Poppy Folklore: The Symbol of Sleep, Death, War, and…Love?

It’s somewhat surprising that of all the plants I’ve featured on this blog, I’ve never quite made it to the humble poppy. Why surprising? Orange and yellow poppies fill my garden with joy every year, and I always look forward to them popping up. Not to mention the fact poppies have amassed a range of folklore and symbolism that remained consistent across the centuries.

William Lilly attributed the poppy to the moon (1659: 82), although Cornelius Agrippa placed it under Saturn’s rulership (1651: 56). Either of them makes sense, given the poppy’s association with sleep and agriculture. Remember, Saturn was originally an agricultural deity.

In folk magic, it often appears related to dreams, visions, sleep, and pain relief (Harrington 2020: 103). We’ll explore these associations in this post, along with its links to both love and the dead.

Poppies and Mythology

Poppies appear in Greek myth, when Demeter created the flower to bring her sleep so she could forget her grief after Hades abducted Persephone. The link between Demeter and the poppy continued into the harvest, and the ancient Greeks offered poppy seeds in their rites to Ceres to ensure a bountiful corn harvest. They also made garlands by weaving poppies among barley. In fact, it’s worth bearing in mind that the corn poppy, Papaver rhoeas, grows particularly well in disturbed soil, which explains its link both with farmland and battlefields – though we’ll come back to the latter further on.

In some art, Demeter holds poppies. Despite this link with Demeter, the poppy also became associated with Hypnos, the god of sleep, Thanatos, the god of death, and Nyx, the goddess of night. They either worn poppies as crowns, or held them in their hands (Folkard 1884: 504). The fact that both Hypnos and Thanatos wore poppy crowns shows the Greeks already knew that opium led to both sleep and death, depending on the dose (Inkwright 2019: 126).

The Romans continued this fascination with poppies, but transferred it to the dead, rather than linking it with sleep. They made offerings of poppies to the dead, especially if they wanted to appease the individual (Folkard 1884: 504). In Rome, Hypnos became Somnus, and Carl Linnaeus used his name when he named the opium poppy Papaver somniferum (Roth 2017: 37).

The Painkilling Poppy

By the 19th century, the poppy’s associations in Tuscany passed on to Laverna, a goddess of imposters and thieves (Roth 2017: 38). According to legend, her followers used poppy to ease childbirth pains. Charles Leland relates a rite women could practice if they had to hide their pregnancy, although part of it suggests someone sedated the mother with poppy so they could spirit away the unwanted child. I don’t know how accurate we can consider this given Leland’s ‘flexibility’ with his sources, but it does rely on poppy’s soporific effects (Roth 2017: 39).

It’s certainly possible people used poppy in childbirth though. The Victorians often mixed it with belladonna to make a childbirth drug known as Twilight Sleep (Roth 2017: 40). It left the mother completely unaware of having given birth (Leavitt 1980: 147). Some sources suggest Queen Elizabeth II used Twilight Sleep for her first three children, although its components had changed by that time, being refined to scopolamine and morphine (Hall 2022).

Poppies, Sleep and Dreams

We’ve already discussed how poppies are linked with Hypnos, or Sleep, but they were also linked with his brother, Morpheus, or the god of dreams. The opium poppy especially became a symbol of rest, peace, and sleep (Binney 2018: 29). Their attribution to the night might explain why the Romans also linked poppies with Diana, goddess of the moon (Carruthers 1879: 140).

Humans knew about opium’s effects as far back as the Neolithic era. Even Pliny recognised the dangers of the drug, admitting the very real threat of overdoses (Binney 2018: 30). By the 19th century, poets immortalised poppy’s soporific effects in their writing. Thomas Warton immortalised it in the first verse of his ‘Ode to Sleep’;

On this my pensive pillow, gentle sleep!
Descend in all thy downy plumage drest;
Wipe with thy wing these eyes that wake to weep,
And place thy crown of poppies on my breast.

Of course, in the 19th century, people were also big fans of both opium and laudanum, the latter of which was a tincture of 10% opium in alcohol. While it was prescribed for pain relief, some artists and writers grew far too fond of it. Thomas de Quincey even wrote Confessions of an English Opium Eater in 1822 about his love for opium.

Through their association with opium, poppy seeds can magically help with psychic dreaming. Christina Oakley Harrington suggests baking cakes or muffins involving poppy seeds (2020: 104). Enjoy one before sleep, ideally with a bunch of poppy flowers before your bed, and see what you dream about.

If you have a question you want the answer to, poppies could apparently help with that too. You could write your question onto a slip of paper. Next, empty a dried poppy pod and push the paper into the pod. You’d put it under your pillow and recite a charm before going to sleep, before dreaming your answer (Roth 2017: 41).

Planning on picking poppies? Be careful what you’re doing. If the petals fall while you’re picking them, you might be struck by lightning that day (Inkwright 2019: 127).

Love Spells and Poppies

Surprisingly, poppy also appears in love spells, particularly in the form of seeds. Harrington suggests tracing a love symbol that means something to you using poppy seeds on a poppy-seed cake. Eating the cake activates the spell (2020: 104). This may be because the Romans also associated the poppy with Venus (Carruthers 1879: 136).

