Why Onions Were Once Too Sacred to Be Eaten

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Down to Earth Series · 13 pages

The core passage is from Isaac Myer's Qabbalah: The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol or Avicebron, published by the author in Philadelphia in 1888 in an edition of 350 copies and reprinted in 1988 by Wizards Bookshelf as part of their Secret Doctrine Reference Series with an introductory review by H.P. Blavatsky. The excerpt is from Appendix C, “Construction of the Akkadian, Chaldean, and Babylonian Universe,” page 451. Blavatsky's review of Myer, published in Lucifer Vol. III (18) of February 1889, is given in full in this library under the title “Blavatsky on the Qabbalah by Isaac Myer” in the Blavatsky Speaks Series.

Myer's note is brief and the compilation builds outward from it. An idea of the Egyptians and Hebrews, he writes, was that the universe was depicted by the layers of an onion, the Egyptians having considered that vegetable in early times too sacred to be eaten — and he adds that the Mohammedans and Russians, from the onion-shaped domes of their sacred buildings, seem to have held a similar idea. The compilation then sets a second observation beside it drawn from anatomy: that the human ovum, on dissection, is composed like an onion of concentric layers of flat cells. The remainder of the document assembles the supporting material for reading the vegetable as a figure of concentric worlds rather than as a dietary curiosity, so that the taboo is presented as a consequence of what the onion was taken to represent.

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