Look at almost any website about orchids and you’ll discover that there is a Greek myth which explains how they came into being and how they got their name. The myth tells of Orchis, the son of a satyr and a nymph, who clearly inherited some of his father’s libidinous behaviour. He is said to have assaulted or even raped a priestess of Dionysus, the god of wine. The god took his revenge by having Orchis torn apart by wild beasts and then scattering the bits to the four winds. `His father was obviously distraught and begged for the gods to bring him back to life. In vain. However they did agree to transform each of the bits of his body into a flower which is named after him – in other words they became orchids. Sounds convincing doesn’t it – not very nice but then nobody’s ever claimed that Greek myths were pleasant!
There’s only one problem with the story….
…it has absolutely no foundation at all, not even in Greek myths. I said there is a Greek myth about Orchis but actually what I should have said is that there is a supposed Greek myth- because in fact the story doesn’t appear anywhere in classical texts and seems to have been invented by a French garden writer, Louis Liger, in 1704.
To be fair his account does borrow elements from genuine myths, such as those of Pentheus (who is torn apart) and Hyacinthus or Amaryllis who die and are transformed into a flower.
Unfortunately very little is known about Liger despite the fact that he was quite a prolific writer about agriculture and the rural economy. Even Wikipedia only has one and a half lines stating that he was born in Auxerre in 1658 and died near there in 1717. His books are available in French at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, but luckily one was translated into English by George London and Henry Wise as The Compleat Florist in 1706 very soon after it was first published in Paris.
The story of Orchis is only one of a whole series of classical/ pseudoclassical myths, each of which was accompanied by a moral. These would have appealed to the cultural elite of the day because they often refer or seem to refer to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which was enjoying popular revival at the time, as indeed, it was in Britain too. The moral attached to Orchis ends :
When we think of orchids today we probably think first of the cellophane-wrapped moth orchids found in every supermarket or petrol station, and then maybe we remember those other exotic looking symbols of luxury and exoticism, seen in hothouses or more upmarket commercial venues, which have their roots wrapped around a mossy branch to replicate their homes high up in the trees of rain forest.
It’s probably only later we recall that Britain and much of the temperate world have their own native orchid species. These are smaller but, on close inspection, no less exotic looking – but they’re also different because they have their roots in the earth. And of course it is these terrestrial orchids that were known to the ancient Greeks and that gave rise to their name.
Many terrestrial orchids have two bulbous looking roots which are rhizomes or tubers that store starch as food for the plant. One supplies the plant’s food for the current years growth and consequently gets smaller and wrinkled as its supply of starch gets used up, while the other grows larger as the supply of starch formed by the current years leaves for next years food increases. The two roots were thought to resemble particular parts of male anatomy and so the Greek used the same word ὄρχις for the plant as they did for testicles.
This led to other associations on the same theme. Theophrastus, the early Greek physician and herbalist in his Historia Plantarum or Enquiry into Plants recorded another orchid-related myth, based presumably on local folklore, that the larger rhizome given as “slep” a kind of porridge with goats milk gives sexual potency, while giving the smaller one decreases or inhibits it. His account is taken up by Pliny in his Natural History with the Greek ὄρχις becoming orchis in classical latin, and it’s clear that from then on all round the classical world orchids became increasingly associated with sex. For example the Roman playwright Petronius makes several references to their aphrodisiac properties in his play Satyricon, where characters drink a liquor made from orchid roots.
The work of these early writers were to remain the basis of western thinking about orchids for another thousand years but, despite that, orchids weren’t called orchids or even orchis until until the mid-16thc, instead the plants were then usually referred in herbals as “satyrions”.
It was the great Swiss physician and botanist Conrad Gesner who seems to have been the first to use the term, when he mentions “Orchis or Satyrion” and says they are good to treat what he calls ” ye falling evil.” From then until the early 19thc the two names – satyrion and orchis – go hand in hand, but alongside dozens of common names such as ‘naked man’, Italian lad’s weed, adder grass, or Dead men’s fingers.
