Saturday, December 3, 2016

Le pot aux roses

I was unable to find any evidence to support this idea.  Here follows one of Virginia's made up facts.  This is a good one, and really should be true.

I looked up the origin of the phrase, "le pot aux roses," - a French saying which means a secret, but literally translates as 'the pot of roses.'  The dictionaries that I looked at did not give me the meaning that I think it has.  So, this is embarrassing, but I think that the pot of roses signifies a woman's yoni, you-know-what, private parts, genitals.  Ok, I said it.  That was difficult.  And embarrassing.

Do you know how many hours I've spent trying to figure out old European symbols?  I've been trying to understand apotropaic magic for months.  Apotropaic means banishing, but it extends to attracting also. So these symbols are all about banishing the misfortunes and attracting the good things in life.  There are a lot of fertility symbols - I've been looking at art that contains baskets of flowers, or vases of flowers.  Cornocupia must be the English equivalent to the "pot aux roses.."

[Easily confused with "the pink post" - a lovely sound-alike in French.  I'm saving this for a future blog about holorimes and Mondagreens.]

I find nothing in print to support the claim that le pot aux roses represents female genitals.  But after looking at an enormous amount of florid Victorian art, and tracing the history of cornocupia, baskets and vases as fertility symbols, well, this idea is inescapable.  Kind of obvious...

Edit:   Here is a page from Wikipedia that seems to support what I'm saying.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_rosa    It's a history of the Rose as a symbol of secrets.

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