Perfume of Love 
In fact, the fruit of the Old World mandrake is known to have the scent of fresh human sweat, and I believe that is the reason it came to be used in love magic.
The closest we've come to successfully linking the magical and material worlds in the past is through the Doctrine of Signatures. The Doctrine of Signatures is an ancient way of looking at plants that goes back at least as far as Plato, although in its simplest form, in Western botanical medicine, it was most developed by Jacob Boehme in the 1600s and by William Cole in The Art of Simpling (1656). It provided a direct link between the material and the magical, and magic workers of the past were familiar with it, as it was a prevalent idea in medieval society.
The primitive version of the Doctrine of Signatures most frequently bandied about is that a specific plant part signifies its medicinal use by its resemblance to the body part it treats—the classic example being lungwort, which has spots on its leaves that resemble the holes of the bronchial tubes in the lungs.
The true Doctrine of Signatures is not as mechanical as that, however. The alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) extended the doctrine from plants to people, other animals, celestial objects like the moon, and features of the landscape like rivers. He wrote that any natural object with lines, veins, wrinkles, or colors can be interpreted as having meaning and can tell us something about its nature. He considered that the Archeus, the lowest aspect of the astral plane that pervades all things, created signs in everything and argued that the art of recognizing signatures (which he extended to divinatory methods like palmistry, geomancy, hydromancy, pyromancy, and so on) in nature is a part of astronomy. Perhaps that was true for medieval astronomers, who were more mages than scientists, but the art of reading signatures has been and continues to be the stock in trade for many magic workers today.
Paracelsus warned that these signs could appear in a confusing mix, which he likened to a council meeting where everyone wants to have their way and the resolutions adopted end up being foolish. As an example, a plant may have thorns (Mars) but also lush, sweetly scented flowers (Venus). It may be a perennial, which tends to indicate that it works in the long term (Saturn). It may like to grow in sun (solar), but with cool, wet feet (lunar). It may have small, hard fruits (Jupiter) and a dill-like smell (Mercury). A wise person knows how to sift through all these competing signs to choose which part of the plant is most apt for the situation at hand. So we must be careful when we make use of signatures to determine which of them is most appropriate, most “true” for our purpose.
This is precisely the point that those who mock the Doctrine of Signatures miss—anything can contain within itself multiple signatures. It is the skill of the interpreter that determines whether the plant part indicated is usable in a particular situation or not. Our power here lies in the ability to go through all the signatures of any plant and find the one that is the most fitting for the work involved. That ability to sift and sort through a variety of information about a plant is part of the magic practitioner's job.
Today, practitioners of magic have come to rely, perhaps a bit too much, on tables of correspondence when dealing with plants. It is true that the characteristics of planetary rulership that are always a part of tables of correspondence tend to cross cultural boundaries in a way few other indicators do. People of all cultures all over the world and in every era have been able to see the planets. Many cultures have assigned values to them, and often these values are surprisingly similar. This, to my mind, points out an underlying verification of planetary characteristics.
Do these characteristics or this energy have anything to do with the planets themselves? I honestly don't think that matters. It's something we can chat about while sitting on the porch on a summer night, but otherwise . . . ? What matters in my experience is that these characteristics identify particular types of energy streams that we can grasp and make use of in magical operations.
Tables can be very helpful when you are starting out in magic, because they give you a sense of a general tendency—for instance, why a particular plant is associated with Mars and is therefore good for protection. But you have to be able to think for yourself and not be dependent on planetary tables of correspondence. You should be able to look at any plant—whether or not it is included in a table or even established in magical lore—and determine by examining its appearance and behavior which planet rules it. From there, you can hypothesize about which parts of the plant are good for which magical task, knowing that each part and method of preparation will yield different results.
Knowledge that has been handed down, whether by tradition or in books, is only a foundation. The superstructure of knowledge is built on this foundation by folks working individually and directly with the natural world, concluding and practicing based on that knowledge, and building more on their own conclusions in turn. In other words, the book of magic is written by each individual and is a combination of lore and that person's own experience. I think that, when we look at some common practices in magic, we see evidence of this type of building of a personal magical system in items like a magical journal, or Book of Shadows, or whatever we want to call it. These have become somewhat corrupted in our society, as some people simply copy spells from others. On a deeper level, however, I think these records represent a personal body of magic built upon a blend of received lore and lived experience in the garden and with the spirits. What I want this book to do for you is to show you how you can build on what you already know about the witching herbs from your reading or from tradition by getting you out there in the garden and observing and working to contact plant spirits. By doing this, you create your own personal magic that works best for you in the here and now. That is real magical power, in my opinion.