Gesner was closely followed by William Turner, the father of English botany in his New Herball [three volumes 1551-1568] who picks up on their association with male anatomy and tells his readers : “There are divers kindes of orchis… ye other kindes are in other countrees called fox stones or bear stones, and they may after ye be called dog-stones.” Stones, as I’m sure you knew or could guess, was a common term for testicles too so the association lasted quite a long time.
This association is based on the ‘doctrine of signatures’, which suggested that the medicinal or other qualities of a plant was shown by its shape and appearance. In this case appropriately shaped plants and vegetables could enhance the sexual organs and improve sexual prowess. Several plants were thought to work in this way including [believe it or not] carrots and parsnips, but the most widely written about was Satyrion. By the 17thc orchid roots had become thought of as a very well known aphrodisiac.
For more on this see Jennifer Evan’s Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England]
John Parkinson’s Paradisi of 1629 begins to questions the connection, in a sign of the new approach to science by arguing that although he tried them as well as sea holly roots and tulip bulbs in sugar, he knew “not any that hath made any especial experiment” to prove or disprove it, also saying that he had “not eaten many” himself. However in his later book, Theatrum Botanicum of 1640, Parkinson quotes Discorides: “if men eate the greater they shall beget men children, and if women eate the lesser they shall bring forth women children… most of our apothecaries doe promiscuously take not only of both those rootes but of all sorts of Orchides.” The later 17th-century English botanist Nicholas Culpepper warned against over-indulgence. Writing in the British Herbal, he said: “The roots are to be used with discretion… they… provoke lust exceedingly which the dried and withered roots do restrain.”
“A Woman selling salops”, from The Costume of Great Britain by W.H. Pyne, 1805:
© The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum
You might be wondering how on earth people were able to consume orchid roots. The answer is they drank them in a drink called salep [sometimes spelled differently] made from the dried starchy substance in the the roots. The drink originated in Asia Minor, modern day Turkey where it is still popular. Like tea and coffee salep arrived in Britain in the second half of the 17thc, imported from the Ottoman Empire mainly for medicinal use. The first reference I can find is in a very short book with a very long title, Some Observations Made Upon the Root Called Serapias Or Salep imported from Turkey shewing its admirable virtues in preventing women’s miscarriages by Dr John Peachi published in 1694. There is no mention of any “lustful” properties. Salep became popular from the end of the century and surprisingly became a staple ingredient of a naval surgeon’s stock. It was promoted by James Lind in his Essay on diseases incidental to Europeans in hot climates on 1768 and was even carried by Captain Cook on his voyages to the Pacific.
A saloop stall depicted in an early nineteenth-century engraving (British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
More significantly salep could be bought from street sellers and salep houses across London and elsewhere throughout the 18thc and it became cheaper with the development of a home-grown industry using native orchids or imported American Sassafras tree roots which were also used to make root beer. This resulted in lower status for salep as it became a drink of the labouring class, and drunk in different places the more exotic tea and coffee which remained the drinks of choice of the middling sort and elite. However by the mid- 19thc salep had faded into obscurity as tea from the ever-expanding empire became cheaper and cheaper and replaced as the workers choice.
For more on salep see Freya Purcell’s 2022 article: “Getting to the Root of It: Saloop in Early Modern London”
However, you might be surprised to know that the orchid’s association with sex had also emerged in the Americas. That’s largely to do with the most famous/widely used orchid of all: Vanilla planifolia. Aztec rulers were known to have accepted vanilla pods as tributes from other tribes and when the Spanish arrived in 1520 they were offered vanilla- flavoured chocolate drinks. The first historian of the Conquest Francisco Hernandez, reported that the Aztec emperor Montezuma drank large quantities of chocolate flavoured with spices such as chilli and vanilla, which enabled him to satisfy his many wives. That might have shocked them, but early Europeans colonists apparently followed suit.
Vanilla planifolia is one of about a hundred species of orchids in the vanilla family, which are mostly climbers and scramblers. It can climb up to 20 m and was also used for many medicinal purposes, but its the aphrodisiac properties “learned” from the Aztecs which were remembered when vanilla reached Europe, probably within 20 years of Columbus, reaching the Americas.
