In the real Middle-earth all plants had powers beyond their biological qualities. They contained a vital life force, which could be released like a spirit. It cauterized, healed, mended and repelled invading malignant forces. Today, in low-lying wild fields of England, Wales and Ireland, some of these Middle-earth ‘power-plants’ species can still be found.
Vervain
The Anglo-Saxon herbal books often feature vervain, or verbena, among the healing concoctions and salves. Today this herb still thrives, growing up to two feet tall, with toothed leaves. From July to September, bees buzz and forage for nectar amongst the lilac, five-petalled flowers. The Old English translation of the Herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, a compendium of Latin texts, recorded that vervain drove away all poisons and was ‘said to be used by sorcerers’. And in the Lacnunga collection of magical medical remedies, along with rue, dill, periwinkle, mugwort, betony and other powerful herbs, vervain was an ingredient in a healing salve against the ‘demons of disease’. This somewhat general pharmaceutical indication makes it sound endearingly like the cure-all quack medicines of the old American Wild West, sold from the back of a wagon. But in fact, ancient European herbal practice used many plants which have today achieved recognition as having therapeutic qualities, and from which some modern medicines are prepared. For example, to cure a cough, the Lacnunga manuscript calls for: ‘… honey droppings and marche seed and dill seed. Pound the seeds small, mix into the droppings to thickness, and pepper well. Take three spoonfuls after the night’s fast.’ Today we would recognize this as an effective intervention for breaking up congestion.
Enchantment Of Plants
Herbal medicines were applied to patients directly. But another ingredient was often added: magic. Herbs were ‘enchanted’ with incantations and rituals before they were prepared for use as medicines, or as they were being administered to the patient. Even today, a popular name for vervain in Wales is ‘enchantment herb’, or ‘wizards’ herb’!
Tolkien included Anglo-Saxon magical plant medicine in The Lord of the Rings. When Frodo had been wounded by a dagger cut, the Strider lifted the blade of the offending knife and it disappeared like smoke in the air. It had evil magic. Aragorn grasped the remaining dagger hilt, and sang over it slowly and in an alien language to counter its force. Then he pulled some long leaves of a plant from the pouch at his belt. He called it Athelas, explaining that he had to journey a long distance to find it, locating it by its strong aroma. He boiled the leaves, and bathed Frodo’s wounded shoulder.
In ancient Europe, the Church authorities preached and legislated against the practice of using plants in a magical way, for it seemed to draw on an Otherworldly power that was outside the church’s jurisdiction; ‘Let no one enchant herbs!’ said St Eligius in AD 640. His plea fell on deaf ears, for the practice of magical medicine seemed to thrive. But certainly the Christian concern about the enchantment of healing plants being somehow a threat to their missionary activity was well-founded. For in the times of Middle-earth, a person’s health was considered to be, literally, a blessing.
Life-Force and Healing
The notion of a person’s well-being centred on the idea of wholeness. We can see this in the etymological relationship, still preserved in modern English, between the words heal, whole, health and holy. These concepts were still actively and intimately related for the Anglo-Saxons. A person’s physical health was linked with their psychological and spiritual vitality. This is how the intervention of ritual and ‘magic’ was thought to add to the immediate biological properties of a plant remedy. The Anglo-Saxon word ‘haelu’ meant good fortune, material prosperity, and health, along with spiritual blessing. From it is derived our word ‘heal’. This power could be passed on to a person through anyone with Otherworldly ‘connections’ – like a king granting wealth, a wizard or, later, a priest offering blessings, or it could be granted by an object of ‘power’ – like a magic ring or rune-carved necklace. When a person was ill, it meant that they had lost this general life-force of haelu, and may even be afflicted by a malevolent force of anti-haelu.
Haelu was like a generalized life-force. It was similar to more recently identified notions of ‘mana’ among some indigenous peoples – a kind of personal power and ‘good luck’ which kept a person safe and granted them various abilities, including the capacity to heal others.
Life-force was the source of all vitality. In a person it was believed to be generated in the head, and flowed like a stream of light into the marrow of the spine and from there into the limbs and crevices of the body. Power-plants help to control the channels through which the energy flowed. Since life-force was believed to emanate from the head, the experience of fevers must have felt like an upsurge in its production, in an attempt to guard against invading malevolent spirits, or elves’ arrows. The increase in life-force made the head feel hot, even to others. If the spirits continued their attack, life-force flowed down the spine like molten metal in a smith’s crucible and the entire body became hot.