Where to begin, then?
The Doctrine of Signatures can be extremely helpful, but I believe that we can take it much further in order to get closer to understanding the spirit of a plant. We can look at the details and patterns of the plant in order to arrive at a deep understanding of the plant spirit. This approach assumes that everything about a plant means something—and probably more than one thing. Everything about a plant—the shape and color and smell of its flowers, how the leaves grasp the stalk, how it goes about reproducing itself and spreading its children, where it likes to grow, how it behaves with other plants, how it responds to animals—has meaning for the magic of that plant and is a signifier of the plant spirit's identity. These attributes are signatures of the plant's spirit and its magical abilities.
This kind of interpretation goes back to the interpretation of sacred texts in ancient times. Just as ancient scholars looked at a holy text on the level of individual words in order to tease out information about the divine spirit that inspired the text, so we can “read” a plant to discover a path to its magic and spirit. What is especially attractive to me about this method is that not only can we use it to find what may be hidden about a plant but also that our method for doing so is based solidly in the material world. It is not all personal gnosis—which can be insightful but can also be a bunch of ignorant baloney or wishful thinking. We can see the link between the material and the spiritual or magical in a rudimentary form in the Doctrine of Signatures. For instance, we decide that if a plant has thorns, it's a Mars plant, because thorns are tiny weapons and Mars is a warrior (or an angry red planet). But does that say something about the spirit of the plant? Let's look closer.
Lore doesn't have to come from a grimoire or a high priestess. It can come from any part of our culture, any practice with a plant. One of the first things I look at when I want to learn about the magic of an herb is how it has been used medicinally. Information about the medicinal actions of herbs tends to be widely available and to involve little axe-grinding, in contrast to any written or even spoken material you may gather about an herb's magical uses. One of my favorite texts to consult for herbal medicine is Bartram's Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine. This British book is founded on a practice of herbal medicine that is a bit more rigorous than what we find here in the United States and includes many traditional herbs that are not part of American herbal medicine anymore.
For instance, if herbal medicine tells you that an herb is a stimulant, you have justification for identifying it provisionally as a Mercury herb and can look at other aspects of the herb (leaf shape, scent, growth pattern) to bolster that identification. Having established for yourself that an herb is ruled by Mercury, you can then go on to examine whether it may be helpful in rituals for the acquisition of particular magical skills or charms to improve communication between two people.
By doing this, you never need have recourse to a table of correspondence or feel concerned that an herb in your environment that attracts you—perhaps something native to your area—is not listed in any table you can find or has not been addressed in any magical context. You can begin to know that herb starting with information about its medicinal use.
I often go further and examine an herb's chemical properties. A good source for that is a website called Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Database (ars-grin.gov/duke/plants.html), which lists the various chemical components of a large number of herbs. Examining these components can reveal unsuspected aspects and potentialities of an herb—although often, the most potent chemicals are volatiles (things we can smell), and we can notice them right away when handling the herb.
English lavender, for example, is typically considered a Mercury herb, but the list of chemical components on the Dr. Duke website gives camphor as a component of its flowers. Camphor is typically connected to the Moon, since it's cooling and white and its scent is cold. If you click on camphor in that list, you find all the properties of camphor—for instance, that it's a stimulant of the central nervous system and can cause convulsions, making interesting connections between the Mercury aspect of this plant and Mercury's rulership of the mind. You also find a list of plants with the highest levels of camphor—which, surprisingly, includes sage. This implies that sage has some Moon qualities that you should watch out for. It also hints that perhaps English lavender and sage may be good partners in magical work, because they have significant volatile chemicals in common.
This is not the kind of relationship that would be revealed simply by examining the usual botanical plant families or looking at only the plant structure, flower color, growth habit, or even tables of correspondence, which may put sage under Jupiter or Earth. Lots of magical secrets are hidden in plain sight in the chemical makeup of plants. So already we can see that, even at the very base of the material level—chemistry—we can deduce what an herb's magical capabilities may be.
