Fig

The common fig is a deciduous tree or large shrub of the mulberry family, Moraceae, growing up to seven to ten metres, with smooth white bark and rough, fragrant leaves of three or five deep lobes. What we eat as the fruit is a hollow, fleshy vessel lined inside with tiny flowers, reached by a specialised wasp through a small opening at its tip. Native to the Mediterranean and to western and southern Asia, the tree thrives in dry, sunny, rocky ground. It may be the first plant people ever cultivated: sterile figs from about 9400 BC have been found at Gilgal I in the Jordan Valley. Greeks and Romans grew many kinds, and Spanish missionaries brought it to California in 1769. In Babylonian myth Ishtar took the form of a divine fig tree, and Kynes records that Eleusinian initiates sat where the first fig tree was found, that Dionysus was often shown crowned with fig leaves, that women at Bacchanalian festivals wore necklaces of figs for fecundity and that Egyptians laid figs in tombs as food for the afterlife. A raging bull tied to a fig tree, Culpeper claimed in a passage Northcote quotes, grows tame. In magic the fig serves fertility and love: Cunningham has a branch set before the door so that a traveller comes home safely, and gives a fig to charm someone, while Kynes uses fig juice as a ritual libation.