Note 85 — Chapter XIII · The Symbolism of Jade

Leonard W. King, who has gathered together the surviving evidence regarding the mysterious nig-gil-ma85 points out that the name is sometimes preceded by “the determinative for ‘pot’, ‘jar’, or ‘bowl’ ”, and is identical with the Semitic word mashkhalu. In the Tell-el-Amarna letters there are references to a mashkhalu of silver and a mashkhalu of stone (a silver vessel and a stone vessel). The nig-gil-ma may be simply a “jar” or “bowl”. “But”, says Mr. L. King, “the accompanying references to the ground, to its production from the ground, and to its springing up … suggest rather some kind of plant; and this, from its employment in magical rites, may also have given its name to a bowl or vessel which held it. A very similar plant was that found and lost by Gilgamesh, after his sojourn with Ut-napishtim86; it too had potent magical power, and bore a title descriptive of its peculiar virtue of transforming old age to youth.” The nig-gil-ma may therefore be a plant, a ship, a stone bowl or jar, or a vessel of silver (the moon metal). If we regard it as a symbol or avatar of the mother-goddess it was any of these things and all of these things—the Mother Pot, the inexhaustible womb of Nature, the Plant of Life containing “soul substance”, the red clay, the moon-silver, or, as in China, the jade of which the sacred vessel was made. The Great Mother’s herb-avatar was the ginseng (mandrake), as in the Egyptian Deluge story it was the red earth didi from Elephantine placed in the beer prepared for the slaughtering goddess Hathor-Sekhet as a surrogate of blood and a soporific drink; the mixture was “the giver of life”, the red aqua vitae, like the red wine and the juice of red berries in different areas.87 The mandrake was the didi of southern Europe and of China. Dr. Rendel Harris shows that the early Greek magicians and doctors referred to the male mandrake, which was white, and the female mandrake, which was black. The black mandrake was personified as the Black Aphrodite.88