The Initiate's Crown of Thorns

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 5 pages

A short exchange from Lucifer of August 1888, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings X under the heading The Chaste Tree. A correspondent, W.N. Gale, asks for the botanical name of the Agnus Castus plant, what authority there is for supposing Christ was crowned with acanthus, and whether any of that family is indigenous to Syria — noting that Loudon gives Paliurus australis, Christ's Thorn, of the order Rhamni as the probable plant, and that Hasselquist thought it a kind of buckthorn, called Spina Christi by Linnaeus, which Gale had himself received from Syria where it is common and bears a small yellow berry.

Blavatsky's reply describes the Agnus Castus, after Loudon, as a species of Vitex, the chaste tree, from agnos, a willow-like tree, the Greek word being close to agnos meaning chaste and so giving it the name. On the crown itself she claims no authority beyond probability, but argues for the acanthus as a herbaceous prickly genus with protruding thorns, most common in Palestine and Asia Minor though as common in India, and used there, in Syria and elsewhere as part of the paraphernalia of initiation during the Mysteries — which is why this short piece sits in a section on initiates, alongside the treatment of the same wreath in Samson and Hercules.

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