But the possession of life-force was not restricted to people. The Anglo-Saxons believed in a generalized spirit force suffusing their cosmos. This view of a vital presence in the environment is today labelled ‘animism’. It implies a belief in a level of life that in our culture we reserve for human, or animal species only. It is a label redolent of the ‘primitive’ views documented by anthropologists among the indigenous cultures of the world. And yet in the recent resurgence of interest in complementary medicine, we are once again recognizing that the natural plant world has healing resources that might yield up more secrets if we pose the right questions.
Research projects are underway at Oxford University and other major medical centres into healing properties of plants used by indigenous healers in the Amazon, Africa and Australia. And explorations into the psychology of healing has shown how the state of mind of a person has a remarkable impact on their ability to resist infection by affecting the strength of the body’s immune response, and also in the recovery from serious and life-threatening illnesses. At New York University, a hospital-based study run by Professor of Nursing Dolores Kreiger, initiated a body of research which indicates that massaging a person’s ‘energy field’ which extends a few inches beyond the body, without physically touching them, resulted in both faster healing protocols than ordinary massage, and an increased haemoglobin level in the blood when compared to conventional massage techniques. And controlled trials at Stanford Research Institute demonstrated how jars containing seedlings, when touched daily by a spiritual healer, grew faster than identical jars of seeds touched only by a laboratory assistant. This dash of twenty-first century science shows that some of the features of Middle-earth magic are still thriving deep within the paradigms of a world view we assume to be on the opposite pole of rationality. They knew nothing of such studies a thousand years ago, but their experience convinced them that life-force permeated everything.
Mugwort and the Battle for Magic
The second half of the Middle-earth millennium saw a battle waged between the indigenous wizards and Christian missionaries to control magic. The Christians believed in much of it – their objection to its use was that it gained its powers from sources outside the blessings of the Church. For the missionaries this was both sacrilegious, and undermined politically their influence with the people of Old England.
We can see this power struggle as it focused on particular magical plants – like mugwort. It grows wild still in clumps 3–4 feet high, by roadsides and along the bottom of old hedges throughout lowland Britain. It has tiny red-brown flowers which appear in July and August. As well as being a plant for wizards and healers, it was used as protection by the general populace. This custom continued towards the end of Middle-earth, when it was incorporated into Christian practice – people picked, purified and strengthened it in the smoke of ritual bonfires on St John’s Eve, and then made it into garlands and hung it over doors to keep off, we are told, ‘all the powers of evil, including the spells of sorcerers’.
But earlier in Anglo-Saxon England, before the advent of Christianity, the plant had special significance not as a superstitious protection against sorcerers, but as a plant used on behalf of the populace by wizards in order to counteract malevolent spells made by other spellcasters. In the Lacnunga manuscript an entry called the ‘Lay of the Nine Herbs’ begins with an incantation to the powers of Mugwort:
Have in mind, Mugwort, what you made known,
What you laid down, at the great denouncing.
Una your name is, oldest of herbs, of might against thirty, and against three,
Of might against venom and the onflying,
Of might against the vile She who fares through the land.
In the lore of incantations, the number three and its multiples were traditionally employed to construct word magic, to weave a spell. Mugwort was believed to be able to counter such attempts to send malevolent magic. We can see from the way in which the herb was addressed by ‘incantations’ that its life-force or ‘spirit power’ was being addressed, while the onflying, the ‘She’, refers to the elves, who were sometimes depicted as agents of the Wyrd Sisters, the forces who determined fate.
Certainly the ‘spirit power’ of these ‘enchantments’ was recognized by the early Christian authorities, and they developed invocations for disarming the plants of their powers. For example, St Hildegard, a nun who lived from 1098 to 1179, came from Bingen, near the present town of Mainz, feared the power of the plant mandrake, and wrote:
When it is dug out of the earth, at once let it be put into running water for a day and a night, and thus all ill and evil humour which is in it is expelled, so that it is thus no longer of value for magical purposes. But when it is uprooted from the ground, if then it is laid down with the earth adhering to it which has not been removed … then it is an evil agent for much hurtful magic.
This hostile Christian view pictures the plant mandrake as retaining its healing power only while still in contact with the earth. But since it was the indigenous healers and wizards who employed this power, rather than Christian monks, it was depicted as ‘hurtful magic’ by Hildegard.
Christian Hallowing of Plants
Sometimes where the Christian authorities could not successfully outlaw a magical practice, they adopted it into Christian custom. Celandine is a common perennial, a member of the poppy family. It grows 1–2½ feet high, with yellow, four-petalled flowers. It is easily identified by the drop of poisonous, deep orange latex which is exuded if a stem is broken. This was once used as a cure for warts, and was also believed to be a cure for sore eyes. In the Lacnunga healing manuscript, the plant gatherer is instructed to: ‘Dig round a clump of celandine root, and take with thy two hands turned upwards, and sing thereover nine Paternosters; at the ninth, at “Deliver us from evil”, wrench it up; and take from that shoot and from others to make a little cup full, and then saturate them, and let him be fomented by a warm fire; he will soon be better.’
