The Alchemist's Garden

10:20pm: My blog has moved
The Alchemist's Garden has moved to its own site, here. I have wanted to use this other site for a long time. I still need to do some work on it, and the comments that were made on livejournal don't transfer over, but it's up, and you're welcome to come and visit and comment all you want!

10:34pm: Mandrakes and Quintessence
Today I started soaking five batches of mandrake seeds. I had two different harvests of white mandrakes from Israel, three batches (one separated by color of seeds) of two different accessions of white mandrake from the IPK seedbank in Germany, and a batch of black mandrake seeds. I hope these will have interesting results. Meanwhile, my turkmen mandrakes are still getting used to living under the shop lights. I realized that the water source in the basement hasn't been used for so long that it has quite a buildup of minerals, which have shown up on the leaves when I sprayed them with 6-6-6 fertilizer.:( I hope this has not done damage to them in terms of a buildup of salts in their soil. I guess I will find out.

I also spent some time sorting out one of the quintessence operations described in Hollandus's book on medicines. Hollandus was a late medieval alchemist who is usually only read for his work on (metallic) Saturn. It has been believed that Paracelsus copied some of his work, but new research is showing that actually Hollandus copied Paracelsus (an academic in Holland is doing some research on him). A couple of things drew me to him. Hollandus is one of the few old alchemists who focuses on medicines, for one. For another, Manfred Junius mentioned that Hollandus recommended various parts of plants be used, that different parts should be treated separately. I thought when I read that this fellow must actually know something about herbs. The other thing that drew me to Hollandus was Raphael Patai's discussion of him and his son as Jewish alchemists. So when I found a translation of his works being sold by AMORC, I got them, thinking I would be able to use his directions for attaining the vegetable stone. I was so naive. His description is exceedingly confusing and convoluted. He himself states that making the vegetable stone is more difficult than making the mineral stone. Discouraged, I put it aside.

But lately after reading Fulcanelli's Dwellings of the Philosophers and learning something about Barbault, I thought that if I could make my way through one of Hollandus's lesser operations I might then have hopes of tackling his vegetable stone. From there I might go on to Barbault. Hollandus describes how to achieve the quintessences of honey, of sundew, and of sugar. But trying to discern exactly what he is describing is very difficult. And Hollandus is one of the clearest of the old alchemists. Compared, for instance, to the twelfth-century Turba Philosophorum, which contains about 50 bajillion different meanings for, say, the term "Magnesia," Hollandus is forthright and clear. I have been working out both the sugar and the honey, comparing them, and found that a page was missing from the sugar description. I found that page stuck back in the sundew operation, but I am going to focus on the quintessence of honey because it does not appear to have anything missing, even though he does make mention that it is a slightly different work than that of sugar on account of the nature of honey. I also am attracted by what he says about honey--that because wildflower honey is collected from a myriad of plants, it has a myriad of powers. And here is some animal alchemy that does not involve any harm to any animal. No one does animal alchemy nowadays that I know of.

I have been finding that by going through and retelling in my own words all of the steps of the operation--the same technique I learned in grad school for understanding difficult texts of literary theory--I get closer to understanding exactly how the operation is performed and what is going on. Each time I have gone through the operation this way, I have discovered something I had previously missed that brought more clarity to what was being described. Also, I am getting to the point where I see the structure of the operation. Once I get that, I think I will be able to apply it elsewhere.

I have frequently come across the statement in alchemy (from Mutus Liber) that understanding can only come from, among other things, reading, reading, and rereading. Never have I so felt the truth of that until working with Hollandus. And at the same time, I feel closer to my own take on alchemy with Hollandus than with anyone else I have read.

5:39pm: More on Mars and Solstice Seed Starting
I've infused two ingredients I intend for the Mars protection oil in jojoba using a warm water bath--bdellium and "bee goo." The latter is a bee product that has not much of a honey scent but more of the scent of warm bees, so it's animalic even thought it doesn't require any harm to an animal. I have never worked with it before, and most folks who have have used it in alcohol, so this is unexplored territory. But since bees are a Martial insect, I thought bee goo would be a great choice for a Mars protection oil. The goo has imbued the jojoba with its scent but it has fallen to the bottom of the jar. The bdellium mostly smells just resinous. Neither are strong scents, but I think they will be good as "background" for the other scents I plan to add. I hope I can work on that this weekend.

One certain task I have for this weekend is starting white and black mandrake seeds. I've got to paw through my 2008 seed start selections and see if I have anything else that is primarily a root and needs cold stratification so I can start things right now. The end of this month, as the Moon wanes, is auspicious for starting plants that are harvested mostly for their roots.

