Image: Latin Picatrix, Jagiellonian Library, Kraków · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
A cone of frankincense smoking on a Cardwell verandah. Nutmeg by the stove. Valerian on the bedside table. All three turn up in a medieval book of magic, alongside hemlock and opium.
Parts of it are shrewd observation. Parts are poetry. And one line, about snakebite, would hurt anyone who trusted it.
Educational only: no advice, and no suggestion to get, burn, prepare or take any plant named here. Legal lines are our published reading, not legal advice.
Snakebite in Australia: phone 000 at once. Apply a pressure immobilisation bandage and keep the person still. Do not put any plant on the bite, give one by mouth, or burn one. Antivenom is the only treatment.
Any plant possibly swallowed: phone the Poisons Information Centre on 13 11 26, 24 hours, anywhere in Australia, or 000 in an emergency.
For any question about a herbal medicine, consult a degree-qualified herbalist with competencies and adequate training in pharmacognosy.
- A learned medieval book of esoteric magic naming about 150 plants. Its usual method is burning them as ritual smoke.
- It is most reliable on plants that sedate, purge or poison.
- On love and favour it is mostly symbolism: lovely smells, no proven spell.
- The birthwort in its snakebite charm harms kidneys, causes cancer and has never been shown to help.
- Read it as history, never as instructions for your body.
A spell book with a good nose
Planets on the label, taste and smell underneath.
Its Arabic name means the Goal of the Sage; Europe called it the Picatrix. Every planet gets its plants. Saturn takes the bitter and deadly, Mars the hot and biting, Venus the sweet and fragrant. Under the astrology sits an old Greek habit of judging plants hot or cold by taste and smell, and it caught real things. Bitterness often marks a plant defending itself chemically. The heat of pepper probably trips the nerves you feel a burn with.
The book’s usual method is the fire, resins above all: frankincense, myrrh, mastic. Most of that smoke is best understood as changing a room’s mood, not dosing you like a swallowed drug. Henbane and opium on the coals are another matter: nobody can assume a poisonous plant turns safe as smoke.
A “Picatrix herb” label may rest on a translator’s guess; thirteen of the book’s plant names are still unidentified or disputed.
When a plant floored someone, they wrote it down
The book is at its sharpest on poison.
Where an effect was quick and obvious, old writers noticed. Their knock-out plants include opium, mandrake, henbane and deadly nightshade, and modern pharmacology confirms each does sedate, intoxicate or poison. Hemlock and monkshood are there as killers.
So is nutmeg. In case reports, people intoxicated by it were plainly poisoned; how it acts in people is still unsettled.
Keep nutmeg for cooking; those case reports were poisonings. If someone may have eaten any plant, phone 13 11 26 now, or 000 in an emergency.
Roses for love, and valerian in the wrong job
Where the chemistry runs out, the poetry takes over.
To win a lover or a king’s favour, the book reaches for rose, violet and saffron: dear to buy, gorgeous to smell. A fine scent can warm a room. Nothing shows a smoke can bind a heart.
Valerian is cast as a love potion. Its modern reputation is for sleep, resting on tradition, lab work and human trials that disagree: some support, well short of proof.
Whatever valerian does or doesn’t do for sleep, this book is no evidence either way. For advice, consult a degree-qualified herbalist with competencies and adequate training in pharmacognosy.
Cross out the snakebite charm
One old remedy is plainly dangerous.
Round birthwort goes into one of the book’s charms against adders. Its acids damage the kidneys, as far as kidney failure, and cause cancer of the urinary tract. It has never been shown to help a bitten person, and Australia bars the whole birthwort group from medicines for exactly that reason.
The tradition that rightly feared hemlock passed this down beside it.
In Australia a snakebite means 000 at once, a pressure immobilisation bandage and keeping still, with no plant on the wound, in the mouth or on the fire. Antivenom is the only treatment. And when frankincense next drifts across your verandah, you’re smelling what a medieval compiler believed could draw down the planets. Chemistry can’t test the planets. It can agree with him about the room.
The short version of Ambrose Fenwick’s essay, AIP Grimoire Herbal No. 1. Every plant and every source is there:
- Jesse Kirby — Wrote the page from his own notes with the essay shut: chose the incense, nutmeg and valerian a reader already owns as the way in, set the four sections, and put the snakebite first aid in the red box at full strength
- Zoe Bennett — Wrote the title, the search description and the labels, and framed the share around the kitchen and bedside plants that turn up in the book
- Theo Karras — Picked the Kraków manuscript cover and the four section banners from the essay’s own licensed photographs, opened each one and wrote alt text to what it actually shows
- Leah Bianchi — Built the page: red safety box, one-minute card, the pull quote, the four what-this-means cards and the card back to the essay, checked for reading on a phone
- Dr Luke Iggulden, Chief Scientific Officer — Senior author. Commissioned the Explainer series, set its direction and approved it
Contributors
- Ambrose Fenwick — Wrote AIP Grimoire Herbal No. 1, the essay this page retells
Image credits. Latin Picatrix, Kraków, Jagiellonian Library MS 793, public domain. Coffee ceremony: ProtoplasmaKid, CC BY-SA 4.0. Opium poppy capsule: Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 4.0. Saffron: Emilie40, CC0. Aristolochia rotunda: MurielBendel, CC BY-SA 4.0. All via Wikimedia Commons.
AIP Explainers are the plain-language editions of the Institute’s technical articles, published alongside the original. Everything on this page is carried by the full essay, where the sources and the reasoning are set out. Regulatory information is as the essay stated it on publication and may change. Spotted an error? Write to our contact form.
Jesse Kirby
Head of Community Outreach
Australian Institute of Pharmacognosy
Cardwell QLD, Australia
australian-pharmacognosy.org · our contact form
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