Hi friends,
The moon is almost-dark. The hoots from the barred owls have been sounding from the woods all day long, announcing the tides of All Hallows Day. It hasn't rained solidly in weeks. Months? I light my dried mugwort on the porch, where I write to you from. No Samhain fires this evening, there is a fire ban. It's 75 degrees,
not a sweater in sight!, which I find to be the eeriest part of the day - over 20 degrees above average temperature for this time of year. My incense will do: I wrote a little about Mugwort
a few newsletters ago, but I'm back with more artemisa-musings today.
German theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto, in his book, The Idea Of The Holy, offers two phrases that describe a possible experience of the numinous: mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinosum. Mysterium tremendum is the experience of the sacred that induces fear and terror where mysterium fascinosum is the experience of the sacred that leads to delight and ecstasy. The experience of mystery can lead to either (or both): absolute fear and upmost rapture. I find no better example of this than working magically with mugwort.
Many people turn to Mugwort for the first time because they want to remember. They want to remember their dreams, their potential for visionary insight, they want to remember how to honor their intuition: Mugwort teaches us how to trust our gut. We make dream pillows with the leaves and smoke the dried herb before bed, asking for vivid dreams. And Mugwort jumps at the invitation to show us her sibylline magic: all we have to do is ask. I have students who tell me that after years of nothing in the dream realm, just a few nights of dreaming with Mugwort brings them riding bareback on a white mare through oceanic depths, flying into the cosmos to give Cygnus the swan-constellation a kiss, giving birth to an ancient beech forest on a gold-threaded quilt. What joy! To delight in the dream realm again, to remember the power of our dreams, to remember your own capacity for oracular visioning. It is powerful magic, indeed. It is no wonder that this plant has been a close ally to witches for hundreds of years. When we make Mugwort salve to rub on our temples and feet before bed we are in resonance with the old Teutonic traditions of infusing goose fat with the fresh herb to initiate astral flight. For me, there is no other herb that brings me back into the belonging of the silver-veined lineage of magic. This is one mystery of Mugwort, the ecstasy of remembering our power in our bodies. Mysterium fascinosum.
But the blade of Mugwort is sharp. When we ask Mugwort to bring us dreams, when we ask for vivid sight, when we ask for the gift of the oracle, we open ourselves up. Anything can step through the door. The galloping white mare in the dream shapeshifts into a wild nightmare, the hooves of the horse pressing down on your chest as you sleep. Each star of Cygnus transforms into an exploding bomb; there is terror in the dark. And the beech forest has been slashed and burned, a river of blood runs where ancient trees once stood. Over the years, working with Mugwort, my students and I continuously note that because our felt sense of the world around us deepens with use of this plant, we become more aware of that which is also unspeakable, that which is terrifying. Mysterium tremendum. Another mugwort mystery. Mugwort is a power plant: it shows us how different forms of power move through the world. Vivid dreams become hallucinatory nightmares, old ghosts return, we have a heightened sense for where a violation has occurred, where fear has taken hold. One spine-chilling reminder of this is that the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl, site of one of the worst nuclear disasters of all time, is named after the Ukrainian word for Mugwort: чорнобиль, which translates to black-stalk or black weed.
Dear reader, I do not mean to make one weary of Mugwort. This is a letter of praise. This extra-sensory power that mugwort strengthens in us is a treasure in today's world. We need our sharp blade of intuition. We need to trust our creature bodies. Mugwort activates and stimulates not only the psychic body, but the physical body as well…. Mugwort gets our digestion moving, our blood circulating. It reawakens all our senses from deep slumber. Mugwort will not let us go numb. Nor will it let us fall into amnesia, into forgetfulness. Mugwort is a plant that moves between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Mugwort rides the threshold. Even better, mugwort is the threshold. The door.
To stepping through,
xx Liz
p.s. I really started writing this email to let you know that applications for
Herbal Mystery School are open for 2025, but then Mugwort took the reins. But if you'd like to learn more about this program that asks you to work magically, in ritual and deep devotion, with one plant a month over the course of a year,
click here. We work with Mugwort one month! And I'll offer ways to walk this threshold space with Mugwort, I promise. Applications are at the bottom of the website page.
p.p.s.
Veil Opener is still available, for those of you who are wanting to drop into autumnal plant magic this All Hallow's Eve, despite it being in the 70's here today.
p.p.p.s. Sometimes in Herbal Mystery School I joke about the herbal nightclub of my dreams where I assign our different plants that we work with throughout the year to different roles at the club. In my dream club, Mugwort would be the DJ. Here's a playlist made a few HMS cohorts back,
DJ MUGWORT, just for the occasion. ;)