I'm still doing the last bits of purchasing of seeds I want to grow out for harvest. Two years ago I started some Papaver setigerum, but the seedlings were so weak and spindly that they did not survive. I found seeds from another source this year, and I hope I will have better luck. This is a nice poppy, a subspecies of somniferum (some say it's the ancestor of somniferum), similar in appearance but shorter, and I believe the pods tend to be elongated.

I already have a couple of mourning widow geranium going. These have dusky purple flowers (they are usually a weirder color than in the engraving above) and very nicely shaped leaves (the pic shows one of the one-year-old plants I had to leave behind in my last place--you can see this is a vigorous plant and very handsome). It will take two years, but I would really like to get seeds for this plant. It would go so well with the other "black" flowers. The golden henbanes have had several bouts with aphids, but they are growing lustily despite them. Dittany of Crete and variegated myrtle are likewise very fat and happy. Only the turkmen mandrakes are a bit on the spindly side, most likely because I pushed the envelope outside for too long and then once they were inside, did not get them under lights fast enough. I think they will be okay, though. Some seeds are still coming up.

6:15pm: Making oils and packaging
I've spent the past few days doing nothing but working on putting together oils, packaging, and redesigning labels because of having new bottles. I have wanted for a while to have all the oils in the same size bottle instead of having 3 sizes. Finally I found a bottle I think I can stick with (the one with the glass applicator rod), but that has meant redoing all the labels for the oils that previously came in the square frosted bottles. It is extraordinarily time-consuming to redesign all the labels, although it will cut my work in half in the end. I must say the new labels look pretty good. I've started using a new label paper that is a rough brown. Gives a nice antique look.

The Flying Oil is selling so quickly that I can hardly keep up with it, which is great. I have more dittany of Crete growing under lights in the basement and will have to infuse more base oil for the flying oil soon. I haven't made any more progress on the floral flying oil, though. I'm still playing around with the idea of switching over to using tuberose and some other very expensive absolutes. Tuberose certainly is known for having a narcotic effect.

My datura flower oil smells even less like a datura today, so I have to go back to the original formula and mess with that some more. My second and third versions departed from it quite a bit--too much, I guess. I had some superior quality ylang ylang extra that was burning a hole in my pocket, and so I just had to put it in something. It is letting me know it has no interest in representing datura, lol! Meanwhile, I am anxiously awaiting some vegetal black musk attar that I think will work great as a base for a vegetal musk oil. I have been too busy with grunt work to do anything more on the vegetal civet, unfortunately.

1:50am: Spirit of Datura oil again
I went back to work on the Spirit of Datura oil because I thought the first version changed too much during storage--the lemongrass became rampant. Well, now it isn't quite so intensely lemongrassified, but I nevertheless came up with a couple more versions. Both of them are centered on various lemony scents with some mastic for the fresh snap pea scent and then two different smoother-overs: vanilla and beeswax. We will see which version is better. Right off the bat, neither one smells right. I tried using orange flower for the sake of its citrusy relationship but maybe that isn't going to work. Orange flower is not my favorite absolute, and maybe it knows that. It is just so paltry compared the smell of real orange blossoms.

Combining whatever I end up with as the flower scent with the leaf scent is going to be a real trip, I can tell, sort of like dealing with the actual plant.

My actual datura plants are now up to their kneecaps in snow, almost transformed into brown "antlers." I expect I will be able to harvest them in the next couple of days. I am not sure exactly what I will do with them. I think I will turn them into some kind of talisman incorporating some kind of writing.

4:32pm: The Book
I am finally getting an organizing principle worked out for the book on growing the witching herbs. It's been a long time coming. The book has felt so scattered for so long, only united by the fact that it is about growing things. That wasn't good. It felt more like a pamphlet than a book. Now I feel like real unity between all the different sections is possible.

I am making use of the doctrine of signatures in an in-depth version thanks to Paracelsus and combining that with the use of planetary influences as they occur in Rudolph Steiner/Biodynamics, which is a nice continuation of the stream of European magic that looks back to Plato for its info. In some ways this is the same source as others have used (Pliny, Dioscorides, Agrippa, Culpeper), but I think it is much more sophisticated. It is also much more like what traditional witchcraft--the real thing--should be like, since that would depend heavily on a person's actual experience with the herb close up and personal, and with a lived knowledge not only of the heavens but of seasonal changes and so on in one's environment.

I think this will work really well and even perhaps offer a new way to look at and work with plants (and other things). It does require observation instead of just pulling things out of one's heinie.

7:36am: Snow
We had snow last night, a very wet snow that stuck to everything. The silver maple, which is the alpha tree in the back yard, is complete lace. This pic is just part of the very top. It reminds me of Edwardian lace, busy yet sensuous.