Although the seeds were bought back there was no success in getting vanilla to grow in Europe. So at first it was considered a very expensive aromatic used mainly to flavour chocolate, until Hugh Morgan one of Elizabeth’s I’s physicians and apothecaries used it for flavouring “sweetmeats” which began its rise to being one of the world’s favourite flavours.
But even the name of this new world orchid carries explicit sexual connotations because when they arrived in Spain the vanilla pods were named after their shape, vaynilla, a diminutive of vayna derived from Latin, vagina, meaning sheath. The Spanish word vaynilla became corrupted into Dutch and then English as vanilla with the first printed occurrence in 1658.
Confusion must have reigned when the first tropical and sub-tropical orchids began to arrive in Europe in the 18thc. They were not terrestrial but epiphytic meaning they grew on another plant, although they didn’t live off the host plant as a parasite. It wasn’t until Carl Linnaeus began to set out a new system of classification that things began to get clearer. In his first attempt at classifying plants Genera plantarum in 1737 he identified 38 species of orchids. By the time he published his revised classification in the more famous Species Plantarum in 1753 there were 62, and when the second edition came out 10 years later there were 102 known sorts.
Linnaeus named the order Orchidae and subdivided it into 8 groups or genera which included ones named for orchis and satyrions. However the term orchis continued to be used quite widely for another 150 or so years, while the word orchid doesn’t get used according to the OED until its used in a letter of 1843, before entering more common usage in John Lindley’s School Botany of 1845. By then the hothouses of the European elite were being rapidly filled with newly imported tropical orchids and the name became commonplace.
The introduction of tropical orchids did not mean that Liger’s Orchis myth had been forgotten. In fact it took hold and gets picked up and repeated by many 19thc writers. It appears in Flora Historica by Henry Philips published in 1824, which is copied word for word in John Newman’s Illustrated Botany 1846, and then again by John Keese’s The Floral Keepsake 1850 in the description of Cypredium insigne, the Bengal Ladies Slipper orchid and again in Richard Folkard’s Plant lore, legends, and lyrics.
The myth leapt over the Atlantic to re-appear in 1880 in Thomas Meehan’s The Native Flowers and Ferns of the United States although the story was updated for more “morally sensitive” [for which maybe you can read prudish] times. Meehan says Orchis “was one of the most dissolute of the heathen gods, and excited the resentment of one of the priestesses of Bacchus, who stirred up some of the male attendants at the festival of Bacchus to redress the insults offered to her, whereupon they fell upon him, and tore him to pieces. The general verdict of his co-deities was that it “served him right,”
It becomes even more tame in Grace Niles’ Bog-Trotting for Orchids published in 1904 [p.109] where Orchis “failed to observe the rules of politeness while attending a festival of Bacchus, and offended one of the priestesses with his rude behaviour. He was reported to the attendants for punishment, who in anger tore him to pieces. His father Patellanus, and his mother, that sweet nymph Acolasia, sought the co-deities’ influence, who, it sought the co-deities’ influence, who, it is said, urged the superior gods to command a flower to rise from the earth perpetuating the name and memory of their son”
Nor does Liger’s invention stop there. Apart from Jim Endersby’s Orchid: A cultural history the other serious major book about orchid legends is Luigi Berliocchi’s The Orchid in Lore and Legend which was first published in English in 2000. In that the author says clearly that Orchis is “a passionate youth, the son of a nymph, from whom he received beauty, and of a satyr, who added the gift of a robust libido” who having attempted to rape the priestess, “perhaps, of his privileged birth, had foolishly imagined himself immune to the Fates, who would swoop to punish any hubris. Punishment being tailored to the crime, his came naturally enough from the animal world into which he had sunk— Orchis was torn limb from limb by wild beasts. Destiny was thus fulfilled, justice done, and the natural and social order re-established.” Berliocchi’s version of events has been endlessly repeated usually without any acknowledgement ever since. That’s unfortunate because he sometimes misquotes, rewrites or mistranslates extracts from his sources.
For more information, I’d highly recommend Jim Endersby’s Orchid: A Cultural History, (2016), for a wonderful mix of information and humour covering as it does, not only the the history and legends about orchids, but their place in popular culture. I’ve also written other posts about orchids which you can find at:
The Garden History Blog 
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