Meandering Magic

Meandering Magic

• Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Thyme, Rosemary and Lavender all work for purifying the body and space as well as drawing love in- and figs, well, they have other gifts.

Herbs of Venus are said to be those tasting sweet, pleasant to smell, pleasant to touch and with beautifying qualities; they also tend to be used for ritual smokes of purification, protection or unhexing.  Some of these are simple kitchen herbs like rosemary and sage. All these I gathered by hand on Friday as the Full Blood Moon was rising.The world felt like it was about to heave a great breath before a ragged scream.  There's more than war in the air- there's plain, simple conflict coming to a head.  I choose to walk the path of destroying those things which bind me.

Fig is called "argument" in some floral folk symbolism and has been associated with sexual desire and shame.  Just sayin'.

Just one green woman's tea shelf.

In my family, if you need to remove the evil eye, you smudge and bathe and clean the house top to bottom, light candles on the ancestral altar.  This is a common occurrence in elements of American folk magic; cleaning the environment in which one resides, cleaning the air one breathes with burning herbs, cleaning the blood and body with water and cleaning the spiritual center of the home with light.  Mom's altar, my alter, my sisters, my auntie's- there is a common tool on all of them that serves as both food for the ancestors and poison to intrusive medicine; sage.  When we lived in the Southwest as kids, the sage smelled sweet and was always burned with tobacco, but up here it's often burned with dried cedar. 

Mimosa flower smells sweeter than all the perfume in Paris and one grows where I work.  Mimosas are associated with love in folklore, but also with powerful exorcisms and healing especially in the form of baths or tinctures.

"Well, they’ll stone you when you walk all alone,
They’ll stone you when you are walking home;
They’ll stone you and then say you are brave,
They’ll stone you when you are set down in your grave;
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned!"
-Bob Dylan, Rainy Day Women #12 &3 5

Is Hekate not the patron saint of dark green witches, poisoners, dreamers and herbalists alike?  Does she not guide the hand of the old and new witches to arts which involve wisdom of the plant world?  Be it Circe's Juniper Wand or Madea's Mandrakes; the rue of the Neapolitan witches who were said to have called her Dianom, and the rude poisons of the vicious green Flying Ointment?  Hekate is the queen of all witches who pull up roots and cut up baleful plants because those plants are her first children, the first witches she taught her art of Life and Death.  My key to her garden is a poppy, and it is to the spirits of my papavers that I commit my working in her name.  Hekate, mother of Green Witches who garden in sun and shadows, watch over me.