I like winter. It has all the good holidays. It's true you can't garden, but you can plan your garden for next year, which is about 50% as good.:)

8:10am: First snow
This morning we had a dusting of snow. This is about the right time of year for us to start having snow, but we have had an unusually warm and long autumn. Everyone is saying that winter will be very hard this year. I guess we'll find out. I just found out this morning that peonies can be dug up in the fall and stored dry over the winter to be planted in the spring. Someone planted peonies along the fence, and because of where most of the sunlight comes from, almost all the flowers face my neigbor's yard. They take up the best sunny spot in the entire back yard, and I don't especially like peonies. So guess what is going to get dug up, lol? Then next year I can put them in the front along the sidewalk. Or better yet, give them to my neighbor. He loves them.

But meanwhile, I'm still able to move the mandrakes outside for the day and sometimes they even spend the evening in a thick box on the patio next to the house. Today I hope to set up the shelves for them in the basement. I haven't got quite the shelves I wanted yet, but the smaller ones I have will have to do until I get larger ones. I already have a bunch of seedlings and my warm-weather plants growing quite happily down there (the dittany of Crete and variegated myrtle). The golden henbane has really taken off. I have three plants. I hope that by growing them over the winter under lights I will get seeds by the end of this coming summer. This plant is very rare. Its flowers are a nice bright yellow. I started these plants back in August from seeds from a German seedbank.

3:54pm: Fantasy Civet - Not Yet
I put together the first protoypes of my vegetal civet today, and I don't like it. It's got all kinds of stuff in it, which I think is one of the problems. What I end up smelling is mostly the ragged edges of the oils instead of the main notes, which are I guess canceling each other out or there is too much "noise," like when combining too many colors, so you end up with something murky, and not a good murky. It's got five parts to it: citrusy/high-pitched, resinous, rose-like, warm, and leathery. In a way, it is successful because it smells pretty much like I imagined, but I just don't like it and if I bought it, I would be disappointed. It certainly does have a lasting quality. I'm going to remove most of the rosieness, some of the citrousy/high-pitched and increase other parts of that, take out half the resin, and increase the leathery part a great deal. I tend to like things that have a lot more base to them. They just seem to work better in oils, for one thing. For another, to me, many of the high-pitched scents just smell raw.

Well, I suppose before I pass final judgment I should wait until this sits for a couple weeks, but meanwhile I am going to make another version.

And now it is on to the vegetal musk.

2:39pm: Pink Lotus
Pink lotus is an ingredient in the floral flying oil I've been working on. The last pink lotus absolute I bought smelled great when I opened the bottle. It did have an earthy undertone, but I expected that. When I combined it with the other ingredients in the floral flying oil, though, it turned weird and nasty. I went back to the bottle of diluted pink lotus absolute, and it had likewise turned weird and nasty--like mud, but with a chemical sort of streak. So I decided to try a pink lotus from somewhere else.

I got that on Friday and diluted it today. It smells different from the other--not at all as strong but not as muddy either. Weirdly enough, it reminds me very much of the wax stuff like lips and fangs and whatnot we used to get at Halloween as kids. It's a light scent, almost like a tea rose, not the loud tropical scent one would expect. Interesting. I will have to wait and see how it changes after a couple weeks. It's got possibilities.

7:46am: Hod Oil
Today I put together five versions of an oil for Hod. It includes storax, hemp, and mastic essential oils (the hemp doesn't have any THC, folks!). Just made, it smells raw but is definitely Mercury in its nature, and Mercury is the planetary influence for Hod. I like mastic a lot. It always reminds me of snowpeas, and yet for me it's got all these neat medieval echoes. This version is not bad once it dries. I might have to add some other Mercury scent to give it some weight, though.

Of course, I did manage to spill about half the bottle of hemp on the desk. Butterfingers this morning, which means that I won't be working on anymore oils this am but will just go to the post office and hope that fingers lose their buttery badness by the time I come back, because today I want to start vegetal musk, vegetal civet, and Shield of Mars oils. The formulae for prototypes are all worked out.

Five hours later...I can still smell the storax on my hand where I tested the oil. So I know this is a really long-lasting one. The combination of mastic and hemp wasn't right, though. One of the other versions might be better.

12:51pm: Freeze tonight
Our fall has been so warm that we haven't even had a frost yet. It's weird. Here it is about a month after our usual first frost, and tonight will be a freeze. I've covered all the plants I put in the ground just a couple weeks ago and will uncover them tomorrow so they can get a bit more accustomed to their new homes. I pulled up the soaker hoses, cleaned them, and they're drying on the driveway. I mowed all the leaves that have fallen so far (not many). Later today I've got to put row covers on the things that are left in the garden, still pumping out seeds--the mirabilis and the artemisia patch.

Meanwhile, I moved the turkmen mandrake, arctic poppy, and golden henbane babies into the basement and put them under shoplights. That's where they'll be living until next spring. I will be starting the various other mandrake seeds I've got on Samhain.

