A Magickal Herball Compleat.pdf - Magicka School

Love Philtres
Use of love philtres goes back to the time of the Ancient Greeks and may have
been brought into Western Europe by the Romans. In the second century C. E.
Apulieus, the author of The Golden Ass, referred to Witches gathering herbs to
make philtra during a speech he made when defending himself against the use of
magick. Love-philtres are also referred to in the work of comic playwright, Lucius
Afranius [26]. It is conjectured that transmission to the Romans of such arts may
have been through Greek slaves, some of whom ended up as high-class Roman
prostitutes and used magick to entice wealthy male citizens of the Empire [27].
However this may have been, it is certain that love philtres have been a common
feature throughout Europe since those times and crop up in many instances of art
and literature. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon asks Puck to
procure:
Love in idleness.
Fetch me that flower: the herb I showed thee once.
The juice of it, on sleeping eyelids laid,
Will make or man or woman madly dote,
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Whilst in The Love Potion by Pre-Raphaelite painter, Evelyn de Morgan, a sorceress
was shown preparing a phial of liquid.
Aphrodisiacs
Although not magickal in nature, use of aphrodisiacs was often made alongside
spells and enchantments to stimulate the sex drive. Named after Aphrodite, the
Greek goddess of love, herbal aphrodisiacs could include garlic, onion, cabbage,
beans, carrots and celery. To our modern ears such a list seems more likely to
encourage flatulence and bad breath, but then perhaps this was preferable to other
alternatives such as small doses of the lethal drug strychnine, derived from the
seeds of the tree Strychnos nux vomica, which had the effect of tightening pelvic
muscles and must have seemed like an ancient form of Viagra.
End Comments
This concludes our look at herbs in history. In chapter one we learnt of their uses
throughout many times and cultures up to the present day, in chapter two we
concentrated on pre-scientific theories behind the use of herbs and in this chapter
we have considered plants from a religious and magickal point of view. As has
been stated earlier, this groundwork has been entirely necessary, unlike many
magickal herbals that concentrate solely on practical magickal application; you
have been given a deep and broad background on which to establish a solid herbal
practice.
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