Ambrosia

In ancient Greek mythology, ambrosia (Ancient Greek: ἀμβροσία) is sometimes the food, sometimes the drink, of the gods, often depicted as conferring immortality on whoever consumes it. Ambrosia is very closely related to the gods' other form of sustenance, nectar. The two terms may not have originally been distinguished, though in Homer's poems and later works, nectar is the drink and ambrosia the food. On the other hand, in Alcman, nectar is the food, and in Sappho and Anaxandrides, ambrosia is the drink. Both are fragrant, and may be used as perfume.

Etymology

The word has generally been derived from Greek a- ("not") and mbrotos ("mortal"); hence the food or drink of the immortals. The classical scholar Arthur Woollgar Verrall, however, denied that there is any clear example in which the word ambrosios necessarily means immortal, and preferred to explain it as "fragrant," a sense which is always suitable. If so, the word may be derived from the Semitic MBR ("amber", which when burned is resinously fragrant; compare "ambergris") to which Eastern nations attribute miraculous properties. In Europe, honey-colored amber, sometimes far from its natural source, was already a grave gift in Neolithic times and was still worn in the 7th century CE as a talisman by druidic Frisians, though St. Eligius warned "No woman should presume to hang amber from her neck." W. H. Roscher thinks that both nectar and ambrosia were kinds of honey, in which case their power of conferring immortality would be due to the supposed healing and cleansing power of honey, which is in fact aseptic, and because fermented honey (mead) preceded wine as an entheogen in the Aegean world: the Great Goddess of Crete on some Minoan seals had a bee face: compare Merope and Melissa. Additionally, some modern scholars, such as Danny Staples, relate ambrosia to the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria.

Examples of ambrosia in mythology

• Thetis anointed the infant Achilles with ambrosia and passed the child through the fire to make him immortal—a familiar Phoenician custom—but Peleus, appalled, stopped her, leaving only his heel unimmortalised.
• In the Iliad xvi, Apollo washes the black blood from the corpse of Sarpedon and anoints it with ambrosia, readying it for its dreamlike return to Sarpedon's native Lycia. Similarly, Thetis anoints the corpse of Patroclus in order to preserve it. Additionally, both ambrosia and nectar are depicted as unguents (xiv. 170; xix. 38).
• In the Odyssey, Calypso is described as having "spread a table with ambrosia and set it by Hermes, and mixed the rosy-red nectar." It is ambiguous whether he means the ambrosia itself is rosy-red, or if he is describing a rosy-red nectar Hermes drinks along with the ambrosia. Later, Circe mentions to Odysseus^[1] that a flock of doves are the bringers of ambrosia to Olympus.
• One of the impieties of Tantalus, according to Pindar, was that he offered to his guests the ambrosia of the Deathless Ones, a theft akin to that of Prometheus, Karl Kerenyi noted (in Heroes of the Greeks).
• In the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess uses "ambrosian oil" as perfume, "divinely sweet, and made fragrant for her sake."

See also

• Ichor, blood of the Greek gods, related to ambrosia.
• Amrita, of Hindu mythology, a drink which confers immortality on the gods, and a cognate of ambrosia

References

• Ruck, Carl A.P. and Danny Staples, The World of Classical Myth 1994, p. 26 et seq. [1]
• Encyclopædia Britannica 1911: Ambrosia