One of the projects I hope to get to next year is the back of the back yard, shown here. I would really like to increase the woodland aspect of this little area. My neighbor, whose yard looks like a golf course, keeps telling me I should cut the trees and shrubs down, what a shame, no light. I like it this way and told him I hope they will get bigger and create some privacy. This would be a great little place to do magic, if I could encourage more growth. I think it's just a matter of time, but this is where I hope I will be putting some large native plants next year. And who knows--I will probably make cuttings of the multiflora rose and put them around so that the edges of this area are a little more impenetrable to your average ape.

6:39pm: Collecting seeds
This year I started some perennials, and because they need at least two years to flower, I got no seeds from the costmary, allegedly variegated moonwort, variegated mugwort, southernwood, new extra-black hollyhock, bog myrtle, Russian belladonna, or a bunch of other things. However, today I collected some seeds. There was a bit of a confusion between these three plants:

Mirabilis jalapa - regular four o'clock. A nice plant, but I didn't intend to grow it.
Mirabilis multiflora - desert four o'clock. Used shamanistically. Pink flowers. I sell this seed and also got two packets in a seed exchange. So I thought.
Mirabilis longiflora - sweet four o'clock. A nice plant with elongated white, sweet flowers. I didn't plant it. Ha.

Instead of having M. multiflora coming from two different sources plus (I thought) my own, I got M. jalapa and M. longiflora and no M. multiflora at all. The M. jalapa are red/fuchsia and producing jillions of seeds. These are very robust plants and I think I will grow some next year (in spite of the fact that I don't especially like them) because they form nice dense plants that mean no weeding at all.

I was worried that the seeds I have been getting from my supplier as M. multiflora were labeled incorrectly, since I thought I had planted some of my own in addition to the seed exchange seeds. I know my supplier wildcrafts these seeds and they show pics of the plants that are correct. I have authoritative photos of Mirabilis jalapa and multiflora seeds but none of longiflora, so as soon as the Mirabilis longiflora plants produced seeds, I would be able to compare them to the seeds I have that are identified as Mirabilis multiflora. Well, I harvested one seed the other day and let it dry, and today I looked at it and it is most definitely not like the seeds I have that are identified as Mirabilis multiflora. So those are okay. The pic shows the correct seed for M. multiflora. M. jalapa seeds are similarly shaped but black and ridged. M. longiflora are bumpy and ridged. These things remind me of the bodies the men found "At the Mountains of Madness," one of my most favorite stories of all time. It inspired me to buy a huge map of Antarctica which I displayed for many years. With the way global warming is going, we might well end up discovering abandoned cities under all those miles of ice.

This is not the first time I have gotten completely misidentified seeds in a seed exchange. The thing is, these packets came from a seed exchange where the people are pretty knowledgeable. I am surprised someone would mix up M. jalapa with M. multiflora. They are way different.

Probably boring you all to death. It is just a nightmare for any merchant to think that something they are selling is incorrectly identified.

1:34pm: Starting seeds for next year
Today I started some seeds for next year. I wanted to try some different races of wolfsbane, so I got several subspecies from different sources in Canada and Germany. These I am going to try with Norm Deno's method for recalcitrant seeds that like cold. They are planted in small pots and put inside of plastic bags, the tops only loosely closed, and then set on the north side of the house. I know that the placement on the north side is meant to get them the cold they crave, but I always associate the north with banefulness as well. I started Aconitum lycoctonum, Aconitum moldavicum, and Aconitum vulparia. There's a lot of wrassling about nomenclature with the aconites:

Aconitum lycoctonum = A. lycoctonum ssp. vulparia, A. septentrionale, and A. vulparia = Yellow wolfsbane (this is the kind I have seeds to on the site)

Acontium moldavicum = A. lycoctonum ssp. moldavicum = Purple wolfsbane

I've always felt nervous about working around aconites because they are extremely poisonous and there is no antidote. Just handling the wet seeds once I experienced numbness up through my forearm. These are powerful. So I wore a rubber glove to plant them. I do love the flowers and they would look nice at the back of my yard where there are more wooded type conditions.

Since I was planting anyway, I decided to start some blackthorn seeds I've had sitting around for a year or so. I have heard they can take two years to germinate.

12:28pm: Overlooking the fact that I'm swamped...
I began working on a site devoted to historical gardening. I'm starting with medieval gardens and will gradually include other periods. There won't be anything for sale on the site, just info supported by ads. I've been wanting to do this for the past two years and finally am really working on it.

I also got back to work on my book, Growing the Witching Herbs, which has been in a holding pattern for quite a while. I would like to get sample chapters out to publishers by my birthday in mid November. Gotta have some kind of goal with it or I'll never finish it. If they all reject it, I will self-publish it. If I do that, I would love to take Culpeper and Gerard as my models for layout.:)

6:42pm: Finally getting my potted plants in the ground
Ever since I moved into this house, the retaining wall next to the basement steps has been in the process of collapse. Because I knew the area around that was going to be dug up in order to repair that wall, I could plant nothing over there, even though it's in a nice sunny spot. Finally the wall was fixed two weeks ago, but it took another two weeks before they came back and filled up the hole.

