RUBUS SPP
.)
Plant range and properties: Blackberries grow throughout the northern parts of the world, and Appalachia is no exception. Blackberries, both native and invasive species, grow thick in old fields and on forest edges. Bramble patches, while pesky to move through when trampling about looking for herbs, are home to one of the most well-loved medicinal and magical plants in the mountains. The blackberry’s sharp thorns and sweet fruit position it at the gateway of gentle and fierce.
Medical and magical uses: According to the legendary southern folk herbalist Tommie Bass of Alabama, next to peach leaves, no other herb has such a distinguished use in the South. The high tannin content of blackberry roots and leaves makes them useful for skin ailments, sores, sore throats, and vomiting. They shine as a remedy for diarrhea and dysentery, or the “summer complaint” as it was once known, especially the tea made from the roots.
To make blackberry-root tea, add a teacup full of roots to a quart (1 L) of water and boil for 20 minutes. Take a swallow of the tea every time you have to run to the restroom.
You can also make tea from the rest of the plant, using one teaspoon of dried leaves or fresh or dried green fruits to one cup of water.
Blackberry jam and even wine made from the berries are also old remedies for “the trots.”
This thorny plant is involved in one of our most curious healing magics, the act of “passing through.” This may be a remnant of the notion of purification of blood guilt in ancient times. In this ritual, individuals or groups passed under gates or yokes, which stripped them of an attaching stigma. A stand of blackberry briars was made to resemble a passageway by burying the exploratory shoots of these prolific vining plants. The buried shoots would take root to form a true and natural tunnel. This circular space was then used magically as a portal to “pass through” sick children, people, and objects to cure them. Passing through rituals could also use horse collars, holes in trees, white oak sapling splits, and even the belly of a standing horse.
In one North Carolina tradition, to cure whooping cough, place the diseased person under a briar whose end has taken root in the ground, and they will be cured.
A similar cure for a child or adult with whooping cough can be effected by having the patient crawl under the bush three times forward and back.
JIMSONWEED, DATURA
(
DATURA STRAMONIUM
)
Note: This plant can be deadly.Datura contains tropane alkaloids, hyoscyamine, scopolamine, and atropine. Datura is sometimes sought after as a hallucinogen, but it is not intended for this purpose and can cause permanent psychosis or psychiatric disruption. This is due to the fact that determining the amount of alkaloids in each plant is impossible without scientific analysis. Do not handle this plant with bare hands or carelessly, and never ingest.
Plant range and properties: This plant has debatable botanical origins, but everywhere it grows it has been regarded as a powerful and dangerous beauty. Known as datura in most places, in Appalachia it is most commonly called jimsonweed. This is due to a story from Jamestown, Virginia, in which a cook mistook the plant for an edible green from his home country and poisoned his fellow men at the settlement. The narcotic and deliriant properties of the plant quickly made themselves known, as the poisoned men reacted to unseen forces and cried uncontrollably, among other terrible symptoms. This incident earned the plant the name “Jamestown weed,” which was eventually shortened to jimsonweed in the local dialect. Jimsonweed may have originated in South America, though it is now widespread throughout North America and considered noxious and invasive (though perhaps unfairly so).
Medical and magical uses: There are many South American Indigenous traditions of using this plant for magical and ritual purposes, though the people of Appalachia would not have known this historically. They would more likely have been familiar with the European and North American Indigenous uses of this plant.
Theophrastus describes dosages that will drive a man to permanent madness and death.
In Europe, datura was associated with witches and flying ointments, and brewers in Germany, Russia, and China used the seeds to lend their herbal beers narcotic properties. The long occult history of this plant was not so much lost as transformed in the mountains of Appalachia. There are some theories that “flying ointments,” or hallucinogenic salves reportedly made in the Middle Ages to give witches “spirit flight” during their Sabbaths, were in fact powerful pain ointments used by healers and herb people to soothe arthritic joints. Cherokee folk medicine throughout Appalachia employed teas made from these leaves for external pain, and used the leaves for asthma and similar uses. Some Western tribes employed the seeds in magical rituals.
