Long reverenced for their spiritual significance and beauty, water lilies appear on top of ponds worldwide. The water lily is full of symbolism and deep meaning in a myriad of cultures.
Water lilies are loved and renowned for their spiritual meaning and symbolism – as it is a sacred symbol of the earth. In certain cultures, it also represents the sun – often a symbol of abundance. Folk medicine also reveres the water lily for the healing quality of its bulbs and roots.
Today, we’ll look at all the various meanings of water lilies. This article will explore why so many cultures hold this flower in such high reverence. Let’s get started with the spiritual significance of this plant.
Water Lilies Have a Spiritual Meaning
As I mentioned, water Lilies often hold profound spiritual significance for many people. This reverence makes sense, as the water lily has been around for thousands of years. In hieroglyphs and drawings from ancient times, you will find symbolism involving the water lily.
Water Lilies are more significant to Eastern cultures than the Western world. They are vital in Buddhism and Hinduism, but many peoples across many timelines have found beauty in and respect for this plant.
Eastern cultures revere the water lily for its religious significance – usually representing new life and beauty out of a place of chaos.
On the other hand, Western cultures usually revere this flower for its physical benefits rather than its spiritual significance. Water lilies are honored because of their incredible healing qualities.
Often folk medicine uses these plants to help reduce swelling and inflammation and provide a smooth cooling sensation for burns. However, its curative effects are yet to be substantiated.
Let’s talk about the spiritual meanings of water lilies for different cultures and religious beliefs worldwide.
Water Lilies Spiritual Significance in Buddhism
For the Buddhists, the water lily represents the highest stage of consciousness – the ultimate enlightenment. It is a constant reminder of living, dying, and rebirth into a better and higher form of consciousness.
In addition to its representation of enlightenment, Buddhists place different spiritual significance on the various colors of water lilies.
- Red water lilies: These bright lilies are related to love – and passion and are typically considered the heart’s lotus.
- Purple water lilies: These lilies are often a representation of spiritual power. During times when the Buddhists are attempting to connect with the higher universal power, they often sit near purple water lilies.
- White water lilies: These pure lilies represent the process of mental purity. In Buddhism, one of the primary goals is to clear one’s mind and erase the ordinary negativity that typically surrounds our conscious minds.
- The pink water lily: The color pink represents the deity with the highest power at any moment. This relevance might include revered deities such as Brahma, Bodhisattvas, and Shakyamuni. In Buddhism, it may also represent the Buddha himself.
- Blue water lilies: These lilies are associated with knowledge. They are often present when people are in deep study or reviewing the sacred scriptures.
Water Lilies Spiritual Significance in Hinduism
Hinduism is another Eastern culture where the water lily holds great significance.
For the Hindu people, water lilies symbolize the resurrection – similar to Buddhism’s interpretation of this flower as enlightenment and rebirth. The Hindus also see this flower as a representation of the cycle of living, dying, and being reborn.
One of the biggest reasons that Hindus see the water lily as the power of the resurrection is the way the flower wilts throughout the night and renews itself in the mornings. In the evening, the flower folds in upon itself – a representation of death. The Water lily regains its former strength in the morning, opening its petals to take in the sun again.
Hindu culture also reveres water lilies for their nutritional value. While this may appear to be a physical benefit, in Hinduism, the physical and spiritual bodies connect deeply. What nourishes the body also feeds the soul and the spirit.
These flowers grow widely across India, where Hinduism is the most popular. The people often eat the flower stalks of red and white water lilies. It is usually boiled and cooked with turmeric and salt.
The Spiritual Significance of the Water Lily in Ancient Egypt
As I mentioned, people hold the water lily in high regard over many cultures and timelines. It’s not just in modern times that this beauty has been honored.
In ancient Egypt, the water lily represented unification internally within the Egyptian nation and externally in alliances with other countries. In some places, the Egyptians offered the water lily to various individuals and world leaders as a peace offering after a war.
For the ancient Egyptians, the blue water lily was the most significant of all the colors of the lilies. Over time it became known as the “sacred blue lily of the Nile.”
Initially, the plant could be found over the whole of Egypt, growing beautifully along the banks of the Nile River. Over time, however, as the Egyptian people began to identify it as a sacred flower, it became scarce.
The ancient Egyptians honored the water lily because of its ability to induce hallucinogenic experiences and states of ecstasy. Like the Hindu people, the Egyptians also used the water lily for the general healing of almost every ailment.
Blue water lilies adorn the tomb of Tutankhamun’s body as a reminder of the sacredness of the king. When archaeologists opened the Pharaoh’s tomb in 1922, they were surprised to see so many water lilies covering the body of Tutankhamun. The archaeologists concluded that the water lily induced transcendence and ecstasy.
The water lily isn’t as highly revered in modern times because frequent harvesting has eliminated it from growing nearby the Nile. It is considered an endangered plant at this time.
Water Lily Spiritual Significance in Christianity
Though the water lily is more sacred to Eastern religions, it has even made its way into modern Christianity. Many people in Christianity honor water lilies as symbols of purity, righteousness, and holiness. Like the Buddhists, the white water lily embraces the concept of purity above any other color lily.
When Yeshua (Jesus) walked the earth, water lilies grew along the shores of the Lake of Gennesaret and deep within the valleys of Palestine. Yeshua was sometimes called “The Lily of the Valley.”
The water lily appears in many sacred scriptures in Christianity and Judaism. You can find references to covenants made around the water lily in many history books and inspirational and prophetic books such as Psalms and Song of Songs.
Like the Egyptians, the Christians have also revered this flower as a symbol of unity. Similarly, they often presented the flower as a symbol of peace between various people.
