with the myth of Myrrha in a prior letter to Emperor Henry VII, which he wrote on 17 April 1311. Here he compares Florence with "Myrrha, wicked and ungodly, yearning for the embrace of her father, Cinyras"; a metaphor, Claire Honess interprets as referring to the way Florence tries to "seduce" Pope Clement V away from Henry VII. It is incestuous because the Pope is the father of all and it is also implied that the city in that way rejects her true husband, the Emperor.
In the poem Venus and Adonis, written by William Shakespeare in 1593 Venus refers to Adonis' mother. In the 34th stanza Venus is lamenting because Adonis is ignoring her approaches and in her heart-ache she says "O, had thy mother borne so hard a mind, She had not brought forth thee, but died unkind." Shakespeare makes a subtle reference to Myrrha later when Venus picks a flower: "She crops the stalk, and in the breach appears, Green dropping sap, which she compares to tears." It has been suggested that these plant juices being compared to tears are a parallel to Myrrha's tears being the drops of myrrh exuding from the myrrh tree.
In another work of Shakespeare, Othello (1603), it has been suggested that he has made another reference. In act 5, scene 2 the main character Othello compares himself to a myrrh tree with its constant stream of tears (Myrrha's tears). The reference is justified in the way that it draws inspiration from Book X of Ovid's Metamorphoses, just like his previously written poem, Venus and Adonis, did.
Music
In music, Myrrha was the subject of an 1876 band piece by John Philip Sousa, Myrrha Gavotte and in 1901, Maurice Ravel and André Caplet each wrote cantatas titled Myrrha. Caplet finished first over Ravel who was third in the Prix de Rome competition. The competition required that the candidates jumped through a series of academic hoops before entering the final where they were to compose a cantata on a prescribed text. Though it was not the best musical piece, the jury praised Ravel's work for its "melodic charm" and "sincerity of dramatic sentiment". Musical critic Andrew Clements writing for The Guardian commented on Ravel's failures at winning the competition: "Ravel's repeated failure to win the Prix de Rome, the most coveted prize for young composers in France at the turn of the 20th century, has become part of musical folklore."
Italian composer Domenico Alaleona's only opera, premiering in 1920, was entitled Mirra. The libretto drew on the legend of Myrrha while the music was inspired by Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) as well as Richard Strauss' Elektra (1909). Suffering from being monotonic, the final showdown between father and daughter, the critics commented, was the only part really making an impact. Mirra remains Alaleona's most ambitious composition and though the music tended to be "eclectic and uneven", it showed "technical enterprise".
More recently, Kristen Kuster created a choral orchestration, Myrrha, written in 2004 and first performed at Carnegie Hall in 2006. Kuster stated that the idea for Myrrha came when she was asked by the American Composers Orchestra to write a love-and-erotica themed concert. The concert was inspired by the myth of Myrrha in Ovid's Metamorphoses and includes excerpts from the volume that "move in and out of the music as though in a dream, or perhaps Myrrha's memory of the events that shaped her fate," as described by Kuster.
Art
The Metamorphoses of Ovid has been illustrated by several artists through time. In 1563 in Frankfurt, a German bilingual translation by Johann Posthius was published, featuring the woodcuts of renowned German engraver Virgil Solis. The illustration of Myrrha depicts Myrrha's deceiving her father as well as her fleeing from him. In 1717 in London, a Latin-English edition of Metamorphoses was published, translated by Samuel Garth and with plates of French engraver Bernard Picart. The illustration of Myrrha was entitled The Birth of Adonis and featured Myrrha as a tree delivering Adonis while surrounded by women. In 1857 French engraver Gustave Doré made a series of illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, the depiction of Myrrha showing her in the eighth circle of Hell.
In 1690, Italian Baroque painter Marcantonio Franceschini depicted Myrrha as a tree while delivering Adonis in The Birth of Adonis. The painting was included in the art exhibition "Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna, 1575-1725" at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California which lasted from December 16, 2008, through May 3, 2009. Normally the painting is exhibited in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (English: Dresden State Art Collections) in Germany as a part of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (English: Old Masters Picture Gallery).
In 1984, artist Mel Chin created a sculpture based on Doré's illustration of Myrrha for the Divine Comedy. The sculpture was titled "Myrrha of the Post Industrial World" and depicted a nude woman sitting on a rectangular pedestal. It was an outdoor project in Bryant Park, and the skin of the sculpture was made of perforated steel. Inside was a visible skeleton of polystyrene. When finished, the sculpture was 29 feet tall.
Science
Several metamorphosing insects' scientific names reference the myth. Myrrha is a genus of ladybug beetles, such as the eighteen-spotted ladybird (Myrrha octodecimguttata). Libythea myrrha, the club beak, is a butterfly native to India. Polyommatus myrrha is a rare species of butterfly named by Gottlieb August Wilhelm Herrich-Schäffer found on Mount Erciyes in south-eastern Turkey. Catocala myrrha is a synonym for a species of moth known as married underwing. In total the United Kingdom's Natural History Museum lists seven Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) with the myrrha name.
Myrrh is a bitter-tasting, aromatic, yellow to reddish brown gum. It is obtained from small thorny flowering trees of the genus Commiphora, which is a part of the incense-tree family (Burseraceae). There are two main varieties of myrrh: bisabol and herabol. Bisabol is produced by C. erythraea, an Arabian species similar to the C. myrrha, which produces the herabol myrrh. C. myrrha grows in Ethiopia, Arabia, and Somalia.
A large asteroid, measuring 124 kilometres (77 mi) is named 381 Myrrha. It was discovered and named on January 10, 1894, by A. Charlois at Nice. The mythical Myrrha inspired the name and her son, Adonis, is the name given to another asteroid, 2101 Adonis. Using classical names like Myrrha, Juno, and Vesta when naming minor planets was standard custom at the time when 381 Myrrha was discovered. It was the general opinion that using numbers instead might lead to unnecessary confusion.