Today I had the pleasure of placing plants around that area to see what I would like to go where. I have several that I need to put in the ground. Today I got the dyer's broom (Genista tinctoria) planted. This is a variety with double flowers, but still it is not much to look at, and I did not realize that it doesn't get much over two feet tall. For some reason I was thinking it was a big plant. Well, it is considered to be a sort of ground cover because it is spreading, so that's something. I've still got the prairie rose (Rosa setigera) and the bog myrtle (Myrica gale) to place. These are all nice big healthy plants. I am really hoping that the bog myrtle especially likes it where I put it and becomes a large bush. It would be great to be able to harvest small amounts of this plant. I did find out that male and female plants are required for it to produce seeds, so I guess I am going to have to get some more.:) It is a nice-looking plant. I will take some pics tomorrow to show them off.

Right next to this area is also a place of deep shade. I am thinking this will be a great place for the mandrakes next season. Meanwhile, I am going to put the three Russian belladonnas there. I am not sure if they are dormant or just dead, but it's worth it to put them in the ground. I seem to have very little success with this particular plant.

It's also time to put the vegetable garden away, to take down all the trellises and to pull up the soaker hoses. I'm hoping we don't get a real frost for a while yet, because I would really like to get seeds from the Mirabilis longiflora and from the Day of the Dead marigold, which is just starting to make seeds now. I will have to grow that one again next year in a sunnier place with more water (in the front). It was quite small due to being too dry.

I love October. It's finally gotten cold and the sky is so clear. I love the fall smells of dead leaves, moist ground, and cold air with a hint of wood smoke. And one of the best things in life is being inside on a cold evening reading a book with the cats curled up all around.

9:24pm: Ambergris/Kether Oil & Bottles
The faux ambergris oil that I have been working on for Kether on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is finished, and wow, is it fabulous! Warm, rich, regal--everything I think of for ambergris, and not one single synthetic or animal ingredient. It's all plants. I'll be putting a page together for it in the next couple of days.

I've been bothered by the black/violet bottles I've been using to package up the more concentrated oils. They are beautiful, but they are not the right size (they are actually larger than 5 ml because they were designed to hold a fat orifice reducer), you can't see the color of the oil (some of my oils are a beautiful peacock blue or emerald green), and it is impossible to see how filled up they are. I have been using a syringe to fill them, and it is just too much of a pain. I have shopped for other bottles but found nothing I really like. For now I will be packaging the concentrated oils in clear bottles that have a glass applicator stick. I figure the applicator will be nifty for drawing sigils or writing on candles with the oil. This is also a bigger bottle - 1/4 oz or 7.5 ml - so it holds 50% more than the present 5 ml (which has actually been holding 6.5 ml!). It has just been too difficult to get a 5 ml bottle that does not have an orifice reducer or that doesn't have to be ordered 10,000 at a time, etc.

5:05pm: Faeries and plant spirits - is they is or is they ain't our pals?
Today I picked up a book that's just come out on plant spirits called "Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World," ed. by J.P. Harpignies. It's put out by an imprint of Inner Traditions, which often has interesting books (their book by Manfred Junius on plant alchemy is the best, for instance). It's a collection of essays about the spiritual relationship between people and plants in different cultures, especially in terms of visionary plants, as they are called, and also with a focus on anthropology. It got me thinking about the ways we look at plant spirits.

It seems there are a couple of ways of approaching plants spiritually (in the US, anyway). One is what I think of as the "entheogen" approach. I feel a lot of unease about that approach because IME, which is not huge, but it's there, "entheogen" is often a code word for "legal high." For instance, if I see that "extracts" of an entheogenic plant are being sold, I have to wonder if their use is really intended to be for contacting the plant's spirit and asking it for guidance or whether its use is intended to be a poor substitute for smoking pot. At best, North Americans seem to use these plants to get to know their own personality better. It's about the user, not the plant. And "user" does seem to be the right word. There seems to be a real disconnect between the people using these plants and the plants themselves, thus the existence of stuff like extracts.

I can't say that disconnect is unique to people who approach plants as entheogens, though. That seems to be pretty much the rule for many who consider plants as any sort of spiritual aid at all, whether it be for plain old hexing, for spiritual exploration, for magical help, or whatever. So I won't go off on a tear about that.

On the other end are people I guess I would call New Age, for lack of a better term, who often make use of concepts like devas and plant fairies to discuss a world populated by pretty much predictable and helpful plants. I've written in the past about my consideration of fairies as not to be trifled with, so I won't expand on that. But there does seem to be a certain parallel between considering fairies more or less purely beneficent and approaching plants as if they were the same.

