Laurel wreaths were not part of academic insignia from the very beginning. In the early conferment ceremonies of the first universities, master’s graduands were vetted by the learned community of masters before being awarded their degree and found eligible for the teaching profession and, last but not least, joining the ranks of their peers. The new holders of master’s degrees were given red hats, which were referred to by their Latin names of biretta or pileus. The laurel wreath only later entered the academic world.
According to surviving sources, a laurel wreath was first given to a holder of a master’s degree as late as 1315 at the University of Padua. On 3 December the university crowned the historian and poet Albertino Mussato with a laurel wreath as a recognition of his endeavours for the university and the city of Padua in his position as ambassador to the court of Henry VII, the Holy Roman Emperor. At the time, the Italian Renaissance was evolving into a broader cultural trend marked by the idolisation of antiquity. In this spirit, Latin-language poetry became one of the great ideals of humanism, and Italian towns, princes and universities began to crown poets with laurel wreaths. From this period date the well-known portraits of Dante Alighieri and Petrarch, both wearing laurel wreaths, as well as the title Poet Laureate adopted in the court of England, that allude to the custom of awarding great poets with a laurel wreath. The portraits of Dante and Petrarch depict them wearing two insignia of the master’s degree, the established red cap and the more timely laurel wreath. It was not until 1341 that Petrarch was crowned with a laurel wreath in Rome by the senate and the city state.
In the Middle Ages, the laurel wreath was also regarded as the crown of late antiquity Christian martyrs, as can be seen in the mosaic depicting a procession of saints created by Byzantine masters in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. The laurel wreaths worn by victorious sports heroes and gladiators in the arenas of ancient Rome were transformed into golden wreaths, adorned with gems, crowning and honouring the different kinds of victories achieved by saints in their spiritual struggles and by persecuted Christian martyrs who sacrificed their lives.
In old Finnish literature, sometimes reference was made to the ‘coronation of master’s graduands’ instead of ‘conferment of master’s graduands’. This can be traced to the Swedish expression lagerkröning, crowning with laurels, which, in turn, is derived from the Latin word corona, which originally meant a wreath or a circle, and later evolved to also mean a crown. Roman emperors wore a golden laurel wreath as a sign of victory, similar to their victorious generals. These golden wreaths served as one of the early models for the crowns of medieval kings.
In Rome, similar to ancient Greece, the laurel was a sacred tree. Laurel groves were believed to be the sacred dwellings of gods, nymphs and similar mythic spirits. Roman laurel wreaths were symbols of victory that were used to crown generals leading their victorious troops home in a triumph. The triumphant and crowned generals were accompanied by an officer or slave whose task was to whisper “Memento mori (remember you are mortal)” in their ear to ensure that the celebrated heroes would not get any ideas in their heads surpassing their rank and rights. During the reign of Augustus, the laurel wreath and triumphs became an exclusive right of the imperial family. According to legend, Augustus’ spouse and future Empress Livia saw an eagle snatch a white hen in its talons and then drop it in her lap. In its beak, the hen held a branch of a laurel tree, which Livia, at the counsel of her augurs, planted in the garden of her villa outside Rome, called Ad Gallinas (chicken pen). Both the eagle and the chicken were birds used by ancient Etruscan augurs, i.e., priests and prophesiers, in their visions. This laurel branch, sent by gods and marked by omens, grew into a laurel grove, which according to legend, provided the laurel leaves for the wreaths of triumph for the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The same legend has it that the entire laurel grove died shortly before the overthrow of Nero, the last emperor of the dynasty in the Year of the Four Emperors in CE 69.
Associating laurel wreaths with prophesy was not a Roman invention, but originated in Greece. In ancient Greece, the laurel tree was the sacred tree of the sun god Apollo, a master of archery and healing diseases. Apollo’s temple in Delphi was the venue of the Pythian Games, which together with the Olympic and Isthmian Games, were the greatest sports festivals in ancient Greece. Similar to the modern Olympic Games, originally poetry and other art forms were included in the competition. Victorious poets were awarded with Apollo’s wreaths; after all, Apollo was the leader of the Muses and the god of music and poetry. The name of the Pythian Games originates from the mythic serpent Python, which has given its name to the modern genus of snakes. According to the myth, Python lived in a cave in Delphi and terrorised the area, until Apollo killed the serpent with his arrows. As Python was of divine origin, Apollo founded the games to make amends for his deed and pay tribute to the serpent. In ancient times, various games were originally also part of funerary ceremonies, such as the Roman gladiatorial combat, which started as an element of the funeral rites of statesmen and the aristocracy, with the losing gladiator being sacrificed to the spirit of the deceased.
