Onion

The onion, Allium cepa, is one of the most ancient of cultivated food plants, grown across the old world since prehistory. Nowhere was it more freighted with meaning than in ancient Egypt, where its concentric layers, read as circles within circles, made it a symbol of eternity, and where onions were placed in tombs, painted on temple walls and pressed into the eye-sockets and body cavities of the dead. Egyptians were said to swear oaths upon the onion, and Roman writers mocked them for it. The Israelites in the desert numbered the onions of Egypt among the foods they longed for.

Herodotus, touring Egypt centuries after the pyramids were built, records that an inscription on the Great Pyramid itself detailed the vast sums spent on radishes, onions and garlic to feed the labourers who raised it, a claim historians treat cautiously since the inscription itself has never been found, though it fixed the onion in the popular imagination as the food of the pyramid-builders as much as of the pharaohs entombed inside them. The mummy of Ramesses IV was found with small onions placed in its eye sockets, apparently the only instance of the practice used to this degree on a royal mummy, a striking physical case of the burial symbolism this article describes.

Culpeper placed the onion under Mars, the hot and fiery planet, an obvious reading of its heat and its power to sting the eyes. In European folk practice the onion was a protective plant that absorbed sickness and evil: a cut onion was left in a room to draw off disease, hung in the house to take up infection, and used in charms to banish harm, the vegetable read as a sponge for whatever was malign. Its meanings run in two channels, the Egyptian eternity of its endless layers, and the folk role of a fiery bulb that draws off and destroys what is unhealthy, both grown from the plain nature of a pungent, many-coated root.

Onion skins, saved and boiled, remain the traditional dye for Easter eggs across Ukraine, Poland, Russia and much of Eastern Europe, producing a rich gold-to-mahogany colour without any synthetic dye, a genuinely living seasonal practice that turns the humblest kitchen scrap into part of a religious festival. Modern food science has also confirmed that onion contains genuine antimicrobial compounds, part of why it was historically valued as a preservative and a folk defence against spoilage and infection long before the word bacteria existed, a case where an old protective reputation and a measurable chemical property point in the same direction.