I guess belladonna is as good an example as any. Here's a plant with a long history of being used a plaster for painkilling. It was once sold over the counter for this purpose, even as late as the 1930s. In Europe, you can still buy belladonna plasters, although I believe they are actually made of alkaloids mixed with inert stuff now. The interest in the entheogenic community in belladonna is slim, which is a good thing, but I think this lack of interest does not come from a healthy fear of this trickster but rather that belladonna for some reason does not have the glamor or sexiness (in the ad sense) of a tropical psychedelic plant, even one of its cousins, like brugmansia, which to my mind is a damned harsh mistress. Is this because belladonna is not much to look at? Because a prophet is always disdained in his own land (it's a Western plant after all)? Because it's called deadly nightshade, and it's hard to miss that "deadly"? I don't know.

I haven't seen belladonna discussed in any plant deva type books that I have looked at. From that perspective, most of the plants approached are more or less innocuous, like culinary herbs. It seems to me that this approach must skip over the more truculent and poisonous plants because they don't play nice and so can't fit into a worldview where a generally positive attitude is the rule. The thing is that a number of baneful plants are completely unpredictable.

What this all means is that a whole group of plants gets ignored, and in the process, we don't expand our knowledge about plants that are right here, right now, and that have been part of Western [European] civilization for a long time. It seems like both approaches have the perspective that we can not ever really look at how we relate to plants. All we will see is the veil, as in this study by Durer. It's a painting of empty cloth drapery, but it's easy to look at it and see what we think it is--a woman with her back turned to us. Just so, wee end up looking at plants only in terms of how they can be made to fit into what we already believe. They're objects, not subjects, despite all the protestations about shamanism and whatnot.

To a certain extent, our relationship to baneful plants reminds me of our culture's relationship to the war in Vietnam. Every time you turn around, someone is making a new program or a new movie or coming out with a new book about WWII or about Iraq, Desert Storm, or whatnot. Vietnam gets skipped over again and again. It's too dark and messy to look at up close. If we really looked at it, we might have to re-evaluate our entire relationship to war and to the rest of the world.

I think there is a similar sort of "here there be monsters" about belladonna et al. To really work with this sort of plant would mean having to readjust one's attitudes about plants completely. Because belladonna, as mentioned above, does not play nice or fair. It will act one way this time and another way next time. It will show you something horrific and then make you forget it. And so on. It's not a good teacher, or maybe it's the best kind precisely because it brings death back into the equation of plant + human and thus forces us to take it seriously if we deal with it at all. I am not advocating ingesting these plants, btw. But I do think we need to know them, especially if we call ourselves witches or sorcerers. Right now, the majority who ever risk getting involved with them are stupid teenagers who end up in the ER. Maybe we witches or shamans or whatever we are calling ourselves today need to be less like spectators in a museum or visitors to an amusement park and more like active participants, like the witch in this painting. She doesn't look like a nice old biddy and she's not pretty, but her image exudes power, strength, craft, and knowledge gained from hard knocks. I cannot imagine her being interested in investigating the ins and outs of her psyche or believing in the pure goodliness and predictability of plants, can you?

I think it's a wonderful thing that many people are growing such plants now, even though I have a sense that some of that springs from a sort of consumerism, where one wants to own the wild forces, the hedge. I do this myself, to a certain extent, and I hope that for all of us it can blossom into a less objectivizing knowledge and respect, to an openness to a different way of learning about these plants, a partnership.

Hope I don't sound like too much of a blowhard. This is an issue I have been thinking on for some time. Please feel free to comment.

9:27am: An unexpected Moon plant
A couple weeks ago I discovered that the seeds I had gotten in an exchange as Mirabilis multiflora (desert four o'clock, which is used shamanically by the Hopi) were actually Mirabilis jalapa (four o'clock), a nice but very common flower popular during the Victorian period. The rest of the mirabilis plants had not yet bloomed, so I assumed that they were Mirabilis multiflora. Today one of them finally started opening some buds, and it is Mirabilis longiflora, sweet four o'clock. This is a neat plant with very elongated violet-white flowers that open in evening and stay open until the following morning. They are sweet-scented and attract hawkmoths. I'm glad to have gotten this seed, even if it wasn't as identified, because this plant is definitely worth growing in a Moon garden. It flowers later than most plants that would be in such a garden, and it's pretty much carefree. I don't know if this plant will make enough seeds to sell this year. Probably not. But at least I can plant more and have them available next year.

