You can see how handy gourds can be, and why people have grown and appreciated them with such devotion, a devotion both sacred and profane. According to legend, it was with a gourd-shaped vessel that the biblical Noah was lured into drunkenness; and according to a different legend, Gautama, later called the Buddha, observed that from his long fasting toward enlightenment, the skin on the top of his head had wrinkled up like an old gourd.
So gourds have also tendrilled their way into cultures through language, metaphor and legend. The Pima Indians believed that the gourd plant was first given to people by Navitco, a deity whom they honored every eight years. And there are stories from the Neur of the Sudan and the Wa of Indo-China that have the first human beings issuing forth from gourds.
The gourd in fable
To illustrate a point once, my friend Aesop told a clever one about a gourd and a pine. In one season a gourd grows up through a tree to the top of a tall pine. Feeling cocky about this, the gourd boasts to the tree about how quickly it grew to this great height, fewer days in number than the years it took the tree to do the same. Whereupon the pine replies that there it has stood long and fast through the heat of many summers and the cold of countless winters, yet the first frost will wither and topple the upstart gourd.
In the Popul Vuh — a pre-Columbian document of the Kiche people of Central America — a bomb is mentioned: a gourd filled with live hornets. We can only imagine, in a feud, how nice it would be to have a stash of those around the house.
Phallocryptology
One of the more unlikely and surprising of the uses that gourds have been put to, are the penis sheaths of New Guinea. These are fashioned from very long (the longer the better?) curved fruits that are carefully hollowed out and then decoratively carved. They are then worn over the male member (hence their anthropological designation, phallocrypts). It's anybody's guess as to what status these impart.
Of all the objets d' gourd that have been created by the hands of clever persons, perhaps the most charming of all are the Chinese pigon whistles. The whistles are small instruments made from tiny bamboo tubes and little gourds scraped to paper thinness. These are then attached to the tail feathers of flocks of pigeons, so that when the birds fly through the air the wind moving through the tubes produces a delicate and enchanting music. One's soul longs to join in such a flight of imagination!
And we'll let this perfectly enchanting practice from Peking be the last word on the subject.
