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"First Quarter: Weaving the Nine Herbs' Charm"
Hello. It's Friday, and lately we have begun to harvest tomatoes, and we found our first new potato, and the nearby farms have blueberries, raspberries, peaches. The autumn carrots are planted. The air is rich with dragonflies. We have not yet had enough rain to break our critical drought, but rain at least keeps passing through here and there. The heat of the day is strong but comfortably lazy, rather than an oppressively humid nightmare. With enough shade and a breeze, I can still spend time in the garden, and I've been loving the progress of our new herb bed, and I've also been intrigued by a volunteer arrival in our flower bed, which is mugwort.
I don't want this mugwort to stay where it currently is, since I'd rather tend it near the other ritual herbs and it also grows so aggressively that its current position will make it spread over our septic tank cover if we leave it unchecked. So I intend to dig it up. However, I will probably wait a couple of months until the plant is more mature, then divide the roots of what I pull: half can be dried and saved for medicinal experimentation or ritual burning, and the other half can be propagated somewhere better. Although mugwort is a somewhat potent autumn allergen, its pollen spreads less widely than that of ragweed, and the allergic factor can be solved by just cutting the flowers off. I would very much like to have mugwort on hand because of its history in Euro-traditional herbalism — among other traditions — as a sleep aid, antiparasitic, and significant plant for reproductive medicine, with folk knowledge and some limited scientific data pointing toward mugwort's value in inducing uterine contractions, which might help anyone trying to regulate menses, conduct an abortion, or induce labor.
In saying so, I do not mean I am personally certain that mugwort can do these things, nor do I recommend using any herb in a high stakes situation where unclear dosing could at best waste time and at worst do serious damage. But as I've indicated in past writings, I keep exploring herbalism for more complicated reasons than just trying to do 1:1 replacement for pharmaceutical drugs. I find it wise to use minor ailments as an excuse for reweaving relation with plantlife, generally pairing the emphasis on minor ailments with plants whose most likely effects are not very intense and thus hard to overdo if consumed in moderation; I also find it wise to learn ethnobotanical lore and experiment in non-desperate circumstances just in case I ever find myself thinking, "Any port in a storm," as access to a certain pharmaceutical is ever cut off, temporarily or permanently. And where mugwort is concerned, its arrival right outside the door feels very appropriate to the uterine phenomena in my life that are reaching a distinctive culmination this summer.
I probably shouldn't turn this guest away. Even if the timing were different, I still wouldn't. Mugwort has such a rich history alongside humans across Eurasia that it's increasingly a plant favored for smoke purification work by Euro-descended settler witches who are already aware of how we should *not* be stealing white sage. And for those of us who engage with the animism of the early English people — whether as our direct ancestors or as a culturally imposed psycholinguistic substrate — mugwort holds special importance as the first of nine plants belonging to the 10th century Old English magical-medicinal poem Nigon Wyrta Galdor, or the Nine Herbs Charm.
I am writing today to share that poem with those of you who are unfamiliar, because it's a powerful series of verses if you practice any sort of hedgecraft, green witchery, Germanic ancestor work, or rites that overlap. I will first share the Old English text untranslated in its entirety, then I will link you to several people's translations, and then I will dissect my own takeaway about the mentioned herbs and the salve for which they would apparently be used.
https://salt-for-the-eclipse.ghost.io/first-quarter-weaving-the-nine-herbs-charm/