Delphi was the seat of the most famous oracle of ancient Greece. Apollo’s high priestess Pythia prophesied to the Greeks seeking advice from the gods by citing verses, sent by Apollo, about future events. Pythia prophesied in a trance, the origin of which has raised heated debate over centuries. It was assumed that Pythia's ecstatic state was induced by vulcanic vapours filling the adyton, her chamber. However, excavations at Delphi have not discovered such a chamber, and scientists disagree whether the local bedrock would be able to produce such vapours. In Pausanias’ and Strabo’s historical depictions, Pythia carries a laurel branch and chews on laurel leaves; both the oracle and the people who received advice from her wear laurel wreaths. In the 19th century in particular, this inspired scholars to suspect that the laurel leaves were the source of the divine trance. Although laurel leaves contain a trace of hydrogen cyanide, they contain no hallucinogens. From time to time it has been speculated that the culprit might have been a related species of laurel, which is more toxic, namely Daphne mezereum. However, classical writers starting with Pliny the Elder clearly name the Delphi laurel as distinct from other laurels. As it turns out, laurel leaves were not the source of Pythia’s ecstasy, but rather, she just used them to purify her mouth before speaking divine and sacred words about the future. The people who received advice from the oracle wore wreaths made of Delphi laurel upon their return to their hometowns to deliver the sacred words and truth of the god Apollo. In other words, the laurel wreath was a sign of divine knowledge received from beyond the tangible world. At the same time, the laurel wreath gave some protection from bandits and enemies during the voyage home, as harming travellers who were under divine protection was believed to result in retribution from the gods. Apollo’s wrath, which sent arrows carrying diseases, was especially feared.
In Greek mythology, the relationship between Apollo and the laurel tree was explained by the myth of Apollo and Daphne. According to the story, Daphne was a beautiful nymph, the daughter of the river god, with whom Apollo falls in love after being struck by Eros’ arrow of passion while Daphne is struck by an arrow of aversion. The reason for the arrows was a feud between Eros and Apollo over an entirely different matter, in the typical complex soap opera characterising the plots of Greek myths. The sun god pursues the nymph, who in order to escape from the god, asks her father (or, in other versions of the story, Zeus, the king of the gods) to transform her into something else. The river god Peneus transforms his daughter into a laurel tree, whose branches the grief-stricken Apollo uses to make a wreath. However, this myth has been created in retrospect to explain an existing custom, rite or phenomenon. In the Greek language, daphne means laurel. This metamorphosis is said to have taken place in the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly, famous for its laurel groves. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the most renowned variant of this myth and has inspired many artists in European history, the most famous example being Bernini's sculpture Apollo and Daphne in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.
Before the arrival of the cult of Apollo to Greece from Asia Minor, during the Mycenean and even during the Minoan era, Delphi is assumed to have been the shrine of Ge, the goddess of Earth (Gaia in ancient Greece), later known as Athena. Python, the serpent killed by Apollo, was a sacred animal of the earth that moved between the underworld and the sphere of humans above ground. Snakes were believed to have many mystic powers, such as the secret to immortality, because it was thought that they were capable of rebirth each time they shed their skin. In fact, discoveries from Minoan palaces in Crete include statues of deities holding two snakes in their hands, and the same symbol features in Bronze Age runestones found far up North in Gotland. In later mythology, two snakes appear in the myth of Heracles. In this myth Hera, the queen of the sky, sends two snakes to kill the infant Heracles, Zeus's demigod son, in his cradle, but the infant strangles the sacred snakes to death. Sacred snakes were associated with the cult of deities reigning over the fruits of the earth. A possible remnant of this cult is the custom familiar from 19th century rural Finland, which included keeping sacred snakes in the cow sheds with cow's milk to drink to serve as guardians, whose deaths were believed to predict the demise of the cattle. Equivalent to the ancient Finnish belief in the protecting power of Rauni, the spouse of the weather god Ukko, against lightning, was the belief among Mediterranean peoples in the power of the laurel tree to protect against lightning, due to the cracking sound the laurel makes when burning. Sacred groves, sacrificial stones and snakes are strongly linked to the cult of venerating ancestors; in agricultural spiritism, cultivated land is believed to remain in the possession of the forefathers who cleared the land for cultivation in the first place. In Greek mythology, blood sacrifice played an important role in nekyia, places where spirits of the dead, after being offered blood, gained the ability to speak. Since these spirits were unaffected by time, they were able to share future events with epic heroes, such as Odysseus and Aeneid. Seeking knowledge from the underworld evolved into an independent topos in epic literature, of which a Finnish example is Väinämöinen’s journey to Tuonela to obtain the words needed for building a boat.
