Ave Maria

As a young child, I had heard Ave Maria set to music, and I was aware that Catholics and football players prayed "Hail Mary," but for a surprisingly long time (maybe until I was 11 or 12?) I never made the connection between the two. Having been raised without any knowledge of Latin, I didn't know what ave meant, but I thought of it as likely meaning "grandmother" (because of Esperanto avo, "grandfather," which I correctly guessed was probably derived from Latin) or perhaps having something to do with birds (the class Aves). The relevance of birds was obscure, so I tended toward the former interpretation: Ave Maria probably meant something like "Grandmother Mary" -- as God's children might well address the woman called the "Mother of God." I never guessed that it simply meant "hail"!

I also noticed early on the similarity of ave to the name Eve, which struck me as a meaningful coincidence. Eve was also our "grandmother," of course, and Mary was the mother of the Second Adam, Jesus, just as Eve was symbolically the "mother" of the first Adam (who called her "the mother of all living" before they had had any children together).

Much later, when I became aware of Muhammad's apocryphal statement about the goddesses of Mecca -- "these are exalted birds, whose intercession is to be hoped for" -- that idea, too, became part of the cloud of association surrounding the phrase Ave Maria.

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Today I was washing the dishes and listening to the Verve song "Bitter Sweet Symphony," with its repeated line, "it's a bittersweet symphony, that's life," and it made me think of the old debate among Mormons over whether the fruit of the tree of life was bitter or sweet. Referring to the two trees of Eden, the Book of Mormon speaks of "the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter" (2 Nephi 2:15). The problem is that the fruit of the tree of life is said elsewhere to be "sweet above all that is sweet" (Alma 32:40-42), and the forbidden fruit is said to be "delicious to the taste and very desirable" -- so which fruit was bitter? When I was a missionary, one of my colleagues attempted to solve the riddle by proposing, mostly tongue-in-cheek, that the forbidden fruit was the coffee bean -- bitter but delicious, and of course forbidden to Mormons!

The bitter fruit debate passed briefly through my mind, and my attention turned to other things. I thought of the /x/ thread I linked in my November 15 post "Mandrakes, treasure-hunting, syzygy," in which one anon had, somewhat surprisingly, listed "Spelling and Etymology" as one of the factors that might bring about paranormal experiences. This made me wonder if there were any words that I used often without knowing their etymology. Not really, not in English, but then it occurred to me: a word I am in the habit or repeating 50 times a day every single day -- ave! I know now of course that it means "hail," not "grandmother" or "exalted bird," but I realized that I hadn't the faintest idea where the Latin word had come from or what other Indo-European words it might be related to. I couldn't even hazard a guess -- what a strangely opaque word! Our English hail obviously means to wish someone good health and is related to hale and heal and other such words, but where could ave possibly have come from?

After I finished with the dishes, I looked it up, and it turns out it's not an Indo-European word at all. It's of Semitic origin, borrowed from the Carthaginians, and the similarity to Eve is not a coincidence.

Borrowed with an unspelled /h/ from Punic *ḥawe ("live!", 2sg. imp.), cognate to Hebrew חוה‎ ("Eve"), and as avō from Punic *ḥawū (2pl. imp.), from Semitic root ḥ-w-y (live).

So Ave Maria is literally, etymologically, connecting Mary to Eve and to the tree of life. This reminded me of this striking passage from the Book of Mormon, in which Mary is equated with the tree of life:

And it came to pass after I had seen the tree [of life], I said unto the Spirit: I behold thou hast shown unto me the tree which is precious above all.

And he said unto me: What desirest thou?

And I said unto him: To know the interpretation thereof . . .

And it came to pass that he said unto me: Look! . . . And I beheld the city of Nazareth; and in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white.

And it came to pass that I saw the heavens open; and an angel came down and stood before me . . . And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God . . . Knowest thou the meaning of the tree . . . ?

Then I made the connection: I had just been thinking about the tree of life, and whether its fruit was bitter or sweet. Well, doesn't the name Mary itself mean "bitter," etymologically -- related to Marah, the bitter waters? And yet to Sancta Maria, "holy bitter," we pray, Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve! -- "Hail, our life, our sweetness, and our hope!"

Then there's Yeats's idea that the two trees, the sweet and the bitter, are really only one holy tree and its reflection, and that we undo the Fall when we "gaze no more in the bitter glass."

I think I'm starting to agree that there is something paranormal about etymology.