Plants
Cypress
Trees
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Cypress, a tree, is ruled by Saturn in Culpeper's herbalism, cold, drying, and grounding, a herb of bone, structure, and age. The dark, spire-like cypress is the tree of mourning and of the dead, sacred to Pluto and the underworld, planted in graveyards and carried at funerals since the days of Greece and Rome; the youth Cyparissus, grieving, was changed into it and became forever the emblem of sorrow. Its wood is close, fragrant, and near incorruptible, so that coffins and the images of the gods were made of it to endure. Culpeper used its cooling, binding cones and leaves to stay bleeding and fluxes and to firm loose gums and slack flesh. A tree of grief, death, endurance, and the grave, wholly of Saturn.
Facts
Debunked
Origin Period1653 7Tradition: Culpeper, The Complete Herbal Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled. Origins
Botanical IdentificationCupressus sempervirens, the Mediterranean cypress, family Cupressaceae 3 Origin of the NameFrom Greek kyparissos, a name of pre-Greek origin borrowed into Latin as cupressus, and tied in Greek myth to the youth Kyparissos, who was transformed into the tree while grieving. 4Tradition: A Modern Herbal Origin RegionThe eastern Mediterranean 3 Traditions
Principal Religious TraditionsGreco-Roman religion, where the cypress is planted in graveyards and carried at funerals as the tree of mourning, sacred to Pluto and the underworld. 5 Meaning
ThemesLongevity, comfort, and protection 2Tradition: Cunningham Attributions
Ruling PlanetSaturn 1Tradition: Culpeper TemperamentCold, drying, and grounding, a herb of bone, structure, and age 1 Traditional AilmentsCones and leaves used to stay bleeding and firm loose gums 1 Correspondences
Element CorrespondenceEarth 2Tradition: Cunningham Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceOvid's Metamorphoses tells how the grieving youth Cyparissus, mourning the death of a beloved stag, was transformed by the gods into the cypress tree, becoming forever the emblem of sorrow. 6Tradition: Greco-Roman mythology (Ovid's account) Learn More
The Tree of Mourning
The cypress, Cupressus sempervirens, is a tall, dark, columnar evergreen of the Mediterranean, and across the classical and later European world it is the tree of death and mourning above all others. It was sacred to the underworld and to its gods, planted in cemeteries, where its narrow dark form still stands, and its branches were carried at funerals and set at the door of a house in mourning. Its very evergreen persistence, which might have made it a sign of life, was turned the other way: because a cut branch does not regrow, it was read as an emblem of a death from which there is no return.
In an entirely different tradition, Persian and later Ottoman and Mughal poetry reads the cypress not as death but as an image of the beloved's slender, upright grace, sarv in Persian, a stock comparison running through centuries of lyric verse and echoed in the tall, tapering cypress trees still planted in formal Persian and Mughal gardens as living architecture rather than as any sign of mourning. The tree's famously rot-resistant timber also made it a preferred wood for ancient Mediterranean shipbuilding, and Iran's Cypress of Abarkuh, a single tree of great and disputed age, is claimed by some local tradition to be over four thousand years old, though the figure is not confirmed by any scientific dating and should be treated with real caution.
Cyparissus, and the Grief Made a Tree
Ovid gives the tree its founding myth: Cyparissus, a youth beloved of Apollo, accidentally killed a tame stag that was dear to him, and in inconsolable grief begged the gods to let him mourn forever; he was changed into the cypress, the tree of sorrow, so that he might stand at the graves of others and share their grief. The tree's durable, fragrant, rot-resistant wood also gave it a paradoxical link to permanence, it was used for coffins and for the images of the gods, but its dominant meaning remained constant from antiquity onward: the cypress is the tree of death, mourning and the grave, its dark spire the recognised sign of a place of the dead.
The gopher wood from which Noah's ark is built in Genesis is another plant identity the text leaves genuinely unresolved: the Hebrew term appears nowhere else in the Bible, and while cypress is one of the most commonly proposed candidates, on the strength of its ancient shipbuilding use and its resistance to rot, other scholars have suggested cedar, juniper or simply a general term for resinous conifer timber, so that the exact tree behind one of scripture's most famous construction projects remains an open question rather than a settled fact.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Cunningham's magical herbalism sets the cypress to Earth, matching its Saturnian rulership.
Culpeper files the cypress under Saturn, cold and drying, a tree of bone, structure and age, which agrees with its long standing as the tree of mourning.
Sacred To
Pluto, Deities Pliny records the cypress as the tree of Dis, lord of the Roman dead, and it stood at the doors of houses in mourning. The graveyard planting follows from that and not the other way about.
Sources
1. The English Physitian: or an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar Herbs of this Nation
2. Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs
3. Plants of the World Online
4. A Modern Herbal
Maud Grieve, Dover Publications, 1931On kyparissos, its pre-Greek root and the myth of KyparissosView the Source 5. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. cypress; the tree of mourningView the Source 6. Metamorphoses
Ovid, (various editions)on Cyparissus transformed into the cypressView the Source 7. Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670
Agnes Arber, Cambridge University Press, 1938ch. on the English herbals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesView the Source Naturalis Historia (Natural History)
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