A Witch's Garden: Monkshood

Disclaimer

This is NOT a page about Wiccans or neo-pagans, and I do not advocate the belief that Wiccans are Satan-worshippers and/or baby-killers. I am well aware that they are not. This is a starting point for historical research into the great witch craze of 1100-1700 AD. And please, don't ask me for spells.

Monkshood

Monkshood's seeds, leaves, and roots are poisonous, and are very dangerous if eaten or if the juices get inside cuts. Monkshood was also known as Aconite, Garden Wolfbane, Helmet Flower, Friar's Cap, or Soldier's Cap. It was called Wolfbane or Wolf's Bane because meat saturated with its juice was used as a wolf poison during the middle ages.

Supposedly the 'quintessential plant of the occult'. It has beautiful purple flower spikes. It was used in combination with belladonna to make a flying ointment, and in combination with water parsnip, cinquefoil, belladonna, and soot to make an ointment of the imagination, that allowed witches to contact the other side. It contains the deadly poison aconitine, which slows heart rate, decreases blood pressure, and numbs pain. The ancient Greeks believed monkshood sprouted from the spittle of the hellhound Cerberus (mAlice).

Monkshood poisoning was often attributed to sorcery. Because of the difficulty in dosing the drug, as an ingredient in love philtres, "the result was often not so much an increase in the ability to love as it was love frenzy or even death" (Rätsch 34).

Wolf's bane was used as an ingredient for a potion in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."

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A Witch's Garden is copyright 1997-1998 to Shantell Powell.
The preceding botanic illustration is from The Virtual Garden Search Engine, part of the Time Life Electronic Encyclopedia.