Delphi’s ancient status as a sacred place and site for rituals is reflected in the sporadic mentions of the ‘ritual of the hut and the boy’ by Greek writers. For the ritual, a hut was built in a laurel grove, and a boy was selected by drawing lots to lead the priests of the temple to destroy the hut and to ‘flee’ to the Vale of Tempe in Thessaly. In Tempe the boy and the priests gathered laurel branches and returned back to Delphi carrying the branches in a triumph. It is thought that the ritual was based on a play symbolising the death of an ancient sacrificial king and the rebirth of a new king. The sacred laurel tree symbolised sanctification and purification from sin.
Also located in Delphi was the centre of the ancient Greek world, the Omphalos, which was believed to mark the place where two eagles, sent from Olympus to the east and to the west by the king of gods Zeus, crossed paths. It is likely that the Omphalos was the sacrificial stone of an earlier cult of the goddess of the earth, left in the sacred laurel grove when the priests of Apollo took over the temple. However, a woman continued to serve as the prophet and spokesperson of the deity in the form of Pythia. It was believed that the deity would speak through a woman only, even if sovereignty over the sacred grove had been transferred to the sun god Apollo, thanks to the myth of Python. Apart from making prophesies in a trance, it has been proposed that Pythia interpreted the rustling of leaves or the forms of shadows cast on the ground by trees in the sacred grove, as did the oracle Dodona in Epirus in the sacred oak grove of Zeus.
The nature of the ceremonies in early Delphi can be deduced from the ceremonies of ancient Crete, which was spared from the migration of Dorian tribes. In Crete, in the sacred grove of the goddess Hera, priestesses sacrificed animals on a sacred stone and drank the blood of sacrificed bulls to induce a trance and prophesy to the king of the city. Their blood was also needed in the nekyia, in other words, in necromancy. Also in Crete, laurel trees marked the boundaries around the sacrificial site of a sacred place. It is possible that one of the beliefs of the Neolithic bull cult was that bull’s blood was toxic to all other than deities, as the blood of this powerful animal was thought to contain this exact power.
The light golden flowers of the laurel tree develop into small berries that, as they ripen, turn from green to red and finally black. The red colour of laurel berries may have been associated with the blood sacrifices performed in laurel groves, which together with the scent of the tree has resulted in its sacred status. The English word bachelor derives via French from the Latin word for the laurel berry, baccalaureus; after all, out of the laurel berry grows the laurel tree that provides the leaves for the wreaths bestowed on master’s graduands.
In ancient Egypt, laurel branches were among the materials to fabricate the crown of the immortal Osiris, the lord of the underworld, according to the spells in the Book of the Dead. In the funeral rites of the New Kingdom, the wreath was laid on the image of a face on the sarcophagus, and this tradition of the 'crown of the righteous' continued until the Roman Empire took over Egypt. This crown of life was likened to the crown of the sun god Ra. Like Ra, Apollo of Delphi was a sun god, and the link between light and knowledge is self-evident. The connection of solar deities to the laurel tree makes sense, considering that laurel groves on the shores of the Mediterranean send off a strong aroma at sunrise, as the first rays of the sun begin to warm the laurel leaves, causing them to secrete large quantities of etheric oil before the rising wind mixes the scent with currents of air.
An aromatic tree species, laurel leaves secrete a spicy scent. Like many other plants that secrete odours pleasing the human nose, the laurel tree has, since time immemorial, been used as a medication, a spice and as an element in rituals. The pleasant scent of laurel has been used to purify things considered impure and to sanctify things or locations needing sanctifying. The laurel tree and sacred knowledge extending beyond the everyday have been intertwined since the beginning of history.
Pasi Pykälistö, MA
(Text last updated on 13 May 2024)