Ecstatic Agendas

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Fullness and Satiety to you my lovely friends.

Tonight we have our front door open, and the sound of crickets is echoing in from the dark.

This above is a cupful of Borage petals and seeds – I have been drying them through the Summer as my plants drop them. This is a generational migration and I am fanning my fingers through it’s flow as the Borage extends itself outward from the original seedbed I started a few years back. I practice gratitude by gathering the purple flowers most mornings, saying “Thank You” as I pluck each hypnotic pentacle from the ground.

The bees love this plant and work delicately within the labyrinth of stalks. I practice temporal awareness by slowing myself, creeping gently through the humming swarm to ever- so- slightly extend my arm into their thirsty dance. The tiny supple stars glow purple in the shade. My gratitude is also to the bees and to the soil and to the sun. This land is generously private, considering the cranky tumult of the city blocks around us. It is quiet here and fragrant. Nonetheless, the wind is quite active as it cascades down from the gorge and bounces off the little mountains around us.

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On a recent morning I woke to the word HENBANE sounding in my head. It’s a word I’m only barely familiar with: from readings in herbalism and folklore I had a vague sense of Henbane as a poisonous/ medicinal plant, but just one among many in my spotty research, and not one I’d payed any attention to. Dandelion, Mugwort, Rosemary, Lavender, Thyme: these are the plants I seek out, cultivate, burn, and steep as often as I can.

I also try to pay attention to what’s growing in the edges of the garden, around the cracked foundations, the curbs and traffic medians:

A couple of years ago I noticed a variety of Nightshade near our south fence, intertwined with the St. John’s Wort. In terms of potentially divinatory, decidedly risky plants to befriend, it is that one, the wild Bittersweet Nightshade, that captures my curiosity. After all, it wasn’t growing here when we first moved to this land, and it didn’t appear until after I’d disturbed the soil and displaced some of the (frankly aggressive) St. John’s Wort.

All of this is to say, I had no prior interest in Henbane until the word showed up, way out on the tip of my tongue where the weather can be unpredictable, as I rose from slumber that day.

“My teeth were clenched and a dizzy rage took possession of me…I was permeated by a peculiar sense of well-being connected with the crazy sensation that my feet were growing lighter, expanding and breaking loose from my body. Each part of my body seemed to be going off on its own, and I was seized with the fear that I was falling apart. At the same time, I experienced an intoxicating sensation of flying…I soared where my hallucinations—the clouds, the lowering sky, herds of beasts, falling leaves…billowing streamers of steam and rivers of molten metal — were swirling along.” 

 -Gustav Schenk, 1966,
describing a Henbane hallucination.1

As it turns out, henbane is a blood relative of my nightshade, and shares with its cousin a storied history of magic, mischief, poison and healing. In medieval Europe it was known as a ‘witches plant’, burnt for purification, “as well as in the preparation of concoctions, love philtres and ‘flying ointments’.” -Europeana.eu²

But the USDA traces henbane’s use by magicians and herbalists much farther back, to at least 4000 BCE in Europe and Eurasia, while also listing it as a powerful and dangerous alkaloid narcotic that can cause “loss of muscular control, dilation of the pupils, heart palpitation, hallucinations, delirium (‘madness’) and in large doses, coma, and death.” ³

My plant identifier app further cautions that all parts of the plant are highly toxic, with symptoms including skin irritation, excessive salivation, headache, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, an unusually high pulse, coma, and convulsions. -PictureThis app ⁴

In short, not a plant that I’m going to start out with in a salad or a cup of tea. Liminal dream oracle notwithstanding.

After some searching and consideration (how do I familiarize myself with this plant in a visceral and visionary sense, without putting myself into a coma?) I settled on this Verdant Inks Green Blood Henbane from Rosarium Blends⁵ out of Washington:

Rosarium is well regarded in the field of practical magical botanicals – I am excited to use this ink in ritual and in drawing some magical seals and talismans, in writing a message to the sky, the fire, the plant, to the ink itself. Putting brush to fine paper is a sensual pleasure, and all the more so while in the process of following an instruction from dream, from intuition, from the turn of a card or the roll of a die.

What is the importance of entering into animistic relationships with the plants that present themselves in my yard, my neighborhood, my dreams? (Often useful weeds, it should be said, which help break down and restore damaged or impacted land while also possessing medicinal properties and folkloric/ astrological/ ritual correspondences!)

What should I keep in mind when integrating wild and cultivated herbs and flowers in my practice?

I spoke earlier of the Nightshade- Now there are two- the variety I described above, which has begun sprouting amethyst bells in hanging clusters as it pulls forth from the foliage of St. John’s Wort below, and another growing in a large bushy spread inside the greenhouse, stretching admirably out of hard packed dirt. I’ve been watering it, talking to it, asking it to stay and grow and collaborate. Small flowers are blossoming; soon there shall be berries.

The chthonic world is all around us. We, in fact, are of the chthonic. Emanations of messy poetic sensation, we erupt forth from the Earth, conjured into self-identity, and then fall back as waves into the ocean of potentiality. The spirits of the plants around me are similarly of this tidal unfolding, this respiration of the biosphere- but different enough that we do not reach one another through language alone. The teas, the oils, the inks, the song and dance, the watering and plucking – these gestures of curiosity can hopefully function as incursions into… as yet unnamed futures. These acts bring us closer. Imaginal and service-oriented. Empathetic and archaic. Speculative and utilitarian. From the known into the unknown. Beyond maps and symbols.

Jason is an artist, writer, and non-denominational minister with a garden and a lifelong interest in lurking around the Occult/ Paranormal shelves in bookstores worldwide. As Sun Duel they record and sometimes perform music with a variety of friends and loved ones.  www.linktr.ee/JWT9000  

NOTES

1. https://sites.evergreen.edu/plantchemeco/henbane-medicine-andor-magic/
2. https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/magical-mystical-and-medicinal/henbane
3. https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/ethnobotany/Mind_and_Spirit/henbane.shtml
4. I am not being compensated in any way for mentioning this free app.
5. https://rosariumblends.com/