myth for saffron

The goddess of the dead sat on her mountain, bored - on a mountain of bones, looking out in the the waves and seeing all the living from a distance until they came to her to pass through her wooden threshold.

She saw every kind of living thing travel through her door. And they were always startled when they got there.

She could remember a time when all the earth was water, and all the waves would sometimes jump into the sky. Death looked similar to those animals as it does now. They would meet her on her underwater mountain and she would direct them, and they would tell her the story of their lives. When they passed her threshold they would leave their bones behind, one of which she kept, and the rest were given back to the soil. She’d throw that bone on the ground and thus that her mountain was made.

But now that the mountain was high above the sea and the wind made the stories loose and flew away like small clouds in the wind from the goddess of the dead. And so with no stories in her mind she was lonely, and bored. Until one day a hero died, someone who lived many lives in their life and told her stories with such details, splendor and intrigue she thought she could listen to them forever. Not only this - the storyteller reminded her of stories she had long forgotten.

When the storyteller left and passed through that wooden threshold, she knew she must remember the stories, because they seemed to give the goddess a life she had long forgotten about. So instead of throwing this hero’s bone on the ground she found a place for it on the mountain and dug it into the limestone - the bone soil. With the care this bone was given the bone began to hum a little song. She began to do this with all the bones that came into her hands.

One September she took the rays from setting sun and set them into the base of the bones and found that they acted like tongues so they could speak. The stories started to come up. And now, when the souls came they would tell stories, and hear stories from the crocuses. In this way she would continue to speak with the dead and the dead who were passing through the threshold were not so scared anymore.

Now the bones look like eggs from the ground the color of the hearts of the dead. When they rise they were not startled. They were new as spring, and the goddess of the dead knows that the dead have left more than their bones behind, but their stories too.

When we see saffron we can understand that death is what gives life meaning. It’s the wind which fills our sails in this sea of life that we are in. We can fear the unknown, or we can see that from what passes small eggs in the form of saffron come.