The Doctrine of signatures and how it applies to magic
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Caveat -This is not a medical blog, I am not a doctor, if you have any medical issues please see a qualified medical specialist. Do not ingest anything you aren’t 100% sure of .
Thank you.
In my last post I referenced something called the Doctrine of Signatures, so thought I’d better come back and give some further information on this and how you can apply it to magical work with plants and other materia. Then I’m free to write about more interesting stuff - frankly. So much to write about, so little energy as I’m still healing from surgery.
What is the Doctrine of Signatures?
Put simply, the Doctrine of Signatures involves using a plant's appearance (and smell/taste/habitat) to divine or deduce its medicinal properties. A theory reminiscent of sympathetic magic and which states that plants with the ability to heal look like the body parts or conditions that they can be used to treat. For example the plant eyebright or a cross section of a carrot both look like an eye and therefore can be used to treat issues with the eye. Who doesn’t remember their parent telling them eating carrot would help them see in the dark? Just me?
While this is essentially a creationist theological viewpoint - it is not a purely Christian one - and certainly something that I think can actually fit well into an overall animist perspective and which can be used when working with plants magically, especially when in the process of getting to know plant spirits and their nature.
This ‘doctrine’ has been much disputed in modern times (by modern I mean the last few hundred years) and is now treated as pseudoscience. I’ve found it still bears use magically. As ever - this is how I work and your mileage may vary!
The history
In an example of convergent cultural thinking, this idea was not limited to any one culture, in fact it occurs so often as to be considered ubiquitous.
In the West, the first written mention of the DoS is found in the writings of the Roman naturalist, Pliny the Elder (AD 24-79). This clearly wasn’t a revolutionary theory as it was his contemporary Dioscorides who mentioned that the herb known as ‘scorpius’ which so named as it resembles the tail of a scorpion, was a cure for scorpion stings. Dioscorides, a Roman citizen of Greek ethnicity living in Turkey, listed this in his De Materia Medica, written in approximately AD 77, cramming it full of knowledge likely gained both at the Academy in Cilicia and as a doctor in the Roman army. This book is our prime source on the medicines of antiquity - the five volume work covers around 600 plants, as well as animal and other materia, and really formed the core of European pharmacopeia until the 19th century. That is some impressive staying power.
In the 1500s, good old Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, though in my house we refer to him as the Badompadonk - ahem) wrote extensively on the topic and his ideas were carried on by his followers, gaining traction throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
Paracelsus wrote of the principle similia similibus curantur (like cures like). He believed that all plants, animals, and minerals were put on Earth by the Creator for human use, and that this Creator deliberately placed signs within these things to indicate these very uses. Interestingly his language here does have an animist flavour as he is stating that these non-human things are ‘striving’ to communicate this…
"Nature marks each growth which comes from her according to its curative benefit … and there is no thing in nature, created or born, which does not strive to reveal its inner form outwardly; for the inner life continually works toward revelation."
This belief was continued by his followers including Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), a cobbler by trade, who experienced a mystical vision in 1600, which he claims revealed to him the relationship between God and man. His ‘Signatura Rerum’ (The Signature of all Things) was published in 1621. Here, Böhme advised students to keep Paracelsian theories in mind when studying plants - in his words:
"And there is nothing that is created or born in nature, but it also manifests its internal form externally, for the internal continually labours or works itself forth to manifestation … which we see and know in the stars and elements, likewise in the living creatures, and also in the trees and herbs"
Culpeper, the famed English herbalist, physician and astrologer, published his herbal under the title ‘The English Physitian’ in 1652. This was aimed at the layperson, rather than at his fellow doctors, and was chock full of references to the DoS, as well as his astrological theories. He wrote
"… by the icon or image of every herb, man first found out their virtues. Modern writers laugh at them for it, but I wonder in my heart how the virtues of herbs first came to be known, if not by their signatures. The moderns have them from the writings of the ancients-the ancients had no writings to have them from."
Much modern literature still mentions the DoS, though it is not without vociferous and scathing opposition.
Religion
As seen above, the popularity of this view was largely religious, which is unsurprising. If you believe in a creator god and a meddling devil, as pretty much everyone did in medieval tEurope, then surely all illnesses come from the Devil, and God in his mighty benevolence has responded by providing us with the cures and the clues to be able to find them. The Lord and his Mysterious Ways again....
In the words of botanist William Coles, writing in 1656
“Though Sin and Sathan have plunged mankinde into an ocean of infirmities, you the Mercy of God, which is all over his workes, maketh Grasse to grow upon the Mountaines and Herbes for the use of men, and hath not only stamped upon them a distinct forme but also hath given them particular signatures whereby a man may read the use of them”
The DoS even appears in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ where the Archangel Michael uses eyebright to cure Adam’s eye infection.
Modern views
As we move into more secular and scientific times, it is not surprising that opinion on this has shifted considerably. There were some earlier opponents but it was really in the 1800s that scepticism took off with a vocal denier in German physician Samuel Hahnemann stating:
"I shall spare the ordinary medical school the humiliation of reminding it of the folly of those ancient physicians who, determining the medicinal powers of crude drugs from their signatures, that is, from their colour and form, gave the testicle-shape orchis-root in order to restore manly vigour, the phallus impudicus to restore weak erections, and considered Hypericum perforatum, whose yellow flowers on being crushed yield a red juice (St. John's blood), useful in haemorrhages and wounds, etc.; but I shall refrain from taunting the physicians of the present day with this absurdity, although traces of it are to be met with the most modern treatises on Materia Medica."
