PASSION OF CHRIST

Despite popular misconception, the passion flower has nothing to do with libido. Rather, it is related to the Passion of Christ, and when the first species were discovered in the Americas, they were seized upon by missionaries as a sign of the ‘work of God’.

It is not known which of the species was first to be discovered, but later descriptions were based on P. caerulea. The first drawings of a passion flower were brought to Europe by Emmanuel de Villegas, an Augustan friar. He travelled to Rome in 1609, where he showed them to a monastic scholar named Jacomo Bosio. Although Bosio did not believe that a flower could be so marvellously formed, he was eventually persuaded and considered it essential to show to the world this ‘Flos Passionis’.

All parts of the plant represented Christ’s Passion, and the fact that the flowers were in bud for weeks, and only opened for a day, was thought to be a sign that God had deliberately hidden their glories from ‘the heathen people of these countries until the time preordained by HIS Highest Majesty’.

The representative nature of the plants changed over time because colour and leaf shape vary among the species, but in the common P. caerulea, it can be seen as the 10 petals representing the 10 apostles, minus Peter and Judas; the three bracts represent the Trinity; the five-lobed leaves are the hands of his persecutors; the tendrils are the cords that bound Christ. The corona represents the crown of thorns, the three stigma the nails, and the five stamens the wounds of crucifixion.