In Appalachian folk medicine, jimsonweed is used for pain as a poultice of leaves mashed in hot water. This hot leaf mash is then applied to old injuries, swollen joints, and areas of the body afflicted with arthritis. The narcotic properties help to soothe these inflammations. Jimsonweed was also used for cancers, especially ones that were visible externally. Boils were also encouraged to come to a head with a hot jimsonweed-leaf poultice mixed with peach leaves. The jimsonweed leaves were also dried and smoked for asthma, often mixed with other herbs like mullein and rabbit tobacco to open the lungs. Jimsonweed was used in Black communities for whooping cough and worms when mixed with sugar and eaten. The tincture was used historically to help relieve tics and mania in people suffering from epilepsy.
European Appalachians brought with them their beliefs about the devilish associations of this plant, however, and it was often looked at with suspicion despite its pain-relieving properties. In Germany, folklore recounted that the plant was used in brothels as an aphrodisiac. This was whispered about into the mountains of Appalachia, and another name, the Devil’s Apple, was commonly used to describe the spiky, poisonous seedpods. Having a large amount of the green, strong-smelling ointment in one’s home could be taken as a sure sign of witchcraft, due to these old tales.
MAYAPPLE OR AMERICAN MANDRAKE
(
PODOPHYLLUM PELTATUM
)
Plant range and properties: The umbrella-like leaves of the mayapple dot the stream sides and the low, wet places of the mountain South in springtime. Unmistakable with their unusual palmate leaves and merry yellow fruits, this wild edible and poisonous plant is easy kin to sassafras and poke, with their varying reputations as magical, edible, medicinal, and sometimes deadly. Known also as the American mandrake, because of its comparable taproot shape, this plant has come to be associated with much of the fantastical lore of its European compatriot. The ripe fruit is the only nontoxic part of this plant, and it is quite edible, though legendary American botanist Asa Gray described it as “slightly acid, mawkish, eaten by pigs and boys.”
In Appalachia, harvesting mayapple is part of the root-digging tradition. The harvest and sale of the roots of plants like bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), sassafras (Sassafras albidum), ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), and goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) for medicinal purposes provided much-needed income in an often-challenging rural economy.
Medical and magical uses: In folk medicine, the roots of the mayapple were used by First Nations people in Appalachia as a vermifuge, to treat tumors and warts, and as a laxative. They also used tea made from the roots as a natural insecticide on potato plants and corn. Settlers came to use it for typhoid, dysentery, hepatitis, and cholera, and retained its Native use as a purgative. It was used ground and powdered to draw the poison out of snake bites. Today it is being researched as a cancer-fighting drug because of a unique chemical contained in the roots known as podophyllotoxin, which is used to synthesize an anti-tumor treatment. It has also been studied and used quite successfully to treat genital warts. It is, however, a poisonous plant and was used in certain tribes by those seeking to die by suicide.
The American mandrake has been used interchangeably for the European mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) since new settlers compared its gnarled roots to the solanaceous mandrakes of Europe, though the two species are unrelated. Its association with the European mandrake is evident in its other folk name, “the witch’s umbrella,” as it was said to be used by witches as a poison. The human-like forms both of these roots sometimes take on during their mysterious underground lives have fascinated people for thousands of years.
The root can also be used in the making of “alruna” or “alraunes.” These mysterious fetishes are simply roots from certain plants fashioned into the shape of a human and used for magical purposes. Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic and belief left a large fingerprint on Appalachian folk magic due to migration. One of these influences was the use of poppets or dollies. Made of wood, wax, or even plant roots, these dolls were fashioned after suspected evildoers or witches, and “worked on” by Charm Doctors and Witch Doctors to free victims from a magical attack. Roots were used much as they had been in Old Germany among the inhabitants of Pennsylvania, and as these colonists pushed southwards, they brought these magical practices with them. Mayapple was a prime root sought out for such magics.
There are many legends and taboos surrounding the harvest of both mandrake and mayapple, from the idea that the plant would cry out if lifted from the soil and render its listener dead upon hearing its wails, to the idea that the leaves would shine in the moonlight and transport their plucker high into the air. Joan of Arc herself was allegedly asked during her trial, “Who made your mandrake?” Some have speculated that these horror stories were generated to discourage the harvest of the European mandrake to ensure certain sellers a robust supply of this in-demand root.
In modern rootwork and conjure, the mayapple root is used to make a poppet, or as it is called by many Appalachian folk magic practitioners, a “dollie.” This image is then fixed with a paper bearing the name of a loved one and is used in magical workings for love.
A single root rolled in paper money and tied with the carrier’s own shoestring is also used as a talisman for conjuring wealth.
SASSAFRAS
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