T. F. Thiselton-Dyer's Folk-Lore of Plants (1889) examined the history of DOS in the 16th and 17th centuries noting that it "led to serious errors in practice" and there is no denying that there have been poisonings caused by the blind belief in the DoS.
Most modern scientists consider the DoS absurd and some claim it has been completely debunked, however it remains popular among herbalists and in fact the much missed biologist Stephen Jay Gould was sympathetic to the idea in a way which I find particularly apt when considering our ancestors and their contribution to our understanding of plant magic:
"I question our usual dismissal of this older approach as absurd, mystical, or even prescientific (in any more than a purely chronological sense). Yes, anointing the wound as well as the weapon can only be labeled ridiculous mumbo-jumbo in light of later scientific knowledge. But how can we blame our forebears for not knowing what later generations would discover? We might as well despise ourselves because our grandchildren will, no doubt, understand the world in a different way."
More recently, ethnobotanist Bradley Bennett has posited that the DoS may function more as a mnemonic for remembering plants than as a technique for discovering effective plant medicines, which I will revisit below.
Other cultures
So far we have been looking at this with a very Western gaze. The DoS though, as mentioned, is ubiquitous and examples can be found throughout Chinese, Tibetan and Native American medicine. In fact it really is everywhere.
A prime example of the DoS in action in China is ginseng, the name is an Anglicization of the Chinese word for “man-essence” and indeed the root does look like a person. The plant’s signature is then easy to divine, it is a cure for low ‘essence’ and it is a popular supplement for low energy or low sex drive.
Examples
Not all magical and medicinal uses of plants match up - but we are still researching so many of these plants that in my opinion it isn’t so much about things having been disproved but rather not having been proved or disproved yet. Below are a couple of examples where the uses do match.
Calendula - another flower that looks like the iris of the eye and is still included in modern day eye treatments. Magically it can be used to help us ‘see’ more clearly, for example by promoting prophetic dreams or helping reveal the truth in a situation.
Walnut - looks like a brain and so is believed per DoS to help with mental ailments. Scientifically the walnut has been found to contain melatonin, which in laboratory trials has been show to reduce brain inflammation. Magically the walnut is used in hoodoo to help a person fall out of love by severing mental connections. In Ancient Greece they were used to treat parasitic worms, and you can see how the surface of a walnut looks like worm tubes - you can extract fungicide and insecticide from walnuts too.
Caveat
I would like to be clear however - that while I am a firm believer in herbal medicine as a complement to scientific medicine, it should not be used instead of. If you have problems with your brain chemistry, eating walnuts alone is not going to cure you.
If you have a medical condition, do see a doctor, science is real and most conditions can be better treated with prescribed medicines rather than dietary changes, herbal tea and magic. Though throwing a little magic on top of any medical treatment can be a great help - which brings me to…
How to apply to magical use
In my opinion DoS does still have utility - even if just as a mnemonic. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. While early texts mentioning it seem to present signatures as a priori clues, we must remember that these writers were not physically there when these discoveries were first made, they were recording long handed-down folk remedies. Things which had often been proved through long term successful use. As such it seems more likely the connections were made after the plant’s properties were discovered and attributed as a memory aid.
So - even to the non-witch - the Doctrine of Signatures can be a great way of remembering and transmitting plant knowledge on the fly. Post hoc attribution of signatures serves as a reminder and this is most likely how the knowledge of plants and their properties were transmitted in pre-literate societies.
As a witch however (select other magical denomination according to your preference) I think we can use this a little more deftly. I talked in my previous post about speaking to plant spirits and getting to know them through communication. Plants do not communicate to us in words, well, not unless you have particularly developed psychic senses and can hear them in your head.
On a micro level an individual plant will show you its needs through how healthy it looks - is it wilting, are the leaves browning, for example. This is why many witches use houseplants as wards in the home, they can be primed to flag up spiritual attack and serve as an excellent early warning system.
On a macro level a plant genius spirit will communicate through their physical form - their appearance, their taste (only taste if you know what it is - please don’t be putting foxglove in your mouth by mistake) and their texture and habitat.
If you aren’t yet gifted in plant communication you can learn a lot about their uses from folk names too.
Some examples of magical DOS
Belladonna - shiny black berries on five pointed star sepals - death and exorcism
Bindweed - both name and form show useful for binding magic
Mugwort - green on one side of the leaf and silver on the other, Venus and the Moon
Nettle - aggressive stings, Mars, protection and war magic
Pomegranate - round, red, full of seeds like a womb, fertility magic, love charms
Rosemary - astringent smell and spines - protective magic
St John’s Wort - bright yellow, comes out in Summer, alleviates sadness and all solar work
Conclusion
Well that was a lot of words to describe a simple and only partially useful thing haha! But like any kind of communication, plant communication is multifaceted.
By taking in everything the plant is communicating to you though its appearance, smell, texture - you will better understand how to approach it for the work you wish to do.
Just as you would read the room in a social situation, you may want to read the flowerbed to see if this plant is willing to communicate - it may be approachable like mugwort or prickly like gorse. It may grow in pampered gardens which could indicate a soft approach or sprout almost miraculously from a crack in a wall suggesting tenacity of character.
Next time you want to pick a plant, look at its leaves and flowers, their shape, their colour and where it grows and see if it gives you any clues as to its nature. You might surprise yourself.
References
Bennet, Bradley C. Doctrine of Signatures: Through Two Millennia, https://www.herbalgram.org/resources/herbalgram/issues/78/table-of-contents/article3244/
Jones, Lucy, A working Herbal Dispensary
Schukle, Daniel C, The Green Mysteries