The concordance 11 witnesses

Ambrosia

Orientation

When Sarpedon falls before Troy, Apollo washes the corpse and anoints it with ambrosia, the ‘immortal oil.’ R. B. Onians builds the corpus’s most sustained account from details like this one: ambrosia is not wild honey and not, strictly, food, but the divine counterpart of mortal anointing oil, absorbed through the skin, known by its fragrance, the exclusive substance of the gods’ deathlessness. Nectar, the divine analogue of wine, stands opposite it, and Onians shows the familiar conflation of the two to be post-Homeric confusion. Jane Ellen Harrison complicates the celestial picture from below, recovering a ritual recipe for ambrosia whose immortalizing power belonged originally to chthonic cyclical regeneration rather than Olympian permanence. What looks like mythological trivia is, in the corpus, a precise inquiry into how the Greeks imagined immortality: as a substance, applied to a body, with a smell.

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In the library 11 receipted passages

Ambrosia, unlike such honey, is the stuff of immortality and is not available for men. Honey is freely eaten by mortals… So far from being thought to belong peculiarly to the gods, honey is not offered to them or associated with them in any way in either Homer or Hesiod.

Onians refutes the dominant hypothesis that ambrosia derives from wild honey, establishing instead that ambrosia is the exclusive substance of divine immortality, categorically distinct from anything available to mortals.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

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If we must think of ambrosia as a divine counterpart to the ἀλειφάρ possessed by men, i. e. to animal grease or its equivalent, olive-oil… Ambrosia gives off a pleasant smell just as do fat and oil.

Onians advances his central claim that ambrosia is the divine equivalent of mortal anointing oil or grease, infused through the skin and recognizable by its fragrance, not a food or drink in the ordinary sense.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

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ambrosia is defined as pure water, olive oil, and pankarpia… because in the pankarpia and the oil and the pure living water are the seeds for immortality, for next year’s reincarnation… its ancient immortality was of earth’s recurrent cycle of growth, not of heaven’s brazen and sterile immutability.

Harrison recovers a ritual recipe for ambrosia and argues its original immortalizing power was rooted in chthonic cyclical regeneration rather than in Olympian permanence, complicating purely celestial interpretations.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis

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the different interpretations… This later exchange of functions has fostered the idea that nectar and ambrosia were originally the same thing, but the Homeric evidence is much the fullest and the nearest in time to any origin and it differentiates, as we have seen, quite clearly between the functions of the two substances.

Onians demonstrates that post-Homeric conflation of nectar and ambrosia is a secondary development, and that the Homeric evidence maintains a rigorous functional distinction between the two divine substances.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis

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nectar should be the divine equivalent of the other form of nourishment which men thought proper to offer to the gods — wine. It is. The allusions above imply that it was liquid. Like wine it is ‘mixed’ in a κρατήρ and it is poured out like wine (οἰνοχοεῖ) for the feasting gods.

By identifying nectar as the divine analogue of wine, Onians clarifies the complementary opposition between nectar and ambrosia, each corresponding to a distinct mortal substance.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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Wash him with streams of water from the river, anoint him with immortal oil, ambrosia, and put immortal clothing on his body.

Homer’s direct equation of ambrosia with ‘immortal oil’ used to anoint Sarpedon’s corpse provides primary textual evidence for ambrosia’s unctuous, preservative function.

Homer, The Iliad, 2023supporting

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nectar, the drink of the gods, as ambrosia is their food, applied as a preservative against decay.

The Homeric lexicon establishes the standard ancient differentiation of ambrosia as divine food and preservative agent, distinguishing it from nectar as divine drink.

G, Autenrieth, Homeric Dictionarysupporting

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the mortified Psyche’s fragile ego is kept alive like a hydroponic plant, feeding nightly on the nectar of Eros’ love, i. e., on archetypal fantasy… Jung saw a transformation chamber in which the traumatized ego was broken down into its basic elements, dissolved, so to speak, in the nectar of the gods.

Kalsched deploys the figure of divine nectar — functionally contiguous with ambrosia — as a metaphor for the archetypal fantasy that sustains the traumatized psyche in its schizoid enclosure.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996aside

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a male messenger from heaven… gave her a honeycomb of paradise to eat and thus endowed her with immortality.

Jung cites a legend in which a paradisiacal honeycomb confers immortality, representing a structural parallel to ambrosia’s function as the substance of divine life within a mythological-alchemical context.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944aside

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