Flora Unveiled

290 i Flora Unveiled

Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees

of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so.

The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of

every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good.^6

The two Hebrew words used to denote “earth” in the Bible are eretz and adamah, both
of which have feminine genders. Eretz refers to the earth which brought forth plants, while
adamah is the earth from which God fashioned Adam. Together, Eretz and Adamah can
be interpreted as a latent “Mother Earth,” whose generative powers God invokes to create
plants and animals.
A more explicit reference to Mother Earth in the Judeao- Christian tradition occurred
in the thirteenth century, when Saint Francis of Assisi broke with centuries of medieval
Church tradition by extolling the natural world. In his Latin poem, “Canticle of the Sun,”
composed around 1224, Francis affirmed a familial relationship with “Brother Sun,” “Sister
Moon,” and “our sister Mother Earth.” “Mother Earth” (“Matre Terra”) was singled out for
particular praise as the one “who feeds us and rules us”:

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and

produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

As in Genesis, it is Mother Earth, not God directly, who produces the flowers and herbs.
To Francis, our organic relationship to Earth was no mere metaphor, but a deep spiritual
truth. Assisi’s “Canticle of the Sun” placed the Christian imprimatur on the pagan concept
of an earth mother— hints of which are found in Genesis— and inaugurated a new era in
the Christian attitude toward nature.
Although her name was coined in the Renaissance, Mother Nature’s literary antecedent
can be traced at least as far back as the twelfth century to the goddess Natura. Natura makes
her literary debut in twelfth- century France in the poems of the Neoplatonist philosopher,
Bernard Silvestris. Her character was further developed and elaborated by other twelfth-
and thirteenth- century authors, such as Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun. E.  R. Curtius,
went so far as to suggest that the goddess Natura was no mere literary conceit, but a resur-
rection of the pagan reverence for nature:

Natura is a cosmic power. ... She is one of the last religious experiences of the late-

pagan world. She possesses an inexhaustible vitality. ... (Her) power over men’s souls

is proved by the Christian polemic against her.^7

The name Natura is related to the Greek term physis and the Latin term natura,
both of which are grammatically feminine. The first known use of physis (t he e s s e nt i a l
character of a material object) occurs in Homer’s Odyssey, fittingly, in relation to a
magical plant, Moly, which Hermes presents to Odysseus to protect him against the
sorceress Circe:

So saying, Hermes gave me the herb, drawing it from the ground, and showed me its physis.^8