Just from examining the medicinal and chemical properties of a plant, we can begin to get a picture of its general magical aspects. But if we look at the plant itself—its pattern of growth, the shape of its flowers, the number of its petals, what kind of fruit it produces (succulent, poisonous, dry, no fruit at all), its scent or taste, its cycle of growth, and where and how it grows—we can get a good sense of not only how we may use the plant magically but also of who the plant spirit is.
The more different perspectives you have on a plant, the more you come to know it in depth and in truth, and thereby approach its spirit. Once you do have a handle on it, you can make incense, washes, smokes, inks, dyes and other colorants, poppet stuffing, oil infusions, and even mannekins for use in various rituals, taking the plant's planetary influences as rough guides and your experiences on the ground to refine your knowledge of its magical capabilities. You can use the information available on the material manifestation of the plant's spirit to make magic with that plant and approach its spirit.
Now that we've covered the intellectual approaches to knowing an herb, let's look at the sensual. Most of the herbs that are part of Western witchcraft have been ingested in one form or another, whether as a medicinal herb, a culinary herb or spice, a smoke, or an incense. All of these are valid ways of further coming to know an herb magically. Sometimes ingestion is the primary way that an herb is used in ritual—mugwort, for example, which is a tried-and-true aid to increase dreaming and, by extension, a help in Sabbatic work. It's an herb of little toxicity and, in our day, little medicinal or culinary use. Another good example is tobacco. The ingestion of this herb's smoke is probably the single most widely used magical or spiritual tool in the Western world. It has definite psychoactive effects that are especially powerful when it is not habitually ingested. But there's a “but” about ingestion.
You have to be sure that an herb you intend to ingest for magical purposes does not have dangerous effects on the physical level. One example I encountered a little while ago was someone wanting to make a tea for fertility from the root of American mandrake (Podophyllum peltatum). Clearly, they were basing this on the lore surrounding Old World or European mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), which, in the Hebrew Bible and also in latter days, was used for fertility—especially the fruits. In fact, you can still buy a liqueur made from the fruits of mandrake that is supposed to encourage lust, which does tend to lead to fertility. Today, it's very common to substitute American mandrake in spellwork for European mandrake, which is so difficult to obtain and very expensive when you do find it (although I will teach you in this book how to grow your own).
The problem is that, although American mandrake is often used as a magical substitute for Old World or European mandrake, it actually has almost nothing in common with that plant and, in my opinion, does not work as a substitute on any level at all. Just look at the physical effects. Whereas Old World mandrake contains tropane alkaloids, which are known to produce frightening hallucinations, American mandrake contains the ferocious phyllotoxin, which causes vomiting and diarrhea that can be so violent that a person may have to be taken to the emergency room and can even die from dehydration.
What made people conflate American mandrake and Old World mandrake? Well, they share some physical aspects. They both grow in woodlands. They both have fragrant white flowers. They both have round, golden fruits with apple-like flesh that, when fully ripe, are pleasant to eat and not poisonous. If you just look at one similarity between these two plants, you might be tricked like the poor individual who was advised to drink a tea made from American mandrake root for fertility. But if you look at even the most superficial aspects of its growth, you find big differences that tip you off right away that you cannot substitute these herbs for each other magically or in any other way.
Perfume of Love
In fact, the fruit of the Old World mandrake is known to have the scent of fresh human sweat, and I believe that is the reason it came to be used in love magic.
Just for starters, the root of American mandrake is cord-like and grows horizontally in a line stretching out from the above-ground part of the plant. By contrast, the root of Old World mandrake is like that of a radish, growing directly down from the crown of the visible plant, and is famous for its resemblance to a human body. European mandrake grows from the same crown every year, penetrating deeper into the earth; American mandrake always produces new crowns as it moves across the forest floor, spreading outward in a very Uranian way (remember that Uranus rules purgatives in medicine). Thus, one plant sits still; the other travels. They are drastically different in the way they grow, which tells you they are drastically different in their medicinal uses—and implies that they are significantly different in their magical uses as well. So maybe using American mandrake as a substitute for European mandrake in spellwork is not such a good idea, regardless of who told you it was.
But let's say you are aware of any possible toxic effects of a plant and have taken them into account. Then you might, for instance, make tinctures using brandy for the fruits, rum for the leaves, potato vodka for the roots, regular vodka (usually made from grain) for the seeds, and so forth. You can then ingest the tincture in small amounts and note the effects. This will guide you further in identifying the magical properties and how the act of ingestion may itself be incorporated into ritual or give practitioners additional powers for magic.
