Folk magic and herbal magic

All over Europe, folk belief gave plants special powers. They protected house and livestock, brought love, warded off thunderstorms and evil forces. These customs are often very old and were later linked to Christian feasts.

A fine example from the Low Countries is the kruidwis, the herb bundle. On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, bundles of herbs and grains are blessed in Dutch and Belgian Limburg. The bundle, with mugwort and wormwood among other things, was kept at home and thrown on the fire during thunderstorms, as protection against lightning.

Midsummer night, St John’s Eve on 24 June, was also a time for herbs. St John’s wort was picked and hung above the door against misfortune. In the nineteenth century folklorists collected such customs, and in the twentieth century a modern herbal magic arose, especially in pagan movements.

In folk belief plants have a power of their own, which you can use if you know how. What matters is the moment of picking, such as on a holy day or at full moon, the right words, and the purpose.

Plants protect: rowan above the stable door against witches, garlic against evil, mistletoe as a bringer of luck. They can also bring love or foretell the future.

There is a thin line between folk medicine and folk magic. The same herb could help against coughs and against witches.

The knowledge was passed on orally, in families, by elders and by people known for their knowledge: herb women, wise women and men, and sometimes the village priest.

A persistent image is that the witch hunts of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries mainly burned herb women. Historians see it more subtly: most of the accused were ordinary people, often poor or living alone, and not healers.

Today herbal magic lives on in modern pagan and Wiccan traditions, and in a broad interest in folklore.

Nineteenth-century folklorists such as Jacob Grimm, in his Deutsche Mythologie of 1835, collected much folk belief about plants.

In the Netherlands the physician M.A. van Andel described folk medicine in the Netherlands in 1909, with many examples of magical and practical customs.

As early as the first century, Pliny the Elder described how Celtic druids cut mistletoe from the oak with a golden sickle.

Many customs live on. The blessing of the herb bundle is still held every year in Limburg and in Elen in Belgian Limburg. Mistletoe hangs in Christmas decorations, and people kiss beneath it.

Modern herbal magic is popular, with books, rituals and shops.

Folklorists and historians study these traditions as valuable intangible heritage.

Well-known plants of folk magic are St John’s wort, mugwort, vervain (verbena), elder, rowan, mistletoe, rosemary and rue.

Many stories surrounded the elder: a spirit lived in the elder, and anyone who wanted to cut a branch had to ask first.

There were also dangerous “witches’ herbs”, such as deadly nightshade, henbane and thorn apple, which turn up in stories about flying ointments. Mandrake, with its human-like root, was said to scream when pulled from the ground.

Folk magic is cultural heritage. Appreciate it as a way in which people once understood their world.

The so-called witches’ herbs, such as deadly nightshade, henbane and thorn apple, are deadly poisonous. Never use them.