2:14pm: Artemis of the Mountaintops Oil
This is completely different from any other oil I've made. Even though I have used mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) and wormwood (Artemisia absinthium in plenty of things, I haven't ever wound up with an oil like this. When it's wet, it's harsh--the wormwood is STRONG. It dries right away, though, and then smells strangely minty or fresh, but this is a dry freshness, not a scrunchy one. This works with the image of the goddess as she was worshipped in the mountains of the Mediterranean, which are dry and contain many aromatic plants.

Gradually the oil changes again and a sweetness comes to the fore. This must be the peach artemisia/native wormwood and davana working together. It's nice. After a while, it is almost like the scent of a daffodil. Really unique.

For me, this oil is proof that sometimes the most interesting stuff comes from going at things in a very mechanical way. In this oil, I decided that the best way to approach this goddess was to use plants named after her. That seems as though it is working with this oil.

This oil has a very Airy aspect, and I have always had trouble with Airy scents. Although I like mints, I have never been interested in working much with their essential oils, because they are overwhelming, IMO. This gives that freshness but with an additional dryness and it is subtle, not a sledgehammer. It is a virginal smell, but it is not antiseptic, as for instance camphor can be. I like it!

I am going to give it a couple more days to see if anything else occurs to me in terms of this oil, and then I think it will be ready to rock and roll.

11:16pm: Fulcanelli, Birds, and Spirituality
The Fulcanelli book "Dwellings of the Philosophers" is proving to be even better than I had thought. Anyone on the mineral path should definitely check it out, because he does give very explicit descriptions of various things, including the method used to arrive at a gold that would definitely have been taken for gold in the middle ages, as it passed all the tests they then had.

One of the things mentioned in the foreword and that has certainly come up in many alchemy discussions I've been privy to is the nature of the secret fire. I had always thought of this rather hazily as just the stuff that makes an atom vibrate or that makes electrons go around a nucleus and such, whatever that might be. When Fulcanelli talks about the difference between chemistry and alchemy (he describes the latter as a "spiritualistic chemistry which allows us to catch a glimpse of God,") he mentions that for instance you can't just throw some H and some O together and get water. Something is missing. That something is what alchemy takes into account, he says. Alchemy is about causes as opposed to chemistry, which is about facts. What I gather from that is that alchemy focuses on the process, which is no secret, that's for sure.

He also mentions the Language of the Birds. I have seen this phrase thrown around before but never really thought about what it might mean--just another alchemical obfuscation, I assumed. He says, "that the name and the thing are based on the permutation of form by light, fire or spirit; such is in any case the true meaning indicated by the Language of the Birds." (p. 40). It seems that this language is about gases and other penetrating substances. This makes sense with pictures I have seen, especially this one from Solis Splendor. Notice the eagle at the top, which remains after the other birds have flown away. However, he also says later, "The language of birds is a phonetic medium based solely on assonance" (assonance is the use of repetition of vowel sounds). I think of the connection between breath and gases, but there is more to this yet. I wonder, though, if it is significant that here he uses lower case and is talking about the actual sounds of real birds, just to trip us up. Very alchemical.

Thankfully, he is not one of those who believes that if you just follow the right recipe, you will arrive at the Philosopher's Stone: "Untiring nature works--better than in the rocky abysses--under the prudent attention of a person, with the help of the stars and the grace of God." (p. 45). So more is needed than the right substances and the right vessels and the right process. It is also the right time of year (the stars) and a spiritual development that is involved.

Along these lines, one of the things I learned about Armand Barbault was that he believed that the Prima Materia was revealed to a person or to put it another way, was chosen intuitively, after great thought and deliberation. It is not one single thing for everyone. It seems to be unique to each person. This connects back to Fulcanelli's idea about the grace of God being vital to the Work. He quotes one writer on alchemy approvingly who says that alchemy can't be learned from books but only through divine revelation. He also says it is not about digestions and cohobations, yet it is clearly a physical process as well as a spiritual and astrological one.

One of the most interesting things he's discussed so far is what he calls "cabala." This has nothing to do with Kabbalah or even Qabalah, as far as I can see. Instead, it is the use of visual puns to give information. He gives many examples. One simple one is the front of a house built by a fellow named Bolton. A design depicts a jagged line, a thunderbolt, coming down to hit a barrel, a tun. I was amazed to read how taverns made use of such puns in their signs. Oddly enough, this made me think immediately of herbal codes, those lists begun since the Renaissance that give the equivalents of things like "semen of a hamadryas baboon."

He also quotes Geber speaking about how spirits (like alcohol but also gases) affect bodies, which made me think immediately of scent and how that affects the material and magical worlds.

At any rate, this book has already given me lots of information to work with, and I have read only 100 pages so far.

