Plant allies - stinging nettle / common nettle
Urtica dioca - stingers. orties, burn nettle, devil's claw, devil's plaything
I seem to be talking a lot about plants lately but oh, plants are so much fun, yes even nettles. I’m sure everyone is familiar with these, they were the scourge of the playing fields of my childhood, I feel I spent half my teen years extracting wayward hockey balls from clumps of nettles while desperately trying to avoid being stung. Funny how times change, as now I am inordinately fond of these defensive and adversity loving weeds.
So ubiquitous are they, that they have even made it into every day speech with ‘to nettle’ meaning to irritate or provoke.
Nettles are unequivocally Martial - they are fighters, and can be used to spellwork to harness both the aggressive and protective aspects of that planet. They can add energy to the body through diet and to magical work in general. Some sources also list them as Jupiterian, likely due to their link to Thor who rules Thursdays.
Correspondences:
Planet - Mars (and some sources, Jupiter)
Astrological - Scorpio (that sting!)
Element - Fire
Works - funerary magic, necromancy, cursing - both coercive and attacking, protection, fortification, perseverance
Description:
Nettles tend to grow in large clumps, often on waste ground - which means they thrive even in the most urban neighbourhood, making the nettle a great ally to the city witch. It is a survivor - incredibly hardy, and a fighter - with an in-built defence mechanism.
Easy to find then - but easy to identify? Well, to paraphrase Culpeper, the nettle is the only plant you can easily identify even in the dark, thanks to their distinctive sting. Ye Merrye Olde English Humour aside - nettles are easy to spot, while there are mimics (for example the white and purple deadnettle) stinging nettles are very distinctive. They stand almost 2 metres high when fully grown, with dark green, coarsely toothed and pointed leaves set in alternate, opposite pairs.
Nettles protect themselves by means of stinging hairs on their stems, called trichomes. These are hollow - very like hypodermic needles. When the plant is touched, the tips of these delicate silica hairs break off, injecting formic acid and histamines into their ‘victim’. I exaggerate, but it really can be quite painful - as every school child knows all too well. Top tip - the more purple the stem, the more stingers you are likely to encounter. And once stung, ignore the usual advice about dock leaves - what you need to do is get some juice from ribwort or greater plantain, or rosemary on the stings.
Folklore and history:
Nettle has played an important role in human life from very early times, with woven nettle fibres being found in Bronze Age grave goods in Denmark dating back over 2800 years ago. The use of nettle for clothing and bedding continued in Scotland until the 1800s when industry decreed other fibres easier to produce and thusly more profitable.
Nettle clothing appears in folklore across Europe - in the UK it was believed that one should not pick nettles after May Day in case one angered the Devil who was using them to weave his shirts. In Denmark again we have a Hans Christian Andersen tale of a young girl who wove shirts from nettles in order to break a spell that had turned her brothers into swans.
Nettle is one of the herbs in the famous ‘Nine-Herbs’ charm of the Anglo-Saxons - and was believed to protect from elf-shot.
Uses culinary:
The young tips can be gathered in the Spring and cooked like spinach, cooking them destroys the stings - no nettle salads please. Older plants can be toxic, but you can ensure a constant crop of fresh growth by cutting nettle patches down and harvesting the young shoots. Samuel Pepys mentions a nettle pudding in his diaries - which is believed to have been made with egg white or aspic and to have been meant as a pick-me-up after Winter. Once again we have nettles relieving enervation.
Uses medicinal:
Anaemia - a useful addition to the diet due to their high iron, calcium and vitamin C content - eaten in soup or taken as tea
Arthritis and rheumatism - deliberately stinging aching joints with nettles has been shown to bring great relief in scientific studies and this practice is used fairly regularly in parts of the UK
Fatigue - between half a teaspoon to one tablespoon of the seeds per day to enliven and energise - start low and work up! Taking too much can have an amphetamine like effect, and some folk do use the recreationally. I can’t recommend it, it made me jittery - but you do you!
Rashes, burns and cuts - the juice applied to skin disorders promotes healing and staunches blood flow
Slimming - as per fatigue
Uses Magical:
Daniel Schulke, in his masterful ‘Green Mysteries’ describes nettle’s chief occult virtue as strength in adversity and I wholeheartedly agree. It is aggressively Martial - offering protection, binding, adding strength to any working. I find it is especially useful in curse work. The plant spirit of nettle however, is not aggressive in a threatening way, it is martial like an Aries. It wants to help, it wants to help so much it is clamouring to do something for human allies.
Uncrossing - in Hoodoo, dried leaves are used as a jinx breaker, combined with another jinx breaking herb like mint or rue, and a mineral like black salt or graveyard dust. This is then sprinkled around the house to cut off curses laid by other witches.
Bravery - another Hoodoo spell suggests carrying a pinch of nettle with a pinch of yarrow in a yellow bag along with a name paper on which you have listed your fears.
Banishing - burning nettles can smoke cleanse a space, the leaves can be place on a photo of a person you want to banish, or they can be used to dress a banishing candle
Binding - nettle flax makes a great string for a binding spell
Cursing - use as banishing to dress photos, name papers or figure / skull candles representing a person or situation
Healing - keep a bundle of nettles under the patients bed, replacing daily. To see if someone will survive an illness, place a freshly picked nettle in a glass of water they have sipped from. If the nettle dries overnight their illness may be terminal, if it stays green they will survive.
Foraging tips:
While nettles grow all year round, the best time in harvest is in early Spring until they flower in May. After this the leaves start to fill with cystolith crystals which can irritate the urinary system. If you have your own nettle patch and want to eat them year round, just keep trimming them and the new growth will be fine to eat all year round.
You will need sturdy gloves, I wear Marigold washing up gloves but some stings still make it though, so if you are wary either get rose gardening gloves or heavier duty rubber ones. You’ll also need scissors.
For food, just pick the stem down to the (approximate) tenth leaf, this is best eaten fresh or you can dry for tea. For fibres you can pick the entire stem and hang to dry. When gathering the seeds, you need to be careful to identify the female nettles, and I find it best to just snip these directly into a jar or plastic pot, rather than take the tops of the plant. You then need to dry these out for a week or so, and then pass through a sieve to remove seeds from fibres.
Female nettles tend to have the seeds hanging heavy and pendulous, the male thin and erect - make of that what you will. Ahem.
As always - do not forage anything below dog pee height, not from right beside a road, don’t take too much (not a problem with nettles though), if in the UK do not dig up roots unless you are on your own land and finally - don’t forget to ask the plant for permission before and thank it after - you can see a process for that in my previous post. You’ll get a lot more magical effect from a plant you treat well.
References
https://www.alchemy-works.com/urtica_dioica.html
Culpeper, N. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician.
Hatfield, G. Hatfield’s Herbal - The Secret History of British Plants.
Illes, J. The Element Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells.
Phillips, R. Wild Flowers of Britain.
Schulke, Daniel. The Green Mysteries
Wright, J. The Foragers Calendar.
yronwode, catherine. Hoodoo Herb and Root Magic.
Apparently the body reacts to nettle stings by producing more acetylcholine, which makes me wonder if that nootropic effect might be connected in some way to the stimulant aspect of the seeds.