Wormwood

An all-flower Spagyric that we made from the summer blooms of our own twelve-year-old plant, a bushy and determined survivor that we have dug up and moved five times in ten years. Wormwood has a troubled past and a bad reputation, but we have worked with it Alchemically through the years and it always offers something interesting.

This Alchymical Initiatic is ruled by Mars, but is not so aggressive as previous Spagyrics we’ve made of wormwood, probably because of the softening effect of the flowers on its energy.

This Wormwood is very altering to perception and vision, creating an impressionistic blur of popping colours, especially of garden or natural scenes. In fact, forms of this plant were consumed in quantity by Van Gogh, Monet, and many other Impressionists, and our experience with the Wormwood Spagyric brings a new understanding of their art and mode of seeing.

Like Mugwort, Wormwood is used as an internal cleanser, but at a much stronger level, and has been used since ancient times to dispel worms and parasites, tonify toxic digestion, and stimulate the body’s own purification process.

It is extremely bitter, and in Russian folklore the combination of its medicinal value and bitterness made Wormwood a symbol of “the bitter truth”, something that is hard to swallow, especially for the self-deluded or naive, but healing once it is accepted.

Wormwood should be avoided while pregnant or nursing.