Some examples of people who wear saffron robes

ἡ ἄρκτος, by Lisa Cunningham

One of my Pandora stations plays a song called "Saffron Robe", by the band Centipede Eest. The chorus goes as follows:

I was wearing a knife in my back
You were wearing a saffron robe
Then you set yourself on fire
This situation's burning out of control

Who are these people, and why are they doing these things? I don't know. But these are the people I know of who wear or have worn saffron robes.

This is saffron. It's a spice. It can also be used
to dye clothes a bright yellow-orange color.

1. Some Buddhists monks.
   
   
2. Hindus who have renounced the world. According to Wikipedia, "Symbolically, a sannyasi casts his physical body into fire by wearing saffron robes when entering this phase, signifying purification of body through fire thus freeing the soul while the body is still alive."
   
   
3. Students at the School of Metaphysics, at their graduation ceremony. (Or so one of them told me.)
   
   
(* Apparently it was also worn for other functions in classical Greece. The Liddell-Scott lexicon defines krokoton as "a saffron-colored robe for state occasions, as for the festivals of Bacchus". There is also a verb, krokotophorein, meaning "to wear a saffron robe.")
4. Little girls in classical Greece, while doing a dance called the arkteuein ("acting like a bear") during a rite of passage at the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron.^{1, *}



These girls are doing the bear dance.

5. Priestesses of the Minoan goddess on the island of Thera, before it exploded.² The frescoes there also show girls harvesting crocuses and presenting them to the goddess, which suggests that it's considered sacred to the goddess. Other frescoes show robe presentation ceremonies.
   
   
6. Eos, the goddess of Dawn, according to Homer: "Dawn in her saffron robe came spreading light on all the world..."³
   
   
7. Hekate, according to an Orphic hymn: "Celestial, Chthonian, and Marine One, Lady of the Saffron Robe."⁴

This is a crocus. Saffron comes from its stigmas.

My initial observations are just that most of these examples are associated with either religions that started in India, or with goddesses in the Aegean. Do you know of other examples, or the reason, or what the song I mentioned is about? Please post it in the comments.

References

¹ Rockwell, David B. Giving Voice to Bear: North American Indian Myths, Rituals, and Images of the Bear. Lanham, MD: Roberts Rinehart : Distributed by National Book Network, 2003: 168.

² Castleden, Rodney. Atlantis Destroyed. New York: Routledge, 1998: 67.

³ Homer, Fitzgerald Robert. The Iliad. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974: 175.

⁴ “Orphic Hymn to Hekate.” Accessed January 29, 2014. http://www.hermeticfellowship.org/OrphicHymnHekate.html.

See also...

After writing this, I found these two interesting, informative series of articles about saffron.

Saffron Mother, by Elatia Harris, at 3 Quarks Daily. An extremely well-written series of three articles; the first part is about the use of saffron on Thera and includes pictures of the frescoes that I mentioned.

Ancient Cultic Associations of Saffron Crocus, by Paghat. An exploration of saffron symbolism in mythology. Among other things, it shows pictures of Hindu goddesses wearing saffron-colored clothing. Her site has articles about the lore of many other plants as well.

Why does this blog exist?

I will be using this blog to do the following things:

• To post topics that are somehow connected to mythology and folklore, that I find interesting, or funny, or confusing.
• To try to work out what I know, while I still know it. (I tend to forget things I read if I don't write them down.)
• To review or summarize books or articles I have read.
• Often, I will be hoping that somebody with more information will happen upon my blog, find my questions and explain it all to me.