The spell seems to indicate that the stems be broken and the juice milked until a small cupful is obtained, and then the stems saturated, or covered with water. The patient takes the concoction and sits by the warmth of a fire. This incantation as written is obviously Christianized. Originally, it would have almost certainly involved the enchantment of the plants by singing incantations nine times (a number sacred to the Middle-earth heathens) over the plant before digging it up. St Eligius would have winced.
Similarly, vervain was Christianized, as in a prayer which made it a plant of Calvary: ‘Hallowed be thou, Vervain, as thou growest in the ground, For in the mount of Calvary there thou was first found. Thou healedst our Saviour Jesus Christ, and stanchedst his bleeding wound; In the name of the Father, the Son, and the holy Ghost, I take thee from the ground.’
Clearly this is meant as a Christian prayer to be used by people (perhaps as a step in their conversion) as they picked the plant for ‘magical medicine’. Further, the person who, a thousand years ago, recorded this remedy, wrote that the vervain was picked, crossed with the hand, and blessed with the charm, and then worn against ‘blasts’, a general category of illnesses caused by ‘ill winds’. From the praising lines, the indication of the herb’s power in staunching bleeding wounds, and in the making the sign of the cross over the herb and blessing it with ‘the charm’, we get some idea of the detailed process of enchantment.
Collecting Magical Plants
The indigenous peoples of Middle-earth collected their herbs and plants with very great care. They observed strictures concerning the location for collecting, the phase of the moon, and the particular individuals who were allowed to cut the plants from the ground.
The impeccably detailed rituals for collecting the plants, and the complexity and specificity of the preparations of them into salves and other concoctions, is evidence that the wizards saw plants as existing simultaneously on a physical and a spiritual level. Pliny, writing about the Celtic tribes in Britain several hundred years earlier, explains that the Celts gathered vervain at sunrise after a sacrifice to the earth ‘as an expiation’. And the maladies for which vervain was used by the Celtic tribes were not always of an organic nature, but to do with psyche or spirit. Pliny says that they believed that ‘When it was rubbed on the body all wishes were gratified; it dispelled fevers and other maladies; it was an antidote against serpents; and it conciliated hearts.’
There were various other procedures and taboos in collecting sacred plants, common to most ancient tribal groups. For example, the Roman writer Pliny, reporting on the Celts in Britain, also describes a herb which the Celts collected called selago which we cannot now identify. They believed it ‘preserved one from accident, and its smoke when burned healed maladies of the eye’. He explains that they culled it without the use of iron, and after a sacrifice of bread and wine. The person gathering it wore a white robe and went with unshod feet after washing them.
Another plant, samolus, was placed in drinking troughs as a remedy against disease in cattle. The person collecting the plant had to have fasted first. It could be pulled from the ground with the left hand only, and uprooted wholly. And the gatherer must not look behind him! Clearly, this ritual deals with life-force and magical powers well beyond any merely material qualities of the plant. In sum, collecting the above plants have included such ritual observances as fasting, washing and keeping the feet bare, wearing white, not using iron, using the left hand only, uprooting the whole plant, collecting at sunrise, not looking over the shoulder, maintaining silence, and sacrificing to the plant in ‘expiation’.
Expiation to whom, or what? The plant? Many of these practices were, as I have said, later incorporated into Christian worship in order to render a new and alien religion familiar, user-friendly. The Middle-earth practice of giving thanks to the plant being picked or harvested was incorporated into the Christian ritual by prayer, in which thanks and praise were accorded to the plants and to the powers of the Earth: ‘Ye (herbs) whom earth, parent of all, hath produced … this I pray, and beseech from you, be present here with your virtues, for she who created you hath herself promised that I may gather you with the goodwill of him on whom the art of medicine was bestowed, and grant for health’s sake good medicine by grace of your powers.’
It is remarkable that in this prayer, the source of creation of the herb was credited to the Earth in her feminine aspect apparently, for it refers to the ‘she who created you’ rather than to the masculine God of Christianity. Further, the plant is addressed directly, as in a magical tradition, rather than addressing God and asking Him for his strength and blessing to be applied to the plant (as in another incantation turned into a prayer directed to God: ‘Whatsoever herb thy power do(th) produce, give, I pray, with goodwill to all peoples to save them and grant me this my medicine’). The ‘him whom the art of medicine was bestowed’ was in this case the wizard about to collect the herb. The direction of his thought, and heart, is to the herb he is addressing; the sacred presence he is ‘expiating’ is the feminine aspect of Earth; Mother Earth.