Culpeper placed the calendula under the Sun and the sign of Leo, and in European folk practice it stood for constancy and for grief, strewn at funerals and worn in wreaths. The Tagetes marigold carries the heavier ritual load: in Mexico the cempasuchil, the flower whose Nahuatl name means twenty-flower, is the flower of the Day of the Dead, its petals strewn in paths to guide returning souls home, a practice with roots in pre-Columbian Aztec observance. In India marigold garlands are ubiquitous at weddings, festivals and temple offerings, draped over deities and honoured guests alike, the same golden flower serving the sun, the dead and the gods across three continents.
The Aztec use of the Tagetes flower predates the Day of the Dead festival that absorbed it: sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers, among them the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun, recorded cempasuchil already in ceremonial and medicinal use before the conquest, so the modern observance grafts an old flower onto a layered indigenous and Catholic calendar rather than inventing its role. In India the marigold most commonly strung into garlands for weddings and temple offerings is usually a Tagetes species rather than the true pot marigold, the same English name covering a Mediterranean plant and a New World one that reached Asia only after 1500. A single word, marigold, thus binds together a European herb of grief and constancy, a Mexican flower of the dead, and an Indian flower of celebration, three unrelated botanical strands united only by their shared gold.