A Magickal Herball Compleat.pdf - Magicka School

develop with the rise of Christian European metaphysics, which had its roots in
the writings and proclamations of the Fathers of the Church, in the early centuries
of the Common Era [7]. For them, symbolism could express the underlying unity
in everything. Harmonies, similarities, and proportions were the glue that bound
the Universe together, and these were evidenced by signatures found throughout
nature [8]. It was the job of humankind to find these signs, learn of them, and use
this knowledge to develop further as spiritual beings, in the hope that this would
eventually bring an individual closer to God. This idea was developed more fully
by Paracelsus, who, in the first half of the sixteenth century, created the Spagyric
method of Pharmacy, whereby medicines were fashioned by separating, purifying
and recombining the constituent parts of an herb or mineral. In the work Liber
Paragranum he proposed that nature was in a 'raw and unfinished' state and that
human beings had been given the job of evolving things to a higher level by God.
Paracelsus was an Alchemist and such ideas were perfectly in keeping with the
alchemical ideal of attaining spiritual perfection. For him, the 'raw' medicinal herb
had to be separated into the basic alchemical constituents of Mercury, Sulphur and
Salt, and all non-essential components removed. These three constituents were
then recombined to create the medicine.
However, it was not until the writings of the German visionary mystic Jacob
Bohme (1575–1624) that the Doctrine of Signatures became a fully fledged
philosophical idea. A master shoemaker by trade, Bohme had experienced a
profound mystical vision of God and Humankind as a young man, whereby the
relationship between the two was to be found in all things. Inspired by this in his
forties, he wrote Signatura Rerum (1621), known in English as The Signature of all
Things. This had a profound effect on European religious and philosophical
thought: so the argument went, the Creator had left his mark on nature and,
therefore, by a process of observation, one could find not only evidence of his
genius, but also a sign of the correct use of all living things. It was not long before
his ideas were applied to the medicinal qualities of plants.
The herbalist immediately influenced by Paracelsus and Bohme’s ideas was
William Coles (1626-1662), author of The Art of Simpling [9] and Adam in Eden, and
a member of the College of Physician’s in London. Based on their theories he was
able to make conjectures about herbs that were established through signatures
found in both colour and form. Therefore, walnuts were the perfect palliative for
ailments of the head because of their hard outer shells and brain like contents; the
body of liverwort could be used for treating related diseases as it resembled a liver;
toothwort would cure dental problems; spleenwort, splenetic disorders; and
lungwort, whose patchy leaves resembled the lung, could aid respiratory problems
[10]. On the other hand, based on the signature of colour, jaundice could be cured
by plants with yellow flowers or roots such as goldenrod; bruising by a poultice
made from the purple leaves of irises; and blood disorders alleviated by plants
with red hues.
The Doctrine of Signatures was to be complimented by theories of the astrological
influence on herbs, made fashionable by Nicolas Culpeper. In a way, the linking of
astrology and plants would have been the natural corollary of finding signs of the
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