That said, I do like what the respected author Paul Huson had to say about ingesting herbs in his book, Mastering Witchcraft: “The bludgeoning effect of drugs is the last resort of the ineffectual spellbinder. Witchcraft is effected by magical art, not chemical means.” I think this is especially true for those herbs that contain tropane alkaloids (like mandrake, henbane, belladonna, datura)—which just so happen to be some of the same herbs that are traditionally associated with witchcraft. I also do not believe that the ingestion of truculent herbs like datura is advisable, especially when there are other less dangerous ways to get to know the plant spirit right there in front of us. I think that to use herbs in this mechanical way is to treat them like a bunch of dead molecules rather than like living beings with powerful, eternal spirits who may want to mess with us just for the hell of it.
So far, we've been relating to herbs as herbs—as if they were, basically, tools not much different from a hammer or a pen. Hammers and pens can be well made or faulty, beautiful or ugly. They require skill from the user, as well as a certain amount of intrinsic capabilities as tools, but they are not capable of independent thought or of deliberately hindering or helping our work. When you work with an herb, rather than with its plant spirit, the herb is a tool. When you work with a plant spirit, the herb is a sacred text that you can read to learn about the spirit. And that spirit has its own will and its own desires that may not match what you want to achieve.
When you are silent, you have more of a chance of hearing what someone else has to tell you, and I think that this is especially true in the garden. In some ways, ordinary gardeners are closer to magic than most people, because of the opportunity gardening gives them to listen to other spirits and to relate to lives that are fundamentally different from their own. We can anthropomorphize animals to the point where it becomes difficult to perceive their “themness,” but that doesn't usually happen with plants, because they are physically so different from us. To understand a life so alien from your own requires a real opening of the soul. I believe that anyone is capable of doing this, but it does take patience, work, and will.
If you are not cultivating a plant, or at least working with it in the wild, it is very difficult to come to know the spirit of that plant. If you want to work with henbane, but the only henbane you possess is in powdered form, you may have difficulty contacting the plant spirit, because powdered henbane seems always to be adulterated with flour, which can get in your way. This is not to say that magic work can't utilize herbs that you have bought rather than grown or harvested. Far from it. I sell herbs myself and often buy herbs that I cannot grow myself, as they derive from tropical trees. However, it is more difficult to contact a plant spirit using store-bought herbs.
When you grow an herb yourself, especially if it is one you grow on a regular basis, it is almost certain that, sooner or later, the spirit of that plant will contact you if you make yourself open to it. For one thing, when you grow the plant yourself, especially from seed, you are able to see it at various stages in its life, under many different weather conditions, in various seasons (sun phases), and through all the moon phases. I also see this activity—growing a plant—as being devotional to the plant spirit.
Yes, there are plants that grow without any human assistance, but many that are associated with magic actually seem to prefer to grow around people. They appear to get something from that proximity besides the benefits of cultivation. In fact, my sense is that they receive something spiritual or nonmaterial as well—something we lack the words to define at this time in our development.
I also view cultivating a plant as being akin to the Kabbalistic concept of tzimtzum, the Lurianic concept of how the Divine contracted to make room for the universe as an independent existence. Tending a plant can be a very caring and selfless activity. Moreover, many of the plants used in magic have aromatic foliage that, when brushed against, releases its signature scent. This may not always be a pleasant smell, but it is always an identifying characteristic.
Scent is among the primary ways that plants communicate with animals. This is certainly true with moths and butterflies, but even fruits begin to release a fragrant odor when they are ripe and ready for animals to eat them. If a plant can send out requests through scent for certain parts of it to be visited or even consumed, then it most likely can and will communicate other things about itself. However, we must be open to this communication and recognize that communication does not always have to occur in the form of words or even images.
Scent can be narrative, can tell a story. It can be a way for us to communicate with the plant spirit itself. Since scent is one of the least understood senses—and in our society, perhaps the least necessary and thus most mysterious—it is often accorded magical or spiritual properties. The Zohar, for instance, considers scent as the one food for the soul that is available on this plane and that can feed angels and other spirits as well as gods—which goes a long way toward explaining the importance of incense in magic.
It is certainly true that scent can affect the mind on the physical plane by being psychoactive. Examples include the perfume of brugmansias—which, if slept under, provides the sleeper with terrifying visions—or the uplifting scent of frankincense, or jasmine's ability to raise the seizure threshold. So one important means of communication between plants and people has to be scent—not only when plants send their scent to us but also when we, in turn, use that scent to evoke the plant spirit through magic oils or scented candles.