Young Greeks used poppies as a divinatory tool to see if their lovers were true. They put a poppy petal in their left palm and struck the petal with their right hand. If the petal broke, it meant their lover was true. If it didn’t, their lover was unfaithful. The practice actually passed into Rome, and even into 19th century Italy (Folkard 1884: 505).

In Tuscany, witches apparently put poppy leaves onto hot coals and then read the size and shapes of the flames to get their answers. Other people burnt poppy seeds and divined their answers from the sounds they made as they burned (Roth 2017: 41).

Singletons could also use poppy seed cake to find out where their future partner might come from. They had to throw a piece of cake out the door and let a dog run to fetch it. Your partner would come from whichever direction the dog reappeared from (Inkwright 2019: 127).

Some people also called the corn poppy, or Papaver Rhoeas, Joan’s Silver Pin. Apparently, people used this as an insult to describe “some tawdry ornament displayed ostentatiously by a sloven”, and it became linked with the poppy since the flower was so ornamental (Folkard 1884: 393).

The Poppy and the Dead

Poppy seeds can be used in magic related to the dead, through its links with the underworld (Roth 2017: 40). I’d also venture to say that its association with Thanatos and Hypnos helps. Harold Roth notes it’s a far safer, and easier to find, option compared with other baneful plants (2017: 41).

Agrippa includes black poppy in a suffumigation recipe, along with hemlock, mullein, henbane, red sandalwood, and sagapenum. When used, spirits would apparently appear in the smoke. Adding celery apparently drove such spirits away (1651: 86).

Incidentally, throwing a handful of poppy seeds at a demon could apparently ward it off. It seems the demon would be forced to stop and count all of the seeds, giving you time to run away (Inkwright 2019: 126). We also see this with lots of other items, including sand and juniper leaves, in folklore, so it seems many small items could do the trick. It’s often associated with vampires as well, which paints The Count in Sesame Street in a new light.

I think the contemporary association between the poppy and the dead comes through its specific links with war. Look at how many people on TV fight to wear the first (and biggest) poppy from the middle of October. Yet while we might now associate the poppy with Remembrance Sunday and the First World War, the link between poppies and war is much older. Richard Folkard, writing in 1884, noted a belief that red poppies sprang up from the blood of those who died at Waterloo (1884: 505).

Surprisingly, the practice of wearing poppies to commemorate war dead comes from America, not Europe. Moina Michael took inspiration from the poem, ‘In Flanders Fields’, written in 1915, and vowed to wear a poppy on her lapel to honour the war dead. She even bought 25 silk poppies and gave them to colleagues. Two years later, the National American Legion named the poppy as their official symbol of remembrance.

Madame E Guerin then saw the sale of poppies by the American Legion as a way to raise money for children affected by war. She and a band of French Widows made paper poppies to sell before they took their efforts to the UK. The British Legion soon adopted the poppy, although the Women’s Co-operative Guild created the first white versions in 1933 to represent a desire for peace. The purple poppy honours animals killed during war (History Press 2017).

So what do we make of the folklore of poppies?

It’s surprising how consistent a lot of the folklore is. The continual link between poppies and sleep, based on its association with opium, has remained as an obvious association. I would argue that the links with the dead come from the same root.

But then this idea of psychic dreaming comes along, and I think that’s possibly related to poppy’s use in sleep. But the one that fascinated me was the association with love, since a plant so heavily associated with sleep and dreams doesn’t immediately scream “romance“.

That said, poppies are very common, they’re easy to grow, the seeds are plentiful, and I can see why they would appear in lot of things, purely because they’re easy to get hold of.

A lot of the associations for poppies tend to appear more through their use in magic than in medicine. But poppy is not a folk remedy; this is where we got opium from. So instead it appears in folklore as a divinatory aid – and a pretty one at that!

What do you make of poppy folklore?

References

Agrippa, Henry Cornelius (1651), Three books of occult philosophy, London: R.W.

Baker, Margaret (2011 [1969]), Discovering the Folklore of Plants, 3rd edition, Oxford: Shire Classics (affiliate link).

Binney, Ruth (2018), Plant Lore and Legend, Hassocks: Rydon (affiliate link).

Folkard, Richard (1884), Plant lore, legends, and lyrics: Embracing the myths, traditions, superstitions, and folk-lore of the plant kingdom, London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington.

Hall, Jenny (2022), ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Royal births: transforming the monarchy’, Maternity and Midwifery Forum, https://maternityandmidwifery.co.uk/queen-elizabeths-royal-births-transforming-the-monarchy/.

Harrington, Christina Oakley (2020), The Treadwell’s Book of Plant Magic, London: Treadwells Books.

History Press (2017), ‘The poppy as a symbol of remembrance’, History Press, https://thehistorypress.co.uk/article/the-poppy-as-a-symbol-of-remembrance/.

Inkwright, Fez (2020), Folk Magic and Healing: An Unusual History of Everyday Plants, London: Liminal 11 Press (affiliate link).

Leavitt, Judith Walzer (1980), ‘Birthing and Anesthesia: The Debate over Twilight Sleep’, Signs, 6 (1), pp. 147-164.

Lilly, William (1659), Christian Astrology, London: John Macock.

Roth, Harold (2017), The Witching Herbs: 13 Essential Plants and Herbs for Your Magical Garden, Newburyport, MA: Weiser (affiliate link).