The Water Lily in Greek Myth
Overall, people everywhere have fallen in love with this mystical plant because of the mystery it presents.
The water lily signifies beauty—which is no surprise since the ancient Greeks named the flower after a nymph of beauty, nýmphē. These beautiful fairy-like women personified nature; they were not goddesses but were more long-lived than mortals.
These beautiful nymphs were known to inhabit waterways such as wells and lakes, and their fair beauty became interwoven with the beauty of the water lily.
Additional Spiritual Iconography of the Water Lily
Many generations of humankind have viewed the water lily as the symbol of the cycle of life. Each culture has put its spin on it over time, but it still holds on to its original meaning of the process of life.
Many people relate water lilies to the world’s creation. This link is partly due to how the flower grows, grasping at life amid the water. The concept that life could appear out of seeming nothingness was incomprehensible for ancient peoples. The water lily helped them understand how the world came to be.
In addition, the water lily represents universality, especially in the Eastern world – one of the biggest reasons why it is a sacred flower in the world of Buddhists and Hinduists.
Eastern people, in particular, are enchanted by the view of universality and connection in all things. Unlike the Western culture, which often segments and compartmentalizes all items into categories, the Eastern people see the world as a whole being. It is not the left and right hands but two hands that both work together to complete a whole piece.
The water lily, which grows in the most uncommon conditions, represents life breaking through even the most challenging conditions.
The Water Lily’s Use in Ritual Spiritualism
Mystics associate the water lily with the opening up of the “third eye.” Because the later Lily acts as a hallucinogenic, mystics ingest the plant to induce trancelike spiritual states. This practice occurs in a multitude of cultures around the world.
This plant also acts as a ritual narcotic. Evidence shows that cultures such as the ancient Egyptian and Mayan people used the water lily multiple times to induce a hypnotic and pain-free state of ecstasy.
Many of our modern drugs come from plants like the water lily. Arguably, the plant produces an even more substantial effect than synthetic versions that people often use today.
In many ancient cultures, the people would ingest water lily tea to prepare to interact with the spirit realm. Studies suggest that the blue water lily’s psychoactive effects are due to apomorphine and nuciferine.
Once the mystics ingested the tea, the narcotic and hallucinogenic benefits would take effect within an hour as the narcotics entered the bloodstream. Through this, the ancient people believed they could interact with the spirit world on a significantly more profound level than they typically could.
Evidence suggests that this would happen because the water lily induces a calmative effect on the brain—inhibiting the amygdala where fear and anxiety arise. This altered brain state is where users often make fantastical connections that people do not experience in higher brainwave patterns.
Physical Benefits of the Water Lily
The significance of Water Lilies goes far beyond spiritual symbolism – water lilies provide a whole host of physical benefits for the consumer.
I briefly touched on this when speaking about the significance of the water lily in Hindu culture, but far more than just the Hindus use the water lily to bring healing to the body.
Over time, this flower has been an enormous resource for treating various ailments, from burns to fever to skin conditions. In some regions of the world, people consider the water lily a miracle plant because of the number of health benefits it provides.
Folk medicine suggests the plant can reduce swelling and inflammation externally and internally. It is often applied externally to sores, bruises, and so on. It is also said to aid in the recovery of broken bones.
In addition, they suggest plant can heal a bad cough and helps to rid the body of viruses. It is known to be a support system for the body – often restoring strength to even the weakest immune systems in the elderly and young children.
Most often, people use the water lily in teas or use them in essential oils. However, in certain cultures, the whole of the plant is ingested. Usually, it is boiled or fried.
The flowers are also often crushed and mixed with various oils to make a type of salve that one can apply to several body parts.
However, these effects are anecdotal as the curative effects are in their early stages of testing in a scientific setting. Also, parts of the plant are toxic—so one should take care when approaching the plant.
The Origin of Water Lilies
As I mentioned, water lilies have been around for thousands of years – possibly over 180 million years! Water lilies are one of the oldest known flowers in our modern world—living even during the age of dinosaurs. They are one of the most tenacious plants, expanding their growth amid conditions where it would appear impossible for other plants to survive.
Babylonians and Assyrians were one of the first to cultivate this plant. Water lilies flourished along the Nile River for years until they were over-harvested and endangered. In modern times, flowers began reappearing, and people began cultivating them again in the 1800s and 1900s.
At this time, water lilies began to spread throughout North America and Europe. Over time, many people in North America began to assign the same significance to the water lily that various Eastern cultures had.
Water lilies are a part of about sixty different species of freshwater flowering plants, mainly native to temperate and tropical regions of the world. They also multiply rapidly, which is one of the reasons people coveted them.
Why Are People Drawn to Water Lilies?
Beauty will always draw people’s reverence – and what better example than the water lily perched precariously on the top of the water?
People have also become attached to water lilies because of how they grow. The root systems of the plants stretch down deep into the water to reach the mud below. They even use their adapted forms to pull in oxygen despite being underwater.
The idea of beauty emerging from the depths – from the mire and mud has long resonated with humankind—and will continue to draw our attention.
The idea that a plant fight so hard to survive while still producing beauty has inspired humanity for thousands of years. It is a picture of continuing to move forward no matter the challenges.
Conclusion
The water lily reflects life and abundance. It connects with universality and spirituality in every dimension and timeline. It also represents the cycle of life – living, dying, and being reborn.
These same themes surround the water lily in both Eastern and Western cultures.
One thing is sure – the water lily will always hold a place in the hearts of humanity. It is a connection point for us and the inspiration for a more hopeful future.
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