8:39am: More on Alchemy - The Silent Book & Potable Gold
Since I had started to read Fulcanelli, I did a little research to find out more about him (or them, as the case may be). One bit I found on the alchemy site also discussed Armand Barbault and how he had used Mutus Liber to make alchemical medicines in the past century. His book is known in English as "Gold of a Thousand Mornings." I remember hearing about it when I began to seriously study alchemy, but I never looked into it. Recently I saw it being sold on Amazon for almost $400. I thought that this book described the alchemical experiments done a while ago with I think it was cosmic rays and a base metal, but it doesn't. Instead, it describes how Barbault, using the 17th-century Mutus Liber as his text, began a work involving alchemically transforming the Prima Materia through the addition of plant juices and dew. This immediately drew me. I looked around, and I found a copy of the book for sale in Canada in French for $7.00. My French is adequate to read material like this. It's funny, but recently I began brushing up on my French because I'd looked at some stuff on magic in French--Piobb's Formulaire and also some other material and then had found an interesting book in French on making incense. So I've been working on my French, and it looks like doing that has saved me about $400, lol!

The Mutus Liber is a short book with no text that contains elaborate illustrations of a series of alchemical processes. This pic shows the famous harvesting of dew using stretched cloths.

8:38pm: Fulcanelli
Anyone who's ever been interested in alchemy knows how important pictures are in that art. The bizarre and brilliantly-colored images associated with alchemy were what first drew me to it. But when I decided to study alchemy in earnest, I concentrated mostly on the texts, because that's what everyone does. Unfortunately, many alchemical texts have been contaminated by copying, by market forces (yes, they existed even in the early Renaissance), and by the distortions imposed on meaning by time and translation. A few years ago I pretty much gave up on trying to work with alchemical texts, especially as 99% of them are devoted to the Mineral Path, which doesn't have a lot of interest for me.

Since then I have occasionally turned over just how one might approach actually traveling the path to the Stone of practical alchemy. I wondered if perhaps the real key was in the graphics after all. That got me thinking about Fulcanelli, who is famous in alchemy for his book on how the artwork of medieval cathedrals describes alchemical processes. He asserted that the real truth of alchemy was not to be found in texts but in architecture, and since he is credited with attaining the Stone, his assertions might be worth reading. They would certainly be a unique perspective. So I determined to read his work and just today received a book that I've been trying to obtain for a while, his "Dwellings of the Philosophers," in which he looks at the decorations and structures of the homes of past alchemists in order to spy out alchemical secrets. Already I've latched onto this image. What I liked about it was how much it resonates for witchcraft as well as alchemy. You can't see it in this photo, but the top of this furry man's staff depicts the head of an old woman covered with a hood. Fulcanelli argues that this is in fact one perspective on Philosophical Mercury. I can see already, though, that he leaves much unsaid. For instance, the man is depicted as furry. Why? I also seem to remember depictions of a male figure with his upper body facing one way and the lower body facing another (such as is shown in the pic) as representing the result of some sort of alchemical process. Now I can't quite dig up the exact meaning, though.

In alchemy, one sometimes runs across descriptions of a certain phase of the Work being characterized by a pervasive, pleasant smell that fills the entire house. Fulcanelli is the only alchemist I know of who discusses scent at greater length. This has bearing for working with magic oils and incenses. He argues, for instance, that pleasant smells indicate volatilization and bad smells indicate fixation. There is a lot more to it than that, but it is a different way of looking at scent.

I hope to have more to say about Fulcanelli and how it relates to scent, color, and magic as I go along. But even if you never intend to get into alchemy as a system, its images can provide endless inspiration for magical work. Take a look at Solis Splendor, for instance, an absolute banquet of images:

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/splensol.html

3:35pm: Malkuth three months later
I have never been completely happy with my Malkuth oil. It took me a lot of twiddling to get something that smelled like dittany of Crete put together from natural essential oils. This compliments and amplifies the dittany of Crete oil that I infused from the actual herb last summer. I'll be able to infuse more of that this summer, but the Malkuth oil just always smelled a little too thin to me.

I happened to smell some that I made a while ago, and it has changed appreciably. It is now darker and more complex, as if with shades of frankincense and earth. I like it now and I think it represents Malkuth much better than I had hoped it would. Very satisfying!

11:11am: Seedbabies
One of the turkmen mandrake seeds has started to sprout! Woohoo! The golden henbane seeds are sprouting as well.

My late garden is doing pretty darn good. I picked four cucumbers this morning. This is from the Pioneer variety. Must be that hybrid vigor. The White Wonder appears to be a total non-starter. There are plenty of purple bush beans--very tasty eaten fresh, I must say. Pole beans are just starting to bloom. We are heading for cool weather now--time to take the a/c out of the window--so I will probably not get much from them. Tomatoes are loaded with green fruits. I'm really looking forward to the yellow beefsteaks ripening, because they are my favorite kind of tomato these days. I've had only one from that plant--it was set back for some reason.

I am going to try starting a few turnips. I found some really interesting British turnip seeds and just got them this weekend.