In my experience, being around and tending a growing plant every day—basically in a posture of helping and attentively listening—is a way to let the plant spirit know that you want to make contact and that you are ready to learn. Years ago, a rabbi told me that one way to indicate to the Divine that you want to make contact is to study holy books; by doing so, you indicate that you are open to contact with the sacred. I see tending plants in the same way. A plant is a sacred text—the description and plan, the story of the plant's spirit—and when you tend that plant and cultivate and groom it, you indicate to its spirit that you are open and ready and receptive to its contact. I see this posture as completely different from consuming plant parts.
Often, plants offer a particular part to animals for consumption—fruits, for instance—as an element in a bargain wherein they distribute their seeds. Even when we eat the leaves of a plant, I have sensed that these plants know that their siblings and their children will have more opportunities to propagate than if they were growing alone in the woods somewhere and no one ate their leaves. And, as with animals, propagation seems to be one of a plant's primary aims in life. So when we tend plants to help them grow or propagate, we let their spirits know that we are well disposed toward them and that, while we may kill masses of them during the harvest process, we intend to further their progeny more than would have been possible for them on their own.
We provide an important service to the community of that plant; the god of that plant, its spirit, must take heed of that service. I am certain that plant spirits notice our attentions to their avatars. If anything is equal to prayer in the relationship between people and plant spirits, it is our tending and helping to propagate their material manifestations as plants. I think it is also a good example of how prayer, in order to work, must be in the form of action.
It's also true that the plants we cultivate tend to be far less ferocious in their effects than those that grow in the wild. I have seen a lot of advice that claims that plants intended for use in magic should be harvested from the wild, rather than grown in the garden, because wild plants are considered to be more powerful. But plants grown in the optimal conditions of a garden tend to be far more relaxed and friendly. They don't produce the high amounts of alkaloids that wild plants do, because they don't have as much need for them, as they are not being gnawed on by every passing critter. A garden-raised baneful will likely have fewer alkaloids, because it is not as afraid of being eaten. A plant that is less afraid is a happier plant and one that may be more open to interaction with us, because it is not constantly in fear for its life or worrying that its babies will be destroyed.
My advice to people wanting to contact plant spirits: Choose a plant toward which you feel simpatico or one whose shape you just like (often the same thing) and grow it. Grow it in your yard or in a pot, on your windowsill or in your home—anywhere that provides the conditions for cultivation. Tend it and wait with an open heart.
We cannot demand that a plant spirit show itself. But my experience has been that, eventually, the spirit will reveal itself, and in a most unmistakable way—through dreams or visions, for instance. It is a mighty impressive and awe-inspiring experience, one that lets us know that our allies are extraordinarily powerful and also fundamentally different from us.
The first pair of leaves for pretty much all plants except grasses is identical—a generic leaf shape. The second set of leaves, called the “true” leaves, will have the characteristic shape in miniature of their immediate family (their species). To me, these two sets of leaves have something to teach us. The first, generic, set shows how all plants are fundamentally the same; the second set shows how they are all different. Sameness and difference easily coexist in the plant world, just as they do for us. All of us are the same at the base, but we are all different at the same time.
This also implies that all magic is fundamentally the same and draws upon the same pool of energy. It is only externally that various rituals and works are different, aimed at different environments and situations and times. I think this shows that we are justified in tailoring magical works to particular events and need not copy the rituals from another time or place in order to be “authentic.” We can create our own magic that suits the situation and our level of knowledge and power, knowing that we are drawing upon the same energy used by our ancestors or our neighbors on the next continent.
One of the most wonderful things about herb magic is that there can never be any doubt about whether a magical practitioner is capable of growing a plant. If an herb is sympathetic or a plant spirit willing to work with you, it lets you know in no uncertain terms. Plants will not grow for you if they don't want you; but if they do want you, then they will grow prolifically—even those that have a reputation for dropping dead at the slightest insult. Unlike other practices, in which the operator may always be in doubt regarding whether the work is “real,” herb magic always gives strong indications of its potency and its reality. You can go around boasting about your magical accomplishments and no one can say a word against it. But if you cannot grow a marigold, then you cannot make any claims about doing green magic. This book shows you how to get on that path. But first, let's take a look at the practical aspects of working in your witch's garden.